Theoretical history – anti-fascist search movements | nd-aktuell.de

“Why do we want our own subjugation?” This was a key question of the workshop: “What was fascism theory? Epistemology, poetics and mediality of a heterodox genre”, which took place in mid-September at the Essen Cultural Studies Institute (KWI). Whether this question really goes to the core of fascist socialization remains to be seen. In any case, the organizers’ efforts to place the topic of fascism in the bourgeois scientific community respond to an urgent question of our time. Accordingly, the current global fascistation, despite the emphasis on the historical dimension, was the declared interest of the workshop. Contrary to what the subtitle – typically intellectualistic for the academic world – suggested, the discussions at the KWI had clear political concerns and ultimately also with a view to anti-fascist practice. At least the evening event was actually open to a general audience. Also (unfortunately still) notable: a high proportion of FLINTA and many politically active speakers, but hardly any professors.

Is there a need for a system?

The workshop was made up of five panels that linked the historical dimension with the normative one: “1919–1933: First explanations of a new political phenomenon,” “Around 1968: Why do you become a fascist?”, “1964–2024: About the historical fascism”, “1955–1991: History & Theory of Fascism: A Complicated Relationship” and “1974 ff.: The concept of fascism in the cultural life of the Federal Republic”. The specifics of the chosen time periods were not checked for plausibility in all cases and seemed to be due more to the need to subsequently systematize the speakers’ various research projects. No matter how political the topic may be, the workshop is still in the context of science as a workplace. The fact that the historical theories of fascism were not systematically presented and discussed is certainly due to this fact.

The lecture by Fernando Esposito (University of Konstanz) was helpful with regard to a systematization of fascism theories after the Holocaust and the Second World War, although it only took place in the fourth, i.e. penultimate, panel. Under the title “Fascism Theory and Criticism of Modernity,” Esposito presents “three vignettes” from the history of fascism theory. The first vignette consisted of a “book of the zero hour”, the “Dialectics of Enlightenment” by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, published in 1949, and the associated “Constitution of the Theory of Fascism” in the context of the “rise of sociology to the leading science”. the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. In the politicization movement of the 1960s and 70s, which was largely driven forward by the student movement, the theory of fascism functioned as “a kind of bridge to social criticism,” which at that time was strongly critical of capitalism. The correct reference to the connections of those theories of fascism with anti-racist and anti-colonial theory formation, for example by Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis, at least partially broke through the Eurocentrism of the workshop – which was also criticized in a break discussion: What about China, Japan, the Trikont?

The second vignette, drawing on the work “Modernity and the Holocaust” (1985) by the British sociologist Zygmunt Baumann, dealt with the developments of the 1980s: Here, in the fascism debate, the concept of modernity increasingly took the place of capitalism; Baumann also “turned away from criticism of capitalism.” The third vignette depicted Anglophone fascism research and an assumed “autumn of theory” in the 1990s, which was characterized less by theory building than by the telling of sometimes highly aestheticized “fascism stories” from (supposed) historical distance.

Esposito began his lecture with a quote from the French post-Marxist Jean-François Lyotard from 1986: “Each of the great emancipation narratives… has, so to speak, been mutilated in its principle over the last fifty years.” Against the background of this skepticism about the truth, the Signature of postmodernism, the question raised later by the speaker must also be considered as to whether current science actually lacks a “macro theory” to explain our present, with which current fascism could also be explained or understood.

This in turn leads me back to the organizers’ thesis that a closed theory of fascism is not necessary at all; on the contrary, it is precisely the formal and content-related “breaking points”, the heterodoxies within the theory formation that give it the title, that do justice to the subject matter. This thesis was examined in more detail in the first panel by Caroline Adler (University of Hamburg), under the title “Fascist Fittings. Walter Benjamin’s theories of German fascism. Here she was referring solely to Benjamin’s journalistic work, which actually by definition does not represent a closed theoretical structure, but intervenes on a daily basis.

When dealing with Benjamin’s explicitly political texts, it would have been interesting to examine the essay “The Author as Producer,” written as an “address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris on April 27, 1934″ – which was probably never given in the end. In it, the Marxist philosopher drafts, among other things, an anti-fascist instruction manual for intellectuals, the discussion of which would have benefited this workshop and its participants. For Benjamin it was clear: The theory of fascism has to be a criticism of capitalism. This fact was at least actively discussed at the workshop, but also rejected: “Is it even a theory of fascism if it is so general? We don’t want to change the world, just develop a theory of fascism.” How this defeatism relates to Max Horkheimer’s dictum, “But anyone who doesn’t want to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism” is left to the interested reader.

Is there a need for a patriarcha?criticism?

The patriarchal aspect of fascism has received much justifiable attention, particularly from psychoanalytic and trans political perspectives. It was this approach that examined the question of the “why” of personal fascization. Particularly noteworthy here are the contributions “The Nazi Mother. On the history and effectiveness of a fantasy” by Yanara Schmacks (The Graduate Center, CUNY) and “Decline fantasies. Fascism and Trans Panic” by Maxi Wallenhorst (Leuphana University of Lüneburg). Wallenhorst spoke about the right-wing enemy image of trans identities, an important piece in the necessarily shaky fascist worldview. The increasingly internationalizing right is gathering under the fighting term “gender ideology”. According to one contribution to the discussion, the defamation of trans people as “degenerate” in this context belongs to the same conceptual group as the Nazi idea of ​​“degenerate” art.

The concept of petromasculinity provides a materialist contribution to a current theory of fascism.

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Based on the reception of National Socialist educational guides in the 1970s and 80s, Yanara Schmacks dealt with a special aspect of the Federal Republic’s coming to terms with the past: the discussion about female perpetrators. Contrary to Margarete Mitscherlich’s dictum of “anti-Semitism as a men’s disease” (1983), psychoanalysts such as Sigrid Chamberlain and Ute Benz insisted that women were also perpetrators during the Nazi era. Using the unreflective reproduction of the “Phantasm of the Cold Mother,” the speaker rightly pointed to the misogyny that was also internalized by the “68” women. One contribution to the discussion made a reference to the GDR, which, like the other “non-Western” states, otherwise left a blank space in the workshop: not only the “Nazi mother” but also the socialist woman, who was working and therefore absent in the Federal Republic of Germany she was portrayed as a “cold mother” to whom the Western democratic woman stood as a positive counter-image; For example, in the 1990s, ex-GDR citizens were held responsible for the rise of right-wing radicalism in the East. In the 1990s and 2000s, according to Schmacks, the focus on problematic Nazi motherhood served primarily as a (misogynist-based) defense against guilt: instead of the political and social guilt towards the Nazi victims, there was the woman’s family guilt towards her own child.

The concept of petromasculinity, which was first mentioned in the psychoanalytically informed contributions, provides a useful materialist contribution to a current theory of fascism. They describe the strong male dominance among right-wing movements, which range from denying the climate crisis to defending a fossil lifestyle, conspiracy theories and anti-feminism. With reference to fossility and the ongoing patriarchy, petromasculinity describes real elements of current capitalist socialization – or rather its crises, especially in the climate crisis, which underlies and includes all other current crises. Against this background, it becomes clear: “Why do we want our own subjugation?” is actually the wrong question. Conversely, it becomes a shoe-in: submission is not the desire that fascism fulfills, but rather the experience of the ability to act; the subjugation of others instead of experiencing one’s own powerlessness. Blending into the national masses will be an attractive offer as long as class society exists. The workshop at the KWI provided important illustrative material on this nature of fascism, even if it ultimately refrained from taking a normative approach.

The workshop “What was fascism theory? Epistemology, poetics and mediality of a heterodox genre”, organized by Morten Paul and Stephan Höhne, took place from September 18th to 20th at the Cultural Studies Institute Essen (KWI).