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The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism Author(s): Paul Betts Source: Journal of Contemporary

History, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 541-558 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3180759 Accessed: 31/03/2010 22:48
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Journal London,Thousand Oaks, CA and of Contemporary HistoryCopyright? 2002 SAGEPublications, New Delhi, Vol 37(4), 541-558. [0022-0094(200210)37:4;541 -558;027917]

PaulBetts

The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism

One of the most curious things about contemporary academic culture is the amount of recent attention devoted to what is now known as 'fascist modernism'. New books, exhibitions, television programmes and cable channel docudramas about fascist culture abound, to say nothing of the crop of academic review essays and special journal issues devoted to the topic.' These days there seems no end to the intense international preoccupation with a subject that only a generation ago was routinely regarded as reckless and even repugnant, more recycled Third Internationalism than legitimate scholarship. This was especially true during much of the Cold War in Western Europe and the USA, where fascism and modernism were typically treated as intrinsically antithetical and morally incompatible. Even plain historical evidence to the contrary like the celebrated marriage of Italian fascism and futurism - was commonly dismissed as ideological naivete or political opportunism. What has emerged quite clearly since the events of 1989, however, is the extent to which these perceptions were products of the Cold War. Nowhere was this more apparent than in West Germany, where cultural imperatives often went hand in hand with political ones. Insofar as the overriding task of the late 1940s and early 1950s was to integrate this new post-fascist polity into the charmed circle of the liberal West as quickly as possible, the postwar period soon gave rise to a distinctly transatlantic campaign to neutralize the toxic cultural legacy of nazism. Often this meant recasting fascist culture as a 'regressive interlude' in an otherwise redemptive tale of modernism triumphant. The Italian case was more complicated, given Mussolini's unabashed patronage of avant-garde culture, as well as the absence of any Weimar Republic to which a postwar generation could claim cultural allegiance. Even so, it is not as if there were no postwar efforts in Italy that aimed to sanitize and rehabilitate aspects of inter-

I should like to thank Roderick Kedward and Dagmar Herzog for their constructive criticism. 1 Recent academic assessments include Scott Spector, 'Was the Third Reich Movie-Made? Interdisciplinarity and the Reframing of Ideology', American Historical Review, 106, 2 (April 2001), 460-84; Peter Jelavich, 'National Socialism, Art and Power in the 1930s', Past & Present, 164 (August 1999), 244-65; Suzanne Marchand, 'Nazi Culture: Banality or Barbarism?',Journal of Modern History, 70 (March 1998), 108-18. Note also the special issues on 'Fascism and Culture', Modernism/Modernity, 3, 1 (January 1996), 'The Aesthetics of Fascism', Journal of Contemporary History, 31, 2 (April 1996) and 'Fascism and Culture', Stanford Italian Review, 8, 1-2 (1990).

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war modernism as post-fascist cultural ballast and guidance.2 While dissenting voices challenging the supposedly elective affinity of liberalism, progress and modernism could be heard with increasing intensity from the 1960s on, it is really the end of the Cold War that has spurred new curiosity toward the shadowlands of modernism. The fact that interest has extended well beyond Germany and Italy to include Austria, France and Spain highlights its broadening appeal.3 It is tempting to dismiss the import of this phenomenon as nothing but another short-lived academic fad. The key issue, some might argue, is that the 1970s subculture fascination with fascism - as Susan Sontag so astutely diagnosed at the time - has now seized mainstream public culture.4 Surely there is a good deal of truth and irony in this; but I would suggest that there are other motives behind the renewed interest in fascist culture. Among them are the manifold desire to contextualize the recent re-emergence of virulent European nationalism and quasi-fascist political parties; to trace the origins of the development of full-blown 'audiovisual regimes', telegenic media cultures and the more general 'visualization of politics'; to recall the last days of European hegemony and a Europe-centred world; as well as to locate the unholy grail of postmodernism itself. Regardless of its scholarly value, this new literature certainly marks a sea change in historiographical attitude and approach. Where Cold War scholarship on fascist culture by and large concentrated upon its diverse causes, the new trend inclines toward investigating its multiple effects.' By the same token, scholars are slowly moving away from older interpretations of how European culture was irreversibly 'Americanized' or 'Sovietized' to suit overarching Cold War objectives. Of growing concern instead to many cultural historians these days is the extent to which fascist modernism - including its narrative forms, visual codes and/or political mythologies - continued to influence the reorganization of postwar life and culture. Whether one sees this latest academic cottage industry as the final banalization of evil or the ironic revenge of Albert Speer's infamous 'ruin
2 Dawn Ades, Tim Benton, David Elliott and lain Boyd White, 'Selectors' Introduction' in Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930-1945 (London 1995), 17. 3 Recent titles include Erin Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford, CA 1998); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, CA 2001); Maria Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ 1998); Jean-Louis Cohen (ed.), Les Annees 30: L'Architecture et les arts de l'espace entre industrie et nostalgie (Paris 1997); Le Temps menacant 1929-1939 (Paris 1997); Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self (Ithaca, NY 1997); Simonetta Falasca, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetic Power of Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, CA 1997); Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA 1993); and Richard Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture (Hanover, NH 1992). 4 Susan Sontag, 'Fascinating Fascism', reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn (London 1983). 5 Useful broad-based examples are Graham Bartram et al. (eds), Reconstructing the Past: Representations of the Fascist Era in Post-War European Culture (Keele 1996) and Nicholas Hewitt (ed.), The Cultural of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought and Film (New York 1989). This shift of emphasis can also be seen in Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present and Future (Oxford 1996).

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theory of value' is immaterial; the point is that fascist 'futures past' have gained remarkable purchase in today's international scholarly community. It is scarcely surprising that nazi Germany remains a main focus of this broader reappraisal. In many ways it was the predictable by-product of the ongoing debate on German identity in the wake of Reunification, much of which has pivoted upon re-evaluating the very meaning of the nazi and Holocaust legacies for post-Cold War Germany.6 Not that revisions of the nazi past are new. On the contrary, the nazi era was subject to divergent reinterpretation throughout the Cold War, as both Germanys took great pains to distance themselves from its dark patrimony. Whereas East Germany built its political and cultural identity upon the vaunted and often mythic heritage of antifascist resistance and non-complicity, officially denouncing the Third Reich as the natural offspring of 'fascist capitalism', West German attitudes toward the nazi period were more varied and contested. Over four decades they underwent successive waves of reassessment, from self-congratulatory narratives of radical rupture during the 1950s to leftist critiques of scandalous continuities and restorationist tendencies during the 1960s and 1970s and finally to neo-conservative revisionism aimed above all at 'normalizing' German history during the 1980s.7 What is so striking, however, is the extent to which post-Cold War accounts have gone well beyond these old ideological battlelines. The principal questions are less how class-driven, 'polycratic', or reactionary nazism really was. Nor do debates turn on whether nazi politics and culture were 'intentional' or 'functional'; even the task of adjudicating complicity and resistance - which animated much of the discussion 15 years ago - has flagged noticeably. Different issues are now at stake. In part this has to do with the hidden effect of 1989. Much has been made of the fact that the dismantling of the Berlin Wall converted the Cold War into instant history. Germany, long the object of international geopolitics, has finally become a political subject in its own right again.8 But it is not as if the 'rush to German unity' rendered only the Cold War as the past: the same went for fascism and the second world war, whose legacies shaped the political and moral lives of both German republics.9 Since then the historiography on nazi culture has moved in two seemingly contradictory directions. On the one hand, it has been abstracted and generalized. Of course, this in itself is nothing novel. During the 1960s, for example,
6 Reinhard Alter and Peter Monteath (eds), Rewriting the German Past: History and Identity in the New Germany (Atlantic Highlands, NJ 1997). 7 Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA 1988); Richard Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (New York 1989); and Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington, IN 1984). 8 Not that this was an easy road. Indeed, the heady days of 1989 soon gave way to acrimonious debates - both within and beyond Germany - about the place and significance of the German past (be it the nazi era or the GDR tout court) after Reunification. Marla Stone and Harold James (eds), When the Wall Came Down: Reactions to German Unification (New York 1992). 9 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA 1997).

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West German leftists worked to 'internationalize' the history of German fascism as an indictment of western 'monopoly capitalism'. But the emphasis has changed considerably this time round. In the hands of recent scholars, nazi culture has emerged instead as a contemporary allegory of intolerance, existential extremity and/or radical evil; the tragic culmination of enlightened science and rationality; the hothouse fusion of violence, myth and aesthetics; and/or a case study of the limits of post-Holocaust representation, communication and 'visual culture'.10 While such new perspectives have certainly afforded fresh avenues of enquiry, the results have been quite uneven. One well-known example is the Los Angeles County Museum's 1991 reconstruction of nazi Germany's infamous 1937 'Degenerate Art' exposition, which raised serious questions about the use and abuse of the nazi legacy. Much of this had to do with the fact that the show was partly conceived as a dark parable about the state control of the arts in the wake of the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy." The debates about the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles also touched on the nettlesome problem of negotiating past and present, as well as questioning to whom this past really belongs. Plainly such controversy reflected the more general anxiety about the popularization (or even representation) of Holocaust history, as many worried about the inevitable trivialization of the Shoah through mass media spectacles and bland comparisons. So dramatic has been the scope and speed with which the Holocaust has become mainstream history that its topsyturvy reception story over the decades has itself become a new object of academic investigation.1' For better or worse, the nazi era and the Holocaust are no longer restricted to either German or Jewish history, and have been refashioned for wider cultural consumption. Part of the reason why this broadening effort has been so influential is that it has invited new international analyses and comparative approaches. Several Thus recent works have taken up the task to great profit for future research.13 fields the in fruitful less have treatments such proved comparative far, however, of art and cultural history. Quite indicative here has been the common postCold War reflex to lump together fascist and communist culture. It is especially striking in the run of recent comparative exhibitions arranged under the rubric
10 See, for example, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes and Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Mythe Nazi (Edition de l'Aube 1996); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge 1989); Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution' (Cambridge, MA 1992) and Barbara Zeliker (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust (London 2001). 11 Stephanie Barron (ed.), 'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles 1991), 22. 12 Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford 1994); Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London 2000); Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: The Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London 2000). 13 Richard Bessel (ed.), Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts (Cambridge 1996); Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison, WI 1995).

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'art and dictatorship'. While such comparisons were a standard staple of Cold War propaganda well before 1989, the 1930s shotgun marriage of state and culture has garnered increasing public attention.14A good illustration of this was the 1995 'Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930-1945' exhibition, at London's Hayward Gallery. Even if past exhibitions had addressed the suppression of the avant-garde across Europe in the 1930s,15 this was a more ambitious review of the 'politicization of the arts and mass media' in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. In it the links between past and present were very clear. As the exhibition's curators put it, the show deals 'with the painful history that has created the Europe in which we live. The spectres of authoritarianism, racism and rampant nationalism which haunted those years are still with us today.'16But in the effort to trace the genealogy of illiberalism, there is precious little on how fascist and communist art and culture contributed in different ways to the 'Europe in which we live'. As Peter Jelavich observed in his review essay, not much can be found in the way of a 'truly extended, systematic comparison of the "art of dictatorships"; it [the exhibition] opted instead for juxtaposition'.17Indeed, the tendency to treat anti-liberal culture as a whole - where similarities not differences are stressed - is very much the central theme. Yet one could argue that this is not so much blurring national differences as writing a new history of post-Cold War united Europe. As one contributor stated in the preface to the exhibition's catalogue, 'As Europe once more seeks to find its voice, this exhibition seeks to contribute to the regaining of a common memory.'18 Others are more critical of this reconfiguration of 1930s European culture. For many Eastern Europeans, for example, lumping together fascist and communist art is really a crude form of 'victor's justice' on the part of the liberal West, which has smugly reinvented its former ideological enemies as museum curiosities of twentieth-century illiberalism. In so doing, the old leftist campaign to portray fascism (together with its 'superstructural' culture) as the child of capitalism has been turned on its head: fascism and communism are now condemned together as kindred dystopias of the flesh and spirit. Such renditions have not gone unchallenged. The storm of protest surrounding the 1999 West German-curated 'Rise and Fall of the Modern' exhibition in Weimar is a good case in point. It was the largest display of East German painting since the Wende; yet it was the manner in which nazi and communist
14 Besides the French shows already noted, Wendy Kaplan (ed.), Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885-1945 (New York 1995); Kunst und Diktatur: Architektur, Bildhauerei und Malerei in Osterreich, Deutschland, Italien und der Sowjetunion, 1922-1956 (Baden 1994); Andreas Beaugrand (ed.), Totalitdre Kunst - Kunst im Totalitarianismus?: Beispiele aus dem NS-Staat und der DDR (Bielefeld 1997). 15 See, for example, 'Die Axt hat gebliiht. . .' 1937: Europaische Konflikte der 30er Jahre in Erinnerung an die friihe Avantgarde (Diusseldorf 1987). 16 Ades et al., 'Selectors' Introduction', Art and Power, op. cit., 7. 17 Jelavich, op. cit., 38. 18 Klaus Gallwitz, 'Preface', Art and Power, op. cit., 9.

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art were exhibited in tandem as the iconography of the anti-modern which provoked such disquiet. East Germans reacted vehemently. Weimar's Deputy Mayor Friedrich Folger spoke for many when he sniffed that '[West German curator Achim] Preiss came here from the West, from Cologne, and he does not understand that good and bad alternated in East Germany. To place East German art beside that of the Nazis is an outrage.' Leipzig painter Wolfgang Mattheuer dismissed the exhibition as nothing but 'an expression of the West German victor's mentality'. Clearly, it revealed the polemic nature of placing nazi art in certain comparative contexts, in this case pointing up the ongoing post-Reunification cultural wars about such 'End of History' triumphalism.'9 But if the study of nazi culture has been broadened in recent years, it has also been narrowed considerably. Several recent works, for instance, display a distinct tendency toward replacing earlier ideologically-driven stories of allpowerful elites and manipulated masses with more nuanced cultural histories of the complex interplay of ideas, institutions and everyday practices.'?In this regard, Alan Steinweis' Art, Ideology and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater and the Visual Arts (1993) is useful in illuminating the intricate cultural politics of the Reich Chambers of the Arts (RKK), especially insomuch as the organization often entertained competing notions of what constituted proper German art and culture. Jonathan Petropoulos' Art as Politics in the Third Reich (1996) in turn revises earlier images of nazi anti-modernism by describing the private patronage of modern art among the nazi 6lite. Others, too, have re-opened the dossier on various aspects of nazi cultural life more generally, calling for more sustained analyses of the relationship between form and ideology.2' This literature effectively complements the other trend toward abstract models by supplying more empirically-grounded studies of cultural decision-making. What they both have in common, however, is a shared disinclination toward treating nazi culture as the historical fulfilment of what were once seen as the peculiarities of German Geist and Kultur. It was perhaps inevitable that the fascist era would become the stuff of current art retrospectives. Indeed, the return of fascist culture as art exhibition is rather fitting. This is particularly true with respect to fascism's marriage of state and aesthetics, as well as its obsession with rendering politics visible and
19 Roger Cohen, 'Exhibiting the Art of History's Dustbin', New York Times, 17 August 1999, B3, B5. See, too, Hanno Rautenberg, 'Kesseltreiben in Weimar: Aus Bilderstreit wird Bilderkampf: Wie eine Ausstellung der Ost-West Konflikt schiirt', Die Zeit, 27 May 1999, 49-50. 20 Eric Rentscher, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA 1996); Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC 1996); Peter Fritzsche, 'Nazi Modern', Modernity/Modernism (January 1996), 1-21; Harold Welzer (ed.), Das Geddchtnis der Bilder: Asthetik und Nationalsozialismus (Tibingen 1995); Joachim Petsch, Kunst im Dritten Reich (Cologne 1994). 21 Glenn Cuomo (ed.), National Socialist Cultural Policy (New York 1995) as well as Brandon Taylor and Winfried van der Will (eds), The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester 1990).

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spectacular.22Countless historical pageants, Volk festivals, military parades, propaganda films, art exhibitions and grandiose buildings all exemplified the fascist desire to invent mythic imperial pasts and futures, all the while mobilizing the passions of the present for imminent war-making. The nazis were, of course, most extreme in this visualization of politics, denouncing all loyalty to liberal political texts (e.g. the Versailles Treaty and Weimar Constitution) in favour of decisive political action based on fatal aesthetic criteria - beautiful vs. ugly, healthy vs. degenerate, German vs. Jew. This has proved a boon to museum curators and television programme-makers everywhere. For in an era in which the contemporary art object itself has apparently lost its cultural charisma and/or clear connection to politics - what postmodernists like to call its 'loss of affect' - museum exhibitions on fascist culture (not to mention the growing number of Anglo-American university courses on the subject) never fail to excite attention or ticket sales. It is hardly coincidental that the West's resurgent interest in 1930s anti-liberal culture during the 1970s occurred in tandem with the deeply-felt crisis of modernism at the time. As Igor Golomstock put it, the 1970s interest in fascist art was in large measure fuelled by a 'nostalgia for Art's lost social role, for its purposeful organization, for its direct link with social and political life'.23This has further intensified in the last ten years. But if these new exhibitions invoke fascist art as the ominous aesthetics of collective mission, social engineering and - in the nazi case racist metaphysics, its one-time danger now appears safely consigned to history. As Eric Hobsbawm noted:
How much of the art of power has survived in these countries? Surprisingly little in Germany, more in Italy, perhaps most ... in Russia. Only one thing has gone from all of them: power mobilizing art and people as public theatre. ... If the theatre-state is to live, the show must go on. In the end it did not. The curtain is down and will not be raised again.24

On this point the Weimar 'Rise and Fall of the Modern' exhibition was particularly instructive. Equally as striking was the way in which the 50-year taboo against displaying nazi paintings had been so casually lifted. One should remember that after the war, nazi art was studiously locked away in dark museum storerooms as toxic cultural material. Many nazi-era works did not see the light of day until the 1974 'Art in the Third Reich' exhibition in Frankfurt am Main. The acrimonious debate over the political and moral perils of exhibiting such 'non-art' to the wider public - and especially children underlined the high stakes of unpacking the buried past.25 Other shows followed, such as the 1977 Munich 'Die 30er Jahre: Schauplatz Deutschland',
22 George Mosse, 'Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations', Journal of Contemporary History, 31, 2 (April 1996), 245-52. 23 Igor Golomstock, trans. Robert Chandler, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China (London 1990), x. 24 Eric Hobsbawm, 'Foreword', Art and Power, op. cit., 15. 25 Kunst im Dritten Reich - Dokumente der Unterwerfung (Frankfurt 1974).

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the 1981 Paris 'Realisms', the 1982 Milan 'The Thirties: Art and Culture in Italy', as well as the 1987 Berlin 'The Staging of Power' expositions. In West Germany there were even several mid-1980s exhibitions dedicated to rehabiliThese produced such scantating the work of Arno Breker and Albert Speer.26 dal and outrage that the newly-established Green Party devoted a full plenary session meeting to the affair, ultimately issuing a statement condemning such neo-conservative revisionism on both moral and intellectual grounds.27In fact, the whole question about whether or not to hang nazi art in museums continued to provoke intense discussion through the late 1980s.28 Not so in the 1990s. On the contrary, there was talk of including nazi-era art in national museum collections as part of the more general (albeit self-critical) story of twentieth-century German art and culture. For example, the 1999 Berlin show, 'The 20thCentury: A Century of Art in Germany', made no bones about featuring Arno Breker heroic bronzes and clips from Leni Riefenstahl films, along with images by Kandinsky and Joseph Beuys.29Apparently, the brown spectre once haunting Europe is considered dead enough to allay any worries about fascist art's once potent pathos and affective powers. Still, it would be premature to write off fascist artifacts as completely impotent. Crowds still line up to see these exhibitions, and fascist images are never in short supply at the box office or on the television screen, to say nothing of the academic bookshop. Indeed, it is precisely its 'grim fascination and its undoubted terror' that is so attractive.30In his 1992 Art in the Third Reich, Peter Adams even went so far as to say that nazi painting (by removing Jewish figures from the canvasses of an idealized Germany) actually anticipated and in some measure was responsible for atrocities to come.31Adam is by no means alone: others too have underlined nazi culture's power to bind and entrance. Yet its danger has apparently vanished with the regime itself, as its visual archive now serves as a source of historical fascination based on half a century's distance and wonder. But there are other changes afoot. Three additional shifts in recent historiography are worth discussing in some detail. The first concerns the changed image of nazi culture. Noteworthy in this regard is the virtual disappearance of the early Cold War construction of nazi cultural life as largely anti-modern. Few today would subscribe to the once-dominant image of nazi culture (the term alone was once considered a scandalous oxymoron) as essentially reactionary ideology and kitschy pastoral idylls. That is not to say that there is
26 Walter Grasskamp, 'The De-Nazification of Nazi Art: Arno Breker and Albert Speer Today' in Nazification of Art, op. cit., 231-48. 27 Peter Reichel, Der Schone Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Frankfurt 1994), 17. 28 See, for example, Nazi-Kunst ins Museum? (G6ttingen 1988). 29 Alan Riding, 'Germany Picks Art of the Century: A Vast Exhibition Recalls War, Peace and the Struggle for Renewal', New York Times, 2 December 1999, Bl1-12. 30 Taylor and van der Will, 'Preface and Acknowledgements' in Nazification of Art, op. cit., vi. 31 Peter Adam, Art in the Third Reich (New York 1992), 305.

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no interest in nazi culture's irrationalism, occultism and misty virility myths. But they are increasingly treated as less the return of Teutonic paganism than a decidedly modern crisis of national identity and what French art historian Eric Michaud suggestively calls nazism's 'fantasies of autonomy'.32 In this sense, Benedetto Croce's oft-cited notion - first formulated in his 1925 'Manifesto of the Antifascist Intellectual' - that fascism and culture were inherently contradictory has lost its intellectual hold. No longer does Nikolaus Pevsner's famous observation that any word devoted to nazi architecture is one word too many reflect today's cultural climate. With few exceptions, the new literature tends to stress the modern aspects of nazi culture. This has often meant erasing the line between 1932 and 1933, as well as exploring the continuities between the 1920s and the 1930s. As a result, the seemingly impeccable antifascist credentials of leading Weimar modernist institutions and artists have been subjected to new scrutiny. No better example is the recent trend to expose the strange career of Werkbund-Bauhaus modernism (to say nothing of the shadowy dealings of their once-untouchable leading figures) within the Third Reich.33Even those spheres long regarded as the supreme examplars of 'blood and soil' ideology - such as painting and architecture - have proved less adverse to Weimar modernism than once believed.34Granted, to argue for the modernity of the Third Reich is hardly a new assertion. It was first introduced by Ralf Dahrendorf and David Schoenbaum in the mid-1960s, as the Third Reich's modernizing thrust was seen as having created the conditions often despite itself - for the more individual-oriented consumer society of 1950s West Germany.33This theme was elaborated a generation later by the likes of Detlev Peukert and Zygmunt Bauman, who similarly stressed the modern dimensions of nazi social policies. What distinguished the 1980s revision of nazi political culture was the way in which the Third Reich was treated less as the midwife of 1950s liberalism than as an alternative form of modernity itself.36Needless to say, such a thesis was (and still is) quite delicate and at
32 Eric Michaud, Un Arte de I'Eternitd (Paris 1996). 33 Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), Bauhaus-Moderne und Nationalsozialismus (Munich 1993); Sabine Weissler (ed.), Design in Deutschland, 1933-1945: Asthetik und Organisation des Deutschen Werkbundes im 'Dritten Reich' (Giessen 1990); Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen (Frankfurt 1992); and Herbert Bayer: Kunst und Design in Amerika, 1938-1985 (Berlin 1986). See also the revisionist biographies by Winfried Nerdinger, Walter Gropius (Berlin 1985) and Elaine Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York 1989). 34 See Petropoulos, Art as Politics, op. cit., Taylor and van der Will, op. cit., and most recently, Paul Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London 2000). 35 Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (New York 1967) and David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939 (New York 1966). 36 Detlev Peukert, Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne (G6ttingen 1989) and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge 1989). See also Ronald Smelser, Robert Ley: Hitler's Labor Front Leader (New York 1988). Peukert's Inside Nazi Germany can also be viewed in this light, though his conclusion very much asserts the connection between the 1940s and 1950s

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times was used to downplay the centrality of racism within nazi Germany's project to build a new state and society. The controversy sparked by the 1991 publication of Rainer Zitelmann and Michael Prinz's Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung, much of which resulted in the volume's overall tendency to discuss nazi social policy divorced from racist politics, underscored the high stakes of the debate.37While it would be misleading to suggest that the concept of nazi modernity enjoys full consensus,38it is undeniable that the thesis has gained more and more acceptance among scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. On this score, Peter Fritzsche's 1996 article, 'Nazi Modern', is particularly innovative. In it he attempts to tackle the issue from another angle, namely that of modernism itself. In the main, Fritzsche sets his sights on placing National Socialism within Germany's interwar culture of avant-garde modernism. The claim, however, is not somehow that nazi art and culture were all that radical and/or progressive. Fritzsche's point is rather that nazism was shaped by the same cultural landscape of disorder and possibility characterizing German life after the first world war. In his words,
For the civil servant or the public health official, as much as for the artist, the enduring aspect of the modern age was instability. Modernism, which has usually been conceived in literary or artistic terms, has remarkable social and political implications. It is the apprehension of the malleable: the dark acknowledgment of the fragility and impermanence of the material 9 world allied with the conviction that relentless reform could steady collapsing structures.

On one level, this interpretation is very much in keeping with Modris Eckstein's much-quoted assertion in his classic Rites of Spring that Germany 'has been the modernist nation par excellence of our century'.40But there is a good deal more at stake here than simply suggesting that the Dadaist and technocrat were cultural bedfellows. Fritzsche aims to dissolve the boundaries between German aesthetic modernism and social politics by putting the whole interwar period under the sign of radical reconstruction. This spirit was obviously not confined to nazi Germany, but it assumed a special resonance there:
West Germany. Detlev Peukert, trans. Richard Deveson, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, CT 1987), esp. 236-49. 37 Rainer Zitelmann and Michael Prinz (eds), Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt 1991). Note also the controversy sparked by the publication of Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust as well as Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutsche Plane fir eine neue europdische Ordnung (Hamburg 1991). The debate is reproden Zusammenhang duced in Wolfgang Schneider (ed.), Vernichtungspolitik: Eine Debatte iiuber von Sozialpolitik und Genozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Berlin 1991). 38 Influential rebuttals of the modernization thesis include Jens Alber, 'Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung', Kolner Zeitschrift fir Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 41 (June 1989), 346-65 and Norbert Frei, 'Wie modern war der Nationalsozialismus?', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 19 (1993), 367-87. 39 Fritzsche, op. cit., 12. 40 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, MA 1989), xvi.

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Although the Hitler regime cannot be adequately described as merely a German version of Beveridge's England or Roosevelt's America, the Nazis operated in the subjunctive tense, experimenting, reordering, reconstructing, and it is this spirit of renovation that qualifies National Socialism as modern.41

This is important in a number of respects. First, it places nazism's 'will to totality' as part of the broader post-1918 desire for social experimentation born of profound incertitude and the need for fundamental reform. At first his argument appears to dovetail neatly with the recent renaissance of the longmaligned concept of totalitarianism as an explanatory tool to describe European dictatorships ranging from Mussolini to Hitler, from Franco to Stalin. Michael Burleigh's new The Third Reich: A New History (2000) is only the most current title in this new scholarly dispensation. Where Fritzsche departs from them, however, is the suggestion that nazi Germany's 'totalitarian version of the modern' (17) had its roots largely in Weimar radicalism. As such, Fritzsche draws interesting parallels between the 1920s artistic avant-garde and the 1930s campaign toward radical modernization, arguing in effect that nazi social policies served as the political avant-garde of their day. It is true that others have hinted at the connection between 1920s avantgarde artists and 1930s policy-makers. Igor Golomstock's book, significantly entitled Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China, first made this claim in bold fashion. In it he wrote that
... if the principal characteristic of totalitarianism is that it proclaims its ideological doctrine as both uniquely true and universally obligatory, then it is the artistic avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s who first elaborated a totalitarian ideology of culture. Only that art has the right to exist which is an effective instrument for the transformation of the world in the necessary direction, while everything else is counterrevolution or bourgeois reaction: to the revolutionary avant-garde this was an absolute and unshakeable truth.42

So pervasive was this avant-garde spirit of innovation and experimentation in interwar Europe for Golomstock that he has no qualms about declaring 'totalitarian art' as the 'second International Style of contemporary culture' after modernism.43But Fritzsche is less interested in aesthetic debates. His chief point is that interwar Germany was a construction site for a range of new visions of social engineering, and it was this feeling of danger and malleability - the existential condition of modernism itself - that fuelled new dreams of radical change across the political spectrum and cultural domain.44
41 Fritzsche, op. cit., 7. 42 Golomstock, op. cit., 21. A similar argument is made for Stalinist Russia in Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (Munich 1988). 43 Golomstock, op. cit., 306. See also Franco Borsi, The Monumental Era: European Architecture and Design, 1929-1939 (New York 1987). 44 For a useful discussion about the value of this model, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Fascist Modernities, op. cit., especially the introduction. Crucial in this regard is also Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (New York 1984).

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A second new avenue of enquiry about nazi modern concerns the so-called industrial arts within the Third Reich. While assessments of nazi culture were once largely confined to painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and propaganda film, a generation of new scholars has begun to reconsider the significance of advertising, entertainment cinema, industrial design, television, But it is autobahns, pop culture eroticism and other 'low culture' enterprises.45 not enough to describe these developments as simply a postmodern impulse to climb down the cultural ladder to rediscover the hitherto trivialized world of nazi material culture. For these fields were often laden with surprising political gravity and cultural power in their own right, not least because they rested at the very crossroads of industry and ideology. And in light of the nazi effort to dissolve the boundaries between high and low culture in the name of a new Volkskultur, these new industrial arts occupied a key place in the Third Reich's infamous visual culture. If anything, the cumulative result of these new studies has been to underline the very ubiquity of industrial aesthetics in the Third Reich. What at first appears as a flippant question is on closer inspection deadly serious: what ultimately did not count as industrial design in the Third Reich? Mass political rallies, monumentalist architecture, propaganda films, Thing theatres and radio broadcasts are commonly cited as constitutive elements of the notorious repertoire of nazi cultural tools and techniques. But could it not be argued with equal validity that yellow stars, Hitler salutes, Gothic script, Iron Cross medallions, torchlit processions, the V-2, eugenics, the 'death-speak' of bureaucratized mass murder and even the 'Final Solution' itself were also expressions of the industrial design of nazi ideology? Central to this new research is the exploration of the ways in which 'trivial culture' related to the broader nazi campaign to intensify the identification of the people with the government by dissolving all political resistance, cultural distance and racial difference in an aesthetic ideal of unified purpose and imperialist mission. While some of these new works are occasionally guilty of losing sight of the broader context of nazi cultural politics, they have succeeded in enlarging our notions of nazi material culture well beyond 'Home Sweet Heimat'. Likewise, the study of these industrial arts has opened up rich repositories for investigating what Peter Reichel ironically calls the 'happy illusion' (sch6ner Schein) of nazi modernism. This is not so new as all that, of course. Even since the late 1960s scholarship on nazi industrial culture has been at the forefront of challenging the long-held Cold War image of nazi culture as
45 Uwe Westphal, Werbung im Dritten Reich (Berlin 1989); Sonja Giinther, Design der Macht (Stuttgart 1992); Karsten Witte, Lachende Erben, Toller Tag: Filmkom6die im Dritten Reich and (Berlin 1995); Edward Dimendberg, 'The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways Hakenkreuz unterm Fernsehen Klaus Winkler, 73 91-137; 1995), (Summer Modernity', October, (Cologne 1994); Heiko Zeutschner, Die braune Mattscheibe (Hamburg 1995); Udo Pini, Leibeskult und Liebeskitsch: Erotik im Dritten Reich (Munich 1992); Paul Betts, The Pathos of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, 1945-1965 (Berkeley, CA forthcoming).

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essentially Teutonic pastoralism, Speer-esque monumentalism and/or 'blood and soil' reaction. It was in this context that Anna Teut's Architektur im Dritten Reich (Berlin 1967) and Barbara Miller Lane's Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge, MA 1968) were such milestones, in that they effectively qualified reigning assumptions of nazi 'blood and soil' culture by showing its undeniable modernist penchant. Studies on industrial design and film reached similar conclusions.46 By the late 1970s and early 1980s, this alternative view of nazi modernism found wide reception in new books and exhibitions about the fascist past.47But where earlier accounts were often inspired by a desire to expose embarrassing continuities with the socalled 'Adenauer Restoration', their successors were motivated by other issues. At the heart of these most recent works is a fascination with the industrialized fantasy world of nazi modernity, what Giidrun Brockhaus suggestively calls the fascist 'offer of experience'.48 This is all the more suggestive given that one of the hallmarks of fascism (not only in Germany and Italy, but also in Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Spain) lay in the state organization of mass leisure.49 In recent years, there has been a discernible movement away from moralizing narratives of mass manipulation toward fuller descriptive accounts of the emotional linchpins of fascist everyday life, so much so that the psychological fascination of fascism has emerged as a favourite research topic.5?0 Clearly this development owes much of its inspiration to the advent of the 'history of the everyday' methodology pioneered during the late 1970s and early 1980s, which concentrated upon the realm of individual experiences and private memories (often based upon oral history) swirling beneath the crust of conventional social history and structural sociology.51One might even contend that it is precisely the subjective side of fascism that is the red thread running through some of the most influential reconsiderations of the nazi past over the last two decades, be it Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies (Minneapolis 1989, original German 1978), Art Spiegelman's Maus (New York 1992; 1986), Edgar Reitz's film, Heimat (1984), Spielberg's film, Schindler's List (1993),
46 Josef Wulf, Die bildende Kiinste im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation(Reinbekbei im 3. Reich'in Form,69, 70, 71 (1975). Hamburg1966) and Hans Scheer,'Gestaltung 47 Hans-Dieter DeutscheKulturund Lebenswirklichkeit Schafer,Das gespalteteBewusstsein: 1933-1945 (Berlin1981); Die Dreissiger Jahre:SchauplatzDeutschland(Munich 1977); and BertoldHinz (ed.),Die Dekorationder Gewalt(Giessen1979). 48 Giidrun Schauder undIdylle:Faschismus als Erlebnisangebot Brockhaus, (Munich1997). 49 VictoriaDe Grazia,The Cultureof Consent:Mass Organization of Leisurein FascistItaly Palmiro 1981), 239. Fora key earlyassessment, (Cambridge Togliatti,'TheDopolavoro'in idem, Lectures on Fascism(New York 1976 [1935]), 73-87. 50 BerndOgan and WolfgangWeiss (eds), Faszination und Gewalt:Zur politischenAsthetik des Nationalsozialismus (Niirnberg1992); John Milfull (ed.), The Attractions of Fascism(New York 1990); Inszenierung der Macht:Asthetische im Faschismus Faszination (Berlin1987); and Alice Kaplan, Reproductionsof Banality: Fascism, Literatureand French IntellectualLife MN 1987). (Minneapolis, 51 LutzNiethammer et al., Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet 1930 bis 1960, 3 vols (Berlin 1983- ) and Alf Liidtke (ed.), The History of EverydayLife: Reconstructing HistoricalExperiences and Waysof Life (Princeton, NJ 1996).

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Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (New York 1992), D.J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York 1996), or the recent rash of firstperson Holocaust survival tales. While it is true that this approach owes its roots to the work of Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich back in the 1930s, the focus now is decidedly less upon 'authoritarian personality', 'flights from freedom' and 'restructured libidinal economies' than symbolic negotiation, material motivations and the 'practices of everyday life'. An oft-cited example is Alf Liidtke's landmark study on the symbolic world of German workers from the Kaiserreich through the Third Reich. In it he persuasively shows how the nazi exploitation of the old romantic concepts of 'German quality work', 'work value' and even 'joy of work' was remarkably effective in winning over workers to the regime by appealing to their psychosensual identification with 're-enchanted' industrial labour. Consequently, such ideology helped forge vital links between pride and production, while at the same time cultivating loyalty to the regime.2 In a similar fashion, scholars have started to look seriously at how the famed 'Strength Through Joy' vacation packages, the Volkswagen and the so-called 'people's homes' played an equally stabilizing function in furnishing fetching images of future prosperity.53 What they all show is that even the regime's inability to make good on these promises (not a single Volkswagen was ever produced for private use) in no way detracted from their symbolic importance. On the contrary, those massproduced material dreams of deferred gratification and postwar affluence became even more precious amid consumer rationing and wartime sacrifice. In this way, historians are beginning to explore just how the nazi fabrication of the good life and postwar bonanza played a long-underestimated role in 'normalizing' post-1933 social life for many Germans. Recent forays into what might be called the Third Reich's 'culture of pleasure' have uncovered new material on the 'gracelands' of nazi leisure, consumerism, plunder, sexuality and tourism.'4 The long-obscured importance of material culture has even
52 Alf Ludtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrik-Alltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschimus (Hamburg 1993), esp. 318ff. 53 Dennis Doordan, 'Political Things: Design in Fascist Italy' in Designing Modernity, op. cit., 229-53 and Kaspar Maase, Grenzloses Vergniigen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850-1970 (Frankfurt 1997), esp. 196-234. 54 Shelley Baranowski, 'Strength Through Joy: Tourism and National Integration in the Third Reich' in S. Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (eds), Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, MI 2001), 213-36; Sabine Behrenbeck, 'The Transformation of Sacrifice: German Identity between Heroic Narrative and Economic Success' in Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (eds), Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering 20th Century Germany (Palo Alto, CA 2002); Hartmut Berghoff, 'Enticement and Deprivation: The Regulation of Consumption in Pre-War Nazi Germany' in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds), The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford 2000), 165-84; Special Issue on 'Sexuality and German Fascism', Journal of the History of Sexuality, ed. Dagmar Herzog, 11, 1-2 (January-April 2002); Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford 2001), esp. 115-34; Alon Confino, 'Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 1945-1960', History and Memory, 12, 2 (Fall/ Winter 2000), 92-121; Hasso Spode, 'Arbeiterurlaub im Dritten Reich' in Carola Sachse, Tilla

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worked its way into memoirs of the era. An interesting instance is Hans Deischmann's 1995 Objects: A Chronicle of Subversion in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which uses commonplace objects and spaces as vehicles of individual reminiscences of the period. Thirdly, this new historiography is distinguished by a new interest in the lasting effects of fascism. Some of this is nothing but an extension of the 1970s trend toward debunking the once-hallowed legend of 1945 as 'zero hour' by laying bare the persistent continuities in everything from architectural styles to family policies. What separates this new literature from its antecedents, however, is the effort to address how each Germany (mis)handled these nazi and Holocaust legacies. Despite some new works on East Germany,56most of the attention thus far has been on the early Federal Republic. In recent years the conventional perception of the 1950s as one of public silence on and private suppression of the nazi past (what Adorno called 'purposeful forgetting') has given way to a new image of the decade as a rich 'culture of memory'.57 While no one would dispute that West Germany and West Germans still denied a great deal, a range of new works - often those conducted by the 'historians of the everyday' - uncovered a strange body of recollections and memories teeming below shopworn periodizations and platitudes.58Cultural historians, too, are rethinking how the nazi past - however imagined stood as a traumatic reference across the cultural landscape. Virtually all of the humanities and social sciences were engaged in some form of Trauerarbeit after the war, picking through the moral and epistemological rubble in search of what could be salvaged as heuristic and moral compass after 1945.59Their success in doing so varied tremendously; but it was notable that certain disciSiegel, Hasso Spode and Wolfgang Spohn (eds), Angst, Belohnung, Zucht und Ordnung: Herrschaftsmechanismen im Nationalsozialismus (Opladen 1982). 55 Hans Deischmann, trans. P. Constantine and P. Glassgold, Objects: A Chronicle of Subversion in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (New York 1997 [1995]). 56 Besides Jeffrey Herf's Divided Memory, op. cit., see Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies (Durham, NC 1996) and Martin Damus, Malerei der DDR (Reinbek bei Hamburg 1991). 57 Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung: Geddchtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich 1995); Heinz Bude, Bilanz der Nachfolge: Die Bundesrepublik und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt 1992); Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfdnge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich 1996). See also Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years:A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968 (Princeton, NJ 2000), 17-126. 58 Ulrich Herbert, 'Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of the Third Reich' in Richard Bessel (ed.), Life in the Third Reich (Oxford 1987), 97-110; Lutz Niethammer, "'Normalisierung" im Westen: Erinnerungen in die 50er Jahre' in Gerhard Brunn (ed.), Neuland: Nordrhein-Westfalen und seine Anfdnge nach 1945/1946 (Essen 1986), 175-207; and most recently, Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA 2001). For Italy, R.J. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani (eds), Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation (Basingstoke 1999) and Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge 1987). 59 Winfried Schulze, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach 1945 (Munich 1989); Walter Pehle and Peter Sillem (eds), Wissenschaft in geteilten Deutschland (Frankfurt 1992); Robert Moeller (ed.), West Germany under Construction (Ann Arbor, MI 1997).

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plines - above all fiction, sociology and later film - arose as the principal narrative modes for representing the relationship between past and present.60 Recent works in the field of memory have pursued different tacks. A wellpublicized newcomer to this new 'culture of memory' is the study of memorials and commemorations in both Germanys. To the extent that they are always as much about the present as the past, memorials thus afford valuable insight into each country's perceived relation to its nazi past. In so doing they reveal how collective memories were officially and visually articulated; how they radically differed across the divides of Cold War time and space; and how they continue to incite controversy (e.g. the Neue Wache debacle, Berlin's new Jewish Museum or, for that matter, Potsdamer Platz) about the rendition of the past in reunited Germany.6'Others have widened the scope of enquiry still further. New studies on architecture, historical preservation, business relations, industrial design, sexuality and tourism have gone a long way toward revealing the presence of the past in postwar culture across the Cold War
divide.62

All told, the changing image of nazi modernism thus very much reflects our shifting attitude toward the cultural meaning and legacy of the Third Reich. Much of this new historiography is quite innovative and pioneering, having reconsidered the problem of nazi modernism from a fresh post-Cold War vantage-point. But it is not without occasional shortcomings. While some assessments woefully underestimate the presence and power of what Saul Friedlander has called the dialectic of kitsch and death underlying nazi culture, others discount the racist component altogether in their haste to unmask the regime's uncanny (post)modern face. In part this is due to the fact that 'nazi modern' has increasingly become the stuff of mass-media production and commercial consumption. Not that this is especially new; the traditional sites of memory-production - the state, universities and the institutional world of
60 Judith Ryan, Postwar German Novels and the Third Reich (Detroit 1987); Volker Berghahn, 'Deutschlandbilder, 1945-1965: Angloamerikanische Historiker und moderne deutsche Geschichte' in Ernst Schulin (ed.), Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich 1989), 240-72; Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA 1989); Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY 1990). 61 James Young, The Texture of Memory (New Haven, CT 1993); Sabine Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helde (Vierow 1996); Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge 2001). See also Klaus Neumann, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany (Ann Arbor, MI 2000). 62 Gavriel Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley, CA 2000); Rudy Koshar, Germany's Transient Pasts (Chapel Hill, NC 1998); Dagmar Herzog, '"Pleasure, Sex and Politics Belong Together": Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany', Critical Inquiry, 24 (Winter 1998), 393-444; Jonathan Wiesen, 'Public Relations as a Site of Memory: The Case of West German Industry and National Socialism' in Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (eds), The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana, IL 2002); Paul Betts, 'The Nierentisch Nemesis: Organic Design as West German Pop Culture', German History, 19, 2 (Spring 2001), 185-217; Confino, 'Traveling as a Culture of Remembrance', op. cit.

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Kultur - lost their control of the nazi past to pop culture long ago. Indeed, this cultural free-for-all about the fascist past may be postmodernism's most lasting legacy, insomuch as our contemporary mass-mediated 'surfeit of memory' has not brought about a more enlightened civic culture. As Omer Bartov has written:
Thus, we may have reason to fear that the current mechanical reproduction of images of violence is progressively transforming reality into fiction and memory: as we watch an actual genocide taking place [Rwanda, Bosnia] right in front of our eyes (on the screen), we are no longer sure whether it is real or staged, past or present, memory or anticipation. We no longer remember the past so as to act against its repetition in the future but transform the present into a past that precludes all action .... The dreadful notion of the Holocaust as a comforting memory (since it is over and done with, and being the very worst of which humanity is capable can by definition not be surpassed), and the no less horrifying exploitation of the Holocaust as a means to legitimize inaction and indifference, conformity and complacency, appear to have become a very real possibility in our present civilization.63

This is what Bartov meant by 'murder in our midst'. Michael Geyer makes a similar point, yet goes one step further in his analysis of 1990s cultural memory. In an essay written in 1996, he takes up the post-Cold War transformation of what he calls Germany's 'politics of memory'. As Geyer sees it:
This politics of memory is predicated on the assumption that public knowledge about the Third Reich and the transparency of a reckoning with the past will have a cathartic effect; and that remembering the Holocaust will prevent the recurrence of National Socialism and of the attending evils of racism and anti-Semitism. It will remake German identity and thus sever relations with the past. As a politics, the myth of German amnesia has motivated German academics and intellectuals to explore the history of the Third Reich during the past twenty-five years .... Notwithstanding this outcome, there is also good reason to suggest that the emphatic project of combating radical evil with enlightened knowledge is in jeopardy. It is not that memory has suddenly faded with German unification, as many proponents of a politics of memory feared it might. What happened instead is that the culture of memory continued to expand, reaching a high first with the surprising popularity of Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List and then with the innumerable commemorations that accompanied the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. While these memorial efforts were overwhelming in their own right, they did not follow the path of enlightenment. What can be discerned, above all, is a return of memory without the effects that once were presumed to follow in its wake.64

The same moment of cultural danger applies equally to the fascination with fascist modernism more generally. This is no trivial matter. For what underlies this cultural sea change is the evident collapse of the once-formidable antifascist consensus on both sides of the former Wall. In the end this may be one of 1989's most potent legacies. How it all will pan out is of course impossible to predict. But one thing is sure: the stakes are still very high, even if (or per63 Omer Bartov, Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Mass Death (New York 1996), 10. 64 Michael Geyer, 'The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany' in Joan Copjec (ed.), Radical Evil (London 1996), 169-70.

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haps precisely because) the one-time passionate debate about nazi modernity has faded considerably. The cultural fall-out of the 'fascist revolution' - as George Mosse indefatigably reminded us through numerous books and essays may be with us more than we like to admit.65 In this sense, the 'postmodernization' of nazi culture has simply reproduced one of fascist modernism's most distinguishing features - the untethering of knowledge and liberation, enlightenment and progress.

Paul Betts is Lecturer in German History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Pathos of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, 1945-1965 (Berkeley, CA forthcoming), and co-editor of Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering 20th-Century German History (Stanford, CA 2002).

65 Some of his most important essays have been republished in George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York 1999).

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