Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Philipp Blom
Read between
July 5 - July 22, 2020
Joseph Goebbels.
directed members of the party’s paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteiling or SA, to do everything possible to disrupt performances
By December the authorities had retracted their approval for the film, which meant it could no longer be shown publicly.
Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), the film version of Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat,
No longer held back by a morality that had been comprehensively discredited, no longer believing in anything more than the possibilities of getting laid and getting by, no longer really hoping for anything much, the amorphous sense of self in this postwar society was turned into an immense field for experimentation, and many strange flowers blossomed on this field. Some of them were among the finest German culture had produced; others—from erotic floor shows to paid quickies in public toilets—were signs of another kind of inflation, in which love had lost its currency and was replaced with a
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In Berlin itself neither the burgeoning creativity nor the delicious decadence of the German capital could disguise the fact that the political climate was slowly but surely sliding into violence. Clashes between Nazis and Communists
Horst Wessel
a time for marching and for political rallies. The streets were full of men with nothing better to do.
loans from the United States,
were being called in and few new ones given. Germany’s industry and its political stability had depended on these loans,
The war had brutally accelerated for millions the experience of living in a modern world, and the forces of the new had asserted themselves triumphantly in a postwar Europe shaken to its moral core.
Even if prophets and doom-mongers blamed the mechanistic and soulless nature of modernity for all the world’s ills, hardly anyone was ready to live without it.
Now, trapped in a crisis in which there seemed to be no hope of escape and little prospect of improvement, this new, modern life began to look cold and threatening. As many retrenched into clannishness and united against common, often imaginary enemies, the postwar years began to pivot, beginning to feel again like prewar years.
As the atmosphere hardened across Europe, the energies of modernization seemed to turn against those at the bottom of society, and millions sought refuge in ideologies that were viscerally hostile to one another, it seemed that another war (the same conflict renewed, perhaps) was only a question of time.
child slaves of Sicily
the prohibitionists’ victory against the German fondness for beer, the Italian love of wine, and the universal popularity of spirits was only part of a much larger campaign to keep America eugenically pure, white, and Anglo-Saxon.
1924 Immigration Act,
WHILE THE ECONOMIC SITUATION WAS DIRE, a larger, messianic narrative of hope and national greatness was unfolding. Mussolini and his Fascist Party looked at Italy as little more than the clay out of which a great future nation was to be formed. Their model was clear: like the futurist poet Filippo Marinetti, they wanted nothing less than to restore the grandeur of the Roman Empire, a proud, warlike, powerful country celebrating virility and violence. Contemporary Italians, Il Duce believed, were too soft, too craven, and too cowardly to be capable of creating a great civilization. To build a
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Spengler had called for a Caesar to stem the tide of European decadence and restore the greatness of the West. While he despised Hitler, whom he regarded as a proletarian upstart, Spengler believed the world had found such a man of destiny in Mussolini.
series of laws designed to encourage population growth:
Mussolini had an almost carnal feel for politics and for the mood of the crowd.
The revered leader proved himself a genius when it came to creating an image of his heroic and even saintly person in the public mind.
The strong messianic Christian overtones of these sentiments were crucial to the success of the Fascist regime.
in order to capture hearts and minds, he needed more than a rhetoric that was ultimately derived from the futurists and from his former mentor Gabriele d’Annunzio. Il Duce found this elusive ingredient in the strong presence of the church and its rituals, statues, and symbols in all areas of personal and public life.
The 1929 Lateran Treaty was advantageous for both sides, as it offered the Holy See political legitimacy and the Fascist government a considerable moral bonus.
Though intermittently suspicious of each other, their common needs and enemies by far outweighed their disagreements. United in their hatred of communism, both were authoritarian and hierarchical, both despised democracy and liberal ideas, both believed in the supremacy of martyrdom and of faith over reason, and both allotted a subordinate role to women and to all people of other creeds (or, in the case of the Fascists, other ethnic backgrounds).
Speaking in Rome in 1927, Mussolini had outlined his vision of the world and of Italy’s place in it in words that could almost have been chosen by the Pope himself:
Europe no longer has any faith: it does not attach any real importance to religious values, but only to money, to the individual and collective instinct for survival, to the pursuit of enjoyment, and to a peaceful life. Fascist Italy—Catholic, disciplined, warlike—will be able to dominate Europe if it can defend its physical and moral health.”
the Vatican very obviously had no problem whatsoever in dealing with and dignifying Fascist dictatorships.
1933 the newly elected Pope Pius XII celebrated two new concordats—with fascist Austria and Nazi Germany—to add to the existing ones.
HAVING MADE THE CHURCH HIS ALLY, Mussolini could make even more effective use of the potency of Catholic symbolism and ritual.
MUSSOLINI AND HIS FASCIST PARTY were by no means alone in using religious feelings and symbolism to further their cause. After all, fascism as well as socialism and communism can be described as political religions: like religion, they responded to a longing for order, purpose, and meaning that was particularly acute in the atmosphere of fragmentation and nihilism during the 1920s and 1930s.
For obvious reasons Mussolini based his image on Catholic iconography, just as Stalin would increasingly appropriate not only the powers of the tsars but also the cultural and spiritual place they had occupied in Russian culture.
The narratives of the totalitarian religions gave ordinary people a sense of transcendence, of touching something that was greater than they were, of essential truth. They offered a sense of the sacred and the immutable laws of Providence, which in the racist vocabulary of fascism invariably meant a sense of one’s own superiority.
But the totalitarian religions, Mussolini’s Fascism being a case in point, also did something else: they restored a sense of hope, a positive future. This future was invariably messianic and inflated in its vast expectations. But especially in times of crisis, in which so many people had so little to lose and so much to gain, they created a space people could inhabit in contrast to the present, which was difficult and even dangerous.
While the Soviets had built Magnitogorsk and were dreaming up other gigantic programs, Fascist Italy did not lag behind.
draining of the Pontine Marshes,
paying obeisance to the past was only part of the project to captivate the imagination of millions. In order to accomplish this, the future had to be enlisted as well.
embrace the aesthetics and technology of modernity,
the poet Filippo Marinetti, whose futurist movement consisted of an orgy of roaring engines, smoking factories, vertiginous speed, and sex.
Fascism literally took to...
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THE TROUBLE HAD STARTED with the first Five-Year Plan, introduced by Stalin in 1928.
The Bolshevik vision of muzhiks and rural misery was no mere propaganda,
agricultural practices were indeed woefully inefficient,
most people were poor, and literacy among the rural population, especially women, was low.
Alcoholism was endemic, brawls in the village square were frequent and usually brutal, domestic violence was rife and seen as part of life, and the women, like the children, lived practically in bondage to their men,
The Bolsheviks had sworn to change all this. Instead of the backwardness, inefficiency, and injustice of traditional farming, scientific, socialist agricultural production would combine resources in huge collectives, transforming servile, ignorant country folk into proper agricultural proletarians and producing enough grain to feed the vast acceleration of industry the Soviet leadership had projected as part of its Five-Year Plan. The first attempts to implement this policy were met with resistance, which embittered Moscow.
The problem, it was thought, was the wealthy peasants,
The Soviet leadership was therefore convinced that the only possible answer to this was to liquidate the kulaks as a class.
Some one hundred thousand families were transported to Siberia or to other regions during the early 1930s; some of them were on the trains of misery arriving in Magnitogorsk. Many more were arrested and simply executed. Denunciations by jealous neighbors were a daily occurrence.
