TOTalitarian ARTs : The Visual Arts, Fascism(s) and Mass-Society [1 ed.] 9781443879545, 9781443828741

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TOTalitarian ARTs: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s) and Mass-society Edited by Mark Epstein, Fulvio Orsitto and Andrea Righi This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Mark Epstein, Fulvio Orsitto, Andrea Righi and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2874-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2874-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables and Illustrations ................................................................. viii Preface ......................................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................ xi Part I: Totalitarian Environment: Spaces and Images Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 The Use and Abuse of the Classic Fragment: The Case of Genoa and Sculptor Eugenio Baroni Silvia Boero Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 20 Fascist Ideology, Mass Media, and the Built Environment: A Case Study Maria D’Anniballe Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 40 Face to Face: Iconic Representations and Juxtapositions of St. Francis of Assisi and Mussolini during Italian Fascism Amanda Minervini Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 62 Mussolini in American Newsreels: Il Duce as Modern Celebrity Pierluigi Erbaggio Part II: Totalitarianism, Italian Cinema and Beyond Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 82 Pasolini’s Reflections on Fascism(s): Classic and Contemporary Mark Epstein

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 97 From Moravia to Bertolucci: The Monism of The Conformist— The Farce after the Tragedy Part I: From Tragedy to Myth .............................................................. 97 Part II: From Treatment to Farcical Finale ..........................................116 Angelo Fàvaro Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 133 Nazi-Fascist Echoes in Films from WWII to the Present Fulvio Orsitto Part III: Totalitarian Aesthetics and Politics Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 162 The Other Modernity: Fascist Aesthetics and the Imprint of the Community Myth against the Failure of Liberalism Ana Rodríguez-Granell Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 182 Thought vs. Action: Golden Age Aesthetics in French Proto-Fascist and Fascist Discourses Gaetano DeLeonibus Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 199 Envisioning Vichy: Fascist Visual Culture in France 1940-44 Sean P. Connolly Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 217 Salvador Dalí: The Fascist Genius? Anna Vives Part IV: Totalitarian Geography Chapter Twelve ........................................................................................ 236 The Impossible Reconciliation: Pedro Lázaga’s Torrepartida (1956) Daniel Arroyo-Rodriguez Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 251 Representations of Dictatorship in Portuguese Cinema Isabel Macedo, Rita Bastos, Rosa Cabecinhas

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Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 284 Looking Forward, Looking Backwards: Notes on the Dictatorship in Uruguay Claudia Peralta Part V: Contemporary Forms of Totalitarian Representation Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 300 Totality and Destruction in Contemporary German Culture: Playing on Fascism in the Total Art of Serdar Somuncu Arina Rotaru Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 320 Seit heut früh wird zurückgeschrieben: Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Political Comics of the Far and Extreme Right Maria Stopfner Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 350 YouTube Fascism: Visual Activism of the Extreme Right Matias Ekman Part VI: Comparative Reflections on Totalitarian Worldviews Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 374 Totalitarian Trends Today Mark Epstein Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 408 Theories of Video Activism and Fascism Matias Ekman Chapter Twenty........................................................................................ 426 Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as a Theory of Fascism Andrea Righi Editors ..................................................................................................... 440 Contributors ............................................................................................. 442

LIST OF TABLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER ONE Fig. 1 Arch of Triumph (Frieze), by Dazzi ................................................... 5 Fig. 2 Monument to the Mutilated Soldier, by Eugenio Baroni ................... 9 Fig. 3 Monument to the Mutilated Soldier (Detail)...................................... 9 Fig. 4 Andrea Doria, by Eugenio Baroni....................................................11 Fig. 5 Guglielmo Embriaco, by Eugenio Baroni ........................................11 Fig. 6 The Navigator, by Antonio Morera ................................................. 12 CHAPTER TWO Fig. 1 Palazzo della Provincia, early 1900s .............................................. 23 Fig. 2 Palazzo della Provincia, after the 1928-30 Restoration .................. 26 CHAPTER THREE Fig. 1 Image from the last page of Ardali’s book, San Francesco e Mussolini ........................................................................................... 50 Fig. 2 Juxtaposed Images of St. Francis and of Mussolini ........................ 51 Fig. 3 Simone Martini, Juxtaposed Portraits of St. Francis and of Louis of Toulouse........................................................................................... 52 Fig. 4 Propagandistic Photograph of Mussolini by Scagli ......................... 54 CHAPTER FOUR Fig. 1 Variety, September 21, 1927............................................................ 69 Fig. 2 New York’s Times Square Theatre Program ................................... 71 Fig. 3 Captions and Images of Benito Mussolini in the 1926 Hearst Silent Newsreel Mussolini Smiles! ....................................................... 73 CHAPTER SEVEN Fig. 1 Roma, città aperta (Open City—Roberto Rossellini, 1945).......... 141 Fig. 2 La caduta degli Dei (The Damned—Luchino Visconti, 1969) ...... 145 Fig. 3 Salon Kitty (Tinto Brass, 1976) ..................................................... 150 Fig. 4 Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) ......................... 151

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CHAPTER TEN Fig. 1 Révolution nationale ..................................................................... 202 Fig. 2 Fête de Jeanne D’Arc: Foi, Jeunesse, Volonté .............................. 204 Fig. 3 Untitled.......................................................................................... 205 Fig. 4 Les assassins reviennent toujours sur les lieux de leur crime ....... 205 Fig. 5 Untitled.......................................................................................... 206 Fig. 6 The Earth—She Doesn’t Lie (La terre, elle, ne ment pas) ............. 206 Fig. 7 L’Arc de Triomphe ......................................................................... 207 Fig. 8 Il était une fois un Maréchal de France ........................................ 208 Fig. 9 Il était une fois un Maréchal de France ........................................ 208 Fig. 10 Laissez-nous tranquilles!............................................................. 209 Fig. 11 Et derrière: Le juif ........................................................................211 Fig. 12 Le Juif et la France ..................................................................... 212 Fig. 13 Le Juif et la France ..................................................................... 213 CHAPTER THIRTEEN Fig. 1 Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010 .................................................. 267 Fig. 2 Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010 .................................................. 270 Fig. 3 Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010 .................................................. 270 Fig. 4 Manuel Martins Pedro, in Sousa Dias, 48, 2010 ........................... 273 Fig. 5 Conceição Matos, in Sousa Dias, 48, 2010 ................................... 274 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Table 1 Thematic Categories and Main Features of Video Clips ............. 355 Table 2 Summary of Thematic Qualities in Far Right-Wing Videos .. 357-358

PREFACE

The essays contained in this volume were inspired by the conference Tot Art: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s) and Mass-Society organized by Mark Epstein and Fulvio Orsitto, and hosted by California State University’s Program of Italian and Italian American Studies at the Chico campus on September 26th 2013. We would like to thank California State University and the N.E.V.I.S. (New Echoes and Voices in Italian Studies) caucus for their patronage, and Prof. Patricia Black, Chair of the ILLC (International Languages Literatures and Cultures) Department, for her generous help in organizing the event. For further information on the conference visit the website https://sites.google.com/site/totart2013/home.

INTRODUCTION

TOTalitarian ARTs: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s), and Mass-society analyses the connections between the visual arts and mass-culture in totalitarian societies (within capitalist social formations). Rather than providing an unrealistically comprehensive investigation of the innumerable ramifications of said connections, the essays collected in this volume offer multidisciplinary approaches that map the link between artistic media and imagination, as well as between them and the persuasion and indoctrination of the masses. They explore the physical and mental continuum between coercion and consensus in totalitarian regimes. Although the adjective ‘totalitarian’ may only be evoked in the title of this volume by the term TotArt—a neologism we coined to highlight the relation between totalitarian societies and visual arts, but especially as a parody of Andy Warhol, to call attention to the consumer aspects of contemporary totalitarianism, in which often the individual actually aspires to become part of the mass, gaining a sense of ‘normalcy’, legitimacy and bonding in so doing—and despite it being seemingly eclipsed by the term ‘fascism(s)’, it is indeed the exploration of the associations of totalitarianism(s) and visual arts that constitutes the epistemological horizon of this collective work. As editors, we adopted an inclusive and comparative approach that allowed us to incorporate and study a varied number of political systems influenced by Italian fascism (from Spain to Portugal, from Germany to the military regimes in Latin American countries), which are all subsumed under the ‘totalitarian’ rubric. Finally, our expansion of the word ‘totalitarian’ is not only geographic and political but also historical. While the term ‘totalitarian’ was coined in fascist Italy, it has a rather labored and contradictory history. Totalitarianism has been investigated by historians of fascism (i.e. Hannah Arendt1 and Emilio Gentile2) and

1

It should be noted that Arendt herself fell under Heidegger’s spell, something that is relevant not just in terms of their personal relationship, but in how it can have influenced her later analytical framework. Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004); and Antonia Grunenberg, Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger: Geschichte einer Liebe (Munich: Piper, 2006).

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Marxist scholars alike (especially by experts on state-theory and relations between state and civil society such as Nikos Poulantzas and Bob Jessop3). This complex and interdisciplinary examination of its contradictions has continued in recent years, with works by Sheldon Wolin, William Engdahl, Mike Lofgren, and Herbert Schiller among others, on the various forms and aspects of totalitarianism that have been developing in western parliamentary systems.4 As editors we see the phenomena discussed in this collection as part of a series of continuums, where the connection between an art medium (cinema for instance), a specific grouping of human beings (family, group of friends, group of protesters, party gathering, crowd at a sporting event, mass at a rally, etc.), and the political institutional setting in which they occur are not given once and for all, but congeal in specific constellations in a time and a place. From direct democracy to the most encompassing and controlling forms of totalitarianism there is a continuum, from solitary meditation while reading a lyric poem to the (potential) revelry of spectators joining in the performance of a dance with professional dancers in a ballet there is a continuum, from life as a hermit in a Tibetan shrine in the Himalayas to participation in a mass rally against the TPP there is a continuum. In other words, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to isolate an event or a temporary state of existence that is purely individual or purely social, a purely introspective elaboration/‘consumption’ of a work 2

Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo: il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista (Rome: Carocci, 2008); especially Chapter 9 “I silenzi di Hannah Arendt. Il fascismo e Le origini del totalitarismo”, 315-339, which demonstrates fairly conclusively that Arendt was wrong in not considering fascism a form of totalitarianism. 3 Nikos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974); The Crisis of the Dictatorships (London: New Left Books, 1976); Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)—only one of many works by probably the leading Marxist theorist of the state. 4 F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009); Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2007); Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre: a Warning (London: Verso, 2015); Herbert Schiller, Culture, Inc.: the Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mass Communications and American Empire (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

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of art or a purely participatory sharing in a work of art, a purely ‘free’, ‘democratic’, unconstrained act or event as against a completely predetermined, controlled, totalitarianly imposed event. Raymond Williams in the course of more penetrating reflections on the concept of ‘hegemony’ introduced the ideas of residual, dominant and emergent forms, which exist side by side, but whose normative power shifts historically during their struggle for preeminence.5 The cognitive, cultural, psychological and corporeal states of individuals changes throughout their lives, the human aggregates in which they socialize do as well, and so do the institutional settings in which they operate (which mostly preexist them, but to which they may also constructively contribute)—institutions to whose formation and transformation both individuals and aggregates may contribute in quite different degrees. The concept of ‘mass’, which generally has connotations that are more closely associated with the political than ‘crowd’ for instance, has been at the center of many reflections on modernity, from those of Charles Baudelaire and the flaneur, to Walter Benjamin’s on Baudelaire and his Paris.6 Of course, in material terms a ‘mass’ is simply an aggregate of individuals, but its perception has been subject to significant transformations since the Enlightenment. From fears of the ‘crowd’ associated with the ferment of the French Revolution, to the ambiguous shifts between fear/distance and being lost in/merging with the ‘mass’ (in both Baudelaire’s and, later, Benjamin’s works), to essays speculating on the crowd’s characteristics and how to manipulate them (such as Gustave Le Bon’s—which, according to a scholar of fascism, George Mosse, may have influenced those movements),7 ‘mass’ and ‘crowd’ represent the ‘otherness’ that any individual outside the ‘self’ already constitutes in 5

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121-127. 6 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1995); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). Benjamin is probably one of the most important intellectuals to study symptomatically for the transition to fascism, as his interest in the ‘mass’ intersects that for the loss of the ‘aura’ in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in which he significantly quotes Abel Gance, the director of the monumental, three-screen, film Napoleon, whose subject of course points to the possible ideological continuities of earlier forms of Bonapartism or Caesarism and contemporary fascism within the capitalist mode of production. 7 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Dunwoody: N.S. Berg, 1968); George Mosse, Nazi Culture. Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (London: W. H. Allen, 1966), xxiii-xxiv.

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societies that are increasingly predicated on a consumerist, fairly mechanical, individualism—one which, ultimately, rarely explores processes of socialization, or the many possible forms of shared association, living, work, play, and art. The tension between ‘individual’ and ‘mass’ is also one of the many components of the historically complex opposition of ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’, or, in the context of post-Nietzschean German culture, between Zivilisation and Kultur: where ‘civilization’ is the bearer of the many institutional, social, and ‘normalized’ values of the broader (mass) society, while ‘culture’ (especially with the onset of Romanticism), gathers many of the connotations of individual cultivation of inwardness (which also in some ways harp back to earlier religious, pre-Enlightenment ideologies).8 These tensions and ruptures within cultural traditions, eventually can lead to the forced/imposed forms of bricolage in which a Futurist programmatic refusal of tradition, and a cult of seemingly completely new and rootless forms of technology and power coexists in the Fascist regime with the cultivation of symbols of past imperial power and glory. The symbol of the fascio littorio, was originally Etruscan, then adopted as a symbol of power in Imperial Rome, and later, prior to its adoption by the Fascist movement, had been used by movements on the Italian left, for instance in the so-called “Fasci siciliani” (if perhaps with more corporatist than imperial overtones). This transition from left to right is characteristic of the biography of Benito Mussolini himself, and the forced (tied) bundling of the individual staves into a ‘mass’, presided over by the life and death power of the axe, very succinctly expresses the lack of any exploration of inter-individual, non-constrained, forms of association. In other words, it expresses virtually complete lack of consideration for the complexities of both individual(s) and their association, whether in more coerced, classic, forms of fascism, or more induced, hegemonic, consumerist forms of contemporary totalitarianism—where the individual is basically only given consideration as a unit of consumption and production, a statistical blip in an ocean of drones. In short, where the individual is only seen as a consumer and not a citizen or a political animal. Our collection of essays explores some of the many variants in which totalitarian institutions coerced compliance, induced and enticed participation, channeled individual energies towards goals desired by the regimes in question; or, in the case of totalitarian movements aspiring to

8

Williams, Marxism and Literature, 11-20.

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power, how they shape(d) their works and messages to interact with certain kinds of implied public(s). Historically the visual arts, but also new media and technologies have had a strong association with fascism(s), arguably because of a strong sensory component, which, like analogous forms of subconscious persuasion exploited in advertisement, often helped channel individual energies and beliefs towards totalitarian goals. One need only think of futurism and vorticism in painting, theater and film, or of the strong connection of the cinema medium to totalitarian regimes (Leni Riefenstahl being one of the most iconic examples in this regard). In reality, as Sabine Hake reminds us, the study of fascism(s) seems almost inseparable from the analysis of their “unique status as a filmic fantasy.”9 Hence, recalling the considerations of many film theorists10 and directors11 of the so-called early cinema period—who, while investigating the ontology of the new medium, found numerous similarities between cinema and the slumbering state of daydreaming the audience experiences while watching a film12—it is not hard for one to see how, while being seated in a movie theater, spectators undergo a ‘regressive’ process that shares many characteristics with the dream state;13 a ‘regressive’ process that one could also associate with the 9

Sabine Hake, Screen Nazis. Cinema, History, and Democracy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 4. 10 Ricciotto Canudo, Hugo Münsterberg and Louis Delluc, among many others. 11 Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, René Clair, and Luis Buñuel, to mention a few. 12 A thorough survey of early film theorists who drew attention to the oneiric nature of cinema is provided by Laura Rascaroli—consult “Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory.” Kinema (Fall 2002), http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=141&feature—who also offers valuable reflections on a debate that characterized early cinema: that on the primary function of the medium itself, which according to some theorists was merely to reproduce reality, while according to others it was to explore and, ultimately, exploit the technical possibilities of the medium in order to depict (or evoke) aspects of the human experience like fantasy and dream. The ‘regressive’ process that permits cinema to resemble the dream state will also attract the interest of more contemporary film theorists (Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour), semioticians (Cesare Musatti, Roland Barthes), and psychoanalysts (Guy Rosolato). 13 In order to facilitate this ‘regression’ to immobility, spectators even find the most comfortable position on the chair, just like they do before going to sleep. Moreover, the very language of cinema seems to mimic the dream state “from the iconic language on which it is based, to the flashbacks, the sudden shifts in perspective and the jump cuts between one scene and the next.” [“a partire dal linguaggio iconico con cui è strutturato, ai flashback, ai salti improvvisi di prospettiva e alle cesure fra una scena e l’altra.”]. Franco De Felice and Alessandro

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passive position of the masses being indoctrinated by totalitarian regimes; a ‘regressive’ process that, ultimately, cannot but favor filmic fantasies on fascism(s). Moreover, as an artistic medium, cinema embodies many aspects that draw it to totalitarian forms of control of the consumer’s response. Ontologically speaking, cinema is a medium that requires a very complex technical setup and a large number of specialized collaborators (to an even greater extent than theater or opera, the whole area of special effects and animation being just two technical directions pioneered by cinema). However, what differentiates filmic events from theatrical and operatic events is their uniqueness, given by the fact that their consumers are not physically in the presence of other human beings (whose performance can always be, albeit theoretically, altered by the audience). Consequently, cinematic spectators are reduced to passive witnesses of a projection of images and sounds that flow by; a projection that cannot be altered by viewers and that, in all its sameness, could be repeated an infinite number of times in front of supposedly unlimited audiences. In other words, what differentiates cinema from ‘older’ artistic expressions (such as theater and opera), and equates it to ‘newer’ ones (like television) is its absolute (one might even say ‘totalitarian’) control over pro-filmic space and time.14 In fact, although cinema and television share the arrangement of space and actions with theater and opera (so that the term mise en scène could technically be used in all these fields), cinema’s—and, to a certain extent, television’s—peculiarity consists in the fact that the results of said preparation are then recorded as immutable pro-filmic micro-events (later to be assembled in a filmic narrative through the montage process).15 Hence, the spectators’ passive state during the pleasurable Pascucci, Cinema e psicopatologia. Aspetti psicologici della rappresentazione cinematografica e potenzialità applicative in psicologia clinica (Ariccia: Aracne, 2007), 34. 14 A separate discourse needs to be developed as regards the video-making explosion on the Internet brought about by the Web 2.0 revolution. If, on the one hand, the preceding reflections on the pro-filmic seem at first to also be applicable in this instance, on the other, one has to consider that the complex chain of postings and re-postings that characterizes the contemporary social media scene, and the easy access to software that makes editing feasible and available to all, undermine the concept of a finite product, ultimately affecting the unamendability of every video uploaded on web. 15 This sense of totalitarian control in the ‘reproduction of reality’ (or at least the illusion thereof), includes a sense of control over all time and space (past, present and future precisely), and possibly brought some of the psychological impulses in the totalitarian personalities of some leaders into closer proximity with some of the ideals embodied in the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.

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consumption of a dreamlike filmic narrative, is comparable to the submissive state of the masses receiving and ‘consuming’ (more or less hidden) messages provided by totalitarian regimes eager to foster oneiric filmic fantasies in them. Finally, the expression ‘visual arts’ in the title of this volume, is also used in reference to ‘performing arts’, and to evoke those that—perhaps more appropriately—should be referred to as ‘plastic arts’. Hence, in the TotArt context, this phrase also incorporates architecture, urban planning and the shaping and control of spaces (especially public ones). If the sense of (totalitarian) control characterizing the cinematic medium affected what one could call ‘lived life’, the control of architectural spaces and urban planning obviously are part of what totalitarian ideologies and cultures would value as control over the actual spaces in which life and social interaction occurs, and which are therefore contained and molded by them. The first part of the volume, Totalitarian Environment: Spaces and Images, contains four essays that examine the definition of fascist urban spaces and the representation of Mussolini’s public image. Social spaces and public art are central to any form of government. For fascism, however, squares, buildings and public places in general, were all the more important as these were areas the regime aimed to control and monopolize also in terms of expression. In this context, Silvia Boero’s essay, “The Use and Abuse of the Classic Fragment: The Case of Genoa and Sculptor Eugenio Baroni,” considers the political and social implications of the reconstruction of the Foce area in Genoa. As Boero reminds us, the fascist government intervened on this working class neighborhood by forcibly removing its inhabitants to make room for a new square and for a modern replica of the Arch of Triumph. Hence, the renovation of the Foce area perfectly exemplifies how the regime intended to follow a Roman aesthetic in order to reinforce the myth of fascist Italy as the modern embodiment of Imperial Rome. Nevertheless, the political use-abuse of architecture was not always successful, stumbling from time to time on its own illusion of grandeur or on sporadic instances of opposition. This is the case with the work of artist Eugenio Baroni, whose group of statues, commissioned to celebrate the House of the Mutilated Soldier, stands as a silent reminder of the horror of war. In her contribution entitled “Fascist Ideology, Mass Media, and the Built Environment: A Case Study,” Maria D’Anniballe continues the exploration of fascist intervention in architecture by documenting the origin and scope of the ideologically charged restoration of the Palazzo della Provincia in Verona. Taking a different approach from Boero, D’Anniballe makes the case for a political use of architecture that did not follow the example of classical Rome but

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rather that of the middle Ages. As D’Anniballe illustrates, the dictatorship’s centralized political system was flexible enough to allow for such cases of bottom-up experimentation, an episode that differs from what happened in Genoa. In this sense, Verona is also an interesting casestudy in the medievalization of Italy, showing how local authorities took the lead in creating a counterfeit building and how, with the media’s help, they promoted a distinctive image of the town as an emblem of medieval society (in order to generate tourism while reinforcing a shared notion of identity and Italianness). Although Mussolini’s cult of personality has been frequently studied, the last two chapters of this section of the volume propose two somewhat different perspectives. Amanda Minervini’s essay, “Face to Face: Iconic Representations and Juxtapositions of St. Francis of Assisi and Mussolini during Italian Fascism,” shows how the regime was able to win Saint Francis to the nationalist cause by co-opting his inflexible ethic of sacrifice, obedience and mystical love. Investigating the work of Father Paolo Ardali, Minervini explains how Saint Francis is turned into a precursor of the Duce. Finally, in his “Mussolini in American Newsreels. The Duce as Modern Celebrity,” Pierluigi Erbaggio focuses on how the fascist leader became a celebrity of the Hollywood star system. As the author explains, well before the well-known propaganda of Istituto Luce, it was actually two US companies (Fox and Hearst productions) that—casting him in the captivating light of a business man—first portrayed him as a modern leader, well versed in the latest technologies. The four chapters comprised in section two of the volume, Totalitarianism, Italian Cinema and Beyond, offer more analyses of cinematic representations, and further the study of everyday life and survival under fascist regimes, by addressing the built-in-desire to conform to fascist norms and institutions, as well as to be molded by modern subtle and pervasive forms of social control (which often tend to reduce individuals to mere objects). In his “Pasolini’s Reflections on Fascism(s): Classic and Contemporary,” Mark Epstein offers a reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) and its treatment of sexuality, as both a recantation of its celebration in the so-called trilogia della vita, and, within a much broader framework, as well as a depiction of what Pasolini himself called the “anthropological mutation” carried out by neo-capitalism. Epstein elaborates on Pasolini’s distinction between historical (‘classic’) and neocapitalist fascism. According to Pasolini, contemporary fascism is qualitatively different from its previous counterpart: the totalitarian endproduct of contemporary mass society is its ability to commodify every aspect of life via consumerism (a form of capillary control on the individual level that ‘classic’ fascist institutional coercion could only

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dream of). In this sense, Epstein reads the scandalous nature of Salò and its treatment of sexuality as a metaphor to understand the pending catastrophe of a new and ubiquitous form of fascist oppression, one that is especially pernicious due to the depths it is able to penetrate. In the last part of the essay, Epstein discusses Pasolini’s theory of the sacred, underscoring its materialist foundations, and highlighting how Pasolini understood the sacred as a bulwark against the rampant instrumentalization of life under capitalist rationalization and commodification (and as the point of origin for a genetic reconstruction of a non-moralistic ethics). Angelo Fàvaro’s inquiry into the idea of conformism as a pillar of fascist ideology—“From Moravia to Bertolucci: the Monism of The Conformist. The Farce after the Tragedy”—comes in two parts. The first one, “From Tragedy to Myth,” deals extensively with Alberto Moravia’s novel The Conformist in light of its filmic adaptation by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970. By means of a meticulous close-reading, Fàvaro details how Moravia produced a rational explanation for the tragic desire for normalcy that pushes Marcello, the protagonist, to collaborate in the homicide of an anti-fascist intellectual in France. Bertolucci, on the other side, depicts this path in more expressionistic tones, thus proposing a less tragic view of Marcello. The second part of the essay, “From Treatment to Farcical Finale,” examines the film’s treatment (which Fàvaro recovered from the Archivio Centrale di Stato), and through a careful and original analysis of the plot shows how the text can be used as an intermediate artefact to interpret both the film and the novel. In the chapter that concludes this section, “Nazi-Fascist Echoes in Films from WWWII to the Present,” Fulvio Orsitto analyses the so-called Nazi-Fascist imaginary emerging in post fascist cinema from a cultural perspective. In order to discuss the countless Nazi characters emerging in filmic narratives since WWII, Orsitto proposes a division of this vast corpus of examples into three phases: the first one ranging from WWII to the late 1960s, the second one from the 1970s to the early 1980s, and the third one from the late 1980s to the present. Orsitto’s overview of the Nazi-Fascist imaginary emerging in post fascist cinema shows how, from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, the cinematic Nazi-Fascist imaginary is inhabited almost exclusively by stereotypical depictions of Nazi (many) and Fascist (few) characters informed by three kinds of perspectives: the mocking attitude (prevalent in the 1940s but, occasionally, resurfacing in other decades and media as well), the rehabilitating outlook (visible in a handful of 1950s films that tend to portray Germans as the last bastion against the Communist threat), and the ‘perverting’ approach (launched by Hollywood films of the 1940s, taken up by Rossellini’s so-called War Trilogy and then incorporated and

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further explored in the Nazisploitation genre of the 1970s—which is discussed in the second part of this chapter). The final part of this essay is devoted to the discussion of the proliferation of Nazi characters in the contemporary mediascape. Part three, Totalitarian Aesthetics and Politics, contains four essays that address fascist aesthetics from a theoretical perspective (i.e. as they emerge in intellectual discourses in Germany and France) and from a more practical one (i.e. with close-readings of specific examples present in the visual arts in France and Spain). In “The Other Modernity: Fascist Aesthetics and the Imprint of the Community Myth against the Failure of Liberalism,” Ana Rodríguez-Granell explores fascist aesthetics, suggesting that the fascist imaginary not only fueled the cult of efficiency (derived from a rationalist modern mass society) but also referred to the primitive and ancestral joy of belonging. Indeed, this is where, according to Rodríguez-Granell, one discovers the connection between the fascist aesthetic tradition, the irrationalist tendencies of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and the fin-de-siècle imaginary. This chapter charts the continuity between various periods of German history characterized by the belief in aesthetic and artistic redemption and by the notion of culture as a political project. Analyzing those discourses that construct the concept of community as a pre-rational impulse, Rodríguez-Granell discovers links with the later neo-pagan and regenerative ideals of völkish movements (Fidus) and the mysticism of the Konservative Revolution, and highlights the inherent contradictions in a notion of modernity that is widespread in European fascism. In “Thought vs. Action: Golden Age Aesthetics in French Proto-Fascist and Fascist Discourses,” Gaetano DeLeonibus investigates the distinction between the nationalistic (proto-fascist) discourse of the turn of the 20th century and the pro-European fascist discourse of the 1930s. For both groups, aestheticism informed or was informed by a political attitude. However, the former subscribed to a view that could be labeled as “aestheticized politics” (believing that aesthetics should shape political action), while the latter fostered “politicized aesthetics” (asserting that political criteria should determine aesthetic criteria). In his essay, DeLeonibus offers a meticulous examination of these two views through examples taken from the writings of two French literary figures turned ideologues, Charles Maurras and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, concluding that theirs were not fully formed ideologies, but rather aesthetic positions inspired by a Nietzschean spiritual conflict against a culture they considered to be vulgar and decadent. In “Envisioning Vichy: Fascist Visual Culture in France 1940-44,” Sean Connolly proposes an in-depth study of the visual culture of Vichy’s

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Révolution nationale and underlines how, although Petain’s regime shared many of the ideological characteristics of fascist Germany (i.e. corporatism, peasantism, xenophobia, antisemitism, religious nationalism, and the rejection of liberal democracy), many of these tenets were not merely an import from the German occupiers, since they already had well-established roots in Right-wing groups of the Third Republic such as Action Française, Croix de Feu, and Jeunesses Patriotes. The mythologizing of national heroes, heroines, and enemies that characterized the fascist visual culture of Vichy analyzed by Connolly, allows the author to reflect on the mythic interplay of a national past, present, and future, and on the characters constituting the rich palingenetic national mythology of Petain’s regime. Finally, Anna Vives—in “Salvador Dalí: the Fascist Genius?”— offers a series of thought-provoking observations on Salvador Dalí’s flirtation with fascism(s). Starting with the consideration that the two most common approaches to this topic (the aesthetic attitude and the scandalized one), are limited in scope and do not address the fundamental reasons that fueled Dalí’s interest in Hitler and Franco, Vives maintains that—although the artist was certainly not an apolitical subject—his fascination with totalitarianism was not motivated by political but by ‘artistic’ reasons. In order to clarify the peculiarity of Dalí’s political position, Vives details his involvement with the Surrealist movement, and concludes that the artist’s interest in fascism(s) was inspired by his artistic interest in mocking orthodoxy regardless of its nature. Part four, Totalitarian Geography, contains three essays investigating forms of fascism that developed in countries with Romance-language based cultures. In his “The Impossible Reconciliation: Pedro Lázaga’s Torrepartida (1956),” Daniel Arroyo-Rodriguez exemplifies how cinema was used by the Franco regime as a means to cement its political control, and subtly modulate its interpretations of the Spanish Civil War, in order to further ideological, social and political control in the short term. The film combines elements of the Western, the political documentaries of the 1930s and 1940s, and nods to the cine de cruzada. Compared to Hollywood products of the time, Francoist cinema is still technologically backwards. Its legitimizing strategy consists in simultaneously humanizing individual members of the enemy (the opposition to the dictatorship) while showing that, as a group and a potential institution, they represent something alien and dangerous, which needs to be eradicated. The following chapter by Isabel Macedo, Rita Bastos, and Rosa Cabecinhas— “Representations of Dictatorship in Portuguese Cinema”—provides the reader with a brief history of recent Portuguese cinema and of the military dictatorship that dominated Portugal for a good portion of the 20th century,

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focusing on two films in particular: Fantasia Lusitana (Lusitanian Illusion, 2010), by João Canijo, and 48 (2010), by Susana de Sousa Dias. These two films’ portrayal and examination of memory underscores its importance for the contributions of history from below to an overall historical picture of Portugal under the military dictatorship. Both films demonstrate how multiculturalism can become a strategic tool in the hands of totalitarian regimes, exploring the uses of “lusotropicalism” by Salazar’s dictatorship (as part of the diplomatic stratagems used to avoid being categorized as a fascist regime). The essay combines examinations of frameworks (the history of the dictatorship and its, especially cinematic, representations), the regime’s use of cinema as part of its propagandistic strategies, and the institutional connections of Portuguese directors, institutions, and film schools to their analogues within the broader European context. Finally, in “Looking Forward, Looking Backwards: Notes on the Dictatorship in Uruguay,” Claudia Peralta examines an often overlooked dictatorship among the many that plagued Latin America for decades: the dictatorship in Uruguay. After explaining the varied reasons for its having garnered less attention, and being researched less often, Peralta chooses four documentaries to expose the realities of this period to a wider readership. They are: A Las cinco en punto, (2004), Nos sobra una ley (2011), Por esos ojos (1997), and Romper el muro de la impunidad (2013). As in the case of Macedo, Bastos and Cabecinhas, Peralta argues that recollecting memory of the period—especially in the testimony of its victims—is one of the most important achievements these documentaries can contribute to. The documentaries deal with the initial days of the coup and the reactions to it (A Las cinco en punto); with interviews and eyewitness accounts of relatives and people involved with the “disappeared” (Por esos ojos); with the corrupting and degrading influence of not repealing the Ley de Caducidad—which essentially protects the impunity of the dictatorship’s perpetrators and accomplices (Nos sobra una ley); and, last but not least, advocating for a reopening of the cases against individuals involved in the dictatorship’s abuses, crimes and oppression (Romper el muro del impunidad). Part five, Contemporary Forms of Totalitarian Representation, contains three essays that analyze current relations between totalitarianisms and the visual (and performing) arts in Germany and Sweden. In “Totality and Destruction in Contemporary German Culture: Playing on Fascism in the Total Art of Serdar Somuncu,” Arina Rotaru examines the role of minorities in conjunction with ethnicity and performance as it intersects with fascism(s). Focusing on the work of actor and performer Serdar Somuncu, Rotaru offers an in-depth analysis of this artist’s experimentations with

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genres, and of his venturing into the taboos of National Socialist history. Rotaru underlines Somuncu’s intervention against the entirety of German public memory as a national discourse composed of German perpetrators and Jewish victims (a seamless whole which blocks the possibility of confluence between the German, Turkish and German Turkish pasts), and his crucial role in questioning the notion of a monolithic German discourse about public memory as national discourse. Finally, through a close reading of Hitler Kebab, Mein Führer, and Hate Messiah, Rotaru explains the true meaning of Somuncu’s total art and the way in which it foregrounds the war of cultures (which is truly a war on minorities, with whom no shared humanity is possible). In “Seit heut früh wird zurückgeschrieben. Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Political Comics of the Far and Extreme Right,” Maria Stopfner offers a stimulating analysis of the neo-fascist ground offensive against the democratic status quo, focusing on the youth wing of the German Nationalist Party, and its attempts to broadcast its ideology to a young audience via the genre of political comics. Using Der grosse Kampf: Enten gegen Hühner (The Big Battle: Ducks against Chickens) as a case study, Stopfner examines this text’s strategies of typological and referential intertextuality and its interdiscursivity (with reference to ethnic prejudice and to collective memory). Through the investigation of the aforementioned communicative strategies, Stopfner unveils the ‘hidden’ meaning encoded in this 2009 comic, and explores the atmosphere of intended ambivalence that informs this socio-political operation and that, ultimately, favors a communication game aimed at group-bonding (in which the ability to understand the ‘true’ meaning embedded by the author depends on the reader’s background knowledge). Finally, in “You Tube Fascism—Visual Activism of the Extreme Right,” Matias Ekman presents a series of pioneering observations on the online video activism of neo-fascist groups in Sweden. Ekman’s analysis is grounded in the (demonstrated) assumption that the development of digital communication and information technology has played an important role in facilitating the production and dissemination of political propaganda by far right-wing movements. As Ekman recalls, Swedish far right-wing groups and the white-power music scene have a long history of media production, and were quick to adopt digital communication practices. In recent years they benefited greatly from the progression of online communication, as the Internet provided new distribution channels and facilitated new environments in which activists and supporters could consume propaganda and communicate. Providing us with a comprehensive overview of more than two hundred video clips produced and uploaded on You Tube by five organizations, Ekman’s

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chapter discusses how the video content relates to the political strategies of the extreme right, and reflects upon the relationship between mediated communication and the socio-cultural context of far right-wing politics. Part six, Comparative Reflections on Totalitarian Worldviews, contains three essays that reflect on contemporary forms of fascism/totalitarianism, as expressed and pursued in various media (or, in the case of Epstein, as embodied in the new institutional and political arrangements of the current US dominated unipolar world-system). All these contributions challenge the widely accepted belief that ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘fascism’ (a totalitarianism that defends, entrenches and/or deepens capitalist social relations of production) are somehow polar opposites, rather than political, social, ideological and institutional phenomena that can be followed along a continuum. In “Totalitarian Trends Today,” Mark Epstein examines the devolution of current capitalist institutions and the rise of a new form of ‘disenfranchisement’ totalitarianism, which are predicated on the complete destruction of the ideological foundation of the ‘liberal’ theory of democracy, ‘informed consent.’ Epstein follows the many ways the US and UK are devolving according to this new totalitarian model, and compares the characteristics of this process with those considered typical for ‘classic’ forms of totalitarianism. On the level of ‘high’ culture he also shows the continuities between the (political, as well as ideological roots) of Heideggerian theory and those postmodern verbalizations that accompany the current neoliberal descent into totalitarianism. In his essay “Theories of Video Activism and Fascism,” Matias Ekman analyses the ways in which the far right has appropriated audio-visual media and strategies typically associated with liberal and progressive groups for its own political purposes. Ekman argues that these strategies often follow a bio-political path, reinforcing cohesion among group members, through both sexual hyper-masculine bonding practices and a strategy of the aestheticization of politics—one pursued by means of the mass groupcommunications of late modernity—which are more fragmented and detached from physical space than those which were characteristic of the more classic forms of mass propaganda in the fascist and Nazi periods. This more disseminated and pseudonymous strategy still pursues far right aims through a cultural politics of emotions. In the last chapter of the volume, “Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus as a Theory of Fascism,” Andrea Righi uses Deleuze and Guattari’s text to help us understand the other side of fascism: not the monstrous, violent, aberrant side, but the one whereby fascism gains the consensus of those it seduces, becoming a means for those it subjugates to will their own oppression. Righi examines the film The Hunger Games (2012) as an example where this ‘other side’

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is also revealed. He then proceeds to discuss the French authors’ theory of desire as a means of subverting the distinction between the object desired and its representation (making them one, using chains of fluxes of desire flowing through their mechanistic model of the ensembles of machines). This is where fascism is able to capitalize on desire by channeling it toward its oppressive uses. Righi also discusses how Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between a “molar” type of fascism (which is basically consistent with the historical, hierarchical, “monstrous” kinds of fascism) and a “molecular” type of fascism, which Righi argues has now come to be the predominant one. In order to exemplify some characteristics of this newer molecular fascism, Righi analyzes another Hollywood film, The Bling Ring (2013), showing how ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’, economics and life (biology, sexuality) have in some sense merged. In conclusion, the connections between the visual arts and mass-culture in totalitarian societies explored by TotArt contributors in many of their nuances offer crucial critical insights into the relationships between mass and individual, civil society and state, community and individual (d)evolution, autonomy and self-knowledge. Moreover, the essays contained in this volume provide a significant framework for assessing not only the historical development of capitalist societies since the Enlightenment, but also where they might be located on a continuum from most coercively totalitarian to most democratic (at least in terms of institutional, juridical and ethical self-regulation), albeit in hegemonized forms. Despite the variety in perspective and style offered by the twenty chapters comprised in this volume we, as editors, believe that they form a polymorphic whole that can be perceived as such from beginning to end. Our thanks go to our contributors, without whom this collective effort would not have been possible, and to our readers, for whom we hope this work will open new spaces for debate on the connection between the visual arts and mass-culture in totalitarian societies. Mark Epstein Fulvio Orsitto Andrea Righi

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Works Cited Ali, Tariq. The Extreme Centre: a Warning. London: Verso, 2015. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 2004. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon Press, 1995. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. De Felice, Franco, and Alessandro Pascucci. Cinema e psicopatologia. Aspetti psicologici della rappresentazione cinematografica e potenzialità applicative in psicologia clinica. Ariccia: Aracne, 2007. Engdahl, F. William. Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009. Gentile, Emilio. La via italiana al totalitarismo: il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista. Rome: Carocci, 2008. Grunenberg, Antonia. Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger: Geschichte einer Liebe. Munich: Piper, 2006. Jessop, Bob. The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Hake, Sabine. Screen Nazis. Cinema, History, and Democracy. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Dunwoody: N.S. Berg, 1968. Lofgren, Mike. The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. New York: Viking, 2016. Mosse, George. Nazi Culture. Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. London: W. H. Allen, 1966. Poulantzas, Nikos. The Crisis of the Dictatorships. London: New Left Books, 1976. —. Fascism and Dictatorship. London: New Left Books, 1974. Schiller, Herbert. Mass Communications and American Empire. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. —. Culture, Inc.: the Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Rascaroli, Laura. “Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory.” Kinema (2002). http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/artile.php?id=141&feature Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wolf, Naomi. The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2007.

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Wolin, Sheldon. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

PART I: TOTALITARIAN ENVIRONMENT: SPACES AND IMAGES

CHAPTER ONE THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE CLASSICAL FRAGMENT: THE CASE OF GENOA AND SCULPTOR EUGENIO BARONI1 SILVIA BOERO

Introduction In 1932 Mussolini delivered a speech in Perugia before the Academy of Fine Arts, a speech that summarized his plan to forge a fascist culture and aesthetics. He felt the time was ripe to call upon writers, artists, and architects in order to convert that part of the population (mainly intellectuals) to fascism which, despite showing some sympathy with its goals, had not yet adhered to his ideology. He had successfully overcome the crisis that followed the assassination of Socialist representative Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, and now his main objective was the fascistizzazione of Italian culture in toto. Leonard Barkan, speaking of the Renaissance in Italy, directs our attention the use/abuse of the classic fragment as a tool of persuasion: “The whole phenomena of classical survival—disjointed, challenging to read, open, seeming to solicit modern response—makes it difficult to separate fragmentation from reconstruction.”2 This statement is also valid for the Italian fascist dictatorship—or, better, for the years between 1924 and 1940. This period marked what in Italian I call appropriazione indebita or illegitimate appropriation of the classical fragment, in the figurative arts as well as in 1

Acknowledgments: the author would like to express her deep gratitude to friend and colleague Dr. Laurie Cosgriff (Portland State University, Program of Classics), for her invaluable help. 2 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 341.

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literature. I use the term “classical fragment” to designate all artistic, architectural and sometimes linguistic references related to Imperial Roman times that the fascist machine used in order to gain consent. The use/abuse of the Imperial Roman style was the safest strategy used to deploy the new propaganda within a common cultural framework under the aegis of the fascist “new” aesthetics. In my work I will investigate the case of the city of Genoa, where an almost total reconstruction of already existing monuments and redesign of urban plans took place between the years 1924 and 1938. Genoa, at the time of the fascist uprising, was a city with socialist and anarchist tendencies; carrying out these reconstructions and transformations aimed not only to draw people towards the new fascist aesthetics but also, more importantly, to control and eliminate dissent. Therefore, in the name of the identification of Italy with Art, a massive architectural revision was presented as necessary: “I do not know if it is possible to separate the names of Italy and Art”3 said Mussolini from the Campidoglio on May 24th 1924. Along with the architectural features of Genoa, I will analyze figurative sculpture, primarily the works and the projects by the anti-fascist artist Eugenio Baroni. Although not well known, Baroni and his art can provide a fine example of dissent. My research focuses mostly on the analysis of two of his statues, representing Guglielmo Embriaco and Andrea Doria (medieval and renaissance socalled heroes respectively). Throughout my study I will employ semiotics as a tool of investigation, with references to Eco and Pierce. Baroni was, for too long, wrongly considered a fascist artist. Actually, Baroni subverts the fascist paradigms and, by doing so, he states his dissent. He died two years before Gramsci, unaware of his work. Gramsci may have not known Baroni’s name. Had Gramsci lived longer, he would have listed Baroni among the organic intellectuals.

Genova and its Fascist “Refurbishment” “The youth appeal to Mussolini, so that he might regulate architecture’s fate, which today is suffering. In their petition the youth ask Mussolini for an answer. Whatever Mussolini answers will be fine. Because Mussolini is always right.” 4 3

“ Io non so se i due nomi d’Italia e d’Arte siano separabili.” Translations are mine. 4 “I giovani si rivolgono a Mussolini, perchè regoli le sorti dell’architettura, oggi male in arnese. Nella loro petizione i giovani chiedono a Mussolini una risposta. Quello che risponderà Mussolini andrà bene. Perchè Mussolini ha sempre ragione.” Carlo Cresti, Architettura e Fascismo (Siena: Periccioli, 1989), 45.

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Chapter One

These frightening words appeared in 1930 as the incipit of the petition that a group of young Italian architects submitted to Mussolini. As Barbara Miller says in one of her articles, throughout history architects had always been in need of wealthy patrons, because of the great expenses involved in building. And government buildings, because of their size and visibility, have always been the most attractive commissions. Thus, architects have always been involved in politics, and have nearly always sought positions of power and influence. With the advent of the twentieth century, the scale of government buildings often transformed architecture into civic planning on a monumental scale, and the relative democratization of politics vastly increased the size of the public: the need for power in the architects’ world had never been so great.5 This was the case of the young Italian architects mentioned above, who, besides being supportive of Fascism, were seeking a power that previous administrations had denied for too long. Whether they were in search of artistic glory or mere political influence, they surely knew that they would be remembered—for better or for worse—as the controversial innovators of Italian, and, to a certain extent, European—art and architecture. In Genoa as in many other Italian cities the Fascist regime carried out renovations and transformations not only to attract people to the new fascist aesthetics, but also to control and eliminate dissent by displacing and relocating groups of citizens into newly created housing projects intended as mere panoptikons. One of the most controversial and massive plans was the reconstruction of the area called Foce, a central neighbourhood at the mouth of the river Bisagno. Presented by architect Marcello Piacentini and sculptor Arturo Dazzi in 1923 to podestà (or mayor) Eugenio Broccardi, with the title Beatissimi Voi (Blessed You), the works for this project began in early 1927, with the completion of the project for covering the river Bisagno in late 1928. The creation of a boulevard, today called Viale Brigate Partigiane, was followed by the opening of Piazza della Vittoria with the Arch of Triumph (Fig.1) and the adjacent buildings designed for public use. According to art critic Massimo Razzi: It was supposed to be Genoa’s central square, even more central than Piazza De Ferrari. They (the regime) liked the idea of a “roman style” square, austere but lively, located at the edge of city traffic and not crowded with cars like Piazza De Ferrari. But the Genoese never loved it; 5

Barbara Miller Lane, “Architects in Power: Ideology in the Work of Ernst May and Albert Speer,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xvii.1 (1986): 238-310.

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today they come to Piazza della Vittoria to work, for the few shops, to catch the buses to travel to the Riviera or to the hinterland, to visit administrative offices. Under its porches, shops have never occupied those spaces of supposedly great commercial interest. It is a sign that the heart of Genoa could never move here.6

Figure 1. Arch of Triumph (Frieze), by Dazzi

The imposing forms and proportions of this building clearly had a demonstrative function: it was erected to show everyone—especially those who did not yet support the dictatorial machine—that fascism was nearly omnipotent, second only to the Roman Empire. The use/abuse of the classic fragment is obvious in the Arch of Triumph: it vaguely resembles the one erected by Augustus in the city of Aosta after he defeated the local population; carved with heroic and epic scenes of war, inspired by Roman bas-reliefs on the four sides of the upper part, the arch is bulky and 6 “Doveva essere la piazza centrale di Genova, ancor di più di piazza De Ferrari, considerata troppo di passaggio. Soprattutto piaceva l’idea di una piazza alla romana, austera e commercialmente vivace, al margine dell'arteria di traffico e non attraversata dalle auto come Piazza De Ferrari. Ma i Genovesi non l’hanno mai amata, frequentandola per lavoro, per i pochi negozi, per prendere le corriere che partono dai suoi terminal diretti per le riviere o l’entroterra, per pratiche pensionistiche al palazzo dell’INPS. Sotto i porticati intere gallerie che dovevano offrire spazi di grande interesse commerciale non sono mai state occupate da negozi. Segno che il cuore di Genova non è riuscito a trasferirsi qui.” Massimo Razzi, L’Ulivo sul Tetto (Genova: GGallery, 1992), 67.

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depressing, despite the whiteness of the marble that was meant to confer airiness to the construction. Despite the efforts to make it resemble an ancient Roman monument, the Genoese arch is a reminder of our darkest era; a preposterous example of the abuse of classical fragments is evident in the inscriptions in the upper part of the monument. Above the frieze, we read: “O Superb Genoa, sanctify your sons who died for their country fighting on earth, in the sky, and in the sea to the glory of the centuries.”7 The syntax of the sentence is as awkward today as it was in the 1920s. Even rhetorically this inscription sounds excessive, and it is also incorrect from a syntactical point of view. It should read: “O Superba Genova, consacra alla gloria dei secoli i figli morti combattendo in terra, in mare, in cielo.” Superba is an attribute of Genoa, used by medieval chroniclers at the time of the city-states.8 This is a reference to the supposedly glorious centuries, when Genoa ruled over the Mediterranean and Black Sea, and the meaning of the verb “to rule” includes the actions of pillaging and ravaging. The redundancy of the sentence inscribed on the fascist arch is due to the use of the Latin construction applied to the Italian language, with the verb at the end, a structure that sounds stiff in Italian. The neighborhood that stood in the same area before the opening of the square and the erection of the skyscraper was called Vico drito Pontexello—Vicolo Dritto Ponticello, in Italian—a populous district inhabited by working class citizens whose political views were in stark contrast with those of Fascism. It was a strip of about three hundred meters in length, with ancient and deteriorated buildings, but of historic value nevertheless. Brand new but cheap case popolari, or housing projects, located on the nearby hills were ready to host the people evicted from the ancient section. The compulsory resettlement allowed the regime to exercise control on that part of the population that had previously caused political trouble for the regime. It must be said that the possibility of restoring the ancient dwellings was considered—and bitter fights took place during the meetings at city hall, since at that time not all the city aldermen had sold themselves to Fascism. In 1933 the Rivista Municipale—the monthly magazine published by the Genoa City Council since 1920 and totally swallowed up by the regime already in 1923–wrote that those houses were unhygienic, and did not have any of the characteristics of buildings such as

7

“Genova, i figli morti per la patria combattendo in terra in mare in cielo alla Gloria dei secoli superba consacra.” 8 As Petrarch says in Itinerarium breve de Ianua ad Ierusalem, 1380 ca.

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those built by Fieschi and Giustiniani.9 The fact that those dwellings were representative of a folk architecture, and very significant to understand ancient, almost forgotten building techniques, did not have any importance. Those buildings were the product of the tough simple life endured by undemanding people, determined to maintain their culture and freedom against the annihilating machine of Fascism. An anonymous song was even written to commemorate the destruction of the area Vico Drito Pontexello; which was promptly censored by the regime as anti-fascist, and it clearly was.10 Piazza della Vittoria, where the Arch is still standing today, was to be connected to the nearby Piazza Dante by two tunnels, opened to ease downtown traffic, which was already chaotic at that time (actually, the opening of these passageways contributed to the additional destruction of older settlements of some historic and cultural value). It is on top of one of these tunnels, the one named after Nino Bixio, supposedly Garibaldi’s right hand man—that the regime ordered the statues of Guglielmo Embriaco and Andrea Doria, the two Genoese “heroes” par excellence, which were going to be carved by Eugenio Baroni, to be placed.

Baroni’s Sculptural Methodology of Dissent As art historian Richard Etlin observes: The Fascist regime, through its art experts, worked hard and consistently in order to link as much as possible the past to the present, to legitimate the Modernist tendencies by relating them to the ancient glorious styles. How the latter were used or exploited, it did not matter; the target was to move toward the people. Among the strategies proposed to make the party more

9 Two prominent Genoese families. The Giustiniani, dating back to the 13th century, was actually a group of families, an “association” based on “shares,” the first documented stock exchange. Twelve Genoese patricians decided to get together to form an “association” and then a “family” (http://www.giustiniani.info/english.html). The Fieschi, instead, date back to the 11th century, and played an important role during the bitter fights between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. 10 The song is about a young man condemned to death without any evidence, solely on the grounds that he was a resident of Vico Drito Pontexello, which was considered a notorious neighborhood. The man was accused of murder in the first degree; his sentence was then commuted to 20 years; only after the war could evidence of his innocence be documented.

8

Chapter One populous and populist was the expansion of Fascist mass culture and resurgence of populist discourse in official high culture.11

Mussolini knew only too well how effectively art could operate on the masses; the combination of Modernism and Classicism mixed in balanced proportions proved to be a winning one. The House of the Mutilated Soldier, a shelter that was supposed to provide material and moral support for those who fought in World War I, who had been physically and psychologically disabled by the war experience was supposed to be an example. But architect Eugenio Fuselli—who had no political allegiances—did his best to avoid heavy rhetoric by building a structure with modernist lines, characterized by a striped façade of white and red marble from Levanto12—not in black slate as in the medieval Genoese style—a choice that did not please Mussolini; moreover, the building did not fit into the fascist paradigms the Rivista Municipale set for architects in 1938. But it was too late to appoint another architect for a new project, and money was scarce; therefore, the regime had to content itself with Fuselli’s plan. Nevertheless, the regime found a way to impose its war rhetoric in another way: an anti-aircraft mortar was placed in the garden surrounding the building. Today, ironically, the former House of the Mutilated Soldier houses the Louisiana Jazz Club. The regime decided to have a monument to the maimed soldier at the entrance; Eugenio Baroni—considered among the most prominent artists of the period—was hired even though he had a history of rejecting the regime’s ideology. Baroni created a bronze group (Fig.2 and Fig. 3) that eventually caused much trouble for Fascist rhetoric. It represented two mutilated soldiers supported by a motherly figure; the group contributes nothing to the celebration of war, but is instead a clear denunciation of its horrors.

11

Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 322. 12 A town on the Eastern Riviera, between the Cinque Terre and La Spezia, known for its nearby quarries.

The Use and Abuse of the Classical Fragment

Figure 2 Monument to the Mutilated Soldier, by Eugenio Baroni

Figure 3 Monument to the Mutilated Soldier (Detail), by Eugenio Baroni

9

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Baroni had submitted his project for a commemorative Monument to the Unknown Soldier13 to the judging committee in 1921, stating his ideas through his typical realism; he believed that victory14 could not came through tragedy and sacrifice; instead, his desire was to convey a message of peace. He made it clear that he had no intention of celebrating the war in which he had fought; for this reason Mussolini accused Baroni of being a Bolshevik, and forbade the creation of the work—despite the fact that Baroni’s model won first prize. Mussolini, at the inauguration of the Gruppo Novecento Show at Galleria Pesaro in Milan on March 26th 1923, stated that he never had any intention of supporting anything that might be considered “state art”. Actually he was there to officially establish the paradigms for the propaganda that would characterize all those memorials that, during the next ten years, would appear in almost every square in Italy’s major cities. In those years Baroni was gradually shifting toward expressionism; the 1920s represented a radical turn for him which began with the Monument to the Unknown Soldier and ended15 with the creation of the two previously mentioned statues of Andrea Doria (Fig. 4) and Guglielmo Embriaco (Fig. 5) in Genoa (1928). In these works he pursued a more simplified style, avoiding any decorative element.

13

“Between the two World Wars the democratic governments first, and then the Fascist regime, were greatly committed to commemorate those who had fallen during the Great War. This concern takes on peculiar features in each of the belligerent countries. Starting with the march on Rome, the Fascist government engages in a comprehensive attempt to seize the symbolic legacy of World War I and the victory that was achieved at that time. The more mature result of this attempt consists in the architectural campaign for the construction of memorials that the regime builds during the 1930s in places that had been battlefields or nearby. It is precisely in the accumulation of unnumbered ‘masses’ of burials in shrines, like that of Redipuglia, that Fascism’s goal of building future victories upon the dead finds expression, one which will finally culminate in World War II.” Daniele Pisani, “The Mass as a Foundation of Fascist Memorials of the Great War,” Engramma, no. 128 (July-August 2015) http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=797. 14 Vittoria Mutilata, mutilated victory, is the term first used by Gabriele D’Annunzio in reference to the broken Pact of London. 15 After carving the two statues of Doria and Embriaco, Baroni did not work for the Regime until 1934, one year before his death, when he was asked to carve the monument to the Duca d’Aosta, which he was unable to finish. It was completed by Morbiducci.

The Use and Abuse of the Classical Fragment

Figure 4 Andrea Doria, by Eugenio Baroni

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Figure 5 Guglielmo Embriaco, by Eugenio Baroni

The ideological implications of his art were multiple and diverse. The immediate public outcry that his project provoked was, for him, an overwhelming blow; he nevertheless kept stating his opposition to the Fascist regime. As he affirmed in the preface to the publication of a catalogue of his works in 1921, The glory of the Soldier, if there is one, must be as simple as he is. A monument to him must also be one for the woman that he left alone because of his death. It is not necessary to amplify her sorrow, or to represent the totality of the horror that she had to bear. Such a terrible reality is so enormous that its rhetorical representation would be repulsive, dangerous and, of necessity, artificial.”16

16

Eugenio Baroni, Carteggio (Genova: Archivio Statale, 1980), 18.

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Baroni wanted to leave an interpretive opening for the viewer, rather than providing the regime’s version of what happened on the battlefield. Hence Baroni in his works wished to eliminate any deceptively decorative elements, in order to achieve an immediacy that is both subtle and powerful. An example of his tendency toward expressionism is another monument that was supposed to stand in front of the House of the Mutilated Soldier, but which instead was relegated to a corner, and was replaced by the white marble of a victorious angel (a statue by the sculptor Antonio Morera) in its original location. (Fig. 6)

Figure 6 The Navigator, by Antonio Morera

In the monument to the Maimed Soldier the proportions are deliberately distorted. In a scene depicting the homecoming of two brothers embraced by their mother, their extremities are bigger than their heads, and their bodies appear frozen. The bitter irony of this artwork lies

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in the absence/presence game played by the sculptor, who made his mutilated soldier point towards the uncertain—with a no longer existing hand—; an exhortation directed to another soldier—who is blind—to look at something not visible. The mother seems to whisper soothing words to this son, despite her awareness of their tragedy. She is not a full-bodied woman fit for pleasure and maternity, but a wiry strong boned female, used to tough work and life. There is no decorative or perfectly balanced element in the three figures; they instead recall the suffering, real, features and bodily structures of Italian peasants of the time. The mother in the bronze group also resembles Baroni’s own mother, to whom he was very close; he is buried in the same grave, and on the marble slab he carved her portrait. Their tomb—as much as the monument to the mutilated soldier— is very far removed from any rhetoric; it bears their names and, when describing himself, it has just one word: scultore. The mother is captured in an essential, almost minimalist, gesture of blessing. The theme of the mother is quite recurrent in Baroni’s works, especially in the funerary sculptures commissioned by private citizens, as seen in the Cemetery of Staglieno, Genoa. Baroni, with his mothers, simultaneously questions and engages the viewers at the same time. He wants to depict those suffering women coming from the most battered social classes, who knew the horror of methodical and institutionalized massacre by the Fascist regime—as well as the previous Italian Governments—and which was praised as the path to glory, all too well. Therefore, it is quite difficult to assert that this bronze group stands for the celebration of war and subsequent victory. Nevertheless Baroni had often been considered a pure formalist aesthete, one of those who followed art for art’s sake only. As a matter of fact Baroni did care about style and how aesthetic aspects might have affected the viewers’ interpretation; but he never meant that his artworks had to be seen, as Fry put it, “out of context, as pure form, rather than as expressions of a time and a place.”17 For Baroni the content was as important as form and style, as he wrote in his letters, where he relates both his desire to tell stories through the content of his works, as well as his recurrent nightmare—that of dying before he could accomplish his task:

17 Roger Fry, in Laurie Adams, The Methodologies of Art (New York: Icon Editions, 1996), 17.

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Chapter One That I won’t be able to heal, that I won’t have the time to finish what I have in my mind is too monstrous a nightmare […]. What’s the role of a sculptor, what use is he to this world, if he cannot materialize the ideal?18

He saw himself as an artist/poet,19 far removed from rhetoric, solid and determined, not necessarily famous, who chooses to speak up despite the bitterest censorship. In Baroni’s view, greatness needed no empty rhetoric, but immediacy in visual messages; this was what he felt as his duty: to represent humanity in his works, as he puts it in his above mentioned letters: “Lord, let me live for a few more years. My entire life I had only one task to accomplish, it is the only one and the last. It is the most forceful one. Lord, let me finish it.”20 In this passage of his diary Baroni refers to what he used to define as his mission—not one work of art in particular, but all his works that together were able to convey a collective message to the viewers. At the time of his death, at 55, on June 25th 1935, Baroni was working on the memorial for the Duke of Aosta in Turin. His wish was to, finally, be given an opportunity to be understood; this work would have been the epitome of all his previous ones. But he was once more willfully manipulated; the regime, using his poor health as an excuse, appointed Publio Morbiducci to finish Baroni’s task. The result was a total subversion of his artistic thought, despite the existence of the author’s project. Morbiducci was apolitical; he did not share the Fascist ideology, yet he complied with the Regime. Eugenio Baroni is not considered a great figure in the landscape of Italian art. He is in fact little known, if known at all. Only recently have several works been published by the University of Genoa Press.21 He deserves much more attention; although his work did not have the same impact as did that of artists such as Rivera or Siqueiros, just to cite two of his most famous contemporaries, he is nevertheless as important in terms of his socio-political commitment. He was never a self-declared member of any party or group; he never asserted that he was leading an overt propaganda battle against Fascism. Nonetheless he consistently pursued 18

“Che io non guarisca, che io non abbia il tempo di finire quello che io ho in testa è un dramma troppo mostruoso […] Che ruolo ha uno scultore, che serve al mondo, se non riesce a materiare l’ideale?” Baroni, Carteggio, 22. 19 Using the term in its Greek meaning, poiesis, therefore as the one who creates. 20 “Signore, lasciami vivere ancora qualche anno. In tutta la mia vita ho avuto solo un’opera da compiere, l’unica e l’ultima. È la più forte. Signore, lascia che io la porti a termine.” 21 Monographs by Franco Sbrogi, Professor of Art and Art Criticism, University of Genoa, Department of Architecture.

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the road of subtle dissent, which is not easier than the open fight. Analogously to Orozco in his paintings, he showed deep compassion for a suffering humanity; his sculptures are a homage to those whose rights are trampled—and, at the same time, his art is imbued with psychological insight. When he died the local newspapers Il Secolo, Il Corriere Mercantile and Il Lavoro, at that time all controlled by the Regime, agreed to define him as “Someone who inherited Michelangelo’s enormous talent but, during his artistic life, enjoyed little happiness, much sorrow, renunciations and misinterpretation.”22 In the article, about one page long, only two lines mentioned the two silver medals he earned fighting in WWI. Those same medals he never wore, because he literally tossed them on Mussolini when he, in 1922, called him “Leninista Bolscevico”.

A Semiotic Approach to Baroni’s Art: These are not Heroes The narrative value, as a sign—therefore arbitrary—which I read in the message conveyed by the statues representing Guglielmo Embriaco and Andrea Doria (or, better, which I ascribe to the statues) may generate other, different, messages but they are still signs of something, whether they are related to my own culture or not. The statues resemble two iconic signs, and as such they imply innumerable meanings. Within the Fascist— and not only—iconology the word ‘hero’ refers to a young man, whose characteristics are primarily physical strength and consequently ability to fight, as well as loyalty to his own country, without any doubts or second thoughts. His mission is to defeat an ever-present enemy and to die for victory; war is inseparable from the concept of the hero. The statues carved by Baroni evoke the mental image produced by the word ‘hero’ perfectly and, combined with the idea of the big, young, tough man, constitute a linguistic sign. But, as Saussure reminds us, language does not reflect reality; it constitutes reality. This ‘reality’ that the word ‘hero’ constitutes—the young, handsome, muscled, and proportioned man—is valid in the particularity of the cultural context I am analyzing—clearly not a context Baroni accepted. He did not eliminate the typical signs of Fascism from his art, but he gave them a new denotation, which is the core of representation. Baroni, to a certain extent, did something similar to what Magritte did in his painting 22

“[L]’erede della terribilità di Michelangelo, che, nella sua vita di artista ebbe poche gioie e molti dolori nei lunghi anni di lotte dure, sofferenze, amarezze senza confini, rinunce.” Corriere Mercantile, June 25th 1935, Genoa.

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The Betrayal of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe): as the letters p-i-p-e embody the arbitrariness of Saussure’s signifier, Doria and Embriaco’s physical prowess and their war apparel represent the arbitrariness of the signifier h-e-r-o. Hence, the sculpted images enhance artifice, that is to say the ability to persuade the viewer that what s/he sees is what it is not: it is the linguistic message that breaks the illusion by informing the viewer of the icon’s mendacity. The statues convey an unwritten yet verbal statement to the viewers: these are not heroes, they are just men and, as such, troubled and often wrong. They are not an example to follow or to look up to. They are nothing but human beings. This was the wrong thing to say in the late 1920s, when the war hero was going to develop—in the Fascist/Nazi iconology and iconography—into the superhuman athlete, the icon of the embodiment of racial laws. Through the subversion of this imagery, Baroni proceeded to the subversion of Fascist aesthetics: the new hero he created replaces the sign of power and strength with that of antagonism and resistance. Like the drunken man exposed in a public place by the Salvation Army in order to advertise the advantage of temperance,23 Baroni’s statues are located in a very communal area in order to promote the benefits of a dictatorship based on warfare. But, as soon as they are situated above the tunnel, in the heart of a crowded city, the two heroes become anti-heroes. They become semiotic devices, something that permits a subversive interpretation. They do something more than elevate “heroism”: they also express, through unbalanced proportions, hesitant expressions (or no expressions at all), idle limbs and looks, an experience that is opposed to the ideal they were commissioned to celebrate. The fact that Baroni had carved the statues according to an iconographic standard that differed totally from fascist paradigms, obliged the viewers to associate their presence with a whole system of values that deeply differed from the one the regime kept imposing. Therefore, through what Eco calls a semiotic mise en scène Baroni proceeds to the creation of a different ideology. The artist challenges the viewer to find a meaning for the unacceptable representations of Doria and Embriaco; he offers a plurality of interpretations, and, as a result, a plurality of signs—another use of the mind forbidden during Fascist times. Baroni’s art creates a foundation for a new system of argumentation, based more on a deconstructive procedure than on the larger-than-life narrative 23

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 228.

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of war. His crime was to overturn the process of mimesis, or better, he introduced the viewers to an impure mimesis; Baroni’s “impurity” was to act in complete autonomy, daring to go against classical proportions, elongating and constricting the figures, creating odd juxtapositions, and, by doing so, he underlined the social and political disunity of that age as well as the alienation of its individuals. Despite the growing interest in Eugenio Baroni, few people, even those operating in this field, know him; if they do, it is superficially and for many he is still a fascist who sold his talent to Fascism. Actually he not only had the courage to dissent, but his art, independently from his political stance, should undergo a much deeper analysis than can be undertaken in this essay.

Conclusions In the midst of Fascist propaganda, during the systematic abuse of classical art carried out by the Regime, Eugenio Baroni was one of the few artists who had the courage to go against the flow. The use and abuse of classical art and architecture is typical of other European dictatorial regimes; in the past one could also find the use (and perhaps the abuse) of the classical fragment applied in order to exert a certain amount of power on the masses. It should be mentioned that Baroni was profoundly inspired by two medieval Italian sculptors, Wiligelmo and Antelami, working in the early 12th and in the late 12th/early 13th century respectively. Both are recognized for having initiated their own sculpting schools, for having created their own style in a period when authorship was intended to be collective. The maestranze—guilds—used to be considered the authors, not the architect (often also the sculptor) himself. Wiligelmo and Antelami made a statement by signing their works, giving a personal trait to their art, and by doing so they revived authorship, which had long been suppressed. The very essence of the Middle Ages is captured in the statue representing Guglielmo Embriaco and, at the same time, it is totally subverted by Baroni’s interpretation, which, by means of his signature— and therefore his authorship—expresses dissent. Two historical and social contexts—the hyper-glorified period of the Genoese city state and the Roman Empire—are both present but in conflict, thus leaving multiple options for interpretations, and not just the one the regime commended. Semiologically speaking, Baroni is closer to Pierce’s semiotics than to Saussure’s. He does not limit himself to signifier and signified, but he creates a third category; he allows for the opportunity to peel off the

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layered reality of representation, until the viewer reaches a state of interpretive freedom. The fact that I ascribe a revolutionary value to Baroni and his work, or, at least, a meaning that we can read as one of dissent and resistance does not make him a militant. Actually, from a Marxist point of view, Baroni’s works were mere commodities; he often worked for the rich Genoese bourgeoisie, which he never disdained, and to which he belonged. He was not an artist alienated from his own production either; perhaps he used the tool of dissent in order to escape alienation. The unbalanced proportions he employed in his sculptures of Embriaco and Doria tell of his rejection of the abused classical paradigms and of his effort to establish a style that was uniquely his own, devoid of any patronizing. Baroni was very well acquainted with Giuseppe De Finetti, the Milanese architect who overtly spoke of his antifascism, and, consequently, was banned from any commission; Finetti also had a hard time working for private clients, who did not want to associate their names with his. Yet it is not possible to know how much this acquaintance might have influenced the younger Eugenio. Maybe, approaching Baroni’s case, we should do as scholar Donatella Taverna suggests in her article; that is to let ourselves be fully captivated by Baroni’s art, keeping in mind that “he is a forgotten great who deserves to be rediscovered, whose artistic discourse one has to reengage with.”24

Works Cited Adams, Laurie. The Methodologies of Art. New York: Icon Editions, 1996. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Baroni, Eugenio. Carteggio. Genoa: Archivio Statale, 1980. Cresti, Carlo. Architettura e Fascismo. Siena: Periccioli, 1989. De Caria, Francesco. “Il monumento di Torino al Duca d’Aosta. Eugenio Baroni e le lettere dal fronte (1916-1918).” Studi piemontesi, XV.2 (1986): 399-404. Eco, Umberto. I limiti dell’interpretazione. Milan: Bompiani, 1990. Eco, Umberto, and Thomas Sebeok. The Signs of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

24 Donatella Taverna, Eugenio Baroni, un grande dimenticato (Genova: La Casana, 1980), 13.

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Etlin, Richard A. Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991. Gramsci, Antonio. Letteratura e vita nazionale. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971. —. Lettere dal Carcere. Palermo: Sellerio, 1996. Manacorda, Giuliano. Letteratura e Cultura del Periodo Fascista. Milan: Principato, 1974. Merrel, Floyd. Signs for Everybody. Ottawa: Legas, 2000. Miller Lane, Barbara. “Architects in Power.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XVII.1 (1986): 238-310. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. Pisani, Daniele. “The Mass as a Foundation. Fascist Memorials of the Great War.” Engramma, no. 128 (July-August 2015). http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=797 Razzi, Massimo. L’Ulivo sul Tetto. Cent’anni di Edilizia Genovese. Genoa: GGallery, 1992. Rossetti, Vincenzo. Da Roma a Sabaudia. Milan: Bompiani, 1937. Sapori, Francesco. Bilancio di sei anni di attività. Milan: Bompiani, 1934. —. Da Roma al Circeo. Milano: Bompiani, 1934. Sbrogi, Franco, ed. Eugenio Baroni 1880-1935. Catalogo della mostra. Genoa: De Ferrari, 1990. Taverna, Donatella. Eugenio Baroni, un grande dimenticato. Genoa: La Casana, 1980.

CHAPTER TWO FASCIST IDEOLOGY, MASS MEDIA, AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT: A CASE STUDY MARIA D’ANNIBALLE

Piazza dei Signori, Verona’s political and administrative heart, is framed by buildings in Gothic-Venetian and Renaissance styles seemingly untouched by time: the XV century Loggia del Consiglio on the northern side of the Piazza faces the medieval Palazzo del Comune and Palazzo del Capitanio while the XIII century Palazzo della Provincia (also known as Palazzo del Governo and Palazzo del Podesta) stands on the east side, across from the Arco della Costa and the covered passageway leading to the nearby Piazza delle Erbe. Palazzo della Provincia, the most seemingly pristine structure of this intimate and scenographic architectural setting, is a Fascist-era counterfeit: the product of a highly controversial architectural makeover carried out in 1928-1930, which stripped the building of its historical layers and returned it to a hypothetical original appearance. Endowed with a brand new red-brick façade, proud battlements and slender arched windows, the restored palazzo was designated as the official residence and office of the local podestà (state-appointed local leader) and became, with the adjacent Piazza dei Signori, the stage for Fascist rituals and ceremonies during the years of the regime. This essay focuses on the debate that regards the refashioning of the (medieval) Palazzo della Provincia, arguably one of the most ideologically charged restoration projects undertaken by the regime in Verona. I am particularly concerned with three aspects: the active role played by the local socio-political elites in the restoration effort and their ability to impact national-level cultural-artistic policy; the regime’s strategies of appropriation of Verona’s artistic heritage to legitimize Fascist rule while promoting a feeling of shared national identity; and finally the role of the mass media in advertising the newly restored architecture to local and

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national audiences and recasting its identity for purposes bound to a Fascist agenda. Fascist scholarship has extensively explored the regime’s appropriation of the Roman past. A number of studies have shown Fascism’s efforts to excavate, restore, highlight and appropriate monuments of classical architecture as a first step in the process of reviving Rome’s imperial ambitions.1 The primacy of “Romanità” in the regime’s cultural policies has however eclipsed the role of other historical narratives, and only recently have scholars begun to assess the role of medieval and Renaissance tradition in Fascist cultural policies. Studies on the cities of Arezzo, San Gimignano and Ferrara have shown how the regime appropriated medieval architecture to reinforce national identity and provide political legitimacy to Mussolini’s rule.2 My study builds on this most recent scholarship to discuss how a key monument of Verona’s medieval heritage became, under the Fascist regime, the site of negotiation between official visions and local narratives. It argues that while the restoration was the product of the aspirations of Verona’s social elites, who pressed for an ideal—although fictitious—refashioning of the Palazzo in order to foster tourism, revamp a stagnant economy and support their myth of identity, the central state authority appropriated the restored architecture for its own nation-building agenda. Through film documentaries, photographs and carefully staged ceremonies, the restored Palazzo della Provincia and Piazza dei Signori were advertised to local and national audiences to promote a sense of collective national identity rooted in a common historical past and 1

Scholars have argued that Fascism’s interest in classic architecture was conducive to Mussolini’s imperialistic ambitions. See Giuseppe Cuccia, Urbanistica, edilizia, infrastrutture di Roma capitale, 1870-1990 (Bari: Laterza, 1991); Luisa Cardilli, Gli anni del governatorato (1926-1944). Interventi urbanistici, scoperte archeologiche, arredo urbano, restauri (Rome: Kappa, 1995); and Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome. 1870-1950. Traffic and Glory. Exhibition Catalog (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1973). 2 See Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected. Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004) and “Towers and Tourists: The Cinematic City of San Gimignano,” in Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 113-132; Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, “Inventing the Palazzo del Corte in Ferrara,” in Donatello among the Blackshirts, Lazzaro and Crum, 97112; and Roger J. Crum, “Shaping the Fascist ‘New Man:’ Donatello’s St. George and Mussolini’s Appropriated Renaissance of the Italian Nation,” in Donatello among the Blackshirts, Lazzaro and Crum, 133-144.

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projected through the figure of Il Duce into the future. Ultimately, by examining the debate surrounding the refashioning of Verona’s political and administrative headquarters, this study hopes to problematize the conventional understanding of Fascist-sponsored restorations as top-down undertakings solely decided and implemented by the central government, and to evaluate the extent to which our understanding of Italy’s artistic past is the result of Fascist-era initiatives.

Historical Overview Built at the end of the XIII century as the official residence of Verona’s ruling family, the Della Scala or Scaligeri, Palazzo della Provincia's historical relevance derives from its association with the ruler and warrior Cangrande della Scala. Historians have celebrated Cangrande as the greatest of the Della Scala and one of the distinguished princes of his age both because of his military achievements and for the support he gave to the arts. Giotto came to Verona at his invitation. Dante Alighieri and several other refugees, banished from Florence at the time of the battle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, 3 were also invited and even resided at the Palazzo. Tradition saw in him the Veltro whose kingdom was to bring to Italy the prosperity celebrated by Dante in the Divine Comedy. Cangrande loved architecture, a passion shared by every member of his house. The Della Scala promoted a series of buildings around Piazza dei Signori, the city’s government square. Much of the Della Scala public and private life centered on this piazza. Here, they resided and performed their government activities. Piazza dei Signori was also very close to the church of Santa Maria Antica, where the Scaligeri worshipped and beside whose walls they erected the tombs that glorify them in death. Following the end of the rule of the Scaligeri, the Palazzo retained its initial role as the seat of Verona’s political power for over five hundred years, under the Venetians (1405-1797), the French government (17971814) and the Hapsburgs (1814-1866) before being annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866. Throughout the centuries, the palazzo underwent several alterations, all of which severely compromised its original structure. Under Venetian rule, a loggia was opened on the ground floor of the façade adjoining Piazza dei Signori and a monumental portal was introduced in 1533 by Podestà Giovanni Dolfin. Flanked by double ionic columns and surmounted by the symbolic Venetian griffon, the portal 3

At the time of the battle between the Papacy and the Empire, the Guelphs supported the Papacy while the Ghibellines supported the Empire.

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was the creation of the famous architect Michele Sanmicheli, who chose this solution to celebrate the Venetian domination without causing dramatic alterations to the façade. In 1810, under French rule, Palazzo del Podestà was restored by architect Antonio Smancini, who transformed it into a rather incongruous neoclassical building. Smancini covered the façade with stucco and crowned it with a simple molded cornice, which caused the crenellations to disappear. The arched windows of the first and second floor were closed and replaced by rectangular windows. Finally, the loggia of the ground floor was closed off and reduced in amplitude. As archival photographs and prints clearly document, by the end of the XIX century Palazzo della Provincia had been transformed into a rather anonymous, tile-roofed palace with virtually no trace of its XIII century origin.

Figure 1 Palazzo della Provincia, early 1900s

The 1928-1930 Restoration Following the annexation of Verona to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866, city administrators were faced with economic problems deriving from the withdrawal of the Austrian troops, Verona’s main source of income. Several initiatives, ranging from major public works such as the embankment of the Adige River and the construction of an industrial canal

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to agricultural innovations, were undertaken in the attempt to revamp the city’s economy and transform Verona from a military base of the Hapsburg Empire into a modern city within the new Italian nation-state. The restoration of Verona’s built heritage was an integral part of the new administration’s effort to create a modern and prosperous Verona by encouraging and exploiting a burgeoning tourist industry. Several restoration projects were planned—although only partially executed—in the thirty-year period following national unification, including the refashioning of most of the buildings lining Piazza dei Signori, the core of Verona’s urban identity.4 Restoration of the façade of Palazzo del Podestà was first attempted in 1877. At the time, the local administration requested the opinion of the leading Italian expert on restoration theory, Camillo Boito.5 Boito suggested a rather cautious and conservative approach. He recommended the removal of the stucco from the façade, the reopening of the loggia on 4

Between 1867 and 1896 more than twenty architectural complexes, including secular and religious architecture, were renovated. They include the Domus Mercatorum (or Casa dei Mercanti, 1878-1884), Loggia di Fra Giocondo (1874), Palazzo del Comune (also known as Mercato Vecchio or Palazzo della Ragione, 1877 and 1894-1897), and Palazzo del Tribunale (or Palazzo di Consignoro or Palazzo del Capitanio, 1882-1885), all located in the historical center and in close proximity to one another. Restoration works were also extended to medieval religious architecture, including the churches of St. Anastasia, St. Stefano, St. Maria Antiqua, the tower of St. Zeno, and St. Fermo. On the XIX century restoration of Verona’s monuments see Alberto Grimoldi, “Restauri a Verona: cultura e pubblico 1866-1940,” in L’architettura a Verona dal periodo napoleonico all’età contemporanea, ed. Pierpaolo Brugnoli and Arturo Sandrini (Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1994), 121-162; Giandomenico Romanelli, “La fine della Repubblica, Napoleone, gli Asburgo,” in Ritratto di Verona: lineamenti di una storia urbanistica, ed. Lionello Puppi (Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1978), 397-470; and Paolo Moracchiello, “Dall’annessione a fine secolo”, in Ritratto di Verona: lineamenti di una storia urbanistica, ed. Lionello Puppi (Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1978), 471-529. 5 An engineer, architect, and historian of art, Camillo Boito (1835-1914) was present in virtually all of the most important architectural debates of the new Italian state. In general, Boito argued for a restoration that would respect the authenticity of monuments. Interventions should preserve not only the patina of ancient buildings, he believed, but also the successive additions. His theory insisted on restoration as an in extremis practice, to be undertaken only when other methods of protection (maintenance, consolidation, and repairs) had failed. Finally, Boito asserted that interventions should be clearly marked, and recognizable. See Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109-114.

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the first floor, and the restoration of two and three windows on the second and third floors, respectively. He appeared skeptical of the possibility of providing the building with medieval battlements, as there was no evidence of their original dimensions. Boito warned the administration not to attempt a more extensive restoration project that would be aesthetically pleasing but not historically based. Indeed, it was contended that there was not enough surviving evidence to indicate the building’s original appearance with some certainty. Partial and limited clues came from two paintings by Nicolo Giolfino: The Judgment and Martyring of St. Agatha (1496-1555 ca.) and The Sacrifice of Muzio Scevola (1530). While in the former painting the building’s façade showed battlements, these were omitted in the latter work, which also showed other minor changes. Thus, since no conclusive evidence could be obtained from the available visual documentation regarding the appearance of Palazzo della Provincia in the Middle Ages, any intervention on the building—Boito contended—should be limited to securing its structural stability rather than restoring its (hypothetical) medieval design. In the end, the restoration project was not carried out for lack of funds at the state level, and plans for restoration of the Palazzo were put on hold. They were resumed in 1928, under the Fascist administration, by Luigi Messedaglia. The Head of the local Provincial Council (Deputazione Provinciale), Messedaglia was one of Verona’s most influential cultural and political figures. Determined to return Cangrande’s palazzo to its original splendor and secure its structural integrity, Messedaglia seized control of the project, overcoming decades of economic and bureaucratic impasse, entrusted Antonio Avena (18821967), the director of Verona’s civic museums, and Pietro Giacobbi, the head of the Province’s engineering/technical office, with the project of restoring Palazzo della Provincia. The decisive and resolute nature of Messedaglia’s initiative contrasted sharply with the conventional lengthy restoration procedures in place at the time, showing a degree of autonomy in the decision-making process that is quite surprising under a totalitarian regime. Restoration projects were usually initiated at the local level. Podestà, city mayors, art historians, preservationists, and local political leaders were among the figures responsible for initiating the various restoration projects throughout the nation. In the typical sequence, local officials would contact the regional Soprintendenza ai Monumenti, the local government agency in charge of the preservation and restoration of the city’s architectural heritage and artistic patrimony, in order to obtain official

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Figure 2 Palazzo della Provincia, after the 1928-30 Restoration

government approval.6 The Soprintendenza would appoint an architect to develop the plan for the proposed project. The Soprintendenza also helped 6

Founded in 1907, the office of the Soprintendenza had a merely advisory function in the early XX century, devoid of decision-making power. However, its role and area of influence expanded as the legislation on the preservation and restoration of artistic monuments came into effect. Gradually, the Soprintendenza replaced the Commissione Conservatrice, the city agency formerly responsible for the care of artistic monuments – an expression of local interests and their balance of power. Directed by a public official (typically an art historian) appointed by the central government, the Soprintendenza was a branch of the Ministry of Public Education. As such, it came to be regarded locally as “the local office of a strong central authority, perceived as foreign and hostile.” In particular after the 1927 law, which instituted a national competition to fill executive positions within the Soprintendenza, the divide between the agency and the local forces became increasingly unbridgeable: “formerly a cultural authority known and appreciated locally, the Superintendent turned into a public official.” Alberto Grimoldi, “Restauri a Verona,” 170. See also Guido Zucconi, “La nuova figura del funzionario umanista in un’età di transizione” in Medioevo ideale e Medioevo reale nella cultura urbana: Antonio Avena e la Verona del primo Novecento, ed. Paola Marini (Verona: Comune di Verona, Assessorato alla cultura, 2003), 74, note 6; and Lauro D’Alberto, “La Soprintendenza: storia e ruolo” in Verona 1900-1960.

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the comune (city council) to procure the funds from the Cassa di Risparmio (the local bank), private individuals, and the Government. The Ufficio delle Belle Arti was the branch of the Ministry of National Education responsible for granting the final approval for any restoration project. It was kept informed throughout the process by the Soprintendenza. The Ufficio delle Belle Arti had a special advisory Committee, the Consiglio Superiore delle Belle Arti, which could provide advice to the various restoration campaigns and had the legal power to veto any project.7 Messedaglia was able to operate independently of the local Soprintendenza, and appoint an art historian of his choosing to the project. Antonio Avena was indeed a key figure in fulfilling Messedaglia’s vision for Cangrande’s palazzo. Born and raised in Verona, Avena (1882-1967) was an eclectic and multifaceted figure who, in a career spanning sixty years, worked as a high school teacher, librarian, curator, museum director and artistic director of opera productions at the Arena.8 Although part of his career concentrated on Roman antiquity, in particular the creation of the Roman archaeological museum in 1924 and the reconstruction of the Arco dei Gavi,9 Avena is better known for the restoration of the city’s medieval and Renaissance monuments, which greatly impacted Verona’s urban image and identity. The majority of Avena’s projects are characterized by a sense of choreographic rendering. His works are inspired recreations of neo-medieval style, successful in their blend of building and environment, though often lacking a historical basis. Palazzo della Provincia is a perfect example of Avena’s pseudo-medieval style. In theory, the restoration of the Palazzo was to be a mere integration of visible or well-documented remains. In the documents available at the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e per il Paesaggio delle Provincie di Verona, Vicenza e Rovigo, Avena underlined his intention to limit works

Architetture nella dissoluzione dell’aura, ed. Arturo Sandrini and Francesco Amendolagine (Venice: CLUVA, 1979), 22. 7 See Lasansky, The Renaissance City Refashioned. Fascist Architecture and Urban Spectacle, Ph.D. Dissertation, History of Art & Architecture, Brown University, 1999, 33-35. 8 For a discussion of Avena’s life and career, see Paola Marini, ed., Medioevo ideale e Medioevo reale nella cultura urbana: Antonio Avena e la Verona del primo Novecento (Verona: Comune di Verona, Assessorato alla cultura, 2003), and Giuseppe Conforti, Alba di Lieto and Paolo Rigoli, “Schede,” in L’architettura a Verona dal periodo napoleonico all’età contemporanea, ed. Pierpaolo Brugnoli and Arturo Sandrini (Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1994), 394-397. 9 The Arch had been dismantled by the Napoleonic troupes in 1806 and the blocks it was composed of had been in storage since then.

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to the consolidation of the original structures.10 In reality, Palazzo della Provincia underwent a much more radical treatment, known as sventramento (disemboweling). Work began in 1928 and proceeded quickly to completion in 1930. First, the tower at the corner between vicolo Cavalletto and the church of Santa Maria Antica was restored. New walls were built, and the original crenellation was repaired. The façade of the building facing the Church of Santa Maria Antica (formerly the main entrance) was also restored with new crenellation and a new entrance. The most controversial part of the project was the restoration of the façade in front of Piazza dei Signori. Avena disregarded Boito’s warnings for a cautious approach and virtually reinvented a façade: the stucco was removed to reveal the natural surface of the brick, the loggia on the ground level was reopened and repaired, arched windows were opened on the second and third floors; and the molded cornice crowning the building was removed and replaced with battlements. The Venetian griffon, removed in 1810, was reintroduced on the arched doorway. Inside, the original walls were covered with stucco and decorated with medieval motifs. Pictures of before and after and the report of Piero Giacobbi confirm that Avena did not hesitate to use pieces purchased or simply removed from other historical sites in Verona to achieve choreographic effects and confer unity to an extremely fragmentary structure. Historians have argued that the idealized medieval refashioning of Palazzo della Provincia was the result of the fascination with the Middle Ages that local political forces developed in the aftermath of Italian unification. Eager to distance themselves from the Hapsburg rule, Verona’s elites promoted an uncomplicated and unified architectural version of the past in order to evoke a direct association with the rule of the Scaligeri, Verona’s most glorious moment in history.11 Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that Messedaglia picked Avena, who had recently completed the scenographic and highly imaginative refashioning of the nearby palazzo of Castelvecchio, because of the museum Director’s special ability to evoke a mythic and idealized past. Avena’s approach to restoration, lacking both 10

The archives of the Soprintendenza per i beni architettonici e per il paesaggio di Verona preserves several letters sent by Avena to the Superintendent Armando Venè. In them Avena states his intention to be “respectful of the history and true nature of Palazzo del Podestà” (Archivio della Soprintendenza per i beni architettonici e per il paesaggio di Verona, Busta 251/2). 11 Giandomenico Romanelli, “Il mito del medioevale: tra Ruskin e Boito,” in Verona 1900-1960. Architetture nella dissoluzione dell’aura, ed. Arturo Sandrini and Francesco Amendolagine (Venice: CLUVA, 1979), 17-20.

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scientific and philological bases, must have been perceived more as an asset than a disadvantage for the accomplishment of the task at hand. Economic considerations were equally important, as local critic Arturo Grimoldi has underlined. Avena’s idealized medieval refashioning, which transformed Piazza dei Signori into a more stylistically coherent space, was part of a beautifying effort by local officials to make their city more attractive to residents and tourists alike.12 Inaugurated with much fanfare by Messedaglia in the presence of Verona’s political and cultural leaders, the newly restored palazzo was not immune from controversy. Avena’s imaginative refashioning was harshly criticized by the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti. Indeed, although originally approved by the Commissione Provinciale per i Monumenti,13 work had apparently begun without the knowledge of the Soprintendenza, and went well beyond the approved limit. On June 6, 1927 an irritated Soprintendenza wrote to the Province (the owner of the building) lamenting: In the courtyard of the Palazzo works are currently being executed whose extent is unknown to this office and for which no project was submitted to the Soprintendenza. Since the request [to stop work] submitted to the Engineer [Attilio Ferrari] has had no effect, I ask you to stop all work immediately and to submit all pertinent projects and estimates to this office as demanded by the law.14

The diatribe subsided when the Ministry of Public Education intervened directly on the issue and, after consulting with the Consiglio Superiore per le Antichità e Belle Arti, cautiously approved the project:

12

Grimoldi, “Restauri a Verona,” 180-182. The Commissione Provinciale per i Monumenti was a preservation agency instituted by the central government in 1866, whose functions often overlapped the office of the Soprintendenza. The commission was presided over by the Prefect, and included among its members, representatives of the city’s aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie. 14 “Nel cortile di codesta R. Prefettura si eseguono lavori dei quali questo ufficio non conosce l’entità e per i quali non fu presentato a questa Soprintendenza il progetto. Poichè la preghiera oralmente rivolta al chiar.mo signor Ingegnere Capo della Provincia non ha sortito il desiderato effetto, prego di voler sospendere qualsiasi lavoro nel cortile stesso e di inviarci in esame i preventivi e i progetti come tassativamente è previsto dalla legge.” Letter of 12 June 1927 from Giuseppe Gerola to Amministrazione Provinciale, ASBAPVr, f. 91/142. 13

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Chapter Two [...this ministry] approves the restoration of the three arches between the portal and the [Cavalletto] alley. [The reopening of the arches] should provide guidance for future interventions. However, it is believed that an appropriate regard for the artistic elements of the project should not be separated from the evaluation of the technical difficulties that the reopening of the above-mentioned arches would entail.15

As the reply of the Ministry of Public Education clearly shows, Avena’s controversial restoration of Palazzo della Provincia was allowed to proceed because of the support of central state authority, which gave final approval to the project. Studies have shown that in Verona as in many medieval towns across the peninsula, Fascism often favored simplified narratives about the past, and (re)creations in a neo-medieval style rather than faithful restitution of a building’s multiple historical layers. The celebration of an idealized medieval heritage, devoid of complicating factors such as later additions, had several goals including commemorating a historical era of military strength and political independence, promoting a feeling of shared national identity, and establishing Fascism as the legitimate heir of that tradition. In Verona, the regime did not oppose local initiatives aimed at recreating simplified versions of the built environment. The list of monuments restored according to an idealized model during the twenty-year period of Fascist administration is impressive. It includes Castelvecchio, and the House and Tomb of Juliet. The refashioning of the house attributed by tradition to the Shakespearean heroine is particularly revealing of Avena’s method. Following the release of George Cukor’s movie Romeo and Juliet in 1936, the medieval building on the central Via Cappello underwent a complete and dramatic makeover. First the façade on the inner courtyard was cleaned and repointed, while new arches and arched windows were opened to enhance its medieval appearance. The balcony, one of the architect’s most imaginative solutions, is a medieval sarcophagus formerly housed in the nearby museum of Castelvecchio. Modified to serve its new function, the structure was attached to the first

15

“[Il Consiglio Superiore per le Antichità e Belle Arti] ha espresso il seguente parere: che si possano intanto consentire i lavori di ripristino delle tre arcate fra il portale sanmicheliano di Piazza dei Signori e il Vicolo Cavalletto, per trarne esperienza nei lavori successivi, crede tuttavia di dover segnalare la opportunità che lo studio degli elementi storico-artistici non sia scompagnato dall’esame delle difficoltà storiche che presenta la riapertura degli archi predetti.” Letter of 27 June 1928 from Francesco Pellati, Adviser to the Minister of Public Education, to Giuseppe Gerola, AA.BB.AA, Divisione II, 1925-1928, b. 229.

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floor of the newly restored façade to match the Shakespearean text.16 Lastly, the interior of the house was decorated with paintings and frescoes reproducing medieval motifs and furnishings from the XVI and XVII centuries. Historical accuracy was not an issue as archaeological investigations and a philological approach to restoration yielded to the fantastic creation of an idealized medieval architecture. Avena’s selective and often fictitious recreations perfectly suited Mussolini’s agenda of promoting an ideal and immediate association between the Fascist present and Verona’s historic tradition. The restored Palazzo della Provincia was presented by Avena as: ...a special sign of our time and a symbol of the new dignity one wants to bestow on the function of political power, whose intent is ideally to provide a link to the tradition of the Della Scala’s glorious age. Such a noble past endows current political power with prestige and vigor. Palazzo del Podestà is the most solemn reminder of medieval Verona, a time from which the Veronese progeny derives nobility and power for the present and times to come.17

Avena could hardly have been more explicit as to the political meaning of the restoration: the refurbishment of Palazzo della Provincia occurs at this specific time in history because only the Fascist regime had been able to resurrect the power and prestige of medieval Verona. Fascism endowed Verona with the dignity and glory known by the city under Della Scala rule.18 The records are silent on the role played by Mussolini in the restoration of Palazzo della Provincia. Even without evidence of his direct involvement, 16

Daniela Zumiani, “Giulietta a Verona: spazi e immagini del mito,” in Medioevo ideale e Medioevo reale nella cultura urbana: Antonio Avena e la Verona del primo Novecento, ed. Paola Marini (Verona: Comune di Verona, Assessorato alla cultura, 2003), 215. 17 “L’opera di ripristino e rievocazione è un segno particolare del nostro tempo e della nuova dignità che si vuole imprimere alla funzione del potere, perchè lo riallacciamo idealmente alla tradizione dei più gloriosi domini e lo circondiamo di un decoro che finisce col tradursi in prestigio e forza. Palazzo del Podestà è il ricordo più solenne di Verona scaligera, l’epoca donde la stirpe trae il motto e lo spirito della sua nobiltà anche per la vita avvenire.” See Antonio Avena, “Il ripristino del palazzo, rilievi e criteri artistici dei lavori,” in Il Palazzo della Provincia di Verona, ed. Luigi Messedaglia, Gino Sandri, and Piero Giacobbi (Verona, 1931), 35. 18 On the role of Fascism as a historic agent able to revive Verona’s past see Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary. Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2003).

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the project would have been appealing to Il Duce for the references it made to the warrior-ruler Cangrande. The association between Mussolini and medieval rulers (condottieri) is indeed a recurrent motif in Fascist culture of the 1920s and 1930s. In those years, several biographies of condottieri were published. They praised the qualities of this ideal soldier and leader: audacity, discipline, courage, and moral and physical superiority. Mussolini himself was often represented as a condottiere in paintings, sculptures and photographs. In Verona, the association between Mussolini and the condottiere Cangrande became progressively more insistent as Italy approached the outbreak of war.19 By referring to Mussolini as the new Cangrande, Fascism intended to provide historical legitimacy for the institutionalization of the regime. The idealized medieval narrative of the social elites, then, gained strength as it received the backing of official vision.

Use of the Refashioned Palazzo The restored Palazzo became one of Verona’s most important monuments. It housed the office and official residence of the Podestà on a permanent basis. With the adjacent Piazza dei Signori, Palazzo della Provincia became the backdrop for countless Fascist rituals and ceremonies, including commemorations, demonstrations, celebrations and symposia. On September 26, 1938, the Palazzo was propelled into the national spotlight by being designated as Mussolini’s headquarters during Il Duce’s official visit to the city. Conducted on the eve of WWII, Mussolini’s state visit to the city of Cangrande represented a pivotal event in the history of the local Party. Preparations for Mussolini’s trip to Verona lasted for months. Streets were repaired, buildings were decorated, and flags, banners and swags were placed throughout the city. Temporary installations were erected at important transition points within the urban fabric. Accompanied by Achille Starace, the head of the National Fascist Party, and Dino Alfieri, the Minister of Popular Culture, Mussolini arrived in Verona the evening of September 25, the last stop on a trip to the regions of Friuli-Venezia

19

On several occasions during the course of 1938, L’Arena referred to Mussolini as “il più grande condottiere” (“the greatest condottiere”). In 1939 L’Arena titled its article on Hitler’s trip to Rome “L’Incontro dei Due Grandi Condottieri” (“The meeting of the two great condottieri”). The symbolic importance of Cangrande in Fascist ideology is further demonstrated by the picture of Cangrande that Verona gave to the Führer on his way to Rome to meet Mussolini in 1939.

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Giulia and Veneto that had taken him to Gorizia, Udine, Treviso, Belluno and Vicenza. Mussolini’s journeys through various parts of Italy constituted an important component of the Fascist liturgy. As Emilio Gentile has argued, these trips, often announced years in advance, fed into the mystical aura surrounding Mussolini and further propagated the cult of Il Duce among the masses. The two-day visit was carefully planned to include most of the city’s major architectural landmarks as backdrop for mass demonstrations, military parades and public ceremonies. Iconic sites such as the Roman Arena, the medieval Castelvecchio and the majestic Piazza Brae were coopted by the regime as visual propaganda demonstrating the continuity between Verona’s historic traditions and Mussolini’s government while providing a base for the regime’s nationalistic and imperialistic agenda. Palazzo della Provincia, in particular, was chosen as Mussolini’s official residence while in Verona, due to its associations with the proud medieval warrior Cangrande. There Mussolini was greeted by local authorities the night of his arrival. The following day, in Piazza dei Signori, Cangrande’s palazzo in the background, Mussolini watched the passo romano performed by the Fascist Blackshirts.20 Brigades of local Fascist notables witnessed the perfectly executed steps. Along with Il Duce, they too sang the Fascist anthem Giovinezza as the ceremony came to an end. L’Arena commented on the event as a central moment of the day: “not just a stop among the Fascist old guard, but a meeting, almost a return to the past … a demonstration of Fascist life and a chant of traditional faith, tenaciously preserved and proudly proclaimed.”21 Indeed, the event in Piazza dei Signori was among the most militarily significant. By reviewing the Roman step and singing the Fascist anthem, Mussolini reasserted himself as “the founder of Fascism, the Head of the Revolution.”22 At the same time, the chosen setting established a powerful link between Mussolini and the medieval condottiere, providing a historical and ideological justification for the military enterprise that Il Duce and his Italy were shortly to embark on.

20

Passo romano (Roman step) was the Italian version of the German goose step. “Non una sosta del Duce tra la Vecchia Guardia del Fascio Terzogenito, ma davvero un incontro, quasi un ritorno…una dimostrazione di vita fascista e non soltanto un canto di antica fede tenacemente serbata, suberbamente orgogliosa e orgogliosamente proclamata.” L’Arena (Verona), 27 September 1938, 3. 22 Ibid. 21

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Palazzo della Provincia in the Media If the use of Palazzo della Provincia shows the regime’s ambition to appropriate the former residence of Cangrande to legitimize Mussolini’s rule, the mass media was the means through which the link between Il Duce and Cangrande was activated and enacted, and the historic character of the regime revealed and publicized. Following its restoration, Palazzo della Provincia was featured in La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d'Italia, a lavish mass distribution monthly publication directed by Arnaldo Mussolini (Il Duce’s brother), modeled on the American Life magazine, with full-page photographs and illustrations dedicated to current events. Palazzo della Provincia was also included as one of the highlights of Verona’s built heritage in two documentaries, filmed by the Istituto Luce in 1932 and 1941, respectively. The documentaries, part of a series of short films sponsored by the central government to promote relevant artistic and historic sites in Italy to movie-going audiences, were instrumental in making Verona’s artistic heritage familiar and accessible to a wide audience.23 As such, along with other mass media, they contributed to presenting Verona’s medieval past as part of a larger shared national heritage. Images of the Palazzo circulated widely in the local and national press following Mussolini’s visit to Verona in 1938. The local newspaper L’Arena and a series of national newspapers including Corriere della Sera, Il Messaggero and La Stampa covered the event in great detail. A number of images show Mussolini on the balcony of the Palazzo della Provincia, gazing down at the crowd gathered in Piazza dei Signori or overseeing the Blackshirts performing the passo romano. These photographs, in which Mussolini shares the stage with other party officials and government representatives, capture impromptu situations with Il Duce caught in the immediacy of the action. Along with photographs featuring portraits of Mussolini posed against a background of Verona’s monuments and memorials, these images represented a crucial component of Il Duce’s trip to Verona: they perpetuated and amplified the memory of the visit long after Mussolini left the city, providing those who were not in Verona with a visual summary of the historic day. They also allowed individuals throughout the country to become familiar with the city’s monumental buildings, historic architecture and urban sites as seen through the eyes of Il Duce. Finally, these images underlined the continuity between Mussolini’s government and Verona’s historic traditions. 23 On the role of documentaries in experiencing the city see Lasansky, “Towers and Tourists,” 113-131.

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The relationship between space and polity, strongly evoked and compellingly articulated by the visual records of Mussolini’s visit to Verona, has been discussed and analyzed by several theorists, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jacques Derrida.24 Margaret Farrar, in particular, has underlined the importance of the built environment in shaping and sustaining political practice.25 According to Farrar, identities—both individual and collective—are shaped not only “through complexes of meanings [and] networks of interpretations but also within specific spatial arrangements.”26 In addition, the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs believes that monuments, historical buildings and architectural settings are constitutive elements of the “social memory”, the process through which social groups map their myths onto and through a place and time. For Halbwachs, personal memory is not “stored” in the unconscious, as Sigmund Freud suggested, but is always constructed and located in the social environment of the present. The material and symbolic qualities of monuments and architectural settings help individuals to articulate narratives about their world and construct notions of identity. Besides sending a message of control of the masses and underlining the link between the Fascist regime and Verona’s historic traditions, photographs and documentaries featuring the restored Palazzo della Provincia, in particular those associated with Mussolini’s 1938 state-visit, exemplify the politics of memory through which the regime attempted to construct a sense of collective national identity rooted in a common historical past and projected through the figure of Il Duce into the future. Of course, such shared national heritage was artificially constructed. It was based, as we discussed in the case of the Palazzo della Provincia, on restoration projects that were arbitrary at best, designed to reinforce an ideal and highly imaginative version of medieval architecture, an uncomplicated version of the (architectural) past. As noted by Lasansky, “The regime was well aware that as a young country, Italy was

24

For a discussion on the relationship between political theory and space see Margaret E. Farrar, “Health and Beauty of the Body Politic: Subjectivity and Urban Space,” Polity 33, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1-23. 25 Although Farrar does not refer specifically to buildings and architectural settings in her discussion, her definition of the built environment “the material environment that human beings have organized for the purpose of leisure, commerce, and politics” is broad enough to be considered inclusive of architectural settings and monumental sites. 26 Farrar, “Health and Beauty,” 4-5.

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in need of an accessible, shared culture, and the historical landscape provided this.”27

Legacy Today the legacy of Fascist-sponsored restorations in Verona is alive and well. The refashioned façade of Palazzo della Provincia continues to frame and define Piazza dei Signori, the core of Verona’s historic center. Although an inscription inside the loggia documents the 1928-1930 restoration,28 the true extent of the building’s material reconfiguration remains undisclosed and guidebooks and newspapers articles feature Piazza dei Signori as the heart of medieval Verona and one of Italy’s most intact and best preserved “architectural gems.” Nor have there been critical studies addressing the controversial nature of the Fascist-era restoration of Palazzo della Provincia or other historic landmarks. Indeed, the former residence of Cangrande is not the only case of an architectural site in Verona subject to a process of historical forgetting: from the Shakespearean-inspired architecture of Romeo and Juliet to the medieval castle of Castelvecchio, Verona offers a long list of sites where the memory of Fascist-era interventions has conveniently been downplayed or remains unaddressed. The process, common to other cities in Italy, has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Scholars argue that Italians have been unwilling to confront the past due to the uneasiness they feel towards Mussolini’s regime. Ben-Ghiat, in particular, has suggested that the traumas of the war years have prevented Italians from coming to terms with the legacy of the Fascist past. She claims that “by the time the war ended, a propitious climate had been created for the appearance of explanatory frameworks for Fascism that shifted culpability away from ordinary Italians, facilitating the nation’s collective self-absolution.”29 Architectural historians have highlighted the role that local pride and nationalism have played in keeping the refashioning of Italy’s architectural heritage exempt from 27

Lasansky, “Towers and Tourists,” 130. “DOMICIULIUM VERONENSE IMPERII/AEDES OLIM SCALIGERAE/ QUAS FAMA DANTIS HOSPITIS CIRCUMVOLAT/ANNO DOM. MCMXXX/ VIII AB ITALIA PER FASCES RENOVATA/VICTORIO EMMANUELE III REGE/BENITO MUSSOLINI DUCE/ALOYSIO MESSEDAGLIA PROV. PRAESIDE/VETUSTI AEDIFICI RESTITUTORE.” 29 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Liberation: Italian Cinema and the Fascist Past, 1945-1950,” in Italian Fascism: History, Memory, and Representation, ed. Richard J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 88. 28

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close analytical scrutiny. Lasansky, who has focused on the refashioning of Arezzo and San Gimignano, attributes the lack of studies on Fascistsponsored restoration projects in Tuscany to Italian scholars’ uneasiness towards Italy’s recent past and their unwillingness to question the authenticity of well-established medieval and Renaissance art historical canons. 30 Ghirardo, who has studied the refashioning of Ferrara’s town hall (Palazzo del Corte) under the Fascist administration, stresses the role played by local pride and aspirations in the idealized and historically inaccurate refashioning of the city’s architectural heritage.31 Still, the case of Verona is distinctive. While these and other possible factors, including the literary status of the city derived from its associations with the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, may help us understand the reasons for the scarcity of critical studies addressing the controversial remaking of Verona’s city center during the Fascist ventennio, cases like Palazzo della Provincia help us probe into the culturally constructed nature of architectural heritage while shedding light on the power dynamics that unfolded between the central state authority and local socio-political elites. Indeed, Palazzo della Provincia does not only exhibit the preeminent role that local narratives were allowed to play in the refashioning of Italy’s artistic heritage in the age of totalitarian cultural policies. It also shows how the past is a construction of the present that is constantly inventing and reinventing, choosing, omitting and legitimating, according to the interests and visions of the current players.

Works Cited Avena, Antonio. “Il ripristino del palazzo, rilievi e criteri artistici dei lavori.” In Il Palazzo della Provincia di Verona. Edited by Luigi Messedaglia, Gino Sandri, and Piero Giacobbi. Verona, 1931. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Liberation: Italian Cinema and the Fascist Past, 19451950.” In Italian Fascism: History, Memory, and Representation. Edited by Richard J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Cardilli, Luisa. Gli anni del governatorato (1926-1944). Interventi urbanistici, scoperte archeologiche, arredo urbano, restauri. Rome: Kappa, 1995.

30 31

Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 264-267. Ghirardo, “Inventing the Palazzo del Corte,” 111-112.

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Choay, Françoise. The Invention of the Historic Monument. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Crum, Roger J. “Shaping the Fascist ‘New Man’: Donatello’s St. George and Mussolini’s Appropriated Renaissance of the Italian Nation.” In Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. Edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Cuccia, Giuseppe. Urbanistica, edilizia, infrastrutture di Roma capitale, 1870-1990. Bari: Laterza, 1991. D’Alberto, Lauro. “La Soprintendenza: storia e ruolo.” In Verona 19001960. Architetture nella dissoluzione dell’aura. Edited by Arturo Sandrini and Francesco Amendolagine. Venice: CLUVA, 1979. Farrar, Margaret E. “Health and Beauty of the Body Politic: Subjectivity and Urban Space.” Polity 33, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1-23. Fogu, Claudio. The Historic Imaginary. Politics of History in Fascist Italy. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Ghirardo, Diane Yvonne. “Inventing the Palazzo del Corte in Ferrara.” In Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. Edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Grimoldi, Alberto, “Restauri a Verona: cultura e pubblico 1866-1940.” In L’architettura a Verona dal periodo napoleonico all’età contemporanea. Edited by Pierpaolo Brugnoli and Arturo Sandrini. Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1994. Kostof, Spiro. The Third Rome. 1870-1950. Traffic and Glory. Exhibition Catalog. Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1973. Lasansky, Medina. “Towers and Tourists: The Cinematic City of San Gimignano.” In Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy. Edited by Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. —. The Renaissance Perfected. Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. —. The Renaissance City Refashioned. Fascist Architecture and Urban Spectacle. Ph.D. Dissertation, History of Art & Architecture, Brown University, 1999. Marini, Paola. Medioevo ideale e Medioevo reale nella cultura urbana: Antonio Avena e la Verona del primo Novecento. Verona: Comune di Verona, Assessorato alla cultura, 2003.

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Moracchiello, Paolo. “Dall’annessione a fine secolo.” In Ritratto di Verona: lineamenti di una storia urbanistica. Edited by Lionello Puppi. Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1978. Romanelli, Giandomenico. “Il mito del medioevale: tra Ruskin e Boito.” In Verona 1900-1960. Architetture nella dissoluzione dell’aura. Edited by Arturo Sandrini and Francesco Amendolagine. Venice: CLUVA, 1979. —. “La fine della Repubblica, Napoleone, gli Asburgo.” In Ritratto di Verona: lineamenti di una storia urbanistica. Edited by Lionello Puppi. Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1978. Zucconi, Guido. “La nuova figura del funzionario umanista in un’età di transizione.” In Medioevo ideale e Medioevo reale nella cultura urbana: Antonio Avena e la Verona del primo Novecento. Edited by Paola Marini. Verona: Comune di Verona, Assessorato alla cultura, 2003. Zumiani, Daniela. “Giulietta a Verona: spazi e immagini del mito.” In Medioevo ideale e Medioevo reale nella cultura urbana: Antonio Avena e la Verona del primo Novecento. Edited by Paola Marini. Verona: Comune di Verona, Assessorato alla cultura, 2003.

CHAPTER THREE FACE TO FACE: ICONIC REPRESENTATIONS AND JUXTAPOSITIONS OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI AND MUSSOLINI DURING ITALIAN FASCISM AMANDA MINERVINI

Gabriele D’Annunzio says that today St. Francis, a knight, carries a sword (“Gabriele d’Annunzio dice che oggi San Francesco, cavaliere, porta la spada”) —Lorenzo Ratto

Introduction: St. Francis of Assisi and Italian Fascist Politics St. Francis of Assisi is known worldwide as the patron saint of animals and is also recognized as a symbol of pacifism. According to most interpretations, his “Canticle of the Creatures” voices his conviction that all creatures, as children of God, are to be respected as brothers and sisters. How then could the figure of St. Francis end up serving the Fascist political project, most dramatically by being declared the patron saint of Italy in 1939? Further: why would this specific saint become the emblem of a nation dedicated to war? And why was this campaign so successful? In this essay, I demonstrate how Fascist critics and clergy appropriated the figure of St. Francis to their own mutually sustaining causes by identifying the life and spirit of Il Poverello with that of Il Duce. First, I discuss Emilio Gentile’s theory of the sacralization of politics, and I suggest we

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also need to evaluate the politicization of religion.1 Then, I concentrate on readings proposed by Franciscan friars and members of the clergy, in particular by Father Paolo Ardali, author of a parallel biography of St. Francis and Mussolini.2 Here the life of the Duce is constructed as a mirror-image of that of the most famous Italian mystic, St. Francis of Assisi. After a theoretical introduction, this essay proposes an analysis of the significance of Ardali’s double biography of the Italian Medieval saint and of the Fascist dictator with special attention paid to his use of images.3 The portrayal of St. Francis as a preacher to birds or a tamer of wolves was harnessed by the fascist regime to a new idea of persuasion, whose aim was the enchantment and taming of the masses. The saint's oath of obedience was employed to reinforce fascist hierarchies. His tribute to Lady Poverty provided Fascist Italy with a way to confront the postWorld-War I economic crisis and construct an anti-plutocratic argument directed primarily against the supremacy of the three colonial empires: France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. However, the actual issue at stake was the sabotaging of the operations of the League of Nations, which the Fascist regime perceived as an obstacle to its colonial aspirations. But perhaps one of the most significant connections that the saint provided was that the instrumental use of his image paved the way for a collaboration between the Fascist state and the Catholic Church, a collaboration that originated in the shared enthusiasm for the figure of St. Francis, and that would be sealed by the 1929 Lateran Pacts, and then again in 1939, by proclaiming the saint, alongside Catherine of Siena, patron saints of Italy. The use of the figure of St. Francis by the Fascists, and its function as a bridge between the Fascists and the Church, adds 1

Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), and “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics. A Critical Survey.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6.1 (2005): 19-32. 2 Paolo Ardali, San Francesco e Mussolini (Mantua: Paladino, 1926). 3 This essay is part of a broader research project, thanks to which I have demonstrated the appropriations of the figure of St. Francis during Italian fascism by examining an abundance of archival documents, newspaper articles, books, and visual materials from the 1920s and 30s. My research focuses on discussions about the role of Saint Francis in Italian society during this period, where Francis’s unique saintliness was held up as an image of the typical and ideal Italian. From the material that I have examined it emerges that, instead of functioning as a symbol of pacifism, reconciliation, compassion, and brotherhood—for which the saint is known today—the saint’s exemplary endurance of the pain of the stigmata and his praise of “Sister Death” in the Cantico delle Creature were employed by the regime to inspire Italian youth to sacrifice themselves in the service of war.

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important elements to how we think about Emilio Gentile’s use of “political religion.”4 My research shows that the process of “sacralization of politics” that characterizes Fascism as a political religion was accompanied by a parallel process of “politicization of religion.” In fact, while Fascist critics appropriated the figure of St. Francis while constructing a rhetoric that complied with the Fascist political agenda, some high-ranking members of Franciscan orders joined the chorus.

Fascism and Catholic Symbols A starting point to analyze ways in which Fascist critics and Franciscans described and commandeered the figure of St. Francis is Sergio Luzzatto’s work. In his study of Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, the Italian historian writes about the Fascist regime’s process of appropriating powerful Catholic symbols.5 This venture benefited from the contribution of the neo-Idealist philosopher and Minister of Education in the Fascist Government, Giovanni Gentile. As Luzzatto points out, after several steps towards secularization during the years of the Risorgimento, Gentile’s 1923 school reform prescribed the teaching of Catholic religion in every school (and the cross as a mandatory symbol in each classroom). This choice entailed the massive presence of the topic of sanctity in Italian school curricula. After Italian unification, in Luzzatto’s words, “Quarantined for more than half a century, the so-called Italian saints became the new heroes of a clerico-fascist creed to be spread among the juvenile populace.”6 Saintly figures—like Don Bosco, Catherine of Siena, Maria Goretti, Rita of Cascia, Anthony of Padua, and many more—were also part of the politicization of religious figures. However, the figure of St. Francis played the leading role: as Luzzatto continues, in 1926—that is to say, on the seven-hundredth anniversary of his death—Saint Francis would become the symbol of this process.7

4

Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics. Sergio Luzzatto, Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010), 132. 6 Ibid. In Luzzatto’s original wording, the “juvenile populace” is “il popolo bambino”, “the child-people”, a recurrent judgment of Italians, which targets a political immaturity exemplified again in the Berlusconi era. See the original version in Sergio Luzzatto, Padre Pio. Miracoli e Politica nell’Italia Del Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), 178. 7 Ibid. 5

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The 1920s in Europe were also marked by the trauma of World War I, which represented an exceptional break with the past.8 Many “textual images” and paintings of this time show emotionally and somatically disfigured characters, often recognizable as disabled war veterans.9 Samuel Hynes argues that World War I changed the way British society thought about the world.10 In Great Britain, as in other European countries that were part of the Great War, the image of the warrior hero had to be put side by side with the shell-shock victim. Physical and emotional trauma became recognized as an actual outcome of the war for both the victorious and defeated countries. Fogu convincingly suggests that, while the veterans’ proposal of “museums of suffering” remained unheard because it would have fatally exposed the ambivalence that existed between the idealization of the Great War and the trauma caused by it, Fascism instead offered the “appropriate exorcism of the war trauma.”11 One instance of appropriate exorcism was precisely to conceive of the symbolism of Mussolini’s thaumaturgic touch in a strongly charged textual image. 8

See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1977); Jay M. Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish, Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War (London: Routledge, 2009); Diego Leoni and Camillo Zadra, La Grande Guerra: Esperienza, Memoria, Immagini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986). 9 Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 54. “Textual images” refers to written narratives that produce a vivid image. As in the case of the artistic work by Otto Dix, John Heartfield, George Grosz, Ernst Friedrich, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who were themselves veterans of the Great War. Cf. Olaf Peters, Otto Dix (Munich: Prestel, 2010); Peter Pachnicke, Klaus Honnef, and Hubertus Gassner, John Heartfield (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1992); Uwe M. Schneede, Georg Bussmann, and Marina Schneede, George Grosz: His Life and Work (New York: Universe Books, 1979); Olli Vilén, Hans Gercke, and Gerbert Frodl, Ernst Friedrich, (Wien [Vienna]: Ernst Friedrich, 1993); and Ernst Friedrich and Douglas Kellner, War against War (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1987); Donald E. Gordon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968). 10 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined. The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1991). 11 Fogu, The Historic Imaginary, 54. In my dissertation, I propose a structurally similar argument regarding the figure of St. Francis: while his experience on the battleground was put aside, because it might have inspired soldiers to actually convert, his stigmata were emphasized as a way to exorcise the war trauma and turn wounds and pain into redemptive factors.

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Fogu emphasizes the relation between the endorsement of Fascism and “collective expectations of a historical pharmacon that would heal the psychological wounds of the Great War”; he furthermore points out how the image of the thaumaturgic Duce also reveals “the crucial role that the Catholic imagery played in encoding these expectations.”12 Fogu’s analysis introduces two relevant points: first, the importance of Catholic imagery in the Fascist responses to the cultural and political expectations pertaining to Italian society of the time; second, it establishes a connection between the Fascist employment of a Catholic imaginary and Italian society’s need to deal with the trauma of the Great War. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the construction of the figure of St. Francis also responded to the collective need to elaborate war trauma. Moreover, the image of the thaumaturgic Duce recalls the religious topos of the healing of the lepers, in which St. Francis, in imitation of Christ, was also involved. With or without the consent of the Church, Catholic imagery provides useful strategies to deal with loss and suffering. For instance, Allen J. Frantzen analyzes the European masculine model of suffering and sacrifice during the Great War, tracing it back to medieval chivalric models based on the Passion of Christ.13 In the chivalric model that integrates Christ’s self-sacrifice in its ethos, wounds are not painful and potentially deadly lesions, but are reframed as objects of veneration and sources of honor. As I will show, the figure of St. Francis played a key role in both “exorcising the trauma of the Great War”, and in reinforcing a sacrificial rhetoric, bringing it well into the 1940s. The appropriation of Catholic symbols was essential in attending to the Fascists’ need to deal with war trauma by nurturing a sacrificial logic, inspiring perfect obedience, and surrounding Mussolini with an aura that would reinforce his charisma. Before analyzing the case of the figure of St. Francis, it will be useful to consider the tangled web of religion and politics that supported the grip of Fascism on Italian politics between 1922 and 1943.

12

Ibid., 54, 55. Allen Frantzen, Bloody Goodࣟ: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The author explains that a topos of chivalric literature shows the knights praying in front of representations of the crucifixion before the fight. As an example, he cites a painting of St. Francis of Assisi by Burne-Jones. Allen motivates this scene with the fact that before as well after his conversion, St. Francis was “immersed in chivalry, prayed in the church of San Damiano before ‘a painted cross’ that spoke to him and spurred him to embrace the Christian faith” 5.

13

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Fascism as Political Religion With the aim of legitimizing his absolute control of the political and symbolic spheres, and to enhance his charismatic power, Mussolini took steps to construct an aura of holiness around himself, seeking to represent himself as a “demi-god.”14 As Emilio Gentile explains, “in the regime’s propaganda literature and iconography, il Duce was presented as a reincarnation of the myth of the hero, which is ‘the projection of all myths of divinity.’” Ardent Milanese Fascists founded the “Scuola di mistica fascista” in 1930, cultivating not simply a religious but a mystical faith in Mussolini.15 Having clarified the cultural and political context surrounding the establishment and strengthening of the Fascist regime, it will be easier to understand the motivations that led Father Paolo Ardali to write an inspirational biography of the life of the Duce as a mirror-image of that of the most famous Italian mystic, St. Francis of Assisi. Since Mussolini was trying to portray himself as a demi-god, the construction of a parallelism between their lives granted the Duce an aura of sanctity, allowing Mussolini to shine from the reflected light of the most famous Italian saint, the one who earned the nickname of “alter Christus.” In this way, Mussolini was placed next to the saint who is considered closest to Christ himself, but who was also simply a man, hence more easily imitable than Christ himself. In addition, St. Francis possessed another very convenient characteristic: being Italian. Roberto Farinacci was the national secretary of the Partito Nazionale Fascista in 1925 and 1926, the years in which the seven-hundredth anniversary of St. Francis’s death recurred; the centenary was the object of very important and complex celebrations.16 Farinacci defined Fascist morality in the following terms: “The will to work and be powerful, a selfsacrificing spirit, mystical love of the fatherland, blind obedience to one person.”17 While the accent on work is mainly Benedictine (ora et labora), and the corpse-like obedience had been a Jesuit prerogative18—all four 14

Gentile, “Political Religion,” 236-237. Ibid., 237. 16 Cf. the coeval work by Arnaldo Fortini, Il Ritorno Di San Francesco: Cronaca Del Settimo Centenario Francescano 1926-1927 (Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1937). 17 Gentile, “Political Religion,” 237. 18 I am referring to the formula “Perinde ac cadaver” (obey like a corpse) that the founder St. Ignatius wrote in the Constitutions, adopted in 1554, see Franklin Verzelius Newton Painter, A History of Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), 167. 15

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traits, stripped of the nationalistic tones, are part of Franciscanism: the ethics of work (humble, manual works, such as masonry), self-sacrifice (the assistance to lepers and destitute people, the extreme imitation out of compassion of Christ’s sacrifice through the stigmata), mystical love (the ecstatic experience of god on Mount Averna), absolute obedience (to “Mother Church”). The need for absolute faith in and hence obedience to Fascism and the Duce, “just like one believes in God” was reiterated by Farinacci’s successor, Augusto Turati, secretary between 1926 and 1930.19 As Emilio Gentile observes, the next secretary, Giovanni Giurati, continued along the same path and even escalated the tenor of the messages calling for a “sense of blind faith and dogma.”20 In the formation of Fascist dogma, blood and rebirth (in combination with the cult of martyrs) played a major role: the spilling of the youth’s blood was the necessary ritual for the purification and rebirth of the nation: “Our fallen, through their sacrifice, have confirmed the holiness of the Blackshirt Revolution, its conquest and its future.”21 In the 1930s, the image of Mussolini appeared in some church frescoes “in proximity of the crucified Christ.”22 Which of these Catholic dogmas, which were all employed in Fascist times, would have been the most appropriate tool to reinforce the blind faith that Italian Fascism demanded, the invitation to self-sacrifice, to nurture the cult of martyrs, or to sacralize blood? I suggest that the perfect Catholic dogma for these Fascist cultural and political projects was that of the stigmata: not only did the stigmata implicitly invite to sacrifice and obedience, but their symbolism restaged the scene of the crucifixion in a more human and imitable context (because the figure of St. Francis possesses the convenient characteristic of being both holy and very human—Italian, even).23 Another aspect reported in the legends about St. Francis also fit the Fascist agenda: the prevalence of faith over knowledge. Francis’s rule forbids ownership: the founder of the Franciscan order did 19

Gentile, “Fascism as Political Religion,” Journal of Contemporary History, 25.3 (1990): 229-251, 237. 20 Gentile, “Political Religion,” 238. 21 Gentile, “Fascism as Political Religion,” 243 22 Renato Moro, “Religion and Politics in the Time of Secularization: The Sacralization of Politics and Politicization of Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6.1 (2005): 71-86. 23 In the first chapter of my book project, From Cavalry to Calvary: Representations of St. Francis of Assisi in Twentieth-Century Italy, I establish a connection between stigmata and war. In the second, I develop a theory of stigmata that emphasizes its sacrificial logic and fixation on blood.

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not even allow his disciples to own books. From here the legends elaborated that Francis was not prone to reading or to cultural inquiry, intended as critical reflection on current or traditional topics. As Gentile observes, “Fascism considered ‘faith’ the highest virtue in political activity…Culture and intelligence counted for less than commitment to the dogmas of fascist religion.”24 Gentile’s discussion of Fascism in terms of political religion prepares the ground for my analysis of the ways in which Fascism appropriated the figure of St. Francis of Assisi with the purpose of constructing and reinforcing a nationalistic rhetoric. As clarified by Gentile and Luzzatto, the figure of this saint is only one element of a much wider constellation of symbols and myths reworked or created by Fascism to nurture its ideology. However, because of the manifold ways in which this figure was appropriated, and because it acquired a stronger resonance after his proclamation as patron saint of the nation, I suggest one should regard the vicissitudes of the figure of St. Francis as representative, even while taking all the relevant differences into account, of the larger dynamic of the Fascist production of myths and symbols. Moreover, as I will show in the following sections, the analysis of this figure proves that there was a convergence of interests between Fascism, a part of the Vatican, and some members of the clergy: as I indicated earlier, Father Paolo Ardali published a quite striking parallel biography of St. Francis and Mussolini. Both Ardali’s initiative and the behavior of certain Franciscans, show that the Italian government was not the only one to take steps to turn Fascism into the new national religion; many members of the clergy and of Franciscan orders were prone to interpret Franciscanism and the figure of the founder of the order along the lines propagated by Fascism. The effect of the Fascist interpretation of the Franciscan message was to reinforce hierarchies, obedience, and other desirable qualities of the Fascist “new man.” As Renato Moro observes, if there has been sufficient scholarly work on the sacralization of politics (often connected to processes of secularization), the same is not true for what he identifies as a correlated phenomenon, the politicization of religion.25 For Moro, the two processes “have important mutual relations.”26 The explorations of the uses of the figure of St. Francis during Fascism offer a privileged point of 24

Gentile, “Political Religion,” 238. Moro, “Religion and Politics,” 75. 26 Ibid., 71. Moro’s terminology oscillates between “politicization of religion” and “politicization of the sacred.” In order to avoid confusion, I only refer to the former expression. The author explains that this parallelism gains particular attention since the sacralization of politics is “one of the products of secularization,” Ibid., 74. 25

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view to look at the sacralization of politics and at the politicization of the sacred, and at their entanglement. While looking at both processes at once, because of the startling commonality of intents shared by Fascist critics and certain members of the clergy regarding the figure of St. Francis, the boundaries between the two may seem blurred: as a case in point, I will consider an exemplary case of Clerico-Fascism.

The Parallel Lives of St. Francis and Mussolini Whoever is familiar with the traditional visual representations of the figure of St. Francis, will find the Fascist portraits quite disconcerting. I mentioned previously that Fascist critics sought to appropriate elements of the Franciscan message, his life, and his literary production in accordance with what they recognized as the current political needs of Fascism. The appropriation, however, did not occur only thanks to the critical work of secular Fascists; priests, including members of Franciscan orders, also played a role in fabricating the Fascist adaptation of the figure of St. Francis. Father Paolo Ardali,27 drew numerous connections between the lives of St. Francis and Mussolini. While this association is very counterintuitive given St. Francis’ contemporary cultural image, in the mid-twenties and in the thirties several crucial clergymen and lay Fascists did not see any contradiction in bending the symbolism of the figure of St. Francis of Assisi to represent Italian identity and to boost nationalistic feelings. Mussolini for his part understood that the association of his image with that of St. Francis would have increased his appeal as the leader of the Italian Catholics. He grasped the symbolic force created by joining the figure of St. Francis with patriotic rhetoric, and thus let the coeval literature nurture it. In 1923, on the occasion of the first commemorations of the “martyrs of the Fascist revolution”, a journalist writing for the newspaper L’Assalto had already established a parallel between Mussolini and St. Francis based on their common talent for persuasion: Mussolini, wrote the journalist, was able to enchant the crowds just like Francis did with birds and animals.28 Besides the splurge of articles in Fascist newspapers, conferences, and publications dedicated to the 1926

27 As the author of a biography of St. Francis, Ardali was probably a Franciscan friar. Even if this work is not well-known, I will discuss Ardali’s book because it offers a noteworthy instance of politicization of religion. 28 Herbert Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), 227.

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centenary,29 at least two biographies of Saint Francis published in 1926 established an explicit parallel between the life of the Saint and that of the Duce, even claiming that Francis’s life anticipated that of Mussolini. One book is called San Francesco d’Italia, il più italiano dei santi.30 The second book is called, more simply, San Francesco e Mussolini, written by Father Paolo Ardali published by Franco Paladino (who called himself “Mussolini’s publisher”), for the collection: “Mussolinia.”31 Paladino offered those who purchased a title belonging to this collection a picture of Mussolini aged 19: a santino of Mussolini, as it were! (fig.1)

29

Some titles which appeared at the time of the centenary or shortly after, openly connect St. Francis and Italy even before the 1939 official proclamation, see Dario Lupi, San Francesco santo d’Italia (Urbino: Regio istituto di belle arti per la decorazione e la illustrazione del libro in Urbino, 1928); Agide Gottardi, San Francesco e la rinascita dello spirito in Italia: Conferenza tenuta nella Chiesa di S. Ignazio in Viterbo la sera del 16 agosto 1926 (Viterbo: Scuola tipografica U.G.C., 1927); Giuseppe Padula, S. Francesco, Dante e il Primo Ministro d’Italia: conferenza recitata nel Duomo di Avellino per il 7. centenario di S. Francesco d’Assisi (Avellino: tip. M. Gimelli, 1926); “San Francesco d’Assisi (1226-1926),” described as a “numero speciale dedicato al 7. centenario della morte del ‘più italiano fra i santi’ col concorso dell’Italia Francescana, part of Rassegna del Lazio e dell’Umbria: storia, arte, agricoltura, industria, lavoro, enti locali, turismo.” 30 Numerous books refer to St. Francis as patron of Italy or as “the most saintly of Italians”: see Samuele Cultrera, San Francesco d'Assisi patrono d'Italia (Rome: Il Massaia, 1926); and Guido Gonella, Ricostruire gli spiriti: Discorso tenuto in Assisi per la celebrazione di San Francesco, Patrono d’Italia (Rome: Ist. Poligr. Dello Stato, 1947). In 2010, La Porziuncola and Il Senato published San Francesco patrono d’Italia a 150 anni dall'Unità Nazionale [s.l. s.n.] (Perugia: Graphic Masters, 2010), in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. Also Brother Juniper had his celebrations: Nel settimo centenario della morte di Frate Ginepro da Assisi (1258-1958): cronaca delle celebrazioni di Roma e di Assisi (21-22 giugno 1958), (Venice: Nuova editoriale, 1958). 31 Paladino published the collection “Mussolinia” in Mantua, between 1926 and 1932, after which the economic crisis decreased its activity drastically. “Mussolinia” was conceived explicitly for propaganda purposes and in 1928 the Commissary for the local Federation of the PNF, Francesco Vergani, praised Paladino because he transformed “the Duce’s commandments” in an effective manner—Francesco Vergani, Prefazione a I. Fossati, Elementi Morali, “Mussolinia,” (Mantua: Paladino, 1928). See Luigi Cavazzoli, “La collana ‘Mussolinia’ dell’editore Paladino di Mantova,” Bollettino di Storia dell’Editoria in Italia, anno X.2 (2003). http://www.fondazionemondadori.it/cms/culturaeditoriale/203/20032.

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Figure 1 Image from the Last Page of Ardali’s Book, San Francesco e Mussolini. “A GIFT. Whoever buys an issue from the collection ‘Mussolinia’ will receive a photograph of Mussolini at the age of 19.”

In the opening chapter of the book Analogie Ardali emphatically underlines how Mussolini’s life is suffused with Franciscan spirit: “Oh, quanto spirito francescano c’è nella vita di BENITO MUSSOLINI! [sic].” Ardali motivates the parallelism with a long list of reasons: His life of great renunciations, of suffering, of sacrifices, his will to overcome the difficulties, the high vision of a superior end to be obtained at any cost, even of life, the love for the humble, the chivalric soul, the ardor of the fight, the untiring industry, the energy and the transformative skill which dominates his times, the harmonization, finally, of all his qualities in an intimate and superior, serene, calm, and luminous mood— all such characteristics make Mussolini much closer to the Assisian saint than it is usually thought.31

Mussolini, like St. Francis, lived a life full of great renunciations and sacrifices for the sake of a higher vision. He loves humble people, has a chivalric soul and is fierce in battle, and generally tireless. All these qualities, Ardali writes, are harmonized in his superior and luminous 31

Ardali, San Francesco, 5. All translations are mine. The original text: “la sua vita di grandi rinuncie [sic], di sofferenze, di sacrifici interiori ed esterni, la volontà superatrice, l’alta visione di un fine superiore da conseguire tenacemente a costo di tutto, anche della vita, l’amore degli umili, l’anima cavalleresca, l’ardore della lotta, l’operosità instancabile, l’attività e la virtù trasformatrice e dominatrice del tempo suo, l’armonizzarsi, infine, di tutte le sue qualità in una intima atmosfera superiore, calma, serena, e luminosa, lo accostano più di quanto non si creda al Santo di Assisi.”

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serenity. Besides all the astonishing qualities that St. Francis and Mussolini have in common, Ardali writes that, more generally, even if great men and saints have differences, whoever is familiar with hagiographies will find that Saints were also “conquistatori mirabili” (“admirable conquerors”) on account of their “mystical renunciations.”32 Without further explanations, the following page of Ardali’s book presents the juxtaposition of two portraits, whose effect is quite striking (fig.2):

Figure 2 Juxtaposed Images of St. Francis and of Mussolini, Exactly as they Appear in the Pagination of Father Paolo Ardali’s San Francesco e Mussolini, 5-6.

Francis’s portrait on the left page, reproduces the work of Simone Martini, one of the masters of the Senese School, in Gothic style, probably completed in 1318 which originally was conceived for placement next to the figure of St. Louis of Toulouse, the bishop of the same city who had sworn to the Franciscan oaths (poverty, chastity, obedience, fig.3). The bishop was a prominent figure, but it gained more force by being placed

32

Ibid.

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next to the figure of the revered founder of the order (these frescoes are in Assisi, in the Lower Church of St Francis, North Transept).33

Figure 3 Simone Martini, Juxtaposed Portraits of St. Francis and of Louis of Toulouse Assisi, Lower Church of St Francis, North Transept.

Ardali was aware that the juxtaposition with the portrait of St. Francis would confer an aura of sanctity, respect, and admiration on the neighboring portrait. Even to contemporary eyes, the juxtaposition of the portrait of St. Francis with that of Mussolini may have a striking effect— mostly of surprise. Considering the charisma already enjoyed by Mussolini, in his time this juxtaposition must have been even more powerful and effective in Fascist Italy. Both the portraits have one of their focal points centered on the left hand of the figure, with the difference that Francis’s hand shows a stigma, while Mussolini’s hand is holding a document he is signing. The magnitude of the original, enormous print suggests this is an important document—a new law, a treaty, or perhaps a war declaration, in a typical statesman’s pose. The “manus” indicates both the hand, hence the manual work for the benefit of the Italian people that

33

(Images and information taken from the Princeton Index of Christian Art: http://ica.princeton.edu/images/044479.gif). The whole fresco by Martini represents five saints: Francis, Louis of Tolouse, Elizabeth, Margaret and Henry of Hungary.

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Mussolini enjoyed displaying,34 and, from its Latin etymology, it refers to the “power over the people,” and to “jurisdiction.” Moreover, the parallelism between Francis’s hand, showing a stigma, and Mussolini’s hands, signing a document, suggests that the endurance and self-sacrifice of the political leader, in the name of the State, are similar to those of the Saint. The figures have a similar look, which hints at similarities in their world-views and characters. Moreover, while Louis and St. Francis are looking at each other, establishing a dialogue among saintly figures that excludes the onlooker, Francis is looking at Mussolini, who in turn looks directly at us. The effect is to present Francis as a protector or even an admirer of the Duce. The Duce instead is staring intensely at us, even as he is intent is signing an important document. He is looking up from his work, focused on his task of drafting or approving legislature for the onlookers, the people, detaching himself from his work briefly with his eyes alone. His head remains lowered, humbly and diligently, so he can return to the task. His eyes rolled to the top of his head recall images of religious ecstasy. The juxtaposition, with this exchange of gazes, establishes a politico-religious genealogy. It suggests that, via Mussolini— through St. Francis and even Jesus himself, since Francis had many of the Savior’s characteristics—Italians are offered special access to heaven. Mussolini's gaze acknowledges and invites the onlooker inside the celestial scene. The result is to connote that Fascism is an agency approved of by God, or even a miracle, since it is here depicted as a miraculous scene. Ardali’s operation is two-fold: on the one hand it reveals the Fascist project of sacralizing politics, on the other, by using the figure of St. Francis to legitimate and empower Mussolini, Ardali is politicizing a religious figure. It is doubtful that Mussolini’s picture was created with the intent of placing it side by side with this portrait of St. Francis. It is more likely that this picture, signed by a photographer named Scagli, was taken independently from Ardali’s book, perhaps in the “Covo” of Milan, the headquarters of the newspaper Il popolo d’Italia, which Mussolini founded in 1914. It was used as a propagandistic image, as we can see in the scene reproduced below (fig. 4), in which a gigantic print out of the same image is being prepped to function as backdrop at a formal event (likely the “Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution”). The fact that the picture was used at a formal event testifies that it was a well-known image for the Italians of the time. 34

Think for instance of the famous pictures of Mussolini engaged in harvesting wheat during the “battaglia del grano” campaign, which started as Ardali was writing.

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Figure 4 Propagandistic Photograph of Mussolini by Scagli, Probably Taken between 1914 and 1918.

Ardali shows a good command of the iconographical tradition of the representations of St. Francis and a remarkable ability in bending the iconic quality of Martini’s portrait to a completely different meaning.

Body and Spirit, and the Victory over Pain I will now discuss another provocative way in which Ardali constructs a parallelism between Mussolini and St. Francis. After the previous associations, Ardali now leads the reader to reflect on a very important, and a very charged, topic: pain and suffering. Because Ardali was not an isolated case, I will bring in instances from other studies on St. Francis, both by Franciscans and by the mayor of Assisi, Arnaldo Fortini. Ardali titles the next chapter “Body and Spirit, and the Victory over Pain,” in which the author exalts Mussolini’s spirit of sacrifice, his strength, and other virtues, like his preference for a sober life deprived of comforts and his meditative nature. Just like young Francis, Mussolini combined his inward inclination with an openness toward the outside world, while also entrusting the control of his body to his vigilant, evervictorious spirit.35 Il Duce was as focused on his studies as a saint is with prayers: “And when he studies, and thinks—is not this what his 35

Ardali, San Francesco, 19.

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penetrating eyes are saying?—he knows no distractions, just like saints intent in prayer.”36 Il Duce had been able to pursue his studies and meditations in any situation, in the solitude of a foreign land, the trenches (“immersed in mud, while bullets and the debris flew around near him,” “col fango sino ai ginocchi mentre le pallottole e le schegge gli fischiano a breve distanza”), in the hospital, or in the famous cubicle where he set up the headquarters of the newspaper, Il popolo.37 However, his skill was most remarkable when demonstrating an ability to withstand discomfort and pain, of which life is full, without ever complaining: “He knows very well that climbing mountains—in the literal and metaphorical sense— sometimes is not possible without sweat and blood”, (emphasis added).38 In this passage, one of the rationales of Fascist rhetoric that I have suggested is commonly attached to the figure of St. Francis during Fascism, is already evident. This specific rationale draws a connection between St. Francis and the endurance of pain, and between the latter and the redemptive blood of the stigmata, a bleeding that is intended, at the same time, as a gift from and to God. In the case of this description of Mussolini, the positive idea of shedding blood, which is implicitly related to St. Francis and his “invention” of stigmata, announces a secular type of sacrifice—very likely in war, given the previous mention of Mussolini’s experience in the trenches. And in fact, in the following lines Ardali explains, this time openly, that: “The most beautiful pages of such virtue [the endurance of pain], which reveal him as italianissimo among Italians, are those written during the war.”39 In order to make a stronger and lasting impression on the topic of Mussolini’s remarkable endurance of pain, Ardali compares a picture of the Duce with the many portraits of St. Francis showing his bleeding stigmata: “I am staring at a photograph of Mussolini wearing a military outfit: his face is emaciated, suffering but strong and serene; it makes me recall a thirteenth-century painting of St. Francis of Assisi of the the Senese school: same lively gaze, same noble attitude—he is only missing the halo” (my emphasis).40 36 Ibid., 20. “E quando studia e pensa—non lo dicono i suoi occhi dallo sguardo così penetrante?—non conosce distrazioni, non ne vuole, proprio come i santi quando sono intenti alla preghiera.” 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. “Egli sa benissimo che le ascese non sono possibili sulle montagne—in metafora e fuor di metafora—(…) senza bagnarli talvolta di sudore e di sangue.” 39 Ibid. “Le pagine più belle di questa virtù [la sopportazione del dolore], che lo rivela italianissimo tra gli italiani sono quelle della guerra.” 40 Ibid., 20. “Ho sotto gli occhi una fotografia di Mussolini in tenuta di Marcia: il suo volto patito, sofferente, ma sereno, ma forte, mi richiama alla memoria una

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Another element that in Ardali’s opinion testifies to a similarity between Mussolini and St. Francis, is Mussolini’s serenity, which recalls Francis’s “seraphicness,” (being morally good and pure). “Seraphicness” is also recast as a quality that is useful in military life. In fact, for Ardali Mussolini’s serenity was the reason for his promotion to the grade of Corporal during the Great War. Ardali mentions as proof a citation from Mussolini’s diary, where the combatant reports the words with which his Captain motivated the promotion: (“For performing his duty exemplarily, for his perfect warrior spirit and serenity” (“Per l’attività esemplare, l’alto spirito bersagliesco e la serenità d’animo”).41 After he was wounded in battle, Mussolini had to undergo long and painful medical treatments that he stood with “impressive stoicism and strength of mind,” always refusing any kind of anesthetic—which is, of course, a legend.42 This story, I should add, is behind the Fascist motto “I do not care” (“Me ne frego”), which Mussolini supposedly wrote on his bandages. Ardali adds that Mussolini’s admirable endurance of pain was striking even for “us, used to any horror from the wounds caused by modern weapons.”43 Based on Ardali’s use of the pronoun “us,” with which he is including himself in the group of people used to see war wounds, one can probably conclude that Father Ardali, like Father Agostino Gemelli, was one of the chaplains who served during World War I. By praising Mussolini’s endurance of pain, and by placing this endurance firmly in a parallel with St. Francis’, Ardali is sacralizing the figure of the Duce. Just as St. Francis’ stigmata replicated Christ’s passion on the Cross and also produced a train of imitators (stigmatics), so should the Italian youth of the time imitate Mussolini: go to war, get wounds, and pittura di San Francesco d’Assisi di scuola Senese del secolo XIII: identica vivezza nello sguardo, identica nobiltà di atteggiamento, manca solo l’aureola.” The picture and the portrait are not included in Ardali’s book. 41 Ibid., 21. Because of Ardali’s carelessness with citations, it is not clear whether the emphasis was in the original, but I am more inclined to think that it must come from the improvised biographer. Ardali does not provide a precise citation for Mussolini’s diary. The adjective “bersagliesco” refers to the fact that Mussolini was enrolled in the “Bersaglieri” (Marksmen) corps. 42 Ibid., 23. “Doveva sottostare […] a lunghe e dolorose medicazioni, che egli sopportò con uno stoicismo e una forza d’animo impressionanti anche per noi, rotti a tutti gli orrori delle ferite prodotte dalle armi moderne.” Mussolini was wounded on February 23, 1917, as a result of the mishandling of a cannon during a training session (he was not wounded during actual war nor did he perform any heroic deed). For the anecdote regarding Mussolini see Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 28. 43 Ibid.

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endure them with courage. This reading corroborates Fogu’s interpretation of the post-World-War I collective expectations that created the figure of the thaumaturgic Duce, according to which Mussolini could be “healer of the psychological wounds of the Great War.”44 The elaboration of the image of the thaumaturgic Duce responded to a need to exorcise World War I trauma. Similarly, the narratives about St. Francis transferred the collective war trauma, produced by the massive presence of wounds, onto the image of the stigmata (redemptive wounds). It may make more sense now to consider that, as a clergyman with experience on the battlefield, Ardali would connect Mussolini’s wounding in war with a passage from The Little Flowers, which relates a statement attributed to St. Francis about pain endurance. The cited passage portrays Francis’s praise of the pain of Crucifixion. Ardali writes that after having mentioned Mussolini’s war wound, he is reminded of “Chapter VII”45 of The Little Flowers of St. Francis: It is at this point that my memory goes to that excerpt of Chapter VII (sic) of The Little Flowers, where it says: “O Brother Leo, write that here and herein is perfect joy (…); above all graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit, that Christ granteth to His beloved, is to overcome oneself, and willingly for the love of Christ endure pains and injuries and horrors; inasmuch as in all other gifts of God we may not glory, since they are not ours but God's (...); but in the cross of tribulation and affliction we may find glory, since this is ours; and therefore saith the Apostle, I would not that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (English translation modified, emphasis added).

44

Fogu, The Historic Imaginary, 15. Francis was not the author of The Little Flowers, but this collection of anecdotes about his life have enjoyed a special place among the devout. Perhaps because of a typographical error in Ardali’s text, the cited reference is inaccurate. Chapter VII of The Little Flowers actually deals with Francis’s fasting for forty days and forty nights during Carnival, and it starts with the statement that St. Francis, “true servant of Christ, was in certain things like unto a second Christ given to the world for the salvation of souls.” Ardali actually intends to refer to chapter VIII. He writes: “È a questo punto che mi viene alla memoria quel passo del capitolo VII dei Fioretti in cui si dice: “O frate Leone, scrivi che in questo è perfetta letizia [...]; sopra tucte le cose et grazie, et doni dello Spirito Sancto, si è di vincere se’ medesimo, et volentieri per l’amor di Christo sostenere pene, ingiurie, obbrobrii; però che non sono nostri, ma da Dio...ma nella croce delle tribulatione et delle afflitione ci possiamo gloriare, però che questo è nostro, et però dice l’Apostolo: Io non mi voglio gloriare, se non nella Croce del nostro Signore Jesu Christo.”

45

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Ardali’s citation comes from the chapter on “the perfect joy” (“perfetta letizia”), which argues that perfect joy is found in being rejected by the porter of a convent, being left at the door cold and hungry, for the whole night. In this situation, perfect joy is then enduring this harshness with patience, not being upset, and not thinking anything negative of the porter. Even if someone should come and beat them up with sticks, they will still endure with patience, and joyfully (“con allegrezza”), thinking of Christ’s suffering on the Cross. Ardali selects only the part that invites us to sustain sorrows by thinking of the Cross. The way he connects this part of The Little Flowers with Mussolini’s endurance of the pain from his war wound, is meant to establish a strong relation between the Duce and God: from Jesus’ passion on the Cross, to Francis’ admiration and imitation of that pain (resulting in his stigmata), and, finally, to Mussolini’s war wound. The common element is endurance of pain for a greater good, which Ardali praises in both Francis’s and Mussolini’s lives. Because Mussolini was the model for the “new Italian man,” and because, as shown in the previous chapter, in the mid-twenties St. Francis was being construed as ideally Italian, the relation that Ardali established between God’s Passion, Francis’s stigmata, Mussolini’s wound, and the consequent praise of suffering, were meant to be an inspiration for all Italians. In the same way, Ardali’s entire biography is conceived as an inspirational model for Italian men. This conception of Francis’s stigmata proves that they are situated at the crossroads of the convergent processes of the politicization of the religious and of the sanctification of the political under a totalitarian regime. The symbolism of stigmata I mentioned previously finds an overt instantiation in Ardali’s associating this passage from The Little Flowers with Mussolini’s war wound. Significantly, the preceding part of the cited chapter of The Little Flowers is omitted, likely because it reiterates that one should not despise, but love, the evil porter as one should any other opponent. This message is counterproductive for warfare, and messages of love and brotherhood were openly monitored and discouraged by the Minister of War, as shown in a 1929 confidential document to the head of the war chaplains, Mons. Bartolomasi.46 The second part of this chapter of 46

AAEESS, p.o.701, f. 158, 1929, p.49. Emphasis (capitalization) in the original. Stamped: “Segreteria di Stato. Rapporti con gli Stati.” The heading of the document is “5 RP 16/5/’29 1/2da Educ. Morale ed intervento degli ecclesiastici.” This confidential letter from the War Minister stresses that the moral education of the troops must pertain exclusively to other members of the military and must not be “replaced by the propaganda produced by members of religious orders.” The generals, moreover, must immediately report any material that may refer to “the

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The Little Flowers, which has to do with rejection and beating, hints at the realm of (perhaps gay) male masochism.47 From (virile) pain, Ardali moves to birds, music, and nature, in a section of his book in which, among other topics, he talks about the taming of animals, and also relates music to pain, thus creating a connection between war, music, persuasion, and pain management.

religious ideal of peace, love, and Christian charity [and hence] may weaken the spirit of our soldiers.” 47 “When we shall be at Santa Maria degli Angeli, thus soaked by the rain, and frozen by the cold, and befouled with mud, and afflicted with hunger, and shall knock at the door of the Place, and the doorkeeper shall come in anger and shall say: ‘Who are ye?’ and we shall say: ‘We are two of your friars’ and he shall say: ‘Ye speak not truth; rather are ye two lewd fellows who go about deceiving the world and robbing the alms of the poor: get you hence’; and shall not open unto us, but shall make us stay outside in the snow and rain, cold and hungry, even until night; then, if we shall bear such great wrong and such cruelty and such rebuffs patiently, without disquieting ourselves and without murmuring against him; and shall think humbly and charitably that that door-keeper really believes us to be that which he has called us, and that God makes him speak against us; O Friar Leo, write that here is perfect joy. And if we persevere in knocking, and he shall come forth enraged and shall drive us away with insults and with buffetings, as importunate rascals, saying, ‘Get you hence, vilest of petty thieves, go to the hospice. Here ye shall neither eat nor lodge.’ If we shall bear this patiently and with joy and love; O Friar Leo write that herein is perfect joy. And if, constrained by hunger and by cold and by the night, we shall continue to knock and shall call and beseech for the love of God, with great weeping, that he open unto us and let us in, and he, greatly offended thereat, shall say: ‘These be importunate rascals; I will pay them well as they deserve’, and shall come forth with a knotty club and take us by the cowl, and shall throw us on the ground and roll us in the snow and shall cudgel us pitilessly with that club; if we shall bear all these things patiently and with cheerfulness, thinking on the sufferings of Christ the blessed, the which we ought to bear patiently for His love; O Friar Leo, write that here and in this is perfect joy.” For a study of male masochism, see Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-De-Siècle (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1998). Stuart L. Charme published an article dealing with masochistic models and the cultural response offered by religious practices: “Religion and the Theory of Masochism,” Journal of Religion and Health. 22.3 (1983): 221-233. Specifically focused on Judeo-Christian religions is Jaco Hamman’s “The Rod of Discipline: Masochism, Sadism, and the Judeo-Christian Religion,” Journal of Religion and Health. 39.4 (2000): 319-327.

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Conclusion I have shown one example, among many, of the appropriations of the figure of St. Francis during Fascism. During this time, Father Paolo Ardali was not alone in establishing a connection between the sacrificial logic of stigmata and war wounds. In many speeches and representations, which I discuss elsewhere, stigmata receive particular emphasis, or a relation is openly established between St. Francis and the Italian army. These representations include nationalistic overtones and are attuned to the Fascist political agenda. Even if nationalistic appropriations of saints were not a Fascist invention, the results of the treatment of the figure of St. Francis appear particularly striking. Taken together, these representations convey a broader political message: to conquer a State, one needs at least three virtues: the ability to persuade the masses (analogously to St. Francis with the birds); the ability to tame one’s enemies (analogously to St. Francis with the wolf); the serene, and heroic, endurance of pain (like St. Francis with his stigmata) to inspire the youth to heroic self-sacrifice. Like many of the other doings of Italian Fascism, this paradoxical yet successful appropriation of St. Francis was completely forgotten after World War II and, except for an extremely small circle of academics, remains so today. The topic of Francis’s life under Fascism is also not discussed by the eminent Society of Franciscan Studies. Today, St. Francis of Assisi fully enjoys the fame and the benevolence that many grant him – both inside and outside the Catholic world. Francis enjoys sympathies also outside the religious world, since many lay people also admit to feelings of sympathy for this saint. This lay sympathy is most likely due to the postsixty-eight treatment of the figure of St. Francis, which turned it into a pacifist (and communist) icon. Yet, today’s leftist representations of this saint are the result of a process of forgetting and of post-war “clean up.” The “cleaned” St. Francis is the saint that inspired the current Pope to take his name, for the first time in the history of the Church. During the centuries, Francis’s figure has continuously inspired works of art, but in a predominantly uncritical mode. If after World War II historians had been willing to focus our attention on the exploitation of the figure of St. Francis, Italian culture would not have a patron saint that reassures Italians of their goodness, thus nurturing the stereotype according to which Italians are inherently “good people.” It is the aim of this essay that Italian culture could see in its patron saint a memento: even such goodness can be twisted and exploited to convey unsympathetic and imperialistic messages.

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Works Cited Ardali, Paolo. San Francesco e Mussolini. Mantua: Paladino, 1926. Arnold, Thomas Walker (Trans). The Little flowers of St. Francis. London: Dent, 1907. Bughetti, Benvenuto. I Fioretti di San Francesco. Rome: Città nuova, 1999. Fogu, Claudio. The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Frantzen, Allen. Bloody Goodࣟ: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Gentile, Emilio. “Fascism as Political Religion.” Journal of Contemporary History, 25.3 (1990): 229-251. —. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. —. “Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics. A Critical Survey.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6.1 (2005): 19-32. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined. The First World War and English Culture. New York: Atheneum, 1991. Luzzatto, Sergio. Padre Pio. Miracoli e Politica nell’Italia Del Novecento. Turin: Einaudi, 2007. —. Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010. Mack Smith, Denis. Mussolini. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Moro, Renato. “Religion and Politics in the Time of Secularization: The Sacralization of Politics and Politicization of Religion.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6.1 (2005): 71-86. Schneider, Herbert. Making the Fascist State. New York: Oxford University Press, 1928.

Archival Documents AAEESS = Archivio della Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari, Vatican Archives, Rome.

CHAPTER FOUR MUSSOLINI IN AMERICAN NEWSREELS: IL DUCE AS MODERN CELEBRITY1 PIERLUIGI ERBAGGIO

In considering the links between newsreels and Benito Mussolini, one cannot avoid associating the images of the fascist dictator with the Italian Istituto Luce, the Italian newsreel agency, founded in 1924. Especially when featured in present-day Italian historical documentaries, many filmed images of the dictator appear flanked by the familiar eagle symbol that opened the Cinegiornali, and television audiences, still today, recognize the voices of Luce’s news commentators. The fact that Luce was one of the most pervasive propaganda tools of the regime is something that has become commonplace among scholars of Fascism.2 To a certain 1

This article is part of a larger project on the representation of Benito Mussolini in American media. More specifically, my work studies the dominant positive American attitude toward the Italian dictator between 1922 and 1936, that is, in the years that go from the March on Rome to the Ethiopian war. 2 Relevant studies of Luce include Gian Piero Brunetta, Cinema italiano fra le due guerre. Fascismo e politica cinematografica (Milan: Mursia, 1975); Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media (Rome: Laterza, 1975); Mino Argentieri, L’occhio del regime: Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1979); Massimo Cardillo, Il duce in moviola: Politica e divismo nei cinegiornali e documentari del Luce (Bari: Dedalo, 1983); Giampaolo Bernagozzi, Il cinema allo specchio. Appunti per una storia del documentario (Bologna: Pàtron, 1985); James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy. The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Mino Argentieri, ed., Schermi di guerra: Cinema italiano, 1939-1945 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1995); Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello spettacolo, 2000); Gabriele D’Autilia, “Istituto Luce,” in Dizionario del fascismo. Vol. 1, ed. Victoria De Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto (Turin: Einaudi, 2002); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Stefano Luconi

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degree, the persistent availability and online accessibility of Luce’s newsreels and footage today might be the reason for such a strong connection between the Italian Film Company and fascist propaganda: if all the images of a successful and adored Mussolini always come from one source, that source must be an instrument of the regime.3 This conventional reading of the history of Luce is, in my opinion, only partially satisfactory because it does not take into consideration the generic range of Luce’s nonfiction productions and the key role it played in modernizing Italian cinema by introducing newsreels in a serialized form and by efficiently distributing them throughout the country. Additionally, with regard to the representation of Il Duce on screen, this approach does not account for the existence of other Italian film companies interested in the dictator that produced documentaries on the regime’s accomplishments.4 Also, it fails to consider the network of exchanges between European and American newsreels companies of the time. More importantly, it disregards the constant presence of numerous foreign film companies’ crews which directly filmed Mussolini and allowed the production of newsreel stories that, while not having an apparent propagandistic nature, often proposed a positive representation of the dictator and of his fascist regime. In this essay, I study in particular how two American newsreel companies, Fox and Hearst, which had offices and personnel in Rome, reinforced a narration of Il Duce that emphasized his charismatic leadership and his engagement with modernity. These two American companies not only imported Italian reels from Luce, but also had their own extensive production of newsreels on fascist Italy and on Mussolini. By analyzing the Fox and Hearst newsreels depicting the dictator, I explain the ways Americans focused on—and indeed framed—Mussolini. Rather than a comparative study of Mussolini in Italian and American newsreels, my approach is a contextual one. I study the American newsreels’ representation and Guido Tintori, L’ombra lunga del fascio. Canali di propaganda fascista per gli italiani d’America (Milan: M&B Publishing, 2004); Marco Bertozzi, Storia del documentario italiano (Venice: Marsilio, 2008); Daniela Manetti, “Un’arma poderosissima.” Industria cinematografica e Stato durante il fascismo, 1922-1943 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012); Pierluigi Erbaggio, “Istituto Nazionale Luce: A National Company with an International Reach,” in Italian Silent Cinema, ed. Giorgio Bertellini (New Barnet, Herts, U.K.: John Libbey Publishing, 2013). 3 Hundreds of videos and still images are readily available on the Luce website (www.archivioluce.com) and even on a dedicated YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/cinecittaluce). 4 For instance, in 1933 the dictator invited the film company Cines to produce Mussolinia di Sardegna [Mussolinia in Sardinia, 1933] for the inauguration of one of the regime’s new towns.

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of Mussolini both in a quantitative and qualitative sense: how often did Fox and Hearst propose Mussolini stories in the newsreels they issued? And what sort of representation did they adopt in these newsreels? This essay argues that Fox and Hearst productions established an American cult of the dictator’s personality that even preceded the organization of Italian agencies for propaganda.5 Through American newsreels, Mussolini became a modern political icon whose private and public life merited attention. The American newsreels’ representations of Mussolini emphasized the fascist dictator’s close relationship with symbols of modernity and technological progress, and his embrace of newer forms of political communication. For instance, in 1927, Fox chose Mussolini as the first “Movietoned” international political leader, that is, the first nonAmerican politician to appear in a Fox Movietone sound newsreel. Also, Fox and Hearst often filmed Mussolini delivering speeches in foreign languages, demonstrating his competence in world diplomacy and broadcasting the idea of his central role in international political gatherings that was so prevalent in the press.6 Moreover, Fox and Hearst newsreels made Mussolini a public celebrity. While focusing on the dictator, on his persona, strength, and appearance, these American newsreels often diluted or completely eliminated all political content. Mussolini was the sole protagonist in front of the cameras, which often captured close shots of his face, equating the political leader to a film star. The interest for the dictator extended, as with modern celebrities, to other members of his family, particularly to his two children Bruno and Vittorio who were portrayed in a few newsreels between 1925 and 1935.7 In my conclusions to this essay, I propose a possible explanation for such positive coverage of the Italian dictator in American newsreels by revealing the connections between film companies and American financial powers, that controlled the American film industry both through direct backing and indirect management of filming and sound equipment. This media-finance nexus 5

In the third volume of his voluminous biography of Benito Mussolini, Renzo De Felice characteristically indicates the years between 1929 and 1936 as Gli anni del consenso. 6 See for instance, Yoi Maraini, “Mussolini, Man of Many Interests,” The Living Age (May 24, 1924): 986-989; “Mussolini Back ‘On the Job’,” Literary Digest 85 (June 27, 1925): 20. 7 Exemplary is the May 4, 1931 Fox newsreel Rome. Horse Show Attracts Notables, which depicts Bruno and Vittorio Mussolini attending a horse show with the Italian King Victor Emmanuel III. This newsreel is preserved at the University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections, Fox Movietone News Collection.

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becomes even more troubling and worthy of examination as fascist Italy, as I will detail, benefited from American loans and financial operations that helped Mussolini’s rise to power.8

The Field of American Newsreels In the early 1920s, when the Fascist Party emerged and took power in Italy, newsreels already represented an international medium. Particularly during World War I, newsreels became a powerful and pervasive source of news for American people. If one considers, as Frank Kessler does in the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, the actualités as the “early form of news event films and newsreels,”9 the birthdate of this medium almost corresponds to that of cinema itself. The first actualités, defined as films presenting factual stories and current events, were part of the 1890s Lumière brothers’ productions in France. These short films depicted political personalities, state visits, royal parades, and other public affairs. Exhibitors often connected several actualités with other views, a common name for the short single-shot 15-17 meter films depicting well-known places, sporting events, and ceremonies, and devised a program composed of various films for audiences to experience. What characterizes these early examples of non-fiction films is their strong connection to current events and the fact that they are unstaged, that is, as Tom Gunning puts it, “the subject filmed either pre-existed the act of filming (a landscape, a social custom, a method of work) or would have taken place even if the 8

For a discussion of American financial interests in Italy, see the seminal works of John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) and Gian Giacomo Migone, Gli Stati Uniti e il Fascismo: Alle origini dell'egemonia americana in Italia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980). 9 Frank Kessler, “Actualités” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 5. In addition to the primary sources cited below, for my description of the field of American newsreels, I have found the following secondary sources particularly useful: Peter Baechlin and Maurice Muller-Strauss, Newsreels across the World (Paris: UNESCO, 1952); Adelaide F. Hawley Cumming, “A History of American Newsreels, 1927 to 1950” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1967); Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 19111967 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); Marcel Huret, Ciné actualités: Histoire de la presse filmée (Paris: H. Veyrier: 1984); Roger Smither and Wolfgang Klaue, eds., Newsreels in Film Archives: A Survey Based on the FIAF Newsreel Symposium (Trowbridge, U.K.: Flicks Books, 1996); Clyde Jeavons, Jane Mercer, and Daniela Kirchner, eds., The Story of the Century! An International Newsfilm Conference (London: British University Film & Video Council, 1998).

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camera had not been there (a sporting event, a funeral, a coronation).”10 With the emergence of movie audiences and movie-going practices, during the 1900s, the necessity of proposing interesting, thrilling, and sensational news stories often pushed film companies beyond the mere recording of events in order to attract audiences. Famously, Georges Méliès staged news re-enactments of the Dreyfus affair (1899) and of King Edward VII’s coronation (1902). Staged and unstaged newsreels often coexisted in film companies’ catalogues. Although, as Kessler remarks, “it would be anachronistic to consider [staged news] as ‘fakes’,” the problem of understanding how spectators read and experienced both kind of newsreels remains for early non-fiction scholars.11 The emergence of numerous film companies that specialized in newsreels during the early 1900s suggests that movie-goers enjoyed the content of these productions regardless of their staged or unstaged nature. The French company Pathé-Frères was one of the first to recognize the demands for a regular release of newsreels that would satisfy the recreational needs of growing audiences. During the second half of the 1900s, Pathé began releasing the first weekly newsreels issue, Pathé FaitsDivers, initially only in Paris, then shortly after, throughout France as Pathé Journal.12 In the United States, from the end of the nineteenth century, companies such as Edison, Biograph, and Vitagraph had produced numerous news films, particularly boxing events and re-enactments of episodes of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Nonetheless, Pathé, in 1911, was the first company that produced a regularly released newsreel series in the United States, Pathé’s Weekly. During World War I, as a consequence of the closure of the European market, American film companies, which released long feature films and newsreels, strengthened their national and international position. Thus, from 1918 onward, three American companies dominated the world newsreel market along with Pathé: Fox, Hearst, and Universal. In 1927, they were joined by Paramount, which released Paramount News until 1957. While Universal News kept its name during its long existence (1912-1967), a consistent number of name 10

Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic” in Uncharted Territory. Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed. Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 14. 11 Kessler, in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 6. See also Kessler, “Visible Evidence – But of What? Reassessing Early non-fiction Cinema,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22, no. 3 (2002): 221-222. 12 There is disagreement regarding the dates of issue of these Pathé series. Raymond Fielding remarks in The American Newsreel that scholars’ dating ranges between 1906 and 1910 (326, n.11).

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changes characterized the Fox and Hearst newsreels series in the years leading first to the introduction of sound and then to World War II. Such modifications reflect alterations in the production and distribution structures of the companies and significant variations and modernizations of the medium. For instance, the introduction of sound determined the transformation of Fox News (1919) into Fox Movietone News in 1927, a name that Fox kept until 1963 when it ceased its newsreel production. Hearst’s The International Newsreel (1914), which was initially released through Universal, became The MGM International Newsreel after the 1929 contract between Hearst and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. With MGM, Hearst that same year started releasing a sound newsreel series called Hearst Metrotone News. This latter series concluded in 1967 as News of the Day, a name adopted in 1936.13 Initially silent, newsreels transitioned to sound in the late 1920s. By the early 1920s, newsreel production companies competed for the approximately 16,500 American theatres that exhibited newsreels with their biweekly newsreel issues.14 Fox, in particular, expanded significantly during the 1920s establishing an important international presence and played a crucial role in the modernization of the medium. When Fox introduced its sound newsreels in 1927, it had already created a network of operators in foreign countries. By the 1930s, Fox employed cameramen in fifty countries and had production centers in nine different locations, including Paris and London.15 The Fox transition to sound newsreels engaged the figure of Benito Mussolini, who became the first political leader to appear in a newsreel featuring the new sound technology. Since the 1922 March on Rome, however, Mussolini was already the subject of a remarkable number of silent newsreels and press interest in the United States.

13

The extensive list of names of Hearst’s newsreels series includes: International News (1919-1928), International Newsreel (1928-1929), MGM News (19271929), MGM International Newsreel (1929-1930), Hearst Metrotone News (19291936), News of the Day (1936-1967). UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, “Hearst Metrotone News, Inc.”, Corporate History, Vol. 1, n.p. 14 This figure and other newsreels exhibition details are reported in Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 79. 15 Roel Vande Winkel, “Newsreel Series: World Overview,” in Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken (New York: Routledge, 2006), 987. See also Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 78-85.

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Enter Il Duce: Mussolini’s Presence in Fox’s and Hearst’s Newsreels In Newsreel Man, a rare and precious first-hand testimonial of the 1930s newsreels business, Charles Peden, a former Fox Movietone cameraman, states that “among foreign public men the best performer is Mussolini. He can always be depended on to deliver a vigorous speech extemporaneously, and pictorially he is ideal.”16 This remark echoed a December 1931 Variety first page article about “Big Newsreel Star” in which it was noted that “Hoover, Mussolini, MacDonald and Walker are the world’s greatest newsreel stars.”17 Notably, the Variety journalist added that “there [wasn’t] a program released which [did not] contain Il Duce or some reference to him.”18 An analysis of the archival documentation of both Fox and Hearst newsreels productions corroborates the impression of this overwhelming interest.19 In particular, the two companies’ synopsis sheets, that is, the list of newsreels issued to the theaters, show that between April 1925 and August 1936, about 175 newsreels displayed or referred to Mussolini. More specifically, Mussolini is present in eightyfour Fox records between April 8, 1925 and October 22, 1935. Hearst archival documents, on the other hand, reveal the presence of the dictator in ninety-one newsreels issues between September 28, 1929 and August 31, 1936. In both Fox and Hearst archives, the existing paper documentation does not always match the preserved video footage. This means that a small number of newsreel stories related to Mussolini precede the starting dates of the synopsis sheets and that no paper

16

Charles Peden, Newsreel Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1932), 13. 17 Tom Waller, “21 Big Newsreel Star,” Variety 104, no. 3 (8 December 1931): 1. 18 Ibid., 23. 19 The University of North Carolina hosts the Fox Movietone News Collection among its Moving Image Research Collections. Hearst newsreels are preserved at the Film and Television Archive of the University of California at Los Angeles. These archival holdings are the only ones offering substantial newsreel material from the 1920s’: silent and sound newsreel stories, outtakes, complete issues, and synopsis and dope sheets, that is, cameramen’s written records of their work on the field. In addition to Fox and Hearst newsreels, Universal News footage covering the period 1929-1967 is preserved among the Moving Images Collections at the National Archives and Records Administration. For other information about American newsreel preservation efforts, see William T. Murphy, “The Preservation of Newsreels in the United States,” in Newsreels in Film Archives, ed. Roger Smither and Wolfgang Klaue, 8-12 (Trowbridge, U.K.: Flicks Books, 1996).

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documentation exists for some existing footage in the period that goes from 1923 to 1936. In the case of Fox newsreels, the first preserved newsreel with Mussolini, titled Black Shirts, dates back to February 28, 1923 and shows groups of youth and adult fascist followers marching through the streets of Rome and convening at the monument to the Unknown Soldier at the Altare della Patria.20 Seven other Fox newsreels precede the April 8, 1925 date, while eight Hearst newsreels predate September 28, 1929. In examining the existing Fox and Hearst news stories which directly focus on Mussolini, one cannot avoid noticing that these American newsreels often depicted the Italian dictator as a modern leader, ready to engage with the latest technology. A 1927 Fox Movietone sound newsreel is exemplary in this respect.

Mussolini, Spokesperson of Modernity

Figure 1 Variety, September 21, 1927

On September 21, 1927, Variety’s first page headline was “Mussolini’s Hope in Screen.” The dictator’s statement summarized below the title reads: “This can bring the world together and end war.”21 Reportedly, Mussolini placed his hopes in the new Fox Movietone technology that allowed moving images and sound recordings to be impressed together on 20

Black Shirts (New York: Fox, February 28, 1923). Preserved at the University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections, Fox Movietone News Collection. 21 “Mussolini’s Hope in Screen,” Variety 88, no. 10 (21 Sep. 1927): 1-23.

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film. This Variety article was published a few days before the Italian dictator’s speaking debut on American screens. Mussolini was, in fact, the first foreign politician to be shown in an American sound newsreel. The pioneering newsreel The Man of the Hour premiered at the Times Square Theatre in New York on September 28, 1927. Mussolini’s innovative newsreel shared the program with Sunrise (1927), the latest film by Friedrich W. Murnau (1888-1931), which featured music and sound effects, along with modern cinematographic techniques.22 The theatre program boasts: “Benito Mussolini, Premier of Italy, lives before your eyes through Movietone. He speaks to you, expressing, with his characteristic gestures, his sentiments toward the United States and the Italian-Americans in this country.”23 In addition to emphasizing the presence of Mussolini, Fox celebrates and explains the new recording method that permits the audience to hear Mussolini’s words while seeing his gestures. A specific note about this newest technological advance occupies most of the program page (fig. 2). The Fox Movietone newsreel issue ran to about 20 minutes and included, in addition to Mussolini’s addresses in Italian and in English, the images and sounds of the Italian army marching and singing, and of Italian navy members working on a ship.24 The American Ambassador in Rome, Henry P. Fletcher, introduced Mussolini on camera, and the dictator spoke first in Italian, reading from a script, and then in English, with no script in his hands.25 Mussolini, here coupled with this technological progress, becomes a sort of testimonial to modernity. American audiences had already had the opportunity to see him in silent newsreels and read about his engagement with other symbols of modernity, namely airplanes, transoceanic ships, cars, and speed. With The Man of the Hour Fox puts 22

For a thorough analysis of Murnau’s film distribution, see Janet Bergstrom, “Murnau, Movietone and Mussolini,” Film History 17 (2005): 187-204. Bergstrom indicates the Murnau-Mussolini’s double billing as a possible reason behind the financial failure of Sunrise, particularly in its New York showings. 23 Rome, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Spd Co 1922-1943, container 221, file “P. S. E. Varia 148,” New York’s Times Square Theatre Program. 24 Sime, “Mussolini,” Variety 88, no. 10 (21 Sep. 1927): 20; Kann “Sunrise and Movietone,” Film Daily 41, no. 72 (25 Sep. 1927): 1-4; Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen. A Film Masterpiece,” The New York Times (24 Sep. 1927): 15. 25 The images of this brief speech in English are today available online on the British Movietone Archive website and on YouTube. Numerous paper documents are available at the Rome Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Spd Co 1922-1943, container 221, file “P. S. E. Varia 148”.

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the Italian dictator in a metonymic relationship with its modernizing technology and allows the dictator to speak for himself.

Figure 2 New York’s Times Square Theatre Program (left) [Courtesy of Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome)]; Fox Movietone Opening Caption (Top, Right); Benito Mussolini Delivering his Speech for the Fox Movietone Newsreel (Bottom, Right). [Courtesy of the British Movietone Archive Website.]

The fact that Mussolini was the first foreign political figure to be shown in the newly created genre of sound newsreels, as the caption preceding the short film reminds us, has an even greater value if one considers the importance of this major technological and artistic innovation. The Movietone technology was achieved thanks to the efforts of Earl Sponable and Theodore Case who had been collaborating since the early 1920s on a sound-on-film system. At the time, competition over this sort of technological advance was fierce among film companies. In 1926, Warner Brothers perfected a system commercially known as Vitaphone that involved the use of a recorded disk played on a turntable in sync with the camera movement. This system, although cumbersome and difficult to maneuver, permitted Warner Brothers to produce Don Juan, screened on August 6, 1926, and The Jazz Singer, screened on October 6,

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1927. These two films are traditionally indicated as the first feature films with sound. Sponable and Case’s technology, however, proved to be the most efficient and successful for commercial purposes. It consisted of the impression of a sound track on the same film that carried the recorded images. This system, in the words of the newsreels’ historian Raymond Fielding, “was commercially practical, it involved a minimum of equipment, it provided for absolute synchronism, and—following the subsequent sophistication of technique—it allowed for intricate and artistic editing of picture and sound.”26 The first commercially released sound films with this new synchronized technology were newsreels: on May 25, 1927, a sound newsreel showed Charles Lindbergh’s takeoff, an event that had happened five days earlier; Fox produced a second sound newsreel to record the welcome ceremony and President Coolidge’s introductory speech for Lindbergh’s arrival in Washington on June 12, 1927. My research at the Italian Central Archives indicates that the Fox Movietone crew recorded Mussolini’s newsreel with his speech in Italian on May 6, 1927, that is, two weeks before their filming, on May 20, of Lindbergh’s first sound newsreel.27 This adjustment makes Mussolini the very first subject that Fox filmed for testing its groundbreaking sound technology. Although the screening of Mussolini’s sound newsreel was on September 28, parts of the production process were completed in different moments and after lengthy negotiation for the making of the 85-second long English address. The Fox Movietone cameramen and sound technicians worked with Mussolini and his office from May to August 1927.28 These chronological details are crucial not only for reasons of cinema historiography, but also for my discussion of Mussolini’s presence in American media and for a broader understanding of the dictator’s connection to discourses of modernity. They confirm that American media, in addition to broadcasting the figure of the Italian dictator as an icon of modernity by highlighting his personal interest in all that was mechanical and new, considered Mussolini to be the voice of innovation itself. 26

Fielding, The American Newsreel, 160-161. On the transition to sound, see also Elizabeth Weis and John Belton, eds., Film Sound: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Rick Altman, ed., Sound Theory. Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992); Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2005). 27 Rome, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario, Spd Co 1922-1943, container 221, file “P. S. E. Varia 148”. 28 Ibid.

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Mussolini as a Celebrity in American Newsreels The connection linking modernity’s narratives to Mussolini’s representation is only one aspect of the American media’s narrations regarding the Italian dictator. A very brief Hearst Metrotone 1926 newsreel, entitled Mussolini Smiles!, demonstrates how news media showed an early interest in Il Duce as a show business personality rather than as a dictator or even a politician. In this newsreel, images of Mussolini are interspersed with that of the Italian King Vittorio Emanuele III as they both attend an unspecified official ceremony. This silent newsreel and the 1927 Fox Movietone sound newsreel described above show how Mussolini’s filmic representation catalyzed his star status in the United States.

Figure 3 Captions and Images of Benito Mussolini in the 1926 Hearst Silent Newsreel Mussolini Smiles! [Courtesy of UCLA’s Film & Television Archive]

One of the first striking elements of this silent newsreel, when looking at the caption introducing it and at its title, is that the political element is

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subdued, actually apparently absent. The fascist dictator is identified by his last name or referred to as “Italy’s strong man.” In this Hearst silent newsreel, King Vittorio Emanuele III, referred to only as King Victor Emmanuel in the intertitle, is present as well, but we see him only as one person in a crowd in the long shots; his role, as the intertitle informs us, is that of a jokester. The audience is unaware of the institutional or political circumstances leading to the gathering being shown and the kernel of the news story is Mussolini’s smile, along with his strength in crushing assassination plots. His presence dominates the screen. He is the focus of the two close-up shots and is at the center of the two long shots as well. The way these two sets of shots are intercut in this newsreel, the editing techniques used to re-create a sequence of events, and the intertitle’s attention-grabbing text, all contribute to the creation of a story that manipulates the facts in order to bring the shot of the smiling Mussolini to the fore and make him the news-worthy element. Similarly, the Fox Movietone newsreel stars Mussolini in a sort of political vacuum. Although the title uses the word “Premier,” it also refers to Mussolini as a generic “foreign personage”, thus emphasizing his fame more than his political status (fig. 2). The “historic film” was realized with two cameras in the gardens of Villa Torlonia, Mussolini’s private residence in Rome, and not in a more institutional location. The dictator appears alone in Fox’s sound newsreel, and after the short medium shot depicting him walking out of the house and toward the camera, the audience sees Mussolini in a long close-up as he pronounces his English speech. His arms crossed, maybe to add solemnity or to avoid gesticulation, coincide precisely with the bottom of the frame and make him resemble a bust of an important historical figure. The frontal camera angle allows for a direct connection with the audience. Although his English is far from perfect, he does not appear to be reading. Solemn, direct, and competent in a foreign language, Mussolini invites American friendship and collaboration. But his message is secondary to his mere presence and performance in front of the camera. In both the 1926 Hearst newsreel Mussolini Smiles!, and the 1927 Fox newsreel The Man of the Hour, Mussolini’s upper body takes up most of the screen and he appears larger than life (fig. 2-3). With the invention of photography, but even before with coins engravings, portraiture, and then the rise of printing technologies, the multiplication of images of individual faces have signified power, cultural recognition, and rising fame. When considering Greta Garbo’s stardom, in his 1957 Mythologies, Roland Barthes underlined how she belonged to a “moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest

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ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a filter, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced.”29 By capturing Mussolini’s image alone and in particular his face, in the mid-20s, American newsreels companies such as Fox Movietone and Hearst Metrotone elevated the fascist leader to the rank of a celebrity for American audiences. Beauty could not be the main characteristic of his stardom, but the captivating narration of his physical strength, directness, and effective mastery over modernity created a new kind of public icon in both printed and visual media. Those characteristics were often alternated with more intimate details about his persona as the smile for Hearst camera exemplifies.

Conclusion: Mussolini in the American Cinematic and Financial Empires Between 1922 and 1935, American media transformed Mussolini into a public “star” by proposing an appealing tale of individual success and by exploiting the dictator’s thirst for media appearances. American media’s self-interest certainly propelled Mussolini’s popularity since the dictator’s presence on screen became a secure source of revenues for newsreels producers. For instance, the Movietone newsreel with Mussolini speaking remained on the New York Times Square Theatre bill for two months.30 In order to propose more far-reaching explanations of this long-lasting positive representation of the dictator, however, it might be useful to briefly examine the links between media groups and financial powers such as J.P. Morgan. That is because these American financial institutions were simultaneously involved in the economy of fascist Italy. Thus, it is possible to infer that they had an interest in sustaining an uncritical, positive narration of Italian Fascism. J.P. Morgan, particularly through its banker Thomas Lamont, along with other American banking giants played a crucial role in financing Mussolini and the Fascist Party. In July 1925, Italy agreed to repay the war debts of World War I (totaling over 2 billion dollars), in 62 annual installments to the United States. This settlement was very advantageous to the fascist regime since it represented the payment of only 20% of the actual debt. A month later, the J.P. Morgan bank, which had counseled the 29 30

6.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 56. See the Times Square Theatre’s ad in the New York Times, November 13, 1927,

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Italian government throughout the difficult negotiations regarding the war debt, offered to loan the Italian government 100 million dollars, which would be used to stabilize the Italian currency. The loan was issued in the form of bonds to be bought by the American people in November 1925. This $100 million loan and subsequent bonds on the American market represent only the first of a long series of financial investments that J.P. Morgan, among other financial players, directed to the fascist government and to private Italian companies.31 Among those companies, for instance, FIAT received a loan for 10 million dollars from J.P. Morgan and National City Bank. Further proof of the financial interests that the J.P. Morgan group had in the Turin based car company is the fact that Giovanni Fummi, the Italian representative for the J.P. Morgan bank, became a member of the Board of Directors of the Italian car company in 1926. The picture of this financial interest in Mussolini would not be complete without a few details about the ownership and the role that Wall Street groups played in the American film industry. In 1936, the British journal World Film News and Television Progress conducted a study of the financial forces governing American media. The results of this research were published in a groundbreaking article in their November issue.32 The researchers of the World Film News “Film Council” unit looked at the processes behind the production, distribution, and exhibition networks of the eight major American film companies, specifically, Columbia, Fox, Loew-M.G.M., Paramount, R.K.O., United Artists, Universal, and Warner.33 The investigation highlighted a double dependency of the film industry on the financial world. First, starting from the early 1920s, Wall Street banking firms started backing the film industry directly and through the control of a large portion of film companies’ stocks and securities. Second, particularly after the transition to sound, the major Wall Street financial institutions had a monopoly on the equipment necessary for film production. Relevant to my study of the American newsreels field is the fact that the major film companies and distributors controlled all five newsreels groups. 31

For a more extensive description of the American involvement in the economy of fascist Italy, see Migone, Gli Stati Uniti e il Fascismo, 99-199. 32 “Whose Money Makes Movies?,” World Film News and Television Progress 1, no. 8 (November 1936): 24-27. 33 The “Film Council” was described in the September 1936 issue as “a research group which proposes to study various aspects of the film industry and, from time to time, publish its findings.” The documentary filmmaker Stuart Legg was listed as the secretary of the group. “The Film Council,” World Film News and Television Progress 1, no. 6 (September 1936): 4.

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J.P. Morgan occupied a major position in this connection between the financial world and the film companies. In the mid-1930s, through the investment trust Atlas Corporation (formed in 1924), Morgan owned and handled significant interests in four film companies: Fox, Paramount, R.K.O, and Warner Brothers. Morgan’s group also had direct investments in these companies, excluding R.K.O., through the communications conglomerate A.T. &T., which it organized in 1906 and, in the mid-1930s, continued to manage through fourteen of its nineteen directors. With the transition to sound, then, the control that Morgan exerted indirectly over the film industry became even more remarkable. Two competing manufacturing groups led to the emergence of sound technology between 1927 and 1928: the Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI) and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). These two companies were subsidiaries respectively of Western Electric and of General Electric Co., that is, two of the largest electrical manufacturers in the world. Both Western Electric and General Electric Co. were under the direct control of Morgan. By the 1930s, ERPI and RCA provided sound equipment to all eight film majors and had license agreements all over the world, allowing Morgan to hold a dominant position in the film industry.34 While lending money to the Italian government and issuing Italian bonds on the American financial market, financial powers such as J.P. Morgan held a stronghold over the media industry. It is possible to suggest, although more research is needed on this aspect, that they had an interest in creating a sort of American popular consensus of opinion regarding the Italian dictator through the media they controlled. It is astonishing, however, that this “consensus,” a term reminiscent of Renzo De Felice’s extensively debated thesis of Fascism’s widespread approval in the Italy of the 1930s, already thrived in the United States. On the American screens, through Fox’s and Hearst’s newsreels, Mussolini smiled and talked to the American public years before the 1937 establishment of the Ministero della Cultura Popolare, and before the Istituto Luce could even begin to fulfill the propagandistic potential the Fascist Party dreamed of.

34

In Italy, Istituto Luce signed a contract with RCA for using their sound equipment in 1930. For further details, see Erbaggio, Istituto Nazionale Luce, 228229.

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Works Cited Black Shirts. New York: Fox News, February 28, 1923. Newsreel. “Mussolini Back ‘On the Job’.” Literary Digest, 85 (June 27, 1925): 20. “Mussolini’s Hope in Screen.” Variety, 88.10 (21 Sep. 1927): 1-23. Mussolini Smiles! San Francisco: Hearst Metrotone News, 1926. Newsreel. Rome. Horse Show Attracts Notables. New York: Fox News, May 4, 1931. Newsreel. “The Film Council.” World Film News and Television Progress, 1.6 (September 1936): 4. The Man of the Hour. New York: Fox News, September 28, 1927. Newsreel. “Whose Money Makes Movies?” World Film News and Television Progress, 1.8 (November 1936): 24-27. Altman, Rick, ed., Sound Theory. Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992. Argentieri, Mino. Schermi di guerra: Cinema italiano, 1939-1945. Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. —. L’occhio del regime: Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del fascismo. Florence: Vallecchi, 1979. Baechlin, Peter, Maurice Muller-Strauss. Newsreels across the World. Paris: UNESCO, 1952. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: The Noonday Press, 1972. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Bergstrom, Janet. “Murnau, Movietone and Mussolini.” Film History, 17 (2005): 187-204. Bernagozzi, Giampaolo. Il cinema allo specchio. Appunti per una storia del documentario. Bologna: Pàtron, 1985. Bertozzi, Marco. Storia del documentario italiano. Venice: Marsilio, 2008. Brunetta, Gian Piero. Cinema italiano fra le due guerre. Fascismo e politica cinematografica. Milan: Mursia, 1975. Cannistraro, Philip V. La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media. Rome: Laterza, 1975. Cardillo, Massimo. Il duce in moviola: Politica e divismo nei cinegiornali e documentari del Luce. Bari: Dedalo, 1983. Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Cumming, Adelaide F. Hawley. A History of American Newsreels, 1927 to 1950.” Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1967.

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D’Autilia, Gabriele. “Istituto Luce.” In Dizionario del fascismo. Vol. 1. Edited by Victoria de Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto. Turin: Einaudi, 2002, 684-688. De Felice, Renzo. Mussolini il duce. I. Gli anni del consenso (1929-1936). Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Diggins, John P. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Doherty, Thomas. Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Erbaggio, Pierluigi. “Istituto Nazionale Luce: A National Company with an International Reach.” In Italian Silent Cinema. Edited by Giorgio Bertellini, 221-231. New Barnet, Herts, U.K.: John Libbey Publishing, 2013. Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel, 1911-1967. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Gomery, Douglas. The Coming of Sound. New York: Routledge, 2005. Gunning, Tom. “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic.” In Uncharted Territory. Essays on Early Nonfiction Film. Edited by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, 9-24. Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997. Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen. A Film Masterpiece.” The New York Times (24 Sep. 1927): 15. Hay, James. Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy. The Passing of the Rex. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Huret, Marcel. Ciné actualités: Histoire de la presse filmée. Paris: H. Veyrier: 1984. Jeavons, Clyde, Jane Mercer and Daniela Kirchner, eds. The Story of the Century! An International Newsfilm Conference. London: British University Film & Video Council, 1998. Kann. “Sunrise and Movietone.” Film Daily, 41.72 (25 Sep. 1927): 1-4. Kessler, Frank. “Visible Evidence – But of What? Reassessing Early nonfiction Cinema.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 22.3 (2002): 221-223. —. “Actualités.” In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. Edited by Richard Abel, 5-6. New York: Routledge, 2005. Laura, Ernesto G. Le stagioni dell’aquila. Storia dell’Istituto Luce. Rome: Ente dello spettacolo, 2000. Luconi, Stefano and Guido Tintori. L’ombra lunga del fascio. Canali di propaganda fascista per gli italiani d’America. Milan: M&B Publishing, 2004.

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Manetti, Daniela. “Un’arma poderosissima.” Industria cinematografica e Stato durante il fascismo, 1922-1943. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012. Maraini, Yoi. “Mussolini, Man of Many Interests.” The Living Age, May 24, 1924: 986-989. Migone, Gian Giacomo. Gli Stati Uniti e il Fascismo: Alle origini dell'egemonia americana in Italia. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Peden, Charles. Newsreel Man. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1932. Sime. “Mussolini.” Variety 88.10 (21 Sep. 1927): 20. Smither, Roger and Wolfgang Klaue, eds. Newsreels in Film Archives: A Survey Based on the FIAF Newsreel Symposium. Trowbridge, U.K.: Flicks Books, 1996. Vande Winkel, Roel. “Newsreel Series: World Overview.” In Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. Edited by Ian Aitken. New York: Routledge, 2006, 985-991. Waller, Tom. “21 Big Newsreel Star.” Variety, 104.3 (8 December 1931): 1-23. Weis, Elizabeth and John Belton, eds. Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

PART II: TOTALITARIANISM AND ITALIAN CINEMA

CHAPTER FIVE PASOLINI’S REFLECTIONS ON FASCISM(S): CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY MARK EPSTEIN

The work in which Pasolini most obviously deals with fascism is Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975). And yet it is important to note that this was one of his last works for the cinema (in fact it was the last to be actually shown, though Pasolini was murdered before he could complete the montage; two other important films he was planning were Bestemmia, on the life of St. Paul, which was intended as a critique of Paul's creation of a church rather than a religion, and Porno-Teo-Kolossal, a film about ideology with Eduardo de Filippo, one of the few real actors in Italy according to Pasolini, as the protagonist). Pasolini's reflections on fascism and totalitarianism occur instead throughout a long period of his work, especially in his essays on contemporary society, where the two terms are used in some cases almost interchangeably.1 In Salò there are a number of underlying themes, such as the relations between generations, and the exercise of power by individuals over other individuals (or their groups), by means of coercion: sexual, psychological, ‘pedagogical’ and physical. One could refer to these as props of ‘inner’ fascism. But much more fundamental to Pasolini’s understanding of recent (during the latter part of his life) and current fascism(s) is the issue of consumerism, and the erasure of the 'political' component of individual human beings one could associate with ‘citizenship’ (which is one reason 1

A significant number of essays refer to fascism already in the title, but these are not the only or always the most important ones for understanding Pasolini's thought on the issue(s). Cf. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, [from now on = SPS] (Milan: Mondadori, 1999): Il vero fascismo e quindi il vero antifascismo 313-318, Il fascismo degli antifascisti 336-342, Fascista 518-522, Dal fascismo corrente...alle Ceneri di Gramsci 1414-1419, Da un fascismo all'altro 1526-1531, Poveri ma fascisti 1719-1722.

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the return to aspects of the classical Greek theater and its emphasis on the relation between the public and the spoken word, an indirect form of dialogue, is so important in Pasolini) which will then essentially be totally replaced by the (passive) consumer element. While on the surface it appears to be a fairly simple premise, I believe in actuality it is fundamental to understanding some of the novel features of current totalitarianism, specifically as regards the interactions of the corporate and the ‘political’ world, and as regards the current state of supposedly ‘public’ and ‘representative’ institutions, a topic I will explore at greater length in another essay in this volume. Pasolini represents a particularly important critical voice, as well as an artistic one, for reflections on fascism because he lived through the last phases of the classic Italian regime as an adolescent and young man, and, unlike a number (I would almost venture a majority) of the Italian intellectuals who would dominate cultural life after the regime’s end, he was quite honest and explicit about what aspects of the regime and its institutions had captured his, then still uncritical, interest at the time (on this aspect of the contradictoriness and ambiguity in the portrayals of intellectuals’ role during the ‘regime’, cf. among others Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities).2 He joined a majority of the post-war Italian intellectuals in endorsing what very broadly and rather vaguely would be designated as antifascismo, only to move well beyond it in the 1960s, after the period of so-called neorealismo. In fact one of his most incisive essays, which is critical of the fact that antifascismo was increasingly becoming an empty, or rhetorically manipulated, shell, is entitled: Il fascismo degli antifascisti. This movement beyond neo-realism, both philosophically, politically and aesthetically, coincides in Pasolini with his involvement in cinema as a director (no longer only a screenplay-writer), as well as with an increased use of and interest in Dante as a figure of rebellion and renewal rather than as a vehicle for the imposition of the most mindless and acritical canonization of the past, as was and is often the case in Italy’s ‘educational’ institutions.3 In the course of this move beyond neo-realism to what I have elsewhere called a ‘scandalous’, an anti-figural, and a materialist realism, Pasolini develops his increasingly penetrating and uncompromising critique of neo-capitalism and consumerism, one that contributed to the 2

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). In Italian: La cultura fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000.) 3 Cf. the Dante Alighieri Society or, in a more autobiographical vein, the highschool I went to in the Canton Ticino, Italian Switzerland, which had a portrait of Dante and a crucifix in every classroom.

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increasing hostility his honesty and unwillingness to conform created around him. It is these reflections that so acutely dissected the Italy contemporary to the final phase of his life as being part of a social system that was in reality the antithesis of the democratic facade it paraded to all and sundry, one that was reaching depths of actual totalitarian control that the canonizers of the term, the ideologues and gerarchi of the classic political movement itself, Italian fascism, could barely dream of. Pasolini's Salò is actually also one of, if not his most, formally perfected film(s), and he used the devices of Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom, in addition to some of the structures of Dante’s Divine Comedy (the antinferno and the gironi), as a way to in some sense contain and distance the depths of the horror he was representing. Several critics have in my opinion accurately talked about his Brechtian approach in this film (the famous Verfremdungseffekt), and we should remember that Pasolini was very interested in the relations between the various artistic media, and that he had already playfully dealt with Brecht in his film Uccellacci e uccellini, and was working on a very radical departure from contemporary theater which went back to Plato’s dialogues, the sacred classical origin of the theater itself and the weight it had given to its relations with the public and the ‘unveiling’ of representation, in his pieces for a “teatro di parola” (theatre of the word). Salò in a way is also a continuation and an overturning of the films he had made for the so-called Trilogia della vita, the Decameron (1970), the Racconti di Canterbury (or Canterbury Tales, 1972) and the Fiore delle Mille e una Notte (A Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights), 1974). While these had been a celebration in many ways both of the freedom of film-making itself and of a sexuality and a humanity that was still rooted in social forms and a world of values that was less detached from nature (significantly in socio-historical terms the films are all situated in and based on Renaissance figures, or the somewhat equivalent historical period in India), and a fabulistic element that Pasolini had partially already tapped in Uccellacci e uccellini (1966) and in La terra vista dalla luna (1967) as well as Che cosa sono le nuvole? (1967) (another film with clearly Brechtian elements), Salò overturns this partial celebration, which had mostly been misunderstood along commercial, consumerist, and semipornographic lines by the public, the media, and a number of critics.4 Here he uses sexuality as the central metaphor for the exploitation of human beings by other human beings, for the attempted erasure and ‘conquest’ of

4

Cf. SPS, 260-264.

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both history (time) and nature.5 In other words, as Pasolini explicitly states, for what Marx calls the “commodification of human beings”, the reduction of the body to an object. I believe Pasolini may also have been attempting to work through some issues in his own sexuality and the constraints his present put on it, both in this film and in Petrolio, but this is a very complex, difficult and sensitive issue, that also relates in deep and fundamental ways to how different segments of the gay community have received, evaluated, and not infrequently, distorted or instrumentalized his work and life; also one which I don’t have either the time or sufficient biographical information to deal with here. In using this metaphor Pasolini intends to highlight the completeness, in other words the totalitarian pervasiveness and thoroughness with which one set of human beings control the most intimate aspects of the nature and lives of other human beings. It is a control not only over life and death, as typical of previous absolutist and slave-owning societies, but also over all values and behaviors, specifically those dealing with the most intimate parts of the individual’s life, sexuality, eroticism, as well as with those other orifices that separate and connect the individual body from the outside world, eating and defecation (in some ways a totalitarian perversion of themes explored by Bakhtin in the ‘carnevalesque’). It is an induced control that operates through the psychology, drives, beliefsystems of individuals, and it is this ‘hegemonic’ path that makes it so particularly insidious, a Trojan horse that most frequently enters below the threshold of (self) consciousness; advantages that are well known and exploited by activities such as marketing, subliminal persuasion all the way to mass-propaganda. Here is how Pasolini himself connects these reflections to Salò: Consumerism is nothing but a new totalitarian form—insofar as it is completely totalizing, as it is alienating to the extreme limit(s) of anthropological degradation, or genocide (Marx)—and its permissiveness is therefore false: it is the mask of the worst repression ever exercised by power over the masses of citizens. In fact (this is said by one of the protagonists of my next film, taken from De Sade and situated in the Republic of Salò): “In a society where everything is forbidden, one can do everything: in a society where something is permitted one can only do that one thing.” What does a permissive society permit/allow? It allows the proliferation of the heterosexual couple. This is a lot and just [right]. But one has to see how this gets realized concretely. This occurs as a function of consumerist hedonism (I am using ‘frank’ expressions, by now little more than stereotypes): something which accentuates the social moment of 5

Cf. SPS, 849.

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This totalitarian control is significantly exercised by an older generation over a younger one. While in one sense this is formally derived from De Sade’s novel, in another it is a topic, i.e. the relations between generations, which Pasolini addressed with increasing frequency in the last 10 years of his life, especially but not only in the form of the relationships between parents and children. His later theatrical pieces focus on the issue, as do films I previously mentioned, namely Uccellacci e uccellini and La terra vista dalla luna. On the one hand Pasolini wanted to emphasize how each generation is caught within its own material existential universe in terms of the genesis and the existential experience of values, and that therefore real inter-generational communication is exceedingly difficult, if perhaps not impossible in certain areas relating to what one could call the “automatisms of values.”7 On the other, specifically in connection with the topic of the degradation of social, political and cultural life under neocapitalism and the depth of the totalitarian control it exercised/s, he wanted to emphasize how the younger generation, caught in a world of whose material genesis it was mostly unaware or very naively aware, frequently demonstrated an intolerance, a fascistic arrogance and a basically ‘terroristic’ contempt in its dealings with the ‘other’ and also specifically 6

“Il consumismo altro non è che una nuova forma totalitaria—in quanto del tutto totalizzante, in quanto alienante fino al limite estremo della degradazione antropologica, o genocidio (Marx)—e che quindi la sua permissività è falsa: è la maschera della peggiore repressione mai esercitata dal potere sulle masse dei cittadini. Infatti (è la battuta di uno dei protagonisti del mio prossimo film, tratto da De Sade e ambientato nella Repubblica di Salò): ‘In una società dove tutto è proibito, si può fare tutto: in una società dove è permesso qualcosa si può fare solo quel qualcosa’. Che cosa permette la società permissiva? Permette il proliferare della coppia eterosessuale. È molto e giusto. Però bisogna vedere come in concreto ciò avviene. Intanto ciò avviene in funzione dell’edonismo consumista (per adoperare parole ormai ‘franche’, poco più che sigle): cosa che accentua fino all’estremo limite il momento sociale del coito. Inoltre ne impone l’obbligo: chi non è in coppia, non è un uomo moderno.” SPS, 399. 7 Cf. the essays devoted to the ‘language of things’ in Lettere luterane as a fundamental component (or obstacle) to the communication between individuals, of different classes, generations, and milieus. SPS, pp. 567-580. Cf. also Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull'arte (Milan: Mondadori (Meridiani), 1999 [From now on =SLA]) 2558-2559 on the obstacles these different generational/existential norms present to understanding the literary tradition in times in which it is ‘voided’.

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with previous generations, with the ‘mothers and fathers’ (so Pasolini was certainly not arguing that only one generation was responsible, or capable of acting, in a totalitarian fashion), and therefore precluding, for themselves especially (!), the possibility of actually moving constructively beyond the heritage of these previous generations.8 But in Salò, as well as in several of his essays, we can basically deduce that the genetic origins of these attitudes, and this ‘erasure of history’ lies in the fathers’ totalitarian generation, however much they may fill their mouths with quotations from Klossowski, Baudelaire, Proust and Nietzsche. The younger generation is essentially that of the victims, and insofar as they can represent a more spontaneous or natural erotic and group order, they are bearers of some of the same positive values of the counter-culture generation (though this generation then ended up mythologizing and therefore distorting them as well: cf. footnote 16 in this essay). Although Pasolini never completed either Bestemmia or Porno-TeoKolossal as films, I believe that the critique of St. Paul, which was basically that of the Catholic Church as institution, was part of a much deeper and more encompassing examination of the relation between values, society and institutions, which Salò, but especially his unfinished, encyclopedic, final magnum opus (and/or project), namely the written work (novel might be a somewhat problematic generic categorization in 8

This theme of the new totalitarianism is closely tied to Pasolini’s observing it as being also implemented by means of a ‘civil war’ between older and younger generations of the bourgeoisie (cf. among others SPS,157-8), a ‘bourgeois condition’ that due to this very totalizing process is becoming the universal condition (Pasolini obviously means from the point of view of ideology, values, customs (cf. SPS, 271-277), Weltanschauung, and incapacity of elaborating an independent culture, not from an economic, material and in some respects sociological point of view). By far the most important essay by Pasolini on the contradictions and paradoxes of these struggles between generations is Prologo: E.M., SPS, 242-256 (which, unfortunately, like most of his essays, has not been translated). These themes are in turn tied to the differences involved between protest (“contestazione”) and revolution (“rivoluzione”). One representative essay that deals with these themes is Perchè siamo tutti borghesi (SLA, 1651-1658), in addition to Il PCI ai giovani!. He also criticizes a certain type of “fascismo di sinistra” (Pasolini is not referring to left-wing tendencies within classic fascism, but to fascistic forms of behavior by those youths who identify with the ‘left’) as characteristic of some of these student/youth protests (cf. SLA, 1455-1457), and the ‘monstrous’ homogenization of this totalized younger generation (SLA, p. 2615), which to a certain extent leads to paradoxical reversals of the dialectic of fathers and sons (mothers and daughters, parents and children) within the context of this new totalitarianism: cf. among others SLA, 2697-2701.

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this context) Petrolio were an even more significant part of.9 Although I am mostly speculating here, I think that Porno-Teo-Kolossal was instead intended more as a re-working of Uccellacci e uccellini. Of course the fact that Pasolini dealt with fascism in film is in and of itself interesting and paradoxical. In his understanding cinema was both a way of at least partially bypassing the, mostly philological, but also linguistic, “barriers to entry” that works in national literary traditions inevitably embodied. As the “language of reality” film was a universal language much more so than were those expressed in specific historical languages. It was also clearly, and increasingly, especially becoming a dominant form of mass-culture: [This is from an interview with Pasolini: the critic Nino Ferrero had asked Pasolini if it was true that he had passed from literature to cinema in order to express his artistic world in a more forceful manner] Pasolini: I don’t know if greater or lesser. This isn’t the issue; I don’t know if an image is always more forceful or more violent than a word; sometimes the opposite is true, and I would therefore tend to omit the term greater. I would instead say something a little different, in other words that by renewing technique I rekindled my inspiration, as often occurs. I wanted to inaugurate a vaster dialogue, since in the most optimistic scenario a novel in Italy today addresses itself to at most one hundred thousand people. The cinema instead initiates a dialogue that is infinitely more inclusive.10 9

Salò and Petrolio share a number of elements. Another is an exploration of the ‘underbelly’ of corporeal sexuality, more extensive and direct in Petrolio, which is shown in a much colder light than previously, I believe perhaps also indirectly alluding to the forms of Pasolini’s own gay experience, and absence of a long-term relationship. Marco Belpoliti, Pasolini in salsa piccante (Parma: Guanda, 2010), 79, also underscores this (the title of a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Love is Colder than Death, captures some of this tonality). 10 Pasolini: “Non so se maggiore o minore. Non è questa la questione; non so se l'immagine sia sempre più forte e più violenta della parola; alle volte è vero il contrario, per cui il termine maggiore lo escluderei. Direi invece, in modo diverso, cioè, rinnovando la tecnica ho rinnovato l’ispirazione come spesso accade. Ho voluto inaugurare un dialogo più vasto, visto che un romanzo si rivolge oggi in Italia ottimisticamente, a centomila persone al massimo. Il cinema invece instaura un dialogo infinitamente più ampio.” Enrico Magrelli, ed., Con Pier Paolo Pasolini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1977), 24. Cf. also SPS, 1595, where Pasolini talks about his transition to predominantly using cinema for artistic purposes because it was a way of repudiating the national language he by then found in many ways so revolting.

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Because of the manner in which semiotically it could access material reality in a more comprehensive and less ‘abstract’ fashion than language, this representation of reality could be poetic, and in fact Pasolini considered much of his filmic production akin to poetry. On the other hand the very sort of dialogue that is established between authors and readers of poetry allows one to understand that Pasolini was quite consciously trying to subvert and counteract cinema’s role as vehicle for mass-culture. The extremely provocative nature of Salò (which of course almost undoubtedly has intentional echoes of the French swear word)11 is another way in which he was confronting the conformist and conformizing norms of mass-cultural cinema. In other words he was attempting to use a medium of the new totalitarian culture against itself so-to-speak. But in doing so he never succumbed to the autotelic avant-gardist temptations of the “épater les bourgeois”, and while poetic, his films almost never completely abandon a narrative, and therefore a temporal and historical dimension.12 The ‘inner fascism’ Pasolini portrayed in this film had to use a visual medium, and hence a rather external, and apparently ‘natural’ element such as sexuality. In his many essays, articles and polemics however, Pasolini could address the issues connected to the much more encompassing totalitarianism contemporary to him in greater depth, with many more nuances and ramifications, and these included the issue of the transformation of the language being used by Italians, which increasingly seemed to have erased and be erasing the expressive abilities and potential of its users. The ability to express oneself is part of the foundations of being, and certainly its amputation leaves individuals whom it is difficult to qualify as fully human and social. It is obviously also one of the many

11

Cf. Pasolini’s amused approval of Man Ray’s misinterpretation along these lines (as a preface to a discussion of Andy Warhol), SLA, 2710. Apparently it is possible that Pasolini was hoping to see a portrait of De Sade by Man Ray, while being photographed by the same photographer who had previously photographed Warhol. Cf. Belpoliti, 2010, 59-60. 12 Cf. the essay Il cinema impopolare in the collection Empirismo eretico, SLA, 1609 where Pasolini compares how real or successful challenges to artistic norms have to occur at the ‘front’, on the ‘line of fire’, whereas directors (artists) who are pushed to go too far, end up beyond the front, the line of fire, in enemy territory, where they are interned in a gulag, which the artists themselves then transform into a ghetto. This ‘self-ghettoization’ of the avant-garde or of “underground cinema” does not really result in any risk or challenge, because the enemy has disappeared (or is in charge...). In other words to be successful this challenge has to be part of dialogue/dialectic with the norm (the code), one which one is engaged in continuous struggle with.

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means by which this new totalitarianism annihilates any possibility and/or remnant(s) of democracy. The ensuing “anthropological mutation” was what Pasolini was so concerned about, but which few of his intellectual contemporaries managed to either understand, appreciate, or evaluate in the fullness of its consequences. Italo Calvino, Franco Fortini, his friend Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Franco Ferrarotti and Giorgio Bocca were among these many, and in re-reading the exchanges today one is aware of various degrees of blindness and incapacity to engage in dialogue by these counterparts, and on the other of the power and incisiveness of Pasolini's insights and understanding. Here are some quotations: For example, an “extremely modern” fascist, one in other words being maneuvered by the Italian and foreign economic boom, still reads [Julius] Evola. Italian culture has changed in its lived component, in the existential, in the concrete.13 [i.e. the material culture one lives in, the historical/material context one has been born into, and all the practices, actions, etc. this entails, as opposed to the more abstract, usually mental (as opposed to manual), ‘creative’ and evaluative activities that have been associated with “Culture,” ones traditionally valued more greatly, M.E.]. That which has manipulated and radically (anthropologically) mutated the vast masses of peasants and workers is a new power which I find it difficult to define: but of which I am certain that it is the most violent and totalitarian that has ever existed: it changes the very nature of people, it enters the deepest recesses of their consciousnesses. Therefore underneath the conscious choices there is a forced choice “by now shared by all Italians”: and the latter cannot but deform the former.14

While one can certainly debate the extent to which Pasolini got the empirical details of the anthropological communities he used as examples of the ‘other’ right, to a large extent this type of critique does not really 13 “Per esempio, un fascista ‘modernissimo’, cioè manovrato dalla espansione economica italiana e straniera, legge ancora Evola. La cultura italiana è cambiata nel vissuto, nell'esistenziale nel concreto.” From Scritti corsari, Ampliamento del bozzetto sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia, July 11th 1974, SPS, 326 ff. 14 “Chi ha manipolato e radicalmente (antropologicamente) mutato le grandi masse contadine e operaie italiane è un nuovo potere che mi è difficile definire: ma di cui sono certo che è il più violento e totalitario che ci sia mai stato: esso cambia la natura della gente, entra nel più profondo delle coscienze. Dunque sotto le scelte coscienti c'è una scelta coatta “ormai comune a tutti gli italiani”: la quale ultima non può che deformare le prime.” Ibid.

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understand the more general point Pasolini was making, which I believe remains correct both as a description of general trends and as description of what is changing/being lost. Some critics also believe that in some fashion these examples taken from the past or the anthropologically other, prove that Pasolini was a ‘Romantic’, or a ‘Rousseauian’. I instead believe Pasolini was a materialist, albeit of a rather idiosyncratic variety, and as in the case of many materialist thinkers in the sparse, but very important, and original, recent Italian tradition (from Leopardi to Sebastiano Timpanaro at least), for him the issue of human happiness, or hedonism in a classic and moderate sense, was extremely important.15 He repeatedly emphasizes that what individuals in peasant and anthropologically ‘other’ communities were losing, was especially this ability to be happy (within a culture mostly generated by themselves); this is real happiness, diametrically

15

I am not basing this statement on mere speculation. There is a large body of evidence pointing to different aspects of his materialism, from philosophical, to aesthetic to ethical. I have briefly discussed some of them in “Alcune osservazioni sul materialismo,” Sinestesie, Quad. 14 (2012): 159-168. To show how early and important these convictions are, let me briefly quote from the conclusion of the essay In margine all’esistenzialismo, which starts as a reflection on the relation between Leopardi, existentialism and implicitly materialism (the essay dates from 1946, decades before the justly famous essays by Walter Binni and Sebastiano Timpanaro): “I am not thinking about the materialism that is insolent and flighty fashion, whose images remain in the photos of old newspapers. I am thinking of the materialism that has allowed for this century’s incredible scientific progress, thanks to which the world has really changed in front of the eyes of the living, and certain periodic reevaluations we make of it can no longer be performed except on a different plane from the past; I am thinking of the materialism that invented philology and glottology, infinitely enlarging the field of historical and literary research, opening up unknown worlds such as the romance world; I am thinking of the materialism that overcame religion’s myths, placing Christianity within the limits of an elevated but unavoidable human necessity; I am thinking of a materialism that made Marx and theories of society possible” (“Non penso al materialismo divenuto moda insolente e amena, le cui immagini restano nelle fotografie dei vecchi giornali. Penso al materialismo che ha consentito il progresso scientifico incredibile di questo secolo, per cui il mondo è veramente mutato di fronte agli occhi del vivente, e certi ripensamenti periodici di esso non possono ormai avvenire su un piano diverso che per il passato; penso al materialismo che ha inventato la filologia e la glottologia, ampliando infinitamente il campo dell'indagine storica e letteraria, aprendo mondi sconosciuti come il mondo romanzo; penso al materialismo che ha debellato i miti della religione, collocando il cristianesimo entro i limiti di un'alta e ineluttabile necessità umana; penso al materialismo che ha reso possibile Marx e le teorie sociali.)” SPS, 31-32.

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opposed to the planned, manipulated, instrumental gratification of (neo)capitalism. In an essay devoted to the issue of the “noble savage”, Pasolini goes into some detail about the changes in anthropological and religious norms that bring about the totalitarian conformity of an, unreflected, ‘virile’, adaptation to behavioral norms and a sense of ‘dignity’ that suppress and eventually erase previously existing, mostly autonomously evolved, behavioral and cultural norms.16 Pasolini clearly here emphasizes the etymological sense of “totalitarian” which fascism had inaugurated. In other words it is the pervasiveness and total nature of this consumerist control deep into the most inner and hidden recesses of individual subjectivity that constitute the most extreme form of violence and control of this new fascism. Although Pasolini does not proceed along this line of reflection, and Gramsci was explicitly one of his major influences, this type of neo-capitalist totalitarian fascism actually renders the Gramscian political distinction between ‘hegemonic’ and ‘coercive’ forms of political control obsolete. This new form of control is both: it is both violent (also in a new sense), and coercive, but it is mostly perceived by the individuals subjected to it as ‘hegemonic’, if it is perceived at all. When comparing classic and contemporary forms of fascism, he emphasizes that the instrumental ‘hedonistic’ gratification of (neo) capitalism, consumerist fascism, is worse than the classic form of fascism.17 In one of his most important essays 15 luglio 1973. La prima, vera rivoluzione di destra,18 Pasolini compares the new totalitarianism (fascism) with the older and ‘classical’ forms. He will elaborate on the commonalities and differences in a large number of different essays, but here he underlines how the contemporary totalitarianism is erasing history, 16

Cf. Che fare col ‘buon selvaggio’?, SPS, 217-222, where on 222 especially he emphasizes the fascistic dimension of this conformity, and the almost not fully conscious adaptation of manners, clothing and behavioral norms by the counterculture that undermine this ‘virile’ conformity, and in some sense connect to the ‘naturalness’ of those communities that are anthropologically ‘other’. 17 SPS, 334-335. He does so also when explicitly comparing contemporary ‘classic’ fascistic regimes (Portugal), and their CIA instrumentalization in the context of the Cold War, tied to aspirations to global domination, with Italian consumerist neo-capitalism. 18 Cf. SPS, 284-289, as well as 404, 466-467, as well as reflections on the totalitarian ‘anthropological mutation’ in its connection to Pasolini’s project of Petrolio 512-513, 514-517 (on the totalitarian erasure of values in the younger generation(s)), the essay Fascista (518-522), 542-547 (as connected to the generational issue), 606-607 (on universal ‘bourgeoisification’), and finally 712713.

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in the form of institutions, religions, ideologies and forms of life, while pragmatically (instrumentally, opportunistically) still using the classic forms of fascism (totalitarianism) to pursue a more or less ‘camouflaged’ form of class-struggle, pretending to defend the shells of the institutional forms it has emptied while simultaneously undermining them with the classic fascist instrumentalities. The relation between the two modalities of totalitarianism (fascism), is bound-up in a complex manner in the relationship between generations. In other essays Pasolini explicitly emphasizes how this ‘revolution of the right’ is also carried out by the new generations against the old, it is so-to-speak a ‘civil war’ of the bourgeoisie against itself, its own way of ‘modernizing’, jettisoning the old institutional forms, to accomplish the ever more totalizing contemporary totalitarianism.19 Part of the in-depth penetration of this new totalitarianism (fascism) is that it is no longer based on the confrontation of different and differing class cultures, but on a homogenizing inter-classist culture (in fact a totalitarian deepening of what Gramsci would have called ‘hegemony’; cf. the quotation above prior to footnote 14). No fascist centralism managed to accomplish what the centralism of consumer culture has.20 […] Today, instead, adherence to the models imposed by the Center is total and unconditional. Real cultural models are repudiated. The abjuration is complete. One can therefore state that the ‘tolerance’ of the hedonistic ideology wanted by the new power is the worst repression in human history. How has one been able to implement such a repression? By means of two revolutions, internal to bourgeois forms of organization: a revolution in infrastructures and the revolution in the means of information.21

19

Cf. for instance SPS, 1642-1646 for the opposite ways older and younger bourgeois generations relate to the peasantry and by extension parts of the ‘Third World’. But especially the references already given in footnote 16. 20 I.e. negatively; he then goes on to say how fascism never really succeeded in changing the other cultures within it. 21 “Nessun centralismo fascista è riuscito a fare ciò che ha fatto il centralismo della civiltà dei consumi [...] Oggi, al contrario, l'adesione ai modelli imposti dal Centro, è totale e incondizionata. I modelli culturali reali sono rinnegati. L'abiura è compiuta. Si può dunque affermare che la ‘tolleranza’ della ideologia edonistica voluta dal nuovo potere è la peggiore delle repressioni della storia umana. Come si è potuta esercitare tale repressione? Attraverso due rivoluzioni, interne all'organizzazione borghese: la rivoluzione delle infrastrutture e la rivoluzione del sistema d'informazioni.” SPS, Acculturazione e acculturazione, 290-291.

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And the central factor (in his time) in the revolution of the information systems was (is) television: Pasolini’s evaluation of it is almost entirely negative. His reflections in the essays connect this new totalitarianism to some of his other major areas of concern, namely the (disappearing) realm of values and its relation to art, the commodification of language, not only of its human users, and the disappearance of any political and institutional forms that are/were capable of conveying and enacting the will and desires of the overwhelming majority of the human population. One of the principal instruments of contemporary totalitarianism for Pasolini was TV, and although much less celebrated than Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, his essay Contro la televisione22 goes into some detail about the many different ways in which TV creates conformity and self-censorship.23 Although he never renounced a very deeply rooted rationalism and materialism (whatever a number of rather conformist, superficial, postmodern, especially Italian, critics write, I am thinking among others of Walter Siti, Marco Belpoliti and, to the extent he is partially informed by them, also of Pierpaolo Antonello), Pasolini insisted that rather epidermic forms of rationalism that did not confront capitalist exploitative instrumentalism in a fundamental fashion, were ultimately complicit in the erasure of possible grounds on which to base any human values (the autonomy and independent worth of material being that is not simply a ‘resource’ or ‘property’ for human beings). This critique of instrumental reason differs in fundamental ways from that of the Frankfurt School, both because it only qualifies rationalism with a deeper materialism, and because intellectually it is not beholden to the Nietzsche-Heidegger tradition to the extent the School is. In this interpretation his (materialist) sense of the sacred is ontologically and fundamentally tied to his struggle against the most perverse contemporary totalitarianism. To discuss a materialist’s concern(s) for the ‘sacred’ might superficially appear paradoxical, but in reality the existence of material being is not tied to any predetermined evaluative response. There is no cognitive, scientific answer to the why of existence vs. non-existence. So a variety of cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic responses, both individual and social, all 22

SPS, 128-143. Also in what in the US might be called “public intellectuals”: how therefore certain lines are never crossed (many well-known names, including his friend Moravia, are included). He specifically states that the TV programming contemporary to him was in most ways indistinguishable from that of fascist radio communication (137). As in the case of fascism, the aim and result is the exclusion of citizens from any real form of political participation. 23

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seem possible within a materialist tradition. There is no necessary tie between scientific cognition, a materialist ethics and aesthetics (including the respect and in a certain sense ‘awe’ for the ‘sacred’), and instrumental industrial exploitation of this same material existence (‘nature’, both outer and inner). Pasolini’s critiques, but also understanding of the pervasiveness of Christian influences in Italian (Western) culture (especially in its Catholic variant(s), a recognition of them as a factual premise for any dialogue), were concerned with both founding/preserving the basis for a human, social, ethics, while avoiding innumerable forms and variants of conformism, and examining their relation to history both in terms of material (anthropological) practices and various forms of ideology (including religion and myth). Therefore a genetic/explicative ‘looking backward’ included both ideological retrospectives (religion ĺ myth) as well as their relation to socioeconomic foundations (neo-capitalism ĺ industrial capitalism ĺ mercantile capitalism ĺ agrarian societies ĺ slave societies ĺ prehistoric societies). The greater interest for myth in the later Pasolini is, in my opinion, also tied to this retrospective examination and explication of the genesis of (non-economic) values (and ethics). Hence his critique of the increasingly evacuated forms of contemporary rationalism:24 In this context our old lay, Enlightenment, rationalist arguments are not only blunt and useless, but, what's more, serve the interests of power. To say life is not sacred, that feelings are stupid, is doing producers an immense favor. It is bringing coals to Newcastle. The new Italians have no use for sacrality, they are all, pragmatically if not yet in their consciousnesses, very modern; and as far as feelings are concerned, they 24 It is interesting to note how US pragmatism most especially has provided a philosophical justification (rationalization) for a combination of decontextualized instrumental (pragmatic) ‘reason’, with a (mostly very conformist) preservation/bricolage of religious/theological forms, terms and institutional remnants. C.S. Peirce’s many abstract terminologies (Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness among many, the medieval ties of his semiotics, etc.) show traces of these remnants, while his goals are clearly mostly in line with the later developments of US pragmatism. In contemporary philosophy Richard Rorty preserves this combination and attempt at rationalization, although in lieu of religion, we find the ‘secularized religious’ existentialism of the Heideggerian tradition, and the para- negative theologies of much French logorrhoic thought (in which language and its operations have become a fetish which dominates and controls its human producers/users, i.e. even beyond the material and historical extent this might be a justifiable hypothesis).

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Works Cited Belpoliti, Marco. Pasolini in salsa piccante. Parma: Guanda, 2010. Ben-Ghiat Ruth. Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922-1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Epstein, Mark. “Alcune osservazioni sul materialismo.” Sinestesie, Quad. 14 (2012): 159-168. Magrelli, Enrico. Con Pier Paolo Pasolini. Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Saggi sulla letteratura e sull'arte. Milan: Mondadori, 1999. —. Saggi sulla politica e sulla società. Milan: Mondadori, 1999.

25

“In questo contesto i nostri vecchi argomenti di laici, illuministi, razionalisti, non solo sono spuntati e inutili, ma, anzi, fanno il gioco del potere. Dire che la vita non è sacra, e che il sentimento è stupido, è fare un immenso favore ai produttori. E del resto è ciò che si dice far piovere sul bagnato. I nuovi italiani non sanno che farsene della sacralità, sono tutti, pragmaticamente se non ancora nella coscienza, modernissimi; e quanto a sentimento tendono rapidamente a liberarsene. Che cos’è infatti che rende attuabili—in concreto, nei gesti, nell’esecuzione—le stragi politiche dopo che sono state concepite? È terribilmente ovvio: la mancanza del senso della sacralità della vita degli altri, e la fine di ogni sentimento nella propria. […] E infine vorrei dire che se dalla maggioranza silenziosa dovesse rinascere una forma di fascismo arcaico, esso potrebbe rinascere solo nella scandalosa scelta che tale maggioranza silenziosa farebbe (e in realtà già fa) tra la sacralità della vita e i sentimenti, da un parte, e, dall'altra, il patrimonio e la proprietà privata: in favore di questo secondo corno del dilemma. Al contrario di Calvino, io dunque penso che—senza venire meno alla nostra tradizione mentale umanistica e razionalistica—non bisogna avere più paura—come giustamente un tempo—di non screditare abbastanza il sacro o di avere un cuore.” SPS, 402-403.

CHAPTER SIX FROM MORAVIA TO BERTOLUCCI: THE MONISM OF THE CONFORMIST— THE FARCE AFTER THE TRAGEDY PART I: FROM TRAGEDY TO MYTH1 ANGELO FÀVARO

On September 22nd 1951, several months after the publication of the first edition of his novel The Conformist, Alberto Moravia writes to his aunt, Amelia Rosselli: Of the many comments I received, yours is the one that gave me the greatest pleasure. You showed you understand the meaning of the book and its intent. […] I am especially glad you appreciated the page on the couple in the wood. I wrote that page for your two sons, that page only: in it I expressed the deep feelings that your tragedy had unleashed in me. But I wrote the whole novel to explain to myself and to others why such tragedies can take place and how. It would have been easy to proceed as many do: put the bad guys on one side and the good ones on the other. But I had a higher purpose: I wanted to write a book that was the equivalent of a tragedy, and in tragedies there are no good or bad guys, but only characters with different fates.2

A novel therefore, at least according to the author’s declarations, to explain the reasons for a tragedy, or a tragedy in the form of a novel, this is 1 This entire essay and all the original quotations from Italian sources were translated from the Italian original by Mark Epstein. 2 Alberto Moravia, Lettere ad Amelia Rosselli, con altre lettere familiari e prime poesie (1915-1951) (Milan: Bompiani, 2009), 293. The aunt’s reply was never received.

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what the work appears to be to whoever peruses the events narrated and follows the protagonist’s path: the killing of the Rosselli brothers, Moravia’s cousins, corresponds to the individual tragedy of a family, and from this there emerges the author’s need to explain the reasons for conformism. The impression that this is a tragedy in the form of a novel is reinforced when one carefully notes how the material is arranged in the index. A prologue (three chapters) is followed by a first part (four chapters), a substantive second part (eleven chapters) and finally by an epilogue (three chapters). There is no intent to affirm a Manichean moralism, with its certainty that all the good lies on one side, while all the bad lies on the other, but instead, by reformulating the idea of the tragic, of tragedy, the tragic condition, Moravia eliminates some of its anthropological conditions, such as recourse to myth, ritual or nomos, in order to focus our attention on the problem of the tragic par excellence, which is, at this point, the incapacity of establishing guilt or innocence, or responsibility for that matter, in the “indifferenziato che impedisce il confronto”3 (“the undifferentiated that impedes comparison/confrontation”), hence the coagulation into the undecidable. The novelist wants to expose, in all the raw nudity of which he is capable, the manner in which “characters with different destinies” face the tragedies that occur individually, each character according to a relentless uniqueness; the existential knot in any case remains mysterious: all that one can really know are fragmenta, by way of clues—through clues. In a 19th century presentation of the actions, their consequential chain would have counterposed causality and individual, specific, responsibility, which involves, and reverberates off, others, with irreparable consequences. An irreparable contradiction, one that refuses any simplifying resolution, lies at the center of Moravia’s idea of the tragic; it is the human and political condition of the Sophoclean Oedipus Rex: what is good and what is evil, for oneself and/or for the polis? All the actions Oedipus undertakes are for the salvation of the city, and, with it, his own. Each action, each decision is another step towards the abyss in an incoercible, amplified and truly tragic assumption of “knowledge through pain,”4 confronted in the light of Tiresias’ reflections: “to know how terrible it is if it cannot be useful to he who knows. In fact I had understood that well, but forgot it, otherwise I would not have come.”5

3

Mario Luzi, Preface to Jean Racine, Andromaca (Milan: Rizzoli, 1980), 10. “ʌȐșİȚ ȝȐșȠȢ”, Aeschylus, Agamemnon, v. 177. 5 “ijȡȠȞİ૙Ȟ ੪Ȣ įİȚȞઁȞ ਩ȞșĮ ȝ੽ IJȑȜȘ/ȜȪૉ ijȡȠȞȠ૨ȞIJȚ. ȉĮ૨IJĮ Ȗ੹ȡ țĮȜ૵Ȣ ਥȖઅ/ İੁįઅȢ įȚȫȜİıૃ Ƞ੝ Ȗ੹ȡ ਗȞ įİ૨ȡૃ ੂțȩȝȘȞ”. Oedipus Rex, vv. 316-318. 4

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The paradoxical opposition is undecipherable: nothing remains but to proceed towards knowledge, welcome it and proceed along this epistemological path whatever the circumstances and therefore suffer, paying not only for one's own actions, but also and specifically for the ijȡȠȞİ૙Ȟ (the possession of a knowledge that makes one wise and prudent) one has acquired. Marcello Clerici, the novel’s protagonist, in other words the conformist, is guided since childhood by “more profound and still obscure instincts that were masked in him as greed; he was constantly assailed by furious cravings,”6 by the irrepressible desire for objects, the painful remorse and the cruel “aggressive” happiness in the destruction of flowers, plants and small animals; passing the time, fearing “not so much the scolding as a simple witnessing of acts he himself felt were abnormal and mysteriously imbued with guilt,”7 Marcello discovers and is aware of his guilt. Marcello is aware of his difference, which he perceives as ‘abnormality’ with respect to others, to the other, his friend Roberto.8 Marcello would like life to contain only simple facts, devoid of remorse or considerations of normality and abnormality, in other words remorse. And the child acts with the precise intent of escaping from himself, his agitation, something which is impeded in interactions with his parent figures and the auctoritas of their moral and behavioral suggestions. In the complex relation between him and himself, the boy develops a hypothesis about his human condition: “he could not help thinking, or better feeling, with a vivid, physical awareness of this abnormality, that he was abnormal, an abnormal being marked by a solitary and threatening destiny, now well on his way down a bloodsoaked road on which no human force would have been able to stop him.”9 The problem of Marcello the child is that of the missed formationfoundation of an ethical system, due to both the maternal and paternal attitudes, combined with an awareness of diversity: when the boy tells the cook he has killed – or thinks he has killed – a cat, the woman, revealing her common sense and its popular origins, simply comments: “Those who 6 “istinti più profondi e ancora oscuri che si mascheravano in lui da avidità; egli era continuamente assalito da voglie furiose.” Alberto Moravia, Il conformista, in Opere/3. Romanzi e racconti 1950.1959. Vol. I (Milan: Bompiani, 2004), 7. 7 “non tanto il rimprovero quanto la semplice testimonianza di atti che lui stesso avvertiva anormali e misteriosamente intrisi di colpevolezza.” Ibid., 9. 8 Cf. ibid., 10-15. 9 “era un anormale, non poteva fare a meno di pensare, o meglio di sentire, con una viva, fisica consapevolezza di questa anormalità, un anormale segnato da un destino solitario e minaccioso e ormai avviato per una strada sanguigna sulla quale nessuna forza umana avrebbe potuto fermarlo.” Ibid., 22.

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are cruel with animals are so also with people […], one starts with a cat and then one ends up with humans.”10 The formation-foundation of an ethical system implies that the freedom of individual action can be deployed in collective circumstances, a system which identifies good and evil as shared and intelligible values, not with a view to a meta-ethics or a normative theory, but simply as a way to empirically point to organic and positive ethical criteria that are intuitively shareable: Marcello is aware of his abnormality because he doesn’t succeed in recognizing which norms constitute the formation-foundation of his ethical system. A far remove from generating a joyous expression/conception of existence and the actions he could freely undertake within himself: quite to the contrary it provokes highly contrasting feelings in him. The mother and father are not able to concern themselves morally with the child,11 in the deeper sense that the edification of morally shared behaviors for civil cohabitation assumes in the context of the novel, and the pleasure school offers Marcello should be seen in this perspective: he is attracted to that normality of which attendance at school becomes the emblem,12 although both his physical appearance, so femininely similar to his mother, and his character, which manifests itself in “an unusual facility to blush, an irresistible inclination to express tenderness with caressing gestures, and a desire for pleasure pushed to the point of servility and flirtatiousness”13 contribute to making his situation as a student not completely assimilable in the eyes of his schoolmates. The character’s construction is accurate, and the clues about his infancy and childhood guide the reader towards a Moravian demonstration, proposed slightly rigidly perhaps, and indebted to the many categorizations of the novel proposed by Zola, not because Moravia aspires to verisimilitude or the virtues of the naturalist novel (to be resurrected) after Proust and Joyce, but because he wants to endow his narrative creation

10

“Chi è cattivo con le bestie, è anche cattivo con i cristiani […], si comincia con un gatto e poi si finisce con un uomo.” Ibid., 31. 11 Cf. Angelo Fàvaro, “Quale madre? Presenze materne fra auto-biografia e strategia della dissoluzione famigliare ne Il conformista e ne La noia di Alberto Moravia”, in Le madri: figure e figurazioni nella Letteratura Italiana contemporanea, ed. Laurent Lombard (Avellino: Edizioni Sinestesie, 2014), 91120. 12 Alberto Moravia, Il conformista, 35. 13 “facilità insolita di arrossire, un’inclinazione irresistibile a esprimere la tenerezza dell’animo con gesti carezzevoli, un desiderio di piacere spinto fino alla servilità e alla civetteria.” Ibid. 36.

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with those essayistic qualities that Moravia so insistently aspired to.14 The intervention by the driver Pasquale-Lino while five children are cruelly brutalizing and mocking Marcello, trying to force him to wear a skirt, is salvific: the man takes the boy home, after having taken him for a ride in his car. One character asks questions and the other answers, keeping the conversation going, and finally Marcello states he would like to receive a revolver as a gift. Lino satisfies his requests: they arrive at a large villa, go the chauffeur’s room, he shows the child the revolver, but there is no agreement over what to obtain in exchange, and the poor chauffeur, who says he is a defrocked priest, overcome by a crisis of consciousness, doesn’t have the courage to ask for anything. Ultimately, the child is accompanied back home, with the promise of an appointment the following Monday. The new encounter between the two, in the chauffeur’s room, is for Marcello a complex and undefinable experience; after having been slammed down on the bed, and having banged his head on the wall, Lino begs for forgiveness, crying and hugging him; having raised himself from the bed, the child wanders around the room with the cold revolver in his hand: “at that moment he felt nothing but a strong pain to his head, where he had banged it against the wall; and simultaneously an irritation, a strong repugnance towards Lino.”15 After being chased he is provoked by the man into shooting him: he shoots and hits the man, and, believing him to be dead, escapes through the window. These events, meeting Lino the chauffeur, his killing, combined with the peculiarities of the relations with his parents and Marcello’s presumed psycho-physical differences, constitute the novel’s premise, the tragic and conceptual prologue that ought, somewhat mechanically, to authorize the desperate and despairing search for normalcy on the part of the protagonist, and consequently his conformism: “he reflected himself in his conscience, as in a mirror, the entire time he was walking”16 the narrator Proustianly affirms, referring to Marcello, with the intonation of a parodos “the image of himself, a boy in shorts, books under his arm, in the

14

One ought to reread Moravia's essay, L’uomo e il personaggio (1941), in L’uomo come fine (Milan: Bompiani, 1964), 19-26. 15 “in quel momento non avvertiva che un forte dolore alla testa, là dove l’aveva sbattuta contro la parete; e al tempo stesso un’irritazione, una ripugnanza acuta verso Lino.” Alberto Moravia, Il conformista, 67. 16 “nella sua coscienza, come in uno specchio, si rifletteva tutto il tempo, mentre camminava.” Ibid., 68.

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boulevard flanked by cypresses, an incomprehensible figure filled with dismayed premonition.”17 The novel has a cleverly devised clockwork mechanism which triggers the tragedy at the right moment: the milieu, the human and social environment, together with race, the set of hereditary elements: the irascible, crazy, father together with an excessively young, irresolute, mother, who is not very gifted at educating a child—in light of a moment historically situated in the 1920s-1930s, constitute the ingredients and the prodromes to Marcello’s conformist dilection:18 by now an adult, he goes to the library to search for newspapers of the period (1920), to read the crime reports, and verify what had occurred: the investigation is significantly and tragically Oedipal (just like that of the King of Thebes). “His disquiet, never fully laid to rest in those years, had never really taken the material consequences of the occurrence into consideration”19 but Marcello would simply and egotistically want to verify, seventeen years later, “what feelings the confirmation of Lino’s death would provoke in him”20 and on the basis of his reaction he would assess “if he was still the boy he had once been, obsessed by his fatal abnormality or the new man, completely normal, which he had subsequently wanted to be and was 17

“l’immagine di se stesso, ragazzo in pantaloni corti, i libri sotto il braccio, nel viale fiancheggiato di cipressi, figura incomprensibile e piena di sbigottito presagio.” Ibid., 68. 18 It is important to recall that while the novelist is writing this, he is also at work on a Preface to Boule de Suif by Maupassant, in which he goes over the events leading to the birth of naturalism, recalling Flaubert’s struggles in the passage from romanticism to naturalism in L’uomo come fine, 109-114. In 1950 he also completes some reflections on Machiavelli: Ritratto di Machiavelli, ibid., 115-134. Even though it was written some years after the publication of The Conformist, the essay Note sul romanzo (1956) is also of great interest: Moravia examines the meaning of the use of the third person by 19th century narrators, and the names of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, recur frequently: each in his own way, have a relationship of trust with reality: when this relationship is subject to crisis, the essayistic novel is born. And when Moravia states that those 19th century novels in the third person contain descriptions and “minute reconstructions of the environments that determine it (the third person) and the laws that condition it” (“minuziose ricostruzioni degli ambienti che la determinano [la terza persona] e delle leggi che la condizionano”) (261), he doesn’t seem to be that far from what one can discern in the novel he had written five years earlier, in which the third person narration stylistically allows the intention of a—presumed—greater scientificity to emerge. 19 “La sua inquietudine, mai del tutto sopita durante quegli anni, non aveva mai considerato le conseguenze materiali del fatto.” Alberto Moravia, Il conformista, 74. 20 “quale sentimento gli ispirasse la conferma della morte di Lino.” Ibid., 74.

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convinced he now was.”21 The news doesn’t provoke anything worthy of note in Marcello, rather he finds he is ‘insensitive’ to what happened, and he observes that “it had not only been time that had led to this outcome. A lot was also due to himself, to his conscious efforts, during all those years, to leave abnormality and make himself like others.”22 An apathetic indifference is the guarantee of a recovered normalcy, firmly founded on the repression not only of what had occurred, but of himself: “there was by now no relationship, not even a hidden one, not even indirect, not even muted between the boy he had been and the young man he now was. He was really someone else […], even though his memory was not able to mechanically recall what had occurred that October long ago, in actuality his entire person, right into his most secret fibers, had at this point forgotten it.”23 Strengthened by the superficial and banal observation that “he is like others”, that “he behaves like others”, Marcello is pleased with the recovery of his normalcy. He is equally fascinated in the realization that along with millions of others he hopes that Franco will win in Spain, something which confirmed that “this sympathy therefore originated in deeper areas and once more demonstrated that his normalcy was neither superficial, nor fabricated rationally and voluntaristically, […] but tied to an instinctive and almost physiological condition, to a faith in other words, which he shared with millions of other people.”24 But this relation of equality between himself and these millions of people is only “in the abstract”, since Marcello despises and is annoyed by, feels he has nothing in common with, real people he encounters in daily life, as for instance during his visit to the ministry.25

21

“se egli era ancora il ragazzo di un tempo, ossessionato dalla propria fatale anormalità o l’uomo nuovo, del tutto normale, che aveva in seguito voluto essere ed era convinto che era.” Ibid., 74. 22 “non era stato soltanto il tempo a produrre tale risultato. Molto doveva anche a se stesso, alla sua consapevole volontà, attraverso tutti quegli anni, di uscire dall’anormalità e farsi uguale agli altri.” Ibid., 74. 23 “tra il ragazzo che era stato e il giovane che era non correva ormai più alcun rapporto, neppure nascosto, neppure indiretto, neppure sopito. Egli era veramente un altro […], sebbene la sua memoria fosse in grado di ricordare meccanicamente quanto era accaduto in quel lontano ottobre, in realtà tutta la sua persona, fino nelle fibre più segrete, l’aveva ormai dimenticato.” Ibid., 75. 24 “questa simpatia, dunque, veniva da zone più profonde e dimostrava una volta di più che la sua normalità non era né superficiale, né abborracciata razionalmente e volontaristicamente, […] ma legata ad una condizione istintiva e quasi fisiologica, ad una fede insomma, che egli condivideva con altri milioni di persone.” Ibid., 79. 25 Cf., Il conformista, 81.

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From this moment onward there are no substantial differences between Moravia’s novel and Bertolucci’s film, insofar as the unfolding of the plot is concerned, except in the final sections: obviously as regards the use of flashbacks in the film as opposed to the novel, and in terms of style.26 What instead changes considerably in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist27 is the different perspective with which he looks at conformism: “human beings’ drama is not called fate, but the inescapability of the course of time”28 —something the director had written years earlier, talking about a previous film, La commare secca. This suggestion has not only not been renounced or changed, but seems reaffirmed by his new conformist, with which he identifies, also psychoanalytically, almost as if in a farcical reconstruction of his own obsessions, recognizing himself: “The Conformist is the story of my relationship with Godard. When I gave Prof. Quadri Godard’s phone number and address, it was a joke, but later I told myself: ‘Well, perhaps this all has a meaning... I am Marcello and I make

26

This essay does not intend to analyze similarities and differences between the film and the novel in significant detail, among other reasons because this operation has already been undertaken by Vito Attolini, Dal romanzo al set: cinema italiano dalle origini ad oggi (Bari: Dedalo, 1988), 215-216. What it is instead important to highlight, using a number of passages and comparisons, is the different manner in which the protagonists of the novel and film respectively express their conformism, and consider the different solutions adopted, the one tragic, the other farcical. 27 The Conformist (Italy/France/RFT 1970, color, 111m); director: Bernardo Bertolucci; produced by: Maurizio Lodi-Fè per Mars/ Marianne/Maran; treatment: from the novel with the same title by Alberto Moravia; screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci; cinematography: Vittorio Storaro; film editing: Franco Arcalli; production design: Ferdinando Scarfiotti; costume design: Gitt Magrini; music: Georges Delerue. Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Marcello Clerici), Stefania Sandrelli (Giulia), Dominique Sanda (Anna Quadri), Gastone Moschin (Manganiello), Pierre Clémenti (Lino Seminara), Enzo Tarascio (professor Quadri), José Quaglio (Italo Montanari), Milly (Marcello’s mother), Yvonne Sanson (Giulia’s mother), Giuseppe Addobbati (Marcello’s father), Fosco Giachetti (colonel), Antonio Maestri (confessor), Christian Alégny (Raoul), Pierangelo Civera (Franz), Pasquale Fortunato (Marcello as a child), Marta Lado (Marcello’s daughter), Gino Vagni (Luca), Benedetto Benedetti (minister), Alessandro Haber (blind drunk man). 28 “il dramma dell’uomo non si chiama destino, ma ineluttabilità del corso del tempo.” Bernardo Bertolucci, La mia magnifica ossessione. Scritti, ricordi, interventi (1962-2010), ed. Fabio Francione and Piero Spila (Milan: Garzanti, 2010), 35.

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fascist movies and I want to kill Godard who is a revolutionary, who makes revolutionary movies and who was my teacher’.”29 Moravia’s work wants to validate the principle according to which the birth and development of conformism ought to be attributed to the awareness of difference and the lack of properly interiorized ethical references: it produces-manifests evil by annihilating individual will, a distortion of the mechanisms of conscience. Only massification, the incorporation into the mass, and the abdication of individual thought in order to welcome a uniformizing, collective, fatalistic and ritualistic thought, allows Marcello to neutralize the internal-interior critical debate and abandon himself to the non-choice between good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, and to finally welcome as true, just and good what the mass, following a higher model, believes is such. One cannot discern a real depoliticization in adherence to conformism, but instead a politics understood as the tyranny of the manipulated masses: it is no longer theoréin that dominates and precedes action, but prassein which is supposed to provide a pallid reason, should it be needed, for theoréin. The interior world of the boy-adolescent first, and the man later, privileges action, rejecting reflection and introspection as something painful. In Moravia’s novel Marcello acts obeying OVRA’s (the fascist secret police, specifically aimed at anti-fascist activities) requests, because he wants to be on a par with others who live favoring an uncritical adherence to the dictates of the fascist regime: collaborationism coincides with the most political and conformist action one could discern in any society. It is Moravia himself who states the goal with which he intended to write the novel: “It was my intention to interpret fascism in an intellectual vein. But, perhaps because of my immaturity as a writer, it became a bottleneck through which it was difficult to make everything that I wished enter. Once more I realized it was impossible to write a novel based on historical and realistic data.”30 So The Conformist would seem to 29

“Il conformista è la storia di me e Godard. Quando attribuii al professor Quadri il numero di telefono di Godard e il suo indirizzo, lo feci per scherzo, ma più tardi mi dissi: ‘Beh, forse tutto questo ha un significato … Io sono Marcello e faccio film fascisti e voglio uccidere Godard che è un rivoluzionario, che fa film rivoluzionari e che fu il mio maestro’.” Stefano Socci, Bernardo Bertolucci (Milan: Il Castoro cinema, 2008), 8. 30 “La mia intenzione era di interpretare il fascismo in chiave intellettuale. Ma forse, a causa d’una mia immaturità di scrittore diventò un collo di bottiglia in cui fu difficile far entrare tutto quello che ci volevo fare entrare. Mi accorgevo ancora una volta che il romanzo su dati storici e realistici era impossibile scriverlo.” Enzo Siciliano, Moravia (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), 89.

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be a novel based on an experiment that didn’t work out, according to the novelist’s own words, but reread with current knowledge of novelistic writing, and in the light of the problem of conformism, today it instead appears as a novel that interprets fascism in light of one of the fundamental components of its ideology, conformism precisely, which Moravia was the first to highlight and discuss extensively in a tragic, historic and political key. And the tragedy is specifically carried out in the abnormal-normal dialectics of Marcello, against the politico-historical background of totalitarian fascism understood in Gramscian31 fashion as an ideology capable of poisoning all of reality,32 of which conformism and fear are viral agents spread throughout the population. The practice of hieratization of the Duce and his actions, which function as an inescapable but inimitable model for all citizens, lead to a new way of thinking the authoritarian state, paradoxically creating consensus by sacrificing all civic and political liberties.33 The secret police 31

“Gramsci therefore studies the national-popular, theorizes it and writes about it. Mussolini perhaps puts it into practice, shaped from the right rather than the left: there is the nation formed and disciplined. […] Gramsci uses the words ‘conformism’ and ‘conformist’ strategically” (“Gramsci, dunque, studia il nazionalpopolare, lo teorizza e ne scrive. Forse Mussolini lo mette in pratica, declinato da destra anziché da sinistra: c’è la nazione messa in forma e disciplinata. […] Gramsci usa strategicamente le parole ‘conformismo’ e ‘conformista’). Mario Isnenghi, Dieci lezioni sull’Italia contemporanea (Rome: Donzelli, 2011), 202. 32 Cf. Emilio Gentile, Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2008), 44. 33 “Using the pseudonym Prometeo Filodemo, Basso probably inaugurates the term ‘totalitarianism’ in the pages of La rivoluzione liberale of January 2nd 1925, writing: ‘Fascism has thus outlined all its principles: suppression of all dissent for the good of the Nation identified with the State, which in its turn is identified with those who are in power. This State is the Verbum, and the Chief is the man sent by God to save Italy; he represents the Absolute, the Infallible […] Once these principles have been stated the State can do anything’ and for this reason can become ‘the interpreter of the unanimous will, of an indistinct totalitarianism’. An important twist in the term’s history is represented by the enthusiastic usage that both Mussolini and the theorists of the ‘New Verbum’ will make of it in the meantime. In the Duce’s speech of June 22nd 1925 fascism is exalted as a regime that proudly pursues its ‘ferocious totalitarian will’.” (“Con lo pseudonimo di Prometeo Filodemo, sulle pagine de La rivoluzione liberale del 2 gennaio 1925, Basso probabilmente inaugura il sostantivo ‘totalitarismo’, scrivendo: ‘Il fascismo ha così posto tutti i suoi principî: soppressione di ogni contrasto per il bene superiore della Nazione identificata con lo Stato, il quale si identifica a sua volta con gli uomini che detengono il potere. Questo Stato è il Verbo, e il Capo è l’uomo mandato da Dio per salvare l’Italia; esso rappresenta l’Assoluto, l’Infallibile [...].

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in both the novel and the film—symbolically and dramatically— implements repression, control, the full display and maintenance of conformism. Moravia with the lens of his (Marxist and Freudian) neohumanism justifies a resort to the tragic but within history: “I wrote the novel not ‘for’ the Rossellis but ‘about’ the Rossellis. And it was this that I thought had to be a tragedy, even if one with a historical background, and not an edifying hagiographic story.”34 Bertolucci, on the contrary, sacrifices the story, which is little more than a scenic backdrop, to pursue both a poetic-stylistic research and a psychoanalytic excavation, which are equally essential to the film, to the extent they are the interpretive keys for each frame, generated and polished like the verses of a hypnotic elegy. The cipher of the filmic narration is not historic reconstruction, but is condensed in hallucination, produced via the use-abuse of oxymoronic shots, based on a constant dialectic of opposites: open/shut, light/dark, circular/square, within a framed film, with a fragmented narration that proceeds thanks to prolepsis and analepsis (the first glaring diversion-betrayal from-of the film), and this game of temporal unhinging is a constitutive condition when appraising the conformist’s monism. The novel is in the third person, while the film is a narration via flashback by the first person, Marcello, to Manganiello, an OVRA operative, during a trip in a car which takes them to the place where Quadri, the antifascist professor in exile in Paris, will need to be killed. Marcello, a mature product of conformism, tells Manganiello, whose role it is to check that conformism is not perverted, the story we know from the novel, but reproduced as fragments of memory, losing the novel's continuity and desecrating its structure: Bertolucci is a pupil of Pasolini’s, Renoir, Godard, and the 1930s are reinvented in the film expressionistically. Because what is important for this director is not the historical reconstruction, Una volta posti questi principî lo Stato può tutto e per questo esso può diventare ‘interprete dell'unanime volere, del totalitarismo indistinto’. Una svolta importante nella storia del termine è costituita dall'entusiastico uso che di esso fanno nel frattempo sia Mussolini sia i teorici del ‘Nuovo Verbo’. Nel discorso tenuto dal Duce il 22 giugno del 1925 il fascismo viene esaltato come quel regime che persegue con fierezza la propria ‘feroce volontà totalitaria’.) Simona Forti, 1998, “Totalitarismo,” Enciclopedia Treccani.it. Accessed September 20, 2015. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/totalitarismo_(Enciclopedia_delle_scienze_soc iali)/ 34 “Scrissi il romanzo [Il conformista] non ‘per’ i Rosselli ma ‘su’ i Rosselli. E questo pensai che doveva essere una tragedia sia pure a fondo storico e non una storia agiografica edificante.” Alain Elkann, Vita di Moravia (Milan: Bompiani, 2007), 109.

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but the psychic and allegorical dimensions in which conformism is allowed to crawl, independently of the totalitarian regime referred to. The lack of reality-fiction, conscious-unconscious, distinctions is evoked by the chiaroscuro-like indeterminacy of the protagonist, interpreted by a brilliant Jean-Louis Trintignant, ambiguous and neurotic, irresolute and extremely controlled in his puppet-like poses—with or without strings?— sometimes given very rigidly, and the whole film is dominated by that cappa onirica (“oneiric atmosphere”)35 which makes the story enigmatic and ungraspable (photography was entrusted to Vittorio Storaro, who was able to heighten the light effects to the utmost with a very wisely measured recourse to blue filters). Marcello collaborates in Quadri’s assassination, but he does not manage to engage in action, he looks on, petrified, terrorized and distraught as the professor, Anna, the wife, and the dog are murdered in the snowy candor of Savoy, the pistol that had shot Lino remains unused in this sequence in which the betrayal is emblematically underscored and highlighted by the use of the daggers with which the hit-men fulfill their mission, overcoming historical verisimilitude with allegory and cultivated, aesthetic, citation. All the protagonists’ faces are masks that are denuded sequence after sequence: each one hiding-revealing their hypocritical lives, making everything emerge that renders everyone different and deformist, allowing a disarming fragility to emerge. Fascism appears in all its inhuman and conformist magnificence, absurd and disorienting in the shots of the EUR, the Ministry, its abject pantomime in the radio conversations, in the whorehouse in Ventimiglia, in Italo Montanari’s conversations, a character absent from the novel, a reader—non seeing— (an oxymoron of oxymora) of fascist speeches on the radio and an agent of the secret service; finally Manganiello, the agent always on Marcello's heels, charged with checking his actions and behaviors. In Bertolucci’s film conformism surfaces magmatically, in a peculiar fashion, in all the characters, each a conformist in their own way, and in all their actions, in an insistent and dilemma-fraught farce, between being, intending to be and having to be, Marcello’s emotional and cognitive trauma reverberates in all the other characters, demonstrating the inevitability of this psycho-physical condition. Quadri, dissident and antifascist, his wife Anna, a libertine seduced by Giulia, Marcello's wife, who is also pathetically masked as a young woman in love. Perhaps the only characters one cannot consider to be victims of the reigning 35

Adriano Aprà, Panoramica su Bertolucci, in Bernardo Bertolucci. Il cinema e il film, ed. Adriano Aprà (Venice: Marsilio, 2011), 13.

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conformism are Marcello’s mother, detested precisely because of her inborn incapacity to conform to statutes and regulations, a morphineaddict who supports a driver-lover, and the father, afflicted by mental illness, and for this reason locked up in a mental asylum.36 In Moravia’s work Marcello follows a path of understanding, in Bertolucci’s, on the contrary, he follows a troubled itinerary towards a confused incomprehension of himself, the world, his being in the world, where everything appears incomprehensible and absurdly contained within an insuperable dimension of the lack of sense. Pursuing this line of thought, the novel is a novel with a 19th century structure that attempts to recreate tragedy, following and even chasing precise criteria for the unfolding of the plot, while the film is a work marked by a complex montage: the numerous camera movements, shots from above, below and laterals, follow one another without ever affording the spectator a stable and solid point of view, and if to this one adds the narration in the form of flashbacks, in which fragments of the past are inserted into a hectic and ungraspable present, Bertolucci’s determination to film a work that obstinately seeks to produce an obscure dismay in the spectator becomes obvious. And if in the novel the descriptions of Rome and Paris are not major features, leading to the possibility it could really all take place in Rome or any other place; in the film, on the contrary, the relationship between the two cities is essential as they are clearly shown as opposed to one another: the one as the space of existential conformism, the other as the space that other possible forms of conformism can assume. The sequence of the film depicting shopping in the streets of Paris, Giulia and Anna being enthusiastically carried away by the possibility of purchasing and possessing objects, or that of the restaurant with the little train where Marcello, Giulia, Anna and Luca Quadri go to dine, are both important in this regard. There are some documents that provide us with insight into the operational transition(s) between the novel, point of origin and original text, and its filmic transformation; they are documents37 that refer to differing versions. It has been extremely interesting to consult some 36

One should note that the scene is filmed masterfully on the terrace of the Palazzo delle Feste, dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi in EUR, designed by Adalberto Libera, realized for the Esposizione Universale Romana of 1942, it was begun in 1937 and finished in 1954. For those interested in the building, cf. G. Muratore, S. Lux, E. Cristallini, A. Greco, Palazzo dei Congressi. Vicende e documenti inediti (Rome: Editalia,1991). 37 We are referring to a number of texts that appeared after the novel's publication and before the film, whose purpose was to help in the realization of the film itself.

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unpublished documents preserved by the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Central Archives of the State, in Rome),38 in order to follow the path Bertolucci took from the novel to his own conformist. Bernardo Bertolucci's name appears as both director, and screenplay and story writer (this is followed in parentheses by the phrase “tratto dal romanzo omonimo di Alberto Moravia”—“based on the novel with the same title by Alberto Moravia”) in a note announcing the start of the filming of Il conformista, addressed to the VII Division of the Ministry for Tourism and Cultural Productions, bearing protocol number 1185/612, on official stamped paper. Some of the information provided in this document, dated October 6th 1969, includes information that differs from that in the finished product: Ennio Morricone’s name is provided for the musical score, and he will be replaced by George Delerue; Brigitte Bardot was supposed to play Anna’s role, which instead will be played by Dominique Sanda; Edoardo de Filippo was supposed to have Quadri’s role, and Enzo Tarascio will actually play it; Sergio Tofano was supposed to play Marcello’s father, and will be replaced by Giuseppe Addobbati; Gianni Santuccio was supposed to interpret the Colonel’s role, and instead we find Fosco Giachetti in the final version. The same document states that the following documents are attached in the order given: a) screenplay; b) the film’s treatment; c) financing arrangements; d) production schedule. Appended are the signatures of the following production companies: Mars film Produzione and Green film spa, Rome, October 2nd 1969. On May 31st 1971 (according to what one can read on the protocol’s stamp) Mars film asks the Ministry for Tourism and Cultural Productions (Directorate-General, VII Division) for it to be recognized as an Italian company: at this point the film is finished, distributed and already being screened, all the actors and other professionals involved are known,39 but one must make note of a not insignificant detail: all the artistic and technical personnel is listed, and the first name to appear is that of Alberto Moravia as the author of the film’s treatment, followed by Bernardo Bertolucci’s as screenplay-writer and director. And, additionally, on Mars film letterhead, one finds Alberto

38

My heartfelt thanks to Fabrizio Natalini, professor of Storia e Critica del Cinema (Film History and Criticism) at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, for pointing to these documents and for methodological advice in reading this archival material. 39 The censor’s stamp bears protocol number 56307, affixed June 19th 1970, and warns that it cannot be seen by persons under fourteen years of age.

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Moravia’s name as the treatment-writer,40 and Bernardo Bertolucci’s as screenplay-writer.41 On October 3d 1970 the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Productions, VII – Prod. Lungom. [full-length film productions], in a document with protocol number 1056 co 612, asks Mars Film Produzione “to relay first and last names respectively of the director and the authors of the film’s treatment and the screenplay in as expeditious a manner as possible.”42 It is signed by Director General De Biase. One should also underscore that there is a document, that announces the delivery of two screenplays (by Bertolucci therefore), to be delivered by Green Film SRL on its own letterhead, to the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Productions - Directorate General for Film, via della Ferratella, 51, bearing protocol number 11711, of September 29th 1969. There is also a three-page file typewritten only on the front, form (mod. 56 spett.) on official stamped paper, sent from the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Productions (Directorate-General for Cultural Productions, Div. VII Prod. Lungometraggi), which contains a reference to the Inspector General and an (illegible) signature, which list: the film’s title, the plot, an evaluation, main and secondary actors, a production schedule, which still had not been submitted to the relevant commission, dated October 4th 1969. Both the technical and artistic cast are not yet definitely established, and Mars and Green films deliver two provisional lists to the Ministry on October 2nd 1969. The plot as summarized by the Inspector General does not correspond to that of either the film or the novel if not generically and partially; the misunderstanding of both Moravia’s novel and of Bertolucci’s screenplay is obvious: it is difficult to tell whether this is due to lack of information by its author or because of a precise intent to escape both bureaucratic impediments and the strictures of censorship. In neither film or novel, for 40 On this page, on Green Film srl letterhead, which provides a detailed expense estimate attached to the announcement of the start of the filming presented to the Ministry for Tourism and Cultural Productions, Alberto Moravia is shown as receiving the sum of ten million lire for the treatment and copyright, while Bernardo Bertolucci is shown as receiving five million lire for the screenplay and the dialogues. 41 On January 28th 1970, with Prot.[ocol] N.[umber] 0780/00612, the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Productions releases a first provisional statement, to be formalized further after having seen a sample copy of the film, to both Mars and Green film companies, attributing Italian nationality to the film itself. 42 “di voler far conoscere con ogni cortese urgenza, il cognome e il nome rispettivamente del regista e degli autori del soggetto e della sceneggiatura.”

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instance, does Marcello attempt to prevent Quadri’s murder in any way, and if Bertolucci allows the ‘conformist’ to view the well-known scene of the couple’s assassination almost with indifference, sitting expressionless in the car, while Anna leaves bloodied handprints on its windows, Moravia, on the contrary, with a humanistically delicate touch and a more refined narrative strategy, uses Giulia to inform Marcello of Quadri and Anna’s departure for Savoy; he subsequently learns of the crime’s details from the newspapers: “that morning also, although already six days had passed, his first glances were concerned with the Quadri assassination. […] Several left-wing French newspapers summarized the crime’s unfolding, allotting more space to interpret several of the stranger or more significant details: Quadri killed with some form of blade, in the thick of a wood; his wife, instead, shot three times on the side of the road, and then, already dead, dragged next to her husband.”43 In the following pages moreover, Marcello is informed of the complexities surrounding the crime and of a counter-order which he had however never received, and Giulia confirms to Marcello that she believes the newspapers’ distorted version, according to whom it was fellow partymembers who had killed husband and wife, and here, in a glimmer of unexpected resipiscence, he states the following while reflecting on fate: “When one speaks of fate one is talking precisely of all these things, love and the rest … you could not have acted otherwise and she [Anna] could not, precisely, not leave with her husband.”44 When Giulia observes: “So, there is nothing we can do?”45 Marcello responds by tautologically providing the most beautiful definition of the tragic: “Yes, we can know that we can’t do anything...”46 This is the tragic principle that informs the novel but not the film: Bertolucci does not try either to understand, or much less, forgive, Marcello for what has transpired, and does not even evoke empathetic feelings of wonder in the spectator, but simply annoyance for the chilly distance with which the conformist observes 43

“anche quella mattina, sebbene fossero ormai passati sei giorni, il suo primo sguardo fu per il delitto Quadri. […] Un paio di giornali francesi di sinistra, rifacevano ancora una volta la storia del delitto, soffermandosi a interpretare certi particolari più strani o più significativi: Quadri ucciso all’arma bianca, nel fitto di un bosco; sua moglie, invece, colpita da tre proiettili al margine della strada e poi trascinata, già morta, accanto al marito.” Alberto Moravia, Il conformista, 287-288. 44 “Quando si dice fatalità si dicono appunto tutte queste cose, l’amore e il resto … tu non potevi non agire come hai agito e lei [Anna] non poteva, appunto, non partire con il marito.” Ibid., 295. 45 “Allora noi non possiamo far nulla?” Ibid., 295. 46 “Sì, possiamo sapere che non possiamo far nulla…” Ibid., 295.

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events, as if it were simply meant to occur. Unscrupulously he participates without participating, he is present in his absence. None of this seems to even minimally affect the author of the synopsis who concludes in a Pilate-like manner: Marcello is only one of millions of Italians who fooled himself and was fooled by his ‘duty to the Fatherland’, and following this interpretation he is not truly responsible, nor are the others. The elegance, the aesthetic values, the resort to directorial formal and compositional strategies, but even the conceptualization and the substance of the dialogues in the film,47 one of the most significant being the one that occurs been Marcello and Quadri in the latter’s studio in Paris, in which the Platonic myth of the cave is recounted and analyzed, none of these can be even remotely inferred from the ministerial notes. The myth of the cave as narrated by the professor48 with the windows’ shutters closed, in the dark to make his words resonate in depth in the consciousness of his students, in absolute concentration, is the allegory of the interiorization of concepts and principles directed towards an awareness of one’s conformist condition, clouded not only by fascist persuasion, but by all forms of an obvious or hidden totalitarian system, a seething system, as the film demonstrates, even when one is historically unaware of living in a totalitarian state. The shadows projected on the Platonic cave’s walls constitute the consensus and the paradox that reality is not the one projected, while Bertolucci’s film instead, by means of its projection in cinemas, wants to expose an existential condition which is the one we can grasp in the characters’ actions and reflections: only by doubting the shadows’ reality does the possibility of resisting the regime, monopoly, and coercion take shape. The Conformist is a film in which all the characters’ movements appear to be directed from elsewhere and each one elegantly recites their pantomime in the world: like the protagonists in a melodrama they live ambiguously, betraying, dancing, dying. 47 “The Conformist … is a very remarkable film: because of its linguistic elegance, psychological introspection, evocative virtues and stylistic level. […] Although set in the Rome (and Paris) of the 1930s (with a brief appendix in the days of fascism’s collapse) it would be profoundly mistaken to take The Conformist as a historical film or, even worse, a political one” (“Il conformista … è un film notevolissimo: per eleganza linguistica, introspezione psicologica, virtù evocativa, livello stilistico. […] Benché sia ambientato a Roma (e nella Parigi) degli anni ’30 (con una breve appendice nei giorni del crollo del fascismo) si sbaglierebbe profondamente a prendere Il conformista per un film storico o peggio che mai, politico”)—as Lino Micciché expressed himself in L’Avanti, March 25th 1971. 48 On the myth of the cave and the shadows, cf. Jean-Claude Mirabella and Pierre Pivot, Intervista a Bernardo Bertolucci (Rome: Gremese, 1999), 34-35.

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Works Cited Aeschylus. Agamemnon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Aprà, Adriano. Panoramica su Bertolucci, in Bernardo Bertolucci. Il cinema e il film. Edited by Adriano Aprà. Venice: Marsilio, 2011. Attolini,Vito. Dal romanzo al set: cinema italiano dalle origini ad oggi. Bari: Dedalo, 1988. Bertolucci, Bernardo. La mia magnifica ossessione. Scritti, ricordi, interventi (1962-2010). Edited by Fabio Francione and Piero Spila. Milan: Garzanti, 2010. Elkann, Alain. Vita di Moravia. Milan: Bompiani, 2007. Fàvaro, Angelo. Quale madre? Presenze materne fra auto-biografia e strategia della dissoluzione famigliare ne Il conformista e ne La noia di Alberto Moravia. In Le madri: figure e figurazioni nella Letteratura Italiana contemporanea. Edited by Laurent Lombard. Avellino: Edizioni Sinestesie, 2014. Gentile, Emilio. Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2008. Isnenghi,Mario. Dieci lezioni sull’Italia contemporanea. Rome: Donzelli, 2011. Luzi, Mario. Preface to Jean Racine, Andromaca. Milan: Rizzoli, 1980. Mirabella, Jean-Claude. Pivot, Pierre. Intervista a Bernardo Bertolucci. Rome: Gremese, 1999. Moravia, Alberto. Lettere ad Amelia Rosselli, con altre lettere familiari e prime poesie (1915-1951). Milan: Bompiani, 2009. —. Note sul romanzo (1956), in L’uomo come fine, 261-272. Milan: Bompiani, 1964. —. Il conformista, in Opere/3. Romanzi e racconti 1950.1959. Vol. I. Milan: Bompiani, 2004. —. Preface to Boule de Suif (1950) by Maupassant, in L’uomo come fine, 109-114. Milan: Bompiani, 1964. —. Ritratto di Machiavelli (1950), in L’uomo come fine, 115-134. Milan: Bompiani, 1964. —. L’uomo e il personaggio (1941), in L’uomo come fine, 19-26. Milan: Bompiani, 1964. Muratore, Giorgio. Lux, Simonetta. Cristallini, Elisabetta. Greco, Antonella. Palazzo dei Congressi. Vicende e documenti inediti. Rome: Editalia,1991. Sophocles. Oedipus Rex.http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc= Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0191 Siciliano, Enzo. Moravia. Milan: Bompiani, 1982.

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Socci, Stefano. Bernardo Bertolucci. Milan: Il Castoro cinema, 2008. “Totalitarismo”. Enciclopedia Treccani.it. Accessed September 20, 2015. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/totalitarismo_(Enciclopedia_delle_ scienze_sociali)/

CHAPTER SIX FROM MORAVIA TO BERTOLUCCI: THE MONISM OF THE CONFORMIST— THE FARCE AFTER THE TRAGEDY PART II: FROM TREATMENT TO FARCICAL FINALE1 ANGELO FÀVARO

Among the papers preserved by the Archivio Centrale dello Stato there are twenty pages that contain the film’s treatment. After reading this text,2 several extraordinary facts emerge: first of all once again the numerous differences between Moravia’s novel and Bertolucci’s film, secondly the resort to a sort of edulcorating formula, useful as a mitigating agent with respect to the explosive and for the political powers-that-be, disquieting conceptual perspective, which, in different ways and with different messages, but with equal intensity, emanates from both Moravia’s and Bertolucci’s masterpieces. The first extraordinary divergence between the novel and the film in this detailed rendition of the subject, is precisely the plot’s beginning: we 1 This entire essay and all the original quotations from Italian sources were translated from the Italian original by Mark Epstein. 2 The typescript, analyzed here for the first time, is in the form of a twenty page file, with progressive numbering on the upper left, stapled with three metal staples by a good stapler (this primitive but effective stapling lasts over the years), a cover on which one can read the film’s title in quotation marks, underlined, and in upper case, and slightly lower on the left one finds: “Soggetto cinematografico/ tratto dal romanzo omonimo di/ ALBERTO MORAVIA” (“Film treatment/ from the novel by the same title by/ ALBERTO MORAVIA”). There are some marginal errors or typos. There are no signatures either handwritten or typed.

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are in Rome, in 1937, at the Biblioteca Nazionale, and there is a man in his thirties leafing through the pages of old newspapers. This treatment is arranged ‘artistically’ and with a certain care, and although it still remains the treatment for a film, a text to be utilized and not a literary work, we would not be far off the mark if we hypothesized that, although his name3 does not appear, it could have actually been written by Alberto Moravia, or that Bertolucci could have drafted it together with his novelist friend. This sequence, which does not appear at the beginning of the film, continues by pointing out: “And here is the prologue, chronological not psychological, of Marcello Clerici’s story: we can read it with him in the yellowed pages of an old issue of a Roman daily: year 1920, October 24th, fourth page at the top: DEADLY ACCIDENT—Yesterday chauffeur Lino Seminara, a resident of via della Camilluccia 33, was found in his bedroom, lying in a pool of blood.”4 To all effects and purposes the sequence is ready to be filmed with all the close-ups, details and the camera showing the Biblioteca Nazionale with a panning shot. A flashback returns the story to an avenue in October: “Plane trees bare and white. The first days of school. A heap of bodies, all of them on top of a body lying on the ground, amongst yells and laughter: these are twelve to fifteen year old kids, just out of school. The sharp voice of a tall, elegant, man in a dark chauffeur uniform interrupts the small persecutors’ obscene game. The kids run off picking up their bags; only the object of their game remains there, abandoned, forgotten. It’s Marcello Clerici as a thirteen year old, a head of blond feathers, delicate features.”5 Lino is also described in some detail: “pale, gaunt, sunken eyes, a large and sad nose, a 3 It is Bertolucci who tells us that he asked Moravia to write some interviews for Last Tango in Paris, and, after having complied, Moravia refused to have his name appear in the credits. Bernardo Bertolucci, La mia magnifica ossessione. Scritti, ricordi, interventi (1962-2010) (Milan: Garzanti, 2010), 156. 4 “Ed ecco il prologo, cronologico e non psicologico, della storia di Marcello Clerici: lo possiamo leggere insieme a lui nelle pagine ingiallite di un vecchio numero di un quotidiano di Roma: annata 1920, ventiquattro ottobre, quarta pagina in alto: ‘MORTALE INCIDENTE—Ieri lo chaffeur Lino Seminara, abitante in via della Camilluccia 33, è stato rinvenuto, nella sua stanza da letto, riverso in una pozza di sangue’.” Typescript “Soggetto cinematografico” (“Film treatment”), 1. 5 “I platani nudi e bianchi. I primi giorni di scuola. Un mucchio di corpi, tutti su uno che è per terra, tra urli e risate: sono ragazzi dai dodici ai quindici anni, appena usciti da scuola. A interrompere il gioco osceno dei piccoli persecutori è la voce secca di un uomo alto, elegante nella uniforme scura di chauffeur. I ragazzi fuggono raccogliendo le cartelle; rimane solo l’oggetto del loro gioco, mollato lì dimenticato. È Marcello Clerici a tredici anni, una testa di piume bio[n]de, dai lineamenti delicati.” Ibid.

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disdainful mouth and a crew cut.”6 He invites the boy into the car and whoever wrote this had a very clear idea of what will happen and of the novel’s, rather than the film’s, predominant tone when they explain: “The tragedy occurs rapidly. It is an exasperating and ambiguous skirmish of questions and answers between the adult and the boy … then the arrival at the large villa Lino lives in.”7 The remainder can be found in both the novel and the film, but while in the former the initial segments are narrated tragically, in the latter the filmic sequences are front and center and there is no tragedy in the strict sense, nothing happens, and one easily understands that the boy shoots Lino by mistake, Lino who in any case lacked the courage to molest him. The revolver that Lino offers Marcello is a beautiful and seductive object, and when Lino begs the boy to shoot, the weapon does. We then return to the library scene in which Clerici “esteemed philosophy professor in one of the capital’s high-schools”8 reads the last lines of the article in which he discovers that the driver is dead. Eighteen years after “that absurd day, so distant, so clear in his memory. Now only the banal and bureaucratic words, simple and brutal, from a news article violently lead Marcello to the definitive truth, that horrible reality which he had repressed and ran from for so long. That man was dead. Marcello is a killer.”9 It is at this point that the story starts, an indefinite day in 1937, “this is the story of the natural and absurd acts that a man undertakes in the attempt to destroy the obsession that persecutes him from that day of his adolescence.”10 The treatment starts to follow a peculiar narrative line: the character is presented, his sentimental life is recounted, his fiancée, Giulia, close to marriage, is also presented. “Marcello arrives [at the girl’s house] half hidden by the red and green jungle of a nice bouquet of roses; and he looks around satisfied. It is really a bourgeois house, of the most 6

“pallido, scarno, gli occhi infossati, il naso grande e triste, la bocca sdegnosa e i capelli tagliati a spazzola.” Ibid. 7 “La tragedia si svolge rapida. È un’esasperante e ambigua schermaglia di domande e risposte tra l’adulto e il bambino … poi l’arrivo nella grande villa dove abita Lino.” Ibid. 8 “stimato professore di filosofia in un liceo della capitale.” Ibid., 3. 9 “da quel giorno assurdo, così lontano, così preciso nella memoria. Solo ora le parole burocratiche e banali, semplici e brutali della pagina di cronaca conducono violentemente Marcello alla verità definitiva, a quella realtà orribile che egli per tanto tempo, aveva rimosso e fuggito. Quell’uomo è morto. Marcello è un assassino.” Ibid. 10 “è la storia degli atti naturali ed assurdi che un uomo compie nel tentativo di distruggere l’ossessione che lo perseguita da quel giorno della sua adolescenza.” Ibid.

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conventional bourgeoisie, and for him this is the most welcome aspect: he feels as if he is facing something very common, and therefore perfectly reassuring.”11 The twenty-year-old girl, given her shapeliness, almost looks thirty, and the fiancée is satisfied and content with the normality that this person-situation offers him. “But Marcello Clerici’s life doesn’t end with Giulia: it has broader, more obscure and more ambiguous confines.”12 Here he is in the corridors of the Ministry of the Interior as he talks with “sinister functionaries”, because he has ties to OVRA and he must undertake a mission: find information on Prof. Quadri, an antifascist university professor in voluntary exile in Paris. He must report about antifascist activity in France. Marcello also volunteers the alibi for the trip: marriage and the ensuing honeymoon. “The Boss praises Marcello for his idea, and while the young man leaves the office, the old colonel looks at him with great curiosity. Marcello’s cynicism even managed to impress him, a man used to the cruelest experiences.”13 In neither the novel nor the film does Marcello ever impress one as a cynic. One can certainly gather the detached sense of self-control and desire for normalcy that erupt from every page of the novel, while, on the contrary, the farcical attitudes of a man who, ridiculously, attempts to act, but cannot but look on, entangled in the webs of his irresoluteness and ineptitude, continuously recur in the film. In the days preceding the wedding and the trip to Paris, Marcello visits his mother: before entering the villa’s gate he confronts a man who has been chasing him, and discovers it is special agent Manganiello, who has been charged with observing, protecting and controlling Marcello. In the text Manganiello (p. 5) is defined as the young man’s guardian angel, in reality in the film he is no such thing. The mother’s absence-presence modality is important in both film and novel, and the treatment briefly and icastically clarifies the reasons for this necessary and inescapable sequence. The author of these pages (Moravia or Bertolucci? Both or 11

“Marcello arriva [a casa della ragazza] seminascosto dalla jungla verde e rossa di un bel mazzo di rose; e si guarda attorno con soddisfazione. È proprio una casa borghese, della borghesia più convenzionale, e questo è per lui l’aspetto più gradito: ha la sensazione di trovarsi di fronte a qualcosa di molto comune, quindi di perfettamente rassicurante.” Ibid., 4. 12 “Ma la vita di Marcello Clerici non si esaurisce in Giulia: ha dei confini più vasti, più oscuri, più ambigui.” Ibid. 13 “Il Capo si complimenta con Marcello per la sua idea, e mentre il giovane esce dall’ufficio, il vecchio colonnello gli lancia uno sguardo di grande curiosità. Il cinismo di Marcello è riuscito a impressionare anche lui, un uomo rotto alle più crudeli esperienze.” Ibid.

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neither?) once again observes: “Marcello is an atheist, but the class Giulia belongs to, the middle bourgeoisie, considers it an obligation to remember God on the important days of one’s life. The wedding day is one of these days, and Giulia dragged her future husband to the confessional: purification, the confession of sins, all before the white morning with lilies and the wedding march.”14 At this point the narration coincides with the film: everything is revealed to the confessor, distraught but ready to absolve, Marcello feels the impulse to draw more blood, in order to wash away the blood already spilled, “he will thus be able to reintegrate himself into the surroundings he will have created around himself: the conformism of a tranquil, normal, mediocre, petit-bourgeois life.”15 And on the basis of this short explanation it is possible to understand the difference between the concept of conformism as it is dealt with in the film and the novel. Moravia, and it is necessary to reiterate this is the interpretive key, tackles the conformism generated by fascism as a type of research and the stabilization of a cultural, social and political identity which finds its highest manifestation in the myth of a patriotism, understood in a modern and completely uncritical fashion, directed towards traditional values: Marcello acts for the Fatherland and the Fatherland is fascist. The conclusion of the parable cannot but be tragic, when the misery and pretense of that fascist Fatherland is unmasked, mask behind which there is nothing but the void. Bertolucci is aware that the protagonist’s unease is not simply a distressing individual existential condition, but is at the root of the social relations and the political activities of an entire civilization firmly founded on the hypocrisy of bourgeois conformism, now rampaging with the intent of uniformizing each individual orientation into a collective manifestation. If in Moravia’s novel, Marcello Clerici never doubts his fascist faith, and strengthens the reasons for his behavior while not doubting his actions, to the extent that he only manages to hesitate in the epilogue: “by now he was aware, with perfect clarity, that he had, as they say, bet on the losing horse; but why he had bet that way, and why the horse hadn't won, this,

14

“Marcello è ateo, ma la classe cui Giulia appartiene, la media borghesia, contempla l’obbligo di ricordarsi di Dio nei giorni importanti della vita. Il matrimonio è uno di questi giorni, e Giulia ha trascinato il futuro sposo al confessionale: la purificazione, la confessione delle colpe, prima del mattino bianco dei gigli e della marcia nuziale.” Ibid., 6. 15 “potrà reinserirsi così nell’elemento che si sarà creato attorno: il conformismo di una vita tranquilla, normale, mediocre, piccolo borghese.” Ibid.

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apart from the most obvious considerations, was not clear to him.”16 He reaches the point of thinking about and justifying his own actions: “In the meantime, while in doubt, he was consoled by the idea that even if there had been a mistake, and this could not be excluded, he had bet more than anyone else; more than all those who were in his same situation. It was the consolation of pride, the only one left,”17 and it is precisely at this point that the Moravian Marcello expresses his monist vocation, when he advances to full consciousness, realizing that “he had done what he had done for reasons that were only his own and extraneous to any communion with others; to change, even had he been allowed, would have meant annihilating himself. Of the many annihilations, this was precisely the one he would have wanted to avoid.”18 The true, unique, supreme mistake the novel’s young protagonist understands he has made is that of wanting to “escape his own abnormality”, and the tragedy is in the realization that everything went exactly as it should have, according to that perfect mechanism that regulates the presence of the tragic in the world and in life: the recognition of normality as an empty form in which “everything was abnormal and gratuitous. At the first impact this form had broken into pieces.”19 In Bertolucci’s film instead, Marcello adapts to collective norms and dispositions in a constant dissembling of himself and his life, but always with the ambiguity of someone who is looking and is looking at himself, is observing and observing himself, to the point of doubling himself, and reciting himself as if a puppet; he appears “normal”, making the tragedy implode as farce. This is the condition signaled by the attitude “more diffuse, as well as more difficult to define accurately, […] an ambiguous position, with several layers, which approves some aspects of the political 16

“ormai si rendeva conto, con perfetta chiarezza, che aveva, come si dice, puntato sul cavallo perdente; ma perché avesse puntato in quel modo e perché il cavallo non avesse vinto, questo, all’infuori delle constatazioni di fatto più ovvie, non gli era chiaro”. Alberto Moravia, Il conformista, in Opere/3. Romanzi e racconti 19501959. Vol. I (Milan: Bompiani, 2004), 300. 17 “Nel dubbio, intanto, lo consolava l’idea che anche se ci fosse stato errore, e questo non si poteva escludere, egli aveva puntato più di chiunque altro; più di tutti coloro che si trovavano nelle sue stesse condizioni. Era una consolazione dell’orgoglio, la sola che gli restasse.” Ibid., 301. 18 “aveva fatto quello che aveva fatto per motivi soltanto suoi e fuori da ogni comunione con gli altri; cambiare, anche se gli fosse stato consentito, avrebbe voluto dire annullarsi. Ora tra i tanti annientamenti, proprio questo avrebbe voluto evitare.” Ibid., 301. 19 “tutto era anormale e gratuito. Al primo urto questa forma era andata in pezzi.” Ibid.

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line, but disapproves of others.”20 Just as fascism, according to its depiction in the movie, is a totalitarianism that is imperfect and in fieri, a backdrop for melodrama, similarly the protagonist’s conformism takes shape more as a hesitating and neuroticizing aspiration to normalcy than as an assured and perfectly justified acquisition. If one continues to analyze the twenty typewritten pages one clearly sees how they diverge both from the novel and from the film, not only in their intent, but especially poetically and stylistically, with respect to the characters, one arrives at the point where Manganiello is always trailing right behind the newlyweds. From this point on, everything proceeds as in the film, while obviously lacking its precision and details (for instance the other antifascists who collaborate with Quadri are absent). Anna, Quadri’s wife, reveals to Marcello that her husband knows everything, but is keeping silent. She then kisses Marcello, who instead wants to return to Rome with Giulia, abandoning his secret mission, now no longer a secret (10). In this text’s treatment therefore it appears worthy of note that one is aware of Marcello’s first infatuation only after Anna’s kiss: “Marcello, perhaps for the first time, feels he is able to love,” making the sentimental aspect more relevant than it is in the novel, and less nuanced than it is in the film. The text continues by describing the two young woman friends and the man observes that “Giulia’s presence next to Anna has become less defined and more anonymous, Marcello at this point sees nothing but this wave of copper-colored hair, and the face that is raised towards the sky every time it smiles, that really slender waist, those ample hips.”21 He follows them, and Manganiello follows him in order to gather information (11). Information is insufficient, so the following day, after a dinner with Quadri and Anna, he will be able to provide further clarifications. The narration continues in a manner that follows the film fairly closely, Manganiello waits for Marcello, who only tells him they will see one another in the evening for dinner. The agent gives the man a revolver, he is not supposed to use it, and it is only a precaution. When he returns to the hotel, he discovers that in the room, in addition to Anna’s dog, there are the two women (14). “The caresses and the amorous games that Anna 20

“più diffuso, nonché il più difficile da definire con accuratezza, […] una posizione ambigua, a più strati, che approva taluni aspetti della linea politica, ma ne disapprova altri”. Paul Corner, “Consenso e coercizione. L’opinione popolare nella Germania nazista e nell’Italia fascista,” Contemporanea, 3 (2003): 429. 21 “la presenza di Giulia accanto a Anna si è fatta vaga e sempre più anonima, Marcello ormai non vede che quell’onda di capelli color rame, e quel volto che si alza verso il cielo ogni volta che sorride, quella vita così snella, quei fianchi così ampi.” Typescript “Soggetto cinematografico” (“Film treatment”), 10.

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engages in with Giulia slowly flow in front of Marcello's eyes, and it is as if they make him dream. He remains there, stunned and incapable.”22 He then understands that he was used by Anna so she could get to Giulia: “the logic of events cruelly downsized Marcello’s sudden ‘great love’ for Anna.”23 Giulia is happy when her husband pretends to return to the hotel, and then announces that Anna has invited the young couple to her house in Savoy. “Giulia is happy and unaware. Marcello is desperate: now he knows how the professor will die.”24 During dinner the dialogue between the four proceeds merrily. Manganiello follows everything from a distance: “due to a strange play of mirrors, his reflected image came to be right next to Marcello’s. The grey, horizontal, gaze of his accomplice immediately brings him back to reality.”25 He knows he is only an instrument in Anna’s hands when he states that he and Giulia will not accompany the professor and his wife to Savoy; Anna returns to seducing him (16). The invitation is accepted: “the evening concludes in a ballroom, in the outskirts. Giulia and Anna, merry and slightly tipsy, engage in a waltz, laughing and on shaky legs.”26 Marcello informs Manganiello of everything. The professor, who should have left alone, instead leaves at six the following morning with his wife Anna, Manganiello goes to pick up Marcello at his hotel, but by now it is too late (17). “When Manganiello’s car stops in the great chestnut wood, a couple of meters from the professor's car […]. The killers blocked the road with their car and are finishing off the professor and his wife with daggers […]. There is blood everywhere.”27 At this point the treatment accelerates: Rome July 25th 1943. Marcello and Giulia listen to the announcement on the radio, Mussolini and fascism have fallen, crowds pour into the streets, they are 22

“Le carezze e i giochi d’amore che Anna fa con Giulia passano lenti davanti agli occhi di Marcello, e lo fanno come sognare. Rimane lì, stordito e incapace.” Ibid., 15. 23 “la logica delle cose ha crudelmente ridimensionato l’improvviso “grande amore” di Marcello per Anna.” Ibid. 24 “Giulia è incosciente e felice. Marcello è disperato: ora sa come morirà il professore.” Ibid. 25 “per uno strano gioco di specchi, la sua immagine riflessa viene a trovarsi esattamente di fianco a Marcello. Lo sguardo grigio, orizzontale del suo complice lo riporta immediatamente alla realtà.” Ibid., 16. 26 “la serata si conclude in una sala da ballo, in periferia. Giulia e Anna, allegre e un po’ ubriache, si lanciano in un valzer, vacillando sulle gambe e ridendo.” Ibid. 27 “Quando l’auto di Manganiello si ferma sotto il grande bosco di castagni, a qualche metro dall’auto del professore […]. I sicari hanno bloccato la strada con la loro automobile e stanno a finendo a pugnalate il professore e Anna […]. C’è tanto sangue dappertutto.” Ibid., 18.

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distracted by the entrance of Elsa, their four year old daughter.28 “With sleepy eyes she asks her dad to put her to bed. Marcello leads her to her little room, has her say her prayers and gives her a long kiss before turning the light off.”29 Then Marcello leaves without Giulia to “see how a dictatorship falls.” He walks “like a sleepwalker”: he witnesses the fall of the symbols of fascism, at this point all demolished, and “Marcello is increasingly bent over: it is as if each stone, each marble fragment, were falling onto his shoulders. The people are singing, running, moving about as if crazed, and constantly growing in numbers.”30 In the crowd he then sees Lino, and is recognized by him, the many intervening years notwithstanding: “The explanation is extremely rapid: yes, a newspaper had written he had died, but it had been a mistake and, as a proverb says, this had lengthened his life. In the meantime, while the national anthem is sung, a large procession forms.”31 The treatment concludes with Marcello all alone, considering how everything he had done had been useless, “all useless” (“tutto inutile”, 20). It is less useful to dwell on the similarities than on the divergences between this text with a cinematographic purpose, the film and the novelistic archetype: an analysis of the three different endings allows some data to emerge that is necessary for an understanding of three different messages. The treatment, an intermediate and mediating text between the novel and the film, concludes with Marcello evaluating, in a moment of vanitas vanitatum, the uselessness of all his actions, gestures, reflections, probably his very own existence, a mistaken existence, which cannot be overcome. The novel’s conclusion, condensed into the epilogue’s three chapters, coincides with Marcello’s emerging awareness, Marcello who has by now recognized his mistakes, understood the meaning of his gestures, has accepted diversity and has shared his experiences with Giulia, telling her everything, including what she was already aware of, like his involvement in Quadri's murder. It will not be possible for him to 28

In the film the girl’s name is Lucilla. Elsa evokes Moravia’s wife, the writer Elsa Morante. 29 “Con gli occhi assonnati chiede al padre di metterla a letto. Marcello la conduce nella sua cameretta, le fa dire le preghiere e la bacia a lungo prima di spegnere la luce.” Typescript “Soggetto cinematografico” (“Film treatment”), 19. 30 “Marcello è sempre più curvo: è come se ogni pietra, ogni frammento di marmo, cadesse sulle sue spalle. La popolazione canta, corre, si muove come impazzita, e aumenta sempre più.” Ibid. 31 “La spiegazione è rapidissima: sì, un giornale aveva scritto che era morto, ma era stato un errore e,come dice un proverbio, gli si era allungata la vita. Intanto, al canto dell’inno nazionale, si sta formando un grande corteo.” Ibid.

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continue to be a fascist, while he listens to news on the radio (on that 25th of July 1943) about Mussolini’s resignation and the ensuing fall of the regime, he thinks about escaping across the ocean with his wife and daughter, persuaded he is not guilty because many had adopted his same attitude: he had behaved like a soldier. In the meantime while telling Giulia that they will go to Tagliacozzo, far from Rome, he invites her for a walk downtown to “see how a dictatorship falls.” She would prefer to stay home, she is scared, but finally she goes with her husband. Just previously, commenting on the crowds pouring into the streets and squares “applauding the king”, and the “disgust” this provoked in her: “Until yesterday they applauded Mussolini … a few days ago they were applauding the Pope because they hoped he could save them from the bombing … today they acclaim the king who brought down Mussolini.”32 In this context it is remarkable to observe that on August 25th 1943, in the Popolo di Roma, Moravia had provided a brilliant description of this crowd of conformists, stating that it was always the same crowd, composed of the same individuals, which had crowded the squares and squeezed together under the balcony, delirious and acclaiming Mussolini’s words, for the past twenty years, and now, for the last twenty days, had instead been acclaiming Mussolini’s fall. Moravia declares: “We don’t believe that in Rome there are two distinct multitudes, one that applauded for the last twenty years and another that, instead, only started applauding twenty days ago. So we are forced to think that with some variations, it is always the same crowd, today as yesterday.”33 The novelist feels repugnance for the crowd for the simple reason that individuals who think for themselves and autonomously, are lost in it, and “that mush that is the crowd”34 is generated, which demonstrates his aversion for all forms of demagogy “whatever its political color.”35 He analyzes one of the most obviously dismal phenomena, that of collective conformism generated by the crowds’ contagious emoting, a phenomenon which was well known to 32 “Fino a ieri battevano le mani a Mussolini … pochi giorni fa applaudivano al Papa perché speravano che li salvasse dai bombardamenti … oggi acclamano il re che ha buttato giù Mussolini.” Moravia, Il conformista, 308. 33 “Non crediamo che ci siano a Roma due moltitudini ben distinte, una che applaudiva durante gli ultimi vent’anni e una, invece, che ha incominciato ad applaudire soltanto da venti giorni. Così siamo costretti a pensare che con qualche variazione si tratta sempre della stessa folla, oggi come ieri”. Alberto Moravia, Folla e demagoghi, in Impegno controvoglia (Milan: Bompiani, 2008), 3. 34 “quella poltiglia che è la folla.” Ibid. 35 “qualunque sia il suo colore politico.” Ibid.

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Mussolini, who had read Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, and he explains the dynamics that occur between the demagogue speaking in the square and the crowd quite precisely: The demagogue speaks in the square. […] And when he speaks, it is not to speak the truth, not to enlighten those hundred thousand wretches who expect that truth from him, but rather to achieve certain effects, let us call them choral. In other words he obtains the crowd’s consensus only by flattering its most banal instincts, its vainest aspirations. […] Reason is severe and cold, it does not ask to be applauded, only understood. Demagogues and the crowd, we come full circle, and the perversity of the former is nourished by the folly of the latter.36

Marcello and Giulia go to lose themselves in the crowd’s “madness”, “uniquely joyous, of an amazed, incredulous, clumsy joy in its expressions […], finding a way among the multitude only with difficulty; other trucks filled with workers, men and women, who waved flags, some tricolored and some red. […] There were also many messily dressed soldiers without weapons, who hugged one another, their stolid peasant faces lit up with a drunken hope,”37 and in The Conformist Moravia describes that crowd, capable of everything. He feels repugnance for it. When Giulia, in the Quirinale square, asks Marcello what all those people are waiting for under the balcony on which sovereigns usually appear, he answers, Moravia-style, that no one will appear and that they are not waiting for “Anything … it’s just the habit of going to the square and calling someone.”38 After having witnessed the spectacle of the crowded square, they get into the car, and are now close to Villa Borghese: they get out, and walk in 36

“Il demagogo parla in piazza. […] E quando parla, non è per dire la verità, non per illuminare quei centomila disgraziati che tale verità da lui aspettano, bensì per raggiungere certi effetti, diciamo così corali. In altre parole egli ottiene il consenso della folla unicamente lusingandone i più banali istinti, le più vane aspirazioni. […] La ragione è cosa severa e fredda, e non chiede di essere applaudita ma soltanto capita. Demagoghi e folla, il cerchio è chiuso e la perversità dei primi si nutre della pazzia della seconda.” Ibid., 4. 37 “unicamente gioiosa, di una gioia stupefatta, incredula, maldestra nell’esprimersi […], aprendosi a fatica un varco tra la moltitudine, altri camion carichi di operai, uomini e donne, che sventolavano bandiere quali tricolori e quali rosse. […] C’erano anche molti soldati sbracati e senza armi, che si abbracciavano, le facce stolide di contadini illuminate da una speranza inebriata” Moravia, Il conformista, 316. 38 “Niente … è l’abitudine di andare in piazza e chiamare qualcuno.” Ibid., 320.

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the gardens at night. Giulia experiences an irrepressible desire to make love to her husband, both to be reassured and to experience the inebriating sensation of being capable of thinking of something other than what is happening. While she clings excitedly to her husband, a male figure appears who shines a flashlight on them. He recognizes Marcello and calls him by name. Then he moves away. Marcello starts to run. It is Lino the chauffeur, he is not dead: Marcello is overcome with a primitive and dismal fear: he only manages to say “Because I believed you were dead many consequences followed. But you weren’t dead.”39 Lino confesses he has gotten married, but after his wife’s death he has started acting as previously: he is a night-watchman in gardens full of handsome young men. Marcello tells the man, almost a ghost with a flashlight in the night, a being simultaneously present and evanescent, that he destroyed his life and innocence, and Lino replies: “But all of us, Marcello, have been innocent … was I also not innocent at one time? And we all lose our innocence, one way or the other … this is normality.”40 Giulia’s voice interrupts this dialogue in the dark. Lino’s words allow the idea to ferment in Marcello’s mind that one way or the other, with one experience or the other, innocence has to be lost in any case, and even had he not met the driver, even had he not shot him, he would have lost his innocence and then desired to reacquire it: “Normality was precisely this frantic and vain desire to justify one’s life ensnared by original sin and not the deceptive mirage he had chased from the day he had met Lino.”41 This passage contains the most obvious demonstration of the words Moravia writes to his aunt Amelia: his novel is a tragedy, without good people or bad, but only characters who each have their own different destiny. Marcello’s fate is like Oedipus’: tragedy is rigorous and always reveals a human condition, or the human condition; Marcello is a conformist who does all that he does in order to first understand what innocence consists of, only to then reacquire an original normalcy, following the myth of the uncorrupted and pure origin, but between the illusions of myth and conformism we find the human being with his suffering and impotence when facing fate. It is

39

“Ma dall’averti creduto morto, sono venute tante conseguenze. E tu invece non eri morto.” Ibid., 323. 40 “Ma tutti, Marcello, siamo stati innocenti … non sono forse stato innocente anch’io? E tutti la perdiamo la nostra innocenza, in un modo o nell’altro … è la normalità.” Ibid., 324. 41 “la normalità era proprio questo affannoso quanto vano desiderio di giustificare la propria vita insidiata dalla colpa originaria e non il miraggio fallace che aveva inseguito fin dal giorno del suo incontro con Lino.” Ibid., 325.

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from this complex and unpredictable relationship between reality, human beings and fate that the tragic inevitably emerges. The novel’s conclusion cannot but reflect this incredibly tangled condition, which not even Alexander’s sword could solve: nothing remains for Marcello, Giulia and Elsa (the girl born from their union) to undertake, but a salvific journey, towards a distant elsewhere. They are going towards Tagliacozzo, abandoning Rome, no longer secure, but during their trip an airplane is above their car, “among the noise [Marcello] recognized the thick hail of machine-gun fire and understood the airplane was behind him and would soon be above him: the motor’s noise paralleled the road, like it straight and inflexible. Then the metallic noise was on top of him, deafening, just an instant, and then it moved away.”42 Marcello has been hit, he barely manages to say “let’s get out”, open the door, and not hearing either the girl’s or Giulia’s voices, to murmur in prayer: “God, may they not have been shot … they are innocent,”43 he once more feels the airplane above him, which then moves away in the fiery sky, leaving the night and silence behind. The Conformist’s conclusion is perfectly attuned to the tragedy, and confirms its modulation and disposition: Marcello, Giulia and Elsa are innocent, innocent are the human beings struck by the tragic, an irremovable part of existence, all deaths occur in innocence. Moravia’s catharsis is in the registering of the absurd, which cannot be avoided, the fate of life is tied to the fate of death. At the moment in which Marcello reaches a full understanding of himself and his mistakes, looking at a flower in the underbrush and reflecting on the “voluntary humility of an impossible adjustment to a fallacious normality [that did] not hide anything but inverted pride and self-esteem,”44 his fate is realized by means of the realization of this overturning: normality consists in the loss of innocence, abnormality in the obsessive recuperation and maintenance of innocence. He is distraught by the loss of innocence, though he has committed no crime, nor collaborated in the commission of any; when he instead collaborates in the crime(s) of fascism and specifically that involving Prof. Quadri, he recognizes himself as a normal person, and 42

“tra il rumore, [Marcello] distinse il grandinare fitto della mitragliera che sparava e capì che l’aeroplano gli era dietro e presto gli sarebbe stato sopra: il fracasso del motore era in asse con la strada, come questa diritto e inflessibile. Poi il fragore metallico gli fu sopra, assordante, un solo momento, e quindi si allontanò.” Ibid., 334. 43 “Dio, fa che non siano colpite … loro sono innocenti.” Ibid., 335. 44 “umiltà volontaria di un adeguamento impossibile ad una normalità fallace [che] non nasconde[va] se non orgoglio e amor proprio capovolti.” Ibid., 332.

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believes he has found a way of preserving his normality. Marcello’s death generates the sincerest feeling of compassion in the reader, both due to the situation in which it occurs, and for that necessary quality of innocence invoked and evoked for wife and daughter, the tragic and the tragedy are fulfilled in the sharing of a feeling of an almost inhuman principle of justice, which both contradicts and merges with a most human emotional state, oriented to conceive the absurdity of events with the most dramatic pity. Bertolucci’s film does not conceive of either the tragic or tragedy, since the oneiric atmosphere in which the film was conceived and shot weakens the tragic element to the point of complete neutralization as compared to the novel, allowing both the protagonist and the historical events alluded to to float in this pitilessly ridiculous magma; it is however in its conclusion that the farcical key to the whole is most clearly captured. Marcello, in a medium long shot, has his daughter, very blond and angelic, recite the Ave Maria, with both of them on her small bed: father and daughter, one facing the other, with the backdrop of a blue wall with some clouds which remind one of the most poetical Magrittes, their hands clasped, as in a surreal and grotesque altar piece, while in the background a telephone rings. Behind him a large, luminous, radio is on, which only a few moments earlier had broadcast the news of Mussolini’s resignation, and while the announcement was repeated, the girl was walking around the room with her mother’s hat and fox stole, while the camera showed the refugees with their belongings, an old man caressing a chicken, almost dazed. Giulia appears and tells Marcello Italo has called, and he then puts the girl to bed. Italo waits for Marcello in the usual place, a long time has passed. Giulia implores Marcello to be careful: she reminds him of the Quadri episode, telling him that it was Anna who had warned her that he worked for the political police. The sequence is very expertly constructed: everything is shot as if from the exterior, with an almost Giotto-like technique. Up to the point when husband and wife are in a narrow corridor facing one another, with the camera moving closer, capturing close-ups of both of them in the frame. Marcello fears nothing as he believes he only did his duty. He leaves to see how a dictatorship falls. An angel is framed on Ponte Sant’Angelo: it holds a large placard, with Mussolini’s initials, on which the following is written: monster, unique, shameless, without, honor, thief, international, born, infamous; this is where Italo is waiting for him: while his friend is calling him, Marcello only stops an instant, and remarks that his friend is still wearing a little fascist badge. With a close-up of a hand that detaches it from the chest and throws it to the ground, the shot shifts, and one sees a sidecar that is dragging a

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large bronze head of Mussolini over the bridge’s paving stones. Then one passes in front of the Teatro di Marcello, where prostitutes are gathered, children are playing, refugees are gathered under the arches, a man and a very young boy are talking on some steps: the man is trying to seduce the boy, talking of food and handing him a cigarette, and in the same shot Marcello and Italo appear walking along the theater’s curved outer wall. Marcello recognizes Lino’s voice and attacks him, asking him to remember some dates, perfectly etched in his memory, but not in Lino’s. “What were you doing? I must know … I must know”45 Marcello yells, and while Lino runs off, he shouts after him “Killer. Killer. He killed a man. A political exile.”46 In the shot there remain the very young seduced boy, an incredulous Italo, and Marcello who shouts and points in the direction Lino has run away: “October 15th 1938, professor Luca Quadri. Luca Quadri and his wife, Anna Quadri. He is a pederast. Fascist. His name is Pasqualino Semirama. Pasqualino Semirama.”47 When Italo invites him to keep quiet, Marcello shouts “fascist” at him, and in that moment one can hear a voice-over of voices of people arriving, and men and women, carrying a flag and singing the national anthem Avanti popolo, slowly enter the frame, and move on somewhat confusedly. Italo mixes with them. Marcello remains alone, watching, while everyone has moved away, he sits next to a flame, where previously Lino had engaged in the seductive actions towards the young boy, who is now lying down, completely naked, on a bed not far away: he is making a record player play, and he turns flirtatiously towards Marcello, who looks at him curious and interested. There is no compassion: the spectator is instead left with a profound unease, mixed with a nauseating conviction that the conformist is irredeemable and that the condition of conformism is a chameleon-like, insuperable, existential condition, exhibiting the lack of meaning of all categories of value, enticed by the salvation of compromise: the simple observation of a mass of Italians, identical to those described by Moravia in the article devoted to Folla e demagoghi (Crowd and Demagogues), crosses the arches and the circular walls of the Teatro di Marcello, ready to recite the new part of antifascists, democrats, saviors of the Fatherland. Ridiculously and farcically Marcello, in the film, accuses Pasqualino and remains to observe the naked boy on his bed, pleased with himself, while 45

“Cosa facevi? Io devo sapere … devo sapere”. “Assassino. Assassino. Ha assassinato un uomo. Un esiliato politico”. 47 “Il 15 ottobre 1938, il professor Quadri. Luca Quadri e sua moglie, Anna Quadri. È un pederasta. Fascista. Il suo nome è Pasqualino Semirama. Pasqualino Semirama”. The last three quotations are transcriptions from the movie, min. 1.40.00-1.40.20. 46

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Italo is swallowed up by the crowd, he also, after having thrown the fascist badge away, an antifascist. The psychological dynamics of conformism triggers the pantomime of a hypocritical, Tartuffe-like, pharisaical normality, which knowingly winks towards moral and social monism, with the intent of annihilating the contrasts, the differences, the conflicts by means of imitative and repetitive processes. What Bertolucci confronts with his The Conformist is not so much the search for the reasons why the protagonist acts in a specific fashion starting from some indisputable prejudicial conditions, as had unequivocally been the case with Moravia, who realizes an implacable and painful itinerarium mentis et cordis into the causes of conformism, as it is the realization of the radicalization of a psychic condition, an ineradicable mode of being, which finds its concrete expression in the opportunism and indifference, but above all the monism, of the conformist. It is therefore an ethics in crisis which in Moravia’s conformist tragically leads to the death of men and women, not only good, not only bad, but which is transformed in Bertolucci’s conformist into the awareness of an ethics of crisis, in which no one dies, either bad or good, but everyone is saved in the undecidable metamorphosis of good into evil and vice versa. Tragic fate acts according to its inscrutable but peremptory and draconian laws, there is no way one can derive a cause-effect law from the responsibilities of human action, however fate does not exonerate humans from the responsibility for their actions, and it is for this reason that Bertolucci abandons tragedy in favor of farce. On the occasion of the film’s restoration, during a public event in Bologna, the director stated: The Conformist is above all the story of a man who feels different from all others, therefore all his energy and his desires are directed towards a conformism, a being like everyone else. We are in 1938 and more or less everyone else is a fascist, and he wants to be the perfect fascist. We thought that the film, the story, took place in 1938, but in reality it could have very well have been adapted to that moment, 1970 in other words. I ask myself if, strangely, it could not also be readapted to our present.48

48

“Il conformista soprattutto è la storia di un uomo che si sente diverso da tutti gli altri, quindi tutta la sua energia e i suoi desideri sono tesi verso un conformarsi, essere come tutti gli altri. Siamo nel ’38 più o meno e tutti gli altri sono fascisti, e lui vuole essere il fascista perfetto. Insomma, pensavamo che il film, la storia avveniva nel ’38, ma in realtà avrebbe potuto benissimo adattarsi a quel momento, cioè nel 1970. Mi domando se stranamente non potrebbe essere anche riadattabile al nostro presente.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2f1tVg1SAk.

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Works Cited Bertolucci, Bernardo. La mia magnifica ossessione. Scritti, ricordi, interventi (1962-2010). Milan: Garzanti, 2010. —. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2f1tVg1SAk. Corner, Paul. “Consenso e coercizione. L’opinione popolare nella Germania nazista e nell’Italia fascista.” Contemporanea, 3 (2003): 429. Moravia, Alberto. Folla e demagoghi, in Impegno controvoglia. Milan: Bompiani, 2008. —. Il conformista, in Opere/3. Romanzi e racconti 1950-1959. Vol. I. Milan: Bompiani, 2004.

CHAPTER SEVEN NAZI-FASCIST ECHOES IN FILMS FROM WWII TO THE PRESENT FULVIO ORSITTO

Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and Vichy France have been the subject of numerous films in their respective countries. But none of these regimes have achieved the kind of global recognisability enjoyed by what I call the fascist imaginary in postfascist cinema, that is, the feelings, attitudes, and beliefs by nonfascists about Nazism/Fascism as a historical period, political ideology, form of dictatorship, and social, cultural, and aesthetic phenomenon. […] the fascination with Fascism is inseparable from its long history and unique status as a filmic fantasy.1

Preface The unique status enjoyed by Nazism/Fascism as a filmic fantasy— acknowledged by Sabine Hake’s opening quotation—encourages analyses of the aforementioned Nazi-Fascist “imaginary in post fascist cinema” from a cultural perspective, even more than from a historical one. Indeed, as one can already realize from Hollywood and British comedies made during WWII (consistently inhabited by cartoonish Nazis), and as further evidenced by Nazisploitation movies popular in the 1970s and by more recent filmic and televisual/web-based productions,2 historical accuracy is definitely not the lens through which these motion pictures should be examined.3 As confirmed by Daniel H. Magilow, in “films that conflate the 1

Sabine Hake, Screen Nazis. Cinema, History, and Democracy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 4. 2 Consider, for instance, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and the Dead Snow saga, but also the recent Amazon original series The Man on the High Castle. 3 As a matter of fact, as Tony Barta points out, if “Film cowboys, tycoons, or femmes fatales aren’t generally expected to resemble the stockmen, corporate executives, or real women one might actually have encountered in the past—why

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history of World War II and the Holocaust or that invent new and fantastic histories altogether, Nazis are more caricature than character. In the logic of the Nazisploitation film, all Germans are Nazis, all Nazis are members of the SS, and all members of the SS are war criminals, medical experimenters and sexual sadists.”4 Following Sabine Hake’s suggestion, a category through which one could achieve new insights on the Nazi-Fascist imaginary in post fascist cinema is that of ‘affect’, intended as “the ability of feature films to affect someone or something and to produce affects beyond contents and meanings.”5 Affect theory6 has helped Cultural Studies analyze the rapport between the political and the historical, assessing “the contribution of feelings, emotions, and affects to ongoing transformations of the public sphere.”7 However, if “feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal,”8 in the analysis of the Nazi-Fascist imaginary one must limit the usage of the term ‘affect’ to “the power of film, as a fictional construct and aesthetic phenomenon, to produce democratic subjectivities through the antagonistic, if not dialectic, terms inscribed in the friend-enemy distinction.”9 Moreover, as Brian Massumi reminds us, since ideologies no longer provide master narratives, “affect holds a key to rethinking postmodern power after ideology.”10 Speaking of

should it be any different for Nazis?” Tony Barta, “Film Nazis: The Great Escape,” in Screening the Past. Film and the Representation of History, ed. Tony Barta (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1998), 128. 4 Daniel H. Magilow, “Introduction. Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in LowBrow Cinema and Culture,” in Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture, ed. Daniel H. Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Elizabeth Bridges (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 2. 5 Hake, Screen Nazis, 4. As acknowledged by Hake herself, her phrasing and usage of this category is inspired by Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as “and ability to affect and be affected” in his foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvii. 6 For more detailed analyses on Affect Theory, consult Patricia Tiniceto Clough and Jean Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and Melissa Greg and Gregory Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 7 Hake, Screen Nazis, 19. 8 Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php Retrieved on February 20th 2016. 9 Hake, Screen Nazis, 20. 10 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 42.

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the already mentioned enemy-friend association, the affective dimensions of this binary relationship “are in full evidence already on the level of characterization and character engagement”11 and, as Sabine Hake puts it: In acting out the possibility of a life outside consensus or compromise, the Nazis on the screen allow us to control and preserve the threat of their otherness; therein lies the enduring appeal of those we ‘love to hate’. At the same time, the Nazis rarely acquire the status of fully developed characters; they appear primarily as stereotypical villains, clichéd madmen, and voiceless, faceless extras.12

In terms of relationships between characters, in almost all filmic narratives portraying Nazism, the enemy’s (i.e.: Nazis’) total lack of psychological interiority corresponds to the friend’s (i.e.: protagonist’s) proclamation of narrative agency.13 Hence, Nazis have been (and, arguably, still are) consistently relegated to the role of monodimensional deuteragonists in the whole Nazi-Fascist imaginary emerging from post fascist cinema. In order to discuss the myriad of Nazi characters emerging in filmic narratives since WWII, the present essay proposes a division of such a vast corpus of examples into three phases. The first one corresponding to the period between WWII and the late 1960s, the second to the period between the 1970s and the early 1980s, and the third one from the late 1980s to the present.

The Nazi-Fascist Imaginary: From WWII to the Late 1960s From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, the cinematic Nazi-Fascist imaginary is inhabited almost exclusively by stereotypical depictions of Nazi (many) and Fascist (few) characters informed by three kinds of perspectives: the mocking attitude (prevalent in the 1940s but, occasionally, resurfacing in other decades and medias as well), the rehabilitating outlook (visible in a handful of 1950s films that tend to 11

Hake, Screen Nazis, 21. Ibid. 13 The binary opposition between enemy-friend is strengthened and facilitated by the intuitive and stark opposition between monodimensional enemies (such as the Nazis on screen) and protagonists (friends) implicitly linked to a democratic subjectivity that “finds its most convincing manifestations in the defense of love and marriage, the involvement in families and communities, and the adherence to moral values and ethical principles in everyday life.” Ibid. 12

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portray Germans as the last bastion against the Communist threat), and the ‘perverting’ approach (launched by Hollywood films of the 1940s, taken up by Rossellini’s so-called War Trilogy and, finally, incorporated and further explored in the Nazisploitation genre of the 1970s).14 In the 1940s Nazis appearing on the big screen were serving primarily one purpose: representing the anti-democratic Other. During this period of time the mocking attitude towards the Third Reich (and, on a smaller 14

For a more detailed analysis of the Nazisploitation subgenre one must consider book-length studies such as Daniel H.Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Elizabeth Bridges, eds., Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2012); Marcus Stiglegger, Sadiconazista. Faschismus und Sexualität im Film (Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 1999); and Maartje Abbenhuis and Sara Buttsworth, eds. Monsters in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture (Westport: Praeger, 2010). Furthermore, one must mention the academic relevance of essays such as: Guido Vitiello, “L’erotica di Auschwitz. Una genealogia della ‘Nazi-Sexploitation’ italiana,” in La Shoah nel cinema italiano, ed. Andrea Minuz and Guido Vitiello, 85-101 (Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2013); Mikel J. Koven, “The Film You Are About to See Is Based on Documented Fact: Italian Nazi Sexploitation Cinema,” in Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945, ed. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, 19-31 (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004). Finally, numerous relevant observations on the development of this subgenre can be found in writings like Alison M. Moore, Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism, and Historical Teleology (London: Lexington Books, 2016), principally, 167-195; Valentina Pisanty, Abusi di memoria (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2012), mainly, 53-57; the already mentioned Hake, Screen Nazis (above all in Chaper 4, entitled “Between Art and Exploitation: Fascism and the Politics of Sexuality in 1970s Italian Cinema,” 128-158); Florian Evers, Vexierbilder des Holocaust. Ein Versuch zum historischen Trauma in der Populärkultur (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2011), particularly, 51-74; Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2011), especially, 139-154; Andrea Minuz, La Shoah e la cultura visuale. Cinema, memoria, spazio pubblico (Rome: Bulzoni, 2010), mostly, 66-71; Lucy Rapaport, “Holocaust Pornography: Profaning the Sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,” in Monsters in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture, ed. Maartje Abbenhuis and Sara Buttsworth (Westport: Praeger, 2010), specifically, 101-130; and in Jack Hunter, Sex, Death, Swastikas. Nazi Sexploitation Ssinema (London: Creation Books, 2010)—which, even though does not qualify as an academic publication, offers a very useful overview of films, literature, and comics related to Nazisploitation. In terms of reference works, one should also consider two essays by Damiano Garofalo: “La Shoah nel cinema italiano: una ricognizione bibliografica,” and “Il cinema italiano e la Shoah: una filmografia (1945-2013),” both in La Shoah nel cinema italiano, eds. Andrea Minuz and Guido Vitiello (Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2013).

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scale, towards Italian Fascism) emerged as the predominant one when portraying German and Italian characters. Although the first anti-Nazi film satire is unquestionably the one provided by the Three Stooges in You Nazty Spy! (Jules White, 1940), it is a film released the same year (but nine months later) that critics and scholars alike recognize as the archetype of such a tendency: Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). As Robert Fyne reminds us, Chaplin’s film “caricatured the New Order right down to the Fuehrer’s mustachioed appearance. Every mannerism of the Third Reich was mimicked. Hitler was lampooned as a clown, a buffoon, a comical figure; his personality defects included insecurity, vanity, and plain stupidity.”15 Chaplin’s portrayal of a fascist dictator named Hynkel (ruler of a fictitious state called Tomania) reduces the horror of the Third Reich “to buffoonery and slapstick” and, in the bouncing balloon sequence, reaches the “reductio ad absurdum.”16 After Chaplin, many other American comedians denounced NaziFascism in a frivolous way. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, for instance, joined three service branches (the Army, Navy and Air Corps) with a trio of pictures directed in 1941 by Arthur Lubin—Buck Privates, In the Navy, Keep 'Em Flying—that were “mere vehicles for needed recruitment drives.”17 Similarly, Bob Hope performed his military duty in Caught in the Draft (David Butler, 1941), “a B-comedy that attempted to explain the need for conscription.”18 Many other films employed elements of buffoonery to depict German officers. In both Invisible Agent (Edwin L. Marin, 1942)19 and To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942), for instance, Nazis snap their heels together at the mere mention of Hitler’s name. In Desperate Journey (Raoul Walsh, 1942) Nazi officers are depicted “as incompetent buffoons”;20 while in Hotel Berlin (Peter Godfrey, 1945) the protagonist (learning how to impersonate a Gestapo officer for espionage purposes), is told by his ‘teacher’: “now leave me as a German officer 15 Robert Fyne, The Hollywood Propaganda of WWII (Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1997), 24. The archetypal value of Chaplin’s film extends to the depiction of Italian Fascism as well. In fact, Fyne continues his analysis reminding us of a secondary character mocking the Duce by saying: “Adding to the caustic, ad hominem bite, was the inclusion of Italian dictator Mussolini, called Napaloni.” Ibid. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Ibid. 19 In this film, loosely based on a H.G. Wells novel, the invisible man’s grandson spies on Nazi Germany. 20 Fyne, The Hollywood Propaganda, 76.

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would: click your heels and kiss my hand.”21 On rare occasions the Nazi officer is more dangerous than comical, such as in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). Nonetheless, although the Axis commandant portrayed by Conrad Veidt in this film is certainly not a buffoon, he still represents another example of a monodimensional and “sweltering, heel-clicking martinet who demanded obedience from his subordinates.”22 It is not surprising that such cartoonish depictions of Nazis23 would recur in Looney Tunes cartoons produced by Warner Brothers—i.e., The Ducktators (Norman McCabe, 1942),24 and Daffy. The Commando (Isadore Freleng, 1943)25— and in some of Walt Disney’s cartoons as well—such as, for instance, Der Fuehrer’s Face/aka Donald Duck in Nutzi Land (Jack Kinney, 1943).26 This tendency to portray Nazi and Fascist 21 Ibid. One of the biggest contributions to the reinforcement of the Nazi officer stereotype was offered by actor Sig Rumann, who portrayed the “comical, inept, explosive, heel-clicking, arm-saluting Nazi” (Ibid., 77) in fourteen motion pictures: Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939), Four Sons (Archie Mayo, 1940), Comrade X (King Vidor, 1940), So Ends Our Night (John Cromwell, 1941), World Premier (Ted Tetzlaff, 1941), To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942), Remember Pearl Harbor (Joseph Santley, 1942), Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen (James P. Hogan, 1942), Berlin Correspondent (Eugene Forde, 1942), Desperate Journey (Raoul Walsh, 1942), China Girl (Henry Hathaway, 1942), Tarzan Triumphs (William Thiele, 1943), They Came to Blow Up America (Edward Ludwig, 1943), and The Hitler Gang (John Farrow, 1944). As Fyne reminds us, Rumann “usually ended up with egg on his face in his farcical routines,” (Ibid., 78) reinforcing the cartoon-like aspects of his performances. 22 Ibid., 79. 23 Speaking of cartoonish Nazi-Fascist characters, one cannot avoid mentioning that this kind of monodimensional portrayal is also present in some American and British TV series. Although it often encountered audiences’ disapproval—consider American TV show Campo 44 (a 1967 NBC production taking place in an Italian P.O.W. camp during World War II) and, more recently, British sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home! (a 1990 British Satellite Broadcasting production that spoofed American sitcoms set in the 1950s, and featured Hitler himself, struggling to get along with his Jewish neighbors), both canceled after only one episode—this mocking attitude was also, arguably, the source of Hogan’s Heroes success, making this CBS production (set in a German P.O.W. camp during World War II) last from 1965 to 1971. 24 Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522qtqjSagM (retrieved February 20, 2016). 25 Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFdG8lZ4PJw (retrieved February 20, 2016). 26 Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn20oXFrxxg (retrieved February 20, 2016).

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officers as buffoons emerges also in many British comedies made during WWII. Examples of this trend are some films starring popular British comedians of the time, such as Will Hay, George Formby, and the socalled Crazy Gang (a group of entertainers including Bud Flanagan, Chesney Allen, Jimmy Nervo, Teddy Knox, Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold). A case in point is the war comedy The Goose Steps Out (Basil Dearden and Will Hay, 1942), which—besides mocking Nazis with its very title (a parody of the Nazi dynamic ceremonial marching, also called goose-stepping)—features Will Hay’s character substituting a German spy who looks exactly like him, in order to steal details of a Nazi secret weapon. The plot of Gasbags (Walter Forde and Marcel Varnel, 1941) is very similar, but in this case members of the Crazy Gang, after being carried to Nazi Germany and before returning to England with a stolen weapon, impersonate Hitler himself. Speaking of the German dictator, the comedy/musical war film Let George Do It (Marcel Varnel, 1940— released in the United States as To Hell With Hitler), features a dream sequence in which George Formby’s character even manages to punch Hitler, providing the audience with what Jeffrey Richards calls “the visual encapsulation of the people’s war, with the English Everyman flooring the Nazi Superman.”27 At the end of the war, once the atrocities of the death camps were uncovered, one might expect that Nazis would be treated more seriously. Indeed, as Tony Barta reminds us, “the imagined historical reality of Nazism became a historical reality in its own right, brewing potently in that cultural and psychological realm where imagination and ideology work their way on each other.”28 However, in western culture “the need to pursue Nazism into its history, to understand it in context, was overridden” and at times Hollywood productions seemed to be guided by the need “to rehabilitate the German fighting man, again the front line defense against the Red Peril.”29 This second kind of attitude in portraying Nazis in motion pictures emerges in films like The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (Henry Hathaway, 1951) and The Desert Rats (Robert Wise, 1953)—with James Mason playing Field Marshal Erwin von Rommel in both films— but also in The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1958). There is, however, a third more significant (and problematic) tendency that surfaces in the mid 1940s, and that consists in representing sadism in a 27 Jeffrey Richards, “Formby, George (1904–1961),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/33/101033205/ (retrieved February 20, 2016). 28 Barta, “Film Nazis”, 136. 29 Ibid.

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specifically Nazi context (an attitude that paves the way for the Nazisploitation genre that will emerge in the 1970s). In Hitler’s Madman (Douglas Sirk, 1943), for instance, the sadistic treatment of women is particularly clear in a scene in which a Nazi officer “terrorizes a group of female students at Prague University by selecting some of their number for the brothels on the Eastern front, during the course of which one young woman leaps to her death from a window.”30 In Fritz Lang’s earlier version of the same story, Hangmen Also Die (1942), the same character is depicted with even more diabolical traits. As Jean-Luis Comolli and François Gere emphasize: The character is designed by the fiction to contrive within a single scene, to convene and concentrate in his person, through his body, his face, his attitude, the signs of a radical negativity, everything necessary to make him instantly and externally hateful to the spectator. This body, this voice, these eyes bear death, castration, abnormality, sexual ambiguity. No hint of amiability; quite the contrary, in fact something equivocal, venomous, petty even in his extremes of cruelty […] A body that is sexless and ageless, man-woman-child; but for that reason, in addition to the fact of his authority, an erotic body.31

As Julian Petley reminds us,32 other examples of sadistic Nazis can be found in American productions such as Till We Meet Again (Edmund Goulding, 1940),33 Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943),34 The Cross of Lorraine (Tay Garnett, 1943),35 Hitler’s Children (Edward Dmytryk, 1943),36 Enemy of Women (Alfred Zeisler, 1944),37 and Sealed Verdict (Lewis Allen, 1948).38 Outside Hollywood “the sexual dimension of Nazism”39 is 30

Julian Petley, “Nazi Horrors. History, Myth, Sexploitation,” in Horror Zone, ed. Ian Conrich (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 213. 31 Jean-Luis Comolli and François Gere, “Two Fictions Concerning Hate,” in Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look, ed. Stephen Jenkins (London: British Film Institute, 1981), 130. 32 For a more detailed discussion of sadistic Nazis in Hollywood cinema of the 1940s see Petley, “Nazi Horrors,” 214. 33 Where a Nazi officer intimidates a nun saying he will send her to a military brothel. 34 Where a Nazi states that “the tears of a young girl make the salt of the earth.” 35 Which shows Nazi guards whipping prisoners chained to a wall. 36 Which indulges in a flagellation scene in which we are shown a woman sadistically tortured by Nazis. 37 A description of Goebbels’s oppressive treatment of women. 38 Which describes sexual degradation in the camps. 39 Petley, “Nazi Horrors,” 214.

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Figure 1 The Sadistic Nazi Commander and His Female Assistant Roma, città aperta (Open City—Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

explored by Roberto Rossellini in both Roma, città aperta (Open City, 1945) and Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, 1947) featuring, respectively, a sadistic Nazi commander and his female (lesbian) assistant, and a Nazi schoolteacher who is a pedophile. As a matter of fact, in Tony Barta’s view Rossellini is the first director explicitly “linking Nazism with sexual deviance”40 (or, at least, with what at the time was perceived as such)—a view shared, among others, by Ilian Avisar,41 Guido Vitiello,42 and Sabine Hake, who reiterates that the “implicit equation of normative heterosexuality and democratic subjectivity produced such problematic figures as the gay Gestapo chief and his lesbian co-conspirator in Roma, città aperta […] and the Nazi pedophile in Germania anno zero,” and

40

Barta, “Film Nazis,” 136. Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 157-158. 42 This scholar’s analysis of the infamous torture scene that takes place towards the end of Rossellini’s Open City does not fail to mention the presence of “un ufficiale nazista effemminato e la sua assistente sadica” [“an effeminate Nazi officer and his sadistic female assistant”—all translations from Italian to English in this essay are mine], effectively linking sadism and violence to a sexuality that does not conform to the heterosexual norm. Vitiello, “L’erotica di Auschwitz,” 92. 41

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adding that “Il generale della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959) addresses the dynamics of Nazism and antifascism in similar ambiguous terms.”43 In the 1960s, the connection between sexuality and Nazism is further explored in West German films like Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General—Helmut Käutner, 1955) and Lebensborn (Ordered to Love— Werner Klingler, 1961), but also in Italian productions such as Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1960),44 and in American ones like The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1964)45 and The Night of the Generals (Anatole Litvak, 1967).46 It is however in 1969 that the connection between Nazism and sexuality (often deviating from the heterosexual norm) begins manifesting itself in a 43

Hake, Screen Nazis, 134. Actually, Pontecorvo’s film does not represent the Holocaust in a morbid way. Nonetheless, given that prostitution is part of the protagonist’s descent to hell— albeit implicitly, and without any kind of exploitative intention—this motion picture contributes to the association between sexuality and Nazism. Moreover, as Roberto Lasagna reminds us, in spite of being an unquestionably auteurist film, Kapò was criticized for associating spectacle and Holocaust by (among others) Jacques Rivette, who condemns it in a famous article published in 1961 by Les Cahiers du Cinéma—see Roberto Lasagna, Cinema e spettri del Terzo Reich (Piombino: Edizioni Il Foglio, 2015), 38. Although Pontecorvo’s film portrays a young Jewish girl who “prostitutes herself to the Nazis in order to ensure her survival”—Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 51—one cannot avoid noticing that the protagonist is not denied a certain sense of agency, a characteristic that distinguishes this film from later (and more problematic) auteurist films associating sexuality and Nazism. A case in point is Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter—Liliana Cavani, 1974), whose female protagonist “lacks a sense of agency; she does not choose (hence one cannot find fault with her) but instead is […] chosen.” Ibid. Kapò certainly suffers from being a hybrid product, that is, a film inspired by the attempt to portray the Holocaust in a realistic way but, at the same time, a film that has to deal with the need to be marketable (a need that will force the director to include certain concessions in anticipation of audience reactions). To use Carlo Celli’s words: “The main narrative inconsistency in Kapò is the inclusion of a love story in the film.”—Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 37. Furthermore, according to Celli, “Since Pontecorvo attempted a realistic recreation of the Holocaust, Kapò ultimately suffers from comparison with documentaries from the Allied armies” and “with Alain Resnais’ use of postwar Allied army documentary footage of liberated camps in Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1955).” Ibid., 35. 45 Which features a flashback scene showing a concentration camp brothel. 46 In which a sadistic Nazi general (played by Peter O’Toole) has to fend off an investigation that could reveal he tortured and killed a prostitute. 44

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twofold pattern that would characterize the films produced during the following decade, and differentiate once and for all pure exploitation movies from auteurist films (which, even though they flirted more or less openly with exploitation—to the scandal of some audiences—were, at least, not produced for box office purposes only). The archetype for the latter category is undoubtedly La caduta degli Dei (The Damned— Luchino Visconti, 1969), a grand scale epic that “features child abuse, incest, rape and a homosexual orgy,”47 and that “made fascination with the imagery of Nazism more sexually fetishistic, and openly associated with sexual violence, than any previous film from a leading director, and it established a genre that other Italian filmmakers apparently could not resist.”48 The prototype of Nazisploitation movies was, on the other hand, Love Camp 7 (Lee Frost, 1969), the first exploitation film set in a Nazi camp and, at the same time, the precursor of the modern WIP (Women-InPrison) genre that emerged in the early 1970s.49 This soft core—as Robert Von Dassanowsky points out—is the first movie that “dared to mix sexploitation and Nazism in an attempt to bring the long tradition of Nazi 47

Marcus Stiglegger, “Cinema beyond Good and Evil? Nazi Exploitation in the Cinema of the 1970s and its Heritage,” in Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in LowBrow Cinema and Culture, ed. Daniel H. Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt and Elizabeth Bridges (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), 25. 48 Barta, “Film Nazis,” 137. 49 Among the most successful films within this subgenre (which was often intertwined with other subgenres as well) one must mention Women in Cages (Gerardo de Leon, 1971) and The Big Bird Cage (Jack Hill, 1972)—both of which made Pam Grier a recognizable name in exploitation films, helping her become the undisputed star of the blacksploitation subgenre—but also the Canadian production Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975)—which led Dyanne Thorne to play Ilsa in a couple of ‘legitimate’ sequels like Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (Don Edmonds, 1976) and Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (Jean LaFleur, 1977), and to star in another WIP/Nazisploitation movie like Greta - Haus ohne Männer (Greta: The Mad Butcher, a.k.a. Wanda, the Wicked Warden—Jesús Franco, 1977), which was later repackaged as an Ilsa movie (and titled Ilsa: The Wicked Warden), given the fans’ interest in a saga that, at the end of the decade, got close to having a fourth ‘official’ chapter (tentatively entitled Ilsa Meets Bruce Lee in the Devil's Triangle) which was never actually filmed. Finally, one must mention hybrids between WIP and Nazisploitation coming from France, such as Elsa Fräulein SS (Captive Women 4—Patrice Rhomm, 1977), Train spécial pour SS (Hitler’s Last Train, a.k.a. Captive Women 5: Mistresses of the 3rd Reich—Alain Payet, 1977) and Nathalie rescapée de l'enfer (Nathalie: Escape from Hell—Alain Payet, 1978); from Germany, like Helga, la louve de Stilberg (Helga, She Wolf of Spilberg— Patrice Rhomm, 1978); and, last but not least, from Italy, like La svastica nel ventre (Nazi Love Camp 27—Mario Caiano, 1977).

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adventures in men’s pulp fiction to the screen,”50 and give the ‘Stalag fiction’51 literary subgenre a filmic counterpart. 50

Robert Von Dassanowsky, “The Third Reich as Bordello and Pigsty: Between Neodecadence and Sexploitation in Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty,” in Nazisploitation!, ed. Magilow, Vander Lugt, and Bridges, 116. 51 The ‘Stalag fiction’ was a very popular Nazi exploitation literary subgenre from Israel, which prospered in the 1950s and early 1960s. After the Eichmann Trial (1962), it was banned by the Israeli government. A contraction of the German Stammlager, the word Stalag defines a subgenre that deeply exploits the connection between sexuality and Nazism. As Vitiello reminds us, “Gli Stalag raccontavano, in parte ispirandosi a riviste americane del decennio precedente (da cui prendevano le illustrazioni di copertina), storie di dominazione erotica, tortura e sadismo che coinvolgevano donne delle SS e soldati alleati nei campi tedeschi per prigionieri di guerra. Tra i personaggi non figuravano quasi mai deportati ebrei, e in ogni caso mai con ruoli di primo piano, ma i libri erano scritti in ebraico da autori israeliani sotto pseudonimi americani (in qualche caso perfino tedeschi), pubblicati da piccoli editori di Tel Aviv e consumati avidamente dagli adolescenti, che li leggevano di nascosto accanto alla letteratura ufficiale d’ispirazione sionista. Per quei giovani lettori, gli Stalag, furono un primo tentativo di fare i conti, per vie immaginarie, con gli orrori che emergevano dal processo e con i punti oscuri della loro storia familiare.” [“Stalag novels, somewhat drawing inspiration from American magazines of the previous decade (from which they would also take their book covers), told stories of erotic domination, torture and sadism that would involve SS women and Allied soldiers in German POW (prisor-of-war) camps. Even though there were very few Jews (and never in prominent roles) among the various characters, the novels were written in Hebrew by Israeli authors under American (and in some cases even German) pseudonyms, printed by small Tel Aviv publishers and avidly read by adolescents, alongside the official Zionist literature. For young readers, Stalag novels were the first attempt to come to terms, albeit in an imaginative and indirect way, with the horrors emerging from the trial and with gray areas of their family history.”] Vitiello, “L’erotica di Auschwitz,” 91. One of the most popular writers of Stalag fiction was Yehiel De-Nur, better known as Ka-Tsetnik. Born Yehiel Feiner, Ka-Tzetnik was a Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, whose novels were based on his time as a prisoner in the Auschwitz camp. As David Mikics underlines, his work tends to “blur the line between fantasy and actual events” and consists of “often lurid novel-memoirs,” shocking the reader “with grotesque scenes of torture, perverse sexuality, and cannibalism.” David Mikics, “Holocaust Pulp Fiction,” (19 April 2012), http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/97160/ka-tzetnik?all=1 (Retrieved on February 20th 2016). Moreover—as Guido Vitiello highlights stressing Ka-Tsetnik’s key role as precursor of the Nazisploitation genre—this author was the first to describe a concentration camp using “un insolito registro astrologico-fantascientifico” [“an unusual astrological and almost sci-fi approach”], portraying Auschwitz as “il pianeta delle ceneri” [“the planet of the ashes”]. Vitiello, “L’erotica di Auschwitz,” 88.

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Figure 2 Helmut Berger’s Drag Performance as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel La caduta degli Dei (The Damned—Luchino Visconti, 1969)

The Nazi-Fascist Imaginary: The Sexualization of the 1970s and the Italian Case Instead of maintaining the cordon sanitaire that separates the art films from the Nazisploitation films, I read both as part of the same discursive appropriation of Fascism, of which its sexualization is only the most visible manifestation. No longer distinguished based on bourgeois criteria of quality and taste, both types of films can be located more productively within a specifically European strategy of product differentiation, shared by the masterworks of auteurist filmmaking and the examples of Eurotrash or Eurosleaze that during the 1970s relied heavily on sexuality as a marker of cultural commodification and an instrument of political critique.52

In light of Sabine Hake’s previous quote, it seems appropriate to analyze the discursive appropriation of Nazi-Fascist symbols that takes 52

Hake, Screen Nazis, 133.

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place in both Nazisploitation and auteurist films in more depth. Susan Sontag, in her seminal 1974 essay entitled “Fascinating Fascism,” begins her analysis of this 1970s phenomenon by stressing that “Much of the imagery of far-out sex has been placed under the sign of Nazism. Boots, leather, chains, Iron Crosses on gleamings torsos, and swastikas, along with meat hooks and heavy motorcycles, have become the secret and most lucrative paraphernalia of eroticism,” and concluding her reasoning with a question: “Why has Nazi Germany, which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic?”53 Sontag’s answer lies in her belief that this decade marks the beginning of a re-eroticization of power of some sort, at least in sexual practices. Hence, in order to explain the connection between sexuality and Nazi-Fascism that has inhabited visual media (and especially film) since the 1940s, but that had become substantially more explicit in the 1970s, she highlights the similarities between certain sexual practices and totalitarianism,54 stating that: Between sado-masochism and Fascism there is a natural link, “Fascism is theatre”, as Genet said. As is sado-masochistic sexuality: to be involved in sado-masochism is to take part in a sexual theatre, a staging of sexuality. Regulars of sado-masochistic sex are expert customers and choreographers as well as performers, in a drama that is all the more exciting because it is forbidden to ordinary people.55

In the same years, Michel Foucault poses a similar question, but comes to a somewhat different conclusion. His analysis starts with the French philosopher asking himself: “How is it that Nazism, represented by shabby, pathetic, puritanical characters, laughably Victorian old maids, or at best smutty individuals—how has it now managed to become, in France, in Germany, in the United States, in all pornographic literature 53

Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 102. 54 More recently, a similar conclusion is reached by Italian scholar Giaime Alonge, who also begins by wondering: “Da dove nasce tutto questo? Perché la rappresentazione cinematografica e letteraria del nazismo, nelle sue forme alte come in quelle più basse, si è così strettamente intrecciata con il tema della perversione sessuale? [...] Tanto Hitler come persona, quanto l’ideologia da lui promossa, presentivano tratti di violenta sessuofobia.” [“Where does it all come from? Why filmic and literary representations of Nazism, in both high and lowbrow forms, are so intertwined with sexual perversions? […] Both Hitler and the ideology he promoted had violent traits of sexophobia”]. Quoted in Lasagna, Cinema e spettri, 43. 55 Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 103.

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throughout the world, the ultimate symbol of eroticism?”56 Foucault’s reasoning at first seems to confirm Sontag’s intuition about the reeroticization of power taking place in the 1970s. Afterwards, however, the conclusion reached by the French philosopher is that—as Sabine Hake reminds us—such a process occurs “in the realm of politics proper and not, as Sontag seems to suggest, only in sexual practices.”57 In the realm of cinema the hyper-sexualization of the Nazi-Fascist imaginary is evident especially in Italy, to the point that one may safely say that: No European cinema goes quite as far as the Italian one in compensating for the disappearance of the master narratives offered by cinema and ideology with the denunciatory equation of sexual and political deviancy and its almost compulsive reenactment across the aesthetic divide marked by the famous art films and the infamous exploitation films.58

In Italy, the sexualization of Nazi-Fascism started after 1968 and boomed during the 1970s, in a period of time that Robert Lumley— anticipating Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the state of exception59—calls Italy’s historical ‘state of emergency.’60 Hence, “the sexualization of Fascism occurred during a decade of civil unrest and political violence, mass strikes and demonstrations, and political kidnappings and assassinations referred to […] as anni di piombo.”61 As Danny Shipka recalls: Italy in the early ‘70s was a very different place from what it had been a decade earlier. Not only was the country in the midst of a recession, but negative social and political unrest was making Italy a violent place to live and work. Issues such as organized crime, drugs, terrorism, etc., began to resonate and swell in the country, contributing to an overall malaise in 56

Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” in Radical Philosophy 11 (Spring 1975): 27. 57 Hake, Screen Nazis, 129. 58 Ibid. 59 As Sabine Hike reminds us, “Both terms ‘state of emergency’ and ‘state of exception’, are translations of the German Ausnahmezustand.” Hake, Screen Nazis, 276. 60 For a more in-depth analysis of Italian cultural history during the 1960s and 1970s, see Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990), especially 271-336; and Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: society and Politics, 1943-1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), above all, 348-405. 61 Hake, Screen Nazis, 136.

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Given this peculiar socio-cultural context, some scholars talk about an Italian specificity in terms of Nazisploitation. Marcus Stiglegger even coined the term sadiconazista63 to define the proliferation of exploitative filmic narratives with generic Nazi-Fascist background in the Italian film industry. In his words: “Sadiconazista is a neologism referring to fictional Nazi exploitation pulp literature and cinema between the 1960s and the 1980s composed of the terms ‘sadism’, ‘con’ (with) and ‘Nazism’. Although marginal during these decades, the influence of sadiconazista stereotypes has proven highly influential in international cinema and pop culture up to today.”64 While the discursive appropriation of the Nazi-Fascist imaginary is visible in already mentioned Nazisploitation films produced in Europe, Canada and the United States (albeit habitually crossed with other subgenres such as WIP or Blackspoitation), the Italian film production of the late 1960s—beginning with Visconti’s La caduta degli Dei (The Damned, 1969)—and 1970s is characterized by the fact that the same ‘appropriation process’ is also clearly discernible in auteurist films, effectively showing the cultural diffusion of these Nazi-Fascist specters and simulacra in both low and high brow filmic products. As a consequence, from a mere sadiconazista perspective, one could juxtapose the analysis of films by Cavani, Wertmüller, and Pasolini to the discussion of films by Brass (who constitutes, in many regards, a sort of liaison between high and low brow Italian filmic products of this decade), or by Mattei, Batzella, Canevari, and the infamous Sergio Garrone. Speaking of auteurist films, in Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter— Liliana Cavani, 1974) “former documentarian Liliana Cavani builds on work from her previous documentary series on the Third Reich and tells the story of the fatal reunion of an SS man (Dirk Bogarde) and his former 62 Danny Shipka, Perverse Titillation. The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011), 111-112. 63 Speaking of Marcus Stiglegger’s writings, see Sadiconazista. Faschismus und Sexualität im Film (Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 1999); and, more recently, “Cinema beyond Good and Evil?,” 2012. 64 Stiglegger, “Cinema beyond Good and Evil?,” 24.

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victim (Charlotte Rampling) in the form of an amour fou, an unconditional ‘crazy love’ that has a long history in the conventions of European cinema.”65 Even though some scholars contended that Cavani “chose Nazism and the atrocities committed in the camps to investigate the dialectics of the male-female relationship in contemporary post Nazi society” what still remains problematic, in Elissa Mailänder’s opinion, “is the subjectivity with which Cavani portrays a sensuous torturer.”66 Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom—Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975), already discussed in great depth in Chapter V of this volume, is a complex art film about “the mechanism of power and production” and, ultimately, “about the fascist tendencies in Italy of the present day.”67 Finally, given its partial setting in a concentration camp, even Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties—Lina Wertmüller, 1975) can be included in a discussion on sexuality and Nazism, even though the director, in narrating the story of a Sicilian macho man who becomes a female SS officer’s ‘sex toy’, definitely “takes a more satirical slant.”68 As previously mentioned, Salon Kitty (Tinto Brass, 1976) is arguably “the crucial link between the original art-house or more ‘critical’ neodecadent genre and the hyperbolic degeneration of the Nazisploitation film.”69 Indeed, “Brass displays some intent to create critical filmmaking” but, while the director is trying to sell the audience “an exposé of the perversions of Nazism,” the main narrative is based on “a melodramatic love story that simply allows for more nudity and sex.”70 The numerous Nazisploitation movies produced in Italy during the last part of the decade offer an even more crude and extreme representation of torture and nudity. Among the most popular ones, one could start by mentioning a manifest copy of Salon Kitty entitled Casa privata per le SS (Private House of the SS Girls, a.k.a. SS Girls—Bruno Mattei, 1977) and then cite films indulging in torture and horrific scientific experiments like Le deportate della sezione speciale SS (SS Special Section Women—Rino Di Silvestro, 1976), KZ9. Lager di Sterminio (Women’s Camp 119—Bruno Mattei, 1977), and Kaput Lager. Gli ultimi giorni delle SS (Achtung! The Desert Tigers—Luigi Batzella, 1977). There are also numerous films featuring 65

Ibid., 25. Elissa Mailänder, “Meshes of Power: The Concentration Camp as pulp or Art House in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter,” in Nazisploitation!, ed. Magilow, Vander Lugt, and Bridges, 175. 67 Stiglegger, “Cinema beyond Good and Evil?,” 26. 68 Ibid. 69 Von Dassanowsky, “The Third Reich as Bordello and Pigsty,” 117. 70 Ibid. 66

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implausible love affairs like, for instance, Le lunghe notti della Gestapo (The Red Nights of the Gestapo—Fabio De Agostini, 1977) and L’ultima orgia del III Reich (Last Orgy of the Third Reich, a.k.a. Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler—Cesare Canevari, 1977); and a movie that shows a mutant created by an Ilsa-like Nazi scientist like La bestia in calore (The Beast in Heat, a.k.a. SS Hell Camp, a.k.a SS Experiment Camp 2—Luigi Batzella, 1977). Finally, there are also a couple of infamous films directed by Sergio Garrone, in which it is really hard to find redeeming qualities: Lager SS 5. L’inferno delle donne (Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur, a.k.a SS Experiment Camp, a.k.a SS Experiment Love Camp—Sergio Garrone, 1976) and SS Lager 5: L’inferno delle donne (SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell—Sergio Garrone, 1977). In conclusion, the manifestation of what Spanish philosopher Eduardo Subirats calls ‘totalitarian lust’71 in the 1970s ends up sexualizing the ‘political’ and, as a result, “the coupling of Fascism and sexuality becomes a means for acknowledging both the enduring attraction of fascism as a system of total control and the necessity for postfascist societies to contain this threat, namely, by identifying it with deviant sexuality.”72

Figure 3 Drag Queen Performing in Salon Kitty (Tinto Brass, 1976) 71

For a more detailed analysis of contemporary representations of the spectacle of totalitarian torture, see Eduardo Subirats, “Totalitarian Lust: From Salò to Abu Ghraib,” in South Central Review 24.1 (2007): 174-182. 72 Hake, Screen Nazis, 131.

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The Nazi-Fascist Imaginary: From the 1980s to the Present In contemporary culture, the Nazis have become such all purpose, shorthand signifiers for everything that is vile and depraved that they regularly feature as icons of the monstrous.73

Even though Nazisploitation films have essentially disappeared at the end of the 1970s—as Julian Petley’s previous quotation indicates—in the last three and a half decades Nazis have become recurring characters in many other genres. As a matter of fact, one can even notice a wider (and deeper) proliferation of Nazis on the big screen since, to use Tony Barta’s words, “The Raiders films, even more than the Hitler wave of the 1970s, might seem to mark the high point of the Great Escape: the escape of the Nazis from history into the movies.”74 Barta’s reflections on the fact that Nazism has often inhabited a kind of “fantasy made for the cinema”75 use Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) and, in general, the Nazis inhabiting the popular Indiana Jones saga to reflect upon the diffusion of Nazi imagery in contemporary popular (especially visual) culture.

Figure 4 Nazis vs the Ark Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) 73

Petley, “Nazi Horrors,” 205. Barta, “Film Nazis,” 138. 75 Ibid. 74

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As suggested by Julian Petley, since the 1980s numerous films began to play “upon the fantasy of the Nazis returning to dominate the world,” while others posited “their return at a more limited, local level.”76 Hence, following this twofold pattern, in recent times Nazis have inhabited Hollywood blockbusters such as Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004) and Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011), but also more auteurist films like Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)77 or Grindhouse-like movies like Horrors of War (Peter John Ross and John Whitney, 2006) and Werewolf Women of the SS (Rob Zombie, 2007)—a trailer for a fake Nazisploitation film included in Grindhouse (Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2009). Nazis have also become recurring figures in films hybridizing NaziFascist imagery with the zombie subgenre. The archetype of this new subgenre is Shock Waves (a.k.a. Almost Human—Ken Wiederhorn, 1977), whose plot is based on a crew of Totenkorp zombies wreaking havoc on an island off the US coast. This prolific subgenre includes movies like Night of the Zombies (Joel M. Reed, 1981), Le lac des morts vivants (Zombie Lake—Jean Rollin, 1981), La tumba de los muertos vivientes (Oasis of the Zombies—Jesús Franco, 1982) and, in more recent times, the Norwegian mini-saga Død snø (Dead Snow—Tommy Wirkola, 2009) and Død snø 2 (Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead—Tommy Wirkola, 2014). Nazi imagery has also returned to the Stalag environment—in Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (Keith J. Crocker, 2008)—and has also crossed into the Sci-Fi genre, giving birth to hybrid films like Nazis at the Center of the Earth (Joseph J. Lawson, 2012), Iron Sky (Timo Vuorensola, 2012) and, in the Italian context, to a grotesque spoof78 of Sci-Fi movies and Fascist rhetoric titled Fascisti su Marte (Fascists on Mars—Corrado Guzzanti and Igor Skofic, 2006). Finally, Nazi imagery has literally invaded the video game world,79 76

Petley, “Nazi Horrors,” 207. For futher analysis of Tarantino’s film consult Robert Von Dassanowsky, Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds’. A Manipulation of Metacinema (London and New York: Continuum, 2012). 78 For an interesting exploration of Nazi imagery in contemporary Web/Tv Series see Lara Gusatto, “Nazisti a New York e il futuro distopico nelle serie tv.” http://tvzap.kataweb.it/news/143671/nazisti-a-new-york-il-futuro-distopico-nelleserie-tv/?ref=HRERO-1. (Retrieved on February 20th 2016). 79 For a more detailed discussion of Nazi imagery and video games see Michael Fuchs, “Of Blitzkrieg and Hardcore BDSM: Revisiting Nazi Sexploitation Camps,” in Nazisploitation!, ed. Magilow, Vander Lugt, and Bridges; and Dennis Scimeca, “The Controversial World of Nazi Video Games.” http://www.salon.com/2014/04/12/the_controversial_world_of_nazi_video_games/ . (Retrieved on February 20th 2016). 77

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permeated a number of hardcore BDSM features80—like Dr. Mengele (2005) Gestapo (2006) and Gestapo 2 (2006)—and infiltrated some webbased TV series like Amazon’s original The Man in the High Castle (2016) proving that, indeed, “Nazisploitation imagery is nearly omnipresent in today’s mediascape.”81

Works Cited Abbenhuis Maartje, and Sara Buttsworth, eds. Monsters in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture. Westport: Praeger, 2010. Avisar, Ilan. Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Barta, Tony. “Film Nazis: The Great Escape”. In Screening the Past. Film and the Representation of History. Edited by Tony Barta. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1998. Celli, Carlo. Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2005. Comolli, Jean-Luis, and François Gere. “Two Fictions Concerning Hate.” In Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look. Edited by Stephen Jenkins. London: British Film Institute, 1981. Evers, Florian. Vexierbilder des Holocaust. Ein Versuch zum historischen Trauma in der Populärkultur. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2011. Foucault, Michel. “Film and Popular Memory.” Radical Philosophy 11 (Spring 1975): 24-29. Fuchs, Michael. “Of Blitzkriege and Hardcore BDSM: Revisiting Nazi Sexploitation Camps.” In Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in LowBrow Cinema and Culture. Edited by Daniel H. Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Elizabeth Bridges. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Fyne, Robert. The Hollywood Propaganda of WWII. Lanham and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1997. Garofalo, Damiano. “La Shoah nel cinema italiano: una ricognizione bibliografica.” In La Shoah nel cinema italiano. Edited by Andrea Minuz and Guido Vitiello. Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2013.

80

For an in-depth analysis of this new trend see Fuchs, “Of Blitzkriege and Hardcore BDSM.” 81 Fuchs, “Of Blitzkriege and Hardcore BDSM”, 279.

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—. “Il cinema italiano e la Shoah: una filmografia (1945-2013).” In La Shoah nel cinema italiano. Edited by Andrea Minuz and Guido Vitiello. Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2013. Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics. 1943-1988. London: Penguin, 1990. Greg, Melissa, and Gregory Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Gusatto, Lara. “Nazisti a New York e il futuro distopico nelle serie tv.” http://tvzap.kataweb.it/news/143671/nazisti-a-new-york-il-futurodistopico-nelle-serie-tv/?ref=HRERO-1. Retrieved on February 20th 2016. Hake, Sabine. Screen Nazis. Cinema, History, and Democracy. Madison, 2012, University of Wisconsin Press. Hunter, Jack, ed. Sex, Death, Swastikas. Nazi Sexploitation Ssinema. London: Creation Books, 2010. Kerner, Aaron. Film and the Holocaust. New York: Continuum, 2011. Koven, Mikel J. “The Film You Are About to See Is Based on Documented Fact: Italian Nazi Sexploitation Cinema.” In Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945. Edited by Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004. Lasagna, Roberto. Cinema e spettri del Terzo Reich. Piombino: Edizioni Il Foglio, 2015. Lumley, Robert. States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. London: Verso, 1990. Magilow, Daniel H. “Introduction. Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture.” In Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture. Edited by Daniel H. Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Elizabeth Bridges. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Mailänder, Elissa. “Meshes of Power: The Concentration Camp as pulp or Art House in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter.” In Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture. Edited by Daniel H. Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Elizabeth Bridges. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. —. “Foreword”. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Mikics, David (19 April 2012). “Holocaust Pulp Fiction.”

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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/97160/katzetnik?all=1. Retrieved on February 20th 2016. Minuz, Andrea. La Shoah e la cultura visuale. Cinema, memoria, spazio pubblico. Rome: Bulzoni, 2010. Moore, Alison M. Sexual Myths of Modernity: Sadism, Masochism, and Historical Teleology. London: Lexington Books, 2016. Petley, Julian. “Nazi Horrors. History, Myth, Sexploitation.” In Horror Zone. Edited by Ian Conrich. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Pisanty, Valentina. Abusi di memoria. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2012. Rapaport, Lucy. “Holocaust pornography: Profaning the Sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.” In Monsters in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Post-War Popular Culture. Edited by Maartje Abbenhuis and Sara Buttsworth. Westport: Praeger, 2010. Ravetto, Kriss. The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Richards, Jeffrey. “Formby, George (1904–1961).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/33/101033205/. Retrieved on February 20th 2016. Scimeca, Dennis. “The Controversial World of Nazi Video Games.” http://www.salon.com/2014/04/12/the_controversial_world_of_nazi_video _games/. Retrieved on February 20th 2016. Shipka, Danny. Perverse Titillation. The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011. Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Retrieved on February 20th 2016. Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” In Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Stiglegger, Marcus. “Cinema beyond Good and Evil? Nazi Exploitation in the Cinema of the 1970s and its Heritage.” In Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture. Edited by Daniel H. Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Elizabeth Bridges. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. —. Sadiconazista. Faschismus und Sexualität im Film. Remscheid: Gardez! Verlag, 1999. Subirats, Eduardo. “Totalitarian Lust: From Salò to Abu Ghraib.” In South Central Review 24.1 (2007): 174-182. Tiniceto Clough, Patricia and Jean Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

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Vitiello, Guido. “L’erotica di Auschwitz. Una genealogia della ‘NaziSexploitation’ italiana.” In La Shoah nel cinema italiano. Edited by Andrea Minuz and Guido Vitiello. Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2013. Von Dassanowsky, Robert. “The Third Reich as Bordello and Pigsty: Between Neodecadence and Sexploitation in Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty.” In Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture. Edited by Daniel H. Magilow, Kristin T. Vander Lugt, and Elizabeth Bridges. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. —. Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglorious Basterds’. A Manipulation of Metacinema. London and New York: Continuum, 2012.

Films and TV Series Cited Berlin Correspondent (Eugene Forde, 1942) Bestia in calore, La (The Beast in Heat, a.k.a. SS Hell Camp, a.k.a SS Experiment Camp 2—Luigi Batzella, 1977) Big Bird Cage, The (Jack Hill, 1972) Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69 (Keith J. Crocker, 2008) Buck Privates (Arthur Lubin, 1941) Caduta degli Dei, La (The Damned—Luchino Visconti, 1969) Campo 44 (TV SERIES, 1967) Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Casa privata per le SS (Private House of the SS Girls, a.k.a. SS Girls— Bruno Mattei, 1977) Caught in the Draft (David Butler, 1941) China Girl (Henry Hathaway, 1942) Comrade X (King Vidor, 1940) Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939) Cross of Lorraine, The (Tay Garnett, 1943) Daffy. The Commando (Isadore Freleng, 1943) Deportate della sezione speciale SS, Le (SS Special Section Women—Rino Di Silvestro, 1976) Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General—Helmut Käutner, 1955) Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, The (Henry Hathaway, 1951) Desert Rats, The (Robert Wise, 1953) Desperate Journey (Raoul Walsh, 1942) Død snø (Dead Snow—Tommy Wirkola, 2009) Død snø 2 (Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead—Tommy Wirkola, 2014) Ducktators, The (Norman McCabe, 1942) Elsa Fräulein SS (Captive Women 4—Patrice Rhomm, 1977)

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Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen (James P. Hogan, 1942) Enemy of Women (Alfred Zeisler, 1944) Fascisti su Marte (Fascists on Mars—Corrado Guzzanti and Igor Skofic, 2006) Four Sons (Archie Mayo, 1940) Fuehrer’s Face, Der/aka Donald Duck in Nutzi Land (Jack Kinney, 1943) Gasbags (Walter Forde and Marcel Varnel, 1941) Generale della Rovere, Il (General Della Rovere—Roberto Rossellini, 1959) Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero—Roberto Rossellini, 1947) Goose Steps Out, The (Basil Dearden and Will Hay, 1942) Great Dictator, The (Charlie Chaplin, 1940) Greta-Haus ohne Männer (Greta: The Mad Butcher, a.k.a. Wanda, the Wicked Warden, a.k.a. Ilsa: The Wicked Warden —Jesús Franco, 1977) Hangmen Also Die (Fritz Lang, 1942) Heil Honey I’m Home! (TV SERIES, 1990) Helga, la louve de Stilberg (Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg—Patrice Rhomm, 1978) Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro, 2004) Hitler Gang, The (John Farrow, 1944) Hitler’s Children (Edward Dmytryk, 1943) Hitler’s Madman (Douglas Sirk, 1943) Hogan’s Heroes (TV SERIES, 1965-1971) Horrors of War (Peter John Ross and John Whitney, 2006) Hostages (Frank Tuttle, 1943) Hotel Berlin (Peter Godfrey, 1945) Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975) Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (Don Edmonds, 1976) Ilsa: the Tigress of Siberia (Jean LaFleur, 1977) In the Navy (Arthur Lubin, 1941) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) Invisible Agent (Edwin L. Marin, 1942) Iron Sky (Timo Vuorensola, 2012) Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1960) Kaput Lager. Gli ultimi giorni delle SS (Achtung! The Desert Tigers— Luigi Batzella, 1977) Keep ‘Em Flying (Arthur Lubin, 1941) KZ9. Lager di Sterminio (Women’s Camp 119—Bruno Mattei, 1977) Lac des morts vivants, Le (Zombie Lake—Jean Rollin, 1981)

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Lager SS 5. L'inferno delle donne (Lager SSadis Kastrat Kommandantur, a.k.a SS Experiment Camp, a.k.a SS Experiment Love Camp—Sergio Garrone, 1976) Lebensborn (Ordered to Love—Werner Klingler, 1961) Let George Do It/ To Hell With Hitler (Marcel Varnel, 1940) Love Camp 7 (Lee Frost, 1969) Lunghe notti della Gestapo, Le (The Red Nights of the Gestapo—Fabio De Agostini, 1977) Man in the High Castle, The (WEB/TV SERIES, 2016) Nathalie rescapée de l'enfer (Nathalie: Escape from Hell—Alain Payet, 1978) Nazis at the Center of the Earth (Joseph J. Lawson, 2012) Night of the Generals, The (Anatole Litvak, 1967) Night of the Zombies (Joel M. Reed, 1981) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog—Alain Resnais, 1955) Pasqualino settebellezze (Seven Beauties—Lina Wertmüller, 1975) Pawnbroker, The (Sidney Lumet, 1964) Portiere di notte, Il (The Night Porter—Liliana Cavani, 1974) Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) Remember Pearl Harbor (Joseph Santley, 1942) Roma, città aperta (Open City—Roberto Rossellini, 1945) Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom—Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) Salon Kitty (Tinto Brass, 1976) Sealed Verdict (Lewis Allen, 1948) Shock Waves (a.k.a. Almost Human—Ken Wiederhorn, 1977) So Ends Our Night (John Cromwell, 1941) SS Lager 5: L’inferno delle donne (SS Camp 5: Women’s Hell—Sergio Garrone, 1977) Svastica nel ventre, La (Nazi Love Camp 27—Mario Caiano, 1977) Tarzan Triumphs (William Thiele, 1943) They Came to Blow Up America (Edward Ludwig, 1943) Till We Meet Again (Edmund Goulding, 1940) To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942) Train spécial pour SS (Hitler’s Last Train, a.k.a. Captive Women 5: Mistresses of the 3rd Reich—Alain Payet, 1977) Tumba de los muertos vivientes, La (Oasis of the Zombies—Jesús Franco, 1982) Ultima orgia del III Reich, La (Last Orgy of the Third Reich—Cesare Canevari, 1977) Werewolf Women of the SS (Rob Zombie, 2007)

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Women in Cages (Gerardo de Leon, 1971) World Premier (Ted Tetzlaff, 1941) You Nazty Spy! (Jules White, 1940) Young Lions, The (Edward Dmytryk, 1958)

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PART III TOTALITARIAN AESTHETICS AND POLITICS

CHAPTER EIGHT THE OTHER MODERNITY: FASCIST AESTHETICS AND THE IMPRINT OF THE COMMUNITY MYTH AGAINST THE FAILURE OF LIBERALISM ANA RODRÍGUEZ GRANELL

Ay, despite all “modern ideas” and prejudices of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of optimism, the common sense that has gained the upper hand, the practical and theoretical utilitarianism, like democracy itself, with which it is synchronous be symptomatic of declining vigour, of approaching age, of physiological weariness?1

Introduction: Technology and Primitivism To answer whether there is such a thing as a “fascist aesthetic,” we can turn to the clearest manifestations highlighted by Walter Benjamin, such as the totalitarian symptoms of an aestheticization of politics, or the mechanised rituals of a “Mass Ornament” that organise a multiplicity of fragments under the image of a homogenized mass reflecting the cult of rationalist efficiency.2 As is frequently stated in the literature, these aesthetic ideas were materialised in mass entertainment and on the stage and ultimately became the defining symbol of dictatorial regimes. However, these forms of “mass reproduction” cannot be ascribed exclusively to fascist ideological rituals of affirmation. Mass expression also forms part of contemporary rituals of national affirmation, such as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, military parades in democratic nations, or the Dionysian immersion of a Rammstein concert (a band often 1

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1923), 8. 2 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75-88.

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criticised for its flirtations with neo-Nazi aesthetics). Slavoj Žižek examines this aestheticization of mass joy as a ritual in which the jouissance is expressed as a neutral substance and only in a second instance is it instrumentalized for political purposes, leaving behind the pleasure in itself.3 The fascist imaginary not only fuelled the cult of efficiency derived from a rationalist modern mass society but also alluded to the primitive joy of belonging. It is here that we find the link between the fascist aesthetic tradition and the irrationalist tendencies of nineteenth-century Romanticism and the fin-de-siècle imaginary. The affirmative aesthetic of belonging, though shared with ideologies other than the radical right, was easily transferred between the different ideological factions of the early twentieth century thanks to its powerful criticism of the excesses of rationalism. In this sense, considering that anti-liberalism was not a “parenthesis in European history”4 but a common parameter in ideologies critical of the failure of modernity,5 we will analyze the genealogy of the fascist aesthetic by examining the German case and the reworking of the community myth. This study will attempt to chart the continuity between various periods of German history, built around a belief in aesthetic and artistic redemption and the notion of culture as a political project. To analyse the network of discourses that construct the concept of community as a prerational impulse, we explore those discourses that are crystallised in artistic and cultural expressions close to the Romantic programme and its preoccupations with the return to the lost community and the refounding of unifying myths (Nietzsche, Böcklin). Through this analysis we establish links with the later neo-pagan and regenerative ideals of völkish movements (Fidus) and the mysticism of the Konservative Revolution. Ultimately, we highlight the inherent contradictions in the underlying notion of modernity in European fascism. Consequently, leaving to one side the question of whether there is such a thing as a purely fascist aesthetic, the aim of this study is to determine how some of the aesthetic ideas assimilated and refined by the Third Reich were configured, focusing on their belonging to a tradition forged in the late eighteenth century as a critical response to the Enlightenment. In our analysis we 3

Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 373-386. Benedetto Croce, “The Fascist Germ still lives,” The New York Times Magazine, November 28, 1943. 5 Mark Mazower, La Europa Negra (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2001); Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994). 4

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shall endeavour to shed light on the inherent contradictions within those processes that, as in any totalitarian regime, establish relationships of affirmation-rejection and exaltation-regression with Modernity.

The Return to the Community and a Critical Alternative in German Romanticism Historical and cultural studies offer analyses of Nazi or fascist culture as simple anti-modernism or a reactionary movement for the creation of a new culture as an alternative to certain liberal ideas.6 However, further analysis reveals links with a historical development that predates the interwar period. Many of the cultural manifestations that emerged in the German fin de siècle—as we find with all modern forms of artistic expression—were defined by alternative projects and ways of life. It is unsurprising, then, that in the wake of the second German industrial revolution, from 1885 onwards, movements such as vegetarianism and esotericism, nudism or pantheism came to prominence, each of them feeding into the various anti-bourgeois utopias of community. These tributary movements, which would fuel the political polarisation of the 1930s, illustrated a series of problems with modernity that would be taken up by intellectual debate during the Weimar Republic. So, if fascism, liberalism and modern critical movements are not a parenthesis in but rather part of the transformations to emerge from the time of the French Revolution, the question is this: what is regressive and what is progressive about the Modern Project? This problem would be addressed in the critical theory of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The earliest Romantic criticism is framed by these dialectic terms. From the dawn of Romanticism we find the first accusations and political divorces that anticipated the emergence of two distinct forms of modernity, albeit both concerned with checking the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism. In response to the waning legitimacy of the modern State (faced with the spread of conflicts stemming from the French Revolution 6

Louis Dupeux (1992), Roger Griffin (2007) and Jeffrey Herf (2003) have proposed concepts such as “conservative revolution”, following the suggestion of Arnin Moheler, or oxymorons such as “reactionary modernism”. Without entering into the debate here, we can note that, as members of a new form of historiography, these authors, alongside Emilio Gentile, George Mosse, Zeev Sternhell and Jürgen Kocka, mark the end of the Sonderweg (Germany’s “special path”) and attach overt importance to cultural history and the forms of self-representation achieved through dialogue with political and social history.

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and the Napoleonic Wars), early German Romanticism, though it still looked to the past, did so in search of a utopian future (Bloch 1995). Noone would question the liberal component of Romanticism as a style without a style; if a single common theme could be identified in the great literary and artistic heterodoxy of early Romanticism, it was the interest in a subjectivism disconnected from any imposed law: “In their earliest works these poets began afresh, setting aside all the rules then fabricated.”7 From the early Enlightenment period, reason as a form of government (State) and as a form of knowledge (Science) was gradually instated just as aesthetic concerns also began to find political expression. In this process of modernity, the Romantic movement and idealist philosophy were charged with resituating all those elements that had no place in the empire of logic and empiricism: passions, emotions, desires, primitive impulses, creative capacity, and so on. Immanuel Kant had already noted the function—ethical and moral, rather than utilitarian—of art and culture as the free play of the faculties.8 A politicisation of aesthetics as a political framework, insofar as it constituted a space for individual freedom, resulted from this Kantian axiom. This space operated not as a release for the impulses that society repressed but as the very principle expressing the moral will of the individual at the heart of society. Ultimately, the Romantic Movement emerged as a radical critique of science and rational knowledge on the basis of their disinterest in the intuitive knowledge of the individual. Thus, by means of a cultural and educational policy whose raw materials were the collection of impulses, desires and wills of the German wo/man, the aspiration to beauty, and the idea of belonging to a cultural group, figures such as Fichte, Herder or Schiller set the powerful idea of Kultur against the disaffections of civilisation, a foreign concept imposed by the French invader and the instrument of external governance of an individual’s true desires.9 From the political discourse of Novalis in Christianity or Europe, written in 1799 and published by Schlegel in 1806, we see how Medieval Europe was transformed into the utopian allegory of a longed-for peaceful cosmopolitanism that the secularisation brought by the French Revolution had been unable to instil: “when one Christianity dwelled on the civilized continent, and when one common interest joined the most distant 7

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lecciones sobre estética. Vol. I (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1989), 21-27. From here on all translations from works in Spanish are mine. 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (London: MacMillan and Co, 1892). 9 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (Urizen Books: New York, 1978).

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provinces of this vast spiritual empire.”10 Novalis’ ideas, far from being restricted to the worship of a glorious German past, signalled a nascent dialectic between two elements that would shape an emerging discourse on alternative modernity: history and myth. History, according to Novalis, is not a science but a romanze, a free poetic invention through which to reinstate the communicative function of the myth. Within this context, myth, with its functions as a new form of religion or spirituality, provides the basis for reconstituting organic communities unmediated by the laws of reason or the logic of profit. With the birth of Romanticism, history evolved from its function for the recovery of classical themes or as a channel for the worship of civic virtue (Neoclassicism); Novalis saw in ancient history Jugendtum (juvenility), or history as a link between the past and the future.11 Thus, the past exists only inasmuch as it channels the present such that we may understand our own time and project our destiny. We are, then, dealing with the very idea that was echoed by the heterodoxy of the Marxist left (Benjamin, Bloch): the past as the promised future. This aspiration gave rise to alternative paths of modernity that, unlike the Marxist left, did not disregard the mythical foundation that channels the ways in which an individual engages with the world. It was this current of thought that explains how, at the end of the nineteenth century and after the First World War, the myths generated around concepts such as “life”, “soul”, “unconscious”, “nation”, “totality” or “Reich” were assimilated with such efficiency by the Conservative Revolutionary movement.12 The very notion of revolution, traditionally the preserve of the left, was among the myths appropriated by the radical right. However, as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century the ideological currents concerned with correcting the modern project of the Enlightenment were already leading to opposing stances. Following the July Revolution of 1830, which is commonly cited as the end of the Romantic movement, those figures who had been linked to the Jena circle, such as Heinrich Heine, Hegel and Friedrich Schlegel, began to manifest a series of shifts and splits that signalled the emergence of these two stances: in general terms, an irrationalist, regressive trend and a rational movement upheld initially by progressive factions. After the Napoleonic Wars, Schlegel, a defender of the “restorationist” cause, became the embodiment of this triumph of national over foreign, 10

Novalis, La cristiandad o Europa (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1977), 71. 11 Ibid., 116. 12 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of our times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 3.

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looking to the “Germanic” medieval and Christian world as the cultural and spiritual origin of the community and an inspiration for resistance and renewal; it was at this point, then, that the artistic programme was transformed into an ideology for cultural policy.13 In The Romantic School, written in defence of Junges Deutschland,14 Heine attacked these nationalist offshoots of German Romanticism, to which he referred scathingly. A similar stance was taken in Hegel’s critique of a movement that, he argued, raised art to the level of political ideology, affording it a sacred value. This ideology, developed by Schelling and which had fed the Romantic cultural policy of “creed and fatherland” was, for Hegel and Heine, a pre-modern regression.15 The appeal to the non-rational, to desires, affection and emotions, established elements of authenticity, pure elements of social cohesion within an a priori or pre-political common identity. The “true general will” issued from the volk and not from a legislative instrumentalism, while art, from Richard Wagner to Hugo von Hofmannsthal,16 was the ritual means of mythical consecration. Axel Honneth explains that it is precisely in the early Romantic period that we witness a greater concern for defining the links that structure different social models of the time, beyond the general legal architecture and underlying social contract.17 This marked the beginning of a systematic conceptual differentiation between “community” and “society”. Indeed, in the post-idealist work of Hegel and Lorenz von Stein, one of the chief roles of these pre-rational categories—religion, a common culture, ethnicity, affection—is to assert their status as true elements of social cohesion. Similar narratives of a rewriting of the past and the primordial would continue to inform the utopian imaginary of the nineteenth century, joined by new contributions from other artistic channels, not only as a rite of .

13 Javier Domínguez Hernández, “Lo romántico y el romanticismo en Schlegel, Hegel y Heine. Un debate de cultura política sobre el arte y su tiempo,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 34 (2009): 46-58, 52. 14 The Young German movement, the vanguard of an enlightened, liberal German intellectualism, was a product of the politics of modernisation adopted by the German states under the Rheinbund from 1806 to 1813. 15 Domínguez, “Lo romántico,” 57. 16 In his 1927 text “The written word as the Spiritual Space of the Nation”, Hoffmansthal (2011, 157-170) alludes to this consecration, as well as introducing the idea of a Conservative Revolution, whose foundations can also be found in greater detail in the Das Dritte Reich, written by Moeller van den Bruck in 1923 (Bruck 1934). 17 Axel Honneth, “Comunidad. Esbozo de una historia conceptual,” Isegoría, 20 (1999): 5-15, 7.

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national affirmation but also as an alternative model to capitalist relations of production. From a variety of perspectives and nationalities, the poeticized past and non-rational remnants of the Enlightenment suggested a range of community-based utopias: brotherhoods and feudal guilds as equitable models of exchange; calls for a return to the local; urban planning projects; communities of horizontal production and collectivisation, etc. Whether from the conservative or progressive standpoint, this romanticization of nature, rural life and pre-modern social organisation clearly called for a rewriting of the past to make way for a reimagined vision of community.

The Birth of Tragedy in the Late-Nineteenth Century: Arnold Böcklin as a Bridge between Romanticism and Modernity As Manfred Frank has explained, the communicative function of myth operates in the normative sphere, thus myths serve to guarantee the constitution and continuity of a society through the consensus and unanimity of its members with regard to a set of supreme values. In this sense, Frank argues that the act of justification is predicated not on causal relationships (reason) but on deriving a basis from an unquestionable value such as the sacred, given its irrefutable and omnipresent nature.18 The importance afforded to aesthetics in German culture and National Socialism stemmed from the need to lay a foundation for its mythology. Art remained a core discursive and visual element in this process, inasmuch as it projected the symbols of this mythology and endowed them with meaning. In what we might call the “Night of the Gods” sung by Novalis, Hölderlin, Schelling, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert or Ludwig Tieck, Dionysus embodied spiritual renewal and the affirmation of all that which is found beyond logical thought. As a means of overcoming the crisis of meaning of rationalism, Dionysus became the perfect metaphor of the coming god. In his portrayal as a foreign, reborn, mysterious, boundary-breaking deity, the god of multiplicity and excess, Dionysus, the god from the east, embodied in the nineteenth century a revision of Christianity in the form of a “new religion”. In this sense, it was Nietzsche who, almost a century later in 1871, came to recrystallise the radical charge against modernity through an interest in the “reborn”. The non-philological reading of The Birth of Tragedy can be considered a hinge between the Romantic impulse 18 Manfred Frank, El dios venidero: Lecciones sobre la Nueva Mitología (Madrid: Serbal, 1994), 17.

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of the late eighteenth century and the artistic manifestations that would consolidate the imaginary of the Third Reich. The non-academic component of the book is stressed here because, as we see in Novalis, if there is some nexus to be found with idealism, Nietzsche proposed “to view science through the optics of the artist, and art moreover through the optics of Life.”19 As the prologue announced, this early text was a reflection on the aesthetic significance of Tragedy and its political function before myth was replaced by reason in the era of Euripides and Socrates. It can be argued that in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche contemplates the understanding of the aesthetic-political meaning of the Dionysian cult at the end of Hellenic sophistry, just as at the end of the Enlightenment the unknown god reappears as “a spirit with strange and still nameless needs, a memory bristling with questions, experiences and obscurities.”20 With The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche initiated a process that would culminate, at the end of his career, in the battle of “Dionysus against the Crucified” in Ecce Homo. The cult of Dionysus as the being of the eternal yes, the desire for life, of that irrational jouissance unmediated by instrumentalisms or ends beyond that of itself, destroyed modern values (morals, democracy, capitalism). It is through the artistic ritual of tragedy that, “In song and in dance man exhibits himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak, and is on the point of taking a dancing flight in to the air. His gestures bespeak enchantment.”21 Dionysiac ritual, then, broke away from purposiveness (which is always the purposiveness of reason) and affirmed the perilous game of will, the unmediated ecstasy of man, reconciled with himself and with nature, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated.22 Many of Nietzsche’s ideas, such as creative action and the breaking of representational boundaries, or the relevance acquired by non-rational impulses and art as a vehicle for mysticism, spread beyond the boundaries of fin-de-siècle Modernism. This tradition gave meaning to the foundations of left-wing Expressionism and avant-garde art, as well as to the Konservative Revolution.23 The reformulation of irrationalism thus 19

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1923), 4. 20 Ibid., 5. 21 Ibid., 27. 22 Ibid., 28. 23 For an introduction to the Conservative Revolutionary Movement and its links to German intellectuality, see Armin Mohler’s classic study, Die konservative Revolution in Deutchland, 1918-1932 (1950). Mohler identifies five main categories in the Conservative Revolution: ‘völkisch’ thinkers; the ‘Young

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survived from the culture of Weimar into the Third Reich through the cosmic eroticism of Ludwig von Klages, the Romantic and anti-liberal poetry of Oswald Spengler, anti-bourgeois criticism in the sacred poetry of Stefan George, the Gnosticism and arcane rituals of Carl Jung, who saw in National Socialism the incarnation of Wotan (the Scandinavian equivalent of Dionysus), or in the work of the vitalists and followers of Lebensphilosophie, such as the illustrator Hugo Höppener, more commonly known as Fidus. However, in the fin-de-siècle genesis of this Nietzschean poetic fantasy, the cult of the archaic, ecstasy and the enthusiasm for liberation were in fact crystallised in the work of the counter-current artist Arnold Böcklin, and it is easy to see how these themes were seized on by the National Socialists in the 1930s. Ludwig von Klages himself identified Böcklin as the figure who truly realised this call to the authentic essence of the individual, the Soul:24 “Whose heart was moved even once to beat more quickly by the cloud-shadowed ocean distance which Böcklin’s brush awakened in the painful drunkenness of his Triton’s glance.”25 Georg Simmel, for his part, alluded in Böcklins Landschaften (1895) to the recovery of the archaic and mythological as poeticized history: Böcklin’s trees appear immune to the seasons: they neither flower nor lose their leaves, standing eternal, whether young, mature or in decline. And his ruins never once evoke what they were before their collapse and deterioration. Sint ut sunt aut non sint, let them be as they are or not at all. And it is in the unreality of his fantastical creatures that the atemporality of his visions, that opposition to all which must be described as historical, is at its most immediate. […] Days which stretch beyond their limits, bringing the anticipation of all things past and the memory of all the happiness that is to come.26

Conservatives’, such as Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Moeller Van den Bruck or Heinrich von Gleichen, and the “June Club” of Edgar J. Jung and Franz Mariaux; the “National Revolutionaries” or “Military Nationalists”, represented by the Jünger brothers and those who emphasised the experience of the Western Front; the Youth Movement, ‘die Bündischen’, influenced by Stefan George’s Der Stern des Bundes, Walter Flex’s Der Wanderer zwischen zwei Welten, and the work of Hans Blüher; and the ‘Landvolk’ movement (Bullivant 1985, 51). 24 The soul, in Klages’ vocabulary, can be defined as a paradigm of authenticity, in contrast to the logical-Hegelian spirit; that is, the meaning established by Descartes in reference to understanding and rational activity. Thus, Klages’s distinction between the spirit and the soul is that found between reason and instinctive tendencies. 25 Bloch, Heritage of our times, 302. 26 Georg Simmel, Filosofía del paisaje (Madrid: Casimiro, 2013), 27.

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The Decadent figure of Böcklin perfectly embodied central tenets in the National Socialist ideology, having been overshadowed by French Impressionism in the period immediately after 1905. The avant-garde movement would be branded as degenerate by the National Socialists and its earliest manifestations “as loveless as a medical diagnosis, a photograph, or a statistic. The plein-air civilisation of modern painting which began with French Impressionism, does not belong either to the soul or to the language of the soul; it does not contemplate, but looks.”27 A painting such as Battle of the Centaurs (1873) transmits various constants in the German tradition from Romanticism to fin-de-siècle culture. On the one hand, the Romanticised history described by Novalis is apparent in Böcklin’s allusion to the Franco-Prussian Wars through the suspended space of the myth, in the Battle of the Centaurs. This painting was admired by Nietzsche, as it shows the moment at which chaos ensues when the Centaurs, arcane and irrational beings in the Greek tradition, having drunk heavily as guests at the wedding of the Lapith king Pirithous and Hippodamia, attempt to abduct the bride, falling into a frenzied battle with their enemies. This was suggestive of the German struggle of Kultur against French Civilisation, the irrational instinct against the logical order of reason. In other works, Böcklin’s style is more consistent with the Decadent movement. Examples include Sacred Wood (1882), admired by Thomas Mann, and The Isle of the Dead (1886), which hung in the Reich Chancellery during the Third Reich, evoking pagan worship in natural surroundings and a spirituality distanced from neoclassical influences, providing the middle classes with an authentically “German” modern aesthetic. Consequently, “This post-liberal middle class, as well as many members of the avant-garde, found emotional (not social) truths with which they could identify without abandoning themselves to the urbane, cultureless world depicted by realists and impressionists. In Böcklin’s world, they could observe raw human passions—lust, terror, grief, anger— while still believing that Kultur mattered and would endure.”28 Arnold Böcklin offers an aesthetic of an alternative, anti-liberal modernity, which would be effortlessly taken up by Hitler. That Böcklin was subsequently recognised as a legitimate “Germanic” painter is 27

George Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 163-165. As famously expressed by the German art historian Kurt Karl Eberlein in Was ist deutsch in der deutschen Kunst (What is German in German Art?) in 1933. 28 Suzanne L. Marchand and David Lindenfeld, eds., Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 134.

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illustrative of the oxymoron “conservative modernity” that underpinned fascist culture.29

Refinement of Liberal Thought towards a Conservative Modernity and the Case of Hugo Höppener, Fidus Just as some of the leading figures of the Conservative Revolutionary movement showed a degree of resistance to or regret about aspects of the Nazi government (Van den Bruck, Jünger), it is not our intention to label as proto-fascist all aspects of fin-de-siècle German culture. As explained above, the irrationalist motifs of a certain line of mythical thought do not lead directly to fascism. Let us remember that the left also valued respiritualisation through art with a view to a Soviet revolution, as manifested in the Bayerische Räterepublick of Ernst Toller, Erich Mühsam, Oskar Maria Graf and Alfred Wolfenstein. The Novembergruppe, forged from the German Revolution of 1918, proposed its own programme to finally unite practical socialism and German idealism. In the hands of theorists such as Gustav Landauer (Kuhn 2010), taking inspiration from Nietzsche, the group drew up a revolutionary strategy founded on the recuperation of Romanticism and Jewish messianism, distancing itself from the aspirations of both Social Democracy and Soviet Communism. But to return to the question posed at the beginning of the study: How can we discern the regressive elements of National Socialist mysticism from those elements of a progressive nature? Right-wing radicals had already begun to appropriate elements of revolutionary discourse, albeit with the necessary degree of ideological refinement. The idea of a German socialism (Werktätige), the “Prussian” socialism of Spengler or the socialism of the “front-line soldier” described by Jünger, in place of the Arbeiter linked to the left stemmed from a revolution of spiritual values fuelled not by the proletariat but by the notion of the community as a higher value than any individual.30 The discursive shift from “class” to “nation”, the refinement of Marxism through the rejection of materialism, as seen in the work of Georges Sorel and his mythical interpretation of Marxism, drew on a certain liberal tradition (private property, profit, market economy), excluding individualism, democracy, intellectualism and universalism but maintaining a concern for

29

Ibid., 131. Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), 98. 30

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the achievements of progress.31 Equally, some of the more “uncomfortable” aspects of Romanticism also had to be jettisoned, given their links to criticism of authoritarianism or libertarian movements. Modern and anti-liberal, the ideology of the Third Reich, unlike the liberal European constitutions before it, held law to be subordinate to politics. The regime was founded on the German legal tradition of the conservative Wilhelmine Period: a judicial structure in which Law served to protect the State before the individual. Mark Mazower examines which liberal elements were left intact, for example private law and commercial law under the Weimar Republic, and which revolutionary-regressive elements were incorporated.32 Examples of the latter include the creation of a new State founded on the rejection of liberal jurisprudence in favour of justice based on the Führerprinzip or decree laws issued by the prime minister, which was seen as an instrument for creating a healthy racial community.33 Paradoxically, the limitation of individual rights transferred power to the Government in the interests of common good: This was the totalitarian state, and the Nazi party, like the spider in its web, controlled all the lifelines of the nation. For us such a society means that all aspects of life are subordinated to the demands of politics. But the Nazis did not see their society in these terms.34

At the same time, the cultural foundations of Nazism, its underlying mythology, still found their justification in modern scientific reason. From Kleine’s racial studies in his Rassenkunde des Deutsche Volkes (Short Ethnology of the German People, 1929), Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss’s Die nordische Seele. Eine Einführung in die Rassenseelenkunde (The Nordic Soul, 1932), and Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930) to Paul Brohmer and The New Biology, Nazi culture was grounded in a truth not devoid of logical-rational foundations.35 The Geisteswissenschaften, or ‘spiritual sciences’ (history, theology, philosophy, jurisprudence) were founded on 31

Sternhell, Sznajder and Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 59. Mark Mazower, La Europa Negra (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2001), 21-22. He notes the crucial distinction between the regimes of the Old Right, which longed to return to an elitist, pre-democratic past, and the New right, which conquered and retained power through the instruments of mass politics, as was the case of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. 33 Ibid., 49. 34 Mosse, Nazi Culture, xxi. 35 Texts cited and referenced by George Mosse in Nazi Culture. 32

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Darwinian, biological, psychological and philological principles that continued to fuel the myth of the Enlightenment. Through eugenics and racial biology, for example, Nazism took the negative stereotypes of otherness, concordant with bourgeois normativity, and converted them into medical categories.36 In 1935, in a text critical of National Socialism, Karl Polanyi addressed the essence of fascism from the impossible marriage of Hegel and Nietzsche, through the conjunction of vitalism and totalitarianism. He pointed to the contradiction between modernity and regression in National Socialism, which combined biocentric values in its philosophy of existence (vitalist, amoral, pragmatic, mythological, orgiastic, aesthetic, instinctive, irrational, bellicose or apathetic) with an administrative methodology in which society was treated as a mechanism. In this sense, the Nazi apparatus was governed by logocentric, related, classified and hierarchical values, geared towards instrumentalisation: Klages is Nietzsche without the Superman. Spann is Hegel shorn of his dialectic. (…) But as with Klages so with Spann the change serves only to increase the reactionary effect. Nietzsche rid of anarchist-individualism; Hegel deprived of revolutionary dynamics; the one reduced to an exalted Animalism, the other to a static Totalitarianism.37

Just as the primitive matriarchal communities described by Bachofen inform the Romantic-emancipatory vision of Marxism, they also fuel regressive-fascist mythology, in this latter case through the poetic sublimation of communities. Thus, for example, myth is refined with the removal of the liberal component and the insertion of the matriarchal function as the machinery behind the social reproduction of the State. The fascist myth of community entailed a regression, via Klages, to the original community: to an instinctive, animal pre-consciousness. The key element in this refinement, according to Polanyi, was the eradication of the notion of humanity. An artist who embodies the contradictions of modernity, on the one hand, and the consequences of Nazi ideological adjustments, on the other, is Hugo Höppener, Fidus. An illustrator from the late-nineteenth century onwards for journals such as Jugend and Pan and a columnist for the nudist publication Die Schönheit, Höppener’s career took him from 36

Enzo Traverso, La historia como campo de batalla: interpretar las violencias del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012), 112. 37 Karl Polanyi, La esencia del fascismo. Seguido de Nuestra obsoleta mentalidad de mercado (Madrid: Escolar y Mayo, 2013), 58.

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Wilhem Diefenbach’s commune project to Madame Blavatsky’s “Theosophical Society” and even Gustav Landauer’s magazine Sozialist, until he found himself in the ranks of the Conservative Revolutionary movement from 1900 onwards. In the 1920s, Fidus declared himself openly anti-Semitic and grew closer to the cult of Aryanism. Paradoxically, during the Third Reich he strove to join the coterie of official artists of the regime, signed up to the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture) founded by Alfred Rosenberg in 1929, and wrote tirelessly expressing his desire to be accepted into the higher echelons of the National Socialist movement, a desire that was insistently thwarted. In 1939 he sent a portrait of Hitler to the Führer himself, who in 1943, against a background of growing destabilisation, finally made Höppener an honorary professor of the University of Berlin.38 Nazi culture absorbed many of the regenerationist values of Lebensreform: vegetarianism, hygiene, beauty and physical health, pan-Germanist mysticism, the return to nature, the mystical union between art and life through dance and celebrations, and, most importantly, a strong attachment to irrationalist obscurantism. The völkish movement entered the Third Reich through influential figures such as Rosenberg and Günter or via the ranks of the Wandervögel movement, endowing the regime’s community myth with an organic element that contrasted with the mechanised, materialist societies of modernity. Nevertheless, through links to a particular brand of Romantic humanism, the broad spectrum of alternative movements still presented specific “anomalies” that National Socialism had to eradicate. In this case, as an heir to the culture of fin-de-siècle revolt, Fidus was spurned for his early defence of free love, for the proximity of his group to homosexual circles, and for certain tendencies towards anti-authoritarianism and individual freedom that can be linked to the liberal tradition39. It is here that the Nazi imaginary approaches not just conservative stances but also the modern-Enlightenment categories of order and normality linked to sexuality.40 In Fidus’ Jugendstil illustrations we find narratives of malefemale egalitarianism, often in the form of androgynous fusions; the 38

Jost Hermand and Gregory Mason, “Meister Fidus: Jugendstil-Hippie to Aryan Faddist,” Comparative Literature Studies, 3.12 (1975): 288-307, 301. 39 Mosse argued that the apologia of homosexual love was already an issue in idealist circles, for example in Schiller’s unfinished Die Malteser. See George Mosse “Nationalism and Respectability: Normal and Abnormal Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Contemporary History, 2.17 (1982): 221-46, 224. 40 Ibid., 223.

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woman is always represented as a natural and superior symbol in the communion between individual and nature or individual and community. On this point, Lionel Gossman argues that the völkish movement, in its criticism of Christianity, was acting in accordance with modern values when it echoed Nietzsche’s opposition to the slave-holding religion in calling for “a modern religion compatible with the native, inborn love of personal freedom that, since Tacitus, had been ascribed to the Germanic and Nordic peoples”.41 Equally, and despite his admiration for Böcklin, Fidus did not move in circles that pleased the bourgeois tastes of the German middle classes, belonging instead to the more popular consumer market of illustrated magazines and journals, which did little to further his pursuit of national legitimacy.

Conclusion: Wresting Community Myth from the Grasp of Reactionary Regression Throughout this study of the history of German aesthetics and the mythical return to the lost community, we have endeavoured to present Nazi culture not as an exception to but as an integral part of the contradictions of modernity. Despite technological progress and the defence of rational instrumentalism, primitivist elements such as joy or irrational impulses were woven into cultural policy, fostering a sense of belonging to a national and racial whole. We have seen how this “administered” enjoyment (ranging from the jouissance of collective rituals to the primitivism of the Bacchantes) was one of the persistent motifs, from the time of the anti-Enlightenment revolt, in efforts to correct the excesses or faults of modernity, nourishing political alternatives and consolidating new notions of community. It is here that we fully appreciate the significance of Bloch, who strove to reinstate the lost humanism of nihilism which fuelled the Nazi myth, and whose attempt to restore utopia in its non-fascist sense was published in his 1935 book Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Heritage of our Times). In this work, Bloch examines how the triumph of fascism as a popular movement was achieved through the strength of its roots in and reworking of the mythical baggage of the previous 150 years. In the necessary interlocution between archaic mysticism and the efficiency of a programmatic modernity, the political administration of the irrational foundation ௅ the 41 Lionel Gossman, Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the “Nazi Conscience” (Cambridge: Open Books, 2009), 24.

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utopian fantasy of fascism ௅ was projected in a present that National Socialism turned to its advantage. The now tangible völkish fantasy spoke not only to the middle classes but also to the rural population, the revolutionary aspirations of the working class and the longing for renewal among German youth.42 Years later, in The Principle of Hope, drawing on a detailed study of Freud43, Bloch noted the power of myth as a response to the impulse to pleasure-seeking. Bloch is interesting since, unlike his contemporaries, he determined the root of this phenomenon—the mythical impulse—to be a constitutive factor in the individual subject. In this impulse to satisfaction we find a desire whose repression in the past (utopia, hope) motivates continuous movement in the present. Bloch views the principle of hope that constitutes our relationship with the world as a constituent of consciousness; that is, a constituent process of the symbolic order and not simply a desire to return to pre-cognitive states. Everything is sustained by that necessary fiction, “even the Nothing is a utopian category, though an extremely anti-utopian one.”44 No living being is immune to this impulse, for all the fatigue it produces; the longing is continually, though namelessly, manifest.45 Thus, politics becomes creation from a shapeless raw material. Bloch’s critique of Communism therefore targeted its failure to reckon with the inherent desire by which all individuals are moved. By disregarding the mythical component that underlies all political ideology, as a narrative of hope, Communism was responsible for its own failure against the march of fascism, which it did not manage to engage seriously. For Bloch, it is desire which articulates the myths (the “wishful images”) that emanate from the people, which are still evident in the form of fairy tales, medical and social utopias, the miracle of science, architectural and geographical utopias, in the regions of desire drawn by painting and 42

Anson Rabinbach, “Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and Fascism,” New German Critique, 11 (1977): 5-21. 43 Specifically, Bloch opens one of his chapters on the mythical impulse thus: “From Leibniz’s Discovery of the subconscious via the Romantic psychology of night and primeval past to the psychoanalysis of Freud, essentially only “backward dawning” has previously been described and investigated. People thought they had discovered that everything present is loaded with memory, with past in the cellar of the No-Longer-Conscious. What they had not discovered was that there is in present material, indeed in what is remembered itself, an impetus and a sense of being broken off, a brooding quality and an anticipation of Not-Yet-Become.” Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1995), 11. 44 Ibid., 12. 45 Ibid., 48.

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literature… This gives rise to the wishful images of health, the fundamental desires of a “society without deprivation”. Authentic utopian desire is by no means an infinite longing; rather, it strives merely for the immediate.46 This places us alongside the work of other authors concerned with mythical character, such as Thomas Mann or Walter Benjamin, whose critique of the idea of process as an end in itself, or the modern rationalist myth “that reduces all work to the technical,” lay aside the humanism that gives “our communal life a religious grounding.”47. These “illuminations” about the present through a dialectic with a mythical past can be charted from Novalis, through Nietzsche, to the work of Benjamin and his incorporation of Jewish messianism into revolutionary theory, or to the reflections of Ernst Bloch and Simmel on the atemporal immediacy of myth, which bring us to themes concerning the power of culture as a political tool. The attribution of a singular agency to the constitutive nature of myth has, to a degree, appeared in the work of other left-wing thinkers and in conservative tendencies from the beginnings of modernity. The capacity for agency generated by the masses through the narratives that shape their symbolic order was also evident in the work of other writers in the fascist period, such as Karl Kraus and his fantasies of the “re-enchantment of the world”, or indeed Antonio Gramsci, who reformulated the concept of culture as that territory of experiences and knowledge which afford the popular masses the capacity to organise their own hegemony. After the perversion of the mythical function by the ideological machinery of the Nazis, in the mass societies of our post-fascist era we may still identify many other myths that rework and articulate our intervention on reality. From a standpoint not altogether dissimilar to that of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, contemporary national myths are constructed around the threat of an external enemy; from the politics of fear of George W. Bush to the “New Right” of Jean-Marie le Pen, the security and survival of the community is shaped by the figure of the terrorist or the disorder of the immigrant. New fascisms with new faces continue to transmit a mysticism of adherence and identitarian exaltation, despite our modern and rationally administered technological landscape, harnessing ever-present elements of irrationality and contributing to the construction of remembered pasts that act in the present. Over the second half of the twentieth century, many 46

Ibid., 13-14. Walter Benjamin, “Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present,” in Early Writings (1910-1917), trans. Howard Eilan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 66-67.

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other authors continued to stress the importance of criticism in the face of cultural hegemonies. Raymond Williams devoted part of his practical and theoretical work to reviving the critical nature of certain traditions in popular culture. In the field of artistic creation, filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, who strove to reframe Jewish-Christian tradition within an emancipatory left-wing project, or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, in his reappraisal of German Romanticism that freed myth from its Nazi associations, form part of what we might consider a constellation of thinkers and creators whose pursuit of the Romantic ideal belongs to a revolutionary project that embraces humanism and envisions notions of community distinct from those guided by the law of progress or the law of the enemy. Rather than deny the mythical component of our existence in society, this project wrests myth from the grasp of the (new) reactionary fascism.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Diálogo sobre la religiosidad del presente.” In Obras Completas. Book 2/Vol. 1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Madrid: Abada Editores, 2010, 17-35. —. “Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present.” In Early Writings (19101917). Translated by Howard Eilan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Bloch, Ernst. Heritage of our times. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. —. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995. Bullivant, Keith. “The Conservative Revolution”. In The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar Republic. Edited by Anthony Phelan. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, 47-69. Croce, Benedetto. “The Fascist Germ still lives.” The New York Times Magazine, November 28, 1943. Domínguez Hernández, Javier. “Lo romántico y el romanticismo en Schlegel, Hegel y Heine. Un debate de cultura política sobre el arte y su tiempo.” Revista de Estudios Sociales 34 (2009): 46-58. Dupeux, Louis, ed. La Révolution conservatrice dans l’Allemagne de Weimar. Paris: Kimé, 1992. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Urizen Books: New York, 1978. Frank, Manfred. El dios venidero: Lecciones sobre la Nueva Mitología. Madrid: Serbal, 1994. Gossman, Lionel. Brownshirt Princess: A Study of the “Nazi Conscience”. Cambridge: Open Books, 2009.

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Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lecciones sobre estética. Vol. I. Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1989. Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hermand, Jost and Gregory Mason. “Meister Fidus: Jugendstil-Hippie to Aryan Faddist.” Comparative Literature Studies, 3.12 (1975): 288-307. Hoffmansthal, Hugo Von. Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906-1927. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011. Honneth, Axel. “Comunidad. Esbozo de una historia conceptual.” Isegoría, 20 (1999): 5-15. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. London: MacMillan and Co., 1892. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kuhn, Gabriel, ed. Gustav Landauer. Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Read. Oakland: PM Press, 2010. Marchand, Suzanne L, and Lindenfeld, eds. Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Mariniello, Silvestra. “Temporality and the Culture of Intervention.” Boundary 2 22.3 (1995): 111-139. Mazower, Mark. La Europa Negra. Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2001. Mohler, Armin. Die konservative Revolution in Deutchland, 1918-1932. Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerck-Verlag, 1950. Mosse, George L. “Nationalism and Respectability: Normal and Abnormal Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Contemporary History, 2.17 (1982): 221-46. —. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1.22 (1961): 81-96. —. Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Novalis. La cristiandad o Europa. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1977. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1923. Paret, Peter. German encounters with Modernism: 1840-1945. Cambridge: University Press, 2001.

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Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Scritti Corsari. Milan: Garzanti, 1975. Polanyi, Karl. La esencia del fascismo. Seguido de Nuestra obsoleta mentalidad de mercado. Madrid: Escolar y Mayo, 2013. Rabinbach, Anson. “Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and Fascism.” New German Critique, 11 (1977): 5-21. Silva, Umberto. Ideologia e Arte del Fascismo. Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1973. Simmel, Georg. Filosofía del paisaje. Madrid: Casimiro, 2013. Schmidt, Katharina and Christian Lenz. Arnold Böcklin: 1827-1901. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001. Sternhell, Zeev, and Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri. The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994. Traverso, Enzo. La historia como campo de batalla: interpretar las violencias del siglo XX. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012. Van den Bruck, Moeller. Germans Third Empire. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1934. Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2010.

CHAPTER NINE THOUGHT VS. ACTION: GOLDEN AGE AESTHETICS IN FRENCH PROTO-FASCIST AND FASCIST DISCOURSES GAETANO DELEONIBUS

What is fascism? The answers provided by critics are varied and extreme. On one side of the spectrum, a Zeev Sternhell claims that fascism had become a fully formed cultural and political ideology by the First World War, “not less intellectually self-sufficient than socialism or liberalism”1 while, on the other, a Gino Raymond holds that, unlike communism, “an international doctrine, elaborated in theoretical terms before being adjusted to differing national circumstances”, fascism was the opposite, that is, “essentially a series of opportunistic, non-intellectual national reactions projected as an international doctrine due to the common social and economic conditions that prevailed in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s—uncontrolled inflation, mass unemployment, economic collapse.”2 Not to undermine the usefulness of comparing ideological doctrines, or the economic and social conditions that facilitate a political phenomenon, I would nonetheless suggest that a more historically accurate assessment of fascism needs to examine the history of intellectuals’ reactions to the hegemony of laissez-faire capitalism (global in its scope),3 as evidenced in the collusion of aesthetics and politics. As Jean-François Sirinelli argues in

1

Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 1994), 51. 2 Gino Raymond, “André Malraux and the Radical Dilemma,” in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Timms Collier (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988), 168. 3 See Jean-François Sirinelli, Intellectuels et passions française: manifestes et pétitions au xxe siècle (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1990).

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his political history of French intellectuals since the Dreyfus Affair, the main question that motivated intellectuals’ involvement in politics, through manifestos or petitions, was that of the nation. Considered through this socio-cultural lens, a clearer distinction emerges between the nationalistic, aka proto-fascist, discourse of the turn of the 20th century and the pro-European fascist discourse of the 1930s. While the former subscribed to the view that aesthetic criteria (or ideas or thoughts) should shape political criteria (or action), something that might be designated an “aestheticized politics”, and thus guide the nation toward moral salvation, the latter held that political criteria should determine aesthetic criteria, something that might be termed “politicized aesthetics”, and that moral salvation could only be attained by denying the hegemonic stalemate, endemic in national politics, and instead promoting European political and cultural unity. For both groups, aestheticism informed or was informed by a political attitude. This essay examines these two views through the examples of two French literary figures turned ideologues, Charles Maurras and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. The rabid nationalist and founder of the Action Française Charles Maurras was oriented toward the past and his doctrine of Integral Nationalism betrayed a particular view of French culture, which he imagined as a unique Gallic link in the chain of Greco-Roman civilization. Subverting the delicate balance between Dionysian and Apollonian spirits Nietzsche had established in Birth of Tragedy, Maurras argued that his literary and political objectives consisted in subjecting force to form in order to restore his idea of the golden age, namely the neo-classical simplicity, harmony, and order he perceived in the pre-industrial, Catholic, and monarchical absolutism France had known under the ancien régime. For him, a return to neoclassical aesthetics was the only choice left, so that contemporary France could rid itself of the conspiracy gnawing at its traditions and institutions, and thus attain political salvation. On the other hand, the novelist and editor of the wartime Nouvelle Revue Française Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, whose National Socialism was inspired by Barrès’s chthonic cult of the earth and the dead, located his golden age in the European Middle Ages, ruled by force and a hereditary, Catholic, virile aristocracy.4 Despite this medieval inspiration, Drieu was oriented more 4

Not originally introduced by Drieu, the idea of the Middle Ages as the golden age of Western culture had already been prefigured in the aesthetic quarrel over the concept of classicism in the pre-WWI era. See, Adrien Mithouard, “Le Classique Occidental,” L’Occident, 4 (March 1902), 179-187. Also see, Gaetano DeLeonibus, “The Quarrel over Classicism: A Quest for Uniqueness,” in Nationalism and French Visual Arts: 1870-1914, ed. June Hargrove and Neil

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unequivocally toward contemporary culture and the creation of a dynamic future. He held that the aim of fascism was to rejuvenate Europe at the expense of nations5 by eradicating what he thought to be its worst plague, that is, nationalism, and by mobilizing the energies of the masses behind a single grand design—as exemplified by the Nazi’s handling of modern art.6 In opposition to Maurras, Drieu sought his inspiration in the Nietzsche of Zarathoustra,7 and firmly held that politics determined aesthetics. The aim of both ideologies was the overthrow of contemporary bourgeois culture through political action and the establishment of a new order, harking back to a golden age; however, each chose a different golden age indicative of its distinct goal. For Maurras, the golden age was 17th-century French neoclassicism, a distinctly French aesthetics. He lays out his strategy for restoring order to the “France seule” (“only France”) in his 1909 manifesto “Si le coup de force est possible.” Drieu La Rochelle, who sought to recover the uniformity of an aristocratic and Christian Europe, promoted the European Middle Ages as his ideal in his autobiographical fictions Gilles (1939) and Les Chiens de paille (1944). We can see the aestheticizing process at work in the writings of the nationalist Maurras, whose literary background privileges a dramatic view of the world. From his earliest fictional pieces, Maurras seemed acutely aware of “langue” and “style” and did not hesitate to mix fictional and political languages in order to convey his political message. A case in point is his use of the notion of conspiracy, which acquires aesthetic value in Maurrassian discourse. Maurras began his career as a literary critic and historian and, in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, emerged as one of the main political forces opposed to the Third Republic. As he saw it, the McWilliam (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New Haven; London: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2005), 293-305. 5 Drieu La Rochelle discussed this position in the following essays: Le Jeune Européen (Paris: Gallimard, 1927); Genève ou Moscou (Paris: Gallimard, 1928); L’Europe contre les patries (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), and Le Socialisme fasciste (Paris: Gallimard, 1934). 6 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the AvantGarde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Museum Associates, 1991). See also Alice Y. Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of MP, 1986), 75-141, and Noberto Bobbio, Profilo ideologico del Novecento italiano (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1986), 21. 7 In his “Discours aux Allemands,” to persuade the German nation of his sincere and genuine Europeanness, Drieu states, “At Charleroi, the first sword that tore into me, also tore my pouch and in this pouch my Zarathoustra.” (“A Charleroi, le premier fer qui me déchira, déchira aussi mon sac et dans ce sac mon Zarathoustra.”) L’Europe contre les nations, 35. All translations are mine.

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Republic, the form that democracy took after it conspired to overthrow the ancien régime, had consolidated its power since the 1870s through conspiratorial stratagems, consisting mainly in the collusion of politics and finance. What better way to counter corrupt democratic rhetoric, Maurras asked, than by letting poetic discourse guide the business of politics? As he writes in his 1909 Enquête sur la monarchie: Politics needs the light gait, the winged movement that only Aesthetics can communicate. And, in addition, in order to modify the mistaken ideas that we all form, we need the contribution of those who soothe anger, temper vain passions and, with the subtle harmony of some well linked musical notes, know how to tame ill-formed intelligence and penetrate the rough exterior of unrefined hearts.8

The young Virgil or Dante of the turn of the century, as young literary figures such as Proust and TS Eliot referred to Maurras, proposes such poetic action in “Si le coup de force est possible” [If the coup is possible]—title which suggests a strong probability—co-written under the single pseudonym Henri Dutrait-Crozon with colonels Frédéric Delebecque and Georges Larpent, co-contributors to the Revue d'Action française. His agenda was to sway public opinion to the poetics of nationalism. However, in contrast to the nineteenth-century tradition of conspiracy myths of so-called secret societies—clandestine organizations manipulated by invisible hands—that were believed to conspire against society’s fundamental institutions,9 Maurras proposed “une conspiration à ciel ouvert” (“an overt conspiracy”, 541), a crisis in public opinion, clearly spelling out radical conservatism's intentions and strategies to overthrow the young Republican régime and restore the monarchy. The notion of “conspiracy” and the threat of a secret society become with Maurras an overt political rhetoric designed to intimidate the young Republican régime into abdication. This conspiratorial position, however, remained

8

“Il faut à la Politique la démarche légère, le mouvement ailé, que l'Esthétique seule lui communiquera. Et, de plus, pour modifier les idées fausses que l'on se forme, nous avons besoin du concours de ceux qui charment les colères, tempèrent les vaines ardeurs et, de l'accord subtil de quelques beaux sons enchaînés, savent dompter les intelligences informes et pénétrer l'enveloppe des cœurs grossiers,” Charles Maurras, Enquête sur la monarchie (1901), (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925), 225. 9 John M. Roberts, The Mythology of Secret Societies (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 353-354.

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with Maurras first and foremost an aesthetic stance. The idea of an overt coup, still not acted upon, remains on the agenda of the Action Française.10 In dramatic fashion, Maurras casts his counter-revolutionary on the open stage of history, ready to undergo sacrifice in order to cleanse France of its traitors. These traitors can be classified into two categories: 1) a racially mixed group: the Freemasons, the Protestants, the Jews and the Metics (whom he also called the “Four Federated States”), anarchist and evil elements of foreign extraction, and 2) the immediate political opponents or traditional conservatives whose opposition to his radical views betrays a romantic vision of the world, a worldview Maurras considered a foreign import. The second group plays the role of antagonist in “Si le coup.” The racial division envisioned by Maurras is a bit reminiscent of the ancien régime’s terminology, and his description of the foreigner evokes the notion of the barbarian in Ancient Athens. According to him, the “Four Federated States” were ill-born foreigners with unFrench sounding names containing harsh sounding consonants such as X and Z. They were responsible for the state of political and intellectual anarchy that divided France. Maurras's racism, however, should be understood more as a spiritual, rather than a biological, construct. As Pierre-André Taguieff argues, the pre-notion of “racism”, in other words the manner in which the term was used before it acquired its pejorative connotations, was introduced as a derivative of “the idea of race” and created on the analogy: “the idea of tradition” = “traditionalism.”11 Although the term “racist” appeared for the first time in the context of anti-Semitic nationalism of the 1890s, it had a completely different connotation than the “scientific” nuance it acquired during the 1920s and 1930s. Taguieff points out that the term should be understood as a derivative of “historical race”, a concept of traditional nationalism. This is the meaning that Maurras attached to the term racist, as these final comments on the 1895 conference of “Société d'éthnographie nationale” at the Sorbonne demonstrate: Race as a physical concept is a laughable subject. I believe that its importance is exaggerated. But nevertheless, I also consider myself a racist, as I had the occasion of informing my distinguished colleague who

10 See, “CMRDS 2013 : Nous sommes une conspiration à ciel ouvert.” Action Française. http://www.actionfrancaise.net/craf/?CMRDS-2013-Nous-sommes-une 11 Pierre-André Taguieff, La Force du préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

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invented the epithet racist. I believe like he does that there is a French race.12

Finally, despite his virulent language, Maurras’s hatred of the Jews seems contrived. As he confessed after the completion of Enquête sur la monarchie in a highly revealing letter to the exiled Royalist André Buffet, his anti-Semitism was a political strategy: “Are there not great advantages politically for us to appear to the country as extremely radical antiSemites? Anti-Semitism is a natural current for us to exploit.”13 Similarly, the Drieu La Rochelle of the early 1930s dismissed the term race by associating it with the concepts of nation and nationalism. As he writes in L’Europe contre les patries, “Celts [i.e. the Gauls], Germans [i.e. the Franks], these are words that designate almost similar groups where for thousands of years, primitive races have mixed. Races did not exist in those times, even more so today.”14 Similarly, in La Comédie de Charleroi (1934), Drieu’s narrator states regarding a courageous soldier who refused to crouch down during the battle, “Joseph Jacob. He was a Jew. A Jew as people say. What is a Jew? No one knows. In any case, people talk about them.”15 In Gilles, however, the anti-Semitism is quite virulent. And this, in spite of the fact that Gilles (just like Drieu in his own personal life) had married a rich, young Jewish heiress and unscrupulously squandered her inheritance. According to some critics, such as David Carroll, race and racism in Gilles become a sign of Jewishness and the foreigner.16 Other critics, such as Jacques Lecarme, claim that Drieu’s anti-Semitic rant seems rather faddish and becomes, paradoxically, favorable towards Jewish people in the eyes of the reader. Be that as it may, Lecarme also limits Drieu’s racist phase to the years 1937-1940, since it disappears from his writing after his break with Jacques Doriot’s fascist party (Parti Populaire Français) and once he was allowed to fill in as the editor of the 12

“La race au sens physique est un grand sujet de sourires. Je crois qu’on lui donne une importance démesurée. Et toutefois je suis ‘raciste,’ moi aussi! J’ai eu ailleurs l’occasion d’en informer mon distingué confrère M. Gaston Méry qui s’est fait autrefois chevalier de la race et qui a inventé cette épithète de ‘raciste.’ Je crois comme lui qu’il y a une race française,” quoted in Taguieff, La Force du préjugé, 127. 13 Archives Nationales F7 12861; quoted and translated by Samuel M. Osgood in French Royalism under the Third and Fourth Republics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 66. 14 Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, L’Europe contre les patries, 61. 15 Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, La Comédie de Charleroi (1934). Romans, Récits, Nouvelles. NRF (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2012), 349-520, 391. 16 David Carrol, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: PUP, 1995), 139.

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literary journal Nouvelle revue française under the German Occupation (1940-1945).17 Maurras’s manifesto “Si le coup” privileges the dramatic urgency of a crisis situation: the action begins in the medias res of a deadlocked and desperate situation between two blood relatives: the “conservateurs-nés” (“born conservatives”) and “conservateurs” (“conservatives”), divided between a sense of duty and love for their fatherland. The born conservatives, that is, the “Français actifs”, hold the role of conspirators. Their part consists mainly in modifying the tragic hero’s attitude and leading him to take appropriate action by caressing his hand and, if necessary, forcing it.18 Maurras describes them as “accomplices of history” who roam around the backstage and allow the discreet clinking of their small and resolute arms to be heard clearly. They gently manipulate the hero into action and cajole him into paving the way for the restoration of the monarchy through parliamentary and diplomatic games.19 In contrast, the conservatives who play the part of antagonists direct their opposition against Maurras's theory of the parliamentary coup. They are no less than “ces Français passifs”, “our mild critics,” and “our censors”20 and are frequently compared to Romantic characters— Romanticism representing for Maurras, among other things, the feminine and weakness of soul.21 He compares these conservatives to characters in a play by Musset or a book by Henri Monnier and further accentuates their passivity with the impersonal (and thus passive) formulae “dira quelqu’un”, “on objectera”, “on dira” (“someone will say, object”), or with even the sarcastic “Monsieur!” In contrast to the passive and weak conservatives, Maurras identifies his reader with “our athletic youth”, an example of the frequent association between youth, sport and nationalism in Maurrassianism,22 which also prefigures the fascist cult of youth and fitness. For Drieu La Rochelle, on the other hand, the notion of the healthy 17

Jacques Lecarme, Drieu La Rochelle ou le bal des maudits (Paris: PUF, 2001), 193199. 18 Charles Maurras, “Si le coup est possible,” in Enquête sur la monarchie (1901) (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925), 541-600, 544. 19 Ibid., 544. 20 Ibid., 541, 542. 21 Charles Maurras, L’Avenir de l’Intelligence (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1905/1922), 208-9, passim. 22 Maurras had already written about the relationship between sport and nationalism while covering the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. See, Anthinéa: d’Athènes à Florence (Paris: Librairie Honoré et Edouard Champion, Editeurs, 1913), passim.

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body had been a characteristic of the Middle Ages, which prized the wholeness of body and soul and, had it not been for the Renaissance and Reformation when reason gained primacy over the body, Christian Europe would have continued to value that neo-Platonist harmony.23 To his mind, the only chance for a regeneration of the body was offered by fascism. France’s 1940 defeat by Nazi Germany, a result of the rampant moral laxity of the French, would lead to the country’s rebirth by imposing the ideal model of the Aryan race. This rebirth, for him, was already evident in the multiplication of youth camps in Petainist France.24 Soon the Maurrassian tragic rift between born conservatives and conservatives shifts to a philosophical and political debate. Debate is often part of the dramatic situation as in the works of the 17th century playwright Corneille, and in fact also those dealing with conspiracy (again we think of Corneille’s Cinna). Conspiracy itself, furthermore, is a dramatic or theatrical form of politics. Though both agreed on the necessity of ridding France of the Republican régime and establishing a nationalist frame of mind, the two groups cannot decide upon a single course of action. For the conservatives, a “coup de force” is not only morally unjustified, but also physically impossible due to their own lack of a cohesive political doctrine, as well as to the centralization of power under the Third Republic. For born conservatives, the moral issue of the coup is a moot one, for how could one fight an atheist and individualist enemy who is solely motivated by profits, except on immoral grounds? What is more, the coup could be tactically possible; on the one hand, if modeled on past historical experience; and on the other, if aimed at the top, with the “coup de main” of select civil servants, the centralized system could easily become vulnerable. Though they share a similar political objective with the born conservatives, the conservatives’ strategy—which seeks to take over the state through the democratic process—has failed. Their tactic, that of propaganda backed by bribes, has played into the hands of the enemy’s accomplices, such as Jewish usurers or Parisian embezzlers and has amounted to nothing less than political suicide.25 Their failure echoes the various attempts by the “Ordre Moral” in the initial stages of the Third Republic or the Boulanger experience. The “Ordre Moral”, a coalition of 23

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Notes pour comprendre le siècle (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1941), 35-52. 24 Marie Balvet, “Décadence et restauration du corps chez Drieu La Rochelle,” in Les Temps modernes, vol. 39, n. 437, (1982): 1182-1197. 25 Maurras, “Si le coup est possible,” 544.

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Monarchists and Conservatives of all political creeds, not to be confused with the “Parti de l’Ordre” active during the Second Republic, represented a serious threat to the nascent Third Republic in the 1870s. After the fall of Thiers’s government of National Defense in 1873 and the failure to reinstate monarchy, “L’Ordre Moral” helped elect Edme Patrice Maurice, comte de Mac-Mahon, to the presidency of the Republic for seven years, and dominated the Parliament for the following three years (1873-6). They were defeated in the 1876 elections, and despite Mac-Mahon’s attempts to pursue their political agenda, they were never again able to regain power. Maurras’s ideal coup involves a leader who is also a chief conspirator. The image he provides is of an audacious and well-placed man who single-handedly masterminds and carries out the “coup de force”: “Such was the grandeur of that king of fortune, disguised as Ulysses. Under an unkempt beard and blue blouse, he emitted about him a profound sense of natural and divine right.”26 The concept of the “organic leader,” modeled on the classical hero whose action is divinely sanctioned, becomes with time an important topos in Fascist rhetoric. For example, the organic leader is one who occasions a divine surprise, such as Maurras later portrayed the Maréchal Pétain to have effected in his 1941 article, “La Divine surprise,” a piece introduced as evidence during Maurras’s trial in early 1945 by the prosecution who interpreted it as a celebration of the defeat of France and the Third Republic.27 Maurras had more than one occasion to bring his overt conspiracy to term but repeatedly failed to take action. It remained nothing more than an aesthetic stance on his part. On February 6, 1934, twenty-four years after the publication of “Si le coup”, the far-Right in France again had an opportunity but failed to seize power, when an anti-parliamentary street demonstration organized in Paris by far-right leagues culminated in a riot near the seat of the French National Assembly on the Place de la Concorde. Considered one of the major political crises endured by the Third Republic, the event remains the closest attempt at a fascist coup d’état in France in popular consciousness. True to the image of the invisible conspirator he had forged, Maurras, the theorist of radical conservatism, was nowhere to be found during the uprising. He remained aloof from street violence. When Léon Daudet, son of the famous writer, who, upon the news that Réal del Sarte, the founder of the Action 26

Ibid., 550. Eugen Weber, however, argues that this was an exaggeration because, although for Maurras the fall of the Republic offered consolation for the fall of France, what he was really praising in this article was the old Marshal’s miraculous political capacities. Eugen Weber, Action Française (California: SUP, 1962), 447. 27

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Française’s vigilante group “Camelots du Roi”, had been injured, wanted to march his men on the police barricades at Place de la Concorde, Maurras dissuaded him from taking such action. A more effective strategy, he answered, would be to prepare the next day’s edition of the Action française. In fact, after finishing that day’s front page, Maurras is said to have spent the rest of the night of February 6th writing poetry in Provençal—his “coup de force” never developed beyond a “coup de théâtre”.28 In the aftermath of February 1934, “Politique d’abord!” “la France aux Français”, “la France seule” (“Politics First, France to the French, Only France”)—the xenophobic rallying cries of the Action Française that permeate Maurras’s proto-fascist œuvre (Carrol, 71-96)—sounded hollow to the future generation of fascist intellectuals who blamed Maurras for not having evolved beyond poetic action and eschewing political action. Disappointed by the failed coup, but longing for a true “national and social renaissance”, Drieu La Rochelle embraces fascism in the 1934 collection of essays Socialisme fasciste and fictionalizes his spiritual quest in the 1939 novel Gilles in which the hero, Gilles Gambier, has traversed many social and intellectual circles during the roaring twenties, yet been unable to overcome his longstanding feeling of nausea toward French society and politics. As his old misanthropic mentor Carentan confides to him, France has forgotten her past and fallen prey to a “syphilitic force” intent on emasculating the country.29 Gilles is nostalgic for a French golden age, the aristocratic, Catholic, and virile Middle Ages: “There had been the French raison d’être, that passionate, proud, furious outburst of 12th century epic poems, cathedrals, Christian philosophy, sculpture, stained glass windows, manuscript illuminations, crusades. The French had poets, husbands and fathers. They had produced children, they had built, they had killed, and they had gotten killed. They sacrificed themselves and they had sacrificed.”30 He also imagines a new world order inspired by such a vision of the past, although this vision remains imprecise throughout the novel. The medieval society which serves as a model for the future social order in turn evokes a kind of Platonist social order: “a society in which the production and enjoyment of material goods would be limited to a corpulent, affluent, and bourgeois proletariat; and, as for the elite, a kind of nobility, man’s generosity would

28

Ibid., 336. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles (1939). Romans, Récits, Nouvelles. NRF (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2012), 819-1311, 1173. 30 Ibid., 1121. 29

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be brought back to contemplation.”31 Gilles is quick to note that this contemplation has nothing to do with the intellectual inertia and aesthetic mediocrity that characterized the 19th-century Romantics. Rather, as in Plato’s Laws, this contemplation could be profound and creative only by relying on actions that engage all of society. “There is thought only in beauty and beauty only in the action of an entire society returned to the holy law of measure and balance. Restriction of the elite’s needs, balance of material forces on the one hand, corporeal and spiritual on the other. Asceticism of the cleric, but also the athlete and the warrior. … Such had been Greece, Medieval Europe.”32 Gilles credits Maurras’s role in the restoration of the eternal golden rule in contemporary political philosophical discourse, but that is the extent of his generosity toward Maurras, whom he considers the great political thinker of the previous century but “presently small and impotent.”33 Drieu would later revise this vindictive assessment of Maurras in his Journal: 1939-1945 stating, “I die a Maurrassian, with the regret of not having served Maurras and the Action Française better”. The following year, regretting that Maurras and Daudet did not die in the 1920s so that their youthful image would not be tarnished by that of the 1940s, he writes, “What a shame that Maurras and Daudet did not die around 1925” and then “Will Maurras finally have the tact to die?”34 In order to combat the nefarious forces of decadence, Gilles founds a newspaper, L’Apocalypse, the intent of which is, on the one hand, to counteract the pandering and hair-splitting arguments of the Communists and Radicals; and on the other, to sway an intellectually limited, but “gluttonous” public toward fascism. Though he admits poor knowledge of Italian fascism and only vague familiarity with the Nazi movement, he posits that fascism had been unknowingly conceived by leftists who were artfully reinventing values of authority, discipline, and force.35 Echoing the Drieu of Socialisme fasciste, Gilles will foster these precise values in L’Apocalypse, with the ultimate goal of conspiring to destroy capitalist class culture in order to restore the notion of aristocracy (1193). Unlike the Maurrassian conspirator whose main intent is to sway public opinion, Gilles has no love for his public. In fact, just like Voltaire before him, he aims to écraser l’infâme.

31

Ibid., 1178. Ibid., 1178-1179. 33 Ibid., 1179. 34 Quoted in Carrol, French Literary Fascism, 270, note 4. 35 Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles, 1234. 32

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The day of the coup, Gilles tries hard to motivate Clérences, one of the most promising politicians in the Radical Party, into action: “If a man stands up and throws his destiny into play, he will do what he wants. He will gather into the same net the Action Française and the Communists, the Patriotic Youth and the Croix-de-feu, and many more. Don’t you want to try?”36 For Gilles, France’s decadence is due to the party culture, which holds the country hostage in a stalemate situation. In response to Clérences’s lack of motivation, a frustrated Gilles lays out the genesis of a coup d’état: Attack Daladier (Radical politician and French Prime Minister) or defend him, but through concrete action. Invade in rapid succession a right-wing and a left-wing newspaper. Have this one and that one bludgeoned at home. Leave behind the routine of old parties, of manifestos, of meetings and of articles and speeches. You will rapidly acquire a formidable power of unity. Barriers will forever be broken between the right and the left, and waves of life will rush in all directions. Don’t you feel this momentum? The wave is there before us: we can thrust it in any direction we want, but we must do it right away, at all costs.37

In Maurrassian fashion, Drieu proposes an overt coup d’état. His version though moves beyond the poetic action proposed by Maurras in “Si le coup” and espouses action for action’s sake, violence for violence’s sake. Political rivalries inherited from the 1789 Revolution must be annihilated. It is no longer a scenario for a neo-classical tragedy, but rather one for a cinematic drama. The characters no longer represent blood relatives, such as born conservatives and conservatives, but ideological rivals whose intent is not to hold hands, but to do anything at all costs, given the momentous historical opportunity. The beauty of politics, for Drieu, resides in the action itself. But, after the February disappointment and the unexpected death of Pauline, his wife expecting his child and a former “easy chick”, symbol of 36

Ibid., 1248. “Attaque Daladier ou défends-le, mais par des actes qui soient tout à fait concrets. Envahis coup sur coup un journal de droite et un journal de gauche. Fait bâtonner à domicile celui-ci ou celui-là. Sors à tout prix de la routine des vieux partis, des manifestes, des meetings et des articles et des discours. Et tu auras aussitôt une puissance d’agrégation formidable. Les barrières seront à jamais rompues entre la droite et la gauche, et des flots de vie se précipiteront en tous sens. Tu ne sens pas cet instant de grande crue ? Le flot est là devant nous: on peut le lancer dans la direction qu’on veut, mais il faut le lancer tout de suite, à tout prix.” Ibid., 1249. 37

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his last attempt to rescue decadent France, Gilles leaves the country and re-emerges in the Epilogue under the nom de plume Walter, a Belgian national, alongside the pro-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil war. Rationalizing his commitment to fascism with two of his companions in arms, Gilles declares: For me, I have withdrawn from among nations. I belong to a new military and religious order which has been created somewhere in the world and pursues, against all opposition, the conciliation of the Church and fascism and their double triumph over Europe. […] Against the invasion of Europe by the Russian army, a spirit of European patriotism must be born. This spirit will take life only if Germany has first given a full moral guarantee to the integrity of nations, of all the nations in Europe. Only then will she be able to fulfill efficiently the role that is destined to her by her strength and by the tradition of the Holy Roman Empire to direct the Europe of tomorrow.38

Echoing Drieu’s political thinking in both L’Europe contre les patries and Socialisme fasciste, Gilles’s patriotic Europe can only be realized through the fusion of Church and state, the Christian Church and the fascist state, to the detriment of all nations. For him, through the moral leadership of Germany, fascism offers Europeans the opportunity for a crusade of Reconquista to reverse the invasion of infidels of the Comintern, an invasion brought about by domestic petty politics between the Right and the Left.39 Indeed, to counteract the political stalemate between the Nationalists, represented mainly by Maurras and the Action Française, and the Socialists, represented by Blum, both intellectuals, but not men of action, Drieu-Gilles proposes to unite idea and action, aesthetics and politics, in order to realize the golden age in the near future. The novel closes with the symbolic image of the main character who, uncertain about what lies immediately ahead, is determined to defend 38 “Pour moi, je me suis retiré d’entre les nations. J’appartiens à un nouvel ordre militaire et religieux qui s’est fondé quelque part dans le monde et poursuit, envers et contre tout, la conciliation de l’Eglise et du fascisme et leur double triomphe sur l’Europe. […] Contre l’invasion de l’Europe par l’armée russe, il faudra que naisse un esprit de patriotisme européen. Cet esprit ne naîtra que si l’Allemagne a d’avance donné une pleine garantie morale à l’intégrité des patries, de toutes les patries d’Europe. Alors seulement elle pourra remplir efficacement le rôle qui lui est dévolu par sa force et par la tradition du Saint Empire romain-germanique de diriger la ligne européenne de demain.” Ibid., 1302. 39 The theme of fascism and the crusades is well represented in Hubert Lanzinger’s 1935 “Der Bannertrager” [The Standard-Bearer] oils on wood, portraying Hitler as a crusader.

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virility, the “arena of the bulls.”40 The novel concludes glorifying the motif of action for action’s sake. Echoing the “Santa Maria” of a wounded man lying in a stairway, Gilles breaks into a prayer to the gods (Dionysus, Christ) who die and are reborn. “Nothing is created but in blood.” Such would be the faith of the “Christ of the cathedrals, the great white and virile god.”41 Unlike the Maurrassian metaphysical rebirth of the neoclassical golden age, Drieu’s renaissance takes on a mystical dimension. Indeed, in a mystical tour de force in his last novel, Les Chiens de Paille (1944), Drieu seems to elevate the Maurrassian antagonist, the traitor, to the role of hero. As we have seen, for him, collaboration with the Germans became the legitimate way to ensure the path to salvation for European culture. Treason is aestheticized and takes on the meaning of loyalty. Drieu thus allows Constant Trubert,42 the last incarnation of his righteous hero, to declare: “Treason is of utmost convenience in the comédie humaine. It is the cog that allows all wheels to contribute to one single movement. Traitor, translator, transmitter (...). Judas is an indispensable character, necessary. Without Judas, the universe does not move, without Judas God can neither exit nor enter himself. [Judas] chooses that the world move, that the world breathe. This deus-ex-machina runs the machine. Deus. Deus? Isn’t he a deus, a god?”43 The Judas-hero must execute the leader by transforming himself into a sacrificial priest, thus demonstrating that Drieu’s vision of dramatic truth remains uncompromised. Addressing himself to Cormont, the nationalist leader and a fictional characterization of Maurras, Constant declares: You are in the hands of Judas. I have found your death. You must be done in. Because you are the last Frenchman, the last Frenchman of France alone, of little France, of patriotic France, of lonely France. Jesus was the last Hebrew […]. Life is a sacrifice, a massacre, a perpetual slaughterhouse, smoking in the face of Gods. But the only true sacrifice is human sacrifice […]. The double sacrifice. You must sacrifice others and

40

Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles, 500. Ibid., 1311. 42 The name Trubert, as well as his act of treason, might be a reference to the 13thcentury hero in Douin de Lavesne’s Trubert. Fabliau du XIIIe siècle (Genève: Droz, 1974). It is the story of a sadistic and cunning villain who thrives on his hatred for the powerful. Trubert respects nothing and no one and under different disguises, he fools and betrays the Duke of Burgundy. 43 Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Les Chiens de paille (Paris : Gallimard, 1944), 115-116. 41

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Thus, in a last mystical gesture, Drieu concludes Les Chiens de Paille by sacrificing all the characters in the story. As Constant, emulating the Mayan priest, is about to pull the pin of the grenade in the secret arsenal where he is meeting Susini, the chief black marketeer responsible for the cache of arms, and Cormont, the rabid nationalist who has defeated his arch-rivals, the Communists and the Radicals, a British bomber drops its load. Poetic justice or just punishment? Or is it that a fascist golden age can only rest on the idea of sacrifice and rebirth and thus is a locus of perpetual spleen and ideal, eternally unattainable? Such mysticism underscored Drieu’s politicized aesthetics until the very end as revealed his posthumous Récit secret.45 While Maurras, under arrest since September 1944, was being arraigned for “entente avec l’ennemi” (“collaboration”), fearing humiliation at the hands of low-life assassins, a defiant Drieu took his own life on the Ides of March, 1945. Unlike Maurras’s late attempt to mystify his aestheticized politics in the autobiographical tale Le Mont de Saturne (1950) in which the hero Denys Talon, attracted to his best friend’s girlfriend and torn between the trust or betrayal of friendship, between volupté and sagesse, commits a symbolic suicide by having his right hand plunge a knife into his heart (i.e. the Right or sagesse thus subduing the Left or volupté), Drieu seems to be above such symbolic, empty gestures. By marrying thought and action, as Nathalie Piégay-Gros suggests in her Notes to Récit secret, with this last act, does Drieu turn suicide (a theme that runs throughout his œuvre) into a vocation?46 Or, as Lecarme suspects of the communist Sartre, who seems to have considered the author of Gilles as his own double, does Drieu’s suicide exculpate him from his fascist deviation?47

44

“Tu es dans les mains de Judas. Je t’ai trouvé ta mort. Il faut que tu sois zigouillé. Parce que tu es le dernier Français, le dernier Français de la France seule, de la France petite, de la France patriote, de la France seulette. Jésus était le dernier Hébreu [...]. La vie est un sacrifice, une hécatombe, un perpétuel abattoir fumant à la face des Dieux. Mais le seul vrai sacrifice, c'est le sacrifice humain [...]. Le sacrifice double. Il faut sacrifier les autres et se sacrifier soi-même. Je suppose que quand le prêtre mexicain était ivre de sang, il finissait par succomber à la tentation et il s'éventrait lui-même.” Ibid., 199-200. 45 Drieu La Rochelle, Romans, 1552-1576. 46 Natalie Piégay-Gros, “Récit secret notice” in Drieu La Rochelle, Romans, 1803. 47 Lecarme, Drieu La Rochelle, 203.

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Maurras’s proto-fascism or Drieu’s fascism were not fully formed ideologies or strictly anti-intellectual reactions, but first and foremost aesthetic positioning, inspired by a Nietzschean spiritual conflict, against a culture considered to be vulgar and decadent. Their aestheticization of politics sought to provide their respective generations with an alternative to the stagnant political situation, each inspired by a certain idea of the golden age. The differing role played by either aesthetics or politics in this quest is of note and its alternating influence is still present in our consumer culture.

Works Cited Balvet, Marie. “Décadence et restauration du corps chez Drieu La Rochelle.” Les Temps modernes, vol. 39, no 437 (1982): 1182-1197. Bobbio, Noberto. Profilo ideologico del Novecento italiano. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1986. Carroll, David. French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture. Princeton, N.J.: PUP, 1995. DeLeonibus, Gaetano. “The Quarrel over Classicism: A Quest for Uniqueness.” In Nationalism and French Visual Arts: 1870-1914. Edited by June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New Haven; London: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2005, 293-305. Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre. Le Jeune Européen. Paris: Gallimard, 1927. —. Genève ou Moscou. Paris: Gallimard, 1928. —. L’Europe contre les patries. Paris: Gallimard, 1931. —. Le Socialisme fasciste. Paris : Gallimard, 1934. —. Notes pour comprendre le siècle. Paris : Librairie Gallimard, 1941. —. Les Chiens de paille. Paris : Gallimard, 1944. —. La Comédie de Charleroi (1934). Romans, Récits, Nouvelles. NRF, 349-520. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2012. —. Gilles (1939). Romans, Récits, Nouvelles. NRF, 819-1311. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2012. Kaplan, Alice Y. Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life, 75-141. Minneapolis: University of MP, 1986. Lecarme, Jacques. Drieu La Rochelle ou le bal des maudits. Paris: PUF, 2001. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: Museum Associates, 1991.

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Maurras, Charles. Anthinéa: d’Athènes à Florence. 1901. Paris: Librairie Honoré et Edouard Champion, Editeurs, 1913. —. L’Avenir de l’Intelligence. Suivi de “Auguste Comte ;” “Le Romantisme féminin ;” “Mademoiselle Monk” (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1905/1922). —. “Si le coup est possible.” In Enquête sur la monarchie (1901), 541600. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1925. —. Le Mont de Saturne: conte moral, magique et policier. Paris: Les Quatre Jeudis, 1950. Mithouard, Adrien. “Le Classique Occidental.” L’Occident, 4 (March 1902): 179-187. Osgood, Samuel. French Royalism under the Third and Fourth Republics. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960. Paxton, Robert O. “Radicals.” The New York Review of Books, June 23, 1994. Rasson, Luc. “Colonialisme fasciste: Drieu, Brassillach.” Romania Review 82.1 (January 1991): 76-88. Raymond, Gino. “André Malraux and the Radical Dilemma.” In Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe. Edited by Timms Collier. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988. Roberts, John M. The Mythology of Secret Societies. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Sirinelli, Jean-François. Intellectuels et passions française: manifestes et pétitions au xxe siècle. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1990. Sternhell, Zeev. The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton, NJ: PUP, 1994. Taguieff, Pierre-André. La Force du préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Weber, Eugen. Action Française. California: SUP, 1962. Yana, Pierre. “Le Traître de la guerre dans l’œuvre de Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.” Revue des sciences humaines. Vol. LXXV.204 (1986): 4160.

CHAPTER TEN ENVISIONING VICHY: FASCIST VISUAL CULTURE IN FRANCE 1940-44 SEAN P. CONNOLLY

After quickly conquering Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, Nazi troops invaded northern France on May 10th, 1940. After weeks of French military defeat and retreat, the Germans finally entered Paris without resistance on June 14th and, within three short days, the Third Reich established military and political control over the capital city. On June 16th, the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, who would be immediately replaced with WWI general, and the national hero of Verdun Henri Phillipe Pétain, popularly known as “the Marshal” (le Maréchal). Unlike Reynaud, Pétain agreed with Supreme Commander of the Army General Maxime Weygand that the French government should not relocate overseas and that an armistice with Germany was necessary for some form of French sovereignty to endure. The Battle of France would end on June 17th with Pétain’s public radio announcement of surrender, though the German Wehrmacht would continue its military advance southward. After weeks of public addresses that lamented defeat while lauding a France reborn, Pétain, now as Head of State, reestablished a national presence that he hoped would popularize his new regime, which relocated to the Free Zone town of Vichy on July 10th, 1940. Pétain would not only assume broad executive powers under the new regime; he would also come to personify, if not embody, the very ideals of the Révolution nationale, Vichy’s new reactionary ideological program, whose national credo “Work, Family, Country” (“Travail, Famille, Patrie”) would replace that of the French Republic: “Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood” (“Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”). Though it did not result from populist revolution or a national party, Vichy’s Révolution nationale shared many of the ideological characteristics of fascist Germany; it likewise promoted corporatism, peasantism, xenophobia,

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antisemitism, religious nationalism, and the rejection of liberal democracy. Yet these values were not merely an import from the German occupiers; they each already had firmly established roots in the Right-wing groups of the Third Republic like the Action Française, Croix de Feu, and Jeunesses Patriotes. Moreover, the Révolution nationale sought primarily to foster the rebirth of a singularly “French” national identity after the German occupation, one that would comply with the German agenda without being defined or subsumed by it. The promotion of this new nationalism was significant, therefore, not only for the endurance of Pétain’s government under the Reich, but also for the preservation of popular French national sovereignty under the German occupation. If it is appropriate to call the visual culture of Vichy, if not the government itself, “fascist” under the Révolution nationale, this culture, like the government that advanced it, however, was neither German nor Nazi in character. Indeed, even to call the culture of Vichy “fascist” is problematic for some. Historian Robert Paxton, for example, characterizes the Révolution nationale as more “traditional than fascist” and “more reactionary than revolutionary,” drawing largely from “Enlightenment and 19th-century middle-class values” concerning positivism and the social harmony engendered by natural laws, laws which are quintessentially expressed in family bonds and human progress.1 To these, one might add the French values of physiocracy and public education, which were likewise liberal traditions imported into the ideology of Vichy’s Révolution nationale. To be sure, the ideals of the Révolution nationale had to be drawn from established French sources to be viable, and these were derived not from the revolutionary and radical Right groups of the Third Republic, but rather from the conservative ones, those authoritarian nationalists who, though wary of egalitarian populism, shared the fascists’ traditionalism, antiparliamentarianism, and antisemitism. This allowed them to reconcile their politics both with themselves and with a new reactionary regime that was however distinct from Germany’s own. To call the visual culture of Vichy “fascist”, therefore, requires some definition and qualification, both of the term “fascist” and those qualities of the program that may be called such. Studies of the nature, qualities, and varieties of fascism are, of course, as diverse as they are complex; while some insist on specific “fascisms” for individual periods and places, others seek to distill the common elements of fascist ideology, movements, and states comparatively. For the former, fascism is a uniquely Western, if not European, phenomenon from the 1 Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 232.

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interwar years, representing a 20th century revolutionary radicalization of earlier extreme Right ideology opposed to the liberal democratic reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries.2 This characterization is not inappropriate for many conservative constituencies of the late Third Republic, if not also the French fascists of the era. For the latter, and more recently, however, fascism’s proverbial “third way” has widely been considered an identifiable and distinctive political ideology, one different from the earlier authoritarian Right while integrating key elements of it, like nationalism and anti-socialism.3 Further advancing the effort to identify unique attributes of fascism are historians like Stanley Payne, who developed an influential taxonomic schema with categories like “ideology and goals” and “style and organization” that typologize different forms of fascism.4 Given the quality and variety of these influential approaches, what historian Zeev Sternhell said over a generation ago likely still holds true today, namely that there still exists “no definition of fascism acceptable to all or recognized as universally valid.”5 Nonetheless, it is possible, I would claim, to evoke the fascist character of Vichy and the Révolution nationale as exhibited by its visual propaganda.6 In one propaganda image from 1941 (fig. 1), for example, the ideological program of the Révolution nationale is set forth through the juxtaposition of friend and enemy. On the left, an unstable home “France and Company” topples over an unstable foundation with broken stones labeled “capitalism”, “Jewry”, “communism”, etc. On the right, the stable home “France” is built on the foundation of the new national credo “work, family, country” and the stable pillars of discipline, order, savings, and courage, each corresponding to the institutions of school, skilled trades, folk life, and the military. 2

Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, The European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkley: University of California Press, 1966). 3 Zeev Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 315-376; Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 4 Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980). 5 Sternhell, “Fascist Ideology,” 315. 6 Three comprehensive volumes on the visual culture of Vichy are particularly worthy of mention here: Gerhard Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh, Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation, 1940-44 (Oxford; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Denis Peschanski, Collaboration and Resistance: Images of Life in Vichy France, 1940-44 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000); and Christian Faure, Le Projet culturel de Vichy: folklore et Révolution nationale 19401944 (Lyon: CNRS Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1989).

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Figure 1 R. Vachet, Révolution nationale, Circa 1941 Lithograph from Avignon: Centre de Propagande de la Révolution Nationale

As this image illustrates, Vichy propaganda does suggest a synthesis between, on the one hand, a new Left that fiercely resisted both communism and bourgeois liberalism and, on the other hand, a new Right that fiercely resisted both internationalism and republican nationalism. This synthesis, as Sternhell famously described it (echoing French journalist Thierry Maulnier), was “neither Right nor Left,” resulting from both a “crisis in liberal democracy and a crisis in socialism” in the early 20th century.7 Indeed, the Révolution nationale ideologically resisted both of these currents of modernity. Emerging from this hybrid ideological crisis, however, is also a hybrid ideological rebirth, a national rejuvenation that, in fascism, synthetically combines elitist ethno-nationalism with egalitarian socialism, conservative tradition with youthful vitalism, and secular states with national religion. Such ideological renewal is the focus of historian Roger Griffin’s study of fascism, which he famously defines to be, at its “mythic core”, a “palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism.”8 Palingenetic—or regenerative—myths of national renaissance and renewal were indeed a common feature of much Vichy propaganda and visual culture. In contrast to creation myths, palingenetic myths selectively align nostalgic scenes from an imagined history that ideologically parallel an imagined future, mixing past, present, and future together paradoxically in a utopian space—the nation—that is timeless, monolithic, and unchanging. Characteristic of this national populist palingenesis for Griffin is a national 7

Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 2. 8 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 32.

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mythology of destiny, history, and purpose, a disdain for the decadence of liberal individualism, and a folk egalitarianism that is able to restore national unity. “The core myth”, he explains, “is only that a populist, transclass movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth can stem the tide of decadence.”9 To wit, Pétain himself would attribute the French defeat to “relaxation” (“relâchements”) and the “spirit of pleasure” (“l’esprit de jouissance”) for which an “intellectual and moral redress” (“redressement”) was overdue, one able to realize “a new France” that will “surge” from the people’s sacrificial “fervor.”10 The figure of Pétain in Vichy imagery would not only signify this new moral redress, but also mythically personify – not unlike Joan of Arc – the ideals of the new nation, if not also a Weberian charismatic leader with a cult of personality. A significant distinction between the fascist visual culture of Vichy and that of its German occupiers, however, was the promotion of French Catholic tradition rather than revolutionary populism or a national political party. During the interwar years, Catholicism in France had already been conceived as a viable alternative ethos to the pitfalls of liberalism and communism, and the Church itself was a natural ally of Vichy due to France’s religious history, Pope Pius XI’s established alliances with Mussolini and Salazar, as well as the Church’s shared condemnation of Marxism and communism. Joan of Arc and the annual festival celebrating her in Orléans were convenient and powerful in promoting Vichy’s religious nationalism. In fact, over the course of the Third Republic, Joan increasingly became the anti-republican figure of the French right, who would increasingly reject and vilify the republican image of Marianne. In addition to her nationality, sainthood, and military achievement, Joan of Arc was also an enemy of the English, and her provincial origins made her equally appropriate for Pétain’s doctrine of “return to the earth” (“retour à la terre”), which promoted agrarian productivity and extolled the virtues of simple French folk life. “She was raised a peasant, good peasant of France, vigorous and blessed” said one Henry de Sarrau in a 1941 speech to schoolboys.11 According to historian Eric Jennings, she also came to idealize Vichy femininity in the schoolbooks of the era.12 In many ways, she was the younger, feminine, historic analog of Pétain himself, who came to personify the very same virtues of faithful service to France in 9

Ibid., xi. Philippe Pétain, Actes et écrits, Textes politiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 454. 11 Henry de Sarrau, “La leçon de Jeanne d’Arc. Allocution prononcée au collège de garçons de Libourne le 12 mai 1941” (Libourne, France, 1941). 12 Eric Jennings, “‘Reinventing Jeanne’: The Iconology of Joan of Arc in Vichy Schoolbooks, 1940-44,” Journal of Contemporary History 29.4 (1994): 711-734. 10

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Vichy's visual culture, if not, like Joan, the fascist fusion of national tradition with youthful vitality, nostalgic “old” country with rejuvenated “new” country. This palingenetic fusion is readily seen in a propaganda poster for the 1942 Joan of Arc Annual Festival in Orléans (fig. 2) in which Joan holds a sword inversely, the hilt reminiscent of a crucifix, with the slogan “Faith, Youth, Will” (“Foi, Jeunesse, Volonté”).

Figure 2 R. Ponty, Fête de Jeanne D’Arc: Foi, Jeunesse, Volonté, 1942 Lithograph, 118 × 79 cm, Paris: Office de Répartition de l’Affichage

As a symbol of national defense, Joan of Arc was likewise a convenient figure to use in vilifying Vichy’s enemies, both domestic and foreign. This is apparent in an antisemitic Joan of Arc image designed even before Vichy (fig. 3), which juxtaposes the 1429 liberation of France under Joan of Arc to the apparent “capture” of the nation under modernday Jewish authorities, whose names are framed by the Star of David. In similar contrast, the window fuses the Catholic iconography of the cross with the national iconography of the fleur de lys around the national Catholic heroine herself, juxtaposing these against the Masonic symbol and the Star of David. Just as Joan rid France of its English invaders, so too should the patriot rid France of the foreigner Jews. The captions below the Jewish authorities read: “In the Historic City, the Jews having become Masters of the Army, the Courts, the Parliament, and the Municipalities are writing the first page of decadence in our History.” The caption below Joan of Arc reads: “She who personifies the French race and drives the Foreigner out of France.” The “foreigner” more commonly and historically associated with Joan of Arc—the British—is the subject of a later 1944 poster created by the German-controlled Office de Répartition de l’Affichage

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(fig. 4). Joan appears shackled over a burning city, reminding the spectator not only of her 1430 capture by the English Duke of Burgundy, but also of the threat the Allied British continued to pose to Vichy; the caption reads “assassins always return to the scene of their crime.” If, in these images, Joan is meant to represent the more youthful and feminine face of Vichy’s new nation, Pétain represented, in contrast, the reassurance, wisdom, and tradition of the old French fatherland, the patrie.

Figure 3 Tellebo, Untitled, Postcard, 1938 Paris: Office de Répartition de l’Affichage

Figure 4 Les assassins reviennent toujours sur les lieux de leur crime, 1944, Lithograph, 156 x 118 cm

Cultivating Pétain’s public paternal and patriotic personality was the primary endeavor of the Imagerie du Maréchal, a propaganda organization developed by Pétain himself and located in Vichy. For the artistic direction of the Imagerie, he commissioned Corsican painter Gerard Ambroselli, who had been formerly commissioned by General de Lattre de Tassigny to provide images glorifying Alsatian army heroes. Ambroselli would similarly glorify Pétain. Paradigmatic of the work the Imagerie produced was a 1941 poster of the Maréchal with folk laborers (fig. 5), which unifies the industrial laborers of the city (on the right) with the agrarian laborers of the country (on the left) under the paternal figure of Pétain, two wing-like Tricolours, and the anchoring francisque, a labrys axe attributed to the Franks and conspicuously reminiscent of the Italian fasces. Just as

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Figure 5 Figure 6 Untitled, Lithograph, 1942 Gerard Ambroselli and Louis Soulas Limoges: Imagerie du The Earth—She Doesn’t Lie (La terre, Maréchal elle, ne ment pas) from La vie du Maréchal, Limoges: Imagerie du Maréchal, 1941 the Vichy credo “work, family, country” replaced the democratic credo of the French revolution “liberty, equality, fraternity”, so here does the reappropriated Tricolour replace the symbolism of republican democracy with that of authoritarian nationalism. The Imagerie also produced series of prints from which a 1941 coloring book was produced; The Life of the Marshal (La vie du Maréchal) mythologized Pétain through the prism of values the Révolution nationale aspired to. Each page is visually centered on Pétain and models some episode from his life, highlighting the values of peasant life, military service, and loyalty to nation. In a scene based on his famous phrase “the earth—she doesn’t lie” (“La terre, elle, ne ment pas”), Pétain—referenced here by the more mythic moniker le Maréchal— is seen shaking hands with a farmer whose garments match both the color of the soil and the army uniforms (fig. 6). In the background to the left one sees more agrarian laborers, and in background to the right there are uniformed French youth hoisting the Tricolour and standing in formation before a small town. The composition promotes the synthesis of young with old, farmer with soldier, and state with nation, all centered on the anchoring figure of Pétain. Below the image there is a caption composed by a selection from Pétain’s June 1941 speech extolling the earth and the

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terrestrial French paysan, who together ensure the honesty, safety, and prosperity of the nation. In another illustration from the volume (fig. 7), Pétain is glorified as the hero of Verdun during the July 1919 Victory Parade in Paris. Centered under the Arc de Triomphe with the attentive army to the right and the cheering masses to the left, all waving Tricolours, he visually synthesizes the national unity of the military and the people at a time of past triumph, a time that also models the unity of the current and future nation of Vichy.

Figure 7 Gerard Ambroselli and Louis Soulas, L’Arc de Triomphe from La vie du Maréchal, Limoges: Imagerie du Maréchal, 1941

The visual mythology of the Maréchal was not only the subject of prints and lithographs, however; it was also narrated in illustrated children’s books and fairy tales from the era, such as Albert PaluelMarmont’s biographical fairy tale Once Upon a Time There was a Marshal of France (Il était une fois un Maréchal de France). As Judith Proud argues in her superb study of Vichy children’s literature, fairy tales are a genre particularly suited to propaganda due to their allegorization, simple narratives, simple language, rhythmic repetitive structures, and didactic features.13 Moreover, fairy tales also take place in a timeless, legendary temporal setting which can be easily harmonized with that of fascist 13

Judith K. Proud, Children and Propaganda: “Il était une fois”: Fiction and Fairy Tale in Vichy France, European Studies Series (Oxford, England: Intellect Books, 1995).

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palingenetic myth. Indeed, this setting is rendered in the very telling of Once Upon a Time There was a Marshal of France, which concludes with the same phrase that commences it: “once upon a time”. The circularity of the narrative creates a mythic sense of time that is at once eternally past, present, and future, much like the timeless titular figure of the Maréchal himself, whose “life is as clear and luminous as a legend” (“sa vie est aussi claire et lumineuse qu’une legend”). The circularity of past and future rendered in the narrative parallels the timeless synthesis of age and youth found on the cover illustrations of the text by Pierre Rousseau and Germaine Bouret (figs. 8-9). Juxtaposed against a timeless pastoral background is the uniformed, paternal figure of Pétain, who appears with peasant country children bearing the earthly fruits of flowers and grain. The red, white, and blue of the Tricolour dominate the composition and are accompanied at the bottom by the credo of the Révolution nationale, synthesizing young and old, parent and child, state and citizen into the timeless and mythic space of the Vichy nation.

Figure 8 and 9 Pierre Rousseau and Germaine Bouret Covers for Albert Paluel-Marmont, Il était une fois un Maréchal de France Paris: Editions et Publications Françaises, 1941

If Vichy visual culture mythologizes its national heroes and heroines, it would do the same for its enemies. As seen above, asserting a unified national identity through the visual juxtaposition of friend and enemy was a frequent strategy in Vichy propaganda. Third Reich jurist and political

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theorist Carl Schmitt claimed in 1927 that politics essentially concerned itself with the hard distinction between friend and enemy, a distinction whereby “each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.”14 This political “repulsion” is keenly illustrated in one Vichy poster entitled Leave Us Alone! (Laissez-nous tranquilles!) from 1941 (fig. 10), presumed to have been commissioned by Pierre Costantini’s collaborationist organization French League for Purification, Social Aid, and European Collaboration (Ligue Française d’Epuration, d’Entraide Sociale et de Collaboration Européen). In this image, the three ideological pillars of the Révolution nationale—work, family, and country—are visually synthesized. The geographic contours of the French nation enclose the yellow earth and rising sun and place them against a sea-blue background. From this background there emerge the foreign enemies of Vichy, here portrayed inhumanely as wild beasts: the Freemasons, the Jew, Charles de Gaulle, and the Lie. Defending themselves from these beasts that will not “leave them alone” is a French folk couple who, in thematic parallel to the palingenetic image of the dawning sun, are planting new crops in the fertile French soil.

Figure 10 Té, Laissez-nous tranquilles!, 1941 Lithograph, 127 x 90 cm, Paris: G. Mazeyrie

14 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 27.

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Of Vichy’s various enemies, the most mythologized was the Jew. Indeed, if Pétain personified the French nation under Vichy, the Jew by contrast personified its enemy; both helped to foster a French, if not fascist, ethno-national identity. Though the short-lived Vichy regime would deport some 77,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps, Vichy antisemitism itself was not solely the consequence of the German occupation. Rather, it stemmed naturally from longstanding French traditions like many of Vichy’s reactionary policies. French antisemitism already had a long and complex history before the Third Republic, including the 1890s Dreyfus Affair, which foregrounded the politics of French antisemitism on the national stage by questioning Jewish loyalty to France. The Affair highlighted the power and prevalence of antisemitism which was so widespread throughout the Right during the Third Republic, and which fascists and conservatives alike shared; indeed, they commonly supported antisemitic initiatives like Edouard Drumont’s Antisemitic League of France (Ligue antisémitique de France). Antisemitism would thus inevitably have become a preoccupation for Pétain’s reactionary regime, even without direct German pressure. French antisemitism, and ultimately Vichy antisemitism, therefore, were more strongly linked to the mythology of nationalism and xenophobia than to a biological concept of race. Robert Paxton notes for example that “Vichy xenophobia was more cultural and national than racial, in a French assimilationist tradition…as long as Vichy had a free hand in Jewish matters, a Catholic and national antisemitism rather than a racial antisemitism lay at the base of French policy.”15 The Vichy statute on Jews, drafted and adopted by Pétain in October of 1940 without direct Nazi involvement or encouragement, promulgated official state segregation of Jews. The statute made registration and yellow badges compulsory for French and foreign Jews alike and barred them from public sector employment, entertainment industries, and media. It is important to note, however, that foreign Jews were treated more harshly than French Jews and the former were the first targets of the Vichy regime, as well as the majority of those deported to the Nazi camps. In Vichy national mythology, therefore, the historically marginalized Jew naturally became the central figure for the foreignness threatening Vichy’s national unity and rebirth. During Vichy, the nationalism and xenophobia behind French antisemitism readily harmonized with the occupiers “final solution”—both sought the “removal” of Jews from the homeland. As a result, Nazi propaganda did have a role to play in creating the fascist visual culture of 15

Paxton, Vichy France, 174-175.

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Vichy by mythologizing the Jew as an enemy to the French nation. This was a primary concern for Vichy’s Propaganda Abteilung, an organization controlled by Goebbels’ Ministry of Information and Propaganda that was located in Paris. In one Vichy poster (fig. 11) created by the German regime entitled Behind it All: The Jew (Et derrière: le Juif), the Jew is cast as the international agent that furtively manipulates the Allied Powers behind the scenes. In the image, that which posits the Jew-as-enemy is both his internationalism, as suggested by the national flag curtains, and his bourgeois capitalism, as suggested by his suit, bowler hat, and gold chain pocket-watch. If the internationalism and greed of the Jew made him incompatible with a French nation on its way to being palingenetically reunified and reborn, the power gained through these behaviors also made him a veritable threat and enemy to such unification and rebirth.

Figure 11 Bruno Hanich, Et derrière: Le juif, 1943 Lithograph, 59 x 42 cm, Made in Berlin for Distribution in Vichy France

Such was also the also message advanced during the antisemitic public exhibition The Jew and France (Le Juif et la France) held at the Palais Berlitz on the heavily trafficked Parisian Boulevard des Italiens from September 1941 to January 1942. Reminiscent of the 1937 German exhibit The Eternal Jew (Der Ewige Jude), the Parisian exhibition was endorsed and funded by the German Reich’s Bureau of Propaganda (Propagandastaffel) through its Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions (l'Institut d'étude des questions juives) in France, and it was to tour throughout France and its colonies. The exhibition promoted a culture of antisemitism, mixing

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popular media, antisemitic art, sculpture, photography, decorative art, poetry, and even overt propaganda. The publicity posters and event banner (fig. 12) were fashioned by illustrator René Perón under the pseudonym Michel Jacquot, who, according to historian Henri Bertrand Dorléac, sought to fuse the image of Mephistopheles with that of the migratory Jew from French Epinal imagery.16

Figure 12 Entrance to the 1941 Parisian Exhibit Le Juif et la France at the Palais Berlitz Featuring René Perón’s Banner Illustration Exposition le Juif et la France, 1941 Photograph “Antisemitische Ausstellung in Paris, September 1941” is Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 de.

A critic from this era, Robert de Beauplan, in his review of the exhibition, praised Perón’s image as “a great allegorical composition”, representing the Jew as a “kind of bearded vampire with thick lips and a hooked nose, whose gaunt fingers, resembling the talons of a predatory bird, clutch the globe.”17 As de Beauplan’s description suggests, Perón’s image echoes the antisemitism of Té’s Leave Us Alone! (fig. 10) by dehumanizing the Jew allegorically, even mythically, as a predatory animal 16

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’art de la défaite, 1940-1944, XXe siècle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993), 123. 17 Robert de Beauplan, “L'exposition antijuive,” L’Illustration, September 20th (1941): 59-60.

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or monster, one that seeks to seize France if not the entire world. Reprising the characterizations of Bruno Hanich’s Behind it All: The Jew (fig. 11), the Jew is again mythically linked to a traitorous internationalism and rapacious greed that threaten the French nation. Perón’s portrayal of the Jew in his illustration was appropriated in the entryway sculpture for the exhibition as well (fig. 13). At the base of the sculpture, the Jewish figure crawls at the feet of a proud French mother, who, standing tall, holds her healthy son aloft with her right arm while repulsing a second Jewish figure at the rear with her left arm. While the Jewish figures desperately clutch at change purses and worldly wealth, the French mother easily hoists her muscled son aloft single-handedly in a vital image of national dominance and rejuvenation. The strong mother and son synthesize young and old in a palingenetic myth of France physically and spiritually reborn, one whose vitality is able to overcome the subhuman materialism of the Jewish enemy.

Figure 13 Sculpture at the Entrance to the 1941 Parisian Exhibit Le Juif et la France, Representing the Reborn France Freed from Jewish Influence. Photograph rpt. in Jean Marquès-Rivière, Le Juif et la France Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, 1941

Antisemitism, anti-capitalism, anticommunism, national unity, national identity, and national rebirth—all are evoked through the mythic interplay of a national past, present, and future and the mythic feuds between Frenchman and foreigner, folk friend and enemy elite, heroic humans and

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base beasts. Such settings and characters constitute the rich palingenetic national mythology to be found in the fascist visual culture of Vichy. While this culture has its strongest roots in the Right of the Third Republic, these roots found fertile soil in the fascist culture of Italy and Spain as well as France’s German occupiers. Though this essay stresses the national character of French fascism under Vichy, there is also always an international dimension to any fascism undercutting its pretense to a nation sui generis. It is my hope that the various studies in this volume will offer fruitful comparisons and connections, whether historical, aesthetic, or political, to the fascist visual culture of Vichy, that of its geographical neighbors, or indeed that of others around the world.

Works Cited 1941. Antisemitische Ausstellung in Paris, September 1941. Photograph. Source: Creative Commons License BY-SA 3.0 de, Last Modified 18 April 2014, at 00:40 Accessed August 15th. http://tinyurl.com/krbzwtd. 1942. Untitled. Lithograph (Marshal Pétain with peasants). Limoges: Imagerie du Maréchal. 1944. Les assassins reviennent toujours sur les lieux de leur crime. Poster, 156 x 118 cm. Paris: Office de Répartition de l’Affichage. Affron, Matthew, and Mark Antliff. Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Ambroselli, Gerard and Louis Soulas. La vie du Maréchal. Limoges: Imagerie du Maréchal, 1941. Beauplan, Robert de. “L’exposition antijuive.” L’Illustration, September 20th (1941): 59-60. Bertrand Dorléac, Laurence. Histoire de l'art: Paris, 1940-1944: ordre national, traditions et modernités, Publications de la Sorbonne Histoire de l’art. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1986. —. Art of the Defeat: France 1940-1944. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008. Blanchot, Maurice. “On demande des dissidents.” Combat 20 (1937): 154157. Davies, Lizzy. “Disclosed: The Zealous Way Marshal Pétain Enforced Nazi Anti-Semitic Laws.” The Guardian, October 3rd (2010). Dreyfus, François G. Histoire de Vichy, Collection Variétés et légendes. Paris: Perrin, 1990. Faure, Christian. Le projet culturel de Vichy: folklore et révolution nationale 1940-1944. Lyon: CNRS Presses universitaires de Lyon; Diffusion, Presses du CNRS, 1989.

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Gregor, A. James. The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism. New York: Free Press, 1969. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Hanich, Bruno. 1943. Et derrière: Le juif. Lithograph, 59 x 42 cm. Berlin. Hirschfeld, Gerhard, and Patrick Marsh. Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi occupation, 1940-44. Oxford; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Jennings, Eric. “‘Reinventing Jeanne’: The Iconology of Joan of Arc in Vichy Schoolbooks, 1940-44.” Journal of Contemporary History 29.4 (1994): 711-734. Lebovics, Herman. True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 19001945, Wilder House Series in Politics, History, and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Marquès-Rivière, Jean. Le Juif et la France. Paris. Exhibition Catalogue, 1941. Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. O’Sullivan, Noël. Fascism, Modern Ideologies. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1983. Paluel-Marmont, Albert. Il était une fois un Maréchal de France. Paris: Editions et Publications Françaises, 1941. Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. New York: Knopf, 1972. Payne, Stanley G. Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Peschanski, Denis. Collaboration and Resistance: Images of Life in Vichy France, 1940-44. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Pétain, Philippe. Actes et écrits, Textes politiques. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. Ponty, R. Fête de Jeanne D’Arc: Foi, Jeunesse, Volonté. Paris: Office de Répartition de l’Affichage, 1942. Proud, Judith K. Children and Propaganda: “Il était une fois”: Fiction and Fairy Tale in Vichy France, European Studies Series. Oxford, England: Intellect Books, 1995. Rogger, Hans and Eugen Weber. The European Right: A Historical Profile. Berkley: University of California Press, 1966. Rossignol, Dominique. Histoire de la propagande en France de 1940 à 1944: l'utopie Pétain, Politique d'aujourd’hui. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991.

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Sarrau, Henry de. “La leçon de Jeanne d'Arc. Allocution prononcée au collège de garçons de Libourne le 12 mai 1941.” Libourne, France, 1941. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Sternhell, Zeev. “Fascist Ideology.” In Fascism: A Reader’s Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography. Edited by Walter Laqueur. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, 315-376. Sternhell, Zeev. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Té. 1941. Laissez-nous tranquilles! Paris: G. Mazeyrie. Tellebo. 1938. Untitled. Postcard (of Joan of Arc). Vachet, R. Révolution nationale. 1941, poster. Avignon: Centres de propagande de la Révolution nationale. Weitz, Margaret Collins. “Art in the Service of Propaganda: The Poster War in France during World War II.” Religion & the Arts 4.1 (2000): 43-75.

CHAPTER ELEVEN SALVADOR DALÍ: THE FASCIST GENIUS? ANNA VIVES

Many have not yet forgiven Salvador Dalí for showing a fascination for Hitler and collaborating with Franco. Unsurprisingly, his political position has preoccupied numerous authors.1 The prevailing tendencies have been somehow to disregard such political content by relying on the aesthetic value of his art, or to accuse him of being a bigoted artist. The latter are what Carmen García de la Rasilla has identified as “scandalized readings” of the artist, an example of which would be Ian Gibson’s The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. The second path is seemingly more common among the general public; yet, in academic circles, Dalí’s image emerges in a more positive light or at least there is an acknowledgment of the complexity of his case. However, my contention is that these two approaches, the aesthetic approach and the scandalized approach, are limited in scope and do not solve some fundamental questions that concern Dalí’s flirtation with Fascism.2 Why did Dalí show interest in Hitler and Franco?3 And what was the nature of this interest? It must also be noted 1

Javier Tusell, Arte, historia y política en España (1890-1939) (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999); Robin Adèle Greeley, “Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia,” Art History 24.4 (September 2001): 465-492; Rossend Lozano, “Dalí i el franquisme,” in Salvador Dalí i les arts, ed. Lourdes Cirlot and Mercè Vidal (Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2005), 167-173; William Jeffett, “The Artist and the Dictator: Salvador Dalí and Francisco Franco,” in The Dalí Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940, ed. Michael R. Taylor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 128-152. 2 I am referring to Fascism in very general terms. In fact, Francoism is not properly Fascist (even if it has Fascist aspects during the period 1939-1945). 3 Coincidentally, George Orwell had already expressed himself in these terms when talking about Dalí: “People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship

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here that in what follows I am not pretending to depict the artist as an apolitical subject. On the contrary, I intend to convey that the main reason behind Dalí’s involvement with Fascism is actually not political. It is important to recall Dalí’s place in Surrealism if we wish to further understand his political position. He joined the movement in 1929 and took the commandments of the Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924 and 1930) by the book. Even if Surrealism considered its activities to be independent from moral values and did not conceive the distinction between good and evil as relevant, the scatological, sexual and political content of his paintings was deemed excessive by the surrealists, who decided to subject him to judgment in February 1934. The father of Surrealism, André Breton, demanded explanations of two particular elements from Dalí: the mockery of Lenin in The Enigma of William Tell (1933) and the Nazi symbolism in The Weaning of FurnitureNutrition (1933-4), which were taken respectively as anti-Communist and far right wing material.4 The Enigma of William Tell portrays the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution half naked and with an impossibly elongated buttock with a phallic resemblance, which Dalí scornfully defines as “lyrical buttock” in Diary of a genius.5 Furthermore, the idea of William Tell was used by Dalí to represent the castrating power of the father figure, which he came to identify with Picasso, Breton as well as with his biological father, an atheist and Federalist Republican notary.6 The provocation in The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition is less obvious in its current form, as it was only in an earlier version of the work that the nurse’s armband (a representation of Dalí’s own nurse) included a swastika. A number of questions ensue: was Dalí proposing that he had

between art and morals […] The question is not so much what he is, as why he is like that,” “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí,” in George Orwell: Essays (London: Penguin, 2000), 252-253. 4 Communism was the default political affiliation of many surrealists. Generally, both Freud and Marx forged the rationale of Breton’s movement, even if in practical terms there were important contradictions between communist ideas and Surrealism. 5 Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius (Los Angeles: Solar Books, 2006), 23. 6 Gertrude Stein presents The Enigma of William Tell's father figure in a less threatening light. In her peculiar writing style, she explains: “I did see Dali when he painted his big picture about William Tell. He said it showed the power of the father and child complex but said some one William Tell did not shoot the apple off his child’s head because he wanted to he did not practice it every day in the garden as a form of sadism,” Everybody's Autobiography. 1st edition 1937 (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 30.

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had a Nazi upbringing? Was he pointing to his middle-class education?7 Yet, all these elements were not determining factors in ostracizing the artist and it was only in 1939 that he was formally expelled from the movement, the same year that Breton baptized him with the anagram Avida Dollars. The presence of reactionary material in Dalí is also evident in works such as The Enigma of Hitler (1938) and Equestrian Portrait of Carmen Bordiu-Franco (1974), which are analyzed below. I would argue that Dalí is fundamentally mocking orthodoxy regardless of its nature. He mocks differing political ideologies such as Communism and Fascism (including both Hitler and Franco’s), but also Surrealism. As has been suggested above, Surrealism, too, is orthodox. By 1933, it is apparent that Dalí is more surrealist than the surrealists themselves and he is not far from fact when describing himself as the very embodiment of the movement: “I am Surrealism.”8 I would contend that when Dalí was a surrealist he was not a (typical) surrealist and when Dalí got close to Franco, he was not a (typical) Francoist either. Whilst Breton and his followers’ activities are at odds with the theories they try to sell, Dalí is faithful to them. In fact, Dalí unwittingly pinpoints the paradoxes of Surrealism: how can an intrinsically bourgeois movement be presented as liberal? How can a liberal movement be misogynous and homophobic?9 In a way, Dalí does not succumb to the inherent fallacy of Surrealism. As critics have repeatedly indicated, the surrealist manifestos are highly dogmatic. This is especially true of the second manifesto, where Breton attempts to justify the reasons why a number of the movement’s members had been expelled. As the reading of this manifesto progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that official Surrealism is inflexible and intolerant, ideas that could not be more antithetical to the importance given to liminal stances, the subconscious and dreams within the movement. John Carey has expressed the shortcomings of the avant-garde, therefore including Surrealism, very convincingly:

7

Greeley, “Dalí’s Fascism,” 466. Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 29. 9 For further details on surrealist historical misogyny and homophobia see, for example, Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Gwen Raaberg, eds. Surrealism and Women (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991); Peter Dubé, ed., Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism (Hulls Cove: Rebel Satori Press, 2008); and Richard Easton, “Canonical Criminalizations: Homosexuality, Art History, Surrealism, and Abjection,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4:3 (September 1992): 133-175. 8

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Carey is not the only critic who has made a connection between the avant-garde and reactionary positions. In fact, the avant-garde has specifically been related to Fascism.11 Dalí’s attack on orthodox Surrealism thus becomes an important element in understanding the political content of some of his works. It is also relevant that surrealists were very keen on Lenin’s Communism. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Dalí scandalises both the surrealists and those who are at the antipodes of the movement. In his turn, he is never clearly defined by the restricting borders of groupings. David Vilaseca defines Dalí’s fluid nature in the following terms: “Dalí […] is thus a trans-sexual, transpositional subject playfully existing in n different positions—in n fluid (non) identities, desires, voices and sexes.”12 Vilaseca’s vision of Dalí illuminates many of the apparent contradictions present in the work and life of the Catalan artist. An analysis of The Enigma of Hitler (1938) and Equestrian Portrait of Carmen-Bordiu Franco (1974) is necessary as these two works lend themselves to investigate the alleged sympathy of Dalí for Hitler and Franco. Rossend Lozano suggests that there is a clear difference in ideological content between The Enigma and Equestrian Portrait: the former is overtly irreverent, the latter is linked to Francoism from the point of view of content and function.13 I would say that the second, too, is irreverent, but in a subtle manner: the fact that Equestrian Portrait was commissioned by Franco’s circle possibly resulted in a more tacit mockery of the regime. The Enigma of Hitler depicts a seascape, probably Dalí’s Cape Creus, where the dark palette, the presence of two umbrellas and a drop of water convey the imminence of rain. Both a tree branch and a 10

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 18. 11 An example is Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1. 12 David Vilaseca, The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí’s Autobiographical Writings (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 72. 13 Lozano, “Dalí i el franquisme,” 169.

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telephone appear broken, pinpointing death and unsuccessful communication respectively. Critics have read this telephone as a sign of the sterile dialogue and subsequent agreements between Hitler and Chamberlain at the 1938 Munich conference.14 Interestingly, Dalí said that the umbrella hanging from the branch was Chamberlain’s, which “appeared […] in a sinister aspect, identified with the bat.”15 There is also a certain presence of Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method: the talking end of the telephone resembles a crab claw, which is quite fitting given the marine landscape. This mimicry also suggests that talking on the phone-crab is both an impossible and potentially painful action.16 The broken tree branch is also essential because it links past, present and future in Dalí’s work, that is, it appears in an array of paintings including The Persistence of Memory (1931), The Endless Enigma (1938), The Sublime Moment (1938), The Dream of Venus (1939), Spider of the Evening… Hope! (1940) and Equestrian Portrait (1974). A remarkably small photo of Hitler appears inside a plate with five beans. The picture location and size endow it with edible qualities and in turn this points to the link established by Dalí between the edible and the beautiful.17 Yet it must be emphasized that this beauty relates to the definition of the marvelous provided by Breton in the first surrealist manifesto: for Breton, only the marvelous is beautiful.18 In particular, he defines the marvelous as any symbol with the ability to affect human sensibility for a given period of time. The marvelous beats indifference and makes us smile regardless of the morality or immorality of the acts involved.19 In other words, the beautiful qualities of the marvelous are connected with Surrealism’s spirit of ‘de-moralization.’20 My contention then is that these particular elements make The Enigma of Hitler a work of art that is perfectly aligned with surrealist theories. Yet, Dalí tends to add another element of artistic inquiry into any given 14

Thierry Dufrêne, “Comentarios de obra de Jean-Michel Bouhours, Thierry Dufrêne y Jean-Hubert Martin,” in Dalí: todas las sugestiones poéticas y todas las posibilidades plásticas, ed. Montse Aguer et alii (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid y TF Editores, 2012), 240. 15 Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret, Dali: The Paintings (Koln: Taschen, 2001), 319. 16 The combination of the telephone with marine fauna reappears in Dalí’s works, especially in Lobster Telephone (1936). 17 Salvador Dalí, “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture ‘Modern Style’,” Minotaure 3-4 (1933): 69-76, 74. 18 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Michigan: Ann Arbor Paperbacks - University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14. 19 Ibid., 16-17. 20 Ibid., 17.

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discourse. In fact, the oil under scrutiny also introduces Dalí’s very own aesthetics of objectivity through Hitler’s photograph and the sense of random juxtaposition of objects. This is crucial as it reinforces the objective (even photographic) approach to Nazi content in the painting. I think this detached approach to the political environment of the late 1930s, in particular to Hitler’s uprising, is revealing as regards Dalí’s position, which Tusell has aptly identify as fascination.21 Fascination, as opposed to sympathy, is all that is possible to conclude by analyzing this work. Furthermore, Dalí had previously used beans in Soft Construction with Boiled Beans - Premonition of Civil War (1936), where there is also a sinister anticipation of war. Descharnes and Néret describe Soft Construction in terms that evoke the phenomenic angle observed in The Enigma of Hitler: True to his principle of taking no interest in politics, Dalí viewed the civil war that was tormenting his country merely as a delirium of edibles. He observed it as an entomologist might observe ants or grasshoppers. To him it was natural history; to Picasso, by contrast, it was political reality.22

Yet, portraying Dalí as an apolitical subject would seem dishonest or at the very least naïve. Dalí’s philosophy of softness and hardness unveils further ideas with connection to Dalí’s political position. Dalí defines the hard as that “without dream, without ‘mist of wonder’, measurable, observable, physical, objective.”23 As opposed to this, the soft would convey the oneiric, the marvelous, the limitless, the invisible, the psychological and the subjective. Unsurprisingly, the oil title refers to the idea of enigma. In this work one can appreciate a group of soft elements and a group of hard objects: on the one hand, the branch, the telephone, the umbrellas, the plate, the shells, and the background rocks; on the other hand, the beans, the bats, the flesh taken by the female character behind the hanging umbrella, and the vein-like red cable emerging from the receiver end of the phone. I have left Hitler’s photograph out on purpose. Naturally, this picture cannot be considered a soft element per se, but Dalí points to the Führer’s overall softness when explaining the creative process involved in The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition: At the insistence of some of my most intimate Surrealist friends, I had to 21

Tusell, Arte, historia y política, 291. Descharnes and Néret, Dali: The Paintings, 283. 23 Ibid., 171. 22

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paint out her swastika armband. I had never expected the emotions that would be aroused by this emblem. I became so obsessed with it that I projected my delirium on to the personality of Hitler, who always appeared to me as a woman. Many of the paintings I did at this period were destroyed when the German Army invaded France. I was fascinated by Hitler’s soft, round back, always so tightly encased in its uniform. Every time I started painting the leather strap that ran from his belt across the opposite shoulder, the softness of the Hitlerian flesh squeezed into the military tunic brought me to a state of ecstasy that was simultaneously gustatory, milky, nutritive and Wagnerian, and made my heart beat violently, a very rare emotion I don’t experience even when I’m making love. Hitler’s chubby flesh, which I imagined to be like the most opulent feminine flesh with the whitest skin, fascinated me.24

The soft qualities of Hitler suggest the idea of a subjective mystery, which in turn bring us back to Dalí’s fascinated analysis. The artist is not sympathising with the Führer, he is, to be more precise, transfixed before his (political) persona. Finally, the presence of the dog and the bats is intriguing. Interestingly, Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant explain that the bat “was an unclean beast and became the symbol of idolatry and fear.”25 They also point that some Germanic-influenced art introduces the bat as a symbol of envy and that this animal can additionally symbolize “a person whose spiritual development had been hamstrung, a spiritual failure.”26 Whether Dalí had any of these particular meanings in mind we do not know, but it is plausible to conclude that the incorporation of the bats in the oil is not positive. As for the dog, Chevalier and Gheerbrant tell us that in primary mythological terms it has played the role of psychopomp (think of Cerberus for instance).27 The position of the dog next to the waters echoes his mythological function of guiding men “through the darkness of death”. In addition to this, the dog-headed deities of Ancient Egyptian art would stand “guard at the gates of holy places” and the Celestial Dog “is storm and meteor; he provides the crash of thunder and the flash of lightning and is as red as fire. Although he is foe to the demon owl, he is the herald of war.”28 This last reading fits both the imminent stormy weather and the 24

Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 23-24. I have used italics to reinforce this idea of softness. 25 Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. John Buchanan-Brown (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 70. 26 Ibid., 72. 27 Ibid., 296. 28 Ibid., 296, 301.

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premonition of war latent in the painting quite well. Equestrian Portrait was meant as a wedding present for Alfonso de Borbón-Dampierre, King Juan Carlos’ cousin, and shows Franco’s granddaughter, Carmen Martínez-Bordiu, on the silhouette of a horse.29 The elements appearing inside the horse are clear, whilst the rest of the image, including Carmen, conveys chaos. Likewise, the weather is bright and sunny inside the horse and dark and stormy outside it. Two major symbols of Spanishness appear in the horse area: the Escorial, the historical residence of the king of Spain, and a detail of The Surrender of Breda (1634-35) by Velázquez,30 a painting that memorializes one of the most important victories of the Spanish army in the Eighty Years’ War. The detail taken from Velázquez’s painting represents the Spanish general Ambrogio di Filippo Spinola and the Dutch commander Justin of Nassau. A third element of interest is the blue scarf worn by the horse, which includes the fleur-de-lis, a symbol of the monarchies. In this context, the painting is not divided only from the point of view of space, but also from the perspective of time: the inside of the horse represents the past and the outside refers to the present. The idea of different times represented in the same space (the painting understood as a whole), suggests that time is relative. Einstein’s theory of relativity had already been deployed by Dalí in The Persistence of Memory (1931). The scientific content of the Equestrian Portrait is further emphasized by the crossing of lines next to the Escorial as well as by the crack observed below The Surrender of Breda scene, which suggest mathematical ideas related to the fourth dimension and the theory of catastrophes by René Thom, respectively.31 In his explanation of the oil Corpus Hypercubus (1954), Dalí had mentioned that it was “metaphysical, transcendent cubism”, which “is based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan Herrera, Philip II’s architect, builder of the Escorial Palace; it is a treatise inspired by Ars Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist, Raymond Llull.”32 29

Alfonso and Carmen were soon-to-be-married. He asked her for a portrait of herself by Dalí as a present. See Màrius Carol and Josep Playà, El enigma Dalí (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2004), 131. 30 Velázquez was one of Dalí’s favourite artists alongside Vermeer de Delft, Rafael and Leonardo da Vinci (1184). 31 The Escorial, The Surrender of Breda scene with the Spanish general Ambrogio di Filippo Spinola and the Dutch commander Justin of Nassau as well as the lines crossing, all had already appeared in Dalí’s Portrait of Ambassador Cárdenas (1943). 32 R. Bruce Elder, Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 523.

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So, the Escorial, even if superficially monarchic, is related, according to Dalí, to Catalan Ramon Llull. Llull had been the first to write a scientific text in a romance language, in particular Catalan. As for the crack, Dalí was going to use a similar pattern in Topological Abduction of Europe Homage to René Thom (1983), which the artist related to the A9/E15 motorway between Salses and Narbonne in France, at the border of Catalonia. The crack is also included very faintly in an untitled work belonging to his Series on Catastrophes (1983); but most importantly, it also appears, now clearly, in Dalí’s very last work: The Swallow’s Tail (Series on Catastrophes) (March 1983). The olive tree branches under the horse are also reminiscent of Dalí’s Catalan landscape as well as of Gala, who he would refer to as “olive.”33 The relevance of mathematics in the painting is also apparent if one considers that Dalí produced a work entitled El Escorial and Catastrophe-Form Calligraphy (1982), where ideas of the fourth dimension and the theory of catastrophes by Thom interact. In addition to this, these scientific references in the painting are revealing of Dalí’s unorthodox approach to Francoist ideology. An ideology that had banned Darwin and Isaac Newton (as well as Voltaire, Luther and the feminist movement)34 one could think was at odds with such references, particularly in a portrait of a member of Franco’s family. There is also a sense of mise en abyme, as there are two small horses inside the main horse figure, which coincidentally is the same number of horses included by Velázquez in The Surrender of Breda. Dalí had intriguingly told Carmen that her foot on the painting was very important. In fact, her left foot is placed at the center of the oil as if it were the most essential element in it (the very center of the painting includes her lower leg too). The pyramidal shape on the lower part of the work, with its vertex aligned with Carmen’s thighs, is also mysterious. Dalí’s mockery of Fascist ideology also materializes in the form of overt critique of its main characters and forms. A first example is present in the television film Impressions de la Haute Mongolie - Hommage à Raymond Roussel (1975),35 where Hitler is ultimately depicted as a pig, a

33 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), footnote on page 248. 34 Newton’s statue was removed from a street in Sabadell, Catalonia. See Martí Marín, Història del franquisme a Catalunya (Lleida: Eumo Editorial/Pagès Editors, 2006), 75. 35 The title of the film echoes Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique (1910) and Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (1932).

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link also suggested by Elliott H. King.36 In particular, we see Dalí at his house in Port Lligat, grabbing a postcard that he defines as one of his adolescent obsessions. There we see a little boat in what looks like a sea landscape under the moonlight and Dalí wonders “Why not find something demonic in there”. Then the postcard is placed vertically and, by means of the paranoiac-critical method, the combination of the moon, the little boat and a shadow become the face of Hitler. In anticipation of this transformation, Dalí says: Yes, yes and yes, fix your eyes, spread your eyes wide before this limpid water, and suddenly from this tranquillity, arises the fierce face, Nietzschean, catastrophic, which always precedes the most calm idyllic moments: One, two, three, four, five! Hitler will arise. See the cruel mouth of Hitler! See the eyes, especially his right eye, this kind of abominable tear, personified by the ridiculous petit Pierrot who strolls along the quays imbued with the grievous ideologies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who has caused the misfortunes of all revolutions.

After these words, the image of Hitler’s face is followed rapidly by a number of images, including the one of a pig. A second example of mockery of Fascist ideology is related to the following Catalan tongue-twister, which Dalí uses in the form of a dictator’s speech: “A little, thin, crooked and long-beaked pullet that did not provide good eggs had six little, thin, crooked and long-beaked chicks that did not provide good eggs. If the pullet hadn’t been so little, thin, crooked, long-beaked and provided good eggs, the six chicks wouldn’t have been so little, thin, crooked, long-beaked and would have provided good eggs.”37 Dalí seems to be laughing at the prototypical dictator’s discourse and, subsequently, at orthodoxy. We see the artist dressed in a military uniform and shouting (in a Hitlerian or Francoist fashion) the above. His speech is followed by the applause of an imaginary audience. This is interesting because form and not content is what informs the Fascist discourse. According to Richard Overy “there is widespread assumption that the content of his [Hitler’s] speeches mattered less than

36

Elliott H. King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema (Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2007), 174-175. 37 “Una polla xica, pica, pellerica, camatorta i bequerica, va tenir sis polls, xics, pics, pellerics, camatorta i bequerics. Si la polla no hagués sigut tant xica, pica, pellerica, camatorta i bequerica, els sis polls no haguessin sigut tant xics, pics, pellerics, camatorta i bequerics.”

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the form in which they were delivered.”38 Walter Benjamin also considers Fascism as an aesthetic ideology. In particular, he argues that Fascist politics is based on an artistic ritual function. This politics aims at protecting the sense of aura, which would find its epitome in the figure of the Führer. As Benjamin points out, Marinetti’s slogan “Fiat ars, pereat mundus” (“Long life to art, death to the world”) summarizes the opposition between Fascist elitism and the masses at the beginning of the 20th Century.39 Yet, mocking orthodoxy is not the only element in the equation regarding our understanding of Dalí’s political position. Delving further into his mockery of or fascination for the main figures of Communism and Fascism, Dalí’s political identity is related to his self-representation as a genius. At its simplest, Dalí’s conception of genius responds to a romantic discourse where the subject is endowed with special qualities of inspiration and omnipotence. His self-representation as a genius is perhaps more crucial in those situations when his political position remains ambiguous or even radically right wing. His autobiographical writings, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) and Diary of a Genius (1964), shape a particular image of himself as a genius, which in turn is informed directly or indirectly by the theories of Cesare Lombroso, Theodor Adorno, Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl G. Jung. Lombroso’s reading, albeit highly controversial, is interesting in that many of the symptoms he observed in the man of genius can be observed in Dalí, for instance megalomania and lack of moral concerns.40 His autobiographies provide copious examples of both elements: “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”41 “While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little three-year old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.”42 “This unique book, then, is the first diary written by a genius. And it is more than that: it is written by the unique genius who has had the unique fortune 38

Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London: Penguin, 2005), 17. 39 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 235. 40 Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius. 1st edition (London: Walter Scott, 1891; Michigan: Ann Arbor, University Microfilms International, 1979), vii. 41 Dalí, The Secret Life, 1. 42 Ibid., 12.

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to be married to the genius Gala, the unique mythological woman of our time.”43 Lombroso also mentions selfishness as a quality of genius, which has connections with megalomania and can be recognised in Dalí’s devotion to money in Diary of a Genius: “When one is rich, it becomes completely useless to be ‘committed’. A hero enters into no commitments!”44 Lombroso even states that some men of genius who were devoted to art and poetry were criminals and that nations have normally been led by mad men. All these qualities, that Dalí makes his own in his quest to become a genius, are reminiscent of some of the most unpleasant paraphernalia of Fascist regimes. Adorno’s reading of genius draws on the concepts of subjectivization and reification and suggests that extreme positions with regards to these two can lead to mass culture, myth or Fascism. Dalí’s extreme subjectivization, that is, his focus on self-promotion and his subsequent conception of art as commodity connects with those three elements. To understand it, self-promotion implies disregarding the society to which the artist belongs and relates to the romantic idea of a powerful genius. Dalí ensures that the mythical is part of his self-representation as a genius, with The Secret Life having been read as his “preferred orchestration of his own myth.”45 As we have explained above, the mythological, in other words the aura, is an essential element of Fascist regimes. It is important to note that I am not arguing that Dalí is a Fascist genius, but rather that Dalí’s selfrepresentation as a genius points to a number of signs and tropes typical of Fascism. His aim is Machiavellian, however: the purpose is not political even if the routes the artist takes are profoundly so. In addition to this, Adorno’s theory of aesthetics connects with Benjamin’s consideration of the concepts of creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery as tools informing Fascism, an ideology that, from this point of view, is inevitably found in Dalí’s autobiographical writings and public life.46 Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is overtly used in Dalí’s autobiographies, especially in Diary of a Genius. This deployment is particularly interesting given that Nietzsche himself had been appropriated by National Socialism.47 First of all, there is a similar megalomaniacal content in both men: one need only bear in mind the subtitles of Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is (“Why I Am So Wise” and “Why I Am So Clever”). 43

Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 11. Ibid., 30. 45 Robert Radforth, Dalí A&I (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), 8. 46 Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 212. 47 Assassins Leopold and Loeb also justified their crime by resorting to Nietzsche’s theories. See Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins, The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41. 44

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Secondly, in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche considers that the most elevated intelligence is incompatible with goodness. The true genius requires a combination of both the genius of ability and the genius of morality. Nietzsche also specifies that even if socialism could be considered an ideal political system for the majority, it is not appropriate for developing the figure of the man of genius. Therefore, as suggested by Salim Kemal, Nietzsche’s genius requires a hierarchical society where the ability to produce beauty determines one’s place in this society.48 The artist also makes use of the Nietzschean concept of Übermensch [superman], but there is a certain degree of tergiversation as Dalí feminizes it by calling Gala “superwoman” in Diary of a Genius: “My superman was destined to be nothing less than a woman, the superwoman Gala”; “the Assumption is the paroxysm of the will to power of the eternal feminine, which Nietzsche’s followers claimed to attain. Whereas Christ is not the superman He is believed to be, the Virgin is wholly the superwoman.”49 Even if there are differences in tone between Nietzsche and Dalí, the reader will agree that these ideas are potentially dangerous from a political and moral point of view. Once more it would seem that Dalí’s flirtation with Nietzsche is another area that feeds his association with Fascist ideologies, although as has already been observed, self-representation as a genius rather than political affiliation is the focus of the artist’s efforts. Finally, Jung’s views emphasize evil as a relevant feature of the man of genius. In fact, Jung specifies that heroes have always had devilish attributes.50 An idea that he illustrates with a quotation from Meister Eckhart: “God is not good, or else he could be better.”51 If God were good, he would be better. In fact, this is not the case: God does not have the necessary evilness for creative excellence. And such evilness must not be confused with the bad in terms of the Jewish-Christian tradition.52 These considerations echo Nietzsche’s ideas and can be appreciated in Diary of a Genius, where Dalí distinguishes between his unintelligent, good friends and himself: “they [my friends] are not the way I used to be. I know they

48

Salim Kemal, “Nietzsche’s Politics of Aesthetic Genius,” in Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell and Daniel Conway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 257-286, 262. 49 Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 18, 54. 50 Carl G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1940), 229. 51 Ibid., 304. 52 Ibid.

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are stupid, sports-loving, and good. At their age, I took Nietzsche in my knapsack and I was already racking my own brains and those of others.”53 I would like to conclude by saying that, beyond his overt mockery of the far right, Dalí’s link with Fascism is a consequence of his selfrepresentation as a genius, especially when the artist’s political position remains ambiguous or manifests itself as radically right wing. Undeniably, this does not excuse him for having supported the condemnation of Catalan language in 1951 or the last executions ordered by Franco in September 1975, but at least it reveals that there is not a sudden political change in Dalí and that his main concern is essentially non-political. There is a system in the way Dalí behaves and works, which is very much in line with his paranoiac-critical method, which in the conference “Moral Position of Surrealism” he related to a will to systematize confusion.54 Both system and confusion are key elements in our understanding of Dalí and his particular relation to politics. Dalí’s mention of Franco as a leader that has brought “clarity, truth, and order in the country during the most anarchical moments of the world” may be related to his artistic (paranoiac) reading of Francoism.55 Clarity, truth and order were not Dalí’s preferences regardless. Or at least they were not preferences if unrelated to chaos and the Other. If we wish to understand Dalí, we must keep this hidden Other in mind at all times. He had warned us: “The day that people seriously turn their attention to my work, they will see that my painting is like an iceberg where only a tenth of its volume is visible.”56 I believe that this can be applied to all his work as well as to his actions, including those with political implications. Perhaps, however, the reader may think that there is an area where Dalí clearly failed, that is his antisocial behavior. For example, Orwell had said that he was “as antisocial as a flea.”57 Yet, I think there are a number of questions that we ought to ask ourselves: was his involvement with mass culture not a contribution to the global imaginary? Has his work not added to the democratization of art?

53

Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 55. In fact, Jung frequently refers to Nietzsche in The Integration of the Personality. 54 Salvador Dalí, L’alliberament dels dits: obra catalana completa, ed. Fèlix Fanés (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1995), 22. 55 William Jeffett, “The Artist and the Dictator,” 136. 56 King, Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema, 7. 57 Orwell, George Orwell, 251.

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Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Adorno Gretel and Rolf Tiedemann. London, Boston, Melbourne y Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, Walter Benjamin. Edited by Hannah Arendt. London: Pimlico, 1999. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Michigan: Ann Arbor Paperbacks - University of Michigan Press, 1972. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Carol, Màrius, and Josep Playà. El enigma Dalí. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 2004. Caws, Mary Ann, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg. Surrealism and Women. Edited by Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg. Cambridge, Massachussets: The MIT Press, 1991. Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. A Dictionary of Symbols. Translated by John Buchanan-Brown. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Dalí, Salvador. Diary of a Genius. Los Angeles: Solar Books, 2006. —. L’alliberament dels dits: obra catalana completa. Edited by Fèlix Fanés. Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1995. —. The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. New York: Dover Publications, 1993. —. “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture ‘Modern Style’.” Minotaure 3-4 (1933): 69-76. Descharnes, Robert, Néret, Gilles. Dali: The Paintings. Koln: Taschen, 2001. Dube, Peter. Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism. Hulls Cove: Rebel Satori Press, 2008. Dufrêne, Thierry. “Comentarios de obra de Jean-Michel Bouhours, Thierry Dufrêne y Jean-Hubert Martin.” In Dalí: todas las sugestiones poéticas y todas las posibilidades plásticas. Edited by Montse Aguer et alii. Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid y TF Editores, 2012. Easton, Richard. “Canonical Criminalizations: Homosexuality, Art History, Surrealism, and Abjection.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4.3 (September 1992): 133-175. Elder, R. Bruce. Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.

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García de la Rasilla, Carmen. “Dalí and the Mechanics of Scandal.” Catalan Review: International Journal of Catalan Culture 17 (2003): 33-56. Greeley, Robin Adèle. “Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia.” Art History 24.4 (September 2001): 465-492. Hewitt, Andrew. Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the AvantGarde. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Jeffett, William. “The Artist and the Dictator: Salvador Dalí and Francisco Franco.” In The Dalí Renaissance: New Perspectives on His Life and Art after 1940. Edited by Michael R. Taylor, 128-152. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Jung, Carl G. The Integration of the Personality. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1940. Kemal, Salim. “Nietzsche’s Politics of Aesthetic Genius.” In Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell and Daniel Conway, 257-286. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. King, Elliott H. Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema. Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2007. Lombroso, Cesare. The Man of Genius. 1st edition: London: Walter Scott, 1891. Michigan: Ann Arbor, University Microfilms International, 1979. Lozano, Rossend. “Dalí i el franquisme.” In Salvador Dalí i les arts. Edited by Lourdes Cirlot and Mercè Vidal, 167-173. Barcelona: Publicacions i Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2005. Magnus, Bernd, and Kathleen M. Higgins. The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Marín, Martí. Història del franquisme a Catalunya. Lleida: Eumo Editorial/Pagès Editors, 2006. Montes-Baquer, José (Director). Impressions de la Haute Mongolie. Hommage à Raymond Roussel. Produced by Westdeutsches Fernsehen. 1975. Film. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. 1st edition: 1878. London: Penguin, 1994. —. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. 1st edition: 1888. Edited by R. J. Hollingdale and Michael Tanner. London: Penguin, 1992. Orwell, George. George Orwell: Essays. London: Penguin, 2000. Overy, Richard. The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. London: Penguin, 2005. Radforth, Robert. Dalí A&I. London: Phaidon Press, 1997.

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Stein, Gertrude. Everybody's Autobiography. 1st edition 1937. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Tusell, Javier. Arte, historia y política en España (1890-1939). Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1999. Vilaseca, David. The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí’s Autobiographical Writings. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

PART IV TOTALITARIAN GEOGRAPHY

CHAPTER TWELVE THE IMPOSSIBLE RECONCILIATION: PEDRO LÁZAGA’S TORREPARTIDA (1956) DANIEL ARROYO-RODRÍGUEZ

Faced with Spain’s spiritual ruin, we must put a stone in place of our heart and if necessary, we must throw a million Spaniards to the wolves, if we are not all to be thrown to the swine. —Ángel Ganivet

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) illustrates that the end of an armed conflict does not always involve the start of a peaceful period. On the contrary Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) extended the (more than strictly military) confrontation indefinitely through its political, social and cultural practices. Almost two decades after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Pedro Lázaga’s film Torrepartida (1956), reflects the ongoing tension experienced by the regime at the time. This was due to the need to implement a social and economic opening in order to normalize the regime’s international position after the Second World War (1939-45), combined with its inability to fully overcome the conflict on which its political power was built. Based on this dialectic, Lázaga’s film reconciles the need to on the one hand, open an avenue for reconciliation with those who were defeated in the Civil War; and, on the other, to recall the original confrontation as a measure of internal control at a time when the first inklings of liberalization were arising in Franco's Spain. To this end, Torrepartida humanizes the political enemy, Manuel, the protagonist, whilst at the same time criminalizing the movement to which he belongs. Moreover, the director synthesizes some elements from the 1930s documentary genre, with features from the so-called cine de cruzada (propaganda civil war films) from the 1940s, by using the techniques and scenarios typically found in American westerns.

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Situated at a point in time which revealed the first signs of an opening up of the Francoist regime and its most reactionary ideological cinema, in his film Lázaga motivated the need to both eliminate an enemy that remained operational until the early 1950s, and legitimize the regime’s willingness to reach out towards reconciliation. According to Carmen Moreno Nuño, this contradiction reveals an epistemic break in which, paradoxically, the regime’s repressive apparatus re-emerged and became reinforced.1 In fact, Torrepartida aligns the leit-motif of the Francoist transformation—often seen in the cinema and literature of the period in which this film was produced—with internal socialization policies which, faithful to the principles and origins of the regime, considered any kind of reconciliation to be conditional upon the death of the enemy. Torrepartida narrates the story of Manuel, a member of the losing side in the Civil War, whose brother, Ramón, is the Francoist mayor of the town located in the Teruel province that gives the film its name. The relationship between these two characters encompasses the fratricidal nature of the conflict in its most literal dimension, acting as a microcosm of post-war Spain. Despite being protected by his brother, and continuously being given opportunities by the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard, the militaristic police force in Spain) to be reinstated in the new order, Manuel joins the local maquis. This is the name given to the anti-Franco guerrilla movement in Spain which, according to the Regime, carried out robberies, kidnappings and even murders. However, Manuel shows a humanity and repentance that distinguishes him from the maquis as a group. The film is structured around three criminal acts that reveal the perversion of the ideological aims pursued by the resisting guerrilla groups and, as a consequence, Manuel’s gradual disillusionment. These acts are: a train robbery (and the murder of the Civil Guards who responded to the attack); the kidnapping and murder of Pablo, the son of the Captain of the Torrepartida Civil Guard; and finally, the kidnapping of María, a young woman wooed by both Manuel and his brother. As Manuel becomes aware of the criminal nature of the maquis, he separates himself from the group. This separation, however, does not mean that he can integrate into a Francoist society in which ideological boundaries between friends and enemies remain unchanged. As a result, the protagonist is isolated like a damned figure for whom there is no room in either Franco’s Spain or 1

Carmen Moreno Nuño, “Introduction,” in Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla, ed. Antonio Gómez LópezQuiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño. Hispanic Issues Online (Fall 2012): 1-18, 13. Web. Accessed May 2nd, 2014.

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among the dissenters, and who is killed by his former companions under the impassive gaze of the defenders of the regime. Just as happened with other members of the maquis, Manuel’s end does not come about through the implementation of the law, as an act of war or as a murder, but as a necessary death for the survival of society as a whole. In this way the regime reinforces the concept of the maquis as a criminal group whose members are not subject to the law; as indicated by Jacques Derrida, according to this portrayal, “the opposition between just and unjust has no meaning.”2 As a result, the enemy is exposed to what Walter Benjamin called the “sheer force of law”, and what Giorgio Agamben defined as “a separation of the norm’s vis obligandi, or applicability, from its formal essence, whereby decrees, provisions, and measures that are not formally laws nevertheless acquire their force.”3 This exclusion was carried out both in terms of repression and ideologically, as evidenced by medical, legal and cultural discourses. By adopting these means, the regime normalizes the power imbalance resulting from the Civil War, to the extent that, as indicated by Michel Foucault, these discourses cease to be a surface of inscription in order to take part in a game of action/reaction, question/answer, domination/retraction and struggle.4 Where medical discourse, as analyzed by Moreno Nuño in Criminalizing Maquis, is concerned, the regime resorts to psychiatry in order to establish the inferiority and criminal nature of their political enemy. For example, as reflected in his study “La locura y la Guerra,” psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera described those on the losing side in the war as being “mentally inferior,” “uncultured, awkward beings,” “neurotic psychopaths,” “socially undesirable,” etc.5 For their part, the judicial and political discourses of the 1940s established that all atrocities were committed by the “reds” and that they were criminals from birth and acted accordingly—as shown in the Political Responsibilities Act 1939 (Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas de 1939), the General Proceedings (1943) (Causa General, 1943, Investigation of, and proceedings by, the Attorney General regarding the crimes committed during the “red” domination of Spain), as well as the 2

Derrida Jacques, “The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York; London: Psychology Press, 1992), 43. 3 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 39. 4 Michel Foucault, La verdad y las formas jurídicas (Barcelona: Gedisa Editorial, 2003), 13. 5 Antonio Vallejo Nágera, La locura y la guerra: psicopatología de la guerra española (Valladolid: Libreria Santarén, 1939), 54, 56, 209.

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Decree-Law on Banditry and Terrorism 1947 (el Decreto-Ley sobre Bandidaje y Terrorismo de 1947). The fight against these enemies was not intended to serve any ideological purposes, but rather to address the need to protect the biological purity of society and even its survival as a group. This discourse of biological degeneration can be seen as a variant of a racial struggle in which, as Foucault suggests, the confrontation was waged “not between races, but by a race that holds power and is entitled to define the normal against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to biological heritage.”6 This representation became counterproductive after the Allied victory in World War II. Thus, after the fall of the Nazi/Fascist Axis in Europe, the language and the intensity of the legal and medical discourses concerning the defeated side in the Spanish Civil War contradicted the image of political and social openness promoted by the regime vis-à-vis the Western democracies. By way of example, in order to renew its image abroad, in 1951 the regime created the Ministry of Information and Tourism, which regulated the press, theatre, film and radio broadcasting. The regime also refashioned its political discourse in order to make it palatable to the outside, cleansing it of the fascist language and symbolism that originally characterized it. Gone, for example, were the fascist salute with a raised arm, the exaltation of death and the radically anti-democratic discourse of the military coup. The dictatorship redefined its international political function as a rigid anti-communist bastion in southern Europe and as a potential ally for the major democratic and capitalist powers. Further, countering the ideological openness shown to the outside, the state faced the need to strengthen their exclusion policies internally and remind society of the efforts involved in the exclusion and final defeat of the enemy after the war. In so doing, the regime responded to the liberalizing currents, led by Catholic sectors and the most progressive Falange Members, as well as by a new generation of Spaniards who had not taken part in the Civil War, who exhibited a greater degree of tolerance towards the vanquished. As a result, and in order to reconcile the renewal of its external image with the need to increase domestic surveillance, the regime moved from considering the exclusion and annihilation of the enemy as a principle in itself, to presenting it as a necessary sacrifice for the fatherland. This reduced the reconciliation proposed by the State to a justification for its repressive practices.

6 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” in Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 (New York: Picador, 2003), 61.

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As a cultural and ideological apparatus aimed at the masses, cinema played a leading role in rationalizing the exclusion of the vanquished within the context of the regime’s political reconciliation. This explained the tight control exercised by the State over this medium, either through censorship, or through the granting of public recognition, awards and grants. These awards were granted to films that adhered to the ideological expectations of the regime, facilitating the financial management of these works as well as ensuring privileges for their theatrical release and the duration of their showing. This turned films—as Ramón Gubern stated in an unpublished text quoted by Heredero—into “mere picks to open the coffers of the administration.”7 In a context in which the film industry depended primarily on state protectionism, these benefits predetermined the content, perspectives and conceptual frameworks that could be used in this medium. Francoist cinema conceptualized the guerrilla from within a cultural project that demonized anything linked to the republican order. Consequently, as argued by Heredero, films about the maquis “did not provide an accurate representation of guerrilla warfare (which would have been impossible in that context) so much as the mindset of those making the films, with the express intention of adjusting the ideological and social situation in which they arose to a superimposed ideological construction.”8 The number of awards that novels and films about the maquis received in this period is striking, especially considering the small number of works dealing with this subject and their low quality. The films on the maquis that received awards and grants during the 1950s and early 1960s included Dos Caminos (1954), directed by Arturo Ruiz Castillo, El Cerco (1955), directed by Miguel Iglesias, Lázaga’s Torrepartida and La paz empieza nunca (1960), directed by León Klimovski. The latter was in turn an adaptation of the novel by Emilio Romero, published in 1957, which won the Planeta literary award. The official motivation accompanying awards given by Franco’s regime was that they were “of national interest”, through which, as Heredero suggests, the regime promoted the representation of “unmistakable signs of exaltation of racial values or teachings of our moral and political principles.”9 As a recognition of its portrayal of the political enemy, it was not surprising that the Board of 7 Quoted in Carlos Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo: cine español 1951-1961 (Valencia: Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana; Filmoteca Española, 1993), 81. 8 Carlos Heredero, Historias de maquis en el cine español. Entre el arrepentimiento y la reivindicación, in La Gavilla Verde. Accessed 5 April, 2014. http://www.lagavillaverde.org/centro_de_documentacion/Cine/historiasdelmaquise nelcineespanol.htm. 9 Heredero, Las huellas del tiempo, 44.

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Classification and Censorship regarded Torrepartida to be “of national interest”, and that the National Trade Union for the Performing Arts awarded the script the National Critics’ Award (1956), despite the questionable quality of the performances, and the flaws in the pacing of the film. In fact, Torrepartida’s main virtue, in the eyes of the regime, lays in its ability to reconcile the humanization of the enemy with the need to eliminate it, while at the same time exalting the work of the Civil Guard. This is shown in the final scene, where they heroically conquer the peaks in which the maquis were hiding, in what amounted to a new military victory. As a first approach to the representation of the maquis in the cinema of the 1950s, Dos caminos raised the possibility of reinstating the enemy into the new order, disassociating the genre from the cine de cruzada that had been previously used by this director in El santuario no se rinde (1949). This film showed a slight relaxation in the censorship applied by the regime to its content, as it permitted—and even helped—the open portrayal of the possible integration of the vanquished into Spanish social and political life. The proposal by Ruiz Castillo can therefore be understood as a first step towards reconciliation, without forgetting that it was, as indicated by Heredero, “a call to the vanquished who persisted in fighting for democracy to surrender, showing instead, by way of contrast, the civic and professional peaceful integration of the defeated who were docile.”10 In any case, the film acknowledged the existence of an armed confrontation that went beyond the Civil War, and the human nature of an enemy that cultural discourse had demonized for more than a decade, and so it was a considerable improvement over the ideological cinema of the 1940s. However, Dos Caminos reinvigorated the ideological control mechanisms of Spanish cinema, which represented a new turn in Francoist cultural policies. This regression can be seen, for example, in the revival of cine de cruzada in Torrepartida and, more explicitly, in Klimovski's La paz empieza nunca. This was a popular genre at the start of the 1940s which, faced with the regime’s political uncertainty during the Second World War, fell temporarily into oblivion. In Torrepartida Ruiz Castillo’s proposal was rectified, by adapting elements of cine de cruzada to the openness being promoted by the regime, as well as using the technical characteristics of its production and the hybridization of genres featured in the film. These technical characteristics notably include the use of the camera in outdoor spaces and the use of Technicolor and stereo sound. While these are not 10

Ibid., 205.

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particularly innovative elements, their use was restricted from the end of the Civil War until the early 1960s, revealing, as indicated by Heredero, the technological gap that existed between Spanish cinema and Hollywood.11 In spite of that, these elements highlight the intention to modernize Spanish cinema from a technical point of view, as well as the overcoming of a self-contained system that was formally and thematically closed to any influence from abroad. In terms of the hybridisation of genres, Torrepartida combined elements of the American western—as noted by Moreno Nuño, Heredero and Eduardo Zugasti—with others belonging to documentaries, cine de cruzada, and melodrama. The first can be seen in the use of horses and wagons for transporting the characters, which evoked the atmosphere of American Westerns, rather than reflecting the Spanish post-war period. By using this aesthetic feature—and breaking away from the self-absorbed nature of Spanish cinema from the 1940s—Lázaga used the iconography of a genre that, on the one hand, was profitable and, on the other hand, permitted the construction of a friend-enemy dialectic specific to the context of the war around which this film was based. Further, this spatial configuration and the Western aesthetic reduced maquis members to being mere pre-political primitive figures that emerged from nature as a threat to the progress and civilization which was supposedly represented by the Francoist order. In fact, the mountains occupied by the maquis are presented as a territory where a new danger is lurking behind every element of the landscape. Additionally, as if it were a siege, the maquis are scattered among the uninhabited rocks surrounding Torrepartida, victimizing civilians at will. The peace that exists within the town, as shown by the neighbours who walk through the square and talk cheerfully in the bar, is contrasted with the existence of a permanent state of emergency in the mountains, where the maquis lead the life typical of a military campaign. In fact, the confrontations between these individuals and the Civil Guard which occur in this scenario emphasize a state of undeclared war within it. The farmhouses lie between the indefinite state of war of the maquis, and the peace of Torrepartida. As a border between the city and the mountains, this space acts as a metonym for a vulnerable state in which peace is always conditional and where a state of constant vigilance must be observed against an enemy that hides behind the normality of civilian life. As Antonio says to Ramón when justifying the use of exceptional surveillance measures in the farms: “Cowardice or greed, we know that 11

Ibid., 72.

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some farmer gives them flour and meat” (Torrepartida 1956). As a result, Antonio established a permanent curfew in the farms that, in the event of any suspicion of collaboration with the maquis, turned into a state of war. This is shown, for example, through the implementation of the Escape Act (Ley de fugas), a law which allowed the Civil Guard to set up an emergency check-point from which they could eliminate the enemy without it being considered to be a murder or execution. The film illustrates this in the death of Tomás, El Alicantino—one of the maquis members from Manuel’s group. After being injured during the assault on a train, El Alicantino takes refuge in a farmhouse with Manuela, with whom he presumably maintains an extramarital affair. When he is found by the Civil Guard, a chase ensues that ends with the death of Tomás and the recovery of the money he had stolen. With the aim of adapting the Hollywood aesthetic to the regime’s political needs, Lázaga also resorts to strategies typically found in the political documentary genre of the 1930s and 1940s. This was a genre used effectively during the Civil War and the immediate post-war period to appeal ideologically to the viewer. In doing so, the involvement of the director was essential, as the film’s content needed to be adapted to the ideology of the regime. Torrepartida states its ideological position in the initial credits by means of a written text that, in the manner of official discourse, evokes the use of the voice-over in documentaries: The people and the facts that appear in this film are not all imaginary; most of the times they are a piece of our not yet distant history, which has fortunately been overcome. All wars leave behind them, like a bitter sediment, the leprosy of banditry. Disunity among brothers, fueled by bastardized passions and interests, inexorably leads to ruin and death.

This message is presented as an authoritative statement possessing the attributes of wisdom, thus conditioning the way in which the audience are to interpret the film. This discourse also establishes the rival as being a biological enemy, not a political one, as reflected in it being identified with an illness that arises from the social fabric and threatens to destroy the State and society. Ultimately this is—as is the case in medical, legal and judicial discourse—what David Herzberger calls “truth by assertion”, according to which “the past is how we say it is because we say so, with the objectifying clothing of science.”12

12 David Herzberger, Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Post-war Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 17.

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Torrepartida also establishes its ideological affiliations through the soundtrack. It is significant that Antón García Abril, who was the music director for the film, included in its repertoire the “famous Easter procession of drums from Alcañiz” as noted in the film’s credits. This music helps the viewer establish an implicit connection between the fight against the anti-Franco resistance, and the catholic project that was supposedly championed by the regime. In fact, the drum music in Torrepartida is a hybrid genre linking the religious with the military, and points to the supposed reason for the catholic fight against the maquis, that is, against an enemy that, more than two decades after the end of the war, was still supposed to be a spiritual threat to the nation. As if it were a new Catholic crusade, the ideology of the Franco regime saw the Civil War as a re-conquest whose purpose was to free Spain from the red enemy. This is suggested by the expressions “National Crusade”, “War of Liberation” or, “Re-conquest of Spain”, all of which were used in the official discourse of the regime. Although Lázaga's film cannot be classified as cine de cruzada, it was a nod to the genre in order to establish a connection between the fight against the maquis and the alleged reason for the Catholic support of Franco's side during the war, thus returning to the regime's founding myths to conceptualize this new confrontation. With the aim of giving historical credibility to a representation that can be anticipated to be ideological, Torrepartida alludes to myths, identifiable characters and events of the Civil War and post-war. Firstly, the sacrifice of Pablo, the son of the Civil Guard captain, evokes, as pointed out by Moreno Nuño, “the moral dilemma between duty to country and family love embodied in one of the most powerful icons of Francoist propaganda: General Moscardó, who preferred to sacrifice the life of his son rather than surrender the Alcázar (Fortress) of Toledo.”13 Secondly, as stated by Fernández Cuenca, “the episode of the kidnapping of the son of the Civil Guard Captain (Enrique Álvarez Diosdado) who commanded the forces to totally eliminate banditry from the mountain region was authentic.”14 Cuenca also noted that the main maquis members in Torrepartida - El Alicantino, Manuel and Rafael—were based on real people, although there were some artistic licenses taken in the film. Lastly, the film was located in Teruel, an emblematic city for the Civil War. As stated by Moreno Nuño, the city “suffered a mythical Republican attack followed by a quick and effective counter-attack by the Nationalist army. Thus, Teruel is a 13

Carmen Moreno Nuño, “La representación del maquis en la historia del cine español,” Letras Peninsulares, 16.1 (2003): 353-370, 358. 14 Carlos Fernández Cuenca, La guerra de España y el cine. Vol. 2 (Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1972), 714.

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symbol of the unity of Spain: the Torre no partida well defended by the victors.”15 History, myth and chronicle of events thus merge to exalt the nobility of the Civil Guard in safeguarding the values of the regime and as defenders of the balance of forces resulting from the Civil War. This exaltation of the Civil Guard is paralleled by the demonization of the maquis; while the value of the Civil Guard is praised, the historical portrayal of the maquis is neutralized. In fact, the maquis were presented as a threat to the two ideological pillars that the dictatorship and society were based on: Catholicism and the family. The film emphasizes the spiritual transgression that those resisting Franco committed merely because of their resistance to the regime. This assessment contrasts with the representation of the regime’s defenders as Catholic individuals who were willing, like the biblical figure of Jesus, to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the group. So, for example, the identification of the maquis as an enemy of Catholicism is reflected in a scene in which, after being killed, El Alicantino appears with his arms in the shape of a cross, upside down as if he were an antichrist, with the stolen money scattered around him. With respect to the family, the film epitomizes the Spanish post-war drama in the microcosm of the domestic sphere, and so emphasizes the interpretation of the war as a fratricidal conflict. Its goal was to synthesize the national dimension of the conflict within a family drama, and Torrepartida shows the two-sided rivalry between Manuel and Ramón: on the one hand, as the result of an ideological conflict and, on the other, of an amorous conflict, both were in love with María—Manuel’s girlfriend before the Civil War. In any case, the ideological conflict between the two male characters in turn is couched more in religious than in political terms, as suggested by their mother when, in the course of an argument—and from a visual perspective that significantly contains an image of the Virgin Mary in the background—she intervenes to advise Ramón “You have to work. If you do not sow enough and you get into quarrels, the Devil takes it all away.” As this warning with biblical overtones implies, in addition to the warning about disputes between brothers in the opening credits, the film reduces the civil war to being an allegory “of a contaminating,

15

Carmen Moreno Nuño, “Criminalizing Maquis: Configurations of Anti-Francoist Guerrilla Fighters as Bandoleros and Bandits in Cultural Discourse,” in Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla, ed. Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño. Hispanic Issues Online (Fall 2012): 79-99, 96. Accessed May 14th, 2014, http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/doc/04_MORENO-NUNO.pdf.

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fratricidal war, with connotations of the biblical story of Cain and Abel.”16 Moreover, in accordance with the parameters of Francoist melodrama, María is not presented as a girlfriend or wife, but as a mother who acts as a reconciling link between the maquis member and the mayor. In fact, in Torrepartida she is portrayed as a depoliticized character who protects Manuel, even though he clearly disagrees with the principles she represents. So, for example, when Ramón asks María if she still loves Manuel, she answers, “not in the way that you mean. But I love him because he is alone and he needs us more than ever.” Finally, Manuel attacks, not only family values, but also the existence of family itself. He participates in the kidnapping of Pablo, the innocent son of well-meaning Antonio, the Civil Guard Captain, and so destroys the peace of a home, a model of domestic virtue. For example, when he returns to his home after attacking the train, the Civil Guard’s son, in a friendly and jovial tone, tells him to go to the Civil Guard station to talk to his father. This invitation shows his lack of knowledge of the criminal activities in which Manuel takes part, as well as a degree of trust that dispels all feelings of enmity towards him. Despite these signs of generosity, when Rafael decides to kidnap the Civil Guard's son, Manuel obeys his orders as would any other member of the group, putting aside all possible reconciliation with the Civil Guard officer and his son and, by extension, with the Spanish Catholic family that they represent. It should be noted that Pablo’s kidnapping takes place during Easter Week, which, in addition to providing a context for the film’s soundtrack, establishes a parallel between the sacrifice and death of the biblical figure of Jesus—an innocent, according to the Catholic tradition—and the Civil Guard’s son. In fact the youngster's mother hears the news of the kidnapping when she is in church dressed for the Catholic festival, in strict mourning, almost as if anticipating her son’s death. Following the patriotic and Catholic drives portrayed in the film as the pillars of the regime, the parents accept their loss as a necessary sacrifice for the good of Spain. So, when in a moment of desperation, Mercedes pleads with her husband to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the Civil Guard Captain immediately reprimands her for what would be an act of betrayal against the fatherland. In this way—as was the case with General Moscardó during the Civil War—the father heroically puts the collective interest before his own

16

Mercedes Camino, “El melodrama fascista y la memoria cinematográfica del maquis español. 1954-2006,” Imagofagia: Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Cine y Audivisual, 2011, 10-11. Accessed April 15th, 2014. http://www.asaeca.org/imagofagia/sitio/images/stories/pdf4/n4_dossier_camino.pdf.

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private interest, even though this involves the death of his son. As he says to Mercedes: “I have to fulfill my duty, however painful it may be”. After a failed rescue attempt by the Civil Guard, the maquis assassinate Pablo and place bombs under the boy’s body in an attempt to kill higher numbers of enemies, leaving Manuel feeling powerless. This leads Manuel to confront the cruelty of his comrades and, particularly, of his commander, who had promised that he would not hurt the boy. This is the turning point for Manuel, as he distances himself from his comrades, with the final break taking place when the maquis kidnap Maria. Again resorting to deception, Rafael persuades Manuel of the need to kidnap his former girlfriend and take her to France by force. To do this, the leader appeals to Manuel’s masculinity and guarantees the support of the rest of the group, even though his teammates constantly mock him: “I know that they appreciate you. They have offered to help you with the María business.” However, Rafael’s aim, as he tells one of his subordinates, is to use María as bait and “so trap both the Captain and the Mayor”. In this way, Rafael uses Manuel to exact a revenge that, unlike the kidnapping and murder of Pablo, has neither a political nor an economic purpose. Manuel realizes that this is another trick just as they meet María; he then aborts the attempted kidnapping and, as a result, is injured by one of his comrades. This reaction, together with the outcome of the plan is the justification for the fact that, despite his past, the Civil Guard do not arrest Manuel. Further, in a way that is not made clear in the film, Antonio is aware that Manuel had protected his son during the kidnapping, and this explains his generosity to Manuel. In fact, instead of applying the Escape Act (Ley de las fugas), as was the case with El Alicantino, Antonio allows Manuel to recover from his injuries in the Civil Guard station, offers to intercede on his behalf and urges him to reconsider his political position. Manuel’s peace is disturbed when the maquis, after a second attempt, succeed in kidnapping María. Taking advantage of his disenchantment with his old comrades, the Civil Guard tries to persuade him to help in rescuing María. With this in mind, the captain also offers him a last opportunity to collaborate with the regime on behalf of a humane cause that would allow him to atone for his past errors. However, as repeatedly mentioned in the film, Manuel refuses to collaborate with the regime, although there is no personal or ideological reason preventing him from doing so. Despite this—in what is the main concession of the film to the vanquished—Manuel shows signs of regret when he tries to free María on his own and thus resolve a situation for which he feels responsible. Following their instinct, and as if Manuel were a wounded animal, the Civil Guard watch his steps as he leads them to the place where his former

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girlfriend is being held. In this scenario, Manuel confronts, on the one hand, Rafael and, on the other, his brother and the Civil Guard. After being stabbed in the heart by his old commander, Manuel aims his pistol at the representatives of the Francoist order, which highlights the impossibility of him converting to the aims of the regime and justifies his death as an unavoidable ending. This outcome differs from the reconciliation proposed in Dos caminos. As happened to Manuel in Torrepartida, Miguel, the leading character in Dos caminos, discovers his comrades’ deception who, as in Torrepartida, are presented as being unscrupulous assassins. However—and here is the main difference between the two films—Miguel acknowledges his error and expresses his repentance, rejecting “the road that leads to nowhere” (Dos caminos) and takes the path of the Francoist ideal. In any case, both Dos caminos and Torrepartida illustrate the wrongful road followed by those who take up arms to confront the militarily enforced peaceful coexistence in Franco’s Spain. Acknowledging one’s errors is the path to reconciliation proposed by the regime; nevertheless, this option, as implied in Torrepartida, does not eliminate the need for punishment. Further, by denying the ideological nature of an enemy that at no time is identified as a political dissident, Lázaga’s film precludes the possibility of a true reconciliation. As anticipated by the opening credits, the enemy is not even conceived of as a human being, but rather as having an incurable illness—a leper—that “inexorably leads to ruin and death.” In this sense, Torrepartida responds, not to a real wish for reconciliation on the part of the regime, but, in the words of Luis Deltell, to the regime’s permanent desire “that cinema should explain who the victors were… An open claim to explain, understand and comprehend the winners.”17 By way of conclusion, under the banner of openness and reconciliation promoted by the Francoist regime at the start of the 1950s, Torrepartida came to reaffirm that there was no place in Spain for dissidence, highlighting one of the principles that make the Civil War one of the most tragic events of contemporary European history. To do this, and through its aesthetics and production techniques, Lázaga’s film reflects the cultural and political openness that the regime projected to the outside, whilst reinforcing its basic principles at an ideological level. It is paradoxical that, in a context in which the political and economic openness of the regime was seen as a guarantee that the Civil War and its aftermath were 17

Luis Deltell Escolar, “Perdedor arrepentido o traidor incorregible. El soldado republicano en el cine español del franquismo,” in Congreso La Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939), 2006. Accessed 7 April, 2014.

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history, Torrepartida once again invoked, with the State’s help, the need to exclude and even eliminate the dissident. This treatment, however, was not portrayed as an act of revenge, but rather as a necessary sacrifice for the good of the whole country, an aspect this film underlines through Manuel’s character. In fact, his death results from his inability to accept the hand extended to him by the regime, specifically by Antonio (a Civil Guard), his brother (a Francoist mayor), his mother and María. In this way, the political reconciliation proposed by Torrepartida is reduced to representing the maquis as an enemy that, on an individual basis, possessed human qualities, including a good heart, but lacked any space or redemption options in Franco’s Spain.

Works Cited Anonymous. La dominación roja en España. Causa General instruida por el Ministerio Fiscal. 4th ed. Madrid: Dirección General de Información, 1961. 1st ed. 1943. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Camino, Mercedes. “El melodrama fascista y la memoria cinematográfica del maquis español. 1954-2006.” Imagofagia: Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Cine y Audivisual, 2011. Accessed April 15th, 2014. http://www.asaeca.org/imagofagia/sitio/images/stories/pdf4/n4_dossier _camino.pdf. Deltell Escolar, Luis. “Perdedor arrepentido o traidor incorregible. El soldado republicano en el cine español del franquismo.” In Congreso La Guerra Civil Española (1936-1939), 2006. Accessed April 7th, 2014. Derrida, Jacques. “The Mystical Foundation of Authority.” In Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Edited by Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson. New York; London: Psychology Press, 1992. Dos Caminos. Directed by Arturo Ruiz Castillo. (Eos Films, 1953). Film. El Cerco. Directed by Miguel Iglesias. (Este Films, 1955). Film. El santuario no se rinde. Directed by Arturo Ruiz Castillo. (Centro Films, Terramar Films, Valencia Films S.A, 1949). Film. Fernández Cuenca, Carlos. La guerra de España y el cine. Vol. 2. Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1972. Foucault, Michel. La verdad y las formas jurídicas. Barcelona: Gedisa Editorial, 2003a.

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—. “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France 19771978. New York: Picador, 2003b. Heredero, Carlos. Historias de maquis en el cine español. Entre el arrepentimiento y la reivindicación. In La Gavilla Verde. Accessed April 5th, 2014. http://www.lagavillaverde.org/centro_de_documentacion/Cine/historia sdelmaquisenelcineespanol.htm —. Las huellas del tiempo: cine español 1951-1961. Valencia: Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana; Filmoteca Española. 1993. Herzberger, David. Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Post-war Spain. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. La paz empieza nunca. Directed by León Klimovsky. (Compañía Industrial Film Español S.A., (CIFESA), 1960), Film. Moreno Nuño, Carmen. “Criminalizing Maquis: Configurations of AntiFrancoist Guerrilla Fighters as Bandoleros and Bandits in Cultural Discourse.” In Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the AntiFrancoist Guerrilla. Edited by Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño. Hispanic Issues Online (Fall 2012): 79-99. Accessed 14 May, 2014a. http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/doc/04_MORENO-NUNO.pdf —. “Introduction.” In Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla. Edited by Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones and Carmen Moreno-Nuño. Hispanic Issues Online (Fall 2012): 1-18. Web. Accessed 2 May, 2014b. http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/doc/00_MORENO-NUNO.pdf —. “La representación del maquis en la historia del cine español.” Letras Peninsulares, 16.1 (2003): 353-370. Romero, Emilio. La paz empieza nunca. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1957. Torrepartida. Directed by Pedro Lázaga. (Hispanofox Film, 1956), Film. Vallejo Nágera, Antonio. La locura y la guerra: psicopatología de la guerra española. Valladolid: Libreria Santarén, 1939. Zugasti, Eduardo. Cine Político Hispano. Torrepartida (Pedro Lázaga, 1956). Accessed April 20th, 2014. http://cinepolitico.blogspot.com/2007/05/torrepartida-pedro-lazaga1956.html

CHAPTER THIRTEEN REPRESENTATIONS OF DICTATORSHIP IN PORTUGUESE CINEMA ISABEL MACEDO, RITA BASTOS, ROSA CABECINHAS

Introduction We are experiencing a time characterized by the unprecedented presence of history and memory in the cultural sphere. In this context, visual artifacts, such as films, play a key role in transforming the way historical events can be assessed; giving them renewed visibility by raising public awareness. The presence of these visual products—their various genres, styles and interpretations of the past—can contribute to a richer understanding of history and collective memory and to the development of more reflective and self-aware historical individuals. Cultural memory comprises a body of images and texts, specific to each society and each age, that serves to stabilize and convey its self-image.1 By means of cultural heritage, each society becomes visible to itself and others. Cultural memory is based on communication through media.2 Media technologies, such as film, broaden the temporal and spatial range of remembrance. Film has its specific way of remembering, generating and molding images that have the power to shape the collective imagination of the past. Currently, in Portugal, there is a renewed interest in telling stories about the recent past and the dictatorship in particular. This is even more noticeable among filmmakers, who often try and fill the gaps in historiography 1

Jan Assmann and John Czaplick, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, 65 (1995): 125-133. 2 Astrid Erll, “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory,” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 389-398.

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by focusing on history from below (using ordinary people as witnesses), and confronting official history with it.3 In fact, our understanding of the dynamics of the Portuguese recent past has been enhanced in recent years by the role of culture and aesthetics. The number of films produced in Portugal between 2004 and 2011 has noticeably increased. Moreover, the number of non-fiction films has shown a significant rise in this period.4 The topics covered by these documentaries mainly concern the areas of Arts and Artists (painting, sculpture, theatre, cinema, literature...). In spite of that, local realities, (autobiographical) memories and events from the recent past are also recurrent issues. Our research shows that nineteen documentaries were produced between 2007 and 2013—our range of analysis – and Portuguese dictatorship and the colonial past are their major subjects. The two films analyzed in this paper – Fantasia Lusitana (Lusitanian Illusion, 2010), by João Canijo, and 48 (2010), by Susana de Sousa Dias—are both reflections on the Portuguese dictatorship and constructions of present understandings and awareness. They refer to the values that were widespread during the period in question, as well as to the climate of violence and repression in which people lived. In short, they disclose—using testimonies and archival footage—what had tacitly been forgotten, while maintaining a critical awareness.5 We believe that by offering archival material and testimonies, the debate about the Portuguese dictatorial past can be revived. The key question in this essay is: how is Portuguese dictatorship portrayed in current films? In this paper we focus on the phenomena within, between, and around films which have the power to (re)produce and (re)shape cultural memory.

3

Sonja De Leeuw, “Dutch Documentary Film as a Site of Memory: Changing Perspectives in the 1990s,” in European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10.1 (2007): 75-87. 4 Since 2011 until now, due to the economic crisis the country has experienced, there was a decrease in the number of films produced. 5 Assmann uses the concept of “dialogical forgetting” to illustrate those societies which look for pragmatic solutions to bring a conflict to an end by “controlling and containing the explosive force of memory.” Aleida Assmann, “From Collective Violence to a Common Future: Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past,” in Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe, ed. Helena Gonçalves da Silva, Adriana Martins [et al.], (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 14-22, 22. The author adds that dialogical forgetting or the pact of silence becomes a strategy of European politics.

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From the Military Coup to the Consolidation of the Estado Novo Before focusing on the films we chose, we will briefly describe the Portuguese dictatorship that lasted 48 years. We thus hope to clarify how the Estado Novo (New State) (1932-1974) was developed and consolidated, as well as discuss the role of film and propaganda in the creation and preservation of the regime’s image. The First Portuguese Republic began in 1910 and ended as a result of a military coup in 1926. From this year until 1928, Sinel Cordes and General Carmona ruled the country as a typical military dictatorship. However, among the dictatorship’s followers there were rebels who claimed that Sinel Cordes and Carmona had betrayed the military coup. They considered that the Republic and the democratic institutions were in danger. Indeed, the regime established press censorship from the beginning and undertook other repressive measures against individual rights. The financial deficit in the country worsened during this period (Oliveira Marques 1986). The increasingly stronger opposition was exasperated, and in 1927, both in Porto and in Lisbon, revolutionary movements supported by members of the army, navy and thousands of civilians broke out. The government had a difficult time silencing the riots and there were hundreds of dead and wounded. Further unsuccessful riots occurred in 1928 and 1931. The political police increasingly intervened in the lives of citizens, forcing many opponents of the regime into exile. In 1928, Carmona, the only presidential candidate, won the elections once more and Colonel Vicente de Freitas formed a new government, which included Oliveira Salazar as minister of Finance. Salazar, 39, Professor of Economics at the University of Coimbra,6 was admired for his books and articles on economic and financial issues. Salazar accepted the ministry of Finance in 1928, but conditionally on his being able to oversee the budgets of all ministries and having veto power on all expenditures, thus becoming the “country’s ‘financial dictator’.”7 The success of his financial policy granted him prestige and converted him into the “saviour of the Nation”. The so-called New State and the União Nacional8 (National Union) were set during 1930 and 1931. The Acto Colonial (Colonial Act), a kind of political code of dictatorship concerning 6

For a biography of Salazar see Filipe R. Meneses, Salazar: A Political Biography (New York: Enigma Books, 2009). 7 Ibid., 3. 8 A party created by Salazar whose aims included “encouraging all that was national, and brought the Portuguese together; it existed to encourage a new, national, way of thinking.” Ibid., 132.

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the Portuguese colonies, was also established during this period. In 1932, Salazar replaced Domingos de Oliveira and formed a government predominantly composed of people of his generation who admired him.9 The last steps involved in the shaping of an authoritarian and corporate State were taken between 1932 and 1933: Salazar rejected any sort of agreement with opposition groups and called for a political unity of the country around the National Union, of which he became the leader. In February 1933, the text for the new Constitution was published, followed by the Estatuto do Trabalho Nacional (Statute of National Labour) and a number of measures related to the organization of the corporate State. Political parties, secret societies and trade unions were banned. In the course of 1936 two typically fascist organizations were created and enthusiastically presented: the Legião Portuguesa (Portuguese Legion), or the body of volunteers to defend the regime, and the Mocidade Portuguesa (Portuguese Youth), a pre-military organization for teenagers.10 The New State was firmly established.11 All along Salazar determined what this new regime—the New State—would be like. The resemblances to Italian fascism are clear in several areas, such as the strengthening of authority. In spite of that, he characterized the Portuguese regime as milder as and less severe than the Italian one. However, according to Lourenço, contrary to what one might think the title of his book “Fascism never existed” hints at, the New State was, effectively, a form of “fascism.”12 The PIDE (1945), Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International and State Defense Police) was the main tool of repression used by the authoritarian regime during the New State.13 Created in 1926 and initially designated Information Police of Lisbon and Porto, after World War II, the political police gained new powers,14 focusing all branches on political repression 9

António H. Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal, vol. III, das revoluções liberais aos nossos dias (Lisbon: Palas Editores, 1986). 10 Luís R.Torgal, “Salazar and the Portuguese ‘New State’ - Images and Interpretations,” Annual of Social History, 2 (2009): 7-18. 11 Oliveira Marques, História de Portugal. 12 Eduardo Lourenço, O Fascismo nunca existiu (Alfragide: Publicações D. Quixote, 1976). 13 José Mattoso, História de Portugal Vol. VII – O Estado Novo (1926-1974) (Lisbon: Editora Estampa, 1993). 14 After the coup of May 28, 1926, which established the Military Dictatorship, the Information Police of Lisbon and Porto were created. They were unified in 1928, with the designation of Ministry of Domestic Information Police. Their main functions were the repression of “social crimes” and assisting the government in international police matters. Although they acted for nearly half a century under different names, the fact is that from 1926 to 1974, this state police never ceased to

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and the prevention of crimes against the internal and external security of the State. Pimentel states that the legislation which created PIDE aimed at legalizing the illegal practice of detention for an unlimited time without charge. This condition continued permanently.15

Propaganda, Ideology and Cinema in the Estado Novo Throughout the first decade, the Salazar regime placed cultural policy at the top of its political agenda. The ambitious aim was to recover “a true Portuguese culture” rooted in conservative and outdated principles. It was a strategy based on a subtle articulation of censorship/ propaganda and prevention/ repression. The SPN, Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN - Secretariat of National Propaganda), created in 1933, was established as the brain-centre of cultural policy and propaganda. Its director, António Ferro,16 reported directly to Salazar. He maintained that “politically there is only what the public knows that exists.”17 The SPN was expressly in charge of fostering national identity and a “spirit of unity,” and used propaganda to transmit the government’s message to a largely illiterate population through media such as the press, radio, cinema and theatre. For Ferro, the educational function was paramount. The intention was no less

be an organization of social and political terrorism, serving the interests of the military dictatorship and the regime that Salazar/Caetano represented, thus constituting the principal organization to sustain the regime for several decades. Alberto Pedroso, “A polícia política,” in História de Portugal. Dos tempos prémodernos aos nossos dias, ed. João Medina (Amadora: Clube Internacional do Livro, 1998). 15 Irene F. Pimentel, A História da PIDE (Rio de Mouro: Círculo de Leitores, 2007). 16 António Ferro projected a “policy of spirit” which put art at the service of New State propaganda, in order to instill enthusiasm for the actions of the regime in the Portuguese people. Patrícia Vieira, Cinema no Estado Novo: a Encenação do Regime (Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2011). Writing about António Ferro, Torgal adds that he was also “a journalist that interviewed dictators, a modernist writer, an editor for the literary journal Orpheu—where Fernando Pessoa wrote—, a traveler, a playwright and a cinema lover who visited Hollywood, the land of dreams and ‘make-believe’.” Luís R. Torgal, “Salazar and the Portuguese ‘New State’ - Images and Interpretations,” Annual of Social History, 2 (2009): 7-18, 15. 17 Propaganda Nacional, 26 de Outubro de 1933, in Salazar, Discursos, Vol.1, 159.

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than the “moral regeneration” of the nation,18 using the arts as instruments of collective “seduction” that contributed to a “healthier” life.19 By establishing a relation between culture (in particular cinema and theatre) and propaganda, Ferro opposed spirit to matter, setting up a sort of binary vision (spirit versus matter; good versus evil), which guided the aesthetic direction of Salazar’s propaganda. So, the artistic forms welcomed by the New State always had to convey a harmonious and cheerful social image of the country. Films that did not follow these standards were censored and banned. The notion of harmony became omnipresent and set the emblematic image of the country, as an example of a united corporative State. The organs of censorship would spring into action, prohibiting views/representations which did not come to terms with the regime’s ideals. The SPN’s “policy of the spirit” tried to recover and promote national popular traditions, such as folklore, and to restore Portugal’s “spiritual sovereignty”, using the heroic past, connecting it to the present and to the future.20 An illustrative example is the Exposição do Mundo Português (the Portuguese World Exhibition) of 1940, the major cultural event in Portugal.21 Corkill and Almeida reported that it had a triple function for the regime’s propagandists “in their quest for the regime’s legitimacy, for propagating Salazar’s nationalist version of the nation’s history, and in shaping the national consciousness of the Portuguese people in order to eliminate the ‘anti-national’” feeling.22 Cinema was identified as an important propaganda tool. In spite of his catholic and conservative education, Salazar, under the influence of António Ferro, understood that he needed to continue imposing his 18 David Corkill and José C. P. Almeida, “Commemoration and Propaganda in Salazar’s Portugal: The Mundo Português Exposition of 1940,” Journal of Contemporary History, 44.3 (2009): 381-399, 384. 19 Graça dos Santos, “‘Política do espírito:’ O bom gosto obrigatório para embelezar a realidade,” Media & Jornalismo, 12 (2008): 59-72, 61. 20 In fact, several State events organized by António Ferro made Portugal famous abroad in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, by participating in international exhibitions (Paris, 1937; New York and San Francisco, 1939). As Torgal mentions, the New State conveyed a relatively pleasant image in foreign political milieus. Torgal, “Salazar,” 7. For instance, it was common, during the long period of its existence, to recognize the New State as having an “original” character, thus avoiding the generic classification of “fascism”. 21 The Portuguese World Exhibition, 1940, is an example of a celebration about fundamental symbols of identity as defined by the Salazar regime: God, nation, family, work, authority, national cohesion, empire and multiracialism were some of the values conveyed. 22 Corkill and Almeida, “Commemoration and Propaganda,” 381.

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doctrine by means of propaganda. The government lavished resources on film and newsreel in order to ensure that their ideas were transmitted to audiences, and major public events were recorded in documentary films. According to Paulo “subjects connected with the most diversified organisms of the New State began adopting the cinematographic documentary as their main vehicle for popularizing their message.”23 Jornal Português (Portuguese Journal) and Imagens de Portugal (Images of Portugal) are examples of this approach. The latter was directed by António Lopes Ribeiro—known as the filmmaker of the regime and responsible for the SPN and the SNI.24 Paulo stresses the strategy of releasing these documentaries among Portuguese emigrants, namely in Brazil, spreading an idealized image of the country. In 1940, with the aim of asserting the regime’s “neutrality” during World War II and thus keeping the peace in the country, the New State carried out and recorded in short films the Comemorações do Duplo Centenário (Commemorations of the Double Centenary). This idea of “a world apart (Portugal) in a Europe at War” reaches the interior of the country through the “Itinerant Cinema,” and foreign countries thanks to promotional events carried out by the regime. As far as fictional cinema is concerned, we underline the importance of Leitão de Barros, one of the filmmakers who was most connected to the regime, due to his focus on historical celebration and the nationalist idea of “conversion” to the “glorious” history of Portugal, that his films show.25 As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor (The Priest’s Pupils, 1935), and Camões (1946) are his most relevant films. One of the most important propaganda films of the regime is António Lopes Ribeiro’s O Feitiço do Império (The Spell of an Empire, 1940), a film about Portugal’s mission to bring ‘civilization’ to Africa. In this film,26 the fiction meets the “real” image of the regime through the documentary. According to Torgal, this is a film that, besides trying to promote Portugal and its colonial empire, is also an example of “conversion.”27 In this case, of a Luso-American character converted to the virtues of Portugal and its Empire, whose aim is to inspire 23 Paulo Heloísa, “Documentarismo e Propaganda: as imagens e os sons do regime,” in O cinema sob o olhar de Salazar, ed. Luís R. Torgal (Lisbon: Círculo dos Leitores, 2011), 92-116, 103. 24 SPN was replaced in 1945 by SNI – Secretariado Nacional de Informação (Secretariat of National Information). 25 Luís R. Torgal, “Propaganda, Ideologia e Cinema no Estado Novo: a ‘conversão dos descrentes’,” in O cinema sob o olhar de Salazar, ed. Luís R. Torgal (Lisbon: Círculo dos Leitores, 2011), 64-91. 26 Captured by the photography of Isy Goldberger and Manuel Luís Vieira. 27 Torgal, “Propaganda, Ideologia,” 82.

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Portuguese emigration to Africa, instead of to Europe. This “conversion” cinema was a type of propaganda, used during the years of the dictatorial regime, with the militant intention of reproducing the ideology of the New State. In 1951, international pressure on the Salazar regime increased, due to its colonial position in Africa. The sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1933-2002) traveled throughout the country and the “overseas departments,”28 producing several books that Salazar’s regime used to establish the ideology of “Portuguese exceptionalism,” thus broadening the alleged dimension of the Portuguese national character. Freyre coined the concept of “lusotropicalism” to explain the apparently successful relationships between different cultures in Brazil. This ideology is based on the alleged natural capacity and ability of the Portuguese for miscegenation and relationship with other cultures. This trait would explain the “unique character of colonial relationships, and would, nowadays, have a positive impact on the relationships between the Portuguese and immigrants.”29 Freyre’s theory of “lusotropicalism” was useful in the regime’s efforts to justify the persistent possession of overseas colonies, as it sustained the existence of a racial/cultural affinity between Portugal and Africa30 as well as the construction of a self-representation of the Portuguese as nonracists.31 According to Almeida, this perspective fitted “nicely with the regime’s growing strategy of presenting the Portuguese empire as multiracial.”32 The year 1961 represents a turning point in the history and politics of Portugal. The beginning of that year saw the start of military operations in Angola to counteract independence movements. The Portuguese government sent armed forces that triggered the outbreak of the Colonial War, which spread to Guinea and Mozambique and lasted 13 years. About 50 percent of public expenditures and a mobilization of about two hundred 28

This international pressure led the Portuguese elites to use all their persuasive power to make the world believe that the ‘overseas departments’ were part of a Portuguese ‘pluricontinental nation’”, Bernd Reiter, “Portugal: National Pride and Imperial Neurosis,” Race Class, 47 (2005): 79-91, 79). 29 Jorge Vala, Diniz Lopes and Marcus Lima, “Black Immigrants in Portugal: Luso-Tropicalism and Prejudice,” Journal of Social Issues, 64.2 (2008): 287-302, 289. 30 Reiter, “Portugal: national pride.” 31 Miguel Vale de Almeida, “‘Longing for oneself’: Hybridism and Miscegenation in Colonial and postcolonial Portugal,” Etnográfica, VI.1 (2002): 181-200. 32 Miguel Vale de Almeida, “Portugal’s Colonial Complex: From Colonial Lusotropicalism to Postcolonial Lusophony,” Queen’s Postcolonial Research Forum (Belfast: Queen’s University, April 28th 2008).

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thousand soldiers annually were devoted to it. According to Barreto “over the following ten years, the colonial war became a crucial aspect of national life. It not only affected policies, but also absorbed considerable portions of both budget and resources, which caused an increasingly repressive dictatorship.”33 Marcelo Caetano replaced Salazar in 1968, but still the Colonial War continued, and it determined political strategy. From that year onwards, there were a series of transformations in Portugal, in which the conflict between the opposition and the regime became clearer. For example, the University of Lisbon went on strike and there were constant civil commotions beginning in late 1968, influenced by the events of “May 1968” in France. The students were against the educational system, the curricula of the universities, the political regime, as well as colonialism and war. In 1969 there was a student occupation at the University of Coimbra and for a week there were “free courses” dedicated to (neo) Marxism. In April 1969, in Coimbra, violent clashes between students and police forces marked the visit of Américo Tomás34 to the University. The 1969 elections were affected by several illegalities and serious restrictions on fair electoral competition, exacerbating the political and social unrest.35 From 1970 onwards, the direction of governmental actions saw several changes. Bent on keeping the Colonies, and silencing subversive student movements, the government put an end to any sort of liberalization, by shutting down student associations all over the country. There was “a succession of police raids in university facilities, dozens of students were arrested or forced to incorporate into the colonial army.”36 In addition, from 1970/1971 to 1972 the number of arrests increased and cultural cooperatives were placed under the supervision of the Domestic Ministry, which increased censorship, repression and violence. Portugal’s revolutionary road to democracy began on April 25, 1974, when middle-ranking officers in the armed forces, organized in a clandestine movement of captains, launched a coup against the authoritarian New State and the Colonial War in Africa. The MFA, Movimento de Forças Armadas (The Armed Forces Movement) used a commercial radio station to broadcast 33

António Barreto, Mudança Social em Portugal, 1960/2000. Working Papers do Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, 2002. Available online:http://www.ics.ul.pt/publicacoes/workingpapers/wp2002/WP6-2002.pdf. 34 Américo Tomás (1894 -1987) was a military figure and the last President of the “New State.” He was overthrown in the revolution of April 25, 1974. 35 Fernando Rosas, História de Portugal, Vol VII, O Estado Novo (1926-1974). (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1994). 36 Ibid., 553.

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“Grândola”—a folk song written by José Afonso that appealed to an egalitarian regime. Crowds of jubilant citizens greeted the MFA in the streets, placing red carnations in the barrels of guns and tanks.

Portuguese Cinema: An Overview If you take film as an effective tool for political propaganda, the Salazar regime, especially during the 1930s and 1940s, found both a weapon of political propaganda and a mass entertainment medium in cinema. In this period, a unique sort of genre develops in Portuguese cinema. Films from the comédia à portuguesa37 (Portuguese comedy) reveal a certain uniformity in the way they share the virtues of the State and a cheerful and corporatist Portugal, by making “the people” the protagonists of the narrative. They are often sentimental, have a rural nature, and a light and direct message. As we have seen, during this period, the regime also used the film as a medium to build and disseminate images of the Portuguese empire. According to Monteiro, the arrival of the 1950s revealed an “irreversible decline, in terms of ideas, aesthetic renewal, public and even, production”, which resulted in some sort of misshapen and unattractive cinema.38 However this turns into a moment of intense cinematic discussion in the country, strengthened by the film society movement, which aided the renewal of the following decade. The 1960s witnessed aesthetic rupture and formal invention, which laid the foundations for the affirmation of filmmakers’ freedom and for a reflection about national matters, common subjects of later decades. The standing of the Novo Cinema39 (Portuguese New Cinema) established a total rupture with the cinematic past, moving 37 A Canção de Lisboa (A Song of Lisbon, 1933) by Cottinelli Telmo, O Pai Tirano (The Tyrannical Father, 1941) by Lopes Ribeiro, O Pátio das Cantigas (The Courtyard of Songs, 1941) by Francisco Ribeiro, O Costa do Castelo (The Costa of the Castle, 1943), A Menina da Rádio (The Girld of the Radio, 1944), and O Leão da Estrela (The Lion of the Star, 1947) by Arthur Duarte. 38 Paulo F. Monteiro, “Uma margem no centro: a arte e o poder do ‘novo cinema’,” in O Cinema sob o Olhar de Salazar, Luís R. Torgal (Lisbon: Círculo dos Leitores, 2001), 306-338, 307. 39 One of the key aspects that assured films’ renewal was Cunha Telles Productions (featuring António da Cunha Telles), and particularly the production of the first film by Paulo Rocha – Os Verdes Anos (The Green Years, 1963) – understood as “a new way of thinking life and cinema matters, considered as inseparable parts of a single whole.” João Mário Grilo, O Cinema da Não-Ilusão. Histórias para o cinema português (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2006), 19.

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closer to European vanguards. This new generation40 is characterized by almost exclusively foreign references and the cinephile culture of its members. The direct contact with the major film texts produced throughout Europe was a determining factor, as were the training courses and traineeships abroad which were promoted by the Fundo Nacional de Cinema (National Film Fund), from 1959 onwards, and by the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) from 1961 onwards.41 Lemière claims that from 1970 until 1990 the Portuguese cinema took a stand, due to a group of “author-directors” that firmly defended cinema as art, thus turning their back on the industrial model and the role of the producer.42 Considerable political, social, economical and cultural changes set a group of filmmakers and technicians into motion, including the founding group and a second wave involved in Portuguese New Cinema. They got together in search of internal legitimacy and public recognition of film as art. This movement coincides with an unprecedented process of internationalization in the panorama of national cinema. Producers and filmmakers inevitably grew apart, whereas the CPC, Centro Português de Cinema (Portuguese Cinema Centre), turned into a cooperative of authors. During the 1970s, State interference in the way films were produced in Portugal became clear. On the one hand, Law No. 7/7143 was passed and the IPC created; on the other hand, there was the creation in 1973 of the School of Cinema,44 with Alberto Seixas Santos as its first director, supported by important CPC members.45 As Cunha puts it, it is worth 40

Paulo Rocha, Fernando Lopes, António de Macedo, António da Cunha Telles and Fernando Matos Silva, among others. 41 Paulo Cunha, “As origens do novo cinema português: o turismo cinéfilo e o novo cinema português,” in Atas do XI Encontro da Socine (Brasília: Socine, 2009). 42 Jacques Lemière, “Um centro na margem”: o caso do cinema português,” Análise Social, v. XLI.180 (Lisbon: Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, 2006): 731-765. 43 On December 7, 1971 the Law No. 7/71 which created the IPC, Instituto Português de Cinema (Portuguese Institute of Cinema), was passed. This was a State measure which aimed to control national cinema production. After the fall of António da Cunha Telles (1967) and CPC (1976), and the impossibility of engaging in independent productions, the only way out for cinema was State funding through grants. 44 The first public school of cinema in Portugal. 45 Fernando Lopes, Paulo Rocha and António da Cunha Telles, the technician Costa e Silva and the critics Bénard da Costa and Eduardo Prado Coelho, are some of the top names.

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noticing that “(...) the School of Cinema intended to reconcile ‘prolonged empirical practice’ and ‘a good practical-theoretical training,’ preparing their graduates for the future development of film culture and the labor market.”46 This school proved to be crucial in the following decades, by forming successive generations of Portuguese filmmakers and film technicians. One should stress that many projects47 submitted during this period were censored by the regime. With the revolution of April 25, 1974, censorship was abolished. As a consequence, banned films were released, diversifying the choice of films available in the country, but also the variety of proposals. In 1978 the radicalism of Amor de Perdição (Doomed Love, 1976-1978), by Manoel de Oliveira, launches a new breakthrough in the dominant characteristics of Portuguese production of militant cinema, pointing to the symbolic failure of the cooperative mode of production. From the 1980s onwards, Portuguese cinema experienced a period of expansion and a strengthening of its internationalization, especially in large festivals, signaling a Portuguese uniqueness, with the films of Manoel de Oliveira, António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, Paulo Rocha, João Botelho, João César Monteiro (as well as José Álvaro Morais, Alberto Seixas Santos, Fernando Lopes, Jorge Silva Melo, João Mário Grilo).48 Apart from that, and as a result of implementing a policy for new filmmakers, and thanks to the financial contribution of Portuguese Public Television (RTP), several new directors completed their first works, such as João Canijo, Pedro Costa, Margarida Gil, Joaquim Pinto, among others. Thinking about the modes of production, Paulo Cunha considers that this was a moment of transformation: During this period, a change became visible in the way ‘filmmaking’ was done in Portugal, turning from a model of ‘production without producers,’ in which filmmakers and technicians unions proliferated within a model centered around collective work, into a model of co-productions with

46

Paulo Cunha, Os filhos bastardos. Afirmação e reconhecimento do novo Cinema português 1967-1974 (Coimbra: Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada à Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, 2005), 162. 47 Some films with deep cuts that would prevent their distribution, as is the case of the film Quem espera por sapatos de defunto morre descalço (He Goes Long Barefoot that Waits for Dead Men’s Shoes, 1970), by João César Monteiro, and others hit with full prohibition, as is the case of Eduardo Geada’s Sofia e a educação sexual (Sofia and Sexual Education, 1974). 48 Lemière, “Um centro na margem.”

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international financial partners like French producers of art films, best personified by the producer Paulo Branco.49

The 90s were a sui generis period in the history of Portuguese cinema. While reflecting the new political situation of the country, with its integration into the European Community, the film industry becomes submerged in policy, legislative and institutional changes, in order to attract European funding. As a consequence, the insistence on the “national” is put in question, increasing the tension between quality and great public cinema. It was because of this duality that new authors emerged and, as Ferreira explains, either engaged in a local and internationally acclaimed film such as Teresa Villaverde, or used the “universal” language of the dominant cinema that is consumed by a national audience.50 In this latter situation, Portuguese private television channels made their stand, as was the case of Joaquim Leitão and his films Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve, 1995) and Tentação (Temptation, 1997). The increasing importance of funding through international partners also became noticeable, culminating in a panorama of co-productions, especially with Brazil and the Portuguese-speaking African countries. The need to engage in an overview of colonial history, or in contemporary relationships with the former colonies became clear. On this subject Ferreira concludes: (...) It is a fact that the film production of the 90s seeks dialogue, seeks new forms of production, and tries to engage more with colonial history, contemporary Portugal and a redefinition of male and female roles. The fact is that these searches—sometimes shared, sometimes not—took place in an environment that enabled a great diversity in film production, which differed from the previous decade.51

Areal argues that in Portugal, after the introduction of democracy in 1974, there was a boom in documentary films, as a result of the “need to document the real in transformation.”52 A set of exogenous and 49

Paulo Cunha, “A ‘diferença’ portuguesa?” in Cinema português: um guia essencial, ed. Paulo Cunha and Michelle Sales (São Paulo: SESI-SP, 2013), 215237, 236. 50 Carolin O. Ferreira, “Estabilidade, Crescimento e Diversificação,” in Cinema português: um guia essencial, ed. Paulo Cunha and Michelle Sales (São Paulo: SESI-SP, 2013), 238-267. 51 Ibid., 267. 52 Leonor Areal, Cinema Português. Um País imaginado. Volume I - Antes de 1974 (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2011), 19.

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endogenous constraints marks the film production at the beginning of the 21st century. Scholars have argued that these constraints affected production and the development of projects: “an identity and conservative ‘production machine’, which is (…) particularly adverse to structural changes.”53 These authors add that these constraints hinder the emergence of innovative films, thus breaking the thematic, aesthetic, technical and stylistic continuities that characterized idiosyncrasies and “identity” in the last five decades. Both films analyzed in this paper continue discussing the national question, particularly dictatorship. They are part of a total of 19 films, which have the Portuguese recent past as their main theme.54 However, from a technical, stylistic and reflective point of view, they break with the pre-established representations of the historical period they depict.

Methodological Options As far as methodological options are concerned, we undertook a qualitative analysis, organizing some of the main topics in the films into clusters.55 This approach is complemented by a filmic analysis, namely one performed in terms of film narrative and assembly. We considered the meanings of some words and phrases; the meanings and values of experiences, places, times, objects, and institutions; the master models that connected these meanings; institutions and discourses that were (re)produced; the way they were stabilized or transformed into film. We chose two documentaries: Lusitanian Illusion, 2010, by João Canijo, and 48, 2010, by Susana de Sousa Dias. These two films were selected because they address a specific time period, the Portuguese dictatorship, but also because both films use archival footage, although the assembly techniques and strategies are quite distinct.

53

João Maria Mendes, Carlos Pereira, Jorge Jácome, Marta Simões, Miguel Cipriano and Vanessa Sousa Dias,“Apresentação,” in Novas & Velhas Tendências do Cinema Português Contemporâneo, ed. João Maria Mendes (Amadora: Biblioteca da ESTC, 2013), 1-10, 1. Available Online: http://pwp.net.ipl.pt/sc/gportela/livro.pdf 54 Isabel Macedo and Rosa Cabecinhas, “Contribuições do documentário para a (re)construção da memória sócio-histórica: uma análise dos filmes produzidos em Portugal entre 2007 e 2011,” in Filmes Falados, ed. Frederico Lopes and Ana Catarina Pereira (Covilhã: Labcom, 2013). 55 Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology,” Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, (2006): 77-101.

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João Canijo is one of the most prominent Portuguese filmmakers and stage directors of his generation. He worked as an assistant director to Manoel de Oliveira, Wim Wenders, Alain Tanner, and Werner Schroeter, among others. His films, including Filha da Mãe (Her Mother’s Daughter, 1990), Sapatos Pretos (Black Shoes, 1998), Mudar de Vida (Get a Life, 2001), and Sangue do meu Sangue (Blood of my Blood, 2011), have met significant success with the critics as well as the public in Portugal. In Lusitanian Illusion, made mainly with archival images and videos, he exposes the duality of Portugal during the days of World War II: a peaceful and happy country and the thousands of refugees that passed through Lisbon. The propaganda of Salazarism during World War II preached the achievement of neutrality due to Salazar’s leadership. The propaganda served the regime, describing Portugal as a paradise of peace and tranquility, a “peaceful oasis”. The author of 48, Susana de Sousa Dias recently defended a thesis in Aesthetics and Art Sciences and Technologies (University of Paris 8 and the University of Lisbon) entitled Abrir a História: Imagem de Arquivo e Movimento Desacelerado (Open History: Archival Picture and Slowed Movement). The New State is the thematic universe that has inspired the director’s work. Natureza Morta - Visages d’une dictature (Dead Nature Visions of a dictatorship, 2005) and 48 are examples of her work about this subject. The film 48 is based on photographs taken at the moment of the arrest of political prisoners during the Portuguese dictatorship. The artist filmed the police photographs of some political prisoners compiled in dozens of albums preserved in the national archive and in each case evoked memories of their personal histories of prison and torture. Her film aims to expose the mechanisms by which the dictatorial regime tried to sustain its existence over a 48 year period, as mentioned earlier, with the indispensable support of PIDE.

Analysis Lusitanian Illusion: “An Oasis of Peace in a World at War” The goal of Lusitanian Illusion is to show the ideological construction of the regime and compare it to other views, foreign approaches, concerning the same historical period. The archival footage, mainly centered on the period from 1939 to 1945, with material from the “Portuguese Journal”—promoted and funded by the SPN—amplifies the regime’s propaganda and speech. Moreover, it includes sound, voices that read texts: texts written by famous refugees who passed through Lisbon—

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testimonies of writers such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Alfred Döblin, and the actress Erika Mann—were used. The dynamics between these two layers interested the director because they counterbalance the relationship between the happy and neutral discourse of the dictatorial regime, and the sad reality of refugees who saw this happiness as an illusion in the context of World War II. That was the time when the film sessions had a program of supplements (…) sometimes made of documentaries, cartoons, but they always had the newsreel, which in my time was already called ‘And so the world goes’, but that was formerly done by António Lopes Ribeiro and called the ‘Portuguese Journal’. And so I (…) wondered what would the Portuguese newspapers be like in the 1940s. And I figured immediately that what António Lopes Ribeiro filmed and featured and assembled in ‘Portuguese Journal’ would give the picture, as he says, of ‘an oasis of peace in a world at war,’ as if the war were on another planet. What happened was that delirium overcame my expectations and gave me the idea of the two realities. The reality of the regime’s propaganda remains, (...) New State propaganda left very deep marks.56

In fact, the two levels of reality mentioned by Canijo are clear throughout the film. Canijo’s initial idea was to analyze the possible relationship between the Portuguese and the refugees passing through Portugal; however, he did not find any images of this relationship. The images he found led the author to infer that the delirium was much more widespread and more rooted among the Portuguese than he had initially thought. There are no documentaries or footage concerning the misery experienced by the country, its reality, because only official accounts were allowed. In the years covered by the documentary, because of World War II, the “Portuguese Journal” news mainly concerned security: images of Portuguese Youth and military parades, for example, but also inaugurations of state buildings and exhibitions. These images show some opulence due to the camera shots, which used repeating patterns, and low and high angle shots, mainly to convey a situation of control, power, greatness and security.57 As stated by Piçarra, in “Portuguese Journal,” “the silence of the narrative as to major world events illustrates the regime’s orientation.”58 56

Interview with João Canijo, Lisbon, Portugal, 2013. Daniel Ribas, Retratos de Família: A Identidade Nacional e a Violência em João Canijo. Doctoral thesis in Cultural Studies. University of Aveiro, Portugal, 2014. 58 M. C. Piçarra, Salazar vai ao cinema. A Política do Espírito no Jornal Português. ed. 1. (Lisbon: DrellaDesign, Lda, 2011), 23. 57

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The following excerpts from the film are examples of the discourse broadcast by the “Portuguese Journal” in a period of war: The Portuguese people as one wanted to show their appreciation towards President General Carmona during the cherished pilgrimage to the birthplace of the Nation, as a token of their admiration. They also cheered Salazar and the New State Government with the most sincere fervour, made all the more poignant at this point in time. We are guided and saved by our patriotic love, thanks to the common link of solidarity, which holds us as mortar binds bricks in a building—finally together—standing before the world as one. 59

Figure 1 Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010

Salazar’s image as the “savior of the nation” in a time of war was carefully disseminated. Ribas maintains that the extracts selected to reproduce Salazar's speeches set up a “common sense of national identity, implying certain innate characteristics as the ‘Portuguese character’.”60 The footage selections show some corporations, athletes and youth 59 60

Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010. Ribas, Retratos de Família, 210.

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organizations. Salazar is shot from a low angle, establishing a godlike relationship with the people, filmed as anonymous mass. These images were all part of a national narrative in which discovery, expansion, and colonization played a central role. According to Almeida these narratives “became hegemonic and part of people’s representations as well, not just imposed propaganda.”61 When you are centuries old and boast about a long History, other values, you feel, must arise and these comprise at once a national heritage and an imperative example of national life. Those attributes which were revealed and crystallized, and which make us ourselves and not others; that sweetness of temper; that modesty; that humanity, which is so rare in today’s world; that measure of spirituality which, despite all forces against it, still inspires the Portuguese way of life; the spirit of endurance; the unassuming heroism; the adaptability and the capacity to imprint our way of being in the outside world; the regard for moral values; the faith in law, justice, equality among men and peoples; all of the above, unprofitable as they may be as principles, nonetheless constitute the main features of our national character.62

In the opinion of Barker and Galasínski (2001, 124), nations are not simply political formations but systems of cultural representation through which national identity is continually reproduced as discursive action. The symbolic and discursive dimension of national identity, in the case of the Salazar regime, narrates and creates the idea of origins, continuity and tradition. In this sense, ‘nation’ is an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson [1983] 1991) and national identity a construction assembled through symbols and rituals. As Billig (1995) stresses, banal nationalism is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building. Canijo (2013) considers that the myths spread by Salazar persist today, probably as Billig (1995) argues, because nationhood provides a continual background for political leaders’ discourse, like that of Salazar and of current political leaders in some countries, in which citizens are daily reminded, sometimes in a subtle way, of their national place in a world of nations. The irony in the sequences of the first part of Lusitanian Illusion is emphasized by the absence of voice-over to contextualize the story. This dimension becomes more evident because of the contrast between these sequences and the second layer of the film, which is performed by reading texts by three famous refugees in Lisbon. 61 62

Almeida, “Portugal’s Colonial Complex,” 5. Ibid.

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The texts of three foreign writers who went through Lisbon during World War II (Alfred Döblin, Erika Mann and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) clearly contradict the fantasy of Portugal proposed by Salazar and the images produced by the regime. They expose the falsity of the dictator’s myth whose intent is to project a great, rich and neutral country (Ribas 2014). The harsh reality of an illiterate, poor and hungry people is always excluded in the footage that illustrates the regime’s discourse, while the texts of the three writers characterizing the social context reveal the existence of an illiterate and poor population. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010). (…) I ended up in Portugal, a hot, bright, southern, peaceful world. We said right away: Portugal is a wonderful country. It was two in the morning. We rode into the city, traveled through brightly lit streets full of happy people. Lisbon welcomed us with light, music and laughter. (…) What a world! What a world! Unbelievable. We will never forget the jolt it gave us. Not far from here, the grand nation of France agonized, its cities engulfed in the shadows of war, the northern part of the country overrun by its conquerors. (…) People suffered and were annihilated. Millions of men were kept in prison, millions were frightened, thousands were killed, and here the lights were burning brightly. People were enjoying peacetime. We couldn’t enjoy it. We could think only of what we had left behind. We drove with noise through the bright, infernally bright (so it seemed to us) city.63 In December of 1940, Lisbon struck me as a kind of bright and sad paradise. The imminent invasion of Portugal was much discussed, and Portugal clung to the illusion of its happiness. Lisbon, having organized the most beautiful exhibition in the world, showed a pale smile, like that of a mother without news of her son gone to war, and who attempts to save him through self-assertion: My son must be alive, since I am smiling…64

While these authors’ texts are read, the director introduces footage selections of the refugees’ life in Portugal, as a contrast to the cheerful news of the “Portuguese Journal”. Images of the World Exhibition of 1940, traditional villages, the church, the multiculturalism in Lisbon—in a speech that highlighted racial superiority—, pictures of beaches and hotels contrast with the images of refugees wandering around the city.

63 64

Alfred Doblin, in Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010.

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Figure 2 Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010

Figure 3 Canijo, Lusitanian Illusion, 2010

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The end of the war was seen in Portugal as a victory and the people were involved in ceremonies to praise Salazar as “the savior of the nation.” The film ends with the public act of divine gratitude because Portugal had escaped the war, showing the inauguration, in 1959, of the monument Cristo-Rei in Lisbon, a tribute to the end of the war and the country’s neutrality.

48: Memories of repression and violence According to Susana de Sousa Dias, political persecution and torture during the Portuguese dictatorship have been discussed mildly by official history. In 48 the director tries to tell the history of the Portuguese dictatorial regime (1926-1974) by using just the photographs taken when political prisoners were arrested and their testimonies. Her main goal was to preserve the memories of those who have lived experiences of violence and repression during the dictatorship. The author relates that one of her interviewees told her that the worst aspect of the dictatorship’s violence was its duration.65 In fact, due to that aspect, some authors consider that the representations disseminated during that period persist in people’s mind,66 such as the “lusotropicalist” dimension, affecting the present-day relationship between the Portuguese and immigrants.67 Sousa Dias agrees with this idea of persistence of representations conveyed during the New State. She states that: I lived 12 years under the dictatorship. I was little, but there was a period in my life when I assimilated those ideas: at school, from the mentality of the majority... There are still many invisible traces. It has passed but is not forgotten.68

65

Sources: http://www.torinofilmfest.it/media/0a53a46dc80732fc63536282d0e70939125424.p df and http://alambique.pt/uploads/dossiers/48_-_di_final1.pdf. 66 Almeida, “Portugal’s Colonial Complex,” and Interview with João Canijo (Lisbon, Portugal, 2013). 67 Rosa Cabecinhas and João Feijó, “Collective Memories of Portuguese Colonial Action in Africa: Representations of the Colonial Past among Mozambicans and Portuguese Youths,” International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 4.1 (2010): 28-44. 68 Sousa Dias, “48: Imagens que gritam,” Visão Magazine, May 2 (2011). http://visao.sapo.pt/48-imagens-que-gritam=f600879.

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The film starts with an introduction to the theme, in which the author stresses the duration of the dictatorship, its main pillars, the impact of the Colonial War in the preservation of the regime and the Carnation Revolution, the role of PIDE in this context, thus summarizing recent Portuguese history. From 1926 to 1974, Portugal endured the longest dictatorship of the 20th century in Western Europe. António de Oliveira Salazar was the leader and political ideologue. The Church, the army and the secret police (PIDEDGS) were its pillars. Colonies, nation and regime were merged into a mythical construction based on the concept of Empire. With the 1961 outbreak of the Colonial War, the PIDE-DGS stepped up its actions overseas. On 25th April 1974, a military uprising with the support of the masses put an end both to 48 years of dictatorship and to the Colonial War. It was the Carnation Revolution. The PIDE-DGS was dissolved. A part of its archives disappeared. This included the material on the former colonies containing photographic records of the African political prisoners.69

Sousa Dias adds that she wanted to confront the public with the political prisoner, not with the former political prisoner, allowing the audience to realize how these memories are updated.70 She thought of the present, not strictly of past histories. The experiences reported by former prisoners are about repression, violence, and physical and moral torture. The photos evoked different memories in the interviewees. They encompass the pain of physical abuses, the marks left in their families; and during the silences we understand what is left unsaid, sometimes because of shame, others because of the suffering that remembering certain experiences implies. I put my head against a bar and tried to sleep. An enormous guy came over and stuck a toothpick in my ear. This is such a horrendous sensation. It hurts so much having a toothpick stuck upwards into your ear, that I grabbed the guy and said: “If you ever do that again, I’ll finish you off”. And he only said: “Sorry, but I cannot let you fall asleep.71

69

Ibid. Nuno Lisboa and Susana N. Duarte, “Entrevista a Susana de Sousa Dias,” Cinema, 5 (2014): 207-223, 221. 71 Manuel Martins Pedro, in Sousa Dias, 48. 70

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Figure 4 Manuel Martins Pedro, in Sousa Dias, 48, 2010 This time I only got a few punches. Nothing more, as they did not know that I was a member of the Party. Fascism would not allow the existence of any organization that might be in opposition to the regime. In this one, I’d already had five or six days of sleep torture. I remember this photo. They didn’t take it on arrival, I went off for sleep torture first and later they took me to the PIDE headquarters to have the photograph taken. There was a guy called Cristofaneti, who was a special torturer. He tortured and was one of those who most tortured me.72

Although there are several debates, as stated above, about whether the New State was really a fascist regime, the truth is that this conception permeates the discourse of interviewees, for whom it is evident that the Salazar regime was fascist. The director opened up the reflection on the role of women in the resistance, stressing the feminine political implications for the struggle against fascism. It was an insidious repression, very insidious. It was all about an inquisitorial surveillance (…) It was a country where you had to find out the truth about Portugal through minimal gestures. We were all old, so I thought. We were all old, there were no children not even young people. (…) We were all masked. (…) Fascism was the place for cynicism,

72

António Gervásio, in Sousa Dias, 48.

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Figure 5 Conceição Matos, in Sousa Dias, 48, 2010

Being a woman influenced the work of Sousa Dias. As the director mentions, it influenced the way she worked, the attention she paid to the images and the choice of themes. In fact, the director includes several testimonies of women in the film, that highlight the torture and violence to which they were subjected. Women were tortured in the same way as male prisoners. Besides physical torture, the interviewees stressed psychological torture. In the case of women, the fact that they were not allowed to have a shower when they menstruated, references to the violence against the prisoner’s family, the separation from their children, the “statue” and the sleep torture are all striking in their speeches. As Pimentel notices “If the ‘statue’ implied ‘sleep’, the sleep torture, which does not always imply the

73 74

Maria Galveias, in Sousa Dias, 48. Conceição Matos, in Sousa Dias, 48.

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‘statue’, was the type of torture most commonly used by the PIDE / DGS, and feared by political prisoners over the years.”75 At the end of the film, Sousa Dias adds the testimonies of African men arrested by PIDE. As they mention, the photographs relating to this period disappeared. One African prisoner relates that people were more afraid of PIDE than of the army. The PIDE were terrifying, totally terrifying. All over the place. (…) There are various forms of humiliation; there are various forms of humiliation. An example, Chico would be beating people. Then, after a while, he’d order you to strip your clothes off and bend over. Then he’d bring wire to stuff up your anus. That was what he’d do. (…) At one stage, ten to fifteen people were dying daily in Machava prison.76

In fact, if there is silence regarding the violence experienced by Portuguese political prisoners, this is even clearer when referring to African prisoners, since a significant number of documents in the final phase of Portuguese colonialism was destroyed. For this reason the assembly of testimonies from people who have lived experiences of violence and repression during the colonial period is even more important.77 Furthermore, photos and videos from this period allow the creation of a relationship with the public—especially with the younger one, that ignores this reality—as well as a reflection on this subject, by looking at the faces and voices of people who were arrested and tortured during Portuguese dictatorship.

75

Irene F. Pimentel, “A Tortura,” in Vítimas de Salazar - Estado Novo e Violência Política, ed. João Madeira et al. (Lisbon: A Esfera dos Livros, 2007), 5. 76 Machava Central Prison, Mozambique, Amós Mahanjane, in Sousa Dias, 48. 77 In addition, the director relates that bringing these testimonies as well as these photographs to light “implies a rescue embodied in the exposure of something that the authoritarian regime wanted to hide and the possibility of extending the knowledge of those 48 years of dictatorship. You should be aware that most of these photos belong to people who were never part of the collective memory and even less of history. There are thousands of anonymous women and men without any political leadership roles, and although no one remembers their names, their faces expose a dimension of the political police that no written document can elucidate.” Susana Sousa Dias, “Corpos estranhos ou desigualdades inscritas na película,” in Arte e Género, Mulheres e Criação Artística, ed. Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro and Rui Oliveira Lopes (Lisbon: CIEBA/FBAUL, 2012), 230-240, 238.

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Lusitanian Illusion and 48: Photographs and Videos as Pieces of Resistance and Memory By means of political education and the emphasis on historical memory concerning the Portuguese discoveries and an alleged providential destiny, the regime of Salazar was able to construct a collective imagery that would hinder the desegregation of the nation. Lusitanian Illusion constitutes a recreation of this discourse by means of a filmic assembly work that gives it a critical and ironical nature by combining propaganda about national unity with the reality of the refugees passing through Lisbon. The photographs and testimonies from 48 contrast with the archival material of Lusitanian Illusion, giving us some insights on the violence experienced by those that opposed the regime. In some way, as Sousa Dias stresses, photographs were a weapon of opposition to the regime. The subjects were able to choose the expression with which they faced the camera. There is an ideological answer of the photographed person at the moment the picture is taken. There also seems to be a play of forces between the police and the arrested. Some testimonials mention the need to present the worst face for the photograph.78 The photographs chosen for the film create an effet de réel: by looking at them, the victims disclosed their memories concerning their imprisonment by PIDE. In some sense, Sousas Dias states, the photographs were the “key that unlocks those memories.”79 The truth claimed by documentary film refers to the degree of articulation of the filmmaker's view of reality, represented in the form and style of the film. From this viewpoint, the speaking position of the film (literally the voice through which the filmmaker speaks) is a very important stylistic principle.80 In both films, the directors choose not to include voice over. All the sound is achieved through the voices of the three testimonies and António Lopes Ribeiro, in Lusitanian Illusion, and by the testimonies of victims in 48. The construction of the space in this latter film is given by the image and the sound. As Sousa Dias notes, the documentary is built on a methodology whose aim is to “create a space of thought for the spectator” that would stretch beyond any easy emotional appeal. A relationship between the work and the spectator is thereby established in which it is possible to carry out the task of acknowledging the facts and 78

Sousa Dias, “Corpos estranhos.” Lisboa and Duarte, “Entrevista a Susana de Sousa Dias,” 218. 80 Sonja De Leeuw, “Dutch Documentary Film as a Site of Memory: Changing Perspectives in the 1990s,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10.1 (2007): 7587. 79

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their complexity, raising doubts and questions and weaving the means by which to resist the superficial and generalist reading of history.81 As Sousa Dias argues: You need to slow down, open fissures; in some moments there are people who make them; in others, I open them myself so that the combined effect of the picture can be properly crafted and allow time for integration and reflection by the viewer. He or she must listen carefully to the sigh, the sound made when a person first sees the preserved photograph: all this will allow the language itself to be understood in a wholly different way. The language is tied to what it reveals. The language not only transmits itself; it is a medium. It is almost like dealing with language as if it were a gesture.82

Traditionally realistic documentaries use audiovisual archival material as evidence that they are an authentic sign of their times, as well as a closed master narrative, which will explain the events. Documentary filmmakers have developed diverse representational strategies to deal with the limits set by the specific historical character of a violent past.83 In the case of Canijo and Sousa Dias, they represent events that have to do with the Portuguese dictatorship in a manner that does not intend to contain, define or control them. This is achieved by means of the assembly strategy and sound. They demand of the public that it question the process by which we represent the world and ourselves and become aware of the means by which we make sense of experiences in our culture.84 Looking for the truth (any truth) is no longer an aim; instead, making the public wonder, reflect and reconstruct their own representations about this period of Portuguese history constitutes the aim of the directors – in an attempt to trigger the memories, associations and emotions, a necessary process for historical rewriting. In fact, the use of testimonies and the role of witnesses became crucial in reshaping collective memory. The directors took the opportunity to present individual stories as representations of memory and thus provide a variety of discourses of memory, a variety of truths.

81

Emília Tavares, “The Imprisoned Images,” Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics. Available online: http://www.seismopolite.com/the-imprisoned-images, 2012. 82 Lisboa and Duarte “Entrevista a Susana de Sousa Dias,” 216-217. 83 De Leeuw, “Dutch Documentary Film.” 84 Ibid.

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Concluding Remarks How is the Portuguese dictatorship portrayed in current Portuguese cinema? This was the beginning of our questioning. Although our analysis cannot be generalized, since we focus only on two films, it allowed us to put forward some considerations about the modes of representation of the recent past in Portuguese cinema. As in other recent Portuguese documentaries, the two films we analyzed in this article rely on the testimonies of those who lived in the historical moment portrayed, looking at history from below (using ordinary people witnesses), and compare their versions with official history. We argue that such films constitute counter-hegemonic places, through which subaltern or even marginalized groups can have a voice and express themselves. In order to analyze the selected films we presented a brief overview of the Portuguese dictatorship, which lasted 48 years, and is considered the longest in 20th century Europe. We also stressed the role of cinema concerning the creation and preservation of the dictatorship. In fact, films produced during this period always conveyed a harmonious and cheerful social universe. Those that did not follow these standards were censored and banned. The “politics of spirit”, projected by António Ferro—placing art in the service of the New State—had as its main mission to instill enthusiasm concerning the actions of the regime in the Portuguese people. In the 60s, with the beginning of the colonial wars, the lusotropicalist ideology was selectively used to repress anti-nationalist courses of action and at the same time to create an image of a cheerful and multicultural Portugal, to be disseminated at national and international level. Moreover, the regime had in PIDE, an organization of social and political state terrorism, the main arm that sustained the dictatorship’s power for decades. Using archival footage, Lusitanian Illusion exposes the ideological construction of the regime and compares it with other views, foreign ones, concerning the same historical period, by showing us material of the Portuguese Journal – promoted and funded by SPN – which amplified the propaganda and the speech of the regime. In his film Fantasia Lusitana (2010), Canijo articulates these archival images with the reading of the texts of three famous authors passing through Lisbon, introducing images of the refugees’ lives in Portugal, which contrasted with the cheerful news of the Portuguese Journal. The photographs and testimonies from 48 also contrast with the archival material of Lusitanian Illusion, giving us insights into the violence experienced by those who lived under PIDE’s rule, by those that opposed the regime. Choosing not to use voice over,

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both directors demand that the public be involved in the images and sounds, reflecting on them, in order to make them wonder and reconstruct their own representations about this period of Portuguese history. We argue that both films constitute tools for the reshaping of collective memory. By sharing memories (archival or personal), Lusitanian Illusion and 48 present themselves as (almost) political tools, keeping collective memory alive and more plural. Following modernist storytelling strategies, they were able to deconstruct the official discourses in order to make room for a diversity of stories. To turn these films into counter-hegemonic discourses, they need an audience. Films that are not watched may provide the most exciting images of the past, yet they will not have any effect on memory. According to Erll's perspective, the specific form of reception which turns films into memory-making is not an individual but a collective phenomenon.85 This is why it is important to promote the reflective, critical and involved visualization of the films. In fact, on a collective level, films like these can become powerful media, as their versions of the past may circulate broadly, even at an international level. It is important to proceed further with research about the role of these films in the reinforcement or in the deconstruction of representations regarding Portuguese dictatorship. We consider this could be achieved through closer interaction with young students and schools.86

Works Cited 48. Sousa Dias, Susana (Director). Portugal: Kintop, 2010. Film. Almeida, Miguel Vale de. “‘Longing for oneself’: Hybridism and Miscegenation in Colonial and Postcolonial Portugal.” Etnográfica, VI.1 (2002): 181-200. —. “Portugal’s Colonial Complex: From Colonial Lusotropicalism to Postcolonial Lusophony.” Queen’s Postcolonial Research Forum. Belfast: Queen’s University, April 28th 2008. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Areal, Leonor. Cinema Português. Um País imaginado. Volume I - Antes de 1974. Lisbon: Edições 70, 2011. 85

Erll, “Literature, Film.” This research was developed with the support of a doctoral scholarship (SFRH/BD/75765/2011), co-financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the European Social Fund (ESF) – Human Potential Operational Programme (POPH), under the National Strategic Frame of Reference 2007-2013 Portugal. 86

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Ashuri, Tamar. “Television Tension: National versus Cosmopolitan Memory in a Co-Produced Television Documentary.” Media, Culture & Society, 29.1 (2006): 31-51. Assmann, Aleida. “From Collective Violence to a Common Future: Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past.” In Conflict, Memory Transfers and the Reshaping of Europe. Edited by Helena Gonçalves da Silva, Adriana Martins [et al.]. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, 14-22. Assmann, Jan and John Czaplick. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, 65 (1995): 125-133. Barker, Chris and Dariusz Galasinski. Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis. A Dialogue on Language and Identity. London: Sage Publications, 2001. Barreto, António. Mudança Social em Portugal, 1960/2000. Working Papers do Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, 2002. Available online: http://www.ics.ul.pt/publicacoes/workingpapers/wp2002/WP6-2002.pdf. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications, 1995. Braun, Virginia, and Victoria Clarke. “Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology.” Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, (2006): 77-101. Cabecinhas, Rosa and João Feijó. “Collective Memories of Portuguese Colonial Action in Africa: Representations of the Colonial Past among Mozambicans and Portuguese Youths.” International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 4.1 (2010): 28-44. Corkill, David and José C. P. Almeida. “Commemoration and Propaganda in Salazar’s Portugal: The Mundo Português Exposition of 1940.” Journal of Contemporary History, 44.3 (2009): 381-399. Cunha, Paulo. “As origens do novo cinema português: o turismo cinéfilo e o novo cinema português”. In Atas do XI Encontro da Socine. Brasília: Socine, 2009. —. “A ‘diferença’ portuguesa?” In Cinema português: um guia essencial. Edited by Paulo Cunha and Michelle Sales, 215-237. São Paulo: SESISP, 2013. —. Os filhos bastardos. Afirmação e reconhecimento do novo Cinema português 1967-1974. Coimbra: Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada à Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, 2005. De Leeuw, Sonja. “Dutch Documentary Film as a Site of Memory: Changing Perspectives in the 1990s.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10.1 (2007): 75-87.

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Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Erll, Astrid. “Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory”. In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning, 389-398. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Fantasia Lusitana. Canijo, João (Director). Portugal: Midas Filmes, 2010. Film. Ferreira, Carolin. O. “Estabilidade, Crescimento e Diversificação.” In Cinema português: um guia essencial. Edited by Paulo Cunha and Michelle Sales, 238-267. São Paulo: SESI-SP, 2013. Fishman, Robert M. “Democratic Practice after the Revolution: The Case of Portugal and Beyond.” Politics & Society, 39.2 (2011): 233-267. Freyre, Gilberto. Casa-grande & Senzala: edição crítica. Edited by G. Giucci, E. R. Larreta and E. N. Fonseca. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 2002. Grilo, João Mário. O Cinema da Não-Ilusão. Histórias para o cinema português. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2006. Lemière, Jacques. “Um centro na margem: o caso do cinema português.” Análise Social, v. XLI.180 (2006): 731-765. Lisbon: Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. Lisboa, Nuno and Susana N. Duarte. “Entrevista a Susana de Sousa Dias.” Cinema, 5 (2014): 207-223. Lourenço, Eduardo. O Fascismo nunca existiu. Alfragide: Publicações D. Quixote, 1976. Macedo, Isabel and Rosa Cabecinhas. “Contribuições do documentário para a (re)construção da memória sócio-histórica: uma análise dos filmes produzidos em Portugal entre 2007 e 2011.” In Filmes Falados. Edited by Frederico Lopes and Ana Catarina Pereira. Covilhã: Labcom, 2013. Madureira, Luís. “Lusofonia: From Infancy to Necrology, or the Peregrinations of a Floating Signifier.” Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, 25 (2013): 66-81. Mattoso, José (Dir.). História de Portugal Vol. VII – O Estado Novo (1926-1974). Lisbon: Editora Estampa, 1993. Mendes, João Maria, Pereira, Carlos, Jácome, Jorge, Simões, Marta, Cipriano, Miguel and Sousa Dias, Vanessa “Apresentação.” In Novas & Velhas Tendências do Cinema Português Contemporâneo. Edited by João Maria Mendes, 1-10. Amadora: Biblioteca da ESTC, 2013. Available Online: http://pwp.net.ipl.pt/sc/gportela/livro.pdf Meneses, Filipe R. Salazar: A Political Biography. New York: Enigma Books, 2009.

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Monteiro, Paulo F. “Uma margem no centro: a arte e o poder do ‘novo cinema’.” In O Cinema sob o Olhar de Salazar. Edited by Luís R. Torgal, 306-338. Lisbon: Círculo dos Leitores, 2001. Oliveira Marques, António H. História de Portugal, vol. III, das revoluções liberais aos nossos dias. Lisbon: Palas Editores, 1986. Paulo, Heloísa. “Documentarismo e Propaganda: as imagens e os sons do regime.” In O Cinema sob o Olhar de Salazar. Edited by Luís R. Torgal, 92-116. Lisbon: Círculo dos Leitores, 2001. Pedroso, Alberto. “A polícia política.” In História de Portugal. Dos tempos pré-modernos aos nossos dias. Edited by João Medina. Amadora: Clube Internacional do Livro, 1998. Piçarra, Maria do Carmo. “Portugal olhado pelo cinema como centro imaginário de um império.” In Anuário Internacional da Comunicação Lusófona. Memória social e dinâmica lusófona (77-96), 2010. —. Salazar vai ao cinema. A Política do Espírito no Jornal Português. ed. 1. Lisbon: DrellaDesign, Lda, 2011. —. “Uma cinematografia “sem olhar” ganha o primeiro realizador, Leitão de Barros.” In Cinema português: um guia essencial. Edited by Paulo Cunha and Michelle Sales, 45-69. São Paulo: SESI-SP, 2013. Pimentel, Irene F.. “A Tortura”. In Vítimas de Salazar - Estado Novo e Violência Política. Edited by João Madeira et al. Lisbon: A Esfera dos Livros, 2007. —. A História da PIDE. Rio de Mouro: Círculo de Leitores, 2007. Propaganda Nacional, 26 de Outubro de 1933, in Salazar, Discursos, Vol.1, 159. Reiter, Bernd. “Portugal: national pride and imperial neurosis.” Race Class, 47 (2005): 79-91. Ribas, Daniel. Retratos de Família: A Identidade Nacional e a Violência em João Canijo. Doctoral thesis in Cultural Studies. University of Aveiro, Portugal, 2014. Rosas, Fernando. História de Portugal, Vol VII, O Estado Novo (19261974). Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1994. Santos, Graça dos. “‘Política do espírito’: O bom gosto obrigatório para embelezar a realidade.” Media & Jornalismo, 12 (2008): 59-72. Sousa Dias, Susana. “Corpos estranhos ou desigualdades inscritas na película.” In Arte e Género, Mulheres e Criação Artística. Edited by Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro and Rui Oliveira Lopes. Lisbon: CIEBA/FBAUL, 2012, 230-240.

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Tavares, Emília. The Imprisoned Images. Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics. Available online: http://www.seismopolite.com/the-imprisoned-images, 2012. Torgal, Luís R.. “Propaganda, Ideologia e Cinema no Estado Novo: a ‘conversão dos descrentes’.” In O cinema sob o olhar de Salazar. Edited by Luís R. Torgal, 64-91. Lisbon: Círculo dos Leitores, 2011. —. “Salazar and the Portuguese ‘New State’ - Images and Interpretations.” Annual of Social History, 2 (2009): 7-18. Vala, Jorge, Diniz Lopes and Marcus Lima. “Black Immigrants in Portugal: Luso-Tropicalism and Prejudice.” Journal of Social Issues, 64.2 (2008): 287-302. Vieira, Patrícia. Cinema no Estado Novo: a Encenação do Regime. Lisbon: Edições Colibri, 2011.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACKWARDS: NOTES ON THE DICTATORSHIP IN URUGUAY CLAUDIA PERALTA

This essay explores some of the consequences of the military coup that took place on June 27th, 1973 in Uruguay, and analyzes the ways in which Uruguayan society dealt with the atrocities committed during those years. When people mention the coups of the 70s in South America, Uruguay is often overlooked. We predominantly hear about the Chilean (1973) and Argentinean (1976) dictatorships. However, in the middle of the 1970s more than ten countries in Latin America were living under dictatorships; one of these was Uruguay. The reasons for overlooking Uruguay’s dictatorship could be many, but I will address the most salient ones. First, Uruguay is a small country often overshadowed by its bigger neighbors, Argentina and Brazil. Second, the image portrayed to others and even to its own society is that what happened in Uruguay was not as severe as what happened in other Latin American countries. Third, because there were fewer victims due to atrocities (enforced disappearances or summary executions) than in other places, more attention was focused on other countries. Fourth, contrary to well-known dictators such as Pinochet (Chile), Stroessner (Paraguay)—longest rule in South America—or even Captain Videla and la Junta Militar (Argentina), Uruguay didn’t have a figure that iconically condensed the image of the devil or of infamous perpetrators. During the dictatorship, several military figures had presidential terms in office, but none of them were well known. For this reason Uruguay’s dictatorship was not recognized worldwide. Fifth, someone could also argue that the transition from dictatorship to democracy was relatively smooth, coming as a result of a long negotiation between political leaders and the leader of the coup. Some scholars have pointed out that historically Uruguay has found ways of resolving its conflicts—even the most difficult ones—without harsh confrontations. Finally, the long stable democratic regime at the time portrayed Uruguay

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as one of the most peaceful countries in the region, a factor that most likely contributed to the dictatorship being overlooked. Yet it has been said that the Uruguayan dictatorship was perhaps one of the most effective ones, one of the most intelligent “State terrorisms” or “Terrorismo de estado.” In this study I review four documentaries that are perhaps not well known outside of Latin America: A Las cinco en punto (At Five O’Clock Sharp, 2004), Nos sobra una ley (We Have an Unnecessary Law, 2011), Por esos ojos (For These Eyes, 1997), and Romper el muro de la impunidad (Breaking down the Wall of Impunity, 2013). These documentaries provide a powerful account of what happened from the first day of the military coup on June 27th, 1973. They also reveal the effect that disappearances had on families, as well as efforts by activists to overturn the “Ley 15848, Ley de Caducidad de la Pretención Punitiva del Estado”, which renounced the right of the State to prosecute and judge the gross human rights violations committed during the coup. The last documentary, Romper el muro de la impunidad (2013), provides an analysis of the barriers to truth and justice which are explored by politicians, academics, journalists, victims and their family members, and reviews the emblematic case that brought Uruguay to its knees and changed the policy of “not looking back”. To understand how these documentaries’ narrations are thematically interconnected, I provide a short synopsis of what transpired in the history of Uruguay from 1972-1983. Then, I briefly describe what took place when the dictatorship ended. I argue that these works are extremely important in helping one understand what happened in the history of the country through the eyes of the people who were there, and the victims of the oppression. Specifically, I argue that this “recollecting memory” is important in the making of history. Even though the crimes committed during the dictatorship happened more than 30 years ago, the abuses suffered are still alive in the memories of the victims. What is more, the vast majority of the victims have not received reparations1 or have only received limited ones from the State. Understanding the wrongdoing will acknowledge the victims’ suffering and offer better tools for enforcing democracy, hopefully creating a space for debating the issue. The recollections of those memories are important not only because the dictatorship harmed and imposed fear on the society, but also because it

1

A State’s obligation to provide full reparations for all wrongful acts committed. Although most serious violations, by their nature, are irreparable, reparation is an act by which the truth is acknowledged, along with victims and their dignity.

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broke down the country’s social fabric and imprinted consequences that changed the nation forever. “Looking forward”, “silence,” or “denying the truth” were the philosophies imposed by the new democratic leaders in the aftermath of the coup. Most of the establishment supported the message of leaving the past behind in order to reconstruct society. They proclaimed that by doing so, Uruguayans would ensure that under no circumstances would the military have reasons to come back. As a consequence of these messages the society at large, which was still dominated by a tremendous pall of fear, sealed itself in a code of silence. That fear provided political advantage to some leaders. However, the idea of negating what happened, which is well addressed in several of the documentaries, became a bigger burden, not only at a personal level but also at a social level. Ansín & Bálsamo also come to the same conclusions.2 In an investigative project conducted with their students, the youngsters responded that it was difficult to learn about what had happened because when they asked their elders, the common response was “We do not talk about it here,” or “We can’t talk about this.” For this reason, I deemed the documentaries’ narratives important. Indeed, these narratives help lift the veil of silence that shrouded the country for many years, and hopefully contribute to the realization that without truth, justice is not possible. Additionally, it is necessary to underscore the importance of these documentaries within the educational arena of social justice. As noted in H.I.J.O.S Uruguay, “Some young people in Uruguay are interested in topics relating to the dictatorship while others are not.”3 For example, a documentary in which high school students were asked what they knew about the dictatorship revealed that many didn’t even know it had happened. They questioned the interviewers about what they were saying. Yet, of those who knew about it, many lacked deeper knowledge. For example, when asked to share the name of a person who had disappeared, they didn’t know.4

Historical Background Uruguay was part of the strong social and political movements of the 1960s that denounced structural injustices in the region, but the demands 2

Jimena Ansín and Gisella Bálsamo, “Con las maestras de 6 año. Nacimiento de la opinión Propia,” No te olvides. Revista de la Asociación de amigas y amigos del museo de la memoria, 1 (2010): 35-38. 3 H.I.J.O.S. Uruguay (1/2). Lucas Silva and Victor Burgos Barreiro (Directors). 2006. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSrjAr6_5WY. 4 Ibid.

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were crushed by a strong authoritarian government, culminating in the installation of a military one. The armed forces directly assumed power with the support of business elites in June 1973 (a previous attempt took place in February of 1973). In 1974, the authoritarian right-wing regimes that had come to power in Latin America agreed to coordinate their activities during a secret meeting conducted in Uruguay. The military heads of all the dictatorships made a pact, cooperating to repress, torture, exchange and kill intellectuals, socialists and other opponents. The pact was intended to eradicate Communism or any influence of the Soviet Union (in the context of the Cold War era) and any idea that could come from the experiences of the Cuban revolution and “Mayo francés,” extremely influential events at that time in the region. This plan, known as “Operación Condor” or “Operation Condor,” created a context of political control, repression and planned violation of human rights. Uruguay was not the bloodiest dictatorship in the region but it was likely the most totalitarian because it controlled the whole of society, absolutely everything. Uruguay had the highest percentage of political prisoners in the region who served the longest sentences.5 It is estimated that nearly 6,000 men and women were held captive in nine clandestine detention centers and fifty prisons in the country.6 Thus Uruguay, a country of fewer than three million inhabitants at the time, had “the highest percentage of political detainees per capita in the world.”7 Although the figure could be higher, at least 300,000 Uruguayans were forced into exile for political or economic reasons.8 Moreover, the repression applied on the people was much stronger than in any other country. There was imposed silenced. The Army chased and fought any citizen who was a friend of any idea that challenged the regime – or friend of the friends of those ideas – using ruthless methods. It is well documented that people were classified on 5

Ana Ros, The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Collective Memory and Culture Production (New York: Palgrave, McMillan, 2012). 6 Álvaro Rico, “Sobre la autoritarismo y el golpe de estado. La dictadura y el dictator,” in La dictadura cívico militar: Uruguay, 1973-1985, ed. Carlos Demasi et. al. (Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios Uruguayos, 2009). 7 Quoted in Francesca Lessa, The Memory of State and Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 179. 8 Many famous writers, musicians and thinkers were in exile for many years. Eduardo Galeano and Daniel Vigliette were among them.

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three levels—A, B, and C—according to their political involvement.9 Because this labeling was made public, it impacted people’s employment, as well as their social lives. Thus, even though they were not imprisoned, they were persecuted or perhaps could be persecuted, creating a state of constant fear. The return to democracy in Uruguay was slow, filled with negotiations and agreements10 over a period that lasted almost four years. The armed forces bargained from a position of strength, negotiating their renunciation of power with the political parties. The 1980 referendum presented by the military, which proposed a continuation of their strong role along the lines of the 1976 constitutional decrees,11 was voted down. Even though at this time the society was subjected to a regimen of severe oppression, the civil society began applying pressure for change by mobilizing against the regime. At that moment the military realized the need to conceive of an “exit plan.” The “Naval Club Pact” was the final negotiation conducted by the military, signed by the armed forces and the representatives of the Partido Colorado (Colorado Party), Partido Unión Cívica (Civic Union Party) and the Frente Amplio (Broad Front).12 In this pact the military agreed to renounce its goal of having the former military Consejo de Seguridad Nacional (COSENA) endowed with virtual veto power over all civilian government decisions. Instead, they agreed the military would be granted an advisory board that would be controlled by the president and the cabinet. Additionally, it was agreed they would retain the ability to maintain the seniority system in selecting commanders for military services. They also approved the re-legalization of the parties of the left. However, nothing was discussed in regards to the human rights violations

9 Mariela Salaberry, “Entre dictaduras y democracias,” No te olvides. Revista de la Asociación de amigas y amigos del museo de la memoria, (1) 2010, 20-21. 10 The 1980 plebiscite presented by the branches of the military was not approved. Thus, the military began negotiating with political parties for the transfer of power (see Lessa, The Memory of State). 11 In 1976 the military government issued a series of constitutional decrees that amended the 1967 Constitution by creating a Council of the Nation (Consejo de la Nación) to serve as the supreme governmental body with legislative and executive functions. See Ariela Peralta, “El caso Gelman y los desafios a la ley de Caducidad,” in Luchas contra la impunidad. Uruguay 1985-2011, ed. Gabriela Fried and Francesca Lessa (Montevideo: Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 2011), 203216. 12 The National Party was left out of the negotiations due to the imprisonment of its main leader, Senator Wilson Ferreira Aldunate.

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that happened during the dictatorship.13 Conversely, political scientists and historians have argued that a secret agreement was made to assure impunity for any crimes committed. It could be said that most Uruguayans, regardless of their political views, believe that a tacit deal was indeed agreed upon. The election in 1984 of a conservative party—the Colorado Party— which had close ties to the military, left little room for further negotiations about accountability. Julio María Sanguinetti, a center right member for the Colorado party, became president. As the party took office nothing was mentioned about human rights violations. However, family and friends of the hundreds of remaining prisoners demanded their release, prompting government approval of the Ley de Pacificación Nacional. This meant amnestied prisoners, return of exiles, and job restoration for those who had been dismissed for political reasons. Still, nothing was mentioned about the 175 disappeared ones14 and their families.15 Uruguay was one of the last countries, along with Brazil, to prosecute military perpetrators or to agree to their extradition.16 From the beginning there was a strong push to move forward, to turn the page on the past and look to the future to achieve peace. The government highlighted democracy and the pacification of the country.17 Searching for the truth and fighting for justice were not part of the pacts’ goals. On the contrary, the government emphasized that searching for truth and justice would be a provocation of the military, which could result in institutional destabilization.18 In 1986, the denunciation of human rights violations increased. Family members, some legislators, lawyers, and social organizations denounced disappearances and the use of torture during detentions. Human Rights organizations, along with Madres y Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos Desaparecidos, started to investigate, filing any information they had received from any source. All of these demands set up a series of drafts of 13

Rex A. Hudson and Sandra W. Meditz, Uruguay: A Country Study (Washington D.C.: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1990). Retrieved from http://www.countrystudies.us/uruguay/ 14 http://medios.presidencia.gub.uy/jm_portal/2011/noticias/NO_B889/tomo1/4sec4-listados-detenidos-desaparecidos-cuadros-traslados/1-listado-detenidosdesaparecidos.pdf 15 Ros, The Post-Dictatorship Generation, 2012. 16 Ibid. 17 Francesca Lessa, Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against Impunity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). 18 An argument frequently used in the region and in many parts of the world after authoritarian regimes, wars, etc. had been overcome at that time. Demasi and Yaffé, quoted in ibid., 134.

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bills to limit or prevent prosecution of the military. Eventually, la Ley de Caducidad (The Expiry Law [Law 15.848]) was enacted, and thenPresident Sanguinetti signed it into law on December 22, 1986. This law embodied obstruction of truth and justice. The Ley de Caducidad and its confirmation as the voto verde referendum (1989) were the beginning of 20 years of complete impunity.19 This law not only halted any investigation and prosecution of human rights abuses committed by the military during their rule, but also codified the fact that any review of all the denunciations of past violations that had been received would be the responsibility of the executive branch. What is more, the executive branch was accountable for the task of investigating cases of disappearances which in the end were all dismissed.20 In 2009, twenty five-years after the first referendum on the law, two plebiscites were presented for a vote – one that pressed for the veto of the Ley de Caducidad and the other, Voto en el exterior, allowing Uruguayans living abroad to vote. Neither plebiscite received enough votes to pass.21 From 2005 until the present time, Uruguay has gone back and forth regarding the prosecution of the perpetrators. Although President Tabaré Vázquez (2005-2010) didn’t veto the Ley de Caducidad, he did allow the prosecution of some cases, thus establishing some exceptions to the law. In 2011, the Uruguayan Congress passed law N° 18.831, restoring the capacity of the judicial branch to investigate and prosecute crimes committed during the dictatorship, by considering them under the category of “crimes against humanity.” In October 2009, the Supreme Court of Uruguay, in a landmark judgment, declared that the right to life and the prohibition against depriving a person of his or her freedom perpetrated by agents of the state or with its authorization, support, or acquiescence followed by the absence of any form of (public) notification, were categorical rights that could not be submitted to popular vote (referendum/plebiscite). On February 24, 2011, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the famous case Gelman vs. Uruguay found the State of Uruguay responsible for committing crimes against humanity.22 The Inter-American Court established that certain rights cannot be submitted to popular decision in a referendum, just as the Uruguayan Supreme Court had stated. However, in 2013 the Uruguay Supreme Court declared two articles of the Ley 18.831 unconstitutional, resulting in possible consequences

19

57.6% no, and 42.4% yes. Lessa, Memory and Translational Justice. 21 Ley de Caducidad received 52.3% no, and 47.7% yes. 22 Case 12.607. 20

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relating to the statute of limitations and other exemptions, and eventual failure to prosecute.

Collective Memories Made Public “Something will be incurably wasted in the soul of those who will grow without knowing it.” (“Algo habrá de incurablemente yermo en el alma de quien se forme sin haberlos oídos.”) —Rodó

As previously mentioned, Uruguay’s new democratic government dealt with the inheritances of the coup by implementing one of the most extreme policies of denial and silencing in the entire Southern Cone region. The documentaries bring forth some of the memories that have been repressed. I believe that these documentaries can initiate a dialogue between generations about what happened in the past. H.I.J.O.S. members mention that some public figures and politicians claim “to know the truth” because “they were there.”23 They claim that members of the left have monopolized the discourse regarding what occurred to those who lived during the repression, restricting participation by Uruguayans in the construction of memory. Furthermore, they claim that these members have not encouraged a dialogue to explore what happened. It is my hope that these productions not only help in recovering the memory of what occurred but also encourage a dialogue on how the past has been assimilated and how it can transform the future.

A las cinco en punto (2004) The first documentary, A las cinco en punto (At Five O’Clock Sharp),24 recounts what happened during the first nineteen days of the coup, from the moment that then-President Juan María Bordaberry, with the support of the Armed Forces, declared the dissolution of parliament and installed a Council of the Nation (Consejo de la Nación). The documentary presents the perspectives of those involved in mobilizing against the coup. It is evident that there was a sense of power and unity running through the work of all involved. There is a clear 23

Sempol, quoted in Ros, The Post-Dictatorship Generation. A Las Cinco En Punto. José Pedro Charlo and Universindo Rodríguez Díaz (Directors). Uruguay: Memoria y Sociedad, 2004. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2rwZjFZJzw

24

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message of commitment to fight for the planned goals, and a deep understanding that without each other (students, union members, educators, workers, etc.) maintaining the unity of the whole is impossible, even in dissent. It should be noted that in order to share the story, archived films and photographs were recovered. The visuals weave the story together. The photos were taken by Aurelio Gonzalez, photographer of the newspaper El Popular, journalist, militant and one of the narrators of the story. There are four main parts to this documentary. First, the denunciation of the coup by students, workers, and university members. Second, the mobilization of the military to end the strike and regain control of the country. Third, the demonstrations across the country against the repression on July 9th. Fourth, the end of the strike. Workers, students, and representatives of the Public University detail their involvement in counteracting the military coup. Members of the Convención Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT) narrate how they mobilized, paralyzing the factories by imposing a strike across Uruguay for 15 days, which lasted until the 11th of July. A former student recalls his involvement in preparing for what to do in the event of a coup and recounts, almost with surprise, the level of involvement and political awareness. There was a level of politicization worth mentioning when reviewing the history. People were willing to give up their lives for common ideas and projects. It was not only a union workers’ problem, it was also a students’ problem.25

He recounts how the students organized to take over the other universities in Montevideo, to debate, and to share the pain, the anguish, the anger and the desire for freedom. It is worth noting that 6,000 of the 20,000 students who attended the universities participated in the movement. During the final minutes of the documentary, details are provided on how the country mobilized against the repression. On July 9th a march organized by students, CNT, social powers, and political parties was advertised on the radio through the use of a poem by Garía Lorca titled “A las cinco de la tarde” convoking everyone to peacefully demonstrate against the coup. The documentary ends with former workers detailing how, in spite of all the demonstrations and planned resistance, the 25

“Pero había un nivel de politización que no es depreciable si uno mira la historia. Gente que estaba dispuesta a dejar la vida frente a un conjunto de ideas, proyectos, que no eran solo los gremiales, estrictamente, un problema de estudiante.” My transcription.

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CNT decided to end the strike, and explaining how that decision affected them. Immediately after that, the CNT was prohibited.

Por esos ojos (1997) As mentioned earlier, kidnapping, torturing and killing the youth was a method often used to learn more about the accomplices involved. The case of Mariana Zaffaroni, explored in the documentary Por esos ojos (For These Eyes),26 became an emblematic case because of how it evolved. Mariana Zaffaroni was kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Argentina with her parents María Emilia Islas and Jorge Zaffaroni in September, 1976. She was eighteen months old. Her “eyes” became a sign of hope in Uruguay and a representation of all the disappeared children across Latin American. María Ester Gatti, the maternal grandmother, is the one sharing the story in the film. The documentary expands from Mariana’s birth, to the details of learning her whereabouts, to the first meeting and encounters with the family who kidnapped Mariana, to the first meeting with Mariana, and to the last steps of the case. The first meeting between the kidnapper, Miguel Angel Fuci, and Ester, are detailed. In this meeting Ester learns what happened to her daughter. Miguel Angel justifies that as María Emilia was getting into a plane, she turned around and asked him to take Mariana because she knew this was the end of her life. The disappearance of kidnapped ones took many forms. One was placing prisoners in planes, and as the planes were taking off the doctor aboard gave the prisoners a second dose of a strong sedative to have them fall sleep. Once in the air, the prisoners were thrown alive into the Atlantic Ocean.27 Years later, when this was learned, terms such as “helddesaparecido” or “forced disappearance” were coined; this meant that a person could walk down the street, be kidnapped by the very forces of the military in a country or a neighboring country and disappear forever from the face of the earth. The bodies eventually washed up on shore. This is how people learned about what had happened to their loved ones. Mariana Zaffaroni, renamed Daniela Romina Furci, was twenty-three years old when she met her maternal grandmother, Ester, for the first time. Even though Mariana was not interested in learning about her biological family and didn’t want to give up her relationship with the family of her 26 Por esos ojos. Guillermo Ravaschino (Director). Francia-Uruguay, 1997. Film. Retrieved from: [1-7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOOpTFkev6s&list=PL1A1BE6F26DB52E64 27 Horacio Verbitsky, El vuelo, 1995. Retrieved from http://www.elortiba.org/elvuelo.html

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abductors, Ester didn’t give up. She continued to march with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo28 (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo) to commemorate their sons and daughters and demand their whereabouts. The film29 is a model case because it details the brutality of the coup and covers the fate suffered by more than three-hundred children. Mariana became the “eyes” of all the children who had disappeared. The grandmother works tirelessly along with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo to allow the truth about what happened to emerge, demanding to know the whereabouts of the children. Ester is able to find Mariana, but the encounter is not easy. It is only much later that thirty-six years old Mariana begins to accept the truth, begins to “recover the memory” of what happened to her parents and engages in sharing her life with her biological family. Ester passed away in 2010 but Mariana was there for her last birthday celebration in a retirement home among many of her dear friends.

Nos sobra una ley (2011) The third documentary, Nos sobra una ley (We Have an Unnecessary Law)30 provides testimonials of the group Iguales y Punto (We are all equal [before the law] period). As activists and artists, they used their own artistic ways (i.e., plays, songs, ballet, concerts, commercials) to demonstrate the impact of not repealing the Ley de Caducidad in 2009. The documentary not only explores the disappointment of not gathering enough yes votes to overturn the law, but also how voting ‘no’ affects society in general, and the people and families of the disappeared and tortured in particular. In the documentary they show a new version of a well-known song, “A redoblar”, which was created in 1979 by Mauricio Ubal and Rubén Olivera as a coded message of hope about the end of the dictatorship. The song became a symbol of resistance to oppression. The new version, “A contra reloj” (Against the clock), is sung by public figures of all ages in an attempt to inform the public about the need to eliminate the statute of limitations on prosecutions. 28

Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo is a non-governmental organization whose purpose is to find and return all of the children who were kidnapped and illegally adopted during the Argentine Dirty War to their legitimate families and create the conditions so this violation of the rights of the children never happens again. The organization also demands the punishment of all responsible for this injustice. 29 Por esos ojos. Guillermo Ravaschino (Director). Francia-Uruguay, 1997. 30 Nos sobra una ley. Daiana Di Candia and Denisse Legrand (Directors). Montevideo: Casa Bertolt Brecht, 2011. Film. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/23668596.

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The documentary could be interpreted as their understanding of how lack of public debate and inadequate cultural productions have created a sort of generational gap regarding what happened. The protagonists believe that using cultural media, which appeals to the younger generation, can help others understand how past memories can impact the making of the present.

Romper el muro de la impunidad (2013) The last documentary, Romper el muro de la impunidad (Breaking down the Wall of Impunity),31 produced by N-Map and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), advocates for the reopening of cases related to the dictatorship. One of the cases addressed is Gelman vs. Uruguay. Although this case follows the pattern of other cases, the outcome represented a turning point in how Uruguay treated the horrors perpetrated during the dictatorship. In Buenos Aires, in August 1976, armed men kidnapped María Claudia García Iruretagoyena, the daughterin-law of the well-known Argentinean poet Juan Gelman.32 María Claudia was seven months pregnant when she was taken to Montevideo on a clandestine flight where she gave birth under clandestine captivity. Her remains have not been found. The baby, María Macarena, was left in the doorway of the house of a member of the Uruguayan police forces who adopted the child and gave her a new identity. It took Macarena 20 years to learn her true identity.33 It was not until 2011, after five years of litigation by CEJIL, that the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (ICHR) released its judgment finding the state of Uruguay responsible for the gross violation of human rights on behalf of María Claudia, Juan Gelman and Macarena. The Court pointed out—among other things—that the obligation to protect María Claudia’s life had been violated, Macarena’s identity and nationality had been suppressed, as well as causing the suffering of Juan Gelman, his family, and the relatives of María Claudia 31 Breaking the wall of impunity in Uruguay. N-Map & CEJIL, 2013. Film. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/60881593. 32 Juan Gelman (1930-2014) published more than twenty books of poetry. In 1997 he received the Argentine National Poetry Prize, and in 2007 the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award in Spanish literature. He also had a brilliant career as a journalist. After the 1976 Argentine coup he was forced into exile. During this time he lived in Europe until 1988, then in the U.S. and later in Mexico where he resided until his death. 33 Macarena discovered her identity on March 31st, 2000. She was twenty-three years old.

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due to the lack of investigation of the facts, and the prosecution and punishment of those responsible. The ICHR message to Uruguay— specifically to its judiciary—was that these crimes are crimes against humanity. They are crimes under International Law and International Law must be applied.34 This ruling opened a path for seeking truth, memory, and justice; it also validated the ability of the people to acknowledge that things had happened and should no longer be avoided. It had been a little more than thirty years since the restoration of democracy. The first four administrations imposed a model of forgetting and impunity of the past that did not work (Ley de Caducidad). Even though Uruguayans mobilized with two votes in an attempt to abolish the impunity law, in both cases the law was voted down, thus perpetuating the atmosphere of silence and distrust. The ruling by the ICHR obligated the government to continue investigating and excavating in the search for María Gelman’s remains, and it overrode the main obstacle that had prevented cases from reaching the judiciary—the controversial Ley de Caducidad. Hopefully these documentaries will enable Uruguay and its young generations to collectively face the pain, suffering and deaths inflicted on the entire society. The documentaries should be used as a way to reconstruct the past, to begin a process of mourning and perhaps of assessment, specifically for the young generations, in an effort to realize how decisions can impact societies. They can also encourage them to fight for memories that have been prohibited, for the most secret truth, and for the constant observance of human rights as an open path that can be walked by all people.35

Works Cited A Las Cinco En Punto. Charlo, José Pedro, and Universindo Rodríguez Díaz. (Directors). Uruguay: Memoria y Sociedad, 2004. Film. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2rwZjFZJzw Ansín, Jimena and Gisela Bálsamo. “Con las maestras de 6 año. Nacimiento de la opinión Propia.” No te olvides. Revista de la 34 Uruguay ratified all the regional human rights treaties and accepted the Inter American Human Rights Court jurisdiction, so Uruguay is bound to comply with it and with the principles of international law. 35 Ariela Peralta, “El caso Gelman y los desafios a la ley de Caducidad,” in Luchas contra la impunidad. Uruguay 1985-2011, ed. Gabriela Fried and Francesca Lessa (Montevideo: Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 2011), 203-216.

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Asociación de amigas y amigos del museo de la memoria, (1) 2010, 35-38. Breaking the wall of impunity in Uruguay. N-Map & CEJIL, 2013. Film. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/60881593 H.I.J.O.S. Uruguay (1/2). Lucas Silva and Victor Burgos Barreiro. (Directors). 2006. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSrjAr6_5WY Hudson, Rex A., Sandra W. Meditz. Uruguay: A Country Study. Washington D.C.: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1990. Retrieved from http://www.countrystudies.us/uruguay/ Lessa, Francesca. Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against Impunity. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. —. The Memory of State and Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Nos sobra una ley. Daiana Di Candia and Denisse Legrand. (Directors). Montevideo: Casa Bertolt Brecht, 2011. Film. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/23668596 Peralta, Ariela. “El caso Gelman y los desafios a la ley de Caducidad.” In Luchas contra la impunidad. Uruguay 1985-2011. Edited by Gabriela Fried and Francesca Lessa. Montevideo: Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 2011, 203-216. Por esos ojos. Guillermo Ravaschino. (Director). Francia-Uruguay, 1997. Film. Retrieved from: [1-7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOOpTFkev6s&list=PL1A1BE6 F26DB52E64 [2-7]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwNFAPhtnng&index=2&list =PL1A1BE6F26DB52E64 [3-7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM66iJhIbHo [4-7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTyiEG8YG78 [5-7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNUbieqFK0I [6-7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFq1XlEldTs [7-7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsrYidOeqTc Rico, Álvaro. “Sobre la autoritarismo y el golpe de estado. La dictadura y el dictator.” In La dictadura cívico militar: Uruguay, 1973-1985. Edited by Carlos Demasi et. al. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios Uruguayos, 2009. Ros, Ana. The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Collective Memory and Culture Production. New York: Palgrave, McMillan, 2012.

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Salaberry, Mariela. “Entre dictaduras y democracias.” No te olvides. Revista de la Asociación de amigas y amigos del museo de la memoria, 1 (2010): 20-21. Verbitsky, Horacio. (1995). El vuelo. Retrieved from http://www.elortiba.org/ elvuelo.html

PART V CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF TOTALITARIAN REPRESENTATION

CHAPTER FIFTEEN TOTALITY AND DESTRUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN CULTURE: PLAYING ON FASCISM IN THE TOTAL ART OF SERDAR SOMUNCU ARINA ROTARU

Fascism, Minorities and the Performative In recent years German studies scholars have produced literary analyses examining the role of minorities in conjunction with ethnicity and performance that intersect with studies of fascism and performance. Work on minorities that highlights such techniques as mimicry, employed in self-mocking performances to reclaim rights and dispel misidentifications, that extol ethnicity for the benefit of cultural nationalism, emerged in the 1990s as adjuncts of cultural or performance studies.1 Analyses that treat the spectacle of fascism as a variation of the total work of art, whose quintessential merging of genres it appropriates, date to the early twentieth

1

Studies that analyze mimicry not as subversive but rather as a failed technique of Europeanization in present-day Turkey belong in the same category. Mimicry in this case is not a matter of the relation between the colonizer and the colonized, as in Homi Bhabha’s analysis of British colonialism in India, but rather a matter of perception by a third degree of assimilation of the subject, in this case, Turks subject to the process of Europeanization. Kader Konuk notes the usage of terminological analogues of the word “mime” as both an anti-Semitic trope during National Socialism and later as a symbol of failed Turkish Europeanization. Kader Konuk, “Germans and Jews in Turkey. Ethnic Anxiety and Mimicry in the Making of the European Turk,” in Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World, ed. Roland Hsu (Stanford: Stanford California Press, 2010).

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century, with Walter Benjamin among the leading theorists.2 Although earlier connections between the spectacle of the total work of art and politics had been made,3 the historical positioning of fascism with respect to minorities, including emergent minorities in post-war Germany, along with their treatment in visual and theatrical culture, has been explored to a lesser extent.4 The postwar reluctance to address the extermination of the Jews notwithstanding, the Holocaust has been the subject of numerous dramatic or polemical film productions, in both Germany and abroad, since the end of World War II.5 In Dani Levy’s My Führer - The Really Truest Truth 2

The total work is a concept coined in the mid-nineteenth century by Karl Trahdorff to indicate how arts “flow together into one presentation.” See Karl F. E. Trahndorff, Ästhetik oder Lehre von der Weltanschauunung und Kunst (Berlin: In der Mauerschen Buchhandlung, 1827), 312. In the nineteenth century, the notion of the total work of art was echoed in theories on the relation between art and life, while in the twentieth century discussions around the total work of art have focused on the discourse of power in fascist aesthetics, or, in the later twentieth century, on intermediality as total art. 3 Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age if Its Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings, Walter Benjamin, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Volume 3 (Cambridge: The Bellknap Press, 2002). Historians such as George Mosse have linked the “aesthetics of politics” to the French Revolution. See George Mosse, “Fascism and the French Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989): 5-16. See also David Roberts, “The Will to Power as Art: The Third Reich,” in The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 232-254. 4 Konuk’s study analyzes the opposite phenomenon, the reception of German Jewish minorities in Turkey during National Socialism and the way fascism and anti-Semitism were reflected in Turkish politics and culture during World War II. 5 In Germany, for example, one of the first movies to come to grips with the Holocaust was Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers are Among Us (1946). In the US, the TV series Holocaust (1978) addressed that topic for the first time. Israeli cinema hasn’t touched the Holocaust, with three exceptions. See, for instance, Nathan Gros’ HaMartef (The Cellar, 1963), Tzipi Trope’s Tel Aviv-Berlin (1986) and Me’Ever Layam (Beyond the Sea). While stories that display Jews and Nazis as victims and perpetrators constitute the majority of these films, the visual representation of other minorities persecuted during the Holocaust is rare. The fate of Afro-Germans during fascism has been the subject of theatrical plays such as Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 (2014), but of no films so far. Michelle Kelso’s documentary Hidden Sorrows: The Persecution of Romanian Gypsies during World War II (2006) addresses the fate of Romas during Porajmos (the Roma genocide during the Holocaust), yet such testimonials are rare.

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about Adolf Hitler (2007), however, relations between Germans and Jews take on farcical features.6 This approach recalls filmic narratives of the Holocaust which have been cast in a darkly humorous key in such French or Italian productions as Train de Vie (Radu Mihaileanu) (1998) or La Vita è Bella (Roberto Benigni) (1997). Mein Führer features “a fable that isn’t dependent on fact,” yet is “perhaps closer to the truth,” as the director states in the production credits.7 In a Third Reich on the brink of falling into decadence, Adolf Hitler takes speech lessons from the Jewish actor Adolf Grünbaum and learns to embrace his psychosis and childhood traumas to the extent that he becomes entirely dependent on his Jewish alter ego. The final speech of a Führer who is unable to muster confidence and deliver his hatred-infused tirades is ventriloquized and rendered innocuous by Grünbaum, who is hidden under the stage. In the end the film offers a glimpse of the imagined destruction of the Reich by fire, with the Führer and his coach dying in an explosion set off by Grünbaum. Unlike its predecessors in Holocaust satire, Mein Führer does not focus on the alternate universes of the victims, but analyzes the mimetic relation between Hitler and his vocal coach as well as the foibles of the National Socialist machinery.8 The director’s manifest intention was “not to give the cynical and emotionally devastated people the honor of a realistic image.”9 This statement posits anti-realism as a critical fictional mode among its central premises, while possibly undermining the status of satire as a genre for making political statements. Building on difficulties in navigating 6 Farce is also the key in which George Tabori’s play Mein Kampf is written. The play thematizes the question raised by other works I discuss as well, that is, “is one allowed to laugh?” cf. Steven Lipman, “Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor during the Holocaust,” in Embodied Memory: The Theater of George Tabori (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 261. The characters in Tabori’s Mein Kampf represent a symbiosis of good and evil. Tabori’s purpose is to address the “Hitler in himself” (253). In the fable, Hitler is rescued by Shlomo. Hitler is an egocentric, self-pitying braggart (251), whereas the Jew is the one who “prepares him for his political role.” Anat Feinberg gives some examples of Hitler caricatures from various time frames such as the Great Dictator (1940) or the play by Arnold Brenfeld, Little Hitler or the Conjunctive of the Pluperfect (Stuttgart, 1994). 7 Dani Levy (Director), Mein Führer-Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler. DVD, 2007. 8 With regard to alternate universes, the book Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson offers an instance of identification of a child victim with Hitler. The novelty of the approach consists in the darkly humorous tone of the book. See Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). 9 Ibid. Director’s statement.

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suitable genres for representing the Holocaust by Jewish minorities, I seek to broaden the question about generic tools for navigating representations of fascism through non-Jewish German minorities who were repressed during the Holocaust.10 The historical remembrance of fascism, particularly in Germany, remains elusive, having yet to situate non-Jewish German minorities in relation to the German National Socialist past.11 When they exist, alliances against Jews and non-Jewish minorities seem to occur across a via negativa, as anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism. Furthermore, the connection between the German fascist past and contemporary German minorities is articulated in an anachronistic mode that relies on the belief that minorities do not belong in or do not have access to the same historical frame as other Germans.12 Despite these barriers to a historical-realist mode of 10

The recent film Heil (2015) by Dietrich Brüggemann seems to tackle the issue of other Nazi victims among minorities, as it focuses on the revamping of Hitler’s politics by Neo-Nazi groups in contemporary Germany. The victim this time is an Afro-German author, who becomes a victim of Neo-Nazi rage, loses his memory and begins mimicking Neo-Nazi behavior. By having the Afro-German character ventriloquize Nazi behavior, the film seems to be offering the moral lesson that nobody is safe from the process of indoctrination, and ultimately suggests that the victim is to blame. 11 One exception is the critical amalgam called Islamo-fascism. Contemporary projections of fascism, especially in Europe, highlight its association with Islam on the ground of anti-Jewish sentiment, militantism, and blind faith in hegemonic leaders. Hitchens sees another point of comparison in the fact that both movements suffer from “suicidal tactics,” which will lead ultimately to their own destruction. Christopher Hitchens, “Defending Islamofascism,” in Slate, 22 October, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2007/10/defendin g_islamofascism.html. (Accessed on July 4, 2014). This alignment of fascism with Islam, which uncritically identifies a form of ideology with a contested religion, indicates that a past historical moment is not remembered in order to be expiated but is rather amalgamated with a controversial religion, to which many minorities in contemporary Europe belong. 12 I am expanding here on Zafer ùenocak’s thesis in Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on German Politics and Culture (1990–1998), trans. and ed. Leslie A. Adelson (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). ùenocak describes the separability of the Turkish and German pasts in terms of space, as a door unlocked, which preserves the essential foreignness. He compares this unlocked door with the Jewish experience “passed onto us” (55). See also Leslie Adelson for an analysis of the exclusion of German Turks from the “interpretive landscape” of the Third Reich and the Holocaust as well as of postwar history. Leslie Adelson, “Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity. Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the 1990s,” New German Critique 80

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representation, fascism receives a singular interpretation in the work of the Turkish-born German artist Serdar Somuncu. On the one hand, Somuncu intervenes in the issue of German fascism as an infamous and intangible property of German history. On the other hand, he implicitly unravels matter-of-fact associations between Islam and fascism, which are present in constructions such as “Islamo-fascism.” Somuncu’s satirical magnifying glass introduces another kind of realism. His approach relies on channeling or simulating fascist rhetoric in everyday speech. During the early postwar period, fascist rhetoric was officially expurgated from daily speech, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was banned from the German book market.13 Somuncu’s performance of fascist manifestos such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf or Goebbels’s Sportpalastrede, which I discuss in greater detail below, actuate a gesture that only poetry or visual media such as films or cartoons have attempted in the German-speaking context.14 Only very recently, Timus Vermes reconsidered fiction’s role vis-à-vis fascism by casting Hitler as a twenty-first-century contemporary in his satirical narrative Look Who’s Back (2014) (Er ist wieder da, 2012). In that narrative, which became a bestseller in Germany and the United States, Hitler suffers from historical amnesia and considers the Turks his allies. Although visual arts and fiction had been appropriated as instruments of propaganda by the Third Reich, contemporary German literature makes use of the poetic and performative genre in particular in order to touch on the taboos of National Socialist speech. I offer a brief snapshot of possible explanations of the presence and re-creation of fascist rhetoric in contemporary Germanspeaking poetry and then analyze the use of fascism and its implications for popular culture in performances by Serdar Somuncu. By inserting fascist rhetoric in poetic verse, contemporary German author Thomas Kling uncovers the function of poetry as an instrument of (2000): 93-124, 94, 95. In her introduction to Atlas of a Tropical Germany, Adelson raises the question about the relation Turks enter into with the German past when they enter German territory. “Coordinates of Orientation,” xii. See also Ulrich Baer, http://inter-disciplinary.net/ati/diversity/diasporas/d1/Baerpaper.pdf (retrieved on June 26, 2014). Baer analyzes relations between Turks, Jews and Arabs in film culture. 13 In his Auf Lesereise mit Adolf, Somuncu mentions that the publishing rights for Mein Kampf, which now belong to the Bavarian Landgovernment, will expire in 2015, on a date after which anybody can publish Mein Kampf. Serdar Somuncu, Auf Lesereise mit Adolf (Köln: WortArt, 2009), 350. 14 In his notes documenting his performances, Somuncu mentions the Hitlerinspired cartoon “Das kleine Arschloch” by Walter Moers, which was set to music and thus propelled up the charts. Serdar Somuncu, Auf Lesereise mit Adolf (Köln: WortArt, 2009), 87.

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propaganda during the era of National Socialism. His poem mann aus reit (rheinland) (The Man from the Rhine) includes, next to an alleged quotation from one of Joseph Goebbels’s speeches, detailed descriptions of gestures in space that exhibit the National Socialist propaganda apparatus. The poem is divided into two units, numbered 1 and 2, which are separated visually by a spatial gap. Part 1 is introduced by the image of Goebbels’s index finger, while part 2 contains only the minimal word “dentures” [gebisse]. In the first part of the poem, performative cues convey a sense of how the seduction of gesture contributes to manipulating the audience. The poem provides a description of the scene of Goebbels’s speech through the tactile verb “greifen”, meaning “to touch”, but also “to take possession of something”, as in “Greifhand”, (grasping hand) and “Nachtergreifung”, (possession during the night). Thus, semantically and performatively, the poem conveys a sense of key components of fascist rhetoric. Performative cues connect Goebbels’s grasping hand, bent at the wrist and spectacularly agitated in front of the public, with “his Ausschwitz grace”. The sublimation of horror through aesthetics, especially through performance, reminds one of Benjamin’s description of fascist aesthetics as containment of politics by aesthetics:15 hand jolted from the handwrist, turned to the public/the back of the hand GRASPING HAND POSSESSION BY NIGHT, / HIS AUSSCHWITZ GRACE: A PROPAGANDA- / INSTRUMENT / Goebbelz’ high and low swishing fingers . . . wire, gas and / The image of Goebbelz’ fingers moving in metronome rhythm is followed by an ellipsis and the words “wire, gas…”16

Goebbels’s name itself is capitalized, unlike in the beginning of the poem, while the rest consists of images of scattered objects. The coordinating conjunction “and,” positioned after “wire, gas,” leads into a spatial ellipsis. At the other end of the visual gap, the word “dentures” concludes the void with a synecdoche of a special kind. While the principle of synecdoche applies to a pattern in which the part stands for the “whole,” the part stands here for a whole that does not claim a conclusion but an end, the whole of death. The numerical order thus enacts a sinister 15

In “The Work of Art” Benjamin famously writes: “The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life,” Selected Writings, 121. 16 “aus dem handgelenk ge- / schüttelte hand, dem publikum gewiesener / handrückn GREIFHAND NACHTERGREIFUNG, / SEINE AUSSCHWITZGRAZIE: EIN PROPAGANDA-/ INSTRUMENT / GOEBBELZ hoch-und nieder/ sausende finger . . . draht, gas und . . .” In Thomas Kling, Gesammelte Gedichte, ed. Marcel Beyer and Christian Döring (Köln: DuMont, 2006), 317.

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sequence as it unfolds in time, and abruptly bridges the motion of an index in the beginning of the poem with the human remains at the end. The poem is performative throughout, as it describes hand gestures directed at an audience in detail. Furthermore, the phonetically transcribed name “goebbelz” points to a live and sonorous enactment: 1 goebbelz’ index finger (“. . . your naughty Jewish jaw / will be stuffed”) his lower arm hang/ing relaxed afterwards (…).”17 A poematic style that is highly conscious of its motions, as expressed by the syntagm “turned to the public / the back of the hand” (“dem publikum gewiesener, / handrueckn”) represents fascism’s effects as direct correlations between choreographed movements in space and their deadly results. The issue of guilt and historical remembrance in contemporary Germany is featured here across a medium that is rarely considered in terms of its political impact, poetry. In this case, poetry re-envisions the performance of fascism and its effects on an audience. Yet, the question arises how such a performance of fascism in poetry might relate to Germany’s contemporary multi-ethnic public. I raise this particular question since, as I have mentioned, the issue of differential historical remembrance had been deployed in configuring Germany’s multi-ethnic audience by excluding it from a co-extensive past. The actor and performer Serdar Somuncu has become (in)famous for thematizing precisely this, a Turkish German’s engagement with fascism in performance. Unlike Kling, whose audience is undefined, Somuncu’s work contains reflections on his audience’s peculiar experience of Germany’s past and its exposure to forms of fascism that are encrypted in daily structures. Thus, Hitler Kebab, a work released on CD in 2006, explains for the public the emergence of the artist Somuncu as a performer of fascist rhetoric. The title of the CD alludes to an unsuspecting mixture between a kebab, the meat dish which serves as a synecdoche for Turkish culture, and a name with taboo value, Hitler. The performer-self entitles himself “the recipient of the Edmund Stoibel seal for assimilated Kanaken,” a sarcastic allusion to the Bavarian politician’s anti-immigrant policies.18 The stories performed on CD range from personal anecdotes to debates over

17

“1 goebbelz zeigefinger (. . . wird/ihnen das freche judenmaul gestopft / werdn’), sein danach cool auspen- / delnder unterarm; (…)”. In Kling, Gesammelte Gedichte, 317. 18 Serdar Somuncu, Alexia Agathos, Hitler Kebab: live aufgenommen im Mai 2005 in Köln (Hitler Kebab: recorded live in May 2005 in Cologne), (Köln: Sony, BMG Music Entertainment, 2006).

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the idea of a hegemonic German culture, the so-called Leitkultur.19 One of the anecdotes recounts Somuncu’s decision to play Hitler, which led to a media uproar. The story is staged as a dialogue with a voice that advises Somuncu’s performing persona, in response to his laments about being typecast in the role of the illiterate Turk, to play something really German. Somuncu’s stage persona answers in the form of a nervous, hysterical jitter. This reaction emblematizes generic responses to Hitler’s presence, which negate the possibility of his return and denounce it as unthinkable (“wiederkehrend unglaubwürdig”). The words chosen to describe this negated event accentuate, however, the fact that the notion of impossibility is attached to the event retroactively and deliberately, that is, after the act of return has already taken place. Hitler spielen (To Play Hitler) functions to tease the public into analyzing its rapport with this anticipated event. To play Hitler consists in a collection of onomatopoeic effects, interjections and other inarticulate reactions that reproduce potential public responses to Hitler’s possible incarnation; as Somuncu’s persona notes, this incredulous public reaction takes place despite the success enjoyed by Hitler’s virtual incarnations, documented by highly successful films about Hitler’s last days such as The Downfall (Der Untergang) (2004). In order to answer the question about this possible double-standard in public responses to Hitler in greater depth, Somuncu entitles his next recording on the CD Being Hitler (Hitler sein). The stakes of this sequence are higher: since Hitler, according to Somuncu’s persona, is reflected in the public consciousness as an impossibility, the player insists on raising the question about what it would mean “to be” such a non-presence, the mere allusion to which creates nervous physical reactions. The goal of the sequence Being Hitler is to confront the public straightforwardly with the articulation of a name that has been erased from public consciousness. The performer proceeds to pronounce the name on random occasions, to the horror of his imaginary audience. Resurrecting Hitler’s phantasm by calling it out in a series of inconspicuous circumstances first creates chaos and then leads to a certain rhythmicalness of anticipated reactions, which the performer calls a “rhythmic occasion” (eine rhythmische Angelegenheit). By simulating how the public succumbs to the temptation to identify with Hitler, the performer offers a hypothetical exercise that lays out the effect 19

As Bower notes, the term was coined by Bassam Tibi to refer to a “consensus of shared values by the different communities in Europe,” and later adapted by CDU politician Friedrich Merz to reflect the particular German cultural touch. Katrin Bower, “Turkish German Comedy as Transnational Intervention,” Transit 1 (2011): 12. However, the term also carries the farther-reaching undertones of the German nation as culturally homogeneous, represented by the concept of Kulturnation.

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of totalitarian ideology. Being Hitler simulates a mental and performative game that relies on the concession of a moment of intimacy with a repelled and unnamable object, rendered uncanny by the contemporary rise of neofascism. At the time the CD was released, Somuncu’s incarnation of Hitler was motivated primarily by the statements of politicians and media personalities about the non- existence of Nazis. Playing on subliminal dimensions of the German public’s presumed lingering attachment to fascism, Somuncu excavates negated affinities with a proscribed object of desire, still located at the fringes of the German psyche.20 In the sketch On the Plane (Im Flugzeug), Somuncu’s persona alludes to quotidian fascist fantasies by performing an experiment which consists in his impersonation of a Taliban warrior. Wearing a menacing bomb, and playing with his hands as if to reach for a weapon, the spurious Taliban juggles with the pre-emptive fears of the passengers on an airplane. The point of the experiment consists in his screaming “Hitler,” an act received by the passengers aboard with paradoxical relief. The morale of this transfigurative act is that Hitler seems to be a more palatable reality in the Western context than a member of the Taliban. By capitalizing on public paranoia over the popularized Islamic threat, Somuncu uncovers a deep-seated complacency with fascism, which claims the radical noncomparability of Islam and fascism in the public imaginary. The scream for Hitler expurgates the Islamic other from fascism and lays bare a society dominated by fascist fantasies: “he screams Hitler! and all think ‘thank God’!”21 Hitler Kebab alludes to the toxic mix of Islamo-fascism, a construct that disposes of the hatred for the Muslim other in the dumpster of repressed fascist realities. Hitler Kebab unites two types of projections: across the association of Kebab with Kebbabeln, a form of dialectal speech, one projection frames the outsider Turk as a talking insider; this presumption of an intimate inclusion is estranged, however, by the direct mode in which the Turk becomes privy to Hitler.22 In his performance as 20

The best theory to analyze this buried love is the one launched by psychoanalysts Margarete and Alexander Mitscherlich. According to their famous thesis on “the impossibility to mourn,” the love for the Führer became the object of narcissistic love, which was externalized and then conveniently discarded once Hitler’s name was ostracized. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Mit einem Nachwort der Autoren zur unveränderten Neuausgabe (Zürich: Piper, 1991), 77. 21 “Im Flugzeug,” in Serdar Somuncu, Hitler Kebab. 22 Kathrin Bower cites Helga Kotthoff, who analyzes the show Kebabbel net by Turkish German artist Bülent Ceylan, who combines the word “Kebab” with the Mannheimer dialect term “babbeln,” meaning to talk, but also reminiscent of the

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Hitler, Somuncu ventures into multiple taboo territories: first, he commodifies Hitler’s name and associates it with an object of mass consumption usually identified with Turkish ethnics; second, he approaches his role from the perspective of a Turk who disentangles himself from an Islamo-fascist present and seeks an alternative intervention in German history. If Hitler Kebab outlines the rationale for playing Hitler, Auf Lesereise mit Adolf (On A Reading Tour with Adolf) reconstructs the process of staging a forbidden cult object, Mein Kampf, and performing it in front of European audiences wherever traces of National Socialism remain.23 For his recitals, Somuncu chose provocative locations such as pilgrimage sites for National Socialists across Europe. While Somuncu’s took his idea for recitals of readings from Mein Kampf by the Austrian actor Helmut Qualtinger, the idea of performing Hitler relied strongly on the performer’s impersonation of Arturo Ui in Bertolt Brecht’s drama Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui), dedicated to the rise of the fictive dictator Arturo Ui, who was modeled on Hitler. By contrast to his predecessor, Somuncu inserts details about his own experiences as a Turk living in Germany within the text. Auf Lesereise is in the first place an analysis of reactions by members of the audience, and their repressed or unexplored feelings towards the National Socialist past. The performer is keenly aware of the difference between his audience in the former GDR and an audience in the former FRG. In the GDR, the book Mein Kampf could not be owned and the National Socialist past was considered buried after the victory of communism. In West Germany, the past was confronted by means of the official doctrine of Vergangengeitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). Mein Kampf could be owned but not commercialized. The public in the former GDR, which, at the time of the performance, had already been the site of murderous racist incidents, is more numerous.24 In his notes on the performances, Somuncu claims to have treaded on new territory, by claiming a common past shared by former West and East Germans. Yet beyond this commonality of German–German histories, he other meaning of “babbeln,” to babble. See Kathrin Bower, “Made in Germany: Integration as Inside Joke in the Ethno-Comedy of Kaya Yanar and Bülent Ceylan,” German Studies Review, 37: 2 (May 2014): 373. This infantilization of the Turk does not necessarily reflect on a talking Turk who “simultaneously reflects his insider and outsider status,” (Ibid.) but indicates, in my view, rather an outsider who is bound to insiderness via the constructed Kebab connection. 23 Serdar Somuncu, Auf Lesereise mit Adolf, 41. 24 Ibid.,134.

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also explores a mode of sharing the present by accessing a common past. From a discourse about unification and a common German National Socialist past, Somuncu moves on to use the term “joint present,” which includes his own persona: “For the first time, I realize that GDR and FRG retirees have a common past (and, consequently, also their children and nephews). Handling this history is also the entrance into a new joint present.”25 The issue of the joint present touches on two problematic issues: one is the exclusion of the Turks from the memorialization of the National Socialist past, the other is related to the transformation of the Nazi past into a “negative sacred space” (ùenocak) in which the question of guilt is treated in a “ritualistic” and extraneous way.26 Through his performances, anecdotes, and question-and-answer sessions with a diverse public in both the former East Germany and the former West Germany, Somuncu draws them into jointly working through the past.

An Experiment in Genre I now consider how Somuncu’s performance, besides foregrounding the experience of a Turk venturing into taboo National Socialist history, proposes an experiment in genre which encapsulates the popular appeal of the fascist manifesto while echoing its stylistic fallacies and exposing them to ridicule. Such moments include circular definitions of superior peoples, such as “schöpferisch tätige Völker” (“peoples that are actively creative”) because they “are endowed with creativity” (“schöpferisch veranlagt”) (66). In recitation, Somuncu regurgitates the text, while he frames the whole with historical anecdotes. Before numerous audiences and to great popular appeal, Somuncu’s high-pitched voice reproduces the Führer’s outbursts. By playing Hitler, Somuncu elevates the taboo cast over the book as a forbidden object and restores it to its spoken-word aliveness through a reenactment that challenges the public to consider the actuality of the book 25 “Zum ersten Mal wird mir richtig bewusst, dass DDR-und BRD Rentner eine gemeinsame Vergangenheit haben. (Zwangsläufig auch ihre Kinder und Enkel.) Der Umgang mit dieser Geschichte ist gleichzeitig auch der Einstieg in eine neue gemeinsame Gegenwart.)” Ibid., 134. 26 Zafer ùenocak, “Die Zukunft der deutschen Vergangenheit”, in Das land hinter den buchstaben: Deutschland und Islam im Umbruch (München: Babel Verlag, 2006). In proposing a form of historical writing that transforms the ritualized space of the German past into a multilingual space, Turkish German writer Zafer ùenocak acknowledges the necessity to reform not only history but also the vision of who has access through which means to the German past.

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beyond its material prohibition. While he performs this act, he has his audience engage with the unfinished character of a work and reconstruct it before it becomes the totality of fascism. Somuncu’s embodiment of fascism reproduces the potential of fascist power as material culture. In Somuncu’s vision, the recognizability of such a culture as evil does not preclude the audience’s interacting both with the past encrypted in the performance and with pre-conceived notions of belonging. As Jeffrey Alexander suggests, “one-sidedly cultural and pragmatic theories޵ share with each other the fact that “each eliminates the contingent relationship between performative projection and audience reception.”27 Somuncu’s performance is certainly more likely to be understood through lenses that take in the contingent dimension of the relation between audience and act, as he prompts the audience to engage with the very nature of the performative, which is, as Judith Butler suggests, the exercise of articulation that brings an open-ended reality into existence.28 The testing ground for Somuncu is the Nazi past, which he offers for reflection in its almost unreal open-endedness to a multi-ethnic audience as an exercise of the imagination. As Judith Butler explains in her definition of the performative, this act represents “an exertion of freedom outside of teleology (and eschatology).”29 Thus Somuncu offers this historical exercise to the public as a form which is not an anti-realist fable but rather a rigorous exploration of one’s freedom, beyond a closed teleology, so as to reflect on the past as a member of a novel community which includes emergent minorities. Such provocation to reflection interrupts binaries that have played out exclusively between German perpetrators and Jewish victims, and includes many more individuals in the process of judgment and reflection, from school children to immigrants or naturalized Germans. Somuncu also expands the notion of community in a historical sense, from the “Schicksalsgemeinschaft”, (“community of faith”), the German-owned notion of history, to an expanded ethnic collective memory.30 In Auf Lesereise Somuncu describes his approach to history and culture as a “cosmopolitan” one, as it pleads for a conceptual approach to the so-called “coming to terms 27

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Performance and Power (Malden MA: Polity Press, 2011), 74. 28 Ibid, 130. 29 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Malden MA: Polity Press, 2013), 130. 30 On the point of “Schicksalsgemeinschaft,” see ùenocak’s interview with Karin Yesilada, “May One Compare Turks and Jews, Mr. ùenocak?” in Atlas of a Tropical Germany, 53.

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with the past” (“Vergangenheitsbewältigung”) as a matter that concerns not only Germans but also other nations, and involves not just one temporal frame (the time of the [Nazi] perpetrators) but also other temporal dimensions.31 If one such dimension could correspond to a global past, such as the colonial past, other disastrous consequences of “mastering the past” as a “project of forgetting” concern contemporary parallelisms to contemporary neofascism.32 Somuncu’s experiment in genre includes a pantomimic engagement with old and contemporary fascism. He uses mimesis, which is one of the tools of ethno-comedy, not to imitate and hyperbolize ethnic subjects but rather to capture gesticulations devised by the Führer for the discountable others. As Adorno writes, in his performance the Führer acts out by proxy and in effigy what is denied to everyone else in reality.33 This mimetic zeal is replicated to perfection by Adolf Grünbaum in his capacity as Hitler’s speech coach. Somuncu’s performance as Hitler also occurs by proxy, as it points to the fact that the fascist cult it embodies and whose idiosyncracies it reproduces now feeds in part on alternative minor members.34 If, according to Adorno, the fascist machine needs the Jews and “their artificially heightened visibility”35 in order to function, Somuncu shows how Hitler’s discourse is perpetuated in a contemporary society infused with paranoia against Islam and against other visible minorities such as the Turks. Jews and Turks thus uncannily merge as necessary others who paradoxically nurture the discourse of fascism. By touching on the excluded others and positioning them in opposition to fascism, Somuncu does not attempt to reframe Islamo-fascism in a progressive European discourse of democracy, but rather exposes the deep perversity of the concept itself.36 Islamo-fascism as a form of totality provided a safe site

31

“Auf Lesereise mit Adolf,” 114. Somuncu thus opens up other fields of dialogue about the confluence of German history with global colonialism, for instance. 32 ùenocak interprets “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” as a project of forgetting rather than one of coming to terms with the past. Zafer ùenocak and Bülent Tulay, “Germany—Home for Turks?” in Atlas of a Tropical Germany, 8. 33 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 151. 34 I understand the “minor,” in the sense proposed by Étienne Balibar, as “those human individuals and groups who are subjected to the more or less “protective” authority of full citizens. Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, 151. 35 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 151. 36 This interpretation of Islamo-fascism as reframing is offered by Sieg. Katrin Sieg, “Black Virgins: Sexuality and Democratic Body in Europe,” New German

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for amalgamating two discourses of hatred, which united Muslims and Fascism along an anachronistic discourse of backwardness. Most importantly, Somuncu intervenes against the totality of German public memory as a national discourse composed of German perpetrators and Jewish victims, a totality which blocks the possibility of confluence between the German, Turkish and German Turkish pasts.37 Somuncu’s mode of intervention consists in the act of embodying fascist figures and revisiting the notion of the monolithic German discourse about public memory as national discourse. The Turkish German artist offers a public performance that re-articulates memory around multivalent coordinates, as a German Turkish author who reinvents German popular culture by drawing on the National Socialist appropriation of the total work of art in speech and performance. Some commentators ascribe Somuncu’s performative enactments to the cabaret genre. The German scholar Kathrin Bower situates Somuncu’s work within the tradition of cabaret artists such as Muhsin Omurcu and ùinasi Dikmen, members of the first Turkish German cabaret founded in 1985.38 Yet, unlike Omurcu or Dikmen, Somuncu does not rely on improvisations about the everyday in order to render the lives of Turkish Germans comical but rather offers an improvisation on the ominous contents of fascist history and its uncanny actuality for the everyday. Somuncu himself rejects the label of “Kabarettist” because many consign it to the status of a minor genre and associate it with minorities.39 Indeed, while the cabaret’s audience is a limited, intimate, one, Somuncu’s engaging of the audience reaches beyond the physical space of the cabaret and targets a mass audience, while he avails himself of some of the props of cabaret culture such as irony and sarcasm. In a more recent article, Bower herself discounts the deeper political impact of what she calls “ethno-cabaret.” In this analysis, Bower argues that cabaret articulates

Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 109 (2010): 147–185, here 152. 37 Regarding the seemingly unattainable precondition for the migration into German pasts of Turkish Germans, see Andreas Huyssen, “Diaspora and Migration: Migration into Other Pasts,” Contemporary German Literature 88 (2003): 147-164. 38 Bower, Transit, 5. 39 Cf. WAZ from 29.5.2012, cited in Helga Kotthoff, “Jede Minderheit hat ein Recht auf Diskriminierung. Sprachliche und soziale Verhältnisse in der transkulturellen Alltags-und Medienkomik,” in Komik in der Migrationsgesellschaft, Helga Kotthoff, Shpresa Jashari, Darja Klingenberg (München: Verlagsgesellschaft Konstanz, 2013), 99.

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“comic effects of masquerade” rather than an appeal to the intellect.40 Such an analysis de-emphasizes the political and social role of ethnic comedies and of comedy in general. Bower claims that the use of the technique of “ethnic drag” by ethnocabaretists, which is in essence a disjunction between body and role and functions as ethnic impersonation,41 is not a source of the subversive but is rather meant to emphasize a “shared humanity” (364) between performers and their public. However, such a syntagm seems to presuppose hierarchical structures in which humanity is approximated by virtue of comparison.42 Bower identifies this political incisiveness in Somuncu’s performances, which she contrasts with the ethno-comedic practices of Arab-Turkish comedian Kaya Yanar. Whereas Bower considers Yanar’s ethno-comedic variations to be pure exacerbations of clichés without real subversive potential, she regards Somuncu’s particular take on comedy as having a much more far-reaching potential, which she assesses as transnational intervention. One of the most important aspects of Bower’s reading, relying largely on Vertovec’s definition of transnationalism, is the realization that Somuncu’s Turkish German performances lead to “new modes of cultural production,” which are conducive to the reconceptualization of the model of the nation-state.43 Among the essential features of transnationalism, Vertovec considers “public transformation” a step towards “acceptance of heterogeneous populations”: this transformation as acceptance retains, in my view, a hierarchical comparative model. I propose a reading that situates this public transformation in relation to how the German public itself is transformed by its so-called others rather than exploring how this public changes its perception of others. Somuncu offers, in the tradition of ethnocomedians, exacerbated descriptions of German clichés. Yet he does not collect such clichés only from the everyday, but reaches deep into history 40

Kathrin Bower, “Made in Germany: Integration as Inside Joke in the EthnoComedy of Kaya Yanar and Bülent Ceylan,” German Studies Review 37.2 May 2014, 364. 41 Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 8. 42 The most conspicuous case of uneven comparison is the one between humanitas, roughly defined as the inquiring subject of the West, and anthropos, the nonWestern object of inquiry. See Nishitani Osamu, “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being’,” in Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, ed. Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). 43 See Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism, (London/New York: Routledge, 2009), 7, 84, quoted by Bower, “Turkish German Comedy”, 4.

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to retrieve historical materials of the German fascist past, which he revamps in performance. The clichés of ethno-comedy, which rely on an affirmation of ethnic binaries, are replaced in his intervention by historical re-enactments that confront the nation with the long-obliterated, repellent object of fascist desire. Through his persona (sometimes called Hassiah, the hate Messiah), Somuncu offers the public opportunities to critically review German fascist history with an eye on the present. The public is thus forced to revisit its National Socialist history by confronting, through the mouth of a German Turkish artist, both its historical amnesia and its exclusionary view of its history and culture. If Kling’s poem created the premise for a contemporary engagement with the German National Socialist past through performance, Somuncu’s gesture, by its very premise of a German Turkish author who lends his ear and body to the subdued and censored echoes of the German National Socialist past, offers a manifest site where the public re-evaluates its national coordinates and historical presuppositions about who has access to German history and who shapes national culture. Molded by this new approach to history, the satire turns from functioning as a magnification of existing relations and stereotypes circulating between Germans and Turks into a satirization of the public’s choice whether or not to enact the message contained in the manifestos of fascism by Goebbels and Hitler. Following the success he has enjoyed since 1996 with Auf Lesereise, Somuncu added Goebbels’s Sportpalastrede to his repertoire, and more recently Der Hassprediger liest Bild (2009). While in Sportpalastrede he reproduced, sometimes in indirect speech, the platitudes of Goebbels as a follower who seeks to get close to the myth of the leader by declaring emphatically “today we have Hitler weather,”44 Der Hassprediger conjures up the specter of a similar German nationalist in the present, one who comes from the past to intervene in the present. The “Hassprediger”, which translates as the “hatred Messiah,” is an assumed persona, one who simulates the messianic charm of a radical leader. As in his Mein Kampf performances, Somuncu here again relies on the act of reading which he stages into a performative act. By alluding to messianism, Somuncu relies on the substance of the performative as a promise to be enacted but also negated. For this interpretation of the performative as enactment and negation, I rely on a discussion that underlines the ultimate value of the performative as the promised redemption which fails to occur.45 The 44

Serdar Somuncu, “Sportpalastrede,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGkhS0wSj-k, uploaded on August 9, 2010. 45 This double promise of the performative is phrased by Athena Athanasiou in dialogue with Judith Butler. They rely on the negative model of Kafka’s parable

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messiah teases his audience with the promise of absolution through hatred. His tirades consist in conflicting statements: some outbursts create the impression of a protectionist stance towards foreigners, whose mastery of German is not paralleled by German politicians themselves: I love the german language / but clearly not THOse who / represent Germany / and request from foreigners / to be more GERman / than THEY themselves can be.46

Since this happens at the request of German politicians who do not avail themselves of grammatical rules, the statement seems to unveil a progressive voice, critical of political hypocrisy. Yet other statements seem to be explicitly against immigrants, denouncing their use of language as alienation of grammar “grammatik ist ein FREMDwort für viele.” The latter statement targets mainly “die armadas von HIPhoppern” (“armadas of hiphoppers”), who consist primarily of Turks posing as “substitute niggers.”47 This divided assessment of the fate of immigrants satirizes the double standards imposed by German politicians who assume on the one hand the role of linguistic purists and, on the other, the immigrant advocate’s split consciousness. Both stances reveal an alienation of discourse while purporting to rid both grammar and language of alienating effects. Language purism functions here as another version of ethnic purity exacted in the name of an unadulterated German present. Making the performative contingent on both a promise and a negation, Somuncu’s “messiah” aims at destabilizing the audience’s filters through linguistic roles as prescriptive instances. The voice that articulates a radical distaste in minorities’ creation of transnational relations (between Turks and African Americans or Afro-Germans) alienates the audience as it decentralizes the role of performance as an attribute of Germanness. The question remains: what breaks in as a promise, what is lost on the way in this discourse in tongues? Another sequence of Der Hassprediger liest Bild emphasizes the effects of performance as the expression of the

“Before the Law,” which is also analyzed by Jacques Derrida in an essay of the same name. 46 “ICH liebe die deutsche sprache / aber offensichtlich nicht DIEjenigen / die deutschland vertreten / und von ausländern verlangen / dass sie DEUTscher sind / als SIE es selbst nicht sein können.” An excerpt from this particular show session is transcribed in Helga Kotthoff, Shpresa Jashari Darja Klingenberg, Komik in der Migrationsgesellschaft, 101. 47 “Eh vorzugsweise TÜRken hm die sich für erSATZneger / halten”. Ibid.

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negative.48 Somuncu indexes his performance with a special pointer, “HINweis”, which claims that his role is for the most part not genuine. Thus Somuncu provokes his audience to take sides or simply reflect on his underlying meaning. He projects himself into the mind of his audience, anticipating their reactions of protest, disgust, vicarious identification or just simulated empathy: Yes. I play a role. I do not mean seriously what I say. Except sometimes. Sometimes I do not mean it AT ALL / yet you take it more seriously than I do / sometimes you also have a vicarious / bad conscience when I crack jokes about PEOple, / who laugh more heartily than YOU do.49

The ability to laugh and compare oneself with others laughing through inappropriate jokes amounts to a standard for measuring one’s bad conscience for enjoying only moderately politically incorrect allusions. It is such nuances of envy that preoccupy Somuncu, who raises the bar of inappropriateness in the next sequence, when he, or rather his stage persona, asks nonchalantly: Are there any Jews present? Hahahaha. I don’t LIKE any Jews / they have bent fingers and long hairs (he pulls a face and runs his hands through his hair). They sell JEWELRY. Hänänänänänä / (he pulls a face and gesticulates with the fingers) / hahahahahaha / no. those were GyPSIes. I made a misTAKE.50

Somuncu’s stage persona pursues a series of clichés about the Jews, which he borrows from popular culture to feed his public’s horrified reactions or unacknowledged fantasies. This blatant use of stereotypes about Jews and Romas simulates how the Führer mimics his victims’ perceived personas in order to dominate and incorporate these minorities. While Adorno alludes to the Jews only as 48

My analysis relies on the transcription of the text reproduced in Komik in der Migrationsgesellschaft, 103. The capitalizations in the original transcribe speech emphasis. 49 “JA. ich spiele nämlich eine ROLle. / ich meine nicht ERNST was ich sage. / manchmal SCHON/ manchmal meine ich es auch GAR nicht, / und sie nehmen es viel ernster als ICH. / manchmal haben sie auch STELLvertretend / ein schlechtes gewissen wenn ich witze über LEUte mache, / die darüber herzhafter lachen können als SIE.” Ibid. 50 “Sind JUden anwesend? Hahahahahahha. Ich MAG keine Juden / die haben so krumme Finger und lange HAAre. Hahahhahah / verkaufn SCHMUCK. Hänänänänä. Nein. Das waren ziGEUner. Ich habe mich verTAN.” Ibid.

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the target of Hitler’s mimetic attitude, Somuncu simulates, rhetorically, being at a loss in perceiving who is exactly mimicked in his performance, Germans or Romas. One could say that Somuncu’s art reaches the roots of a global Holocaust imaginary, in which the Jews and the Romas are equally represented in the process of commemoration. When he admits to having made a mistake in misidentifying the vendors of jewelry as Jews, Somuncu’s persona regurgitates an abyss of prejudice which puts the blame on ethnicities who have been shunted to the periphery of the European consciousness. Somuncu’s Hatred Messiah feeds on the phobic imaginary of contemporary Europe, which relies in turn on grotesque projections of minorities. The performative misannounced by the Hate Messiah (see his statement that he took the Romas for the Jews), refers to a denied event, which grows out of its forbiddenness, the return of fascism. Whereas the satire in Mein Führer relied on grotesque improvisations around the pawns and leaders of the Third Reich, which gave it an “anti-realist” touch, the quid pro quo in Hate Messiah is about realistic reconstructions of possible realities. By locating minorities on this historical map in conjunction with a discourse on fascism, Somuncu responds both to the derealization of the National Socialist past and to anti-realism as a mode of representing the truth about Hitler. The total art of Somuncu consists in foregrounding the Hate Messiah as the prototypical annunciator not only of the war of cultures but of the war on minorities themselves, with whom no shared humanity is possible. The cosmopolitanism of history foregrounded by Somuncu finds an interesting reinforcement in this circle of abused address, which recalls the global character of the Holocaust. Somuncu’s Hate Messiah does not wage a war of destruction on fascism, he only anticipates it. In this anticipation of the performative resides the total art of Somuncu.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “Can One Live after Auschwitz?” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Alexander, Jeffrey C. Performance and Power. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011. Bower, Kathrin. “Made in Germany: Integration as Inside Joke in the Ethno-Comedy of Kaya Yanar and Bülent Ceylan.” German Studies Review, 37.2, 357-376, May 2014.

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—. “Turkish German Comedy as Transnational Intervention.” Transit 7.1, 1-22, 2011. Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Malden MA: Polity Press, 2013. Huyssen, Andreas. “Diaspora and Migration: Migration into Other Pasts.” In Contemporary German Literature no. 88 (2003): 147-164. Kling, Thomas. mann aus reit (rheinland) (The Man from the Rhine). In Gesammelte Gedichte. Edited by Marcel Beyer and Christian Döring. Köln: DuMont, 2006. Kotthoff, Helga, Shpresa Jashari and Darja Klingenberg. Komik in der Migrationsgesellschaft. Konstanz and München: VBK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2013. Levy, Dani. (Director). Mein Führer-Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler. DVD, 2007. ùenocak, Zafer. “Die Zukunft der deutschen Vergangenheit”. In Das land hinter den buchstaben: Deutschland und Islam im Umbruch. München: Babel Verlag, 2006. ùenocak, Zafer, and Bülent Tulay. “Germany—Home for Turks?” In Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on German Politics and Culture (1990– 1998). Translated and edited by Leslie A. Adelson. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. —. “May One Compare Turks and Jews, Mr. ùenocak”? (Interview with Karin Yesilada.) In Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on German Politics and Culture (1990–1998). Translated and edited by Leslie A. Adelson. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Somuncu, Serdar. “Sportpalastrede.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= gGkhS0wSj-k, uploaded on August 9, 2010. —. Auf Lesereise mit Adolf. Köln: WortArt, 2009. Somuncu, Serdar, and Alexia Agathos. Hitler Kebab: live aufgenommen im Mai 2005 in Köln. Köln: Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 2006. CD disk. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. London/New York: Routledge, 2009.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN SEIT HEUT FRÜH WIRD ZURÜCKGESCHRIEBEN: INTERTEXTUALITY AND INTERDISCURSIVITY IN POLITICAL COMICS OF THE FAR AND EXTREME RIGHT MARIA STOPFNER

Introduction In recent years, far and extreme right activities in Austria and Germany underwent a fundamental change: as long-term engagement in nationwide organizations is dwindling and traditional means of ideological indoctrination prove to be increasingly ineffective, the far and extreme right was forced to find alternative ways to introduce new and preferably 1 younger members to their way of thinking. So, in 2009, the Junge Nationaldemokraten JN (“Young National Democrats”), the youth wing of the Nationalistische Partei Deutschland NPD (“Nationalist Party Germany”), the most influential party of the far right in Germany at the moment, turned to the genre of political comics in order to bring its ideology home to a young audience. The German Nationalist Party, which was founded in 1964, is explicitly orientated towards the radical and extreme right, as it rejects the existing democratic system and propagates ethnic segregation in favor of a homogenous German Volksgemeinschaft (“national community”).2 In its

1

Verfassungsschutzbericht. 2010. Accessed July 15 2014. http://www.verfassungsschutz.de/de/download-manager/_vsbericht-2010.pdf 2 NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. “Das Parteiprogramm. Arbeit. Familie. Vaterland. Das Parteiprogramm der Nationaldemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (NPD). Beschlossen auf dem Bundesparteitag am 4./5.6.2010 in Bamberg.” 2010. Accessed August 29 2011.

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comic Der grosse Kampf: Enten gegen Hühner (The Big Battle: Ducks against Chickens), this group-specific concept of the world is conveyed through textual and pictorial allusions that intertwine fragments of nationalism, racism, antisemitism and anticapitalism to varying degrees and densities.3 The comic itself is a modern remake of an English illustrated booklet published in 1996 that featured numerous illustrations to a poem by George Lincoln Rockwell entitled The Fable of the Ducks & Hens - A Dramatic Saga of Intrigue, Propaganda & Subversion.4 In his poem, Rockwell—a known anti-communist, racist and anti-Semite— expresses his views on Jewish influence on American politics, thereby adding to far and extreme right conspiracy theories.5 By analyzing the comic of the German Nationalist Party from a linguistic point of view, i.e. in relation to other texts, images and genres as well as common discourses, the present paper tries to unveil the “hidden” meaning encoded in the modernized version of Rockwell’s fable of ducks against chickens.

Methods In Germany, the far and extreme right covers a broad spectrum, including officially banned neo-fascist organizations as well as citizens’ initiatives (e.g. against asylum-seekers), that finds its common ground in xenophobia, anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and a critical stance towards democracy.6 However, in order to understand the behavior of the far and extreme right, one has to bear in mind that reengaging in National Socialism is unlawful in Austria and Germany, and is legally prosecuted

http://www.npd.de/inhalte/daten/dateiablage/br_parteiprogramm_a4.pdf/; Henrik Steglich, Rechtsaußenparteien in Deutschland. Bedingungen ihres Erfolges und Scheiterns (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010); Eckhard Jesse, “Extremismus in Deutschland,” in Extremismus in den EU-Staaten, ed. Jesse Eckhard and Tom Thieme, 83-98 (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011); Claudia Posch, Maria Stopfner and Manfred Kienpointner. “German PostWar Discourse of the Extreme and Populist Right,” in Analysing Fascist Discourse: Fascism in Text and Talk, ed. Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson, 97121 (London: Routledge, 2013). 3 Posch, Stopfner and Kienpointner, “German Post-War Discourse.” 4 Ralf Palandt, “Rechtsextremismus, Rassismus und Antisemitismus in Comics,” in Rechtsextremismus, Rassismus und Antisemitismus in Comics, ed. Ralf Paland, 560 (Berlin: Archiv der Jugendkulturen, 2011), 9. 5 Ibid. 6 Verfassungsschutzbericht. 2013. Accessed July 15 2014. http://www.verfassungsschutz.de/de/download-manager/_vsbericht-2013.pdf, 62.

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on the basis of the Austrian Prohibition Act7 and the German Penal Code.8 The constitutionally granted right to defend the democratic system against anti-democratic forces restricts neo-fascist activities. In fact, organizations can be banned, if they propagate neo-fascist ideology (e.g. denying the Holocaust, reviving the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei NSDAP), or if they threaten the democratic system as such.9 These legal constraints make it necessary for far and extreme right groups to operate in secret, or, in case of the official political parties of the far right, to veil neo-fascist ideology “in ambiguous, yet legal language.”10 The legally induced “calculated ambivalence” of far right discourse11 builds mainly on conversational implicatures, e.g. by exploiting the Maxim of Quality (“Try to make your contribution one that is true”), through irony, metaphor, litotes and hyperbole, or by flouting the Maxim of Manner (“Be perspicuous”) through semantic double-entendres and obscurity.12 Conversational implicatures establish two layers of meaning and understanding: the literal meaning on the textual surface and the actual meaning that needs to be deduced from context. In this way, conversational implicatures leave a communicative loophole, as it is always possible to deny the inferred meaning. Depending on the degree of strategic indirectness, far and extreme right messages can also be considered as instances of “coded language,” as the ability to grasp the “true” meaning behind seemingly nonsensical or ambiguous terms depends on the reader’s background knowledge or specific group knowledge, respectively (e.g. using numbers instead of letters, such as 88 for Heil Hitler!).13 Intertextuality and interdiscursivity, which constitute the main focus of this article, are communicative strategies that also make use of conversational implicatures. Intertextuality and interdiscursivity violate the Maxim of 7

“Verbotsgesetz,” 1947, Art. 3g-h “Strafgesetzbuch,” 1995, Art. 261. For an overview see Posch, Kienpointner and Stopfner “German Post-War Discourse.” 9 Florian Hartleb, “Extremismus in Österreich,” in Extremismus in den EU-Staaten, ed. Eckhard Jesse and Tom Thieme, 265-281 (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011), 265; Jesse, “Extremismus in Deutschland,” 83-85. 10 Posch, Stopfner and Kienpointner, “German Post-War Discourse,” 99. 11 Jakob Engel and Ruth Wodak, “Calculated Ambivalence and Holocaust Denial in Austria,” in Analysing Fascist Discourse: Fascism in Text and Talk, ed. Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson, 73-96 (London: Routledge, 2013). 12 Paul Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 41-58 (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 46. 13 Ruth Wodak and Rudolf de Cillia, “Commemorating the Past: the Discursive Construction of Official Narratives about the Rebirth of the Second Austrian Republic,” Discourse & Communication 1 (2007): 337-363, 207. 8

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Manner (“Be perspicuous”), because the information provided by the text at hand discloses only a fraction of the implicated meaning. The term “intertextuality” was coined by Kristeva and draws on the works of Bakhtin who called attention to the way texts are embedded and shaped by prior and subsequent texts, and, what is more, to the possibility of reaccentuation by representing these texts/images ironically, reverently, parodistically etc.14 Intertextuality establishes a concrete and verifiable connection between individual texts/images (referential intertextuality), or between a specific text/image and a more general text type/image type (typological intertextuality).15 The aim of the present analysis is to show to what extent the political comic The Big Battle: Ducks against Chickens makes use of referential and typological intertextuality in order to relate to other texts or text types and images or image types, respectively.16 Apart from intertextuality in a narrow sense, the present chapter will also focus on interdiscursive elements. Defining discourse as a “particular way of constructing a subject matter,”17 Fairclough introduced the term “interdiscursivity”18 to refer to instances of constitutive intertextuality, i.e. a “configuration of discourse conventions”19 that establish “relations between discursive formations or more loosely between different types of discourse.”20 The present study, however, will define discourse with Reisigl and Wodak as “structured forms of knowledge” as well as “memory of social practices.”21 It will apply the term “interdiscursivity” in 14

Julia Kristeva, “Bachtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique 23 (1967): 438-465; Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); see also Norman Fairclough, “Intertextuality in Critical Discourse Analysis,” Linguistics and Education 4 (1992b): 269-293, 270271. 15 Nina Janich, Werbesprache (Tübingen: Narr, 2003); Ulla Fix, “Aspekte der Intertextualität,” in Text- und Gesprächslinguistik, vol. 1, ed. Klaus Brinker, Gerd Antos, Wolfgang Heinemann and Sven F. Sager, 449-457 (Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2000); Susanne Holthuis, Intertextualität. Aspekte einer rezeptionsorientierten Konzeption (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1993). 16 JN Junge Nationaldemokraten. “Der große Kampf: Enten gegen Hühner.” 2009. Accessed July 21 2014. http://www.npd-segeberg.de/pdf/ Enten_gegen_Huehner.pdf 17 Fairclough, “Intertextuality,” 286. 18 Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992a). 19 Fairclough, “Intertextuality,” 271. 20 Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change, 47. 21 Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London, New York: Routledge, 2001); Ruth Wodak and

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cases of textual/pictorial representations of broader concepts of knowledge, such as ethnic prejudice or collective memory.22 Political comics as such are an example of typological intertextuality to begin with, dressing the persuasive function of a political pamphlet in the clothing of popular fiction. In fact, comics as a medium or, in McCloud’s terms, as a “vessel,” can contain “any number of ideas and images,”23 from Disney’s funny comic books or the complex DC Universe to Art Spiegelman’s biographical Holocaust survivor’s tale Maus or Harry S. Truman’s comic biography that was distributed in the run-up to the USAmerican presidential election in the 1940s.24 The appeal of comics for politics derives not only from their general accessibility and popularity, but also from the unique way in which words and pictures are combined.25 In one of the best known definitions, Eisner characterizes comics as “an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea.”26 Much in the same vein, Grünewald stresses the fact that the narrative succession of images with (or without) text builds a whole as regards content as well as form.27 However, the combination of pictorial/textual elements within a conclusive sequential narrative “allows for much flexibility in the manipulation of meaning, but often in a context that is constrained within a small space.”28 The potential polysemy of the visual medium, on the one

Michael Meyer, “Critical Discourse Analysis: History, Agenda, Theory, and Methodology,” in Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 1-33 (London et al.: Sage Publications, 2009), 6. 22 For ethnic prejudice see Teun A. van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1984), and Communicating Racism. Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk (Newbury Park: Sage, 1987). For collective memory see Reisigl and Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination. 23 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 6. 24 Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture (London: Continuum, 2009), 269-270; for an overview of the development and history of comics see Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels. A History of Comic Art (London/New York: Phaidon, 2010) and Robert C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996). 25 Matthew P. M. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell and Ian Gordon, “Introducing Comics and Ideology,” in Comics and Ideology, ed. Matthew P. M. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon, 1-13 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 3. 26 Will Eisner, Comics and the Sequential Art (Tamarac: Poorhouse, 1985), 5. 27 Dietrich Grünewald, Comics (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 28. 28 McAllister, Sewell and Gordon, “Introducing Comics,” 3.

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hand, allows for multiple interpretations; the narrative sequence, on the other hand, imposes a preferred meaning on the reader within the “closed ideological text” of the comic.29 That is why ideological underpinnings cannot only be found in political comics. In fact, one of the first studies on the ideological substructure of comics criticizes pro-capitalistic tendencies in Disney comics.30 In the meantime, several studies have shown that comics in general seem to be prone to ideological bias and, in this way, become the vehicle for a particular worldview.31 Grünewald, however, states that in order to understand and enjoy the visual narrative, the reader needs to combine what is shown with previous knowledge, thus interpreting and evaluating the comic on his or her own terms.32 Over the years, linguistic interest in comics has moved from analyzing language use in comics33 and, even more significantly, searching for the “language of comics” from a structuralist and semiotic perspective34, to

29

Ibid. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: International General, 1991); see also McAllister, Sewell and Gordon “Introducing Comics,” 7. 31 Among others Matthew Putz, ed., Comic Books and American Cultural History. An Anthology (New York/London: Continuum, 2012); Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan, Critical Approaches to Comics. Theories and Methods (New York/London: Routledge, 2012); Barbara Eder, Elisabeth Klar and Ramón Reichert, eds., Theorien des Comics. Ein Reader (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011); Chris Murray, “Popaganda: Superhero Comics and Propaganda in World War Two,” in Comics & Culture. Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, ed. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Cristiansen, 141-155 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000); Stefan Wolfinger, Von Karl Marx bis Carl Barks. Comics und Geschichte (Wien: Österreichischer Kunst- und Kulturverlag, 1999); Umberto Eco, Apokalyptiker und Integrierte. Zur kritischen Kritik der Massenkultur (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1987). 32 Grünewald, Comics, 11. 33 Helen Trace Tyssel, “The English of the Comic Cartoons,” American Speech 10.1 (1935): 43-55; M. Thomas Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). 34 Among others Wolfgang. K. Hünig, Strukturen des Comic Strip (Hildensheim: Olms, 1974); Eco, Apokalyptiker und Integrierte; Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons, eds., The Language of Comics. Word and image (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2001); Mario Saraceni, The Language of Comics (London: Routledge, 2003); Stephan Packard, Anatomie des Comics. Psychosemiotische Medienanalyse (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006); Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 30

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cognition35 and, most recently, to critical discourse analysis.36 The present article adds to the latter field of research and focuses on interdiscursivity and intertextuality as main strategies to enable diverging ways of understanding in comics of the far right, “blending past and present, fiction and reality, and providing a range of meanings, from quasi-innocent fiction to hate speech.”37 To this end, the analysis will demonstrate in which way and, ultimately, to which end the “representing” text (type) or image (type) in the political comic of the German Nationalist Party distorts the “represented” text (type), image (type) or discourse in order to put an ideological spin on the conveyed meaning.38

I. Intertextuality I.1 Typological Intertextuality As stated elsewhere in the text, typological intertextuality is an inherent characteristic of political comics, using a popular and seemingly light fictional genre to promote political propaganda. Der grosse Kampf: Enten gegen Hühner, however, does not only merge the pamphlet with the comic. The comic also borrows elements from another literary genre: the fable. A fable is a short fictional story in prose or verse that features anthropomorphized animals (plants, objects etc.) as main characters and teaches a moral lesson epitomized by a general maxim of conduct in the conclusion (“And the moral of this story is …”). Unlike fairy tales or 35

Among others McCloud, Understanding Comics; Charles Forceville, “Visual Representations of the Idealized Cognitive Model of Anger in the Asterix Album La Zizanie,” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (2005): 69-88; Neil Cohn, “Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language: The Past and Future of a Field,” in Linguistics and the Study of Comics, ed. Frank Bramlett, 92-118 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). 36 See Matthew J. Costello, Secret Identity Crises: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America (London: Continuum, 2009); Theo van Leeuwen and Usama Suleiman, “Globalizing the Local: The Case of an Egyptian Superhero Comic,” in The Handbook of Language and Globalization, ed. Nikolas Coupland, 232-254 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011); Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner, “Embattled Vienna 1683/2010: Right-Wing Populism, Collective Memory and the Fictionalisation of Politics,” Visual Communication 13.2 (2014): 231-255. 37 Wodak and Forchtner, “Embattled Vienna,” 232. 38 Valentin Volosinov, Marxism and the philosophy of language (The Hague/Paris: Mouton de Gruyter, 1972).

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animal stories, the fable tries to convince the reader of a general truth depicted in the narrative.39 The fable is critical of the status quo and its main purpose is, thus, on teaching and not on entertainment.40 As the species display human characteristics, a mirror is held up to society, mocking human ways of thinking and behavior.41 In fact, there is a longstanding tradition of fables that satirize political, social and religious authorities42, e.g. Martin Luther’s adaptation of Aesop’s fable about the lion and the ass.43 As the reference to the dominant elite is only metaphorical and, hence, only implied via conversational implicatures, the author can always retreat to the literal interpretation, i.e. just a funny story about beasts. In this sense, fables offer the same scope for “calculated ambiguity” as comics, and, for that reason, constitute an interesting communicative resource for far and extreme right propaganda.44 In Ducks against Chickens, the subtitle Eine fabelhafte Geschichte von Intrige, Propaganda und Zerstörung (A fabulous story of intrigue, propaganda and destruction) already hints at the fable genre.45 Apart from structural indices such as being written in verse and conveying “a gnomic utterance summing up the fable’s meaning” at the end, typological references to the fable mainly rest upon the narrative structure, i.e. main characters and plot.46 In line with the basic genre convention of the fable, the main characters of Ducks against Chickens are represented by three anthropomorphized species: chickens, ducks and geese. The special characteristics of each species are outlined in the preface to the fable and can be briefly summarized as follows: chickens are portrayed as villainous fowl, as freeloaders that constantly complain about others, even though they pull the strings from behind the scenes; ducks are depicted as goodnatured and hard-working, though some of them can be easily corrupted. Geese, on the other hand, are not falling for the chickens, they are keine Kriecher (“no grovelers”), sociable and smart.47 Apart from these dominant

39

Ben Edwin Perry, “Fable,” Studium Generale 12.1 (1959): 17-37, 21f. Reinhard Dithmar, Die Fabel: Geschichte, Struktur, Didaktik (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997), 186. 41 Ibid. 42 Perry, “Fable,” 24. 43 Carl P. E. Springer, Luther’s Aesop (Kirksville, Miss.: Truman State University Press, 2011). 44 Engel and Wodak, “Calculated Ambivalence.” 45 JN, “Der große Kampf,” 1. 46 Perry, “Fable,” 36. 47 JN, “Der große Kampf,” 2. 40

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species, the political fable also features (criminal) black crows and (Nordic) swans as minor characters. The fabulous plot starts at a paradisiacal point in time, when ducks lived happily and in peace. The tide turns, as the chickens come knocking in search of refuge. Shortly after the chickens have been granted asylum, they start to take advantage of the good-natured and hard-working ducks. What is more, the chickens infiltrate central institutions of the duck society and eventually take control of education, culture, the courts and the media. Faced with constant chicken propaganda, the ducks gradually lose their self-esteem. At this point, the story shifts to the country of the white geese in the far north. In contrast to the ducks, the white geese do not fall for the lies of the chickens, quite the contrary: the geese give the chickens a good beating and expel them from their country. The chickens, in turn, appeal to the ducks to help them in their distress. The political leaders of the ducks, depicted as mere puppets of the chickens, thereupon declare war against the geese, a war which the chickens win thanks to the duck soldiers. They occupy the country, put the geese in labor camps and hang their bravest leaders. But the chickens’ imperialistic ambitions go even further and they invade the fortress of the swans. However, under the reign of the chickens, society goes down the drain: the duck population is corrupted by the chickens’ money and the former Garden of Eden is populated with criminals, punks and drug addicts. Finally, those ducks who cannot suffer the chickens’ foreign rule anymore fly north and build a new society. The fable ends at the border of the newly founded country: a heavily armed duck soldier denies entry to the chickens who again try to find refuge with the ducks. According to van Leeuwen, legitimation, i.e. the justification of (institutional) traditions and practices, rests not only on authorization, moral evaluation and rationalization, but also on mythopoesis.48 Mythopoesis is defined as a category of legitimation that is “conveyed through narratives whose outcomes reward legitimate actions and punish non-legitimate actions.”49 Storytelling is therefore a powerful tool in the (de-)legitimation of the existing order, linking the past to the present, interpreting events and predicting the future.50 Especially in regards to national identity, narratives play an essential role, because they give a 48

Theo Van Leeuwen, “Legitimation in discourse and communication,” Discourse & Communication 1.1 (2007): 91-112, 91f. 49 Ibid., 92. 50 Bahaa-eddin M. Mazid, “Date-Palms, Language and the Power of Knowledge: An Analysis of a Fable from Kalila and Dimna,” Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009): 2515-2534, 2516.

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meaning to what “the nation” really is and they provide reasons and patterns for identification.51 A nation’s narrative offers “a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols, and rituals which stand for, or represent, the shared experiences, sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which give meaning to the nation.”52 The members of the nation in turn consider themselves as part of the story and share in the narrative.53 On the downside, however, narratives also lend themselves to social manipulation54 in view of intergroup relations, (de-)emphasizing good and bad concerning in- and out-groups. In fact, the Young National Democrats of the German Nationalist Party exploit genre-specific properties of the fable in order to carry their ideologically tainted version of a German national narrative to extremes. Normally, the tertium comparationis of the analogy between the species of the fable and mankind lies in certain character traits or behavioral patterns.55 However, taking extreme right ideology into account, which builds in large part on the notion of human races (e.g. Integration ist Völkermord, “integration is genocide,” party program of the NPD), a different interpretation seems reasonable: in line with a neo-fascist understanding, the fable does not merely map isolated aspects of animals onto humans.56 It also maps the whole schematic structure of species in terms of races and breeds onto the whole schematic structure of humankind.57 What is more, as readers expect fables to hold a kernel of truth and some kind of worldly wisdom, interpreting Ducks against Chickens as mere fiction misses out on its basic 51 Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert and Kenneth Thompson, 595-634 (Cambridge, Mass./Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 613. 52 Ibid. See also Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl, and Karin Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 53 Ibid. 54 Teun A. van Dijk, “Discourse and Manipulation,” Discourse & Society 17.2 (2006): 359-383, 362. 55 M. Reza Talebinejad and Vahid Dastjerdi, “A Cross-Cultural Study of Animal Metaphors: When Owls Are Not Wise!” Metaphor and Symbol 20.2 (2005): 133150. 56 NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. “Das Parteiprogramm. Arbeit. Familie. Vaterland. Das Parteiprogramm der Nationaldemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (NPD). Beschlossen auf dem Bundesparteitag am 4./5.6.2010 in Bamberg.” 2010. Accessed August 29 2011, 13. 57 For a cognitive perspective on poetic metaphor see George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 103.

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political function: indoctrinating young readers with general neo-fascist maxims. While text/text type relations to the fable mainly build on genre conventions as regards content, the typological reference to comics is obvious in the visual appearance of the text, i.e. layout and imagery. In contrast to fables where pictorial elements merely illustrate the written tale, comics relate their story through the sequential combination of text and image within a conventionalized layout. At first, the general layout of Ducks against Chickens strikes one as rather simple: for the most part, each page only consists of two or three panels; the panels are either juxtaposed or put one underneath the other, and are separated by straight or undulating gutters. Interestingly, pages that deviate from this general layout convey one of the story’s central messages and/or yield special meaning, e.g. gutters that resemble fracture lines indicate passages in the story that deal with conflict. The textual portion of the story is given in caption text boxes; balloons are only used sporadically and often mix direct speech with comments from the omniscient narrator. While the general layout of “Ducks against Chickens” is almost simplistic, its imagery is highly sophisticated. The drawings are multicolored and elaborated down to the last detail, with special attention being paid to facial expressions and gestures. The meticulous attention to detail is actually most riveting, as each new reading discloses a previously undiscovered aspect, most often an ideological fragment that adds to the neo-fascist meaning. All in all, contrary to do-it-yourself comics of far and extreme right sub-culture that circulate exclusively within the group, the impression of Ducks against Chickens is decidedly not of a cheap and illegitimate underground production, but of a professional comic book aimed at a broad public.58 The sophisticated technical execution of the comic, on the one hand increases the appeal to (young) readers and, on the other hand, inspires trust. Still, since for most people comics are merely “bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories and guys in tights,” comics cannot be taken seriously.59 This commonplace interpretation is encouraged by the naïve and brightly-colored style of the German Nationalist Party’s comic that resembles the imagery of children’s books. In this way, the visual properties of Ducks against Chickens add to the “calculated ambivalence” of the material, as the modality of the comic—i.e. its “truth

58 59

Palandt, “Rechtsextremismus.” McCloud, Understanding Comics, 2.

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value or credibility” as statement about the world—masks the factual underpinnings and real-world implications of neo-fascist propaganda.60

I.2 Referential Intertextuality I.2.a Referential Intertextuality between Texts (Text/Text Relations) While typological intertextuality,61 i.e. text/text type relations or image/image type relations, builds on the author’s and recipient’s shared knowledge of textual/pictorial patterns and genres, alluding to characteristic properties of types of texts/images as regards layout, structure or typical elements,62 referential intertextuality63 relates to a concrete individual text or image that is represented either modified or unmodified, in part or in its entirety.64 In order to facilitate the identification of intertextual references and, thus, a second layer of meaning to the literal text, the respective passages may be indicated in the text by quotation marks or graphic means, e.g. a different font.65 Ducks against Chickens, however, completely lacks such obvious indicators. Instead, the reader is constantly forced to contrast the written text with his or her background knowledge of other texts. As most neo-fascist writings and slogans are banned due to the German Penal Code (“Strafgesetzbuch”), quoting from these texts for propaganda purposes is unlawful. In such cases, referential intertextuality is necessarily limited to indirect strategies, such as borrowing merely single words.66 However, in order to still be recognizable as an intertextual reference, these lexical elements need to be highly significant in relation to the original text and their contextual meaning within the new text must in some way be reminiscent of the old context. In the following excerpt taken from Ducks against Chickens, two central National Socialist terms, Treue (“loyalty”) and Ehre (“honor”), are used to describe the comportment of one of the species: “Even though the geese lost in the end, loyalty and 60 Engel and Wodak, “Calculated Ambivalence” and Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 155. 61 Holthuis, Intertextualität. 62 Janich, Werbesprache, 174. 63 Holthuis, Intertextualität. 64 Roman Opiáowski, “Intertextualität in der Printwerbung,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes 54.4 (2007): 458-485, 469. 65 Ibid., 460. 66 Janich, Werbesprache, 174f.

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honor show their true value in defeat more than ever.”67 Combining Treue (“loyalty”) and Ehre (“honor”) in one sentence, reminds one of the infamous official motto of the German SS troops (“My honor is my loyalty”). This impression is reinforced contextually, as these terms are used in the comic to characterize a supposedly heroic group. However, while people that display the banned slogan in public render themselves liable to prosecution, alluding to the motto by using its two central terms is legal, even though the contextual meaning is similar. In this way, the semantic properties of the prior context can be mapped onto the new context without risking prosecution. Secondly, indirect referential intertextuality can also be drawn by adopting the syntactic structure of a prior text.68 In order for the reader to identify the reference, the sentence has to be outstanding and widely known, bordering on, or already being a fixed expression. In Ducks against Chickens, we can find the following example of a syntactic intertextual reference: “The chickens quickly decided that the geese should pay for that [i.e. attack on the chickens]: ‘Since this morning, we have been writing back and we will retaliate each stroke with a lie!’.”69 The syntactic structure of Seit heut früh wird zurückgeschrieben (“Since this morning, we have been writing back”) is a slight modification of Adolf Hitler’s opening sentence in his declaration of war against Poland on September 1st, 1939: Seit 5.45 Uhr wird zurückgeschossen (“Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire”).70 Syntactic intertextuality maintains the initial word order and syntagmatic structure, but substitutes the lexical “filling”: In the example above, a general adverb of time is used in lieu of the exact indication of time, and the German compound zurückschießen (“shoot back”) is transmuted into zurückschreiben (“write back”), while the structure of the sentence stays intact. Contrary to lexical intertextuality, syntactic intertextual references seem to be strong enough to embed the modified sentence into a completely different, even antithetical context without losing their intertextual potential: in the case of Ducks against Chickens, the distorted declaration is credited to the chicken, as they use media to spread lies about the geese. In this sense, the 67

“Auch wenn am Ende die Niederlage der Gänse stand, Treue und Ehre erst recht Größe in der Niederlage fand,” JN, “Der große Kampf,” 2. 68 Janich, Werbesprache, 174f. 69 “Die Hühner haben schnell entschieden, dass dies die Gänse büßen sollten: ‘Seit heut früh wird zurückgeschrieben und jeder Hieb mit einer Lüg’ vergolten!” JN, “Der große Kampf,” 15. 70 Audio-file online available at: http://www.mediathek.at/atom/13551E78-2470002D-000007D8-13549150 [14 July 2014].

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chickens start the war, even though the geese beat them up in the first place—a typical example of neo-fascist victim-perpetrator reversal.71 Finally, a text can also allude to general linguistic patterns of prior texts, e.g. by imitating a certain manner of speech or style.72 These references are highly volatile and akin to a general look and feel, which makes them hard to trace. The impression of stylistic likeness is based on the exclusion or allowance of certain lexical or grammatical features and/or by the preference for specific modes of expression.73 As far as Ducks against Chickens is concerned, the general diction strikes one as being excessively poetic, almost pompous, assuming an overly elaborated and antiquated style of writing, e.g. by using the historic German dative (vom Grase), and preferring archaic words, as can be seen in the following excerpt: But on the world’s open meadows, nothing lasts forever, neither peace, nor good fortune. Since nature is unfeeling. And unstable as the gentle drop that hesitantly detaches from the grass and dissolves in the dew, so, bit by bit, fades the dream into the deep night. And before you drowse in memories, your peace is long since spoilt!74

The notion of style signifies a language choice that is, on the one hand, dependent on the communicative setting, but, most importantly, wants to achieve a certain communicative effect.75 The recipient may either perceive this style as unmarked, i.e. appropriate to the situation or, in case of Ducks against Chickens, to the genre, or he/she considers this style as marked, i.e. bearing a stylistic sense that needs to be deduced from

71

See Wodak et al., “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter” Diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 304f. 72 Janich, Werbesprache, 174f. 73 Donald C. Freeman, ed., Linguistics and Literary Style (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970); and Paul Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, ed. Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 41-58. 74 “Doch nichts auf der Welten freier Flur währt ewig, nicht der Frieden, nicht das Glück. Denn unfühlend ist die Natur. Und unstet wie der Tropfen sacht, der zaghaft sich vom Grase löst, im Tau zergeht und rasch zu Staub zerfällt, so schwindet Stück für Stück der Traum in tiefe Nacht. Und ehe Du noch in Erinnerungen döst, ist längst Dir die Ruhe vergellt [sic]!” JN, “Der große Kampf,” 3. 75 Angelika Linke, Markus Nussbaumer and Paul R. Portmann, Studienbuch Linguistik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004).

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context76—hence, another example of conversational implicature. On the surface, the excessive poetic style of the comic can be seen as a tribute to the genre of the fable; however, taking into account the ideological background, the chosen style might also mirror the diction of Third Reich propaganda that is among others characterized by archaic forms and paratactic parallelisms (with an excessive use of the copula and)—a style that is in itself reminiscent of biblical language.77 Apart from stylistic allusions to Third Reich style, some passages within the text allude to a completely different language style: the language of anti-discrimination and anti-racism, alluded to by technical terms, such as Hühner-Anti-Diskriminierungs-Klausel (“Chicken-AntiDiscrimination-Clause”), or by mirroring anti-fascist slogans, such as Rassismus bekämpfen (“Fight racism”).78 In these cases, the respective term or phrase is used mockingly and satirized, putting it in a context that makes it clear that these terms and phrases are a mere façade, made up by the authorities to silence the opposition, or in the words of Ducks against Chicken: to suppress duck pride. In this way, i.e. by de- and subsequent recontextualisation, Ducks against Chickens perverts central anti-fascist and democratic terms and phrases. I.2.b Referential Intertextuality between Images (Image/Image Relations) As we have seen, referential intertextuality between individual texts can be achieved by referring to single, yet characteristic lexical elements, by referring to the syntactic structure of well-known texts or text passages, and by referring to more general linguistic patterns that reflect a certain style.79 In order to describe how images relate to other images, the analysis will appropriate these categories, which were originally devised by Janich to categorize text relations, by applying a simplified notion of visual grammar.80 In line with this concept, lexical elements are the discernible entities (e.g. people, objects, things, features of landscape or abstract symbols) displayed in the respective image; the syntactic structure is 76

Hadumod Bußmann, Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2008), 686. 77 Utz Maas,“Als der Geist der Gemeinschaft eine Sprache fand” - Sprache im Nationalsozialismus. Versuch einer historischen Argumentationsanalyse (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984), 348-349, 143. 78 JN, “Der große Kampf,” 10, 11. 79 Janich, Werbesprache, 174-175. 80 Ibid.

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considered to be the position and pose in which the discernible entities are placed and depicted in the picture, setting the different entities in relation to each other and indicating activity, process or state; and general patterns are found in terms of a certain visual style and modality. For example, we could think of an image that consists of the following lexical entities: a duck, a pond, a sun and a blue sky. Based on the syntactic structure of the image, these lexical entities can be put in relation to each other: the duck swims in the pond underneath the sun in the blue sky, the general visual pattern being similar to an impressionist painting. This simplistic model of visual grammar necessarily falls short of more elaborated concepts, such as Kress and van Leeuwen’s “grammar of visual design” or, more specifically, McCloud’s understanding of comics as “invisible art.”81 Nevertheless, this rudimentary concept is absolutely adequate as far as the aim of this paper is concerned: categorizing the ways in which one image refers to another image. Analogously to referential intertextuality between texts, direct quotation of National Socialist imagery for propaganda purposes is illegal in Austria and Germany. As a result, image/image relations are limited to highly modified versions of the original image. This visual constraint applies first and foremost to Nazi symbols, such as the swastika. In Ducks against Chickens, the central Nazi symbol is echoed in the geese’s emblem, the shape of which—a goose spreading its wings and standing on top of the capital letter “G”—resembles the general outline of the swastika.82 What is more, similar to textual referential intertextuality to National Socialist terms and phrases, this visual impression is supported contextually, since the symbol is used within the visual narrative to emblazon a supposedly heroic species. But again, even though the visual and contextual resemblance is striking, the similarity is not strong enough to be liable for prosecution. Another example of referential intertextuality via reference to a well-known visual element can be inferred from the chicken coalition’s flag, as the white symbol on blue ground bears resemblance to the official emblem of the United Nations.83 But in contrast to the swastika-like symbol whose connotation as heroic emblem is positively reinforced by the context of the story, the UN emblem is actively satirized in line with neo-fascist understanding: the olive branches of the original emblem, which embrace a stylized Earth and signify global peace, are replaced by a chicken claw implying the chicken’s hold on the entire world.

81

Kress and van Leeuwen, Reading Images; McCloud, Understanding Comics. JN, “Der große Kampf,” 14, 18. 83 Ibid., 20. 82

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However, most of the time, pictorial referential intertextuality in Ducks against chickens is based on the general syntactic structure of the original image, while exchanging its lexical elements. Similar to textual references, the prior image needs to be well-known in order for the recipient to identify the reference. In case of Ducks against Chickens, pictorial intertextuality via structural resemblance mainly falls back on iconic images, such as photographs of the air-raids on German cities during the Second World War. According to Hariman and Lucaites, iconic images perform important functions within society, as they shape the understanding of certain events and periods.84 In this way, they also reflect social knowledge and are indicative of underlying ideologies. In fact, pictures documenting the air-raids on Dresden and Berlin represent an important toehold for far and extreme right argumentation, as—despite the inherent fallacy of the two wrongs—the number of civilian casualties during the raids is balanced against the victims of the Nazi regime. In the German Nationalist comic, the connotative iconic meaning of the horror of allied bombing is mapped onto the fictive battle against the geese civilization by integrating the general iconic structure of airplanes flying overhead in the sky, yet replacing aircrafts with ducks.85 Even more striking is the use of visual referential intertextuality in regard to iconic images of the United States, such as “Raising the flag on Iwo Jima”. For Hariman and Lucaites, there is “arguably no image that resonates more with the popular understanding of the U.S. role in World War II than the photograph of five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman raising the Stars and Stripes atop Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi.”86 It has become the visual epiphany of patriotism, teamwork and victory. In Ducks against Chickens, the visual syntactic structure of the original is maintained, while the lexical filling is modified according to the fabulous narrative: instead of the U.S. flag, anthropomorphized ducks raise the banner of the duck nation.87 Much in the same way, the comic also refers to the iconic image of Uncle Sam that dates back to the nineteenth century and has since become one of the most popular personifications of the United States of America.88 However, in Ducks 84

Robert Hariman and John L. Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88.4 (2002): 363-392, 366. 85 JN, “Der große Kampf,” 18. 86 Hariman and Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity,” 363. 87 JN, “Der große Kampf,” 18. 88 Nicholas John Cull, David Culbert and David Welch, Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia. 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara: ABCCLIO, 2003), 403.

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against Chickens, the pointing gesture and stern facial expression of Uncle Sam is incorporated into a chicken, a species that within the political fable assumes the part of the sneaky bad guy.89 So, whereas visual icons of the German past are set in a narrative context that evokes similar connotations to those already established, U.S. iconic images are de- and subsequently re-contextualized in line with neo-fascist interpretations of the Second World War—a point that will be elaborated upon in more detail within the context of interdiscursive elements. But even though intertextual references to the Second World War cannot be denied, the general visual pattern counteracts these historic underpinnings, as the naïve and colorful style imitates the modality of a children’s book that defies its being mistaken for a fact (see also typological intertextuality).

II. Interdiscursivity Whereas the term intertextuality in a narrow sense denotes verifiable textual or pictorial relations between concrete texts or images, insofar as a textual/pictorial element x of text/image A echoes a textual/pictorial element y of another text (type)/image (type) B, the term interdiscursivity is applied to textual or pictorial references to broader concepts of knowledge such as ethnic prejudice and collective memory that cannot be pinned to one single text or image nor to a specific text type or image type.90

II.1 Interdiscursive reference to ethnic prejudice Ethnic prejudice, racism and anti-Semitism constitute focal points of interest within the linguistic field of critical discourse analysis, yet are approached from different angles: discourse semantics tries to uncover collective symbols, i.e. common cultural stereotypes, within discourse fragments of everyday life as well as of institutions such as politics, media or education.91 The discourse-historical approach tries to integrate the 89

JN, “Der große Kampf,” 18. Monika Schwarz-Friesel, “‘Damit Sie auch heute noch kraftvoll zuhören können.’ Zur kommunikativen und kognitiven Funktion intertextueller Markierungen in der aktuellen Werbung,” Sprachtheorie und germanistische Linguistik 13.1 (2003): 3-24. 91 Among others Margret Jäger and Siegfried Jäger, Deutungskämpfe: Theorie und Praxis kritischer Diskursanalyse (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007); Siegfried Jäger, Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung (Duisburg: DISS, 1993). 90

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historical political and social background, and stresses the importance of “multicausal, mutual influences between different groups” in shaping public discourse.92 Van Dijk’s sociocognitive approach focuses on the rationalization and justification of prejudice in social communication and interaction.93 According to van Dijk, ethnic prejudice is a “shared form of social representation” that fulfils important social functions, such as protecting group-interests.94 It is “acquired during processes of socialization” and stored in the semantic memory of society, which, in turn, interacts with individual structures of long- and short-term memory.95 The present analysis agrees with the general socio-cognitive idea of shared group schemata, but is, nonetheless, most indebted to discourse-historical studies on anti-Semitic discourse, as they offer a firm basis for the analysis of interdiscursive elements. First of all, though, a contrast between two seemingly synonymous terms has to be formulated: prejudice and stereotype. Following Quasthoff, one of the first linguists to systematically categorize prejudiced discourse, prejudices are defined as mental states in which negative attitudes are directed towards a group or class of people, whereas stereotypes are verbal expressions thereof and, as part of common knowledge, attribute certain (oversimplified, generalized and emotionally tainted) qualities or behavioral patterns to these social groups.96 Consequently, taking up Quasthoff’s line of thought, interdiscursive reference to ethnic prejudice can be evoked via stereotypical attributes. In Ducks against Chickens, the invaders are, for example, portrayed as brandishing colts in Wild Weststyle, while munching on hamburgers—stereotypical attributes that mock U.S. culture. Most disturbing, though, is the German Nationalists’ focus on antiSemitic prejudice that is seeping through the entire narrative. According to Reisigl and Wodak, “debasing, humiliating and even dehumanizing attributions” towards Jews have been a “taboo since the defeat of the 92

Reisigl and Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination, 31f. See also Wodak et al., “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter.” 93 Among others van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse, and by the same author Communicating Racism. Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk (Newbury Park: Sage, 1987). 94 Van Dijk, Prejudice in Discourse, 13. 95 Ibid. 96 Uta Quasthoff, Soziales Vorurteil und Kommunikation - Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse des Stereotyps. Ein interdisziplinärer Versuch im Bereich von Linguistik, Sozialwissenschaft und Psychologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1973).

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National Socialists,”97 but seem to resurface in varying degrees of directness depending on the respective context.98 In Ducks against Chickens, interdiscursive reference to anti-Semitic prejudice is almost outrageously explicit, as the comic reinstates ancient myths,99 such as the belief in a Jewish conspiracy that seeks to attain national and/or world power,100 or the medieval accusation of poisoning wells, as in the following example taken from the comic: “Among the obscure ‘illuminati’, treacherous murder is planned. They shun the light, they hide in shadows, poisoning wells, livestock and country.”101 The textual content of the excerpt is visualized in a panel that shows two chickens pouring a venomous liquid into the reservoir water underneath the duck village. Interdiscursive elements that refer to anti-Semitic myths can therefore be found on the textual as well as on the pictorial level, thus further enforcing neo-fascist beliefs in the reader. The importance that is accorded to these anti-Semitic messages within the ideological narrative is also evident in the general layout of the comic: pages that display central characteristics and behavioral patterns of chickens, i.e. Jews, seem to suspend the narrative. In these cases, the panels are no longer presented in a linear sequence, but are arranged around a central image that reveals either the true nature or the real driving force behind the historical, social and political status quo.

II.2 Interdiscursive Reference to Collective Memory Abstract historical knowledge is very different from the reconstruction of the past of a certain group. Evaluative discrepancies in interpreting historical facts are almost inevitable, as they are rooted in the particular group experience. In fact, according to Maurice Halbwachs, every group has its own history based on a collective memory that differs fundamentally from other groups’ recollections.102 Collective memory can be “characterized as a collection of traces of the events that were important for the historical sequence of a particular group.”103 As such, Halbwachs 97

Reisigl and Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination, 56. Wodak et al., “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter.” 99 Reisigl and Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination, 55f. 100 JN, “Der große Kampf,” 22. 101 “Im dunklen Kreis der ‘Illuminaten’ wird feiger Meuchelmord geplant. Sie scheuen Licht, sie suchen Schatten, vergiften Brunnen, Vieh und Land.” Ibid., 17. 102 Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: P.U.F., 1950). 103 Paul Ricoeur, “‘Gedächtnis – Vergessen – Geschichte’,” in Historische Sinnbildung. Problemstellungen, Zeitkonzepte, Wahrnehmungshorizonte, 98

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considers collective memory to be the source of the group’s identity, as it serves as a social frame to which individual group members will align their memories of the past. Hence, casting doubt on the collective memory of a given group is casting doubt on the group’s identity and ultimately on the group as such. That is why group specific versions of the past are so fiercely defended and more or less resistant to conflicting historical findings. This is especially true for violent episodes of the past, experiences that all societies share and must come to terms with. As communities are eager to maintain a positive self-image, acts of violence need to be integrated in a way that is consistent with the group’s normative ideology.104 Wodak and de Cillia assume that traumatic events such as war, torture or mass killings are therefore either surrounded by taboos or they are mystified in the form of narratives.105 Within these narratives of conflict, the participants are usually polarized in a way that the protagonists are portrayed as acting in line with the normative foundations of society while the antagonists are not.106 Acts of violence are thus turned into legends that henceforth may serve as morality plays for future generations.107 As Polkinghorne writes: “Cultures collect narrative productions and distill the historical experiences of their members. These stories provide people with exemplary plots that can be used to configure the events in their own lives.”108 Yet, the right to tell the story is not evenly distributed. In fact, in the context of politics, the argumentative potential of narratives is a decisive factor. Through narratives, complex situations are simplified into a causal chain of events, winding up in a gripping story that makes the historical accounts even more memorable.109 Narratives are, therefore, not only essential in the construction of individual as well as collective memory and a central element in the formation and maintenance of collective Darstellungsstrategien, ed. Klaus E. Müller and Jörn Rüsen, 433-54 (Hamburg: Reinbek, 1997), 439. 104 William Labov, “Ordinary Events,” in Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections, ed. Carmen Fought, 31-43 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 105 Ruth Wodak and Rudolf de Cillia, “Commemorating the Past: the Discursive Construction of Official Narratives about the Rebirth of the Second Austrian Republic,” Discourse & Communication 1 (2007): 337-363. 106 Labov, “Ordinary Events.” 107 See also Wodak and de Cillia, “Commemorating the Past,” and Lois Presser, “The Narratives of Offenders,” in Theoretical Criminology 13 (2009): 177-200. 108 Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative and Self-concept,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1 (1991): 135-153, 147. 109 Shaul R. Shenav, “Concise Narratives: A Structural Analysis of Political Discourse,” Discourse Studies 7 (2005): 315-335.

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identity, they are also an ideal tool to propagate a specific worldview,110 as political groups try to impose their narrative on the community as the only legitimate version.111 Memory, identity and narrative are, thus, not only densely entwined with each other, they are also subject to interpretation and change: Hence, there is not one single past, nor one unique narrative; quite the contrary, many narratives which are informed by different interests are in conflict with each other for hegemonic status. They are produced in many public spheres, interact and are recontextualized through the media and in every day interactions.112

In other words, collective memories can be used and modified in order to frame the present in a way that is beneficial to one’s (political) aims and goals.113 In fact, the main aim of the German Nationalist Party’s political comic centers on the historical narrative of the Second World War and the collective memory of the German past. Apart from the general plot that actually (re-)tells the story of “The Big Battle” (“Der grosse Kampf”), several passages in the comic make this interdiscursive reference even more obvious, e.g. by imitating the languages of the allied forces when describing the arrival of the victorious chicken generals (“You see them parading on the streets: ‘Strastwui, Bongswar, Haudujudu’”.114 What is more, the German Nationalists also try to give a neo-fascist spin to the dominant historical narrative of the U.S. involvement during the Second World War. In one of the most significant pages of the comic, several iconic images are grouped together.115 In the background, the geese’s emblem—reminiscent of the Nazi swastika—stands in solitary splendor over the ruins of the geese’s capital destroyed by the air-raids of the instrumentalized duck army that can be seen flying overhead in the sky dropping bombs—similar to the iconic images of the bombings of German cities during the World War II. The center of the page is occupied by the visual adaptation of Uncle Sam as chicken; at the bottom right side, duck soldiers are raising the banner in the style of the Americans on Iwo Jima. 110

Shaul R. Shenav, “Political Narratives and Political Reality,” International Political Science Review 27 (2006): 245-262. 111 Wodak and de Cillia, “Commemorating the Past.” 112 Ibid., 339. 113 See also Shenav, “Concise Narratives.” 114 “Auf den Straßen sieht man sie stolzieren ‘Strastwui, Bongswar, Haudujudu,’” JN, “Der große Kampf,” 19. 115 Ibid., 18.

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The whole ensemble, which is subsumed under the red glow of war and destruction, is, however, thwarted by a goose on the top left side of the page, as it is throwing a stone at Uncle Sam, just like David hitting Goliath. This provides a whole new meaning to the scene and to the underlying historical narrative: Uncle Sam—the personification of the United States—is turned into an all-powerful “Big Brother” and the victory of the allied forces is no longer a feat of deliverance, but of oppression. In line with this neo-fascist interpretation, the national narrative of the Second World War ends tragically—with the Nuremberg Trials: “The geese’s government was deprived of power. The fate of the Reich, then and there, directed by murderers. Many a brave warrior died of hunger, the most loyal of the loyal were cowardly hanged.”116

Conclusion The purpose of comics is to tell a story117 and, as such, they want to “convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response.”118 Comics enable the reader to “travel to another realm,” because we “don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it!”119 In this way, comics are powerful weapons of propaganda, as stated outright in the preface to Ducks against Chickens: After the schoolyard-CD, the national opposition explores a new way of fresh and bold provocation with the comic Ducks against Chickens. The comic is stirring and has to be thrust into the hands of every young German. After the music offensive, let’s now start the comic offensive in the schoolyards.120

Within the neo-fascist ground offensive against the democratic status quo, the communicative strategies of intertextuality and interdiscursivity 116

“Die Gänseregierung, die wurde entmachtet. Des Reiches Geschick dann von Mördern gelenkt. Manch tapferer Kämpfer ist hungernd verschmachtet, die Treuesten der Treuen haben sie feige gehenkt,” JN, “Der große Kampf,” 20. 117 Mila Bongco, Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), 54. 118 McCloud, Understanding Comics, 9. 119 Ibid., 36. 120 “Nach der Schulhof-CD beschreitet die nationale Opposition mit dem Comic ‘Hühner gegen Enten’ nun diesen Weg frischer und frecher Provokation. Das Comic rüttelt wach und gehört in die Hand eines jeden jungen Deutschen. Setzen wir nach der Musikoffensive nun also zur Comicoffensive an den Schulhöfen an,” JN, “Der große Kampf,” 2.

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in Der grosse Kampf: Enten gegen Hühner (The Big Battle: Ducks against Chickens) serve two purposes: on the one hand, intertextual and interdiscursive allusions establish an atmosphere of “calculated ambivalence” that makes it possible to fall back on the literal meaning, if the German Penal Code should be enforced.121 On the other hand, the intertextually and interdiscursively coded (visual) language of the comic also functions as a group-inducing communication game, as the ability to understand the “true” meaning encoded by the author depends on the reader’s background knowledge.122 The knowledge shared by author and reader forges a bond of mutual understanding that strengthens the persuasiveness of the message most effectively.123 Still, it remains doubtful whether the second meaning implied by the intertextual and interdiscursive references analyzed in this paper can be inferred by school children and young adolescents who, according to the preface of the comic, constitute the main target group of Ducks against Chickens. However, due to the combination of comic and fable, the ideological purpose of the neo-fascist pamphlet is achieved in any case: while the far right initiate will rejoice in working out the neo-fascist allusions as evincing proof of him/her being one of the chosen few that get the intended extremist meaning, the naïve reader will simply be drawn into the gripping story of ducks against chickens and will be taught an ideologically tainted moral lesson at the end: Folgt fremden Vögeln nicht (Do not follow foreign birds).124

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bongco, Mila. Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books. London/New York: Routledge, 2000. Bußmann, Hadumod. Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2008. Cohn, Neil. “Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language: The Past and Future of a Field.” In Linguistics and the Study of Comics. Edited by Frank Bramlett, 92-118. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.

121

Engel and Wodak, “Calculated Ambivalence.” Schwarz-Friesel, “‘Damit Sie auch heute,” 20f. 123 Ibid. 124 JN, “Der große Kampf,” 26. 122

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Costello, Matthew J.. Secret Identity Crises: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America. London: Continuum, 2009. Cull, Nicholas John, David Culbert, and David Welch. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia. 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003. Dithmar, Reinhard. Die Fabel: Geschichte, Struktur, Didaktik. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. New York: International General, 1991. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew J. Smith. The Power of Comics: History, Form, and Culture. London: Continuum, 2009. Eco, Umberto. Apokalyptiker und Integrierte. Zur kritischen Kritik der Massenkultur. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1987. Eder, Barbara, Elisabeth Klar, and Ramón Reichert, eds.. Theorien des Comics. Ein Reader. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Eisner, Will. Comics and the Sequential Art. Tamarac: Poorhouse, 1985. Engel, Jakob, and Ruth Wodak. “Calculated Ambivalence and Holocaust Denial in Austria.” In Analysing Fascist Discourse: Fascism in Text and Talk. Edited by Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson, 73-96. London: Routledge, 2013. Fairclough, Norman. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992a. —. “Intertextuality in Critical Discourse Analysis.” Linguistics and Education 4 (1992b): 269-293. Fix, Ulla. “Aspekte der Intertextualität.” In Text- und Gesprächslinguistik, vol. 1. Edited by Klaus Brinker, Gerd Antos, Wolfgang Heinemann, and Sven F. Sager, 449-457. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2000. Forceville, Charles. “Visual Representations of the Idealized Cognitive Model of Anger in the Asterix Album La Zizanie.” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (2005): 69-88. Freeman, Donald C., ed.. Linguistics and Literary Style. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Grice, Paul. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. Edited by Peter Cole and Jerry Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Grünewald, Dietrich. Comics. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: P.U.F., 1950.

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Hall, Stuart. “The Question of Cultural Identity.” In Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, 595-634. Cambridge, Mass./Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Hariman, R., Lucaites, J.L. “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88.4 (2002): 363-392. Hartleb, Florian. “Extremismus in Österreich.” In Extremismus in den EUStaaten. Edited by Eckhard Jesse and Tom Thieme, 265-281. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011. Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Holthuis, Susanne. Intertextualität. Aspekte einer rezeptionsorientierten Konzeption. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1993. Hünig, Wolfgang. K. Strukturen des Comic Strip. Hildensheim: Olms, 1974. Inge, M. Thomas. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Jäger, Margret, and Siegfried Jäger. Deutungskämpfe: Theorie und Praxis kritischer Diskursanalyse. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007. Jäger, Siegfried. Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung. Duisburg: DISS, 1993. Janich, Nina. “Intertextualität und Textsortenvernetzung.” In Textlinguistik. 15 Einführungen. Edited by Nina Janich, 177-196. Tübingen: Narr, 2008. —. Werbesprache. Tübingen: Narr, 2003. Jesse, Eckhard. “Extremismus in Deutschland.” In Extremismus in den EU-Staaten. Edited by Eckhard Jesse and Tom Thieme, 83-98. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011. JN Junge Nationaldemokraten. “Der große Kampf: Enten gegen Hühner.” 2009. Accessed July 21 2014. http://www.npd-segeberg.de/pdf/ Enten_gegen_Huehner.pdf Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. London/New York: Routledge, 2006. Kristeva, Julia. “Bachtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman.” Critique 23 (1967): 438-465. Labov, William. “Ordinary Events.” In Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections. Edited by Carmen Fought, 31-43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Linke, Angelika, Markus Nussbaumer, and Paul R. Portmann. Studienbuch Linguistik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004. Maas, Utz.“Als der Geist der Gemeinschaft eine Sprache fand” - Sprache im Nationalsozialismus. Versuch einer historischen Argumentationsanalyse. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984. Mazid, Bahaa-eddin M. “Date-Palms, Language and the Power of Knowledge: An Analysis of a Fable from Kalila and Dimna.” Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009): 2515-2534. McAllister, Matthew P. M., Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon. “Introducing Comics and Ideology.” In Comics and Ideology. Edited by Matthew P. M. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, and Ian Gordon, 113. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. McKinney, Mark. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Murray, Chris. “Popaganda: Superhero Comics and Propaganda in World War Two.” In Comics & Culture. Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Edited by Anne Magnussen, and Hans-Christian Cristiansen, 141-155. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000. NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands. “Das Parteiprogramm. Arbeit. Familie. Vaterland. Das Parteiprogramm der Nationaldemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (NPD). Beschlossen auf dem Bundesparteitag am 4./5.6.2010 in Bamberg.” 2010. Accessed August 29 2011. http://www.npd.de/inhalte/daten/dateiablage/br_parteiprogramm_a4.pdf/ Opiáowski, Roman. “Intertextualität in der Printwerbung.” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Germanistenverbandes 54.4 (2007): 458-485. Packard, Stephan. Anatomie des Comics. Psychosemiotische Medienanalyse. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006. Palandt, Ralf. “Rechtsextremismus, Rassismus und Antisemitismus in Comics.” In Rechtsextremismus, Rassismus und Antisemitismus in Comics. Edited by Ralf Palandt, 5-60. Berlin: Archiv der Jugendkulturen, 2011. Perry, Ben Edwin. “Fable.” Studium Generale 12.1 (1959): 17-37. Polkinghorne, Donald E.. “Narrative and Self-concept.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1 (1991): 135-153. Posch, Claudia, Maria Stopfner, and Manfred Kienpointner. “German Post-War Discourse of the Extreme and Populist Right.” In Analysing

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Fascist Discourse: Fascism in Text and Talk. Edited by Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson, 97-121. London: Routledge, 2013. Presser, Lois. “The Narratives of Offenders.” Theoretical Criminology 13 (2009): 177-200. Putz, Matthew, ed.. Comic Books and American Cultural History. An Anthology. New York/London: Continuum, 2012. Quasthoff, Uta. Soziales Vorurteil und Kommunikation - Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse des Stereotyps. Ein interdisziplinärer Versuch im Bereich von Linguistik, Sozialwissenschaft und Psychologie. Frankfurt a. M.: Athenäum, 1973. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. Discourse and Discrimination. Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London, New York: Routledge, 2001. Ricoeur, Paul. “‘Gedächtnis – Vergessen – Geschichte’.” In Historische Sinnbildung. Problemstellungen, Zeitkonzepte, Wahrnehmungshorizonte, Darstellungsstrategien. Edited by Klaus E. Müller, and Jörn Rüsen, 433-54. Hamburg: Reinbek, 1997. Rosen, Alan. “The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Spiegelman’s Maus.” Prooftexts 15.3 (1995): 249-262. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels. A History of Comic Art. London/New York: Phaidon, 2010. Saraceni, Mario. The Language of Comics. London: Routledge, 2003. Schwarz-Friesel, Monika. “‘Damit Sie auch heute noch kraftvoll zuhören können.’ Zur kommunikativen und kognitiven Funktion intertextueller Markierungen in der aktuellen Werbung.” Sprachtheorie und germanistische Linguistik 13.1 (2003): 3-24. Shenav, Shaul R. “Concise Narratives: A Structural Analysis of Political Discourse.” Discourse Studies 7 (2005): 315-335. —. “Political Narratives and Political Reality.” International Political Science Review 27 (2006): 245-262. Smith, Matthew J., and Randy Duncan. Critical Approaches to Comics. Theories and Methods. New York/London: Routledge, 2012. Springer, Carl P. E.. Luther’s Aesop. Kirksville, Miss.: Truman State University Press, 2011. Steglich, Henrik. Rechtsaußenparteien in Deutschland. Bedingungen ihres Erfolges und Scheiterns. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Talebinejad, M. Reza, and Vahid Dastjerdi. “A Cross-Cultural Study of Animal Metaphors: When Owls Are Not Wise!” Metaphor and Symbol 20.2 (2005): 133-150. Tyssel, Helen Trace. “The English of the Comic Cartoons.” American Speech 10.1 (1935): 43-55.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN YOUTUBE FASCISM: VISUAL ACTIVISM OF THE EXTREME RIGHT1 MATTIAS EKMAN

The development of digital communication and information technology has played an important role in facilitating the production and dissemination of political propaganda by far right-wing movements for a long time.2 For example, far right-wing organizations were quick to adopt digital communication practices. At the beginning of the 1990s, there were at least 15 to 20 active Swedish neo-Nazi bulletin board systems (BBS’s).3 The communication structures facilitated by the early Internet were wellsuited for smaller, semi-open or closed communities within the milieu. With the progression of online communication, right-wing movements and the white-power music scene benefited greatly as the Internet provided new distribution channels and facilitated new environments in which activists and supporters could consume racist propaganda and popular culture but also meet and communicate with each other.4 Moreover, new communication technologies and new distribution channels for propaganda also played an important role in shaping far right-wing political identities.5 1

This is an edited version of an article published in the open access journal Mediekultur, Vol 30, no. 56 (2014): 79-99. 2 Helene Lööw, Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999. Den rasistiska undergroundrörelsen: musiken, myterna, riterna (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2000). 3 Michael Keith Back Les and John Solomos, “Technology, Race and Neo-Fascism in a Digital Age: The New Modalities of Racist Culture,” Patterns of Prejudice, 30.2 (1996): 10. 4 Rober Futrell, Pete Simi and Simon Gottschalk, “Understanding Music in Movements: The White Power Music Scene,” The Sociological Quarterly, 47.2 (2006): 296. 5 R. Sophie Statzel, “Cybersupremacy: The New Face of White Supremacist Activism,” Digital Media and Democracy, ed. Megan Boler (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008).

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Swedish far right-wing groups have a long history of media production, and over the past years the production and distribution of video clips has become a key strategy in their communicative repertoire.6 The Swedish far right-wing actors constitute a particularly interesting case, mainly because Sweden was the hub of the global white power music scene in the mid1990s,7 and Swedish actors (alongside their US counterparts) have been at the forefront of trends focused on mastering digital information technology since the late 1980s. This essay explores the online video activism of neo-fascist groups in Sweden. The primary aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of more than 200 video clips produced and disseminated on YouTube by five organizations. Furthermore, the chapter discusses how the video content relates to the political strategies of the extreme right and to the social mobilization and recruitment (possibilities) of far-right activists. In order to relate the online video material to the politics and the sociology of the extreme right, this essay focuses on the relationship between mediated communication and the socio-cultural context of far right-wing politics.8 This implies that the video material must be understood in relation to a broader framework of contemporary far right-wing ideology and political action. Furthermore, through an understanding of video communication via online platforms such as YouTube, analyzed as ways of performing and articulating “different modes of audience address,”9 this study discusses the relationship between mediated representation and political mobilization/engagement.

Context: Neo-Fascist Actors In order to scrutinize the video content, a short introduction to the political sociology of the far right-wing milieu will be outlined. The (Swedish) extreme right harbors various ideological positions, such as ethno-nationalists, ethno-pluralists, identitarians, national-socialists and 6

Mattias Ekman, “Pro-Violence and Antidemocratic Right-Wing Extremist Messages on the Internet,” in Pro-Violence and Anti-Democratic Messages on the Internet (Stockholm: Statens Medieråd, 2014). 7 Mathias Wåg, “Nationell kulturkamp - från vit maktmusik till metapolitik,” in Det vita fältet, ed. Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt (Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensis 41, 2010), 10. 8 Norman Fairclough, Media Discourse (London: Arnold, 1995). 9 Lisbeth Van Zoonen, Farida Vis and Sabina Mihelj, “Performing Citizenship on YouTube: Activism, Satire and Online Debate Around the Anti-Islam Video Fitna,” Critical Discourse Studies, 7(4) (2010): 249.

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nationalists. These definitions refer to a rather heterogeneous landscape of far-right politics; but, in fact, the similarities are far greater than the differences. Five actors are selected for analysis: Svenska Motståndsrörelsen (SMR), Nordiska Nationalsocialister (NNS), Svenskarnas Parti (SvP), Förbundet Nationell Ungdom (FNU) and Nordisk Ungdom (NU).10 The organizations advocate some form of subordination and/or separation of people based on race, ethnicity or culture. There are differences between, for example ethno-pluralists and national socialists, the latter relying on theories of racial biology and the former on contemporary (albeit, racist) theories of ethnicity and culture.11 New forms of racism are different from racial biology since they rely on the concept of distinctive and distinguishable homogeneous cultures. Cultural signifiers are used to manifest versions of essentially fixed characteristics among different groups in society, and these differences are perceived as essentially “insurmountable.” However, “racism without race” is not a particularly new phenomenon—actually, its prototype is anti-Semitism.12 Furthermore, ethnicity is also linked to geographic territory, so there are, in fact, small differences among the various positions. The groups advocate an elitist society, and their ideals are fundamentally anti-democratic. They support a society based on Volksgemeinschaft, defined by race, ethnicity or culture— an “ethnocratic” position.13 Citizens who are not perceived to be Swedes or Nordic (and, in some cases, European) can never become part of the Volksgemeinschaft. The groups also rely on the concept of class collaboration or class peace—they reject any notion of a conflict between 10

NNS dissolved in 2013 and called on its members to join SMR. Ethno-pluralist positions are often claimed to be “post-racists”—e.g., HansGeorg Betz, “The Growing Threat of the Radical Right,” in Right-Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Peter Merkl and Leonard Weinberg (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 84—but they are essentially “culturally racist,” see Marina Peunova, “The Transfer of Ideas along a Cultural Gradient: the Influence of the European New Right on Aleksandr Panarin’s New Euroasianism,” in Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe, ed. Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), 308. 12 Étienne Balibar, “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1992), 21f; Hans-Georg Betz, “Against the system: Radical Right-Wing Populism’s Challenge to Liberal Democracy,” in Movements of Exclusion: Radical Right-wing Populism in the Western World, ed. Jens Rydgren (Hauppauge/NewYork: Nova Science Publishers, 2005). 13 Jens Rydgren, “Den radikala högerns sociologi,” in Det vita fältet, ed. Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt (Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensis 41, 2010); Betz, “Against the System.” 11

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labor and capital. Instead, they presuppose a hierarchical social structure in which social and economic inequality is believed to be “natural” to society. Hence, the idea of a natural social order also implies that workingclass movements and parties are the historical antagonist of the extreme right.14 Or, as one neo-fascist activist bluntly puts it, “equality means death.”15 The Swedish extreme right also express elements of the three mythical components that, according to Griffin,16 are essential to fascist ideology—a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism, the decadence of society, and the rebirth of society. The idea of a Volksgemeinschaft rising from the ashes of multiculturalism is an example of palingenetic ultra-nationalism. The idea that contemporary society is in decline is widespread, and the notion that, one day, society will rise and return to its glorious past is reflected in various representations of a mythical history.17 This implicates that the extreme right’s struggle for social change is also framed by a narrative of an idealized past.18 Political discourses emanating from the extreme right are often characterized by conspiratorial thinking. The idea of a Jewish conspiracy is frequent, but there are also conspiracy theories in which established political parties and the mass media are perceived to be in cahoots to deceive the ‘common man.’19 Feminism is defined as an example of state-ideology forced on the “natural order” of society. Within far-right-wing discourses, the body and sexuality of the white woman constitute an ideological battleground. White females are “threatened” or “under attack” by non-white immigrants and must be protected by (male) white nationalists. Violence against women is a frequent topic within far-right-wing propaganda.20 Anti-feminism is also 14

Ekman, “Pro-Violence.” All quotes from the data are translated by the author. http://www.nordfront.se/jamlikhet-utveckling-radikal-dialektik-och-skapandet-avovermanniskan.smr (retrieved March 16, 2013). 16 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). 17 Lööw, Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999. 18 Rydgren, “Den radikala högerns sociologi,” 17. 19 Helene Lööw, “The Extreme Right in Sweden: Growing Slowly,” in Is Europe on the “Right” Path? Right-Wing Extremism and Right-Wing Populism in Europe, ed. Nora Langenbacher and Britta Schellenberg (Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2011); Peter Holtz and Wolfgang Wagner, “Essentialism and Attribution of Monstrosity in Racist Discourse: Right-Wing Internet Postings about Africans and Jews,” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 19.6 (2009); Ugo Corte and Bob Edwards, “White Power Music and the Mobilization of Racist Social Movements,” Music and Arts in Action, 1.1 (2008): 4-20. 20 Liz Fekete, “Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right,” Race and Class, 48.1 (2006). 15

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connected to specific expressions of masculine ideals.21 In Kimmel’s research on former (Swedish) neo-Nazis, he concludes that masculine identities and practices are far more important factors than political ideology for recruiting new activists to far-right movements. Masculinity is performed in violent practices and reflected in narratives of historicized ideals (in myths of great warriors, etc.).22 Violence and overt expressions of masculinity are key components in the formation of fascist political identity, and organizations express ideals of hyper-masculinity—an exaggerated, violent, male identity.23

Analyzing YouTube Video Clips The study is based on a qualitative analysis of 223 clips from the channels belonging to five Swedish far-right organizations. The channel belonging to the most violent group, SMR, is also the most active with 128 distributed clips. The second-largest channel belongs to Nordisk Ungdom (NU), an ethno-pluralist/identitarian youth organization with 52 clips. The other three channels are less active compared to SMR’s and NU’s. The total number of clips has generated just under 1.5 million views, and the five channels have around 2000 subscribers in total.24 The methodological approach is inspired by Norman Fairclough’s (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis focuses on the relation between mediated representation and social and political practices and conditions. All the videos have been examined, and the analysis is structured in two steps. First, eight different thematic categories are identified in the total corpus of 223 clips. These categories are constructed from the main features within the manifest content of the clips (i.e., in the visual, textual and audial elements of the content). The eight categories also build on a distinction between clips depicting external versus internal activities of the five organizations. The clips pertaining to external activities are thematically categorized as the manifestation clip, the confrontation clip, 21 Abby L. Ferber, “Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors: The Construction of Masculinity in Mythopoetic and White Supremacist Discourse,” Men and Masculinities, 3.1 (2000): 30-56. 22 Michael Kimmel, “Racism as Adolescent Male Rite of Passage: Ex-Nazis in Scandinavia,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36.2 (2007). 23 Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” in Fascism - Critical Concepts in Political Science. Volume V. Post-War Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (London/New York: Routledge, 2004). 24 All the figures are based on the information published on YouTube (retrieved March 9, 2013).

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and the direct action clip. The clips representing internal practices are classified as the outdoor clip and the physical exercise clip. In addition to the clips that represent explicit external and internal practices, there are also the thematic categories of interview, humor and news clips. A couple of the videos (often, featuring collage) are multi-thematic, but clips usually represent one distinct category. A few clips fall outside this classification; among them is one with only music and no images. If we look at the viewing statistics for the eight categories, the manifestation clip generates most views, followed by the direct action clip and the confrontational clip. Less popular categories are interview and news. The humor clips are few in number but generate comparatively high viewing rates. Thematic Category Manifestation Clip Confrontation Clip Direct Action Clip Outdoor Clip Physical Exercise Clip Humor Clip Interview Clip News Clip

Features Public demonstrations and meetings Verbal confrontation (phone calls, public confrontation with adversaries), physical confrontation (with security guards, police, opponents) Thematic and staged direct action in public spaces Forest hiking, wilderness activities, farm work Martial arts training, sports activities Ridiculing political opponents and police. Slapstick from activities Interviews with activists, oral announcements News items (of amateurish character)

Table 1 Thematic Categories and Main Features of Video Clips Second, the analysis moves on to scrutinize the qualitative aspects of the clips. This step includes depictions of the various modes/styles, aesthetic features, political discourses and the ideological function of the clips in each thematic category. Mode/style refers to the particular way the clips construct a relationship between the producer and the audience.25 For example, by emphasizing the experiences of camaraderie, physical 25

Fairclough, Media Discourse, 77.

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exercise or violence, the clips address a certain collective identity (or experience) within the audience. The study also examines the aesthetic features of the clips—for example, the specific use of music, the editing techniques and the selected visuals in the clips. The political discourse of the clips refers to the primary political message disseminated in the material. The political discourse could be articulated by a narrator or by the textual and visual messages from the demonstrations (for example, by recording a public demonstration against immigration). The ideological function refers to the specific ideological potential of the clips. When addressing the ideological potential, the analysis highlights the societal (power) dimension of the video content.26 However deploying the term ideological function, does not imply that audiences are passive; rather, it emphasizes the socio-political potentiality of the video material.27 The disclosing of ideological functions is made possible by analyzing the specific combinations of mode/style, aesthetic features and political discourse in relation to the political sociology (i.e., the socio-cultural and political context) of the extreme right.28 Since the analysis is centered on the thematic categories of clips and the general patterns in the visual material, nuances and details are not the primary focus. This also implies that a more in-depth, sign-centered approach is abandoned in favor of a broader and more contextual one.

Video Clips on YouTube In this section, the qualitative aspects of the clips will be presented thematically. The analysis will follow the qualitative properties of the clips pertaining to the eight different categories with a focus on the modes/styles, aesthetic features, political discourses and the ideological function of the clips. The categories are ordered according to the volume of clips, beginning with the most common category.

26

Ibid., 45ff. Ibid. 28 Elizabeth Poole, “The case of Geert Wilders: Multiculturalism, Islam, and Identity in the UK,” Journal of Religion in Europe, 5(2) (2012): 162-191; Fairclough, Media Discourse. 27

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Category

Mode/style

Manifestation Clip

Drama, unity, intensity, victimization, masculinity, aggressiveness

Confrontation Clip

Realism, drama, victimization, fearlessness, latent violence

Direct Action Clip

Spectacularity, masculinity, creativity, playfulness

Outdoor Clip

Pseudomilitarism, physical health, camaraderie, masculinity Hypermasculinity, camaraderie, violence

Dramatic visuals and music, realism, nature (naturalism) Visuals of physical challenges, dramatic music

Politics as play, ridiculing opponents, humor

Music (humorous), collage style editing, slapsticks

Physical Exercise Clip

Humor Clip

Aesthetic feature Music (dramatic), multisemiotic editing, dramatic visuals, close-ups Visual realism, documentary style editing, dramatic music Theatrical visual shots, music (popular and/or dramatic)

Political discourse Antiimmigration, nationalism, racepolitics, violence against women Victims of unjust (state) power actors

Far-rightwing politics targeting societal institutions and processes Racial biopolitics, soundness, culturalhistory, everyday life Racial biopolitics, historicized physical ideals, everyday life

Antiimmigration, antiantifascism

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Ideological function Consolidating belief, showcasing mobilizing capability

Showcasing fearlessness, group cohesion, producing sympathy Mobilizing capability, showcasing street politics

Showcasing strength, endurance and collective force Group cohesion, loyalty, capability to use force, normalizing social practices Popularizing extreme rightwing politics

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Interview Clip

Rationales for far right-wing activism

Visual realism, talking heads, closeups of activists

News Clip

Realism, alternative news

Reportage style, editing, voice-over, public images

Internal discourses about loyalty, collective identities, etc. Antiimmigration

Recruitment of new activists, empowerment of members

Alternative to mainstream media

Table 2 Summary of Thematic Qualities in Far Right-Wing Videos

The Manifestation Clip All five organizations have published clips recording demonstrations and/or public meetings. A common aesthetic element within the clips is added dramatic music (particularly in the SMR clips) and nationalist rock/pop (particularly, in the NU clips). The combination of music and images creates an intense dramatic mode. One recurrent technique is to combine edited series of images, a soundtrack with suggestive music, and an audio file with speeches from the movement's activists. The combination of these three elements creates an impression of a greater number of participants (than in reality), a mode of intensity, and a political rationale for the event. The three elements are sometimes complemented by a series of explanatory (rolling) captions with political messages or a textual framing. The political messages in the demonstrations are downplayed in favor of emotional modes representing strength, unity and force; and, even if political content is present, a more dramaturgical setting consisting of a series of images, music and arbitrary speech constitutes an affective visual politics. When political discourses surface, they tend to center on “mass immigration,” the “celebration of nationalist heroes,” “the violence of the left,” and “violence against women.” The discursive dimensions of the demonstration clips depicting “violence against women” are interesting. First, a couple of clips show demonstrations that exploit media attention on a rape case, and then (re)frame it as a result of mass immigration—thus, attributing violence against women to immigration and immigrants.

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Second, clips connect the issue of violence against women to a general public debate that entails a potentially widespread public pathos. By connecting violence against women to immigration, the clips utilize a classical colonial trope that upholds white women’s sexuality as a symbol in the struggle for European values.29 In the clips from SMR, the violence is framed as an on-going attack against the white race, thus reflecting the idea that the female body is collectively central to the “white nation.”30 One frequent mode in the demonstration clip is collective victimization.31 The visual framing depicts the movement as an innocent victim of leftwing attacks and mainstream political society. This comes to the fore in sequences that frame far-right-wing movements as victims of police force and in images that show physical confrontation with security guards in public spaces—often, with visual close-ups. Within these clips, there is an underlying aggressive mode that appears in images of aggressive activists and confrontational behavior. The SMR clips reveal a particularly resilient mode of male aggression. In several clips, violence comes to the fore in confrontational situations. A couple of clips contain images of what looks like attacks from counter-demonstrators but also various fights with the police. One important ideological function of the demonstration clip is to showcase the capacity to mobilize activists, and to emphasize social cohesion within the group. The latter is visible in representations of camaraderie, loyalty and bravery. These clips fulfill both external and internal socio-political purposes. They highlight internal social unity, and they simultaneously articulate the capability of using violence, if necessary. The manifestation clip also includes representations of public meetings. Both SMR and NU publish series of clips that depict activities in public spaces. SMR publishes clips called “struggle reports,” which include images of public speeches, musical events and activists distributing flyers, etc. In some of the clips, aggressiveness prevails; and, in one clip, activists parade with black shields depicting white spray-painted hanging ropes. In the clip, an activist hands out flyers to people in the streets; and, in a conversation with a passing citizen, one of the activists declares, “I

29 Diana Mulinari and Anders Neergaard, “Sverigedemokraterna och det teoretiska fältet,” in Det vita fältet, ed. Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt (Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensis 41, 2010), 71. 30 Lööw, Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999, 350. 31 Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko, “Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways toward Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence, 20.3 (2008): 415-433.

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personally think that we should drag out the local politicians who are responsible for this and hang them from a tree.”

The Confrontation Clip The confrontation clip involves verbal attacks on political opponents, media representatives, police, government officials and private individuals but also physical confrontation with political antagonists. The confrontation clips are mainly on SMR's channel. Some include recorded phone calls in which different individuals are verbally confronted by one of SMR's leading figures. In the clips subjects are provoked by a series of questions. The visuals include photographs of the person confronted and photos of the activist. These clips fulfill two distinct functions. They represent SMR as the victim of injustices, and they show that SMR is a fearless and confrontational organization. Since SMR deploys politically motivated violence, the clips harbor a latent threat. They articulate a form of covert violence in which SMR make it clear that it monitors certain adversaries that are defined as enemies of the movement. One aspect of confrontation appears in sequences in which SMR activists engage in verbal and physical confrontation with police and security guards. These clips often end with activists being arrested by police. Police confrontation is provoked in order to produce a form of political victimization; simultaneously, the video producers appropriate the logic of mass media (in this case, conflict and violence) in order to gain public attention.32 The clips often include explanatory captions that define the movement as a victim of political repression and state brutality. By constructing visual and textual modes of “repression,” elements of victimization surface in the clips. The physical confrontation with police and security guards emphasizes the visual elements that reflect internal discipline, collective action and the physical ability of activists. Physical confrontations tend to romanticize the movement's strength and determination in relation to an unjust and powerful state enemy. Some clips contain scenes from confrontations with political opponents, such as anti-racist demonstrators. However, the quantity and intensity of recorded violence is limited; the clips include images of minor scuffles and commotion rather than outright physical violence. The content suggests that it is more about demonstrating the movement's ability to use force if necessary rather than 32

Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).

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showcasing direct violence. There is also a juridical aspect to reflect upon here – the footage can be used as evidence against the movement’s activists. The confrontation clips represent activists as if they are under attack by the established society. Within the total corpus of manifestation and confrontation clips, it is primarily the state apparatus that is portrayed as the most important enemy, which also reflects a more modern neo-fascist discourse.33 Immigration and immigrants are viewed as a symptom of a malicious political system and the by-product of an “anti-white” or “antiSwedish” state apparatus rather than the root of the problem. This tactical shift must be understood in light of the political developments of the extreme right.34 By constructing an image of the organization as victim rather than violent attacker, the extreme right groups aim to evoke sympathy in the viewer. The clips portray activities conducted within a constitutionally-protected framework—for example, by questioning specific practices of decision-making or legislation. The political victimization is constructed with simple dramatic effects—for example, through the use of dramatic music and explanatory captions. The ideological function of the confrontation clips is to evoke sympathy for the activists and to showcase the unity and fearlessness of the organizations.

The Direct Action Clip Recording spectacular actions in public spaces is another way to disseminate images of mobilization capacity. The direct action clip documents and preserves small and, sometimes, very short, public events. And by editing together a series of images, speeches and captions, the actions become detached from physical space. By publishing and circulating videos, the direct action receives a new audience. Nordisk Ungdom has staged several unconventional direct actions in public spaces, and these are primarily arranged for video production purposes (in most of the clips, there is no visible public audience). The clips are playful and demonstrate creativity. In one NU clip, images depict activists distributing flyers in a confetti-like manner, all accompanied by a techno music track. The NU clips focus on spectacular and playful visual effects rather than aggressive behavior and hyper-masculinity. The political discourses 33 Cas Mudde, “Conclusion: Defending Democracy and the Extreme Right,” in Western Democracies and the New Extreme Right Challenge, ed. Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), 196. 34 Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins, eds. Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe (London/New York: Routledge, 2012).

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articulated in the clips target institutions in society such as the public unemployment service, Goldman Sachs and private employment agencies. But they also target global warfare and sexual assaults against women. The political aspects of the clips are interesting since they tend to be concerned with socio-economic issues such as unemployment, economic injustice, or geo-political power structures, topics that usually attract attention from the political left rather than right-wing extremists. The NU clips depicting direct actions are clearly inspired by the tactics of the new social right, who often reframe and embed overt racism and xenophobia into discourses of social inequality. The strategy of recontextualizing left-wing discourse has been adopted, with some success, by neo-fascist groups in Italy and Germany.35

Outdoor and Physical Exercise Clips Clips depicting internal activities of the organizations include various practices in outdoor locations. These clips contain images of forest trekking and other exercises in the wilderness. The modes in the outdoor clips emphasize physical challenges and camaraderie—for example, by portraying activists trekking together with heavy equipment in difficult terrain or taking baths in icy lakes. In the SMR clip “Hiking in Dalarna”, four young men are carrying timber in a snow-covered forest. The clip is described in the following way: Last weekend, activists from the Resistance Movement’s fifth nest, once again, went on a wilderness adventure into the deepest forest of Dalarna. This time, the activists dared to go on a tougher adventure than ever before.36

In the clip, one of the activists is acting like a military officer who commands the others to head out into the winter night. After the explanatory introduction, a series of images depicting night-time forest hiking are accompanied with dramatic music. The clip also contains rolling captions that explain “Activity, Borlänge 021812, 1 hour of sleep [in] the last 48 hours, marching for 45 kilometers. No food, barely any water. Constant challenges.”37 35 Liz Fekete, Peddlers of Hate: the Violent Impact of the European Far Right (London: Institute of Race Relations, 2012); Marina Peunova, “The Transfer of Ideas along a Cultural Gradient.” 36 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAOMYO9q6wQ (retrieved March 9, 2013). 37 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAOMYO9q6wQ (retrieved March 9, 2013).

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Sometimes, the recorded hikes are centered within a cultural-historic discourse—for example, in the clip “Ancient Relic Hike outside Stockholm,” published on FNU’s channel.38 To combine an interest in Swedish history with physical activities may seem harmless, but the practices must be understood in a wider political context. The outdoor activities and the pseudo-military practices are rooted in a racial ideology of physical health and reflect a larger discourse of racial biopolitics. The emphasis on physical health and purity draws on pre-modern forms of masculinity.39 Furthermore, these elements also recall the aesthetic ideals of the Third Reich.40 This emphasis on physical purity reveals the effort of actors in the far-right-wing milieu to distance themselves from the white power music scene of the 1980s-1990s—an attempt to regenerate fascist ideals from the 1920s-1930s.41 The mode of physical health and soundness is particularly evident in the clips from FNU and in some clips from SMR. Images of outdoor activities and physical challenges are intended to normalize the social practices of far right-wing movements. By providing counterimages to prevailing perceptions of violent and vicious young males, the clips challenge the dominant framing of the right-wing extremist.42 Social practices become embedded with camaraderie and high spirits, and sometimes the activists come to the fore as a kind of nationalist Boy Scouts. Another category of outdoor clips includes activists undertaking farm work. For example, the clip “Swedish Resistance Movement: Farmers Day” is described in the following way: “On the weekend of 12-13 September, activists from the SMR—mostly city residents—visited rural Skåne to help a farmer with his work.”43 There are several clips on SMR’s channel with a similar content. In the clips, images of activists participating in various farm activities are combined with harmonious music. Some of the clips contain the caption “blood and soil,” which connects the performances to a historic idea of the white race and territorial heritage. They filter traditional aesthetics of a Romantic idealization of nature through a fascist anti-modernism. In one clip, a group of activists with families are walking across a green field to a grove, where one of the leaders gives a speech. Wearing a dark suit, the activist reads from a notebook: “Children, parents. 38

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exYXi1Q6lKs (retrieved March 9, 2013). Kimmel, “Racism as Adolescent Male Rite of Passage.” 40 Ingmar Karlsson and Arne Ruth, Samhället som teater. Estetik och politik i tredje riket (Stockholm: Liber, 1984). 41 Lööw, Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999. 42 Back, “Aryans reading Adorno.” 43 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3_QcVQbRSg (retrieved March 9, 2013). 39

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It is the blood of our race that gives us life.”44 Clips displaying neo-fascist discourse in pretty countryside scenery constitute a form of propaganda that echoes older newsreels from the 1930s and 1940s. Several clips depict various forms of physical exercise—often including martial arts. The physical exercise clips highlight physical challenges and camaraderie, and they emphasize the movement’s ability to use violence. The images of physical combat are combined with text captions. In one SMR clip (titled “Viking combat”), activists are practicing wrestling and archery with a historic reference to the Viking Age.45 In two other clips, activists are running on a military obstacle course. In one clip, activists from both SvP and FNU are taking part in an “airsoft” battle in the woods. The clip starts with a rolling caption that highlights the camaraderie of the activity, and the clip is accompanied by the music track “There Is Only War” performed by industrial metal band Raubtier. The physical exercise clip highlights physical strength and salubrity. Modes of camaraderie, physical challenges and the use of violence characterize the visual propaganda of the internal activities. Violence comes to the fore as selfdefense, but must be understood in relation to the actual violence performed by organizations of the extreme right - physical training and self-defense are preparations for violent racial struggle.46 The main ideological function of the outdoor and the physical exercise clips is the formation of collective (socio-political) identities. Friendship, loyalty, and physical challenges are identity markers that connect far rightwing practices to other popular movements in society (such as sports). Neo-fascist actors are basically feeding common social needs that attract people to collective milieus. In the extreme-right environment, these identity markers become saturated with a discourse of racial biopolitics. The cohesion is emphasized through the physical and social activities performed by a determined and collegial movement.

The Humor Clip One category that stands out in the total corpus is the humor clip. Humor is mainly used to mock anti-racist counter-demonstrators to achieve entertaining effects. One way to create a humorous effect is to repeat short sequences of footage of political opponents and add music to make the opponent look foolish. There are also examples of police officers 44

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-esoiVPACdg (retrieved March 9, 2013). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiYZeaJAM8sandbpctr=1369481354 (retrieved May 21, 2013). 46 Lööw, Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999. 45

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getting ridiculed. One clip depicts activists placing a large banner over a city tunnel (located in a rather inaccessible position). When the police show up, the speed increases and music from the British “Benny Hill” television show is added to the footage. The sequence resembles classic slapstick and ends with the activists climbing down from the top of the tunnel. The clip also depicts activists in verbal confrontation with uniformed police officers, who threaten the activist holding the camera. In the clip, you can hear one officer threaten the activist with physical violence if he does not stop recording. In the editing the threat is repeated several times and, later in the clip, the identity of the police officer is revealed. Hence, SMR portrays itself as consisting of political activists with a sense of humor but also as victims of police harassment and intimidation. The clip combines the generic elements from the direct action, confrontation and humor clips, and it is one of the most viewed clips on SMR’s channel. Besides ridiculing anti-racist opponents, NU also publishes clips in which the humorous effect originates from the action of NU activists. One clip features an activist dancing with the caption “OK, we can’t dance. But we know politics.”47 NU has also published a blooper clip entitled “Best of Nordic Youth” in which they combine a series of images of activists falling and throwing snowballs and confetti. The clip also contains images of activists throwing snowballs at the windows of a refugee center for children. So, by framing attacks (even if they are merely symbolic) against a refugee center in a humorous mode, the violence appears implicit. In another clip from the same event, the leader of NU tries to hand out teddy bears to the manager of the center. After being refused, the activists ridicule one of the refugees standing outside the center smoking a cigarette. These clips are clearly aimed at a younger audience. With a simple message, “refugee children are not really children;” and, with these strategic visual elements, they seem to appeal to younger supporters. Humor becomes a populist tool in the struggle for media attention; and, by ridiculing political opponents, refugees and other subjects; the clips constitute a form of negative campaigning.

Interview and News Clips In 2011, Nordisk Ungdom launched a campaign called “Get Involved” and published a series of recorded interviews with activists. In the clips, activists explain why they became members and why they are committed 47

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiCmOhJ610U (retrieved March 9, 2013).

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to the organization. One of the activists emphasizes the importance of the Internet, and he explains that one of the contributing factors for joining was the on-going discussion he had with other activists on an online forum. On SMR’s channel, there are clips with recorded communiqués. With regard to setting and function, these resemble the interviews on NU’s channel with one exception - these are prewritten speeches recited by a leading activist in SMR. In the communiqués, the activist is talking about the social and political obligations that activists need to fulfill. These clips seem to have an explicit internal function since they highlight the demands of commitment and loyalty to the organization. SvP produces some interesting clips of a journalistic character. The videos are centered on immigrant-related topics. In one clip, the owner of a guesthouse used as an asylum accommodation is interviewed. In another clip, some students are interviewed about the anxiety they experience in the community after the arrival of refugee children. In the clip, several youngsters (some identifiable and some not) explain that they feel “threatened, disgusted” and that they are “frightened” by the refugee children. In the clip, the reporter claims that several “young girls have been harassed by refugee children.”48 In one clip, the names of some juveniles accused of an aggravated assault on an older man are revealed. News clips are not very prominent compared to other categories, but they are noteworthy because they exemplify an attempt to produce alternative online news television. The news clips also resemble news television items published on more established online newspapers platforms. Selecting events and framing them from a racist point of view and publishing them as alternative news items is an approach utilized by far right-wing online news sites.49

Conclusion The video clips on five YT channels belonging to the far right-wing milieu reveal a multifaceted content that serves internal and external political purposes. The “articulations” of political identities and practices in the clips, disclose a multifaceted connection between video production/distribution and socio-political organization and mobilization.50 The following five concluding points might shed some light on this relationship. 48

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nht1Q0o9oI (retrieved March 9, 2013). Ekman, “ProViolence and Antidemocratic Right-Wing.” 50 van Zoonen, Vis and Mihelj, “Performing Citizenship on YouTube.” 49

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First, far right-wing video activism on YouTube is about achieving and increasing public visibility.51 The audience for the publication and distribution of clips on a commercial social media platform is potentially infinite even though the actual audience is limited.52 The published clips are also circulated on other platforms; they are embedded or linked in blogs, websites, etc., facilitating a relationship between the extreme right web and the commercial Internet.53 This enables far right-wing actors to connect with new audiences outside their usual channels of communication. Consequently, participation on commercial platforms discloses new dynamics of alternative media distribution.54 Despite their opposition to mainstream media, far right-wing actors appropriate commercial platforms such as YouTube for their own purposes. Second, video activism is deployed in order to mobilize and strengthen activists and sympathizers. By consolidating belief and showcasing fearlessness and mobilization capability the video clips articulate collective identity and social cohesion. The video content’s relation to offline political and social practices provides a rationale and opportunity of participation.55 Third, by publishing video clips on YouTube, the organizations are able to showcase a diversity of practices and identities, seeking to modify the common historical perception of far right-wing politics. Seemingly moving away from underground activities, the dominating modus operandi of the 1980s-1990s,56 public visibility and everydayness come to the fore as key strategies. The movements represent a diverse range of political and social activities. In the clips, we meet fairly ordinary young men who indulge in outdoor activities, participate in public meetings, and speak directly and publicly to the viewer. Even though the clips on the SMR channel highlight confrontation, homo-social aggressiveness, and latent violence, there is also a great deal of material with socially accepted content in their clips. A substantial number of clips portrays outdoor life and (male) socialization in superficially depoliticized forms. 51

Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching; Bart Cammaerts, “Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure,” European Journal of Communication, 27.2 (2012): 117-134. 52 Tina Askanius and Julie Uldam, “Online Social Media for Radical Politics: Climate Change Activism on YouTube,” International Journal of Electronic Governance, 4.1-2 (2011): 69-84. 53 Ekman, “ ProViolence and Antidemocratic Right-Wing.” 54 Chris Atton, Alternative Media (London: Sage, 2002). 55 van Zoonen, Vis and Mihelj, “Performing Citizenship on YouTube.” 56 Lööw, Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999.

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The modes of camaraderie and soundness reflect a regenerated neofascist culture. Even though physical exercise appears in apolitical settings, it’s essentially an extension of the paramilitary culture that has prevailed in the far-right milieu throughout the post-war period. For example, in the physical exercise clips there are no explicit political discourses; instead, the political meaning is embedded in the historical context. Innocent forest hikes reflect the preparations for a violent, political struggle. The visibility and normalization are elements of an ongoing socio-political collective identity process within the various groups. The clips enhance certain identity markers, such as physical health, masculine homo-sociality and companionship, and reject other identity markers.57 The clips reproduce a framework of socio-political morality by detaching possible elements that have signified the practices of far-rightwing groups during the past (for example recurrent media images of drunk and offensive neo-fascist activists in the 1980s- 1990s). Fourth, extreme right video activism is a form of political action repertoire with specific (media) qualities. By representing different activities and political actions in a short visual format, the various practices are distributed for propaganda purposes. Video activism implies that certain practices, such as direct action, are primarily adapted for dissemination on YouTube. This is particularly evident in the NU videos. NU’s spectacular actions in which activists stage performance-like protests are primarily executed for the purpose of online dissemination. The recorded events are extended in time and space, and constitute a form of timeless visual activism. When the time-space realm of political action becomes extended, the recorded actions also become independent of and detached from the actual event. The vast possibilities for circulation of YouTube clips also show that one of the key objectives of visual activism is the extension of political action in space. The final aspect of video activism on YouTube relates the aesthetic dimension of far right-wing ideology. By producing clips with an affective intent, far-right-wing actors utilize aesthetic elements to access experiences and emotions within the audience. Simple and highly affective symbols and messages are combined with visual and audio elements— producing a cultural politics of emotions.58 The aesthetic dimension of fascist ideology is an important feature in the political communication of far-right-wing actors. By mainly addressing the viewer’s emotions, video

57 58

Back, “Aryans Reading Adorno.” Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79, 22.2 (2004): 117-139.

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activism becomes an orchestrator of affective politics.59 Visual content signifying friendship, resistance, motivation, collective action, political decisiveness and masculinity are combined with dramatic music and discursive (moving) captions in order to construct an aesthetically-coded propaganda.60 The video clips could, therefore, best be described as affective mediations of fascist ideology—an idealism embedded in a politics of the will. There is also a recurrent discourse that frames the discourses of the extreme right as a reflection of a vox populi—in other words that the organizations are expressing a muted and suppressed will of the people.61

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 79, 22.2 (2004): 117139. Askanius, Tina and Julie Uldam. “Online Social Media for Radical Politics: Climate Change Activism on YouTube.” International Journal of Electronic Governance, 4.1-2 (2011): 69-84. Atton, Chris. Alternative Media. London: Sage, 2002. Back, Les. “Aryans Reading Adorno.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25.4 (2002): 628-651. Back, Les, Michael Keith and John Solomos. “Technology, Race and NeoFascism in a Digital Age: The New Modalities of Racist Culture.” Patterns of Prejudice, 30.2 (1996): 3-27. Balibar, Étienne. “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Edited by Étienne Balibar, and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior.” New German Critique, 17 [1930] (1979): 120-128. Betz, Hans-Georg. “The Growing Threat of the Radical Right.” In RightWing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Peter Merkl and Leonard Weinberg. London/New York: Routledge, 2003. 59

Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior,” New German Critique, 17 [1930] (1979): 120-128; Back, “Aryans reading Adorno.” 60 Kimmel, “Racism as Adolescent Male Rite of Passage.” 61 Roger Eatwell, “Introduction. The New Extreme Right Challenge,” in Western Democracies and the New Extreme Right Challenge, ed. Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde (London/New York: Routledge, 2004). Acknowledgment: I would like to express my gratitude to the Swedish Media Council for financial support.

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—. “Against the System: Radical Right-Wing Populism’s Challenge to Liberal Democracy.” In Movements Of Exclusion: Radical Right-Wing Populism in the Western World. Edited by Jens Rydgren. Hauppauge/NewYork: Nova Science Publishers, 2005. Cammaerts, Bart. “Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure.” European Journal of Communication, 27.2 (2012): 117134. Corte, Ugo and Bob Edwards. “White Power Music and the Mobilization of Racist Social Movements” Music and Arts in Action, 1.1 (2008): 420. Eatwell, Roger. “Introduction. The New Extreme Right Challenge.” In Western Democracies and the New Extreme Right Challenge. Edited by Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde. London/New York: Routledge, 2004. Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism.” In Fascism - Critical Concepts in Political Science. Volume V. Post-War Fascism. Edited by Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman. London/New York: Routledge, 2004. Ekman, Mattias. “Pro-Violence and Antidemocratic Right-Wing Extremist Messages on the Internet.” In Pro-Violence and Anti-Dmocratic Messages on the Internet. Stockholm: Statens Medieråd, 2014. Fairclough, Norman. Media Discourse. London: Arnold, 1995. Fekete, Liz. “Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right.” Race and Class, 48.1 (2006): 1-22. —. Peddlers of Hate: the Violent Impact of the European Far Right. London: Institute of Race Relations, 2012. Ferber, Abby. L. “Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors: The Construction of Masculinity in Mythopoetic and White Supremacist Discourse.” Men and Masculinities, 3.1 (2000): 30-56. Futrell, Rober, Pete Simi and Simon Gottschalk. “Understanding Music in Movements: The White Power Music Scene.” The Sociological Quarterly, 47.2 (2006): 275-304. Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991. Holtz, Peter and Wolfgang Wagner. “Essentialism and Attribution of Monstrosity in Racist Discourse: Right-Wing Internet Postings about Africans and Jews.” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 19.6 (2009): 411-425. Karlsson, Ingmar and Arne Ruth. Samhället som teater. Estetik och politik i tredje riket. Stockholm: Liber, 1984.

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Kimmel, Michael. “Racism as Adolescent Male Rite of Passage: Ex-Nazis in Scandinavia.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36.2 (2007): 202-218. Lööw, Helene. Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999. Den rasistiska undergroundrörelsen: musiken, myterna, riterna. Stockholm: Ordfront, 2000. —. “The Extreme Right in Sweden: Growing Slowly.” In Is Europe on the “Right” Path? Right-Wing Extremism and Right-Wing Populism in Europe. Edited by Nora Langenbacher and Britta Schellenberg. Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2011. Mammone, Andrea, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins. Eds. Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe. London/New York: Routledge, 2012. McCauley, Clark and Sophia Moskalenko. “Mechanisms of Political Radicalization: Pathways toward Terrorism.” Terrorism and Political Violence, 20.3 (2008): 415-433. Mudde, Cas. “Conclusion: Defending Democracy and the Extreme Right.” In Western Democracies and the New Extreme Right Challenge. Edited by Roger Eatwell and Cas Mudde. London/New York: Routledge, 2004. Mulinari, Diana and Anders Neergaard. “Sverigedemokraterna och det teoretiska fältet.” In Det vita fältet. Edited by Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt. Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensis 41, 2010. Peunova, Marina. “The Transfer of Ideas along a Cultural Gradient: The Influence of the European New Right on Aleksandr Panarin’s New Euroasianism.” In Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe. Edited by Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins. London/New York: Routledge, 2012. Poole, Elizabeth. “The Case of Geert Wilders: Multiculturalism, Islam, and Identity in the UK.” Journal of Religion in Europe, 5(2) (2012): 162-191. Rydgren, Jens. “Den radikala högerns sociologi.” In Det vita fältet. Edited by Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt. Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensis 41, 2010. Statzel, R. Sophie. “Cybersupremacy: The New Face of White Supremacist Activism.” In Digital Media and Democracy. Edited by Megan Boler. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008. van Zoonen, Lisbeth, Farida Vis and Sabina Mihelj. “Performing Citizenship on YouTube: Activism, Satire and Online Debate around

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the Anti-Islam Video Fitna.” Critical Discourse Studies, 7(4) (2010): 249-262. Wåg, Mathias. “Nationell kulturkamp - från vit maktmusik till metapolitik.” In Det vita fältet. Edited by Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt. Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensis 41, 2010.

You Tube Channels Svenska Motståndsrörelsen http://www.youtube.com/user/MotstandsMedia/ (retrieved March 9, 2013) Svenskarnas Parti http://www.youtube.com/user/Realistenfilm/ (retrieved March 9, 2013) Förbundet Nationell Ungdom http://www.youtube.com/user/Forbundetmedia/ (retrieved March 9, 2013) Nordisk Ungdom http://www.youtube.com/user/Etnopluralist/ (retrieved March 9, 2013) Nordiska Nationalsocialister http://www.youtube.com/user/NNS/ (retrieved March 9, 2013)

PART VI COMPARATIVE REFLECTIONS ON TOTALITARIAN WORLDVIEWS

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN TOTALITARIAN TRENDS TODAY MARK EPSTEIN

In my essay on Pasolini I emphasized he thought contemporary Italian neocapitalist consumer society was more totalitarian than the ‘classic’ fascist regime that had preceded it. Today a wide variety of authors have been focusing on the degradation of parliamentary ‘democracy’ and rise of new forms of totalitarianism in the West, concentrating on the de facto hegemon of the West, the Empire, the USA, as well as its faithful poodle and progenitor, the UK.1 The analyses vary in their focus and the severity of their diagnoses and prognoses, but their number and their urgency are in themselves empirical confirmation that something very serious is occurring. Most of the analyses focus on the relation between political institutions, economic agents, and conditions of emancipation, participation and self-activation (or lack thereof) in civil society. These in turn affect the analysis of the kind of state that has evolved and is evolving in the USA (and the UK). Most focus on developments on the parliamentary2—totalitarian continuum that are closer to, develop, and/or emphasize totalitarian forms of control. 1

F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009); Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2007), in which the author lists the ten steps used to transition from a parliamentary, constitutional, government to a fascistic one (and discusses each step); Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre: a Warning (London: Verso, 2015), principally about the UK; James Meek, Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else (London: Verso, 2014). 2 I don’t use “democratic” because very few Western parliamentary systems approximate actual, diffuse, participatory, democratic practices.

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F. William Engdahl focuses on the geostrategic impact of the Empire, especially after 9/11.. He shows how the Empire used the so-called “end of the Cold War” (after which George Bush started invoking, and aiming for, a “New World Order”) and the 9/11 attacks as crises to exploit in order to deepen and entrench its forms of global control, to aim for the sort of planetary Empire the Third Reich had envisioned in its dreams of a “Tausend Jahre Reich” (with intentional eschatological implications3 to rival biblical ones).4 These forms of control escalated by orders of magnitude in many areas; its goals are clearly expressed in a phrase like “full spectrum dominance”: the depth and extent of the surveillance state enabled by ever more sophisticated electronic technologies are the prime example of this escalation. As part of the ‘public-private’ Trojan-horse tactics that take root with neoliberalism, many areas related to global institutions see escalating activity (leading to attacks on national sovereignty, especially of small nations): using two propagandistic tools, R2P (responsibility to protect) and “humanitarian imperialism”;5 foundations (the National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations) to promote coups (“regime changes”) camouflaged as “color revolutions;”6 and resorting to selective manipulations 3

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), also uses this eschatological conceit, this time more Hegelian in origin, to predict the EU is the kind of ‘institutional arrangement’ that humans most likely will experience at the end of time. I discuss the totalitarian characteristics of EU institutions such as the European Commission below. These prophetic ambitions are in themselves indicative of totalitarian (at least psychological) leanings, an elite prophetic cottage industry that mushroomed with the collapse of the USSR and the gradual political suicide or buy-in/out of the parties of virtually all the ‘old-left’ from communist to social-democratic. Manifest Destiny belongs in this eschatological category. 4 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: BasicBooks, 1997), advocates preempting the emergence of any possible rival power or alliance of powers to challenge the US (one of the figures whose strategy for the control of Western Europe and the Eurasian continent he endorses is Halford Mackinder, a British Empire ideologue, who recommended and pursued a divide and conquer strategy to prevent possible alliances between Germany and Russia by using Eastern Europe, cf. the Ukraine today). 5 Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). 6 There is an egregious history of the use of entities like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations by the National Security State for decades during the Cold War: cf. Edward H. Berman, The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: the Ideology of Philanthropy (Albany:

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of NGOs to promote foreign aggressions and the Empire’s agenda. The escalation is both rhetorical (responsibility to protect, humanitarian intervention),7 providing cover for assaults against civilian populations

State University of New York Press, 1983). The institutions with the very Orwellian names above, squarely belong in this tradition. Soros of course made and makes his billions by the most parasitic means possible: speculation not only within financial capitalism, but in currency exchange markets (no constructive investment purpose here whatsoever). The name adopted by the Soros Foundations refers to a famous book by Karl Popper, a very good friend of Friedrich von Hayek, probably the preeminent prophet of neoliberalism. Both Popper and von Hayek were members of the Mont Pelerin Society. These foundations are not only tools to entrench neoliberalism globally, but precursor models/examples of the ‘public-private’ partnerships that neoliberalism so adores. In addition to their frequent role as private-public partnerships, foundations also massively interfere in the political arena: the Bill Gates Foundation by promoting privatization in education, and insidiously and indirectly by damaging efforts at sustainable agriculture and technology. 7 These new forms of totalitarianism typically follow forms of ‘self-entitlement’ and justification that claim to be fighting (old forms of) totalitarianism. This trajectory is common among ideologues of neoliberalism, such as von Hayek and Popper, but also in its ‘fascistic turn’, from (extreme) left to right (Mussolini’s biography being exemplary in this case), typical of former red-diaper babies like David Horowitz. Samantha Power, one of the main architects of R2P and ‘humanitarian’ pretexts for the Empire’s aggressions, takes this form of selfjustification to new heights, writing the introduction to a new edition of Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), once the author is no longer alive to approve or not. She underscores Arendt’s late inclusion of Stalin’s Russia in the book, because it dovetails so well with the “opposite extremes but equal” cliché, even though she grudgingly has to admit that the book’s worth is more in the area of existential testimonial than of analysis or ground-breaking research. Arendt’s argument that national governments often violate their citizens rights is what most attracts Power, because national sovereignty is the institutional obstacle to global dominance that needs to be eliminated (marshaling the Disneyesque pretexts of humanitarianism). There is a microscopic omission in her account of the global situation: the Empire itself, its record of endless aggressions and support for the most varied forms of terrorism from the Contras to Islamic terrorists, to neofascists and ‘left’ terrorists in Italy during the years of the strategia della tensione, to dictatorial and totalitarian regimes globally (from colonels in Greece, to Franco in Spain to dictators in Portugal, to Latin America, to Africa, to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia). Practices, aspirations to power and global control that completely contradict the humanitarian claims (the world upside down once more). The rhetorical trick of trying to blame war-crimes on its victims by using the despicable Orwellian phrase “human shields” is just a tiny part of the New World Order’s propagandistic

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and their infrastructures (Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, etc.), that take terms like “freedom fighters” for mercenary terrorists in Central America, to entirely new levels of perversion, but also real, including completely unlegislated and uncontrolled new technologies like drones, or (ab)using NGOs, whose legitimate goals focus on helping civilian populations, to actually undermine these populations’ autonomy and well-being and advance the neoliberal totalitarian agenda (forms of camouflage/dissemblance and exploitation of the legal loopholes allowed/devised for ‘public-private’ partnerships).8 arsenal. On ‘humanitarian’ pretexts for imperialist intervention and control, cf. Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism, and David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 178. There are insidious uses of feedback mechanisms within the extreme perversions of this foreign policy: funding Islamic terrorists to overturn the Assad government in Syria, leads to millions of refugees, who overrun Europe. The EU proconsuls rather than (rationally) rethinking their support/allegiance of the Empire’s foreign policy, use billions they are not making available to Greece or to the 99% of their own countries to deal with a problem exclusively created by the Empire’s totalitarian foreign policy. The current ‘solution’, in violation of EU and international law, is a mindboggling ‘fly-wheel’ of migrant persecution and shunting between the EU (Greece mostly) and Turkey, enforced by NATO police actions, and with Turkey being granted ever more billions and institutional privileges by the EU to engage in this, while at the same time promising ‘safe-havens’ in Syria which in reality will be used for further promotion of Islamic terrorism by the Empire. This while Turkey is rapidly devolving into an ever more totalitarian state, with journalists and opposition politicians jailed for long terms for (allegedly) insulting Erdogan, the president. Cf. https://www.rt.com/news/334905-un-eu-turkey-deal/?utm_source =browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome and https:// www.rt.com/news/334837-turkey-migrants-eu-brussels/?utm_source=browser&utm medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome. 8 Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: the Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity (New York: Free Press, 1997), shows some precursor elements and components of this (ab)use of/by NGOs, in this case to aid dumping in underdeveloping countries by (especially agribusiness) corporate interests close to Empire so as to undermine and/or prevent independent and alternative forms of development by these nations or regions. The perverse role of many NGOs is also emphasized by David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 177 ff., where he discusses their role in both privatization and avoiding accountability (like foundations, they are another example of the ‘private-public’ partnership). NGOs’ connections to ‘humanitarian’ imperialism and the Empire’s aggressions abroad are discussed in many works, a good example is: https://interestingblogger.wordpress. com/2013/09/16/big-capitalists-and-human-rights-ngos/ The ambiguity of NGOs’ institutional presence is proven by the fact that Wolin, when concluding the work cited above, believes they might work against the new forms of totalitarianism.

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While Engdahl focuses on the totalitarian goals and implications of the Empire’s expanding geostrategic ambitions, including some of its institutional tools, Mike Lofgren analyses the domestic implications of the entrenchment of the “Deep State”, especially since 9/11. Both Engdahl’s and Lofgren’s accounts emphasize how frequent and essential the resort to fear is in incrementally hollowing out the institutions of the constitutional parliamentary system, the (by now virtually only alleged) separation of powers, in continuously enlarging the National Security9 State, while degrading the shadow of a ‘welfare’ state to virtually nothing. From the Truman Doctrine to making an intentionally opaque, undefined, “war on terrorism” a process with no possible end after 9/11 (including such egregious totalitarian tools, in violation of international law, as “preemptive strikes”), the institutions of the Deep State thus guarantee their endless parasitic growth at the expense of the economy and civil society hosting them. Homeland Security has become the third largest Cabinet department. Generating and exploiting fear of the other has been a fundamental tool of all totalitarian regimes (Jews, gypsies, Communists, or now ‘terrorists,’ Islamic radicals, etc.).10 Fears and crises are constantly used not just to expand the surveillance and repressive apparatuses of the state, but also to prop up, and in fact monopolistically further concentrate,

9

“National security” is a phrase invoked very frequently and almost always with no valid justification: a deep resemblance to the Mob counting on ‘omertà.’ It is also a complete oxymoron: it is not “national” as it only defends the interests of sectors of the oligarchy; for the 99% it is the opposite of “security:” in fact the 99% become the real ‘human shields’ in the implementation of its totalitarian policies. For the manner in which the Deep State exploits fear (complementary to ‘security’) at all levels, cf. Wolf, The End of America. 10 The insidious con of course being that, as in Italy with the funding of terrorism of both the extreme right and ‘left,’ of coups (one of the heads of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, had a long standing relationship with Prince Junio Valerio Borghese who attempted various golpes in Italy), of cultivation of ‘stay-behind’ sapper/terrorist groups like the NATO organized and funded project GLADIO, or of Masonic shadow and parallel governments (the P2 Masonic Lodge), much of Islamic terrorism has been organized and funded by the Empire, from Afghanistan with the aid of Pakistani intelligence, to Chechnya, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, etc. often with the help of friendly theocratic tyrannies like those in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. So a “war on terrorism” that won’t end not only because the criteria and adversaries are purposely undefined, but also because the Empire is constantly playing both sides to topple sovereign nations that are not surrendering to neoliberal impositions.

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the sector of finance capital,11 at taxpayer expense, rewarding criminal conduct at the top of the oligarchy while making poorer homeowners and taxpayers pay for the fraud of others, not performing any actual investigations, or introducing any serious forms of accountability and monitoring (“too big to fail” is the scare-tactic in this case, which just invites further expanded unaccountable conduct of the same kind, followed by future even more catastrophic crises).12 A DC insider and eyewitness, Lofgren’s account is invaluable for this reason. It is both an empirical documentation of many of the totalitarian practices that are 11

Lofgren, The Deep State, 153 ff. shows how the relevant departments and the judiciary have basically not been pursuing anti-trust enforcement at all for the last several decades. 12 The uses of fear and crises to actually reward and protect the perpetrators and further enable the predatory and totalitarian aspects of the neoliberal state against the civilian population it is supposed to represent are legion. Among the better of many accounts are: Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (London: Verso, 2013), which goes a long way towards demonstrating that the neoliberal state is the opposite of a hands-off ‘laissez-faire’ entity (a certain kind of left has also been under the delusion that the ‘the state’ is intrinsically a more ‘social-democratic’ and welfare oriented entity than the private sector: a delusion probably induced by the post-WWII decades, but which has little empirical backing), but pursues privatization(s) of remaining areas of the ‘commons’ for rent-extraction in an extremely activist manner, with many totalitarian components; and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), somewhat more superficial and generic, but she captures some of the overarching practices and culture. From a right-wing, libertarian, perspective cf. http://fff.org/2015/06/25/nationalsecuritys-states-crisis-racket/. The use of fear reaches down to the almost banal, as in the electoral advertisements for the two parties in the US, which are virtually never predicated on achievement(s) or constructive proposals, and almost always instead on fear of what the other party is, has done, might do, or will do. It is also included in the excellent analysis of neoliberalism by David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 162 ff., who specifically examines its connection to the ‘debt trap’ as a means of “accumulation by dispossession.” For neoliberal totalitarian capitalism’s reliance on debt as preeminent means of “rent-extraction” cf. Michael Hudson, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: a History of Theories of Polarization and Convergence in the International Economy (London: Pluto Press, 1992); Super Imperialism: the Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (London: Pluto Press, 2003), and http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/ 02/19/the-new-global-financial-cold-war/. For the most recent in depth account on global financialization and indebtedness, consult http://www. counterpunch.org/ 2016/02/19/the-next-global-financial-fault-line/. For the intentionality of these policies’ execution cf. John Perkins, The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2016).

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becoming routine in the Deep State, but also an observation of its growth and entrenchment not as something planned from above, by a classic totalitarian form of power where party and state are closely intertwined, but as something that is premised on the internal dynamics of Empire, the growth and metastases of monopoly capitalism.13 This transformation from a (barely outlined) welfare (Keynesian) state to a warfare National Security State, to a new kind of totalitarianism, is occurring mostly thanks to growth in the following areas: the military—‘security’—industrial complex, the financial sector, the high tech sector (Silicon Valley). All of them are following neoliberal, privatization induced, globalizing prescriptions. One omission by Lofgren is the Deep State’s relation to academia: the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association have both been drafted by the Deep State and involved in scandals as a consequence.14 Sheldon Wolin is a political scientist, and his account includes more connections to political theory, and to the political and institutional history of the US, than either Engdahl’s or Lofgren’s. He analyzes the capture of governmental institutions and functions by the ‘private’ (i.e. corporate) sector, hence the “incorporated” of the title,15 the kinds of managerial personnel that increasingly dominate this ‘public-private’ monstrum 13

This totalitarianism is consequently not predicated on a transparent, activist, often coercive, ‘molding of the masses,’ one in fact partially predicated on a fear of them (cf. Ortega y Gassett, often for plausible reasons, sometimes not), but rather on the subterranean homogenization achieved via consumerism. In fact today (actually, from a rational perspective, and one not historically conditioned by the elites, probably always) it is most of humanity that desperately needs to confront the elites: cf. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton & Co., 1995). 14 For the very extensive connections of the highest officers of the APA with the National Security State and torture, cf. The Guardian, July 14 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/14/apa-senior-officials-torture-reportcia; for the AAA collaboration in counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq, cf. (of many articles) http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/09/28/when-anthropologists-becomecounter-insurgents/. David H. Price has also written extensively on relations between anthropology and the practices of the National Security State, see Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 15 ‘Corporatism’ is an important component and ideal for many fascistic governments, one in some senses connected to the medieval corporations, in which an ideal of (enforced!) harmony of the distinct (the illusion/delusion being the ‘distinctions’ are only functional) parts of the ‘body politic’ is pursued. The ethos within Japanese corporate structures (still classically capitalist in their external functioning) also deeply relies on this kind of ‘corporatism.’

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(“managed democracy”),16 and how it is interconnected to an imperial and ever more intolerant and totalitarian state (“Superpower”), yet scarcely examines neoliberalism and the capitalist developments since the ‘Thatcher counter-revolution.’ Wolin uses “inverted totalitarianism” to underline it is the result of incremental processes of encroachment and degradation of some ‘traditional’ and supposedly constitutionally guaranteed governmental functions and actions, rather than the sudden capture of power by some party/state combo (entailing top-down, collectivist, and imposed (coercive, violent) forms of change and conformity). Tariq Ali captures an essential component of current totalitarianism: how it combines a public image of moderation at the ‘center’ with very extreme policies and institutional practices, turning the propagandistic nostrum used for preemptively silencing critics, “opposite extremes but equal” (referred to any alternatives on the left and right), upside-down. This extreme enforcement of ‘normalcy,’ of the Thatcherite TINA (There is No Alternative) ideology, analogous to Fukuyama ‘end of history’ ideologies, aims to fuse the new totalitarianism with the ‘everyday’, the ‘eternal present’ (lacking any genetic explanatory history), and the ‘normality’ of common-sense. Particularly poignant when examining the Manichaean two-party systems of Anglo-Saxon origins, Ali also explains relations between the UK, the US and EU convincingly. James Meek’s Private Island provides detailed empirical analyses of privatization’s devastations in ‘everyday life’ in the UK. A number of these authors list possible remedies and believe in ‘civic action’ as a remedy (Lofgren), or are nostalgic about 1960s ‘movementism,’ or that of the Democratic ‘left,’ and hope to see their revival (Wolin), or hope for the general reawakening of a more conscious citizenry (a Wolin student, Chalmers Johnson, cf. footnotes below). A common historical trope/analogy deployed is that of the transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire, one that is both symptomatic and misleading.17 Both 16

The preeminent role of public-private partnerships in economic terms is to privatize/monopolize/pillage gain/profits/rent-extraction (since often what is being privatized is a public asset sold to the private sector for a tiny fraction of its actual value), while ‘publicizing’ risk (as happened with the TARP and other Wall St. bailouts by the US federal government): so in actual fact eliminating any actual risk for the oligarchs involved, while the public foots the bill through taxes, higher fees, lesser services, etc. As in the case of the ‘free market’, the term ‘risk’ in current neoliberal capitalism is devoid of any actual meaning. 17 For some historical discussion of how it is misleading on a class and institutional level, and characteristic of mostly bourgeois forms of self-delusion about ‘civic engagement’, cf. Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: a People’s

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Lofgren and Wolin also use comparisons to “Leninism” or a Stalinist USSR. A nation/Empire whose elites have so consistently and violently opposed any and every form of left-wing party gaining any institutional traction seems to undermine the comparison from the very start (the US and UK represent almost unique exceptions compared to other Western parliamentary systems in this regard): right-wing totalitarianism has instead represented a persistent, documented, source of attraction for the Empire and its elites, especially in foreign policy, but not only. From Prescott Bush to Henry Ford, from Charles Lindbergh to Thomas W. Lamont and from Walt Disney to William Randolph Hearst, extensive swaths of the US elite were great admirers of Fascism and Nazism.18 So it would seem a much more plausible, if partial, analogue.

The Empire as a Special Case but an Exemplary One The unique history of the US since WWII can be listed as one reason it has evolved its special form of totalitarianism. A ‘Cold War’ fought for many decades to impose (‘free’) capitalism throughout the globe brought History of Ancient Rome (New York: New Press, 2003). Moreover the US has been a de facto Empire for close to ¾ of a century (with the relevant impact on its nominal status as a ‘republic’), just escalating its unipolar aspirations after the socalled “End of the Cold War.” 18 From the symbolic (the Roman Empire), to the proven connections and connivances: on Wall St. (Lamont mentioned above); the Dulles brothers (who organized an ‘underground railroad’ for Nazi war-criminals to Latin America); their law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell (cf. Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, A Law Unto Itself: the Untold Story of the Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell (New York: Paragon House, 1989)); trading with Axis powers (Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: an Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949 (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983) and American Swastika (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985); the reinstatement of Nazi businesses and elites in Germany, including making the Nazi secret service, the infamous Gehlen Organization, the foundation of the future German service, the BND; importing Nazi scientists (Wernher von Braun) for the space program and other National Security State projects (Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: the Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (New York: Little Brown & Co, 2014)); supporting Axis junior partners like Francisco Franco and dozens of other fascistically oriented dictatorships around the world, mostly during the Cold War, but extending to Islamic theocracies like Saudi Arabia today. For the continuing indirect influence of these totalitarian connections on today’s right in the US, cf. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). Cf. also the essay by Pierluigi Erbaggio in this volume.

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the state’s most repressive, aggressive and militaristic institutions to a position of dominance within the state as a whole. These can be seen as the origins of an increasingly dominant National Security component (in Lofgren’s terminology, the “Deep State”) within the state apparatus as a whole. Considering the US was mostly ruled by a two-party system (a “one-party system with two right wings,” characteristic of most British former colonies),19 that it evolved from a British colony via successive waves of colonization and immigration (the drive West along the “Frontier”) from the most diverse cultures and origins (virtually erasing the Native American populations and their cultures via prolonged genocidal practices), coalescing superficially via the “melting pot” in forms lacking firm cultural and institutional foundations (but which, along with early levels of mass-literacy, pioneered corporate mass-media, public relations and marketing, etc.),20 one can understand how its society and population (whose prior history and genesis/transmission of values were mostly erased) were suited to being molded by an especially individualistic and aggressive form of capitalism.21 The gradual rise to dominant Western and then global power (Empire) following a succession of wars: WWI, WWII and the “Cold War,” entrenched what has variously been called the Warfare State, military Keynesianism, or a permanent war 19

“Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. ‘We have a single system,’ he wrote, and ‘in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.’” [Gore Vidal] From: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/529557 (omitted: gerrymandering; Superdelegates; no proportional representation; etc.) 20 Cf. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, a justly celebrated documentary that explores the relations between the founders of psychoanalysis (the Freud family), Edward Bernays (public relations and propaganda), Matthew Freud, and consumerism, commodification and mass-culture. The ‘everyday capitalist’ analogue to the much vilified overt propaganda apparatuses of ‘classic’ totalitarian regimes. Forms of individual opaque persuasion that are closely tied to the new technologies and visual media (and hence also the visual arts). One could of course now extend the Freud family connection beyond Curtis, to finance capitalism, propaganda by the corporate media, and the Tory establishment in the UK in the person of Baron (David) Freud. 21 In Europe monopolies (like England’s East India Company) were developed earlier than in the US, but in connection with colonial and imperial operations by the state; the US instead saw the formation of some of the first and biggest industrial monopolies (not initiated by state or political power, though certainly with later forms of collusion), typically in the sector dealing with transportation (including fuel). Instead the later technologically driven monopolies were mostly in the sector of communication(s).

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economy, some of whose economic characteristics are tied to monopoly capitalism,22 making the US a very special case when compared to other Western parliamentary systems. This prominent position, militarily and economically, relative to other Western parliamentary systems, translates to inordinate influence on the most important institutions within them, and an even greater one on virtually all alliances and multilateral institutions (UN, NATO,23 World Bank, IMF). Its dominant position in the world of the mass-media, pressagencies, entertainment (TV programming, Hollywood, now the Internet), an ever expanding global network of bases,24 and a special dominance within the sectors of finance (partnering with the UK; the dollar as global reserve currency) and energy, allowed the Empire to increasingly penetrate, control and dominate both sets of institutions. The ‘choice’ of political economy by individual nation-states (with the exception of a few very large and powerful ones, like Russia, China and India for instance) and the terms of interaction with the ‘global economy’ are consequently almost always very far from “free,” but instead coerced to a greater or lesser (simpler or more complex) degree. These forms of control, that have mostly reduced the EU to a proconsular appendix to Empire,25 via NATO, the unelected, unaccountable, and very opaque European Commission, and OECD among others, mean that incremental shifts towards totalitarianism in the Empire and the UK are felt strongly within the EU as well (though in individual member nations ‘democracy’ may not yet be so degraded).

22 Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: NLB, 1975). Also Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970); The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); Profits Without Production (New York: Knopf, 1983). 23 Cf. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/19/nato-and-the-bananazation-ofwestern-europe/ 24 Cf. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Also Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: the Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25 Cf. Victoria Nuland’s comments about the EU and the ensuing coup, against the diplomatic solution being brokered, in Ukraine; the forced landing of the aircraft carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales; the persecution of Julian Assange (Sweden, UK, EU arrest warrant); the migrant crisis http://www.counterpunch.org/ 2016/02/19/how-humanitarian-imperialism-led-to-europes-refugee-crisis/:just some of thousands of examples of abject toadying to Empire.

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The National Security Aspect of the State The Empire’s unique history, most especially phenomena like the Cold War and McCarthyism (which built on an entrenched hostility to the left dating to the 19th c., cf. the Haymarket affair, later the ‘Red Scares’), prepared the institutional framework for a massive metastatic growth of the repressive, surveillance, and military areas of the state, the burgeoning National Security State.26 The so-called “war on terrorism” which by definition is against non-state, and ambiguously defined adversaries, is also intentionally conceived of as without end. The huge bureaucracies and immense budgets of the National Security State could thus not only be preserved with absolutely no “peace-dividend” in the aftermath of the ‘end’ of the Cold War (which actually never did completely end, with NATO expanding to Russia’s borders; a war now being resurrected in Washington as both an alternative justification for the permanent warfare state, and an escalation in the pursuit of total global control), but actually enjoy significant growth. The Department of Homeland Security has now become the third largest Cabinet department (significantly after the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs) with almost 250,000 employees, and this in not much over a decade. This metastatic growth has been accompanied by massive privatization: from the private prison industry, to the thousands of private companies involved, to the privatization of much of the war provisioning and support effort and mercenarization of those sent to fight,27 to gargantuan

26 The current presidential election has seen an aggressive resurgence of McCarthyite tactics by the oligarchical media, the Neocons, and those sectors of the elite aligned with the commanding heights of the Democratic Party, in the wake of the hacks of the DNC and ensuing revelations regarding the Democratic sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Donald Trump, and several others have all been accused, via insinuation (in typical McCarthyite fashion), no proofs provided, of being in collusion with, or agents of, Russia: in its turn resurrected to perform the bogeyman role once assigned to the USSR in the Cold War. These tactics (in the moment used to distract from the actual content of the revelations), and the paranoiac, obsessive, focus on an “enemy” (Russia) led by a leader now being called “fascistic” (following Hillary Clinton’s very imaginative rhetoric of calling any leader that does not kowtow to the Empire a “new Hitler”), Putin, are both very symptomatic of the current stage of the Empire’s ‘official’ politics, and its unipolar aspirations and fears (after Brexit). The clear rhetorical undercurrent is that anyone opposing Hillary Clinton is “unAmerican.” 27 Cf. the rise of Blackwater/Xe/Academi as symptomatic for the whole sector (the UK is now the leader in global mercenary firms).

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involvement of private companies in the spying and monitoring efforts:28 the NSA’s relationship with Booz Allen Hamilton’s, a company that gets 99% of its revenue from the federal government, involved as we know from Edward Snowden in the PRISM mass-surveillance effort of ordinary US citizens (with many illegal ramifications) is typical. Booz Allen is an excellent example on a number of fronts: it is majority owned by the Carlyle Group (which has many former national security state employees on its board, and very close ties to Middle-Eastern totalitarian theocracies like Saudi Arabia), it showcases the Washington ‘revolving door’ for individuals who allegedly work for the government as ‘public servants,’ while de facto focusing on securing later employment for astronomical salaries in these private sector companies (often monopolies or oligopolies) which they are supposed to monitor, then proceeding to shuttle back and forth between both sectors. These public-private partnerships are one of the many paths leading to the spread of the new totalitarianism. When involved in issues or areas of development where the public side of these partnerships might be subject to legislative oversight by public entities, the partnerships use the private side of the equation for ‘cover;’ when the private side gets scrutinized for potential criminal activities, it can invoke “national security” clauses and protections. In other words: heads the totalitarian state wins, tails and its subjected (drone) population loses. One of countless examples of how completely the propaganda of the totalitarian neoliberal state and its actual economic practices contradict one another. Nowhere as in the National Security State is there less actual market competition: this is the land of no-bid contracts, and permanent revolving doors.29 Thanks to the increasingly dominant role of finance capital, this sector of the state absorbs ever-increasing percentages of the national budgets, while removing all that investment from truly productive 28 Cf. the series “Top Secret America” by Dana Priest and William Arkin in the Washington Post (it ran from July 19th to December 20th 2010), available at: http://www.pulitzer.org/cms/sites/default/files/content/washpost_tsa_item1.pdf. Also for the increasing concentration/centralization (i.e. monopolistic consolidation) of private intelligence contractors cf. https://www.thenation.com/ article/five-corporations-now-dominate-our-privatized-intelligence-industry/ 29 And the many tricks and ruses the Empire developed to get its way abroad are now being ever more deeply implemented in the core of the Empire itself, a preeminent case of institutional and political ‘blowback’ (and central to understanding what ‘globalization’ actually means in class terms). Cf. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan/Owl Book, 2004); Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). And also John Perkins, The New Confessions.

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(economic and non) ventures. Those sectors of the state that might minimally assist its citizens are subject to expanding and accelerating cuts.

The Neoliberal Aspects of State and Society Understanding neoliberalism within the complex framework of global capitalism is key to understanding the new developing forms of totalitarianism. Wolin and Lofgren’s analyses focus on erasure(s) of the ‘proper’ or common-sense distinctions between public and private institutions (enterprises, corporations), less on neoliberalism. A linear, socialdemocratic, explanation could invoke Max Weber’s idea of the “iron cage” to explain the tendencies to rationalization, (unregulated) bureaucratization and hence oligarchy in parliamentary systems: but I believe it would be partial and simplified at best. It cannot explain the increasingly irrational results, or the constellation of interest(s) represented. David Harvey provides one of the best, most accessible, explanations of neoliberalism within the context of the contradictions of capitalist devolution: it pays attention to historical detail, empirical complexity and specific institutional and social outcomes.30 The extreme scissors between propaganda and reality are one signature characteristic of the Neoliberal State. The monopoly capitalist (imperial) economy has never been less truly market or competition oriented. The Neoliberal State uses privatization, ‘deregulation’ (special interest regulation), capitalization of outstanding areas of the ‘commons’, legislated and coerced takeovers/pillages, as some of the major means of imposing a regime of ever-increasing rentextraction and escalation of parasitic practices. As capitalism swallows more of the natural and social worlds, both in geographic (spatial) terms, and via in depth penetration of areas not yet absorbed (education, the knowledge industry, ‘religions,’ interpersonal relations (dating, etc.), all the way to the glaring but symptomatic: fresh water, clean air, and other ecologically related areas), in which the material properties of affected areas become secondary to the imperative of capital realization, the world becomes ever more “upside-down;” capitalism itself, with ever stronger tendencies to financialization, becomes ever more ‘abstract’ (because of the self-reflexive, financial instruments being developed): consequently, with an ever decreasing portion of the world left to capitalize, it is dependent on the realization of capital by any means necessary, rather than on traditional means of realization via production in (more or less, now definitely less) competitive markets. Similar tendencies towards ever 30

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

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greater abstraction to those in financialization, can be witnessed in the establishment of (ever more unaccountable) globalized institutions. David Harvey has named these institutional practices aimed at despoliation (“redistribution,” obviously only upwards) “accumulation by dispossession.”31 These resemble means used during the phase of what Marx called “primitive” or “original” accumulation (during the initial establishment of capitalism as a mode of production), but the current adoption of these institutional means would seem symptomatic of a system that is exhausting its options (i.e. the contradiction between forces and relations of production). Harvey includes privatization in this process: but the ‘commons’ affected now extend to areas (giving corporations entitlement to, naturally preexisting, genetic materials they had no role in developing), and self-reflexive means of profiting from crises (carbon-trading schemes to ‘solve’ pollution problems generated by capitalism, not because they are the most effective, but because they please finance capital the most: in turn creating ecological devastation by altering the ecosystems in which they are implemented (replacement of forests, or other ‘green’ surfaces)) that scarcely resemble classic “commons.” Resort to these institutional means is symptomatic in at least two ways: a) an increase in the ‘coercion factor’ by which income/rents are extracted32 and b) the fact that profits can be generated with increasing difficulty following the canonical ‘motor’ at the center of the system, profits generated via production and competition in markets. The ultimate telos of this increasingly totalitarian capitalism is a completely inverted world (cf. Wolin), an upside-down universe in which all of reality is simply an excuse for the realization of capital, by any means necessary.

31

Ibid., 159, where the author lists its four main features. I purposely use “increase” because regardless of the propaganda or the (self)delusions on this topic, capitalism has always been built on a very authoritarian foundation in the world of production and exchange. Cf. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998): a degradation premised on the despoliation of both (often artisanal) knowledge of work practices and their transmission as well as control over the labor process itself. So Western civil societies’ ‘democratic’ (in reality only parliamentary) facade is premised on a very different reality in people’s everyday lives, which largely vitiates their claims to ‘openness’ from the beginning. 32

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The Capture and Evacuation (Voiding) of Institutions Current totalitarianism mostly entrenches itself in the Empire (and globally) via the degradation, voiding, degeneration of those institutions historically assigned the role of representing the citizenry and guaranteeing a “constitutional order.” Recent studies have shown just to what degree ‘public’ institutions are simply tools of oligarchy.33 One instrument employed for this evacuation is the manipulated use of crises, fear, and panic (9/11, the 2008 crash). Another, probably mostly unintended, dynamic is that between ‘non-profit’ single-issue groups, the oligarchical party system and the state. Instead of parties being ‘aggregators’ for the concerns of those it is supposed to represent, their voiding by oligarchy means individuals often turn to single-issue groups to attempt to address specific concerns. This leads to there now being probably on the order of 100,000s of single-issue groups in the US alone. Since they all have to fund themselves to survive, ultimately that often becomes one of, if not their principal, goal(s). It leads to all the negative aspects of competition, for resources for advocating for often very similar causes, a gargantuan proliferation (even only at the level of contacts with the public: e-mails, solicitation mail, etc.) which no individual citizen could possibly comprehend (hence negative feedback mechanisms), competition instead of coordination on many public interest issues which have common origins (fracking: the environment, public health, corporate accountability, aquifer management, etc.). In essence a form of ‘privatization’ which once again provides the illusion of ‘democracy’ while in reality further entrenching the voiding of institutions, citizen disillusionment, wastage of resources instead of economies of scale: instead of political coalescence and concentration in one or a few institutions to coordinate problem solving (whether parties or other institutions) so as to involve, aggregate, organize individual participation and action, leading to immense multiplier effects, there is disenfranchisement, atomization, dispersal, of almost the entire civil society (as opposed to the dominant fractions of oligarchy which create ever more global, opaque, and unaccountable institutions to enforce their predations world-wide).

33

Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens,” Perspectives in Politics 12 (3) 2014: 564-581; Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

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Another method, which has both preceded (the UN for instance),34 but mostly accompanied globalization, is the removal of many important decisions affecting human beings worldwide to unelected, unaccountable, opaque ‘global’ or regional institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, the EU, and so forth. Far removed from the realities of national politics, most citizens are only vaguely aware of their existence, know very little about them, and have virtually no way of influencing or affecting them. The EU is an example of the intrinsic totalitarianism of these unaccountable institutions, specifically the European Commission and the ECB.35 As with similar Western examples, one could call these forms of “disenfranchisement” or “denial of service” totalitarianism. The EC and the ECB control many vital factors and processes in the lives of Europe’s citizens, but the citizens have virtually no control over the individuals who control these institutions. The European Parliament is an elected body, but its powers are virtually only nominal. It has little control over the operations of the EC, and virtually no mechanisms to hold them accountable. Another path for voiding institutions is via legislation (or its removal, lack of enforcement or evacuation) or the creation of new legislative bodies.36 The fate of habeas corpus in the US since 9/11 goes to the foundations of the legal system and the guarantees for individual rights (dating to the French Revolution) and therefore to a specific government or regime’s political nature: “democratic” or not. As with the sanctioning of the assassination of US nationals abroad without any legal or court proceedings (no charge), the practice of extreme renditions, the use of torture and the creation of extra-judicial concentration camps (Guantanamo), the removal of privilege in attorney—client conversations, the degradation-removal of habeas corpus shows the extent to which the regime in charge in the US has moved from parliamentary to totalitarian (in the words of its Constitution another appropriate term would by

34 At least in the case of the UN however the ‘path’ for citizens from national to UN institutions is, relatively, transparent (the Security Council is of course one of the major exceptions, and still represents traditional ‘big power’ politics). 35 Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009). In June 2016 the Brexit/Lexit vote delivered its opinion. 36 Persecuting, silencing and harassing those who would uphold the rule of law and point to governmental and corporate serial violations is of course one mainstay of the increasingly totalitarian state. As the ACLU has stated (and Helen Thomas confirmed) no administration has persecuted whistleblowers (and so tightly controlled the press) as the Obama administration.

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“tyrannical”).37 The law is constantly used to enforce oligarchical interests against the majority of the population: the passage of Citizens United, Colorado’s use of state laws to ban local prohibition of fracking,38 the overturning of Glass/Steagall by the Clinton administration, or the use of jurists close to the Chicago School of Economics to rationalize shutting down the enforcement of anti-trust legislation,39 a prescription which has been followed de facto by all US administrations in the last decades. The Empire already practices extreme double-standards internationally: it has exempted itself from participation in the International Criminal Court (ICC), but likes to use it for kangaroo proceedings (or threats thereof) against heads to state that do not kowtow to Empire: Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi, while NATO or other ‘allied’ troops are never charged with war-crimes. At the same time (an example being tax proceedings against Microsoft in Ireland) it now tries to claim that US national jurisdiction and law can apply in other countries’ jurisdictions.40 Recently the Empire has escalated the use of the “law” as a means to both persecute international whistleblowers and dissenters who have revealed and are exposing its ever more totalitarian global web: one of the prime targets has been Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange. The web of deceit, manipulation, fabricated charges and the connivance of many European countries and institutions (the UK, Sweden, the EU courts responsible for issuing an arrest warrant, etc.) is quite mindboggling.41 But it now seems to have added other countries’ “law-enforcement” personnel and institutions as an even more camouflaged secretive weapon to engineer 37

For an account that is still excessively benign, and focused exclusively on the legal issues of habeas corpus, cf. https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/tenthings-you-should-know-about-habeas-corpus 38 Cf. http://www.bna.com/state-law-preempts-n17179892912/ 39 Mike Lofgren, The Deep State, 153 ff. (Richard Posner and acolytes). The very foundations of corporate law are of course already fraudulent: the Gilded Age gave us the fiction of corporate ‘personhood.’ 40 Cf. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/09/microsoft-court-casehotmail-ireland-search-warrant The case of US judge Thomas Griesa ruling in favor of vulture funds located in offshore tax-havens and against Argentina (which had restructured its debt) in a Manhattan court is an analogous combination of contempt for international law and totalitarian creep of national jurisdiction(s). In terms of the relentless assault against individual rights and privacy, the FBI is now suing Apple in order to undermine the company’s privacy and encryption protections (to the extent they actually exist). 41 One of the best accounts of the extent and depth of this totalitarian persecution is by John Pilger: http://johnpilger.com/articles/assange-the-untold-story-of-an-epicstruggle-for-justice.

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‘soft’ coups against governments that aren’t toeing the Empire’s line: in Argentina Alberto Nisman (who Julian Assange documented had extremely close ties with the CIA and US embassy personnel) was attempting to prosecute president Christina Fernandez (who had the audacity to refuse to bow to the Empire’s protected parasitic vulture funds, cf. footnote 40), and once weakened, and having lost the election, her successor Mauricio Macri, an imperial darling, promptly acceded to the vulture funds’ blackmail (to the applause of propaganda outlets like the Financial Times); in Brazil, the two main prosecutors of a group the Wall Street Journal has dubbed “the nine horsemen,” another Empire protected group of soft-coup engineers, prosecutors Deltan Dallagnol (Harvard Law) and Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima (Cornell Law) are both products of the Empire’s institutions: “They’re trying to bring some stuff from the U.S. legal system into the Brazilian legal system,” said Jose Vicente Mendonça, a state attorney in Rio de Janeiro and former Harvard classmate of Mr. Dallagnol. “It’s part of a general changing of the mind-set in Brazil. This is a turning point in the Brazilian legal system.”42 Of course what they are not saying is that the administrations targeted by the Empire (as was Honduras, whose president Manuel Zelaya the Empire ousted in a coup, something they attempted in Venezuela multiple times against its president 42

Mr. Mendonça doesn’t seem to be quite aware of how perversely ironic this sounds in context. Cf. http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-brazils-nine-horsemen-crackedpetrobras-bribery-scandal-1428334221. The chorus of imperial propaganda outlets is of course unanimous: NPR a loyal accomplice of the WSJ: http://www.npr.org/2015/07/08/ 421225013/lead-prosecutor-brings-ghandi-like-attitude-to-brazils-corruption-scandal. For an excellent piece, including the background on one the architects of this ‘judicial’ soft-coup and his theories to ‘justify’ it, Sergio Moro, cf.: http://www.counter punch.org/2016/03/08/the-brazilian-earthquake/. The soft coup has of May 2016 lead to its intended result, the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff on preposterous grounds with no legal basis (use of funds allocated for different purposes, as practiced by virtually all her predecessors in office), while some of the leading perpetrators of the coup are those actually guilty of corruption and holding illegal offshore assets (Eduardo Cunha, close to current coup leader Michel Temer, of course another darling of the Empire). As a contrast one should point out that Eliot Spitzer, who was only prosecuting Wall St. malfeasance very moderately, was targeted by the FBI for sexual activities that normally would never have brought this escalation in investigation: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120536943121 332151; curious how top law-enforcement in the Empire actually de facto protects the most powerfully corrupt racket on the planet (cf. the 2008 meltdown and the absolute lack of major prosecutions then), i.e. Wall St., from prosecution. So we can see what kind of “law” Brazil is actually importing/adopting. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming: only those bent on only believing “coincidence theorists” could refuse to open their minds to empirical evidence.

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Hugo Chavez, and that is only listing the most recent of hundreds of either coups, attempted coups, invasions, regime changes, extortions, etc. in Latin America) are ones that implemented policies favorable to the majority of the population and not the oligarchy (cf. the Argentinian debt, or Chavez’s investment in projects for the poorest segments of the population). Virtually no government, in the Empire itself, or in the West, let alone in the rest of the world, is corruption-free. It is only a question of who forces whom to keep quiet, and who encourages whom to expose someone else. Virtually all governments in Latin America have been or are currently involved in various forms of corruption. But it is the Empire’s extremely selective ‘prosecution’ of which governments to target, and in such rapid succession (Argentina and Brazil, Petrobras, are/were virtually concurrent), with the obvious tacit aim of breaking the coalition of progressive Latin American governments that were not aligned with the Empire in foreign policy (and/or ‘guilty’ of belonging to the BRICS coalition), that is so suspicious: as with the selective targeting by the ICC, this manipulation of the application of the law and other countries’ judicial systems is actual proof of the most utter contempt for not only justice, but for the rule of law: by voiding the equality of its application, it is voiding its very foundation. And the Empire’s and proconsular propaganda apparatuses coordinated puff-pieces on the prosecutions in Argentina and Brazil are just part of the smoking gun for those willing to investigate. This use of ‘comprador’ personnel has been a staple of the National Security establishment: typically it was in the police, the secret services and the military (the infamous School of the Americas was one its most feared and nefarious institutions). In Germany, one of the countries in Europe most thoroughly penetrated and colonized by the Empire, it was very recently found the German secret service, the BND, was actually spying on German companies, parts of its own government and European allies on behalf of the Empire.43 This is not the exception in how the Empire tries to control the globe: it is the rule. But now it seems, to try and hide its soft-coups even more thoroughly it appears the next ‘model’ is to use comprador personnel in foreign countries’ other institutions, still related to “law” enforcement, but more in the judicial sector.44 43 Edward Snowden revealed some tips of the iceberg. Here is another probative individual case: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-spying-trial-idUSKC N0T51QP20151116 . 44 The Supreme Court of Spain railroaded judge Baltasar Garzon, expelling him from the judiciary, under pressure from the Empire, as also revealed by Wikileaks. Garzon who was guilty, in the Empire’s eyes of, among other things, attempting to bring Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to trial. The very recent coup attempt in

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The creation of new legislative bodies, following the ‘globalizing’ “removal/abstraction” process (as with NATO, EC, IMF, etc.), is however perhaps the most devastating and consequential in terms of completely voiding the rule of law, and entrenching ‘disenfranchisement totalitarianism.’ The recently signed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP; but the sister-agreement being fraudulently ‘negotiated’ with the EU, with major EC connivance, the TTIP, contains the exact same provision for totalitarian tribunals),45 includes in its secret provisions the creation of unaccountable supranational (“investor-state”) tribunals with which multinationals will be able to sue individual nation-states. It is going to be manned by personnel that previously worked for multinational corporations.46 This action is totalitarian on a number of different levels: it de facto voids all the political, institutional and legal procedures by which citizens can decide which Turkey has in this case also highlighted how initially the aim was perhaps more along the ‘soft-coups’ line: cf. https://www.rt.com/news/353963-cia-fbi-turkeycoup/ (the Gulen organization and the “Dec. 17th process,” which was a judicial coup attempt along the lines of those in Argentina and Brazil). Once Erdogan moved back closer to Russia and Putin following Brexit, the US proceeded with their usual blood-soaked ‘further options,’ which have destroyed most secular civil societies in the Middle East, a process that The New York Times, in its usual hyperhypocritical perversion of history propagandistic twist, in a series of daily special reports “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart” (starting on August 11, 2016; as if this was an act of God...), hides precisely the not only principal but uniquely central and causative agency, namely that of current and recent US aggressions, and that of especially British (and partially French) imperialism and colonialism prior to that (and in carving up the geographic area into the arbitrary Bantustans they are today). 45 Intentionally negotiated in the utmost secrecy, totalitarian precautions used precisely so as to avoid any public scrutiny or discussion of its actual contents, a procedure also being followed in the case of negotiations on the ‘sister’ agreement with the EU, the TTIP, with the proconsuls dutifully following the Empire’s totalitarian lead. For some of the documents and sell-outs the EC and other EU proconsuls were trying to hide from its citizens, cf. https://www.ttip-leaks.org/. The actions of the EU proconsuls, as is almost always the case, belie the high-flying rhetoric. José Manuel Barroso, a former chief of the European Commission, accepted the position of head of Goldman-Sachs Europe, very soon after the Brexit vote (Mario Monti, Mario Draghi, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former head of NATO, being some of the other most prominent proconsuls tied to this bank; the bank responsible for cooking Greece’s books so as to ‘allow’ it to join the EU, something for which it was never prosecuted). He and Rasmussen are the quintessential incarnation of what interests and what kind of abject dependencies the EU de facto represents. 46 Cf. https://wikileaks.org/tpp-investment/press.html

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laws, personnel, procedures they want to govern the nation in which they live (it abrogates national sovereignty, a strategy we already saw at work in Samantha Powers’ R2P; it abrogates self-rule); it creates a completely unaccountable institution; there is no input whatsoever by the overwhelming majority of the people it affects on the selection of its personnel; in giving these additional extraordinary special powers to multinational corporations, the individuals and interests it represents, it completely voids the very foundations of any democratic legal system: equality of application of, and representation in front of, the law.

Totalitarianism: Why and How So far I have shown many of the converging trends that have led to forms of coercion, surveillance, voiding of laws and institutions, and impositions of unaccountable ones that are all analogous to more classic forms of totalitarian, fascistic and dictatorial control. Though the processes involved have mostly been gradual, and not all conducted from one identifiable center/node, typically of the party-state kind, they have been accelerating; due to their opacity, (mostly) avoidance of blatant and widespread violence, they tend not to enter public awareness.47 Where ‘classic’ totalitarianism employs activist means to mold individuals to conform, in consumer ‘disenfranchisement totalitarianism’ human beings are reduced to bundles of ‘skills’ (human capital) and (often induced) needs/desires, useful input for monopoly capitalism: they no longer possess the qualities that make for a truly autonomous, responsible, subject, that can therefore also exercise its political rights and form a selfconscious, self-activating and self-legislating community (the processes Pasolini was analyzing at the end of his life). The ‘citizen’ atrophies and individuals become willing (if mostly not very conscious) participants in the bloating of their consumer (desiring) functions. Combined with a mostly devastated (in terms of accountability, access, representation and democratic participation) institutional landscape, this becomes the perfect 47

Or when they do the corporate mass-media are there to ‘naturalize’ totalitarian phenomena such as the surveillance state: cf. the CBS series Person of Interest, which is very symptomatic in this regard (the lead actor, Jim Caviezel, had the leading role in Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, itself a very symptomatic version of the Christian story). Surveillance is only one of very numerous totalitarian abuses facilitated by digital technology: the creation of millions of phony accounts/entities in the social media to subvert public discussion, approval, norm-creation and, of course, elections is a less well known one. Cf. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/ 04/22/hillary-clintons-support-base-as-bogus-as-us-democracy/.

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setting for ‘disenfranchisement totalitarianism.’ There is a particularly negative vicious-cycle feedback mechanism between the voiding of institutions, realities and emotions relating to disempowerment and disenfranchisement, further hollowing of the institutions, and the ever more dominant (and ersatz) realm of consumption (which reinforces the neoliberal control and degradation of individual subjects). The capillary level of control and (ab)use of hopelessness at the individual (social, political, and psychological) level is what makes ‘disenfranchisement’ totalitarianism even more “totalitarian” (in the original, fascist-adopted, etymological and aspirational sense of the term) than its ‘classic’ counterparts.48 In terms of definition some have tried to contrast dictatorship, as rule by an individual (aided by some entourage(s)), but lacking in institutional and ideological mechanisms to which all must conform, which are instead more typical of totalitarian regimes where party and state are fused to a greater or lesser extent, to totalitarian rule. Thought of as a continuum this analysis does have some persuasive power (Gentile’s critique of Arendt, showing fascism was indeed totalitarian (it had adopted the term as self-descriptive) also relies on it), but in many empirical cases the distinctions are not so easy (Portugal, Latin America). Fetishizing individual rule in dictatorships is misleading: rule is often possible and can be enforced only because of the complicity of personnel in dominant institutions and sometimes of entire institutions. The scholarship devoted to the issue(s) is also divided to a significant extent: in the Marxian tradition, even at it’s most creative, and open, the focus is on the relation of totalitarian states to the capitalist economic system (including the issue of imperialism, which Arendt partially addresses), on relations between classes, and less on the cultural specifics and dynamics of each totalitarian system (Nikos Poulantzas is a good example).49 In the 48 Trends that can be verified, if only by superficial and indirect measures, in examining the statistics of participation in elections and in trends in party or laborunion memberships. These kinds of planned induced ‘demoralization’ were/are part of planning during foreign aggressions, such as the Contra war(s) in Central America. The psychological warfare components have a long history, now plausibly part of the blowback used in the escalation of totalitarian control in the Empire itself. At the level of ‘public intellectuals’ we have an analogous process of voiding of progressive beliefs, ethical principles and tacit/surreptitious adoption of the ‘extreme center’ consensus as de facto values: cf. Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2010). 49 Nikos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974) and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975), The Crisis of Dictatorships (London: New Left Books, 1976), State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978).

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liberal to conservative tradition(s) (Renzo De Felice, Emilio Gentile) a great deal of attention is paid to cultural (also institutional) specifics and dynamics, but much less to issues relating to the interaction(s) of economy, classes and the state (and all of these to civil society). ‘Disenfranchisement’ totalitarianism is different, in that it by voiding institutions it simply removes citizen access to any tools and means of redress and participation. It overturns the bedrock of liberal definitions of democracy: informed consent (dissent).50 The corporate mass-media and persuasion industry largely take care of vitiating any serious interpretation of the “informed” part of the equation.51 It is totalitarian in that via consumption ((ab)using the natural/material foundations on which human needs and desires are based) it molds individuals much more totally and surreptitiously than could ever be dreamt of by ‘classic’ totalitarianism; of course in addition to institutional ‘voiding’ there are the ever more total and invisible networks of surveillance implemented by the National Security State (which are indeed analogous to ‘classic’ totalitarianism), the use of fear, and sometimes violence. It complements this emerging form of ‘disenfranchisement’ totalitarianism within the Empire and its ‘advanced’ appendages by adopting/adapting modifications of more ‘classic’ forms of totalitarian control it had experimented with in the underdeveloping areas of the subjugated ‘periphery:’ this is institutional, political, legal, social “blowback” writ very large (the National Security State). The acceleration of the “New World Order” and the new totalitarianism was enabled by the so-called “end of the Cold War,” the self-destruction of the organized left in the West (aided by the corporate mass-media and persuasion industry), and the heritage of a 1960s ‘movementism’ that, while accurately criticizing problems and dysfunctional elements within traditional institutions of the left (internal lack of democracy, accountability, 50 I emphasize “liberal” definitions. The illusion of “equality” (premised in its turn on the illusions generated by the juridical fictions of “equality in front of the law”) in participation in parliamentary electoral procedures (one person one vote) very fundamentally obscures the extremely unequal class and structural economic productive features the capitalist system is based on. It entrenches and fetishizes the separation of “politics” from “economics.” These inequalities of course have only reached incomparably higher levels with the increasingly unipolar impositions of imperialist neoliberalism. For an excellent account of this illusion, and how it relates to those of Western Marxism and the reception of Gramsci, cf. Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review, I/100 (November-December 1976): 5-78. 51 Cf. Herbert Schiller, Culture, Inc.: the Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mass Communications and American Empire (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

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true participation and interaction, in parties, unions), proceeded to organize along ‘movementist’ models, mostly along a ‘charismatic leader/elite’ vs. mass of followers scheme, which not only practically eschewed issues of organization, but then theoretically and practically removed institutions from consideration. An issue that is currently central to the left’s almost complete incapacity to aggregate, organize and intervene as an actor with some historical staying power. At the level of specific cultural practices, the new totalitarianism differs quite radically from ‘classic’ forms. Most religions are avant-lalettre forms of irrationalist, totalitarian ideology, though often not used politically, socially or institutionally in the manner of ‘classic’ totalitarian ideologies. The work of the Italian historian of fascism, Emilio Gentile (a pupil of Renzo De Felice), focuses to a large degree on issues of fascist culture and institutions, and specifically on the opposition “political religions” vs. “civil religions” and the associated symbolism, rituals, cults, and other practices. He associates “political religions” with totalitarian forms of government (hence fascism) and “civil religions” with parliamentary forms of government (a paradigmatic example being the USA).52 While Gentile is fairly persuasive in his in depth analysis of fascist cultural practices, and some of its ‘religious’/symbolic/ritualistic components, I find the opposition between “civil” and “political religions” less so. In both cases we are dealing with irrationalist forms of persuasion and cohesion/consensus building, though they may differ in the degrees of coercion adopted, and in other political teloi and values. The best defense against having the “masses” manipulated and deployed in support of ‘classic’ totalitarian regimes is to have “individuals” that are educated sufficiently, living in acceptable economic circumstances and being treated socially, legally, institutionally, on an equal enough basis which will mostly prevent widespread grudges against society from arising. Quite clearly these circumstances were never close to being realized in Italy during or after the Risorgimento.53 Gentile tries to confront the transition(s) from the Risorgimento to the fascist regime, arguing that had 52

Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), passim; for a discussion of the US, cf. p. xiii ff. His more detailed discussion of fascist culture, symbolism, ritual and relations to “political religion” occurs in Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Bari: Laterza, 1993). In partial contrast cf. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, ch. 7 “The Dynamics of the Archaic.” 53 Facts should not really be contested here. Of many works to remember, the classic, if somewhat arbitrarily edited, Antonio Gramsci, Sul Risorgimento (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1959).

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the Risorgimento’s “civil religion” been more persuasive, struck deeper roots, later totalitarian developments might have been preempted.54 He shows how Mazzini’s mystical ideas would contribute, via Giovanni Gentile, to the elaboration of a “political religion” (fascist) from a “civil religion” (Mazzini’s, part of the Risorgimento’s).55 Transitions along the continuum between “political” and “civil religions” are therefore always possible, and occasionally realized; the intolerant utopianism inherent in some “civil religions” can easily lend itself to be transformed into a “political religion.” In addition many “civil religions” contain some fairly fundamentalist and intolerant elements themselves: the Monroe Doctrine and the whole US idea of Manifest Destiny is one of these, and so is the US as the “indispensable nation”: these are ideological/mythical/mystical foundations for the most aberrant forms of imperialism. Starting with the writings of the Founding Fathers, the US looked to Rome as a very special model: there is controversy about Republican Rome vs. Imperial Rome, but in many ways the two are inseparable. Symbolically this constitutes a strong connection between fascist Italy and a ‘parliamentary’ US. By discreetly endorsing the ‘centrist’ solutions of a ‘secular culture’ and its alleged anodyne civic virtues, Gentile follows a common myth among Italian intellectuals, one prescribed, but rarely followed in individual practice: for instance Norberto Bobbio’s mythologization of Carlo Cattaneo and Anglo-American Protestant culture (and the “Partito d’Azione”) following WWII. These myths devoted to the UK or the US bear absolutely no resemblance to the realities, certainly not today, but scarcely even immediately after WWII.56 Non-coincidentally, these solutions resemble the ‘civic’ solutions proposed, directly or by implication, by Mike Lofgren, Sheldon Wolin and Chalmers Johnson in the works quoted 54

Emilio Gentile, Italiani senza padri. Intervista sul Risorgimento, ed. Simonetta Fiori (Bari: Laterza, 2011), 3 ff., where he contrasts the wishes and ideals of the ‘padri fondatori [founding fathers]’ with the realities of a contemporary Italy that does not respect those ideals (let alone practice them). One of Gentile’s major myths is the would-be centrality of this (homogeneous??!) ‘secular culture’ (coming from where? rooted in what?) as a foundation for the harmonious ‘polis’. Gentile makes some essential points about Italy’s fragmentary history, but one cannot just solve these by waving the magical wand of cultural homogeneity/hegemony. The material history does not support these wishes: as Pasolini well knew (Tullio De Mauro later commended him for this), one of the infinite facts that would have inhibited this ‘secular culture’ were the astronomically high rates of illiteracy (one very real contrast to the US at the same time), and the lack of any actual national language (which will not be realized until after WWII). 55 Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio, 10 ff. 56 Cf. Tariq Ali, The Extreme Centre, and Mike Lofgren, The Deep State.

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above. They derive from analyses which don’t discern the agents of ‘disenfranchisement’ totalitarianism in the motor(s) and institutions of monopoly capitalism itself. Modern totalitarianism has essentially always been an institutional form for the “advancement of capitalism by other means.” Its current incarnation, both in its genesis and its functioning, is so to an even greater degree. To the extent “religions” and ‘rituals’ are developing they are those of consumerism, and, an empty shell of a ritual, ‘elections.’ Adopting “religions” in Gentile’s sense, means to deny individual emancipation, foster the illusion of living in an ‘eternal present,’ a ‘normality’ of the kind I mentioned discussing Tariq Ali. At the level of culture it reinforces the vicious cycle between ‘disenfranchised’ citizenry and retreat/super-investment in consumerism, with another vicious cycle: creating ersatz ‘solutions’ at the level of Kultur for the ever accelerating and expanding contradictions in the realm of Zivilisation. Even in the apparently most legitimate parliamentary ‘constitutional’ order, given the accelerating pace of change globally, citizens are never asked for their input to modify, validate or update constitutions and legal systems that affect them throughout their lives with a certain regularity. This exclusion is symptomatic of the enormous gap in “democracies” between selfrepresentation and reality. Another omission in Gentile’s accounts (which relates to the fact that he examines the possible shifts between “civil” and “political” religions less as tendencies on a continuum and more as rigidly separate poles), is how these “religions” relate to the more medium-long term trend(s) of secularization. Raymond Williams examined how various other realms of cultural production could assume ‘religious’ functions in bourgeois societies.57 This relation of “religions,” myths, rituals to the ‘freezing’ (‘recycling of the ‘same’’ as a means/delusion of control) of time and history (and certainly their comprehension) is key to understanding a series of important connections between the roughly parallel (d)evolutions of neoliberalism, postmodernism/-ity and contemporary informational technologies. One is the ‘space-time’ compression David Harvey discusses. The other is an aversion, leading to enforced preclusions, to understanding historical genesis and context, whether of economic conditions or of intellectual and artistic production. At an abstract or ‘high’ level of cultural elaboration, it is symptomatic that the overwhelming majority of postmodern ‘philosophy’ is grounded in

57

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) among other works: as well as partially being the results of processes of secularization.

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the thought of Martin Heidegger and his ‘ontologisms’,58 which could, somewhat reductively, be described as a secularization of religious categories (tied to his anti-Christian crusade). The connections between secular and religious forms of existentialism are one confirmation in this regard. This has led to attacks on the concept of ‘subject,’ camouflaged as attacks on (supposedly ‘bourgeois’) ‘individualism’ (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s are exemplary), without proposing any viable substitute. The ‘subject’ therefore becomes an evacuated concept, exhibiting very symptomatic parallels with the ‘neoliberal’ subject as merely a bundle of (production-integrated) skills and (consumer) needs. The same can be said for frameworks related to genetic materialist understandings of time and history (“ontology” is the preferred means of erasure here): exemplary is the postmodern critique of so-called “grand narratives” (in reality an irrationalist critique of materialism in many guises) often presented as almost ‘totalitarian’ (because they had depth and scope), which in destroying any rational networks leaves the voided ‘subject’ adrift in a sea of ‘power’ whose nexuses s/he will never be able to discern (a sinking into the primitive swamp very much akin to Heidegger’s dreams of the ‘subject’s’ ontological ‘absorption’). Both the reasons for selecting the targets of these postmodernist attacks and the legerdemain ‘philosophical’ substitutes 58

A thinker with very well known Nazi allegiances and institutional bonds, which the overwhelming majority of the ‘maitres-a-penser’ who rely on his thought mostly dismiss, avoid, censor, trivialize, most likely because of the large amount of symbolic (and real) capital that this logorrhoic industry has invested in him; a comparable case of censorship by omission is that experienced by Timpanaro’s critique of Freud (by the, mostly Freudian, psychoanalytic and related critical, communities). The so-called Black Notebooks are only the latest, obvious, but relatively minor piece (except they definitely put to rest the issue of his not being a racist) of evidence relating to him. Cf. for some partial investigations Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Emmanuel Faye, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), probably the most detailed investigation into the connections between Heidegger’s philosophical works and his Nazi political convictions (Faye in fact demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that Heidegger was a Nazi ideologue: since Nazism was a complex movement, obviously not the only ideologue; for instance in his attack on the notion of “subject” which his French acolytes and followers have so eagerly made their own), and Nicolas Tertulian (a student of Georg Lukàcs) “Histoire de l’être et révolution politique,” Les temps modernes, 523 (February 1990): 109-136 and “Qui a peur du débat? Réponse à Miguel de Beistegui,” Les Temps modernes, 529530 (August-September 1990): 214-240.

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actually exhibit very significant, mostly camouflaged, escalations in pseudoconceptual frameworks either derived from or very similar to ‘religious’ ones, and in their irrationalist, unfalsifiable, anti-Enlightenment and antiscientific59 tendencies they exhibit actual (not invidiously presumed) totalitarian tendencies. Daniele Balicco (and Franco Fortini) have underscored some of these consequences and aspects in French postmodern thought.60 Important observations on the connections between neoliberalism and postmodernism/-ity have been made by David Harvey, who shows how neoliberalism could exploit some 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ tendencies to its advantage, in this sense joining with postmodernism as its accomplice,61 59 Cf. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998), which includes the famous hoax Sokal pulled on the journal Social Text. 60 Daniele Balicco, “Una lettera a Nietzsche: Fortini e il nichilismo di massa,” Allegoria 63 (gennaio-giugno 2011): 103-133. Balicco discusses Fortini’s concept of “controllo dell’oblio” which also points to the erasure of an understanding of time/history, although the causes Fortini invokes are slightly different. Balicco’s analysis shows some of the major consequences of the French postmodern tradition’s adoption of Nietzsche-Heidegger foundations, how easily Wall St. and the art and architecture it patronized could love this tradition, and finally its adoption/transformation in Italian thought, most specifically in the area of socalled ‘operaismo’ around Mario Tronti, Massimo Cacciari, Antonio Negri and Alberto Asor Rosa, and the politically and philosophically deleterious consequences it has had (104-124 especially). Attacking the ‘subject’ as in Deleuze and followers is also an indirect way to avoid an ethics of responsibility and cogency, because an evacuated ‘subject’ will not be either coherent or historically grounded enough to assume any responsibility—many of these philosophical strains could be seen as an opaque attempt at rationalizing the adolescent egotism, contempt for other/past generations, “tutto e subito,” ‘terroristic’ attitudes that precluded serious (and self-emancipatory) engagement with the ‘past’ that Pasolini had seen so acutely when diagnosing the 1960s (in Italy at the very least) as mostly a ‘civil-war’ of the bourgeoisie against itself. A way to erase long-ranging institutional practices and norms from the past and replace them with the fungible ones of consumer monopoly capitalism, as it was morphing into the neoliberal totalitarian model in ‘advanced’ Western countries. Pasolini could register the enormous anthropological consequences of the transition so clearly in Italy, largely because there many past cultural practices forged by peasant or working classes had been better preserved than in the US or UK for instance. 61 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 37-43 (where he also discusses the relation between liberal utopianism and emergence of fascism). Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990) also discusses postmodernism’s (and partially the New Left’s) self-delusions (cf. 351-355), and the constructive, ‘bridging’ role of Raymond Williams, but overall, since it was written much earlier than the work

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just as later the ‘neoliberal’ state as enforcer will join with the forces and ideologies of neoconservatism: I would add that postmodernism essentially tends to substitute the concept of “class” with that of “identity,” and avoids discussions of the latter concept (and reality) as intrinsically social constructs, neither mythical protective bunkers, nor floating gelatinous fads to be changed on a whim. Both Terry Eagleton and Perry Anderson have also contributed important works showing connections between postmodernity and contemporary neoliberal finance capitalism, and the erasures of time/history.62 Pasolini was ahead of his time in understanding the totalitarian dangers lurking in consumer monopoly capitalism, in understanding 1960s movementism as something at least as inhibiting as it was professedly ‘liberating,’ but especially in insisting on his materialist notion of the ‘sacred’, connected to his idea of “sono una forza del passato [I am a force of the past].” He opposed the kinds of instrumental uses of “religion” adopted by parliamentary and totalitarian regimes discussed above. Insisting on both a materialist, and a historical-genetic understanding of the past runs completely counter to some of the basic elements of postmodernism (and Pasolini never believed “grand-narratives” were intrinsically nefarious: they had to be tested and live up to their claims). Insisting on a (materialist) respect for the ‘sacred,’ for existence independent of and apart from the human species, to be acknowledged as such and not only as potential fodder for human instrumental (ab)use, runs counter to both the dominant political and ideological currents of capitalism, especially in its neoliberal variant, but also to those of much of the institutionally dominant ‘left.’ It points directly to how “upside-down” our world is. The fact that now scientists (specifically geologists) are seriously considering naming our ‘contemporary’ geological era the Anthropocene (because of the impact of the human species on our environment) speaks volumes about Pasolini’s proposal and concerns. Never has the contradiction between the potential for decentralized and democratic planning (the availability of both science and technology), and on neoliberalism, it does’nt yet fully appreciate the dominance of developing totalitarian trends. 62 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998) although Anderson generally finds Fredric Jameson’s analyses, especially Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991) more empirically grounded than I do. Obviously the fact that like so many other ‘post-’s, postmodernism can only define itself through epigonal succession, is another symptom of its apparent ‘floating-free’ of history.

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the actual irrational totalitarian abomination of oligarchical ‘planning’ for pillage been greater. Proposing a new foundation for social, political, economic, ethical and inter-species relations, like that outlined by Pasolini, in and of itself does very little to counter the ever more predatory and degrading totalitarian trends we are witnessing, which need to be addressed at the level of institutions, but it does counter some of the most entrenched and unexamined dogmas of contemporary (postmodern) ‘high’ culture head on.

Works Cited Ali, Tariq. The Extreme Centre: a Warning. London: Verso, 2015. Anderson, Perry. The New Old World. London: Verso, 2009. —. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. —. “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.” New Left Review, I/100 (November-December 1976): 5-78. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 2004. Bacevich, Andrew J. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. —. American Empire: the Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Balicco, Daniele. “Una lettera a Nietzsche: Fortini e il nichilismo di massa.” Allegoria 63 (gennaio-giugno 2011): 103-133. Berman, Edward H. The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: the Ideology of Philanthropy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Bricmont, Jean. Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006. Bricmont, Jean, and Alan Sokal. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador, 1998. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: BasicBooks, 1997. Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Engdahl, F. William. Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Boxboro, MA: Third Millennium Press, 2009.

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Farias, Victor. Heidegger and Nazism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Faye, Emmanuel. The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Gentile, Emilio. Italiani senza padri. Intervista sul Risorgimento. Edited by Simonetta Fiori. Bari: Laterza, 2011. —. Politics as Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. —. Il culto del littorio: la sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista. Bari: Laterza, 1993. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens.” Perspectives in Politics 12 (3) (2014): 564-581. Gilens, Martin. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Gramsci, Antonio. Sul Risorgimento. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1959. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. —. The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Hedges, Chris. Death of the Liberal Class. New York: Nation Books, 2010. Higham, Charles. American Swastika. Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1985. —. Trading with the Enemy: an Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949. New York: Delacorte Press, 1983. Hudson, Michael. Super Imperialism: the Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance. London: Pluto Press, 2003. —. Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: a History of Theories of Polarization and Convergence in the International Economy. London: Pluto Press, 1992. Jacobsen, Annie. Operation Paperclip: the Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America. New York: Little Brown & Co, 2014. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Johnson, Chalmers. Nemesis: the Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

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—. Blowback the Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New York: Metropolitan/Owl Book, 2004. —. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: Norton & Co., 1995. Lisagor, Nancy and Lipsius, Frank. A Law Unto Itself: the Untold Story of the Law Firm Sullivan & Cromwell. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Lofgren, Mike. The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. New York: Viking, 2016. Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London: NLB, 1975. Maren, Michael. The Road to Hell: the Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. New York: Free Press, 1997. Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 2016. Meek, James. Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else. London: Verso, 2014. Melman, Seymour. Profits Without Production. New York: Knopf, 1983. —. The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. —. Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. London: Verso, 2013. Parenti, Michael. The Assassination of Julius Caesar: a People’s History of Ancient Rome. New York: New Press, 2003. Perkins, John. The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2016. Poulantzas, Nikos. State, Power, Socialism. London: New Left Books, 1978. —. The Crisis of Dictatorships. London: New Left Books, 1976. —. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: New Left Books, 1975. —. Fascism and Dictatorship. London: New Left Books, 1974. Price, David H. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Priest, Dana and Arkin, William. “Top Secret America.” Washington Post (July 19th to December 20th 2010).

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Schiller, Herbert. Mass Communications and American Empire. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992. —. Culture, Inc.: the Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Tertulian, Nicolas. “Histoire de l’être et révolution politique.” Les temps modernes 523 (February 1990): 109-136. —. “Qui a peur du débat? Réponse à Miguel de Beistegui.” Les Temps modernes 529-530 (August-September 1990): 214-240. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Wolf, Naomi. The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Pub., 2007. Wolin, Sheldon. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER NINETEEN THEORIES OF VIDEO ACTIVISM AND FASCISM MATTIAS EKMAN

In academic literature, video activism is (almost) exclusively linked to socially and politically progressive practices and actors. It is described as part of a “participatory media culture,”1 or as a radical media practice deployed in order to empower activists in their struggle for progressive social change.2 Needless to say, these perspectives tend to highlight the progressive, open and participatory character of media production, distribution and content.3 Since neo-fascist organizations have appropriated some of the strategies and practices deployed in alternative media production, content and dissemination it would be tempting to situate farright video activism within the alternative media paradigm.4 However, as Atton points out, even if the far-right use similar strategies as progressive alternative media,5 for example by emphasizing opposition to mainstream media, the goal of far-right media is to “construct a community with

1

Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2009); Shirley A. White, “Participatory Video: A Process that Transforms the Self and the Other,” in Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower, ed. Shirley A. White (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003). 2 Tina Askanius, Radical Online Video: YouTube, Video Activism and Social Movement Media Practices (Lund: Lund Studies in Media and Communication 17, 2012). 3 Chris Atton, Alternative Media (London: Sage, 2002); John D. H. Downing, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (Thousands Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001); Clemencia Rodriguez, Fissures in the Mediascape. An International Study of Citizens Media (Cresskill: Hampton, 2001). 4 See Chris Atton, “Far-Right Media on the Internet: Culture, Discourse and Power” New Media and Society, 8.4 (2006): 573-587 and Les Back, “Aryans reading Adorno,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25.4 (2002): 628-651. 5 Atton, “Far-right media on the Internet.”

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closure.”6 According to Downing, alternative media practices reinforce democratic culture through their inclusive and participatory character, however far-right media practices are better understood as “repressive radical media.”7 On the whole, for marginalized actors, online video activism is an inexpensive way of disseminating (visual) political messages. It is not resource-demanding; it basically requires digital recording equipment, a software program for digital editing, and a basic knowledge of political communication. Video production is often centered on the activities of organizations—for example, through documenting street action and social gatherings. It is also deployed in order to mobilize activists in relation to demonstrations, and it is used to produce and disseminate alternative news.8 Furthermore, online video activism has benefited greatly from the rise of huge video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. These commercial platforms can facilitate (potentially) massive audiences and they have also developed into political arenas in their own right.9 Usually, actors in the far-right environment have limited access to conventional distribution channels—for obvious reasons.10 Therefore, commercial sites such as YouTube provide simple and dynamic platforms that are ideal for groups on the political margin. Publishing and distributing videos on YouTube means that far right-wing movements can reach and communicate with new audiences, but it is also about empowering and mobilizing those already involved in far-right movements.11 Furthermore, since public protests and political dissent need to attract media attention in order to influence public opinion,12 video activism becomes a valuable strategy for mediated visibility.13

6

Nick Couldry, “Alternative Media and Mediated Community,” paper presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research, Barcelona, 23 July 2002. 7 Downing, Radical Media, 95. 8 Askanius, Radical Online Video, 64f. 9 Brian McNair, An Introduction to Political Communication. Fifth Edition (New York: Routledge, 2011), 13. 10 Helene Lööw, Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999. Den rasistiska undergroundrörelsen: musiken, myterna, riterna (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2000). 11 Tina Askanius and Julie Uldam, “Online Social Media for Radical Politics: Climate Change Activism on YouTube,” International Journal of Electronic Governance, 4.1-2 (2011): 69-84, 81. 12 See Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Dieter Rucht, “The Quadruple ‘A’: Media strategies of Protest Movements since the 1960s,” in Cyberprotest, ed. Wim van de

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The aim of this essay is to discuss some theoretical perspectives that consider the content and specific features of neo-fascist video activism, but also to scrutinize how the content relates to the sociological aspects of far right-wing politics. Thus, the perspectives are relational in character and they assess online video activism as socio-cultural practices.14 The approach is inductive, and the theoretical perspectives have been outlined in relation to a comprehensive empirical analysis of more than 220 videos produced and disseminated on YouTube by five neo-fascist and far-right organizations (the result of this study is presented in the other essay by Ekman in this collection). The essay recognizes video activism as entailing specific “articulations” and “performances” of political and social identities and practices.15 The argument advanced here is that these could be analyzed through a combination of media centered and society (socioculturally/socio-politically) centered perspectives. Since the video activism of the far-right reveals a rather complex relation between production/distribution strategies and socio-political organization and mobilization, the goal is to provide a theoretical perspective that offers some analytical value. This study draws on three different, yet not exclusive, perspectives in order to assess the production, content and distribution strategies of far right-wing video activism on YouTube. First, by drawing on Ahmed’s (2004) theory on affective economies, and the notion that contemporary societies have turned to “culture,”16 the essay argues that neo-fascist video activism could be understood as a cultural politics of emotions.17 Second, this study discusses how this concoction of violence and masculinity constitutes a particular form of fascist bio-politics. This section taps into Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht (London: Routledge, 2004). 13 See Bart Cammaerts, “Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure,” European Journal of Communication, 27.2 (2012): 117-134. 14 Norman Fairclough, Media Discourse (London: Arnold, 1995); Zizi Papacharissi, “The Virtual Geographies of Social Networks: A Comparative Analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn and ASmallWorld,” New Media & Society, 11.1-2 (2009): 199-220. 15 See Lisbeth van Zoonen, Farida Vis and Sabina Mihelj, “Performing Citizenship on YouTube: Activism, Satire and Online Debate around the Anti-Islam Video Fitna,” Critical Discourse Studies, 7(4) (2010). 16 Arun Kundnani, “The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age,” Race and Class, 54.1 (2012): 113-116; Ferruh Yilmaz, “Right-Wing Hegemony and Immigration: How the Populist Far-Right Achieved Hegemony through the Immigration Debate in Europe,” Current Sociology 60.3 (2012): 368-381. 17 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79, 22.2 (2004): 117- 139;

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some of the ideals of historical fascism (and its historic aesthetics), as well as the sociological aspects of contemporary masculine identity in neofascist movements. Thus, this section argues that video activism could be understood as an articulation of masculine bio-politics. Finally, the chapter turns to Benjamin’s theory of fascism and the aestheticization of politics, in order to understand how emotions, violence and masculinity are performed in the visual representations of far right-wing activists and practices.18

Far-Right Video Activism as a Cultural Politics of Emotions Fascism’s technologies of self and solidarity have proved as influential and attractive as the appeal of any of its systematic ideological features. Perhaps this is how fascisms have been able to speak repeatedly in the name of culture and become eloquent about the racial, national, and ethnic hierarchies constructed by the idea of absolute cultural difference along national lines.19

One of the most frequent characteristics of far-right online communication, if not the predominant one, is an affectively laden combination of discourse and aesthetics. Visual and textual content that address the audience’s emotional experiences and fantasies holds a prominent position in the online communication of the (Swedish) far-right.20 Thus, affective messages that pertain to the individual experiences of everyday (Internet) users are aligned to the political idealism expressed by far-right organizations. Moreover, affective communication clings to a historicized myth of (ethnic) belonging and to the construction of a community with closure. By considering the far-right’s video activism as a cultural politics of emotions, we are able to discuss the relation between feelings, which reside in the individual, and the collective formation constructed around and through the circulation of emotions.

18

Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior,” New German Critique, 17 (1979 [1930]): 120-128. 19 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge/Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 302. 20 Mattias Ekman, “Pro-Violence and Antidemocratic Right-Wing Extremist Messages on the Internet,” in Pro-Violence and Anti-Democratic Messages on the Internet (Stockholm: Statens Medieråd, 2014).

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For Ahmed emotions are first of all cultural practices, “circulating between bodies and signs,” rather than individual feelings.21 Ahmed argues that emotions are crucial in constructing the bodies of individuals within a collective, hence—emotions are socially organized. For example, the emotions of love and hate become central in aligning the bodies of certain individuals within a community, while, simultaneously, excluding other bodies.22 So, by viewing emotions as an important part of the ideological adhesive deployed in the construction of socially exclusive communities, we can assess some of the specific characteristics used in the mediated formation of a “community with closure.”23 Ahmed stresses that the construction of a (racist) body of a nation, depends on the exclusion of subjects based on fear. Thus, the love expressed for an imagined nation (built on race, culture, etc.) ultimately resides in the hatred of the threatening other (the immigrant, the traitorous politician, etc.). The emotional underpinnings of an “ethnic” or a “culturally homogeneous” nation demands a total rejection of what is defined as the cultural or racial “other.” In contemporary society these rejections follow a general discursive turn to culture and difference, and to what Kundnani defines as a “culturalist interpretation of diversity.”24 Thus, complex social and economic relations are reduced to a matter of “culture,” signifying that “the ontology of the social has become culturalized.”25 Cultural explanations of social and economic issues have moved to the center of public debate, both as the result of successful populist right wing parties,26 but also because of a general political (and media) focus on, for example, the “Islam scare.”27 This societal climate enables an increased room for maneuver for actors that articulate the position that culture resides in essentially fixed characteristics among different groups in society, and that these differences are “insurmountable.”28

21

Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 117. Ahmed, “Affective Economies.” 23 Atton, “Far-Right Media on the Internet.” 24 Arun Kundnani, “The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age,” Race and Class, 54.1 (2012): 113-116, 114. 25 Yilmaz, “Right-Wing Hegemony and Immigration,” 369. 26 Ibid. 27 Liz Fekete, “Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right,” Race and Class, 48.1 (2006): 1-22. 28 Étienne Balibar, “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1992), 21. 22

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Furthermore, the contemporary cultural “politics of fear,” paves the way for more radical affective politics, in which the construction of a perceived threat, or the immanent fear “which is approaching,” becomes a far more effective narrative than one encompassing actually existing fears.29 The most obvious example in this cultural politics of fear is the global terrorism discourse. It has the ability to produce an endless number of bodies, onto which feelings of hate or fear are projected. Consequently, the emotional underpinnings which fuel the fear of the other, are not necessarily connected to a fear of a specific subject, but to a more general discourse of fear in which subjects and bodies are produced. This implies that the emotions of hatred and fear become detached from any external referent, and that referents are constructed in relation to specific subjects, events and processes in a given space and time. This also suggests that inclusions and exclusions of subjects in the far-right’s ethnocratic vision of society oscillate over time and space. In the video activism of the far-right, emotions come to the fore as mediators between individual experiences and group cohesion—ultimately constructing a sense of belonging. For example, by representing individual experiences of external violence or transgressions shared by single activists, or the opposite, by distributing collective experiences of (external) violence or hate, emotions are mediated to the individual (the viewer—the activist or sympathizer). By mainly triggering an emotional register, neo-fascist video content becomes an orchestrator of affective politics. Kimmel’s research on neo-Nazis who defected shows that experiences (among the activists) of personal victimization, in the form of bullying and social vulnerability, play an important role in the recruitment process.30 So, by feeding off individual experience of external physical or psychological violence, or general feelings of vulnerability, the visual content connects to the basic human desires of belonging, or to circulating emotions of vindication and retribution. In the latter, the visual representations attempt to reconfigure a sense of loss or dispossession (felt by the potential viewer), by offering a political and social solution to the initial emotion of distress. The videos’ emotive qualities transform the individual experiences through a discourse of collective affinity, creating a seemingly rational alternative to problems experienced in real life. For example, a common narrative in far right-wing online propaganda deals with young people being beaten, bullied, raped, etc. by immigrants (or any 29

Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012); Ahmed, “Affective Economies,”125. 30 Michael Kimmel, “Racism as Adolescent Male Rite Of Passage: Ex-Nazis in Scandinavia,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36.2 (2007): 202-218.

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other fitting description of the “other”).31 These stories are affective mediators between individual experiences and collective political mobilization. Consequently, it becomes problematic to simply speak about far-right violence as irrational or pathological (born out of the hatred of the other), instead its rationale resides in the central need for collective experience and group cohesion, irrespective of how deceitful the intentions of the narrative and topic might be. So, video activism is part of the process whereby both in-group solidarity and the “outside” are constructed, and it thereby discloses the necessity of defining the self within movements of dissent.32 Furthermore, by deploying emotional communication strategies in relation to a concrete action repertoire (for example, through demands for self-defense, or for the protection of defenseless victims) the movements also connect the “YouTube performances” to concrete opportunities of participation.33

Far-Right Video Activism as Articulations of Masculine Bio-Politics For historical reasons the interrelationship between fascism and violence is thoroughly discussed among scholars of various disciplines.34 According to Moore, fascism’s “stress [on violence] goes far beyond any cold, rational appreciation of the factual importance of violence in politics to a worship of ‘hardness’ for its own sake.”35 Additionally, this worship resides in historicized ideals of masculinity and fantasies of disciplined and obedient men. For example, the aesthetic features in the dominant 31

Ekman, “Pro-Violence.” See Manuela Caiani, Donatella della Porta and Claudius Wagemann, Mobilizing on the Extreme Right. Germany, Italy and the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 33 See van Zoonen, Vis and Mihelj, “Performing Citizenship,” 259f. 34 Richard Drake, “The Children of the Sun,” in Fascism - Critical Concepts in Political Science. Volume V. Post-war Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (London/New York: Routledge, 1989/2004); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); Tracy H. Koon, “Extract from ‘The Kingdom of the World’,” in Fascism - Critical Concepts in Political Science. Volume III. Fascism and Culture, ed. Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (London/New York: Routledge, 1985/2004). 35 Barrington Moore, Jr., “Revolution from above and Fascism,” in Fascism Critical Concepts in Political Science. Volume II. The Social Dynamics of Fascism, ed. Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (London /New York: Routledge, 2004 [1966]), 266. 32

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“heroic realism” prevailing in the Third Reich, frequently idealized a hyper-masculine (ancient) naturalism.36 Furthermore, (Italian) fascism’s “mystique of action and violence was tied in closely with the regime’s mystique of youth.”37 I argue that two of the central elements in (historical) fascist ideology—discipline and violence – continue to be crucial for an understanding of the specific characteristics of contemporary visual representations of neo-fascist practices and activists. Moreover, Kimmel’s sociological research focused on Swedish neoNazis who defected shows that several practices in the far-right milieu constitute a masculine rite of passage.38 In this rite of passage the (male) companionship experienced by activists, has proved to be more important than ideology and political discourses in the recruitment of new activists. The (masculine) rite of passage also fortifies the resolution of the activists involved by providing activists a homo-social companionship and a sense of belonging. Consequently, the commitment to the neo-Nazi organizations also declined when these social needs were no longer felt so strongly among activists.39 So, the relationship between masculinity, violence and youth play an important role when assessing the video activism of neofascist and far-right organizations. The mythical aspects of (violent) masculinity are particularly interesting.40 In (neo)-fascist propaganda, historical narratives are occupied with examples of great warriors and mythologized (white) male sacrifices. There is a distinct historical lineage here, for example in the ideological textbooks and training manuals circulating in Mussolini’s Italy, heroism was described as the “creed of the Fascist,” in contrast to the “egoism” of the bourgeois.41 In these narratives, male subjects often conveyed a form of hyper-masculinity—an exaggerated, violent, male identity embedded in the (previously mentioned) “mythical worship of ‘hardness’ for its own sake.”42 Furthermore, processes of collective identity formation in neofascist organizations feed on what some scholars have described as a

36

Ingmar Karlsson and Arne Ruth, Samhället som teater. Estetik och politik i tredje riket (Stockholm: Liber, 1984), 165f. 37 Koon, “Extract,” 206. 38 Kimmel, “Racism as Adolescent Male Rite of Passage.” 39 Ibid. 40 Koon, “Extract.” 41 Ibid., 207. 42 Moore, “Revolution from above,” 266.

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general “crisis of masculinity.”43 For example, organizations fiercely attack feminism, which they believe is a state-sponsored ideology deployed in order to undermine or even vaporize the natural supremacy of the white or European male.44 Far-right organizations foment emotions of a perceived loss of male companionship in what they consider to be an age of masculine uncertainty—a societal climate that tends to promote a more heterogeneous landscape of masculine identities. Obviously, this is a perspective they share with others, such as the “mythopoetic men’s movement” or conservatives’ defense of traditional gender roles in the nuclear family.45 In the far-right milieu this feeling of loss (or feeling of expulsion) becomes particularly evident in their hatred of homosexuality, and of the organizations working in favor of sexual equality, which are perceived to manipulate a natural order. Furthermore, the naturalization of social inequality privileges a certain type of masculine ideal—a racialized version of pre-modern forms of masculinity—a social Darwinist perception of dominant men combined with explicit ethnocratic ideals. Within the far-right milieu historicized masculine ideals are often articulated in myths of great warriors (for example in the shape of Vikings, Waffen-SS volunteers or historic national heroes).The hyper-masculine identity also implies that biological reproduction and the female sexuality become a key attribute in ethnocratic fantasies of a regenerated nation. Therefore, the sexuality and the body of the white woman must be protected in order to secure the reproduction of the “white,” “Nordic” or “European” society. This form of hyper-masculine discourse is most evident in organizations advocating a biological version of race, but traces of this discourse are also evident among cultural racists. In propaganda, white females are believed to be ‘threatened and under attack’ by nonwhite immigrants, and violence against women is a recurrent topic in farright discourses.46 Thus, anti-feminism becomes connected to specific expressions of masculine ideals and masculine identity markers.47 By using violence against women as a recurrent topic in visual propaganda, 43

For a discussion and a critique of this so called crisis see Raewyn W. Connell, “On Hegemonic Masculinity and Violence Response to Jefferson and Hall,” Theoretical Criminology, 6.1 (2002): 89-99. 44 Ekman, “Pro-Violence.” 45 Abby L. Ferber, “Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors: The Construction of Masculinity in Mythopoetic and White Supremacist Discourse,” Men and Masculinities, 3.1 (2000): 30-56. 46 See Fekete, “Enlightened Fundamentalism?” and Ekman, “Pro-Violence.” 47 See Ferber, “Racial Warriors.”

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the violence deployed (or advocated) by activists appears as an honorable, rational reaction—i.e. as a collective self-defense. The far-right milieu offers a (violent) male community, in which perceptions of injustices and vulnerability can not only be avoided, but also actively stopped. So, by consolidating a masculine and homo-social environment (or at least a vision of one), far right-wing communication and propaganda facilitates imaginations of a regenerated masculinity—i.e. fantasies of ethnocratic patriarchy. Anthropologist Statzel argues that the far right-wing online milieu functions as an imaginary community that fulfills political and social functions for the participating members.48 For example, politically marginalized persons may feel a sense of belonging in a large group, and political frameworks of action are constituted on the basis of personal and communal experiences. So, it’s fruitful to understand video activism as part of an ongoing process of socio-political identity formation within farright movements.

Far-Right Video Activism as an Aestheticization of Politics Finally, in order to encompass how emotions, violence and masculinity are performed and articulated in video clips, and how the activism centered on video production and distribution could be understood in contrast to more conventional political practices (such as holding public meetings, distributing flyers, giving speeches, etc.) we’ll turn to Benjamin’s concept of the aestheticization of politics. Benjamin argued that one of the specific features of Nazism was its aesthetic lure.49 By “rendering politics through aesthetics,”50 Nazism was able to utilize new technologies such as film and photography, in a way that, Benjamin argues, “enabled the mass character of Nazism to be captured in unprecedented ways.”51 Fascism’s appropriation of new media technology allowed for new forms of bio-political expression, with Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens as the foremost example of an aestheticized choreography of power and a bio-political submission of the masses. Back argues that the rise of Internet “allow[s] new horizons for the expression of whiteness” 48

R. Sophie Statzel, “Cybersupremacy: The New Face of White Supremacist Activism,” in Digital Media and Democracy, Megan Boler (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008). 49 See Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism,” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (London: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc, 1968), 211-244. 50 Back, “Aryans Reading Adorno,” 628. 51 Quoted in ibid., 632.

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and race politics.52 So by applying Benjamin’s concept of aestheticized politics to new contemporary forms of cultural expressions emanating from the far-right, we might be able to understand the aesthetic lure of 21st century (neo-fascist) visual politics. Far right-wing video activism becomes a strategy, in which the control over (media) representation is the key question. The production of thousands of video clips, and the specific framing and distribution strategies deployed by far-right actors, exposes how different forms of socio-cultural identities and practices are aligned with extensive political projects of the far-right. These projects attempt to connect neo-fascist politics with a historical lineage of political dissent, as well as providing new representational frames. By providing a more diverse gallery of political practices and social identities, video activism becomes an apparatus of redefinition and appropriation. For example, far right activists come to the fore as rather ordinary and concerned citizens, and political practices are aligned to conventional collective practices in society, such as sports and outdoor life. But in contrast to the embodied mass character of visual aesthetics in Nazi-Germany,53 contemporary neo-fascist video production constructs social cohesion through a more diverse gallery of representational forms.54 If the aesthetic lure of the Third Reich was predominantly centered on the submission of self, and the omnipotent power of the Leader and the State, modern visual (online) representation reflects a more fragmented character of communication—i.e. the specific features signifying social media. The absence of mass-audiences and the specific type of medium for video activism on platforms such as YouTube implies that the contemporary neo-fascist aestheticization of politics also embodies the mass-self communication of late-modernity.55 So, online video activism seems to enable a heterogeneous and multimodal neofascist political communication.56 Recorded sequences of traditional forms of mass-mobilization and collective discipline are accompanied by representational frames centered on the self and the individual experiences of both activists and viewers. So, it seems that contemporary far right video activism has the ability to redefine conceptions of what far right identities “essentially” are, what kind of attributes and symbols the actors 52

Ibid., 633. See Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism,” and Karlsson and Ruth, Samhället som teater. 54 Ekman, “Pro-Violence.” 55 See Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 56 Back, “Aryans reading Adorno.” 53

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use and mediate, but at the same time connect these more diverse representational frames to an (imaginary) history of masculinity, strength and idealist politics of action. Thus, it expresses a political continuity through a more multifaceted aestheticization. Another important difference between the aestheticization of politics in 20th century fascist propaganda and in contemporary forms of online communication has to do with the specific qualities of the medium of social media and the Internet.57 In the past, the aestheticization of politics demanded (and produced) mass-audiences or mass-performances connected to particular physical spaces. In contrast, online users tend to form a rather fragmented audience, meaning that the contemporary aestheticization of politics (in video clips) is centered on individual experiences and rationales for participation and inclusion.58 Moreover, online video activism implies that the mediation of political messages becomes detached from physical space. Before the rise of the Internet (and particularly web 2.0) political communication was mediated through film screenings, traditional linear broadcasts, public and print advertisement, on-site public campaigning and so forth, creating various concrete time-space situated opportunities for reception and participation. Needless to say, these “traditional” forms still prevail and play an important role in shaping public opinion and political movements. However, the rise of online communication adds a new and increasingly important form of mediation in the circulation of political messages. For example, archived and published documentation of political activities prolong the presence of the actual events and expand them in space. The mediation of political action on YouTube entails that the representation of spatially-situated events becomes compressed in time when circulated on a social media platform with a potentially large audience. This “appropriation and use of space” enables specific forms of representational modes in which the video producers can control, but also manufacture the visual politics of street action or social meetings.59 For example, by filming spectacular public actions and then publishing them as video clips on YouTube, the time and space confines of the actions are transgressed. Thus, the mediated public actions extend the spatial-temporal realm of the actual event by enabling it to circulate in new online spaces. Consequently, the political space of 57

Ibid. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson, “The Political Economy of YouTube,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: Mediehistoriskt Arkiv 12, 2009). 59 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 220. 58

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action is extended, while simultaneously time is compressed (the specific public action can be (re)witnessed at any time—all the time). Consequently, disseminating clips on online platforms such as YouTube produces new political spaces of action and participation. The manner in which they differ from traditional film screenings, for example, has to do with the infinite possibilities of remediation, circulation and (re)appropriation of online video clips. So, by reconsidering Benjamin’s “suggestive comments about the potential of technology to express aesthetic politics in a new dimension,” online video activism, and indeed other forms of contemporary online political communication, seems to fit that potential.60 One important factor to consider in the circulation of online video clips on platforms such as YouTube, has to do with anonymity, or more accurately the use of pseudonyms on social media platforms (i.e. pseudonymity). Since the reception of, and interaction with, neo-fascist media content harbors potential social stigma—i.e. it’s difficult to openly sympathize with far right-wing and neo-fascist actors—online communication has removed some of the impediments that previously existed in the social interaction between extremist movements and their potential sympathizers. Online video content is (almost) constantly accessible, and the interactive features on social media platforms facilitate new spaces for movements to connect users (audiences) with each other, as well as connecting users to actors within the far-right milieu. A great deal of content in neo-fascist video clips is centered on recruitment and mobilization, frequently with direct invitations to participation aimed at the viewer. This implies that online video activism goes beyond a traditional producer-viewer relationship, since it opens up for a more extensive identity-building process centered on the content of video clips (but in no way restricted to it), and through the interactivity in comments, the possibility to embed clips in other online domains, etc. So, online video activism becomes part of a larger repertoire of far right-wing online culture, and the sociality in new distribution channels such as YouTube play a role in the processes that shape socio-political identities.61 Even though online content and online milieus are frequently depicted as ephemeral, video activism on YouTube also functions as a form of political archive. Published clips, including events situated in time and space (such as direct actions, demonstrations, public speeches, etc.), constitute a place of collective memory that enables activists and sympathizers 60

Back, “Aryans Reading Adorno,” 632. See Robert Futrell, Pete Simi and Simon Gottschalk, “Understanding Music in Movements: The White Power Music Scene,” The Sociological Quarterly, 47.2 (2006): 275-304, 296.

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to participate (indirectly) with activities, to identify with activists, and to connect with the political realm of far right-wing politics.62 Video clips published on YouTube become evidence of collective action and a part of the organization’s own historiography. So, video activism is both connected to a concrete space of political and social action (the recording of public and internal events, gatherings, etc.), but it also enables a mediation form that entails specific characteristics. When various clips are published together on neo-fascist organizations’ YouTube-channels, they disclose a rather multifaceted visual gallery of political and social identities and practices. For example, the most violent Swedish neo-fascist organization (SMR, The Swedish Resistance Movement) has published more than 180 clips on their YouTube-channel, attracting more than 2,300,000 views.63 The YT-channel of SMR embodies an interesting combination of masculine (homo)sociality, aesthetic politics and a very explicit cultural politics of emotions, thus constructing new forms of public visibility and spaces of interactivity.

Summary The presence of far-right and neo-fascist online video activism challenges techno-optimistic discourses that celebrate the advancement of information and communication technology and its possible impact on progressive social change. Even if there is plenty of evidence supporting the notion of social media’s potential to revitalize and strengthen civic engagement, it is also easy to point out opposite trajectories in the sociopolitical use of new information and communication technology. By putting the spotlight on what Caiani and Parenti call “the dark side of the Web”—the emergence of dynamic far right-wing activities on the Internet, a far gloomier picture emerges.64 So, the socio-technological possibilities and constraints are always linked to, and dependent on, specific sociopolitical actors as well as the overall societal climate and development— i.e. it’s crucial to recognize the specific macro and micro contexts in which socio-technology emerges and operates. Far right-wing groups have a long history of media production, and online video activism has become a key strategy in their communicative repertoire. In order to assess how online video clips facilitate the 62

See Askanius, Radical Online Video. http://www.youtube.com/user/MotstandsMedia/ (retrieved October 26, 2015). 64 Manuela Caiani and Linda Parenti, “The Dark Side of the Web: Italian RightWing Extremist Groups and the Internet,” South European Society and Politics, 14.3 (2009): 273-294. 63

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dissemination of political propaganda, and how video activism could be understood in the process of shaping and reshaping extreme right-wing political identities and practices, this essay has presented a combination of media- and socio-theoretical perspectives. By understanding far-right wing video activism as a combination of media production and movementbuilding practices, it is possible to analyze the relational character of media production/content/dissemination and socio-political organization and mobilization. This essay argues that neo-fascist and far-right wing video activism must be understood as a cultural politics of emotions.65 Furthermore, it discusses how this is connected to particular forms of violence and masculinity—and the emergence of a regenerated fascist bio-politics. Finally, the chapter draws on Benjamin’s theory of fascism and the aestheticization of politics, in order to assess how emotions, violence and masculinity are performed in the visual representations of far right-wing activists and practices. By combining both media- and society-centered theories, and by approaching neo-fascist video activism from a relational perspective, we can move beyond the usual discussions on (for example) the problems of online racist rhetoric (such as hate-speech), and discuss the tangible and socio-material consequences of the far-right’s appropriation of socio-technology, and the new forms of mediation enabled by the current online cultures of connectivity.66

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 79, 22.2 (2004): 117139. Askanius, Tina. Radical Online Video: YouTube, Video Activism and Social Movement Media Practices. Lund: Lund Studies in Media and Communication 17, 2012. Askanius, Tina, and Julie Uldam. “Online Social Media for Radical Politics: Climate Change Activism on YouTube.” International Journal of Electronic Governance, 4.1-2 (2011): 69-84. Atton, Chris. Alternative Media. London: Sage, 2002. —. “Far-Right Media on the Internet: Culture, Discourse and Power.” New Media and Society, 8.4 (2006): 573-587.

65

See Ahmed, “Affective Economies.” Acknowledgments: I would like to express my gratitude to Jan Christofferson for valuable comments and suggestions. 66

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Back, Les. “Aryans Reading Adorno.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 25.4 (2002): 628-651. Balibar, Étienne. “Is there a ‘Neo-Racism’?” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Edited by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1992. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity, 1989. Benjamin, Walter. “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior.” New German Critique, 17 (1979 [1930]): 120-128. —. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, 211-244. London: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1968. Burgess, Jean and Joshua Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2009. Caiani, Manuela and Linda Parenti. “The Dark Side of the Web: Italian Right-Wing Extremist Groups and the Internet.” South European Society and Politics, 14.3 (2009): 273-294. Caiani, Manuela, Donatella della Porta and Claudius Wagemann. Mobilizing on the Extreme Right. Germany, Italy and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Cammaerts, Bart. “Protest Logics and the Mediation Opportunity Structure.” European Journal of Communication, 27.2 (2012): 117134. Castells, Manuel. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Connell, Raewyn. W.. “On Hegemonic Masculinity and Violence Response to Jefferson and Hall.” Theoretical Criminology, 6.1 (2002): 89-99. Couldry, Nick. “Alternative Media and Mediated Community.” Paper presented at the International Association for Media and Communication Research, Barcelona, 23 July 2002. Drake, Richard. “The Children of the Sun.” In Fascism - Critical Concepts in Political Science. Volume V. Post-war Fascism. Edited by Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman. London/New York: Routledge, 1989/2004. Downing, John. D. H.. Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements. Thousands Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001. Ekman, Mattias. “Pro-Violence and Antidemocratic Right-Wing Extremist Messages on the Internet.” In Pro-Violence and Anti-Democratic Messages on the Internet. Stockholm: Statens Medieråd, 2014. Fairclough, Norman. Media Discourse. London: Arnold, 1995.

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Fekete, Liz. Pedlars of Hate: The Violent Impact of the European Far Right. London: Institute of Race Relations, 2012. —. A Suitable Enemy. Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe. London: Pluto Press, 2009. —. “Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right.” Race and Class, 48.1 (2006): 1-22. Ferber, Abby. L. “Racial Warriors and Weekend Warriors: The Construction of Masculinity in Mythopoetic and White Supremacist Discourse.” Men and Masculinities, 3.1 (2000): 30-56. Futrell, Robert, Pete Simi and Simon Gottschalk. “Understanding Music in Movements: The White Power Music Scene.” The Sociological Quarterly, 47.2 (2006): 275-304. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge/Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Karlsson, Ingmar and Arne Ruth. Samhället som teater. Estetik och politik i tredje riket. Stockholm: Liber, 1984. Kimmel, Michael. “Racism as Adolescent Male Rite of Passage: Ex-Nazis in Scandinavia.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36.2 (2007): 202-218. Koon, Tracy. H. “Extract from ’The Kingdom of the World’.” In Fascism Critical Concepts in Political Science. Volume III. Fascism and Culture. Edited by Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman. London/New York: Routledge, 1985/2004. Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Kundnani, Arun. “The Crises of Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age.” Race and Class, 54.1 (2012): 113-116. Lööw, Helene. Nazismen i Sverige 1980-1999. Den rasistiska undergroundrörelsen: musiken, myterna, riterna. Stockholm: Ordfront, 2000. Mammone, Andrea, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins., eds. Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe. London/New York: Routledge, 2012. McNair, Brian. An Introduction to Political Communication. Fifth Edition. New York: Routledge, 2011. Moore, Jr., Barrington. “Revolution from above and Fascism.” In FascismCritical Concepts in Political Science. Volume II. The Social Dynamics

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of Fascism. Edited by Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman. London/ New York: Routledge, 2004 [1966]. Papacharissi, Zizi. “The Virtual Geographies of Social Networks: A Comparative Analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn and ASmallWorld.” New Media & Society, 11.1-2 (2009): 199-220. Rodriguez, Clemencia. Fissures in the Mediascape. An International Study of Citizens Media. Cresskill: Hampton, 2001. Rucht, Dieter. “The Quadruple ‘A’: Media Strategies of Protest Movements since the 1960s.” In Cyberprotest. Edited by Wim van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht. London: Routledge, 2004. Statzel, R. Sophie. “Cybersupremacy: The New Face of White Supremacist Activism.” In Digital Media and Democracy. Edited by Megan Boler. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. van Zoonen, Lisbeth, Farida Vis and Sabina Mihelj. “Performing Citizenship on YouTube: Activism, Satire and Online Debate around the Anti-Islam Video Fitna.” Critical Discourse Studies, 7.4 (2010): 249-262. Wasko, Janet and Mary Erickson. “The Political Economy of YouTube”. In The YouTube Reader. Edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau. Stockholm: Mediehistoriskt Arkiv 12, 2009. Whine, Michael. “Trans-European Trends in Right-Wing Extremism.” In Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe. Edited by A. Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins. London/New York: Routledge, 2012. White, Shirley, A. “Participatory Video: A Process that Transforms the Self and the Other.” In Participatory Video: Images that Transform and Empower. Edited by Shirley A. White. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003. Wåg, Mathias. “Nationell kulturkamp - från vit maktmusik till metapolitik.” In Det vita fältet. Edited by Mats Deland, Fredrik Hertzberg and Thomas Hvitfeldt. Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensis 41, 2010. Yilmaz, Ferruh. “Right-Wing Hegemony and Immigration: How the Populist Far-Right Achieved Hegemony through the Immigration Debate in Europe.” Current Sociology 60.3 (2012): 368-381.

CHAPTER TWENTY DELEUZE’S AND GUATTARI’S ANTI-OEDIPUS AS A THEORY OF FASCISM ANDREA RIGHI

As a modern parable on totalitarianism Gary Ross’ The Hunger Games (2012) serves as a suitable didactic model to explore the intertwining fabric that constitutes fascism, both because of what we normally think of when we talk about its historical occurrence—think of Italian fascism or German Nazism—and because of what instead remained implicit in it and only now, in contemporary capitalism, is gaining a distinctive relevance. The film enjoyed a wide audience, so there is little need for discussing its plot. Inspired by the myth of Theseus, The Hunger Games is set in a near future in which an authoritarian and centralized elite, the Capitol, rules over the masses, the twelve districts, with terror and an overpowering military force. And yet not even the display of a mighty repressive apparatus is sufficient to secure the Capitol’s dominion. The gladiators’ fight-to-the-death combats are thus a ruse to maintain power: they represent a ritual in which the defeat of the district’s rebellion is remembered and reasserted. The totalitarian dimension of this society is what one intuitively connects to the idea of a dictatorial regime and, in fact, we are ready to suffer for the pure and brave girl from district twelve, Katniss, who will enter the games with the heroic mission of surviving without killing anybody, thus jamming the perverse mechanism of the spectacle of death. We may expect that good will eventually triumph and evil will be vanquished in the course of the sequel. After all, this is Hollywood’s storyline that secures good numbers at the box office. Yet what surfaces, at least in the first film of the series, (and what for us is more interesting) is a perverse moment in which Katniss, who, usually reluctant to play the glamorous part she is assigned by the system, in this instance actually seems to become fascinated by it. As she spins around in her dazzling fire costume, she stares and gets entangled in the spectacle of the cheering crowd. In this moment she is both an object of

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concupiscence but also a mirror that throws their own desire back at the people (the rich fascist elite). It is in this momentary reflection that the desire of the fascists and that of the heroine coalesce. This instant in which desire is visualized via a strong libidinal investment gestures toward the other form of fascism I will explore. It works at a libidinal level and is rarely mentioned nor, needless to say, represented on the screen. One can argue that there are, in fact, two general ways of representing the historical phenomenon of fascism. The first, and most common, is representing the latter as the incarnation of absolute monstrosity. The magnitude of its evil makes of fascism precisely a monster, something that is utterly different from us. As such it comes to stand as a representative of everything that repels us and that most importantly we are not. In The Hunger Games this is illustrated by the cruel aristocratic grasp of power personified by Snow, the President of the Capitol. He is the true alter ego of the image of the president of a western democracy who stoically stands for the good, whatever the costs, which the media has codified over the decades.1 Diametrically opposed to that, Snow is absolutely determined to maintain order at the cost of inenarrable violence. We can call this atrocious identity an alterity, because it is absolutely other from our own conceptualization of ourselves. This is in general terms the usual depiction of fascism that cinema has given us. It follows a naïve narrative of the history of the twentieth-century, which, however, has deep implications even for more refined theories. Casting off the horror of fascism as an unhappy accident in the otherwise progressive development of modernity—the proverbial case of the bad apple—pushes one to use the classic metaphor of the metastasis, a degeneration that evolves into something that is unrecognizable when compared to its point of origin. And yet historical fascism—think of Benito Mussolini’s two decades of dictatorship—was a regime based not only on military force but also on a wide popular consensus. This means that it ruled in an authoritarian fashion but that it also enjoyed wide support from the very people who were oppressed by this system of power. It is here that the idea of metastasis becomes problematic. How do people will their own oppression? Or, following our initial parallel with The Hunger Games: how is it possible that one and the same desire unites the oppressors and the liberator as shown by the ambiguous scene of Katniss’ glorification? 1

A similar opposition is established between the people of the Capitol, who are dressed extravagantly as attendees at an exclusive fashion show, and the people of district twelve, who look like depression-era-US peasants. The symbolism here is blatant: the poorer but honest American people of our past against the corrupted ones of the near future.

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The answer depends on whether you are intuitively Rousseauian, and you think that all persons are naturally good and society corrupts them, or Hobbesian and believe that humans are naturally predisposed towards evil. Both perspectives however may only superficially be used to explain what I called a fascist alterity. In the Rousseauian case some artificial element must be introduced to distort people’s will. And yet this mechanism must be something utterly historical and also applicable to societies that are not fascist. In other words, according to this line of argument the masses were deluded and tricked into being fascist. The mesmerizing word of the Capitol may corrupt even Katniss, but we soon discover that she is simply playing a part—and this is the notion that the rest of the movie reinforces by portraying the people of the Capitol as rich, ignorant parasites and (most of) the district’s inhabitants as honest and fierce rebels. The Hobbesian case is even worse and it is rarely taken into account by Hollywood: it is precisely the social bond that prevents any community from degenerating due to its own violence and corruption. This artifice is what some call democracy: the fascists don’t have it and thus fully express the ferociousness of human beings, luckily we have it and are somehow protected from that downfall. In any case, one may notice a continuity between modernity and fascism that radically disrupts the all-tooconvincing tale of fascism as the realm of absolute evil while we, the West, are its redeemer and vengeful terminator. The point of this essay is to transcend this Manichean division and attempt a tentative investigation of the deeper motives for the persistence of fascism even in contemporary society. One of the most interesting efforts in studying precisely the continuity and actuality of fascism within modernity is Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s text Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Anti-Oedipus (from now on AO) was a groundbreaking text for the rise of anti-authoritarianism that followed the social struggles of 1968. It is also a very complex work that aims at creating a new theoretical framework, a philosophy in other words, that it is impossible to condense here in a single essay. Thus in the following pages, I will limit my discussion to a very specific theme that AO develops, that is to say a sporadic but insightful reflection they develop on fascism. In so doing, I will take up Deleuze’s and Guattari’s main theoretical points only insofar as they deal with the issue in question. To anticipate my argument, the latter assesses precisely the old Spinozian question of why people desire their own oppression.

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Immanence and Desire One of the most interesting elements that AO introduces in the philosophical debate of its time is that of desire. Desire is commonly associated with an object, in other words it has a transitive nature. Ostensibly one always desires something, and it is this thing that the subject must act upon or seize in order to reach satisfaction. The corollary of this assumption is that I want something I don’t have; for instance, if I crave ice cream it also means that I don’t have it. Under these circumstances, desire is first of all conceived of as based on lack. Secondly it is also representational, that is to say it produces in the imagination the idea of the thing that one wants and that is however absent. AO radically subverts this commonsensical conceptualization of desire. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they argue that: from the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic… conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack, a lack of an object, of the real object… Desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a ‘dreamed-of object behind every real object,’ or a mental production behind all real productions.2

Basing desire on something that we lack produces the unexpected result of rendering abstract or impalpable the very thing that we most urgently yearn for. What is invested with such remarkable intensity becomes a pale image and reality, but on the other hand, takes up the form of its tenuous counterpoint. Instead of doubling desire into a subjective action and an object, AO articulates the idea that there is no difference between the two, or expressed more cogently, that there are only desiring fluxes that are not based on lack. Everything is present in a concatenation that our authors call ensembles of machines. This point may seem counterintuitive but, if one thinks of how the Internet functions, things may appear in a different light. What one may look for while browsing the net is never absent. It’s already there inscribed, as it were, in the algorithms that enable our online searches. This is why Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that “desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine as a machine of machines. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it.”3 2

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 11th ed. 2003), 25. 3 Deleuze and Guattari, AO, 26.

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One may wonder what happens to the desiring individual in this case. Deleuze and Guattari argue that it is not the object but “it is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject.”4 Again if one thinks of the virtual world this apparently absurd proposition may seem more plausible. On the Internet everything is virtually present, while we as users find unstable moments of definition at those junctures when some electronic result is produced, when we determine something through those libraries of data. In this sense we merely activate that electronic production that defines us in particular moments. According to Deleuze and Guattari this assemblage, the desiring chain, shows how flawed the old notion of the human as a little sovereign that rationally controls his passions and needs is. The subject, the little “I” we imagine living in our head who governs the big machine as a pilot on a crane, is nothing but an illusion. Who in fact would be inside the head of the pilot? An even smaller pilot? And behind that what then? Usually this regression stops only with some unknown principle: soul, God … in other words some form of transcendence that guarantees order. What exists is instead formed assemblages of parts that work just like a great factory, except its final production is not defined by a determined plan, but engenders itself in the great laboratory that is life. There are fluxes of energies and management is only a residual effect. Life is thus a series of machines, and “every machine is a machine of a machine,” just like in the virtual space of the Web where every bite of information co-exists in the transmission of an associative chain.5 This proposition has two important philosophical consequences. First, it redefines the subject in materialist terms by further demystifying the remains of a humanist conception: as I mentioned the little sovereign that resides in our head pulling levers to operate our body-machine does not exist, what exists is the concatenation of machines themselves. Second, it forces a new understanding of the world that does not allow for some external element: history is all there is; the field of life is all there is. This is a radically immanentist conception of life, one that does not allow for a transcendent entity, of the type that sketches an infinite regression of causes that usually ends with God, that manipulates things from the outside. This is important for the definition of fascism as well. Using a more philosophically inflected language, we may say that there is no outside to the historical field which fascist alterity comes from. Everything must happen within the field and evil must be explained, not so much as a 4 5

Ibid. Ibid., 36.

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monstrosity, but as a viable option within the field itself, or, to put it in different terms, as a product of the field itself. Hence the centrality of the problem of desire: fascism cannot be something that has been externally forced or skillfully sold to the people. In other words, studying fascism means explaining how people desire this system of power being perfectly aware not only of the tragedies that it engenders but also of the complete artificiality which it is based on. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”6

One Face of Fascism: Technical Machines and Oedipus In AO one can unearth two complementary but different faces of the complex phenomenon that set in motion the productive desire of fascism. The first and most simple one has to do with segregation and it can easily be referred to the most obvious traits of historical fascism: the ultranationalist attitude of a people that believes and actually takes great pleasure in affirming its supposed superiority and exceptionality with regard to the rest of the world.7 Parades, fanfares and military marches are its most visible token and the most widely investigated one. Although this is a sentiment that is still alive in today’s globalized world it is also probably the least intriguing component of fascism. It is the immediate answer to the question I posed above. Any viewer of The Hunger Games, for instance, instantaneously makes that assumption when looking at the people of the Capitol: they benefit from that exploitation of the rest of the district and then they keep them entertained with the show biz that the government organized around it. The second aspect instead is more covert and difficult to pinpoint, but it is imbricated with the movement of capitalism (particularly contemporary capitalism) itself. The reader should be advised that it is also the least developed option in the text, and this is also due to the historical moment in which AO was written. Let us now explore the first dimension using the theoretical framework of AO more in depth, and leave the second to the final notes of this essay. At the risk of oversimplifying, one may argue that if at an individual level subjectivities are assemblages of machines it is also true that larger aggregates, such as societies and economies, work as complexes of 6

Ibid., 29. Cfr. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: the Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 7

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apparatuses. Deleuze and Guattari call them technical machines. These mega-machines carry out a production that is based on repression and its institutionalization. According to our authors, it is at this point that the “strange adventure for desire to desire repression begins.” To understand how this happens one must descend to a more molecular level, at the level of what they call “the law of the production of production.”8 In their view, machines are not self-sufficient units, rather just like switches in an electric circuit they operate as steps in a chain that produces desire but that is also idealist in its general movement. As they write: the machine produces an interruption of the flow only insofar as it is connected to another machine that supposedly produces this flow. And doubtless this second machine in turn is really an interruption or break, too. But it is such only in relationship to a third machine that ideally—that is to say, relatively—produces a continuous, infinite flux.9

This triadic movement never reaches a conceptual synthesis but rather it follows a dynamic that continuously displaces itself similarly to the ways in which energy runs through a network. Moreover this synthesis is not symbolic, that is to say it does not double itself into a representational element that totalizes the process. Any synthesis is simply another break, another stimulus for the flow. Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire here appears in all its might as an inhuman force. This is not sexual desire; on the contrary “these relations bring into play a non sexual energy, for which sexuality has merely served as a symbol of… beyond.”10 The Oedipus complex is what intervenes to reframe and capture part of this flow. In The Hunger Games, one may think of the enthusiasm and libidinal ferment that flows through the people of the Capitol as this kind of inhuman desire. Here the triadic movement of the Oedipal complex can be reformulated in these terms: the father, President Snow, the child, the fascist crowd, and the inhuman flux of desire. A clearly (negative) paternal image, President Snow controls the mechanism of capture of this otherwise overbearing energy. He has systematized it into a system of order. He is the vertex of the social pyramid that gives sense to it. The Capitol’s apparatus reproduces repression precisely because it intervenes in the triadic movement and blocks or channels it via its segregationist system of power. To continue with our schematic reading of the film, President Snow is what normalizes the discourse of desire offering substitutes (Katniss) and 8

Deleuze and Guattari, AO, 32. Ibid. 10 Ibid., 46. 9

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proper outlets (the games). Katniss personifies the object of desire, a strong libidinal flow that goes from the people of the Capitol to her image of beauty, fragile vigor and so forth. President Snow is the one who reconverts this potentially unmanageable explosion of energy into a device with intends to contain and direct it toward its expected result: maintaining power. The Oedipal complex in fact imposes a representational framework, that is to say, a type of synthesis as we conceive it in normal parlance: a unitary point of conclusion that is hierarchical. This is why Oedipus is regarded as an “idealist turning point” that vainly tries to contain the productive desire of the machines which is instead immanent and not based strictly on sexuality, or on sexuality as articulated in the Oedipal complex.11 Under these conditions the subject is constantly seeking the love object, which being censured becomes something unattainable or something that must be sublimated in other forms. This structure is also based on lack and a doubling that produces hierarchy and its investment in it. In fascism in general this seems particularly true for the lower strata, that is to say, for those who should naturally fight against their own repression and instead are in the front line when it is time to defend their tyrants. In this case, “Oedipal applications… depend on the determination of subjected groups… and on their libidinal investments (from the age of thirteen I’ve worked hard, rising on the social ladder… being part of the exploiters).”12 This is the segregationist aspect that marks fascism, the idea and pleasure one draws from being part of a superior and exceptional group. This is why Deleuze and Guattari maintain that fascism “is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize or being subjected to an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.”13 When such a libidinal investment is put into motion then actual calculations and interest are thrown out the window. Class alliances break and solidarity vanishes. It is customary to hear that the rights that other workers may have conquered are simply privileges and forms of parasitic waste when compared to the status of the pockets of other honest working people, while the astonishing figures and the immense power that the wealthy accrue are longed for and revered as a supreme value. In this case The Hunger Games does not serve us well as a parallel. There is little investigation of the social interactions among the masses. Perhaps what we witness in the film is exactly the opposite of a supremacist-segregationist 11

Ibid., 55. Ibid., 46. 13 Ibid., 104. 12

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spirit, and in this sense one may argue that this is a naively Rousseauian film. As a matter of fact, the people’s investment in the game for the game’s sake and in Katniss as the object of desire disables the very purpose of the spectacle. And as we see in the course of the series, the fascist crowd seems to begin identifying with its opponent thus going against their own class interests. To recapitulate, the life-to-death show is part of a social regulation that is marked by oedipal figures. In its main tenets it follows what Delezue and Guattari call a molar organization based on segregation that constitutes the most obvious depiction of fascism as a totalitarian system of control. It is time to move to the second form of fascism. To continue using our parallel with The Hunger Games, I ask the reader to be imaginative and actually turn the aforementioned identification upside down: it is not that the fascists are liberating themselves in solidarity with the oppressed because of their bond with Katniss, but rather that their libidinal investments indeed reflect a contemporary fascistic form of life. Let me explain. Although well alive today, the supremacist articulation of desire for fascism is actually more typical of historical fascism. As I argued ultranationalism and xenophobia are its pillars. But there is a more subtle form of fascism that Deleuze and Guattari disclose that is even subtler than desiring repression, for “fascism implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their centralization.”14 This means that contemporary fascism can actually do without President Snow’s vertical system of control and coercion—in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s language this is the molar organization of society—and simply live off the more fluid and horizontal dimension of the daily exchanges of Capitol’s society—in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terms this is the molecular dimension of any social interaction.

Beyond Sexuality: the Micropolitics of Fascism Today it is the molecular form of fascism that has reached full maturity. It involves a desire that having emancipated itself from the oedipal triangulation is at the service of a persistently, but more subtly yet drastically authoritarian project. As it works today capitalism has mutated into a form of social engineering that much more fully resembles the molecular. Deleuze and Guattari were intuitively already aware of this transformation and clearly stated that “what makes fascism dangerous is 14 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 11th ed., 2005), 214.

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its molar or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.”15 The fluidity of this movement of self-oppression makes this kind of fascism much more innovative and adaptive and explains why Western societies today may resort to classic means of repression only in extreme cases. Let us see how it works. One result of the waning of an oedipal order is the well-known demise of prohibitions and the rise of the injunction to enjoyment and selfrealization as new standards of conduct.16 I say this without regret or nostalgia for the authoritarian forms of socialization based on restrictions, punishments and sacrifice that marked the beginning of modernity. The permissive outlook of our post-industrial societies is in line with the transformation of contemporary capitalism and its iron law of necessary increase in profitmaking. Let us begin with a more traditional example: that of an industrial production that I witnessed a few years ago while visiting a cheese factory in the US. What impressed me was not so much the highly mechanized process of production, or the usual gift shop with samples and endless merchandising that was attached to the factory, but rather the fact that visitors had access to the shop floor. Walking behind a glass screen they could watch workers sweat and toil to punch the eight hours or more of their shifts. Everything looked clean, scientific, beautifully professional. It was like a visit to the zoo only the animals were men and women in white uniforms. One may notice that, as if they were part of a spectacle, these workers were exploited twice: as wage-labor and as (unpaid) actors of a big reality show. The Hunger Games too provides an example of this type of oppression, which is now pervasive, but, because of its disturbing nature, the film relegates this double exploitation to the role of the antagonists in the mortal combat: the Careers are in fact participants from a district that has fully embraced this way of life. People of this sector volunteer to participate in the blood bath and, one may say, rather enjoy the competition in itself. The viewer cannot identify with them but it is not too far-fetched to note that the Careers are a stand in—and a somber one—for today’s real condition of most of the working class. If, in fact, one thinks of how the model of social networks has been engineered and how it works, this parallelism becomes even more instructive. The mode according to which Western consumerism establishes 15

Ibid., 215. Cfr. Todd McGowan, The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004).

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mechanisms of libertarian control is something that important theoreticians have already discussed.17 The social media however bring this apparatus to a new and more profitable extreme. When electronic transactions are carried out it is not only that profit is produced via the sale, but also that that same action produces value via the collection and dissemination of personal data, the so-called electronic profiling. All this is nonremunerated but it creates value. Further these devices are able to descend to a more molecular level precisely by organizing desire in flows that are profitable for capital: they determine what we want, how we want it and so forth. It is a form of reproduction (consumption) that involves production (value). As shown in the aforementioned example of the cheese factory, it thus carries structures (the horizontality against the verticality of power relations), beliefs and self-images into the field of production that until recently were more attuned to the field of reproduction. The clear demarcation between worker and labor has liquefied in the motley dimension of the producer-reproducer of value. And while in times of economic crisis this dream of harmonious and infinite development has been put to a hard test, this device of molecular control seems to be more powerful than the damages inflicted by today’s rampant poverty. The indistinguishable nature of the consumer-producer marks the mode of living of modern individuals designing a whole infrastructure that rests on the “principle of a continuous transcendence of limits.”18 This is a perfectly crafted device that resonates with what Deleuze and Guattari feared the most in the molecular forms of fascism, a system of control from within that does away with vertical power. As Dardot and Laval argue: Far removed from the model of a central power directly controlling subjects, the performance/pleasure apparatus is apportioned into diversified mechanisms of control, evaluation and incentivization and pertains to all cogs of production, all modes of consumption, and all forms of social relations.19

It should be clear how the principle of continuous transcendence of limits applies to the great spectacle of the cheese factory: the worker 17

Cfr. Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle. ed. 1977. Accessible at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm and Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 2nd ed., 1991). 18 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (London: Verso, 2013), 288. 19 Ibid.

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turned into an actor, a shiny cog in this case, the consumer paying for the production twice: as a buyer of the commodity and participant in this great branding effort. In this case we can see both sides of the apparatus at work. On one side we have the performance imperative: the worker turned actor is part of a show where his or her image is at stake. Ironically he or she must give his best performance not because of the boss, but because he or she is now on a stage where his or her reputation is at stake. On the other side we find the pleasure-libidinal dimension: the show of production that the visitor voyeuristically enters. In The Hunger Games the arena which Katniss is thrown into is nothing other than the hyperbolic version of this form of production-reproduction. Let me offer another example of how this new politics of life works that is more indicative of this second aspect. I will draw my argument from a film that perfectly illustrates contemporary neoliberal devices of social control. Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) tells the (true) story of a group of Californian adolescents from well-to-do families who enjoy robbing the villas of their favorite stars. Their motives are not to make a profit but simply to be like them, if only briefly, and boast about their enterprises among their peers. What really strikes the viewer here is not so much the senseless barefacedness and lack of any morals of these teenagers, but rather that in this mix of secular idolatry for the glamorous image, the desire to become famous at any costs, and libidinal investment in pure appearance what goes amiss is indeed sex. The Bling Ring is a rare animal in Hollywood cinema: a story that talks about teenagers, crime and desire where paradoxically sex is basically absent. Why is it so? There is a scene that is particularly remarkable in this sense. In one of their raids on Lindsay Lohan’s house, the protagonist, Rebecca, sensually indulges on a perfume. Spraying it over her body before Marc, her accomplice and inseparable friend, she simulates a sexual act. The paradox is obviously that the object with which Rebecca simulates coitus does not have anything particularly exceptional in itself. For however expensive the item may be, it is also easily available nearly anywhere in opulent California. And yet since it is Lindsay Lohan’s perfume it generates an effect of pleasure that aims directly to a point that Deleuze and Guattari had already intuited. Sexuality is only a mask that stands in for a beyond. The performance/pleasure principle of neoliberalism liquefied the social field by regulating it via permissivism and hedonism. Now this flow of energy is not simply sexual. It is rather movement and circulation through breaks. This scene shows precisely how transgression is now bypassing sexual enjoyment. The tendency to go beyond, to exceed, seems to be directed toward the dream of a truth that becomes readable only through

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the reproducibility of the brand of a commodity. These teenagers take the neoliberal command to transcend limits literally and thus trespass their star’s premises to gain access to their truth in the form of the status symbol. What they find is the sheer inconsistency of the serial, the display of commodities in their luxury format. A simple moralistic reproach here would be pointless. What we witness is a mutation of the social complex that is deeply ingrained in the dynamics of a desire that is now emptied of any passion. It is in other words, the full-fledged extension of that brief moment in which Katniss’ and fascist desire coalesce. The loud cheering of the crowd and the dizziness of the heroin lost in this impersonal wave of desire. A concupiscence that is emptied out and reduced to something serialized, to what in Freudian terms is called a drive. Here in the mere repetition of an act that is as vacuous as Lohan’s perfume itself “the gap constitutive of desire is closed; the self-enclosed loop of a circular repetitive movement replaces infinite striving.”20 It is here that neoliberalism approaches a molecular level of production that mimics life itself. Life in its pure senseless continuum, that is to say the indestructible flux of life that exceeds sexuality. This is the nightmare that Deleuze and Guattari sensed was in the making in a still different phase of capitalism, one that was still based on industrial society where a division between production and reproduction was still readable. The internal movement of capitalism is still the same only its concrete occurrences have changed. Deleuze and Guattari write: “there is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other.”21 It is only this second part of capitalist rhythm that has become much more fluid and flexible. For this reterritorialization looks more and more like it is functioning as a living mechanism capable of more fully “decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them.”22

20

Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2008), 360. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, AO, 34. 22 Ibid., 35.

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Works Cited Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. London: Verso, 2013. Debord, Guy. The Society of Spectacle. ed.1977. Accessible at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 11th ed. 2003. —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 11th ed. 2005. Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: the Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 2nd ed. 1991. McGowan, Todd. The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Center of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 2008.

EDITORS

MARK W. EPSTEIN is a rater for various testing programs at Educational Testing Service. He is also a translator: Forms of Becoming: the Evolutionary Biology of Development (Princeton: PUP, 2009), Statistical Mechanics in a Nutshell (Princeton: PUP, 2010), Dictionary of Communism (Princeton: PUP, 2010), Tracks and signs of the animals and birds of Britain and Europe (Princeton: PUP, 2013), Another Mother: The Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) and Life: a Recent Invention (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) in addition to several essays and other publications. He is the co-editor of Creative Interventions: the Role of the Intellectual in Contemporary Italian Culture (Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009). His most recent publications include: “Alcune osservazioni sul materialismo” in Strategie del Moderno: Critica, Narrativa, Teatro. (Avellino: Edizioni Sinestesie, 2012), and “Uccellacci e uccellini: vie nuove verso il realismo” in New Perspectives on Pier Paolo Pasolini (Pesaro: Metauro, 2016). He has also published numerous essays on literary criticism (Galvano della Volpe, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Sebastiano Timpanaro), Italian literature (Pasolini, Raffaele Nigro, Igino Tarchetti, Giuseppe Rovani among others), on Italian cinema, on the philosophy of language, linguistics, scientific nomenclature and testing. FULVIO ORSITTO is Associate Professor and Director of the Italian and Italian American program at California State University, Chico. He holds a Laurea in Lettere Moderne (1998), a Laurea in D.A.M.S. (2001), and a Laurea specialistica in Film Studies (2004) from the University of Turin. He received a Master of Arts degree in Italian (2003) and a Ph.D. in Italian Studies (2008) from the University of Connecticut. He has published numerous essays and book chapters on Italian and Italian American cinema, and on Italian Literature. In 2014 he has published with Claudia Peralta and Fabio Caramaschi the manual Film and Education. Capturing Bilingual Communities (Linus). In 2012 he co-edited with Simona Wright Vol. XXXIV of the NeMLA Journal of Italian Studies, a special issue devoted to Contemporary Italian Cinema. His recent book publications include the edited volumes L’Altro e l’Altrove nella cultura italiana (Nerosubianco, 2011), Cinema e Risorgimento: Visioni e Re-visioni

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(Vecchiarelli, 2012), Contaminazioni culturali: musica, teatro, cinema e letteratura nell’Italia contemporanea (Vecchiarelli, 2014—with Simona Wright), Pier Paolo Pasolini. Prospettive americane (Metauro, 2015— with Federico Pacchioni), Attraversamenti culturali: musica, teatro, cinema e letteratura nell’Italia contemporanea (Cesati, 2016—with Simona Wright). In 2017 he has two forthcoming co-edited volumes: Dialoghi Mediterranei (with Sonia Massari), and Boom e dintorni. Il miracolo economico italiano tra cinema, televisione e letteratura (with Ugo Perolino). ANDREA RIGHI is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Miami University. In the past he held positions as an Assistant Professor of Italian at Colorado College at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. He is the author of Italian Recationary Thought and Critical Theory: An Inquiry into Savage Modernities (Palgrave, 2015) Working across disciplines, his essays on 19th and 20th Italian literature (Carlo Collodi, Enrico Palandri, Luigi Malerba, Pier Vittorio Tondelli), avant-garde poetry (gruppo 63, Language Poetry, Los Novísimos), cinema (Francesca Comencini), feminism (Luce Irigaray, Luisa Muraro, Ida Dominijanni, Adele Cambria), literary criticism (Johnathan Culler, J. Hillis Miller), contemporary American literature (Grace Paley, Sherman Alexie, Kurt Vonnegut) psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Massimo Recalcati) and contemporary philosophy (Sebastiano Timpanaro, José Jimenez) have appeared on a number of journals including Annali D’Italianistica, Res Publica, Diacritics, California Italian Studies, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies and Nemla Italian Studies.

CONTRIBUTORS

DANIEL ARROYO-RODRÍGUEZ received his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 2010. His research focuses on Spanish contemporary literature and film, with particular attention to the recuperation of historical memory in Spain. In his research, he explores the cultural representation of the guerilla movement (also known as the maquis) that fought against Francisco Franco’s regime after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). He is the author of the book Narrativas guerrilleras. El maquis en la cultura española contemporánea, published by Biblioteca Nueva in 2014. In 2015 he was awarded the Ray Werner Junior Professorship for outstanding teaching in the liberal arts at Colorado College. RITA BASTOS is a Labcom IFP researcher at the Beira Interior University, a Ph.D. trainee in Communication Sciences with a doctoral grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Her main research interests are the representation of urban space and the cinematic landscape in the Portuguese new cinema. SILVIA BOERO is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Portland State University where she teaches Language and Culture, Italian Literature and Criticism, and Italian Culture through Film. Her academic fields of research are Women’s Studies, specifically Italian women writers of the 19th and 20th century. In addition, she is dedicated to Film studies, focusing on Italian documentary. Another field of her research is Visual and Figurative Arts, especially in regards to the works by anti-fascist artists and architects in Italy. ROSA CABECINHAS has a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences, and is Associate Professor at the Social Sciences Institute of the University of Minho. She was former Deputy-Director of the Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS), Head of the Master degree program in Communication Sciences, and Director of the Communication Sciences Department at the same University. Currently she is Head of the Ph.D. program in Cultural Studies (University of Minho and University of Aveiro). Her Ph.D. dissertation, Racism and Ethnicity in Portugal, received the Award for the best academic research on Immigration and

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Ethnic Minorities by the High Commissary of Immigration and Ethnic Minorities in 2004. She is the author of Preto e Branco: A naturalização da discriminação racial (2007); co-editor of Comunicação Intercultural: Perspectivas, Dilemas e Desafios (2008) and of Narratives and Social Memory: theoretical and methodological approaches (2013). SEAN P. CONNOLLY is currently Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Bluefield State College in Bluefield, West Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2010 and his D.E.A. in Philosophy from the University of Paris VIII in 2004. MARIA D’ANNIBALLE is Visiting Lecturer at Carlow University, where she teaches art history courses. Her research focuses on the relationship between architecture, mass media, and tourism in Fascist Italy. She is also interested in a broad range of issues in 19th and 20th centuries visual culture, including: interwar avant-garde, post-war cinema, and the relationship between politics, popular culture, and the built environment. She has published several articles on the subject, and she is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Form Follows Fiction in Fascist Italy: How the Hollywood Movie Industry Has Shaped the City of Romeo and Juliet during the Fascist Regime and beyond. GAETANO DELEONIBUS is Professor of French at Willamette University. He is the author of numerous essays and book chapters on Charles Maurras, on Maurice Barrès and on the French Visual Arts. His research and scholarship focus on the intersection of art, literature, culture and politics in fin-de-siècle France with a particular interest for right-wing continental ideologies. MATTIAS EKMAN has a Ph.D. in Media and communication studies. Ekman is currently working as a researcher at the Swedish Media Council and as a Lecturer at the department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. Ekman’s research interests include the relation between social media and political mobilization with a focus on the political far right, the relation between news journalism and online political communication and the political economy of digital media. PIERLUIGI ERBAGGIO is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian at the University of Michigan. His dissertation “Writing Mussolini: Il Duce’s American Biographies on Paper and on Screen, 1922–1936,” is an interdisciplinary

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study of the biographical representation of the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the United States media. His publications include essays on Italian and American newsreels in edited volumes, and articles on the use of technology in language classrooms. ANGELO FÀVARO works on modern and contemporary Italian literature, comparative literature, and Italian theatrical literature at the Tor Vergata University in Rome. He has published essays on Foscolo, Leopardi, Carducci, D’Annunzio, Moravia, Pasolini, Sanguineti, and Giudici. He has directed several theatre performances, mise en éspace, happenings, and organized numerous national and international conferences. He collaborates with the Alberto Moravia association in Rome, and with the Pier Paolo Pasolini study center of Casarsa della Delizia. He is vice president of the French-Italian association La comédie-Friends of Balzac, and director of the “Mediterranean European” section of the International Journal Sinestesie. ANA RODRÍGUEZ GRANELL received her academic training at Universitat de Barcelona, where she earned her bachelor and doctoral degrees in the Department of Art History. In 2008 she joined the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, teaching and coordinating Art History and Film Studies subjects. Her ongoing research concentrates on Modernism, the relationship between arts, cinema, politics and social movements, Cultural history and fascisms. ISABEL MACEDO is a doctoral student at the University of Minho. She works in the field of Intercultural Communication, developing the project “Migrations and identity in Portuguese documentary films”. Her main research interests combine the fields of memory studies, cultural studies and intercultural communication. She is researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS) and has a scholarship from the Portuguese National Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). As member of the “Social Memory and Identity Narratives” project, she has published several essays relating social representations, conflicts and cinema, with emphasis in the uses of cinema in school contexts. She is coeditor of Interfaces da Lusofonia (CECS, 2014). AMANDA MINERVINI is Visiting Assistant Professor in Italian and German at Colorado College. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from Brown University (2013), and a MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst (2007). Her scholarly interests range among the fields of religion and politics, film and documentary, and political theory.

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CLAUDIA PERALTA is Professor in the Department of Literacy, Language and Culture at Boise State University. Her research focuses on bilingual education, literacy and biliteracy, multicultural education and social justice. She has published several articles in international journals on critical issues in bilingual education. Her current work examines the experiences of Mexican immigrant, first-generation Mexican youth, and refugee students in the educational system in the U.S. She has co-produced two documentaries: Latino Community in Treasure Valley Idaho (2013), and Starting Over Again: The Refugee Experience in Boise, Idaho (2014). She has published the manual Film and Education: Capturing Bilingual Communities (Linus, 2014—with Fulvio Orsitto and Fabio Caramaschi). ARINA ROTARU is currently teaching perspectives on the humanities and global culture at NYU-Shanghai. She holds a Ph.D. in German Studies and Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Her research expertise includes colonial literature and postcolonial studies, minority literatures, as well as avant-garde and experimental thought from the 19th century to the present. She published articles on Herta Müller, Oskar Pastior and Thomas Kling, and is currently working on two book projects: one on the poetics of resonance in German-speaking literature since 1989, the other on Francophone and Germanophone minority literatures and their poetic intersections in the 20th century. MARIA STOPFNER is currently working as a senior researcher (postdoc) at the European Academy in Bolzano, South Tyrol. For her doctoral thesis on parliamentary heckling, she received the Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler Award, the Erwin Wenzl Recognition Award and the Dr. Otto Seibert Award. Recent publications and fields of interest focus on language and politics, especially in view of far and extreme right discourse. ANNA VIVES is a Teaching Associate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research on the Catalan and Spanish Avant-garde has been published in Catalan Review and Romance Studies and is forthcoming in Bulletin of Spanish Studies and Rassegna Iberistica. Her monograph Identidad en tiempos de vanguardia: narcisismo, genio y violencia en la obra de Salvador Dalí y Federico García Lorca was published at the end of 2014 with Peter Lang. She is currently preparing her second book, tentatively entitled The Poetic and Pictorial World of Àngel Planells: The Fantastic Surrealist.