Armin Mohler: "The Fascist Style"

Part 2.

We continue here with Mohler’s short(ish) essay “The Fascist Style.” There will be 2-3 more parts released in the next couple weeks completing the essay. The first half or so is free, send me a few dollars to read it in its entirety! If you enjoy, please share - editing these alone takes many hours!

There is an entry point to our topic that imposes itself. In Berlin in the mid-1930s, a prominent German greets a distinguished guest from abroad who is considered an embodiment of fascism. The German, a master of language, gives a more than conventional welcoming speech. He expresses how he sees and understands the guest from Rome - and one senses from his words that he feels affinity with his guest. A fascist welcomes a fascist. Today we know that the German fell from grace shortly afterwards - as a fascist. This gives the encounter a stereo effect from a distance. Was there a better perspective to recognize what a fascist is?

In the spring of 1934, Tommaso Marinetti, a futurist theorist who had risen to the position of a high state official, visited Hitler's Germany. He is the spokesman of this alarming modern art current as well as of Italian fascism. So he is received with great honor in Berlin, but a feeling of foreignness and insecurity towards the guest from the South cannot be overlooked - the German Reich has not yet fully outgrown the role of Mussolini's junior partner.

Obviously, only one of them received the Italian artist - rhetorician as his equal: Gottfried Benn, who, as the vice president of the Union of National Writers, welcomed Marinetti at a banquet. Benn spoke on behalf of Hanns Johst, the president of the Union, who was abroad. Although Johst, like Benn, also came from an expressionist background, his more jovial manner, accentuated by folklore, fit better into National Socialist cultural policy. (In the same year, 1934, Benn had to retreat into the inner emigration, into the inconspicuous role of a military doctor).

One senses in Benn's speech¹ that he does not have to force himself on this occasion. There is even something like a sigh of relief in him. It is revealing that Benn does not appeal to the Italian in terms of a common spirit or a community of ideas. According to him, it is rather Germany's task, as well as Italy's, "to cooperate in the untheatrical, in the grandly cold style into which Europe is growing." Benn praises Futurism for "casting aside the dull psychology of naturalism, piercing the lazy and tame massif of the bourgeois novel, and with the sparkling and rapid strophism of your hymns" - Benn is addressing Marinetti directly - "going back to the fundamental law of art: creation and style." Even the attacks are interesting. It goes against psychology, the theatrical in the sense of the peep-box stage, against the fundamentally compartmentalized bourgeois culture. And with positive evaluations, a considerable part of the fascist sentiment is already anticipated: cold style, rapid, sparkling, great.

What Benn addresses the guest in the further course of the speech is not content in the usual sense - it is a certain dynamic, a rhythm: In the middle of an age of dull, cowardly and overloaded instincts, you demanded and founded an art that did not contradict the fire of the battles for the attack of the heroes. You demanded the "love of danger," the "habit of energy and daring," "courage," "fearlessness," "rebellion," "the point of attack," "the run," "the death leap," and you called them "the beautiful ideas to die for. With these closing words, taken from Marinetti's work, Benn hints at something else that is common - above all, the origin of the war. War, however, is not understood in the National Socialist sense as a war of liberation of an encircled people. Rather, what is meant is the struggle itself, in which it matters little that the person addressed was on the other side at the time. On the contrary: this kind of war creates a special brotherhood of those fighting against each other; they are closer to each other than to the "Bourgeois," the "Petit-Bourgeois" in their own camp.

Benn also speaks of the "three fundamental values of fascism." It follows that for him these are not general ideas, not even ethical imperatives, but - surprisingly, but consistently - three forms: "The black shirt in the color of terror and death, the battle cry 'a noi' (=over to us!) and the battle song, the Giovanezza (= youth)." That Benn does not cite this as an Italian peculiarity alone becomes immediately clear when he lapses into "we" in the next sentence: "We here... who carried these European moods and these European constraints of form within us..." And he clearly places the emphasis on the futuristic future when, against the "pleasing phrases of the epigones," he points to "the hardness of sacrificial life": "To the rigorous, resolute, to the rushing of the spirit that works on its worlds and for which art is always the definitive moral decision against pure matter, nature, chaos, backsliding, amorphousness."

WHAT IS “MERE AESTHETICS?”

Benn's sentence about "the scaffolding of the mind working on its worlds" is probably the crucial passage in the speech on Marinetti: the identification of art (and in a broader sense of style) with "moral decision" basically subordinates morality to style; style comes before ethos, form ranks before idea. This is something that must be perceived as a provocation by anyone coming from one of the Enlightenments.

It is about something far more pointed than the conflict between ethics of thought and ethics of responsibility, in which the left, the liberal, finds himself entangled in the debate with the right. He is able to understand this conflict, at least in its nature. Here, opposite the "fascist", he sees himself confronted with something completely incomprehensible to him. He believes that he "only encounters aesthetic categories, nothing else." We know this evasion. It is meant to mask the blindness of both liberals and leftists to a basic human attitude that is foreign to them. And both leftists and liberals, seek from the outset to stigmatize a type of human being that reacts to reality in such a completely different way than they do, with the deeply moralistic label "merely aesthetic.”

Behind this is one of those semantic tricks that have led to the confusion of language at present. For the average educated person today, "aesthetic" is synonymous with "tasteful," i.e. arbitrary, random, unserious. However, the word "aesthetic" has a much more precise and, above all, broader meaning than this degenerated form. It is derived from the Greek verb "aisthanestai," which corresponds to our verbs "to perceive" and "to look at." An "aesthetic behavior" in the strict sense of the word consists in the refusal to approach reality from abstractions, from a "system." It does not want to press the world into a preconceived scheme, but seeks first simply to perceive what is there. Any other meaning of "aesthetic" is purely polemical.