The role of writers in European fascism.

1. Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University)
Audio-PowerPoint to stimulate discussion at the conference
“Writers and translators in occupied Europe 1940-45.
Comparative perspectives”
Paris
October 18-19 2021

2.  To clarify my title, I should make it clear that I do not mean it in the Maoist
sense of zhilaohu (纸老虎; 紙老) i.e. ‘something or someone that claims or
appears to be powerful or threatening, but is actually ineffectual and unable
to withstand challenge.’ It was famously used with this meaning by Mao to
attack the US as a world power.
 Instead I am using it as a sort of pun on the word ‘paper’ to indicate that
even though many thousands of largely anonymous or forgotten translators
and writers helped normalize, endorse, and disseminate fascist, Fascist or
Nazi values and played a crucial role in rationalizing the political fantasies
that caused the Second World War, leading to scores of millions of acts of
systemic inhumanity, few of them physically put their lives on the line ad
most remained armchair fanatics screened from the horrendous human
impact of their words. They did not fight, risk freezing to death or being
blown up, participate personally in individual acts of atrocity flowing from
their support for fascism, and rarely faced acts of retribution, vengeance or
justice at the end of the war. Few seem to have taken their own lives for what
they did.
 Their verbal justification of war, hatred, the occupation of foreign countries,
the looting of their culture, the control and terrorization of entire
populations, and the mass persecution, enslavement and murder of entire
categories of ‘othered’ human beings, particularly but not only Jews, was all
from the safety of the study and typewriter with minimal consequences.
 Exceptions: Robert Brasillach was executed: Julius Evola put on trial but
released. Paul de Man journalist at Le Soir, a collaborationist newspaper in
Belgium that took political and cultural positions very close to Brasillach’s,
went on to have a distinguished career in teaching French literature in the US

3. • My presentation will focus on writing but starts with a brief
excursus on translation and fascism
• My quick Google around on the topic of translation and fascism
reveals a big gap here for academic work on the necessity of
translation and translators as a prerequisite for efficient
colonization, cultural destruction, totalitarian occupation ad the
imposition of the culture of the conquerors etc.
• Translators can be seen in their impact as collaborators, as an
essential lubricant of the mechanisms of colonial and totalitarian
occupation and subjugation
• In particular translation is vital to the ‘substitution’ and ‘overlay’
of the existing culture by that of the invaders and occupiers which
encourages the assimilation/co-option of the occupied into the
new reality.
• In the case of interwar fascism, this fascist
socialization/acculturation process takes place on numerous
levels:

13. I take it for granted for my involvement in this workshop that :
i) The project assumes that ‘writing’ represents only one small segment of a
broad spectrum of cultural production under fascism which includes
philosophy, political thought, the human sciences (especially history,
archaeology, anthropology and ‘racial’ sciences such as eugenics), theatre,
cinema, photography, exhibitions, painting, sculpture, architecture, town
planning, design, dance, music, the media, propaganda, educational texts
as well as the institutional infrastructures and superstructures needed to
support or encourage, control or censure them
ii) The project sets out to produce more than a catalogue raisonné of writing
under fascism: it wants to probe into challenging issues such as :
(in the context of the writer) of psychology and the motivation/
inspiration for creativity under totalitarianism, the role of belief,
survival instinct, cognitive dissonance, inner alignment to external
realities
(in the context of the state) the appropriation for political ends of
non-fascist texts/ literature taken from both national and ‘world’
culture, the mechanisms of state control , propaganda and censorship
(e.g. Goebbels’ Reichsschrifttumskammer or RSK) and the
instrumentalization of writing for fascist purposes (e.g. the
importance of associations, prizes, publicity campaigns, prescribed and
proscribed texts etc.)

14. At this preliminary/exploratory stage I propose to use this talk
‘simply’ to help with the initial survey of the terrain by:
A identifying different types of ‘writing’ in this context
B identifying different potential relationships between writing
and fascism,
and then
C adding some thoughts on the spontaneous elective affinity
between some ‘genuine’ writers and fascism
and finally
D reminding ourselves of the potential corollary of
enforced cultural appropriation and spontaneous collusion in
the project to build a fascist culture, namely: intense
censorship and extensive cultural cleansing/ culturecide:
e.g. the Nazis auto-da-fe of books,
while also paying attention to:
E the survival of antifascist writers in exile and what they were
able to publish thanks to surviving to signify the survival of
authentic writing in a post-Nazi world

15. ‘writing’ embraces:
i) fiction
ii) poetry
iii) plays
iv) politico-cultural essays and general punditry about
contemporary history rationalizing the fascist era
v) speeches by leaders
vi) literary journals
vii) work of public intellectuals for collaborationist
newspapers
viii) intellectual rationales for totalitarianism
Some samples:

26.  The appropriation of ‘literary’ high culture of the past / enlisted
into the fascist cult of the nation: Italy/ Germany/ England etc
 Active role of some writers in preparing for fascism: Italy:
Florence avant-garde, Futurists, D’Annunzio; Germany: völkisch
writers, Moeller, Jünger (Nietzsche/Heidegger); Romanian
modernists (Bejan); y Gasset
 Active contribution during fascist era by literary
figures/intellectuals:
 In Italy, Marinetti and some other futurist, Anton Giulio Bragaglia,
Massimo Bontempelli, Giuseppe Bottai, Mino Maccari, Curzio
Malaparte, Umberto Fracchia, Alessandro Pavolini, Mario Puccini
 In Germany: Gottfried Benn, Carl Schmitt. Ernst Jünger, and
hundreds of minor figures
 In France Drieu la Rochelle, Robert Brasillach, Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, Lucien Rebatet, Thierry Maulnier, Paul de Man
 In Belgium José Streel; Paul De Man
 In Spain Ernesto Caballero.

31.  Martin’s book explains how, after France’s crushing defeat in June 1940,
the Nazis moved forward with plans to reorganize a European continent
now largely under Hitler’s heel. While Germany’s military power would
set the agenda, several among the Nazi elite argued that permanent
German hegemony required something more: a pan-European cultural
empire that would crown Hitler’s wartime conquests. At a time when the
postwar European project is under strain, Benjamin G. Martin brings into
focus a neglected aspect of Axis geopolitics, charting the rise and fall of
Nazi-fascist “soft power” in the form of a nationalist and anti-Semitic new
ordering of European culture.
 As early as 1934, the Nazis began taking steps to bring European culture
into alignment with their ideological aims. In cooperation and
competition with Italy’s fascists, they courted filmmakers, writers, and
composers from across the continent. New institutions such as the
International Film Chamber, the European Writers Union, and
the Permanent Council of composers forged a continental bloc opposed to
the “degenerate” cosmopolitan modernism that held sway in the arts. In
its place they envisioned a Europe of nations, one that exalted
traditionalism, anti-Semitism, and the Volk. Such a vision held
powerful appeal for conservative intellectuals who saw
a European civilization in decline, threatened by
American commercialism and Soviet Bolshevism.
 Taking readers to film screenings, concerts, and banquets where artists
from Norway to Bulgaria lent their prestige to Goebbels’s vision, Martin
follows the Nazi-fascist project to its disastrous conclusion, examining the
internal contradictions and sectarian rivalries that doomed it to failure.

32. Why so many creative and educated minds
(artists and intellectuals) drawn to totalitarian
movements in interwar period:
 i) WW1, Russian revolution: keen sense of
civilizational crisis, need for vision, sense that
artist suddenly could move from periphery to
centre
 ii) the crucial role played by the avantgarde in
early Soviet communism

36.  Fascism and Dante and Collodi (Pinocchio)
 Nazism and Goethe, Schiller, (and
Shakespeare)
 Occupied France and Autour de Jeanne d’Arc
(Maurice Barrès)
 BUF and Shakespeare/Kipling

43.  https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/12/parthe
non-of-books-marta-minujin-installation-
forbidden-kassel-germany-documenta-14/