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An Introduction to Modernism—Fascism—Postmodernism
Susanne Baackmann and David Craven
As the 20th
century drew to a close, the shadow of fascism nevertheless lingered on. In
2001, Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, attempted to rehabilitate the neo-
fascist National Alliance (one of whose leaders is Mussolini’s granddaughter) by
bringing it into the government and then declaring: “fascism never killed anyone”
(Stille X). Subsequently, in 2005 Duce, mio padre (My Father Il Duce), the memoir of
Mussolini’s son Romano became a best-selling book that allowed the author to make
many favorable remarks about Il Duce on national television, most frequently on
channels owned by Berlusconi himself. This alarming development, which seems to have
subsided somewhat as a result of the Italian elections in 2006 that Berlusconi lost,
occurred in the context of a scholarly debate that has refocused on the complex
relationship of fascism to modernism, as well as to post-modernism, along with a
concerted rethinking of each of these three terms.
Just as Horst Bredekamp disclosed that the modernist art critic Walter Benjamin
had a rather surprising long term admiration for the political theory of Carl Schmitt, a key
Nazi apologist from the 1930s onward (247), so Mark Antliff also concluded in an essay
of 2002 that “The terms fascism and modern art used to seem comfortably opposed to
each other, but the last two decades of scholarship in history, art history, and literature
have radically revised that postwar complacency” (148). Furthermore, the conventional
wisdom about the strictly antagonistic relation of modernism in the arts to fascism is as
much in need of critical revision, as is the standard post-1945 assumption about the
relation of fascism to an economic modernization predicated in turn on industrial

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capitalism. Indeed, Zygmut Bauman’s insightful study on Modernity and the Holocaust
(1989) has shown compellingly enough that even the irrational genocide of the Nazi
holocaust was untenable without the systematic rationalization, the Taylorization as it
were, of impersonal involvement by its functionaries, which alone allowed mass murder
on this scale to be “humanly” possible. Along related lines, Paul Jaskot’s important book,
The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental
Building Economy (2000), clearly documented the extreme form to which the Nazis used
the technocratic standardization of labor relations and accountancy, both of which were
grounded in the instrumental division of labor known as Taylorism, a celebrated
invention of capitalist modernization at its most efficient.
Moreover, major historians like Richard Evans and Thomas O. Paxton, as for
example in the latter’s Anatomy of Fascism (2004), have shown that despite the anti-
modernization and anti-capitalist rhetoric of every fascist movement, something else
obtained historically speaking, since “whenever fascist parties acquired power […] they
did nothing to carry out these anti-capitalist threats” (10). To the contrary, a decisive
moment both for the German National Socialists (with its “Night of the Long Knives” in
1934) and the Italian Fascists (with its “March on Rome” in 1922) entailed the purging of
precisely those radical members of their respective movements who were most
implacable in their opposition to capital or to any fascist business alliances with the
traditional elites (Evans, 20ff).
Given these patterns within fascist movements of embracing forms of economic
modernization, along with ambivalence towards—but no mere rejection of—various
modernisms in art and architecture, a key question obviously reemerged in the scholarly

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literature. Can we arrive at a unitary definition of fascism for all of these ultra-rightwing
movements, even though they clearly diverge from each other as a consequence of their
claims to regionalist particularism and national exceptionalism?
It was this set of coordinates—along with the disturbing Carl Schmitt-like
recourse to “decisionism” by the current Bush Administration as it “justifies” its ultra-
militarism and uncompromising nationalism—that convinced us to organize the
Conference “Modernism—Fascism—Postmodernism.” It was held at the University of
New Mexico in September 2006, at which the following seven papers were given and
discussed (along with two dozen other papers). Since he had achieved international
attention in the 1990s with his book entitled The Nature of Fascism, the British historian
Roger Griffin was a fairly obvious choice as plenary speaker for the conference. By
shifting the focus on fascism to words from deeds (unlike, say, Jaskot, Paxton, and Evans
who emphasized deeds over words), Griffin attempted to give conceptual unity
ideologically to the various movements termed “fascist” by providing a sweeping
definition of what all of these groups seemed to share in the realm of ideals, in spite of
their manifest differences otherwise.
Griffin argued that “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in
its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (26). This
new theory about “generic fascism” emerged from the growing awareness of many
scholars that we need to grasp as central to all fascist movements their alluring rhetoric
centered on inaugurating a national or ethnic rebirth through the wholesale
transformation of existing society. According to this historical perspective, rather than
being imposed only through brute coercion by groups like the SS or cynical manipulation

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by ideologues like Goebbels, it was the creation of a “national, ethnic-based myth” that
fueled the relative popularity and cohesion of each fascist movement. In addition, the
obvious usage of mass politics and the mass cultural industry by various fascist
movements marks them off from the traditional formations of rightwing parties with their
pre-modern values and elitist practices. As such, the modern skills of fascist movements
to mobilize sectors of the popular classes after 1919—when the term was coined by
Mussolini—was based on an unprecedented reconfiguration of mass politics in relation to
Western modernity, even as the fascist themselves claimed paradoxically to transcend
politics. This purported “transcendence” happened through what Umberto Eco has
incisively renamed ur-fascism’s “cult of tradition,” which was misremembered by means
of a reinvented or “modernized” past (78).
When we bring our attention to the theories behind fascism, as Griffin does, rather
than to whether or nor the theories were ever practiced, we are immediately reminded to
revisit the much debated role of theorists like Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt in either
preparing the way for fascism or in validating it when it arrived. In fact, a recent book by
Claudia Koonz, Nazi Conscience (2003), makes a commanding case for both contentions.
Similarly, the debate involving Heidegger also revolves around such things as his claim
that German was, along with Classical Greek, “superior” to all other languages for
revealing philosophical truths. This often heated polemic still has many points of
irresolution and few easy points of contention, as summarized poignantly by Terry
Eagleton, “This is not to suggest that Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole is no more than
a rationale for fascism; it is to suggest that it provided one imaginary solution to the crisis

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of modern history as fascism provided another and that the two shared a number of points
in common” (57).
An attendant contemporary issue that deserves equal attention involves the
ascendancy within both post-modernism and post-structuralism of Heidegger’s “anti-
humanism.” Such illiberal opposition to humanism tout court unquestionably operated in
tandem with the Nazis’s pathological hatred of humanism, the Enlightenment, and
Marxism, as evident in Heidegger’s 1933 public address on the “Self-Assertion of the
German University,” when he spoke as both Chancellor of Freiburg University and as an
official of the Nazi Party (of which he remained a “member in good standing” from 1933
to 1945). In that chillingly anti-humanist and anti-Enlightenment public lecture,
Heidegger sternly denounced academic free speech and democratic values, while
favoring forced labor and compulsory military service for his students (29-39).
It would thus be disingenuous to conclude that the unrelenting “anti-humanism”
of many French structuralisms and post-structuralist from Louis Althusser and Claude
Lévi-Strauss through Jacques Derrida is simply unrelated to that of fascism, even as these
same thinkers are deeply in the debt of Heidegger, whose anti-humanism was definitely
linked to that of the Nazis. Indeed, it was probably this retroactive recognition of post-
structuralism’s unwanted Heideggerian blindspots that caused Michel Foucault, in one of
his last essays, to agree with Jürgen Habermas, when rejecting the current “blackmail of
being either for or against the Enlightenment” or humanism, as if no further constructive
engagement with either were possible (43). The article below by Joachim Oberst
addresses precisely the paradoxical relation of Heidegger to his own “native” tongue by
“using Heidegger against Heidegger” in the tradition of Habermas and Marcuse, thus

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refusing to succumb to the blackmail of being either for or against the dismissal of
Heidegger’s own philosophy from the curriculum.
Indeed, Derrida also declared in one of his later interviews that, as he came to
equate deconstruction with social justice, he also learned “to distrust a certain kind of
spirit in Heidegger, and to defend spirit, a certain kind of spirit or spectre, in Marx” (38).
Here, as elsewhere, alarm bells have been sounded about certain quasi-fascist tendencies
within postmodernism (though we must recall Hal Foster’s insistence in his introduction
to The Anti-Aesthetic that postmodernism embraces several contradictory trends, some of
which are regressive, while others are not). This justified sense of concern about
postmodernism was addressed in a compelling way during the conference by both
Florentine Strzelczyk and Silvia Söderlind. Strzelczyk explicates in the paper below how
Hollywood’s inverted romance with the Nazis ‘its beloved villains,’ constitutes yet
another sinister chapter in the post-war tale of “fascinating fascism” previously exposed
by Susan Sontag in her well-known essay by that name. At issue here is the disturbing
inclination of postmodern irony to unwittingly underwrite the very phenomenon of
fascism it subjects to only half-hearted critique. In this regard, the conference participants
certainly agreed with Harry Harootunian’s position that we urgently need to “take
fascism seriously” at a time when the “familiar signs of fascism have begun to appear
with greater regularity” amidst the tragicomic buffoonery of the Bush Era (23).
A related task was undertaken by Silvia Söderlind in her paper included here. She
argues that what she terms “ghostmodernism” is a “space haunted by the anxiety caused
by the ‘fascist longings in our midst’ (Sontag)” and ruled by the fictive St. Christopher,
patron saint of travel. The ever mobile St. Christopher tends to sanction lawlessness as

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the only law via a Nietzschean “will to power” that, since 9/11, conflates international
right with national might in an excess of indignation over foreign “victimization.” In
using as a point of departure Jeffrey Schnapp’s observation that fascism has relied on “an
aesthetic overproduction […] to compensate for, fill in, and cover up its forever unstable
ideological core,” Söderlind explores the oscillating and unstable relationship of truth to
power along the lines of St. Christopher’s recent transposition in literature and film.
If postmodernisms now generate contradictory positions concerning fascism’s
future, not just their past, then much the same can be said about the paradoxical relation
of various modernisms to actually existing “generic fascism” from the first half of the
20th
century. A key aim of the conference—and of some of these papers—was precisely
to illuminate the complex relation of modernisms to fascisms by means of something
other than the brittle binaries of past scholarship, with its rigid division between the two
sets of terms. The papers of Gregory Maertz, Roger Griffin, Mark Antliff, and Claudio
Fogu all address the few important points of intersection linking some strains of
modernism with almost all strains of fascism. In his cold-war story of a Nazi art
collection that finally “came in from the cold” via the Bitburg controversy of the Reagan
Administration, Maertz demonstrates something new based on previously unknown
paintings in Nazi collections. There existed a surprising gap in the Third Reich between
the official public ceremonial art that showcased the neo-classicism of Arno Breker (who
represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1938) or Josef Thorak (whose work
adorned public headquarters) and the unofficial modernist paintings collected by at least
some of the Nazi faithful. Although Berthold Hinz has done a fine job of discussing the
official art of the Nazis in Art of the Third Reich, much remains to be learned about the

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more subjective images for private consumption. These images represent a few
tendencies of modernist painting that clearly survived in the heyday of the Nazis, despite
our previous assumptions that all types of modernism were banned in this period.
Which types of modernist art survived? Based on the preliminary findings of
Maertz, there are two basic strains of organic modernism, often linked to rural settings,
and fundamentally at odds with the many inorganic, constructivist strains of modernism
that were anti-fascist. These two basic types of fascist modernism are Post-Impressionist
landscapes of pre-modern topics, on the one hand, and early Expressionist views with
“primordial” overtones connected to Emil Nolde, on the other. But, there is no evidence
as yet of Nazi patronage for the type of Expressionism grounded in the non-organic
angularity and gritty urbanism of Ludwig Kirchner (whose public censorship and public
humiliation led to the artist’s suicide in 1938) or the constructivism of Russian vanguard
artists like Tatlin, Rodchenko or El Lissitzky. Thus, Maertz’s cachet of new primary
sources broadens our sense of how Nazi aesthetics could be linked to rural variants of
early modernism, even as it sharpens our sense of all the other types of internationalist,
urban-inflected modernism with which the fascist sensibility was fundamentally at odds.
In an unduly optimistic reading of this new material, Roger Griffin tries in his
paper to accomplish for modernism what many feel he did for fascism, namely, provide a
unitary definition of all types of modernisms. Yet, Griffin’s definition of “all
modernisms” in fact covers only a small minority of these movements, such as the
agrarian Expressionism of a Nolde or the Post-Impressionism of an André Derain. His
“unitary” framework simply does not encompass most modernist movements in Europe,
much less those from outside the West. Though a stimulating point of departure, Griffin’s

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definition needs to be complemented by a discussion of the emergence of modernism in a
dialogic relation and/or struggle with anti-colonial movements, which often set the terms
for artistic discourse across international lines. Kobena Mercer and Partha Mitter, among
many others, have mapped compellingly the anti-colonial and anti-nationalist nature of
many of these modernist movements caught between Europe, on the one hand, and Asia,
Africa, and Latin America, on the other. This kind of recent research questions any type
of Eurocentric definition of modernism and instead constructively refocuses the debate
on multiple forms of “cosmopolitan modernisms.” As has been demonstrated elsewhere,
the very term “modernism” does not enjoy any purely European provenance.i
Elective affinities might unify different varieties of fascism, but elective
antagonisms define precisely the disunified plurality of movements known as
international modernisms for which nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and sexism
were the enemy. Although superficially linked by modernist techniques, a solemn
photomontage of Hitler by Leni Rienfenstahl, with its insistence on centering the iconic
photo of the “hero,” uses an entirely different pictorial logic than a photomontage by
John Heartfield, for whom modernist collage meant a decentering and anti-hierarchical
image articulating a patent visual absurdity. Little in this set of utterly contradictory
modernist images attests to any form of “generic fascism,” and nothing in this stark
contrast of nationalist versus anti-nationalist modernisms allows us to rely on a unified
definition of “modernism” to render them non-contradictory with each other, either as
languages or as ideological stances.
What then permitted Futurism’s antipassatismo to have national credibility in
fascist Italy precisely when the official cult of tradition was ascendant, even though the

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modern culture industry was gaining momentum? The answer is provided below in
Claudio Fogu’s thesis about the fascist duality of “Imperium and Emporium.” He
demonstrates how Futurism first navigated between two competing types of bellicose
provincialisms – Romanitá (Romanness) and Mediterraneitá (Mediterranean-ness)—and
then sailed straight from imperial conquest to neo-colonial consumerism, both of which
were sanctioned on the subterranean level by the state capitalism underpinning Italian
fascism. In pulling off this nimble interpretative twist concerning how “historic” public
ritual was intertwined with commodity fetishism through the modern tourist industry,
Fogu also reminds us of a crucial observation by Lutz Koepnick that previously appeared
in the pages of Modernism/modernity (1999):
[we] can no longer take for granted the fact that popular attitudes towards the
Third Reich coincided with what we see in the historical images of cheering
crowds, images dexterously designed and mass circulated by Goebbels’s mass
media. […] large sections of the population led a double life: delivering vows of
political loyalty in public rituals and pursuing apolitical leisure activities in the
niches of private life. Contrary to the regime’s rhetoric of political coordination
and total mobilization, the Third Reich not only promised new career
opportunities but also new tactics of diversion and commodity consumption.
Apart from short periods of political euphoria, the allure of racing cars, radios,
Coca-Cola […] and Hollywood-style comedies—rather than the choreography of
Riefenstahl spectacles—provided the stuff dreams were made of (52).
Yet in the Kulturkampf within fascisms between types of neo-classicisms and
new modernisms, much more was at issue than just the ascendancy of a language tied
self-consciously to commodity production or to tradition. The diverse modernisms
stimulated by technological innovations in the early 20th
century, were, as Perry
Anderson observed in his ground-breaking essay “Modernity and Revolution,”
preconditioned by “abstraction of techniques and artifacts from the social relations of

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production that generated them. In no case was capitalism as such ever exalted by any
brand of ‘modernism’” (105). The same can of course be stated about all brands of
classicism that were championed respectively as the “official” styles for key
government buildings under fascism, whether one has in mind the plans of Albert
Speer or his Italian counterparts. What then made a type of classicism the most
appropriate architectural language in every country for fascism’s singularly public face?
In his essay on “Classical Violence” within French fascist art theory, Mark
Antliff addresses this question by discussing two new interpretative shifts that will force
us to change directions yet again in our analysis of fascisms and modernisms. First, he
discloses the heretofore overlooked convergence between fascist aesthetic theory in
France and the classicizing sculpture of Charles Despiau and Aristide Maillol, in turn
mediated by a particular reading of Nietzsche. Second, his title signifies the deeply
sublimated character of classical art in opposition to the much more de-sublimated
artworks produced by most variants of modernism. As such, Antliff’s article dovetails
with the timely recent work of O.K. Werckmeister and Stephen Eisenman. To quote from
Eisenman’s new book, The Abu Ghraib Effect:
[A] key element of the classical tradition in art that extends back more than 2,500
years, at least to the Age of Athens […] is an element seen in the equipoise of the
animals led to slaughter on the Pan-Antheniac frieze, in the cruelty of the Battle
of the Gods and Giants on the Pergamon Alter […] That feature of the Western
classical tradition is specifically the motif of tortured people and tormented
animals who appear to sanction their own abuse […] It is the mark of reification
in extremis because it represents the body as something willingly alienated by the
victim (even to the point of death) for the sake of the pleasure and aggrandize-
ment of the oppressor. This mythic motif constitutes an unacknowledged basis of
the unity of the classical tradition (16).
Here then stands revealed the sublimated violence that made a certain usage of

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classicism ideal for all fascist movements. Only classicism’s idealization of the body
could allow depictions of war in which the body was not mutilated in the most visually
disgusting manner. Only classicism could show “heroic deaths” without the sickening
dismemberment that accompanies all conquests of other humans or animals. Only
classicism could use compositional symmetry to enshrine jarring social hierarchies
and inequities of that type that fascist theories of racism blatantly celebrate. Finally, as a
visual language, classicism is about centering (here an analogue to fascist stability), not
the decentering pictorial logic of virtually all modernisms—whether one has in.
mind Berlin Dada, Russian Constructivism, or French Surrealism.
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Works Cited:
Anderson, Perry. “Modernity and Revolution.” New Left Review 144 (March/April
1984): 96-113.
Antliff, Mark. “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity.” Art Bulletin Volume LXXXIV 1
(March 2002): 148-169.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,
1989.
Bredekamp, Horst. “Von Walter Benjamin zu Carl Schmitt via Thomas Hobbes,”
Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 6 (1998):901-916.
Craven, David. “The Latin-American Origins of ‘Alternative Modernism.’” Third Text 36
(Autumn 1996): 29-44.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Deconstruction of Actuality: An Interview.” Radical Philosophy
68 (Autumn 1994): 28-41.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Ecco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism.” Five Moral Pieces. Transl. Alistair McEwen. New York:
Harcourt, 2001. 65-88.
Eisenman, Stephen F. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion Books, 2007.
Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power. 1933-1939. New York: Penguin Press,
2005.

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Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.
ix-xvi.
Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” Trans. Catherine Porter. Foucault Reader.
Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 32-50.
Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge, 1991.
Harootunian, Harry. “The Future of Fascism.” Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April
2006): 23-33.
Heidegger, Martin. “The Self-Assertion of the German University” (1933) The Heidegger
Controversy. Ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993. 29-39.
Hinz, Berthold. Art in the Third Reich. Trans. Robert and Rita Kimber. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1979.
Jaskot, Paul. The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi
Monumental Building Economy. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Koepnick, Lutz P. “Fascist Aesthetics Revisited.” Modernism/modernity 6.1 (1999): 51-
73.
Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Mercer, Kobena, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press/
Institute of International Visual Arts, 2006.
Mussolini, Romano. My Father, Il Duce. Trans. Anna Stojanovic. New York: Kales
Press, 2006.
Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar
Strauss & Giroux, 1980. 73-108
Stille, Alexander. Introduction. My Father, Il Duce. By Romano Mussolini. New York:
Kales Press, 2006. ix-xxix.
i
On the etymology of “modernism,” as well as its trans-national character, see: David
Craven, “The Latin American Contribution to ‘Alternative Modernism’,” Third Text, No.
36 (Autumn 1996): 29-44 and Kobena Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms.