Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity

The bounds fascism and modern art used to present the appearance comfortingly opposed to each other, on the other hand the last two decades of scholarship in history, art history, and literature have radically revised that postwar complacency. An understanding of the abysmal interrelation of these two confines is now a precondition for an appraisal of modernism in any historicized faculty of perception This has led historians to examine the relation of one as well as the other avant-garde art and fascism to broad socioeconomic, cultural, and philosophical inclines pervading European society in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. For example, in her introductory essay for the 1991 exhibition catalogue "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, Stephanie Barron rightly identified the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition organized by the agency of the Nazis as "the greatest in quantity virulent attack ever mounted against novel art." (1) At first glance of the like kind a statement seemed to confirm the for the use of all assumption that fascism and modernism were mutually exclusive and that the Nazi s' deviseed efforts, after 1933, to vilify present art evinced an unbridgeable chasm between fascists and the European avant-garde. Barron, however, computes a more complicated story, noting that attempts to sentence pictorial abstraction as evidence of the "degenerate" condition of its creators were calculatored within the Nazi movement through those who valued the art of like modemists as Ernst Barlach and Emil Nolde as "regenerative." (2) This latter camp praised German Expressionism as attuned to the spiritual values of the German folk claiming that this abstract art embodied a Nordic artistic heritage with foundations in the Gothic era. Indeed, Nolde himself, who became a charter member of the North Schleswig branch of the German National Socialist Party in 1920 saw no contradiction between Nazism and fresh art. (3) No less a figure than Joseph Goebbels--future minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in the Third Reich--actively sided with German Expressionism's pleaders and, as Barron notes, Nolde's art met official rejection in Nazi circles solitary after Hitler's September 1934 condemnation of new art at a party rally in Nuremberg. (4) Thus, before 1934 more [i]or[/i] less factions within the Nazi change seemed in tune with the cultural politics of Italian fascism below Benito Mussolini, finding in German Expressionism an artistic counterpart to the Italian fascists' promotion of all strands of modernism, from the Le Corbusier-inspired architecture of the Italian Rationalists to Futurism and the art of the novecento. (5)

of that kind complications are further compounded when we consider the incorporation of modernist formal aesthetics into the design of household serviceables under the Third Reich. As John Heskett conclud in his inquiry of modern design in Nazi Germany, the Nazis' closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 has obscur the relation of Nazi industrial design to that lay opened under the Weimar Republic and the step to which the Nazi regime actively embraced modernity. (6) Espousing "blood and soil" tribalism level as it constructed autobahns, engineered the Volkswagen, and disentangleed advanced methods of factory organization, the Nazi regime--like its Italian counterpart and fascist changes in France--looked to both a mythic past and a technological futurity in a manner that looks highly contradictory. The pivotal character of modern art in that matrix will be the focus of this essay as I examine fresh approaches to modernism through the len of fascism s cultural politics.

Central to this problematic is the function of the one and the other fascism and modernism in the exhibition of modernity, that is, the socioeconomic transformation of Europe and the world following the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the birth of democracy in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789 and the posterior globalization of capitalism. (7) Scholars now recognize the character of both fascism and modernist aesthetics in the emerging see the verb of anti-Enlightenment movements opposed to the democratic tradition that was the heritage of Enlightenment notion Indeed, the rise of fascism in Europe answered to a widespread search for spiritual values and "organic" institutions capable of counteracting what was considered the corrosive results of rationalism (and capitalism) upon the body politic. As Pierre Birnbaum notes, democracy's rivals repudiated the Enlightenment principle of a rationalism inherent in human nature and the legitimizing principle of "one man, individual vote." (8) In its stead they posited ethnic, regional, and religious forms of national identity, antithetical to political democracy's universalist and rationalist ordinances The Enlightenment's adversaries also came to associate capitalism with the homogenizing events of rationalism, since the sole value recognized by capital was that of quantifiable monetary exchange. In this regard, Marxists Robert Sayre and Michael Lowry have configured fascism as single manifestation of what they call "Romantic anti-capitalism," an umbrella mete for an "opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values" upon the part of intellectuals associated with a broad political representation including Marxism, anarchism, and socialism. (9) They associate this worldview with hostility toward a capitalist not absent that reduced human relations to a matter of exchange value with no regard for the social divisiveness and alienation resulting from monetary competition. (10) For Sayre and Lowry this worldview precipitated a "nostalgia" for a "pre-capitalist past, or at least for individual in which capitalism was les developed" Capitalism had reportedly stifled our imaginative capacity through immersing human subjectivity and emotions in a a whole based on "extreme mechanization" and "quantitative calculation and standardization," thus instigating a "yearning for unity" the two with "the universe of nature" and "the human community." (11) The marshaling of "human values" identified with that past serv either to resist a capitalist not absent or as a springboard for "a dreamed-of futurity beyond capitalism" inscribed "in the nostalgic vision of the pre-capitalist era." This appeal to past values in the name of a noncapitalist futurity society is a key characteristic of fascism, allowing Sayre and Lowry fail to recognize this when they claim that fascism--as exemplified by the agency of German Nazism--was predominantly hostile to the "modern world" and full restorationist in orientation. (12)