The Fascist Spectacle of Mass Participation
Ike other revolutionary movements, fascism in Italy and national social ism in Germany needed to project an image
Programs. As far back as the French Revolution of 1789, representations of "the people" as political actors took on special significance in revolutionary propaganda (see Interpreting Visual
And Mussolini understood how to use such images to create the impression of an organic and seamless connection between the party's leadership and the rank and file who made up the
Of popular support for their political Evidence, pages 602-03), and both Hitler movement.
A. Benito Mussolini visits a youth camp where recruits to his Black Shirts were in training, 1935.
B. Still image from Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will (1935), a film about a Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Germany, 1934.
1890s were the era of nickelodeons and short action pictures. And in that period, France and Italy had strong film industries. Further popularized by news shorts during the war, film boomed in the war’s aftermath. When sound was added to movies in 1927, costs soared, competition intensified, and audiences grew rapidly. By the 1930s, an estimated 40 percent of British adults went to the movies once a week, a strikingly high figure. Many went more often than that. The U. S. film industry gained a competitive edge in Europe, buoyed by the size of its home market, by huge investments in equipment and distribution, by aggressive marketing, and by Hollywood’s star system of long-term contracts with well-known actors who, in a sense, standardized the product and guaranteed a film’s success.
Germany, too, was home to a particularly talented group of directors, writers, and actors, and to a major production company, UFA (Universum Film AG), which ran the largest and best-equipped studios in Europe. The UFA’s history paralleled the country’s: it was run by the government during the First World War, devastated by the economic crisis of the early 1920s, rescued by wealthy German nationalists in the late 1920s, and finally taken over by the Nazis. During the Weimar years, UFA produced some of the most
C. I. M. Swire (right), a leading figure in the women's section of the British Union of Fascists wearing the organization's female black-shirted uniform (1933).
Representations of the people in nineteenth-century liberal revolutionary movements emphasized an activist definition of political participation, as citizens came together to constitute a national body that reflected their will. Both Italian fascism and German national socialism defined themselves in opposition to democratic or parliamentary regimes, and they explicitly rejected the individualism that was the basis for liberal citizenship. In their orchestration of public celebrations for their program, both fascists and national socialists emphasized images of obedience and subordination to the leader (image A), or to the national movement (image B). Though the pageantry of fascism and national socialism typically emphasized an aggressively masculine image of enthusiastic devotion, most fascist movements also organized special female sections within their movements. In these groups, women could clothe
Themselves in uniforms like their male counterparts and express their own allegiance to the spirit of self-sacrifice that was at the heart of such collective movements (image C).
Questions for Analysis
1. Each of these images was carefully staged and orchestrated to project a specific message. What are the messages contained in each of these images? What details are important?
2. What do these images tell us about the place of the individual in fascist society?
3. What sense of belonging do you think these images are designed to produce? What made such images so attractive to so many people?
Remarkable films of the period, including Der letzte mann (“The Last Man”; released as “The Last Laugh” in English), a universally acclaimed film directed by F. W. Murnau, one of the two great masters of German expressionism. Fritz Lang was the other, directing such masterpieces as the science-fiction film Metropolis (1926) and his most famous German film, M (1931). After Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazis took control of UFA, placing it under the control of Joseph Goeb-bels and the Ministry of Propaganda. Though production continued unabated during the Third Reich, many of the industry’s most talented members fled from the oppressive regime, ending the golden age of German cinema.
Many found the new mass culture disturbing. As they perceived it, the threat came straight from the United States, which deluged Europe with cultural exports after the war. Hollywood westerns, cheap dime novels, and jazz music— which became increasingly popular in the 1920s—introduced Europe to new ways of life. Advertising, comedies, and romances disseminated new and often disconcerting images of femininity. With bobbed haircuts and short dresses, “new women” seemed assertive, flirtatious, capricious, and materialistic. The Wild West genre was popular with teenage boys, much to the dismay of their parents and teachers, who saw westerns as an inappropriate,
VOICE OF THE PEOPLE, VOICE OF GOD BY GEORGE GROSZ (1920). Industrialization, the First World War, and political change combined to make early-twentieth-century Berlin a center of mass culture and communication. In this drawing, the radical artist and social critic George Grosz deplores the newspapers' power over public opinion. That public opinion could be manipulated was a common theme for many who wrote about early-twentieth-century democracy. ¦ How does this cynicism about the public sphere compare with earlier defenders of free speech, such as John Stuart Mill?
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FRITZ LANG'S M. In this film, Peter Lorre, a Jewish actor, played the role of a child murderer, who maintains that he should not be punished for his crimes. Lorre's speech at the end of the film was used in the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew as proof that Jews were innate criminals who showed no remorse for their actions.
Lower-class form of entertainment. In Europe, the cross-class appeal of American popular culture grated against long-standing social hierarchies. Conservative critics abhorred the fact that “the parson’s wife sat nearby his maid at Sunday matinees, equally rapt in the gaze of Hollywood stars.” American critics expressed many of the same concerns. Yet the United States enjoyed more social and political stability than Europe. War and revolution had shaken Europe’s economies and cultures, and in that context “Americanization” seemed a handy shorthand for economic as well as cultural change. One critic expressed a common concern: “America is the source of that terrible wave of uniformity that gives everyone the same [sic]: the same overalls on the skin, the same book in the hand, the same pen between the fingers, the same conversation on the lips, and the same automobile instead of feet.” Authoritarian governments, in particular, decried these developments as decadent threats to national culture. Fascist, communist, and Nazi governments alike tried to control not only popular culture but also high culture and modernism, which were typically out of line with the designs of the dictators. Stalin much preferred socialist realism to the new Soviet avant-garde. Mussolini had a penchant for classical kitsch, though he was far more accepting of modern art than Hitler, who despised its decadence. Nazism had its own cultural aesthetic, promoting “Aryan” art and architecture and rejecting the modern, international style they associated with the “international Jewish conspiracy.” Modernism, functionalism, and atonality were banned: the hallmarks of Weimar Germany’s cultural preeminence were replaced by a state-sponsored revival of an alleged mystical and heroic past. Walter Gropius’s acclaimed experiments in modernist architecture, for example, stood as monuments to everything the Nazis hated. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933, and Hitler hired Albert Speer as his personal architect, commissioning him to design grandiose neoclassical buildings, including an extravagant plan to rebuild the entire city of Berlin.
The Nazis, like other authoritarian governments, used mass media as efficient means of indoctrination and control. Movies became part of the Nazis’ pioneering use of “spectacular politics.” Media campaigns, mass rallies, parades
World History
