“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

This brief guide is intended as an introductory resource. The questions posed are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with objectivity, while acknowledging that the approach is not, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.

Table of Contents

Questions

What was/is the relationship of fascism with history?
How was the fascist reaction to Modern architecture and art? Why
Why did fascist movements appeal to people who felt threatened by modernity and social change?
How did fascist architecture, art, and propaganda turn political ideology into a visible public experience?
What lessons can contemporary democracies draw from the rise of fascism?

The Stone That Wanted to Be Eternal

Fascism did not fall from the sky like a meteor. It rose from the ground, from the filth of the trenches, from the starvation of the cities, and from the terror of those who had a great deal to lose. History likes to call it an anomaly. It was not. It was a logical consequence, which is far more disturbing.

The First World War left Europe with ten million dead and a promise unfulfilled. Italy, on the winning side, felt cheated at the peace table and labeled it a “mutilated victory.” Germany, defeated, was told it alone was culpable and was handed the bill. Then came the Russian Revolution, and the old proprietors of land and factories discovered a new fear, the fear that workers might cease obeying.

Liberal democracy, the regime of courteous debate, seemed sluggish, corrupt, and powerless. Mussolini understood this before anyone else. In 1922 he marched on Rome, and the king, instead of stopping him, handed him the government. Eleven years later, Hitler did not take power by force either; he was invited in by conservatives who thought they could exploit him. They always think they can exploit him. Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, and others followed the same script with local accents. Fascism was never the enemy of the powerful. It was their guard dog, until the dog decided it wanted to own the house.

The middle classes, ruined by inflation and terrified of descending into the proletariat, needed someone to blame. Fascism gave them a list: the communist, the Jew, the outsider, the decadent artist, the feeble. It did not offer solutions; it offered enemies, which is cheaper and more gratifying.

It also promised belonging. The uniform erased the shame of unemployment. The mass rally replaced the isolation of the modern city. A man who was nobody could, for an afternoon, be part of a nation that would endure a thousand years. Few drugs are more potent than the feeling of being chosen.

Here is the paradox. Fascism despised modernity and was its progeny. The Italian Futurists, years before Mussolini, had already exalted speed, machines, and war as «+the world’s only hygiene.+» Fascism took that dynamism and mixed it with an imagined past: imperial Rome for Italy, a legendary Aryan forest for Germany, the Catholic crusade for Spain.

In Germany, the regime organized in 1937 an exhibition of “Degenerate Art” to mock Expressionists, Cubists, and Jewish artists. Next door, it showcased the sanctioned art: brawny peasants, compliant mothers, valiant soldiers. Beauty became a matter of state, and the state decided that beauty had to be wholesome, simple, and silent. Cinema, radio, and propaganda were refined to an art. Truth did not matter; repetition did. A lie told often enough does not become true. It becomes something more useful: familiar.

Fascist architecture

And then there is stone. Every regime that dreads its own mortality builds as if it could defeat it. Ancient Egypt may be a good example.

In Italy, the story is more intricate than the cliché. Fascism did not impose a single style. Two currents fought over the regime’s favor. On one side, Marcello Piacentini and a monumental, stripped classicism of arches, columns, and travertine. On the other, the young Rationalists, contemporary and geometric. The most notable example is Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como, begun in 1932 and completed in 1936 in accordance with the International Style. A translucent building, all glass and proportion, as a symbol for a party with nothing to hide. Irony needs no commentary.

The great unfinished dream was Rome’s EUR district, conceived to host the Universal Exposition of 1942, which never took place. The war cancelled the party. What remains is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the “Square Colosseum,” an empty temple of arches repeated like a slogan. Today it houses the headquarters of a luxury fashion house. History has a sense of humor, though it rarely laughs at itself. geopop

In Germany, taste was far less adventurous. Albert Speer built the Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg, a stage for hundreds of thousands of bodies arranged like bricks. He also drew, with Hitler, the plans for Germania, a Berlin to be virtually leveled to the ground and rebuilt as a world capital, with a domed hall so vast that, it was said, the breath of the crowd would produce clouds inside. Speer even theorized the “value of ruins”: buildings should be designed so that, centuries later, they would collapse beautifully, like Roman ones.

That is the key to fascist architecture. It was not made for the people who lived in it, but for the people who would look at it. It did not house citizens; it shrank them. A human being standing before those walls was supposed to feel small, and to find comfort in that smallness.

Fascism lost the war, but stone is patient. The edifices are still there, some restored, some rented, some admired for their «clean lines» by tourists who take selfies without asking what the lines were meant to say. Perhaps that is the final lesson. Regimes fall; their aesthetics remain, waiting, like a costume in the closet, for the next generation that feels small and wants to be told it is great.

“The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.” Eugene V. Debs, Socialist leader and candidate for president of the United States. (June 16, 1918). He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for this anti-war speech.

Fascination with the Good Old Days

Fascism’s love for the past was never a love for history. History is complex, contradictory, and full of inconvenient people. What fascism loved was *a past that never existed*: a golden age of purity, order, and greatness that had supposedly been stolen by decadence, by foreigners, by democracy. And because that past was imaginary, it had to be made visible, immense, and made of stone.

Mussolini did not want to study Rome; he wanted to wear it. He cut the Via dell’Impero through the heart of the city, demolishing entire medieval neighborhoods so that the ancient forums would serve as a backdrop for his military parades, and he presented himself as the heir of Augustus, whose memory he honored with exhibitions and restored monuments.

Hitler did not want to understand the ancient Germans or the Greeks; he wanted to borrow their splendor. Speer modeled the tribune of the Zeppelinfeld on the Pergamon Altar and envisioned buildings that would one day become majestic ruins, as if the Reich could choose in advance how it would be remembered. Monumentalism was not a question of preference. Columns, arches, and endless staircases were arguments without words: they told the citizen that the State was perpetual and he was not. The past was useful precisely because it was deceased and could not contradict anyone. It promised that the nation had once been great, that its present misery was the fault of others, and that greatness could be recovered by obedience. Nostalgia was the narcotic; the future was the price. Every movement that promises to return to a glorious yesterday is really asking for something today: your silence, your fear, your vote. The past was not the destination. It was the excuse.

Every nostalgia needs an enemy, and fascism found its own in the new. In the spring of 1933, the Nazi government began its campaign to eliminate “modern” tendencies in German art, with particular emphasis on architecture, and to eradicate what it chose to call “art bolshevism (communism).” The label was perfect because it explained nothing and condemned everything. An abstract painting, a flat roof, a chair of steel tubes: all of it was communism, or Jewish, or foreign, which in that vocabulary meant the same thing. The Bauhaus, the school that had dared to envision furniture and housing for workers rather than palaces for princes, was branded a breeding ground for cultural Bolshevism and closed in Berlin on April 11, 1933. Its flat-roofed buildings were derided as “desert architecture,” while its abstract paintings were simply not understood. Not understanding was not a problem; it was the argument. What the crowd could not grasp was, by definition, an affront to the people. Italy was less consistent, flirting with Futurism and Rationalism while dressing up as Caesar, but the logic was the same everywhere: the new was suspicious because it posed questions, and fascism had only answers. The old trick never ages. When you cannot defeat an idea, you label it communist and wait for fear to do the rest.

Totalitarianism Against the Avant-Garde

The fear of the new

Fascism worshipped the nation. Nazism worshipped the race. Communism promised to abolish both, along with the classes that sustained them. On paper, they could not be more opposed. And yet, when we walk through their official buildings and museums in the 1930s, we find the same columns, the same marble, the same heroic bodies looking toward a future that always resembled the past.

This is not a coincidence. It is a symptom. Power that wants to last forever ends up afraid of anything new.

Rome, Berlin and the marble of eternity

Italian fascism was, at first, more equivocal. Marinetti’s Futurists sang to machines and velocity, and Giuseppe Terragni erected in Como a Casa del Fascio of pure glass and geometry. But a regime that styled itself the heir of the Caesars soon required arches more than ideas. By the end, Mussolini’s Rome favored the Colosseum, even if it had to be squared.

Nazism had no uncertainties. In 1933 the Bauhaus shut its doors. In 1937 Munich hosted the exhibition of «Degenerate Art,» where Kandinsky, Klee and Kirchner were displayed as evidence of a sick civilization. Albert Speer sketched a Berlin of colossal columns, designed to appear beautiful even as ruins. A regime that pledged a thousand years could not tolerate an art that questioned the present.

The revolution that devoured its artists

The Russian Revolution, in its initial years, was also a revolution of forms. Tatlin envisioned a spiral tower for the Third International. Malevich painted a black square as if restarting the world again. Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Mayakovsky and Meyerhold believed that a new society required new eyes. For them, the avant-garde and communism were the same pledge: to break with the past.

In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke, and after that he was increasingly unable to govern. He did not leave a successor. He left a warning. In his last writings, known as his “Testament,” he characterized Stalin as “too rude” and proposed removing him from the post of General Secretary. No one listened. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin struggled over the inheritance, and Stalin secured it not in a single battle but patiently, one expulsion at a time. Trotsky was expelled from the party in 1927 and from the country in 1929. By the end of the decade, Stalin was the uncontested leader of a revolution that had pledged to abolish all masters. The others would realize, too late, that in a dictatorship losing a debate can cost more than an argument: Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in 1936, Bukharin in 1938, and Trotsky was killed in Mexico in 1940 with an ice axe.

Stalin and the revolution learned to speak in the past tense. In 1934, Socialist Realism became official dogma. Le Corbusier’s proposal for the Palace of Soviets was rejected in favor of a wedding cake topped by a statue of Lenin. The term «formalism» became a charge. Malevich returned to portraying peasants. Meyerhold was arrested and shot in 1940. The artists who had trusted most in the revolution were the first to discover that the revolution no longer trusted in them.

Pablo Picasso entered the French Communist Party in 1944, and Moscow received him the way a church receives a famous sinner: with open arms and shuttered museums. His dove soared over every congress of the Soviet-backed peace campaign, but his paintings never crossed the border.

In 1947, the official critic Vladimir Kemenov condemned modern art as pathological, irrational and bourgeois, and Picasso was among the accused. The paradox climaxed in 1953. When Stalin died, Aragon asked Picasso for a portrait, and Picasso sketched a young Stalin from an old photograph. The Party judged it absurd and censured it publicly. A dead dictator could not be young, nor human. Only in 1956, under Khrushchev, did Picasso’s work reach Moscow.

The dome that never rose

In 1931, the Soviet Union summoned the world’s architects to design the Palace of Soviets, a structure intended to be the shrine of a new humanity. The response came from everywhere. Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Erich Mendelsohn submitted their proposals, along with the finest Russian architects of a generation that had trusted the revolution would also be a revolution of space.

Among them was Moisei Ginzburg, one of the most prolific voices of Constructivism and the author of the Narkomfin building, an experiment in collective living that sought to redesign not only the house but daily life itself. His proposal for the palace was focused on an immense dome. Inside, a spiral ramp coiled around the main auditorium, as if the masses were to ascend toward the future by walking. A smaller auditorium and a horizontal podium, with courtyards and terraces, formed a complex system of covered circulations. It was a building that moved.

The jury favored stillness. The victor was Boris Iofan, with a neoclassical scheme that would later be crowned by an enormous statue of Lenin. The decision signaled the end of Constructivism as the prevailing movement in the Soviet Union. Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, incensed, wrote a letter to Stalin lamenting the judgment. Stalin, as was his habit, did not need to reply.

Construction began in 1937, and the steel frame started to rise. Then, in June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and the country that had dreamed of the tallest building in the world suddenly needed steel more than symbols. The beams meant to lift Lenin above the clouds were taken down and turned into bridges and defenses. The palace was never finished. Its foundations became a public swimming pool. Ginzburg’s dome, meanwhile, remained on paper, where so many revolutions end up: unbuilt, but intact.

Why power prefers columns: modern art is a form of skepticism

The reasons were the same on both sides of the border. (1) First, the masses had to grasp the message without effort, and a brawny worker or a fair-haired soldier explains itself. (2) Second, legitimacy is derived from the past: Rome, Greece, the imperial tradition. Nothing grants a new regime more authority than appearing ancient. (3) Third, and most important, modern art is a form of skepticism. It fragments, it inquires, it refuses to give a single answer. A dictatorship can live with many things, but not with questions.

That is why the modernists were persecuted in Berlin and in Moscow, by enemies who agreed on almost nothing else. Power can celebrate a revolution in the past tense. It never forgives one in the present.

Fascism (anti-modern, reactionary movement)

Degenerate Art Exhibition, Berlin 1937 **, **,

Germania, Berlin (Albert Speer)

Ideology, Propaganda and Architecture: The Legacy of Albert Speer: **,

German Pavilion (Paris 1937)