Suchergebnisse

This article sets out to contribute conceptual clarity to the growing recognition of the modern and futural dynamic behind fascist cultural projects by focusing on projects for architectural renewal under the Third Reich. It starts by reviewing the gradual recognition of the futural temporality of the regime's culture. It then introduces the concept 'rooted modernism' and argues for its application not only to the vernacular idioms of some of the Reich's new buildings, but also to the International Style and machine aesthetic deployed in many Nazi technological and industrial buildings. The article's main focus is on the extensive use made in the new civic and public architecture under Nazism (and Fascism) of 'stripped classicism'. This was a form of neo-classicism widely encountered in both democratic and authoritarian states throughout the inter-war period, and which can be understood as an alternative strand of architectural modernism co-existing with more overtly avant-garde experiments in reshaping the built environment. The case is then made for applying a new conceptual framework for evaluating the relationship to modernity and modernism of architectural projects, not just in fascist cultural production, but that of the many authoritarian right-wing regimes of the period which claimed to embrace the national past while striving for a dynamic, heroic future. This opens up the possibility for historians to engage with the complex cultural entanglements and histoires croisées of revolutionary with modernizing conservative states in the 'fascist era'.

This article highlights the progress that has been made within fascist studies from seeing 'fascist culture' as an oxymoron, and assuming that it was driven by a profound animus against modernity and aesthetic modernism, to wide acceptance that it had its own revolutionary dynamic as a search for a Third Way between liberalism and communism, and bid to establish an alternative, rooted modern culture. Building logically on this growing consensus, the next stage is to a) accept that modernism is legitimately extended to apply to radical experimentation in society, economics, politics, and material culture; b) realize that seen from this perspective each fascism was proposing its own variant of modernism in both a socio-political and aesthetic sense, and that c) right-wing regimes influenced by fascism produced their own experiments in developing both a modern political regime and cultural modernism grounded in a unique national history.

This article challenges a tendency that grew up in fascist studies in the 1930s to treat Fascism and Nazism as the only authentic expressions of fascism, and to evaluate and understand all other manifestations of the generic force as more or less derivative of them and hence of secondary importance when understanding 'the nature of fascism' as an ideology. This has created an artificial location of each fascism as being either at the core or periphery of the phenomenon, and has reinforced a Eurocentrism that leads to parallel movements in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa to be neglected. It calls for wider acceptance of the realization that researching movements that did not seize autonomous power, such as the Croatian Ustasha, the Romanian Iron Guard, or the Transylvanian Saxons, can enrich understanding of aspects of Fascism and Nazism, such as the role of racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism and organized Christianity in determining the ideological contents ad fate of a particular fascism.

Fixing Solutions: Fascist Temporalities as Remedies for Liquid Modernity This article explores the peculiar temporalities of fascism that emanate from the myth of the eternity of the nation and race that is perpetuated through superhuman, self-sacrificial efforts on their behalf within historical time. It focuses on the role played by modernity as an agent of the «liquefaction» of reality into a perpetual open-ended flux (experienced as decadence and decline), and the attempt by Fascism and Nazism to fix the contours of historical time and restore its shape and purpose through the power of totalitarian organization, political religion, and the manipulation of palingenetic myth. Members of the fascists' organic «national community » were thus exhorted both overtly and subliminally to find a personal transcendent meaning and sense of heroic mission through their active participation in the process of national rebirth. The fascist rebellion against the disenchanted temporality of modernity is located within modernist attempts, not only in every sphere of cultural production, but also in experimental forms of socio-political activism and organization, to create a barrier against the rising flood of disenchantment, relativism, and nihilism arising from modernity.

This new section of the journal is polemical in intent and sets out to stimulate debate. For submission of your contributions (max. 800 words) please visit the website (brill.com/fascism). The journal's consultant editor Roger Griffin sets the ball rolling.