Abstract
I am a belated and inexpert reviewer of this remarkable book. Many academic commentators have gone before me. Their erudite and generally positive assessments can easily be located on the web. I am only an ever so ’umble historian of what actually happened in Fascist Italy scarcely competent to challenge Hell's readings of an untold number of intellectuals’ reckonings with the Roman empire and the persistent meaning found in its decline and fall. It therefore will be pernickety of me to whinge that Hell's photo image of the Via dei Trionfi in 1938 is actually the Via dell’Impero or that Hell's reviewer in the austere Journal of Modern History who thinks Italy's King at that time was ‘Emmanuele III’, was suggesting a venture into monarchical pornography which might be best avoided.
I might be more seriously troubled by Hell's assumption that Mussolini decided everything in his dictatorship. Naturally I agree that romanità is regularly invoked in regime propaganda and there was quite a bit of meaningful rebuilding of the national capital. Nonetheless, I do stick to the view that the Victor Emmanuel monument, the ‘monumentissimo’, was the most outrageous site after the Risorgimento, ‘proving’ that (Liberal) Italy presided over a ‘Third Rome’. Not for nothing did the brutal attack in 1911 on what was at once called by Italy ‘Libya’ (on the classical model) come immediately after the official opening of the monument. Similarly, the Italian dictatorship's first aggression in October 1935 unleashed what was called the ‘Second Ethiopian War’, the first having been waged by Liberal Italy to humiliating defeat in 1896. No Rome legionaries ever trod the mountains of Haile Selassie's empire. Fascism Italian-style and romanità actually have a complex relationship. Finally, Hell claims that Hitler made his final decision on suicide after being told of the abuse of Mussolini's body in Piazzale Loreto on 29 April 1945. But neither Ian Kershaw nor Christian Goeschel agree that a full account of events there had come through to the Führer's bunker.
Petty errors are doubtless inevitable in a work which covers two millennia and reflects on a vast range of opinion. I should stop complaining and examine Hell's book on its own terms. Starting with Virgil, Polybios and some other classical writers, she endorses the thesis quoting Marx quoting Saint-Just (and with the assumed approval of Mary Beard) that ‘the world has been empty since the Romans, and only their memory fills it’ (1). Through 25 complex chapters, Hell then depicts a mimesis that does not fade away. ‘There is no Western empire without ruins, there are no ruins without “barbarians,” and there is no imperial imaginary without ruin gazer scenarios’ (3), she pronounces. Her brief in The Conquest of Ruins is vast.
In what a critic might think is an obsessive pursuit of her thesis, Hell takes her readers from the fall of Carthage and the decline and fall of Rome on to Charles V's attack on Tunis in 1535. She avoids contemplating his troops’ sack of Rome in 1527. Setting the Middle Ages aside, she then surveys with increasing detail imperial ventures by Napoleon in Egypt and Rome, by Captain Cook in the Pacific and by Louis Philippe's France in Algeria and intellectual characterizations of them. She spends the latter 40 per cent of her book examining Germany's imperial ambitions from Bismarck and beyond. ‘The European struggle over empire was a struggle over the ruins and remnants of antiquity, and Germany jumped into the fray’ (259), she explains. So came the Nazis, Hitler and his entourage.
For Hell, the key moment was the Führer's visit to Rome in May 1938. From then on, ‘the Nazis took neo-Roman mimesis to its extreme; their empire would be the greatest Reich ever, and Germans would be left with the most imposing ruins ever seen’ (308). In making such an assertion, Hell does nothing to review other impulses in the Nazi regime to aggression and murder. She half seems to be blaming Mussolini for setting the model and providing a Fascist archaeologist to pilot Hitler through the restored ruins of Rome and the Mostra Augustea (it had opened for the bimillenary in 1937). After the visit, she says, the Nazis began ‘playing at empire in earnest’, making the trip ‘a pivotal moment in the way in which Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler thought about their empire’ (321). But was the trip really so dominant in driving the Nazis to war and genocide?
I am inclined to conclude with these doubts and leave my Germanist colleagues to comment further. But are there still other niggles to trouble us, I must ask? One, already remarked on by another reviewer, is Hell's rigorous focus on the conquerors and so omission of any reading of time and empire by the conquered. Perhaps still more of a worry is the obsessive emphasis on Western European nations (including the USA) and their imperialisms. I imagine that Russia might also be read in her fashion. I can certainly hear Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible roaring that Moscow is the Third Rome and there will be none other. Can Putin, locked in his irredentism in the Ukraine, also be creating ruins and contemplating the time when his Moscow/Rome will be no more?
But the more blatant absence is China and its empire, which has, after all, lasted far longer than petty little Rome. If we want to examine how empire controls our minds then China might be a better site than anything ‘Western’. Anyway, will Rome not be fading from most political, cultural and economic minds since it is more than one generation since a knowledge of Latin, so long the first qualification for arrival into power in Europe, diminished into a forgotten and deprecated skill of those who once were? Satirists may have labelled Trump ‘Il Douche’ but it is hard to see his aggressive/pessimistic MAGAism as much prompted by his reflection on Virgil and the classics. In gazing at Hell's remarkable book, am I in reality observing a ruin of two millennia of classicists’ intellectuality, now to be surpassed by AI and a genuinely globalized world which may or may not save itself from environmental calamity?