Modernism and Fascism by Roger Griffin

Author:Roger Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137149855
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Bottai proceeded to put his finger on the ultimate aporia of political modernism: Fascism had been forced to create a viable collective myth to legitimize the regime precisely at a time when modernity was destroying the habitat in which such myths could survive. Not only can a modernist, totalitarian state, as David Kertzer argued, ‘never eliminate all vestiges of alternative symbolic systems’,108 but it can never successfully impose from above an artificial state religion. The modernity that has shattered the hegemony of revealed religion will also undermine any substitute for it. The total nomos or total community cannot be socially engineered, since the body politic – or rather the millions of individuals who compose it – will always eventually reject the ideological skin-graft. By the time Mussolini was ousted from power by his own Fascist Grand Council on 25 July 1943 his aura of propheta had evaporated as a populist myth and lingered on only for a small nucleus of ‘intransigents’ who would form the backbone of the Salò Republic. The Fascistization of all Italians had been a mission impossible.

The fate of several architectural modernists under Fascism illustrates the regime’s rapid moral dissolution as a cohesive force of social renewal after the regime’s supreme act of ‘making history’: the evening of 18 May 1936 when Mussolini announced from his balcony in Rome that Ethiopia was finally ‘Italian’. In the wake of the anti-Semitic race laws set out in the Declaration on Race – signed by King Victor Emmanuel III, Benito Mussolini, and Giuseppe Bottai on 5 September 1938 – Italy’s Rationalist architects became particularly vulnerable to attacks on aesthetic modernism. The most important of these was mounted by the Farinacci circle, which accused their buildings of displaying signs of decadent Jewish cosmopolitanism. Rather than defend Italian Jews or attack the race laws as a betrayal of original Fascist principles – not to mention basic human rights – a number of architects unwittingly colluded with the new ethos instead by launching a counterattack which consisted in extolling the ‘Mediterranean qualities’ of indigenous Rationalist architecture, and insisting on the Aryan pedigrees of colleagues accused of being Jews, both concessions to the discourse of racism.

It was in this corrupt atmosphere that the debate within elite cultural circles over the Fascist or anti-Fascist properties of architectural modernism came to a head. It had been raging since 1934 when a bitter dispute broke out over the appropriateness of Rationalist aesthetics for the design of the Palazzo del Littorio, the Fascist Party National headquarters, in Rome for which Mario Palanti had proposed his ‘Ship of State’ (see Figure 11 above). However it now began to be overlaid by issues of Aryanism and racial purity. Given what was happening in the enforcement of Nazi cultural and racial policy north of the Alps this was far from a solely ‘academic’ matter. The situation degenerated further once the Second World War broke out. Giuseppe Terragni, the prolific champion of Rationalist experimentalism, was sent to the Russian front, from which he returned 17 months later a broken man.

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