Abstract
As the introductory essay to Visualizing Fascism makes clear, the primary goal of this anthology is to alert scholars in the field of history to the role of aesthetics and visual culture in fascist movements, while simultaneously defining fascism as a global phenomenon. Edited by two eminent historians – one a scholar of 20th-century Japan, the other of Nazi Germany – the volume has much to offer due to the geographical scope of its case studies. In her opening essay, Julia Adeney Thomas argues that ‘the visual also helps liberate [historians] from mired national debates by revealing how easily aesthetic styles and modes of public communication slip across borders’ (p. 5). This specialized focus on historians as the anthology’s target audience is reinforced by its list of contributors: eight of the anthology’s eleven authors are historians, supplemented by essays by one art historian, one architectural historian, and one author from the composite field of German and Media Arts.
The visual material examined by the anthology is similarly circumscribed, with eight essays primarily profiling photography and to a lesser extent the graphic arts, and three dedicated to public monuments and architecture. The editors’ introduction additionally states that ‘limitations of space and the excellence of already existing work argued against’ the inclusion of essays on ‘painting, literature, fashion, film and the performing arts’ (p. 18, n. 15). The absence of such material is unfortunate for an anthology focused on visuality and fascism; nor does the introduction critically engage with the sophisticated scholarship on fascism and visual culture that has developed over many decades in the field of art history. Major art historical analyses of fascist aesthetics (including photography, the graphic arts, panoramas, public monuments, state-sponsored exhibitions, and architecture) are not addressed in the theoretical introduction; moreover, previous attempts to define a generic version of fascism from a global perspective do not figure in Thomas’s outline of her own variation on a ‘portable fascism’ (pp. 6–10). 1 This lack of engagement leads to problems: for instance, while Thomas rightly describes the irrationalism central to fascist ideology as equally essential to the functional eclecticism of fascist aesthetics, she does not address the palingenetic orientation integral to both fascist ideology and aesthetics, which is the principal raison d’être for the appropriation of past traditions on the part of fascist movements. Similarly, Thomas asserts that, due to the fascist quest for unmediated authenticity, its adherents actively ‘resisted’ the self-reflexive techniques of the avant-garde, a claim that is contradicted by the historical evidence. One need only look at the impact of Futurist aesthetics and montage techniques on Italian Fascism, or to the avid celebration of Le Corbusier’s architectural experiments and of ‘New Vision’ photography by French and Italian fascists, for counter examples (and there are many more). Additionally, an aesthetics of myth-making was frequently just as germane to the avant-gardes as it was to the fascists, which accounts in part for their mutual attraction and collaboration (the primitivists Mario Sironi and Ardengo Soffici are prime examples of this orientation). As art historians have demonstrated, far from being ‘leery of modernist aesthetic theories and experimentation’ (p. 11), fascists readily assimilated avant-garde techniques (and many avant-garde artists) into the mythic politics of their movements. Such complications point to the pressing need for a more thorough examination of the literature on fascist aesthetics in other disciplines beyond the editors’ own specialized field of history.
That said, such shortcomings are mitigated by the quality of the essays included in this collection. In keeping with the global theme, the anthology analyses aspects of fascism’s visual manifestations in Germany, Italy and Japan, but also its lesser known iterations in China, Slovakia, Namibia, the Netherlands, and the Dutch East Indies. The anthology opens with a fascinating essay focusing on the palingenetic significance of journal designs, photo collages, and cartoons developed by fascist sub-factions within the Chinese Nationalist Party, known as the ‘Blue Shirts’ and the ‘cc Clique’ during the 1930s. As Maggie Clinton demonstrates, this case study ‘gives us clues to the ways in which fascist symbolics emerged from place-specific struggles while also applying global circulating tropes’ (p. 24). We then turn to Paul Barclay’s fine analysis of the Japanese construction of ‘loyal-spirit towers’ (the equivalent of Italian fascist Sacrarium) commemorating dead soldiers who had fought in fascist Japan’s imperialist campaigns. During the 1930s and into World War Two the Japanese built these towers in Manchuria, China and Singapore, as well as in Japan proper. Historians of European fascisms associate such martyrial shrines with the ideology’s status as a secular religion; Barclay’s essay extends that paradigm while pointing to the uniqueness of the Japanese variant on such commemorative monuments.
Geoff Eley’s cogent essay on ‘Nazism, Everydayness and Spectacle’ shifts our focus to Nazi Germany and a historiographical analysis of the limits on any discourse that would restrict the study of visuality in Nazi Germany to consideration of the regime’s more oppressive manifestations. Eley examines the narratives created by prominent theorists of fascism – including Walter Benjamin, Detlev Peukert, Emilio Gentile and George Mosse – concerning the authoritarian dimension of Nazi visual strategies, best exemplified in the spectacular quality and anonymity of the regime’s mass rallies. By contrast, Eley boldly calls on us to confront the difficult issue of individual agency among Germany’s citizenry in their response to Nazi propaganda, and the alternative, quotidian ways in which the regime sought to win support. This approach calls on historians to follow the example of historians of visual culture in considering other forms of visuality such as commercial films, advertisements for the tourist industry, and even cruise ship designs, all calibrated to ‘the appeals of consumer pleasure and visual enjoyment’ (p. 84).
Eley’s essay is complemented by Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s perceptive study of photographic imagery under Mussolini’s regime and by Lutz Koepnick’s compelling analysis of Heinrich Hoffmann’s photo albums of Hitler, which sold in the hundreds of thousands during the 1930s. Ben-Ghiat asks us to look beyond the stereotypical polar set of fascist images focusing on Il Duce and the anonymous masses to consider ‘the anonymous “faces in the crowd”’ (p. 95) whose potential for individual agency and humanity was just what the regime hoped to suppress. Koepnick in turn, focuses on yet another overlooked aspect of Nazi propaganda in his masterful study of how Hoffmann ‘emulated and modeled the rhetoric of amateur photography’ (p. 131) in order to embed his images of Hitler in a quotidian medium of self-expression – the snap shot.
Lorenzo Ricco then turns our attention to the German colony in Namibia in the late 1930s and its representation by two professional photographers – Ilse Steinhoff, whose photographs appeared in Nazi publications, and Anneliese Scherz, a settler whose work was for private consumption. By drawing on previously unknown archival material, Ricco reveals the extent to which their imagery ‘spoke to cultural imaginaries in the colony itself’ (p. 136) as well as efforts to frame the colony in terms of Nazi ideals.
Julia Adeney Thomas’s provocative contribution argues that Japan’s nonrevolutionary transition to fascism accounts for the non-violent imagery and aestheticist sensibility informing military and government-sponsored photography during the 1930s and 40s, which ‘effectively neutralized’ (p. 161) the medium’s critical capacities. Ethan Mark’s study turns to the Netherlands and its colonies to consider how three interwar monuments built to honor the colonial Governor-General Van Heustz ‘reflect Dutch fascism’s mainly elite and colonial pedigree’ as programmatically ‘imperialist, exclusive and hierarchical’ (p. 187). This study of fascism’s globalization is followed by Bertrand Metton’s analysis of photographic propaganda generated by the fascist Slovak Republic’s Hlinka Youth organization between 1939 and the Republic’s collapse in 1945. Metton’s investigation reveals the regime’s debt to Nazi and Italian fascist visual and cultural precedents in its effort to eschew the more traditionalist elements of Slovak ideology ‘in favor of a new [palingenetic] political myth turned towards the future’ (p. 212).
The two final essays focus somewhat anomalously, but perceptively, on the postwar recasting of Robert Capa’s engagé Spanish Civil War photography as humanist, and on the ideological import of famed architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s evolving attempts to distinguish Nazi architecture from the legacy of modernism, exemplified by his complex response to the industrial architecture of Albert Kahn. Regardless of the merits of these two fine essays, they stray markedly from the volume’s primary focus on fascist modes of self-representation. That aside, Visualizing Fascism is a welcome addition to the literature, calling for an understanding of fascism as a transnational phenomenon typified by the fluid circulation of fascist ideology and imagery.