As was discussed in Chapter 2, already in the 19th century the first signs of mass consumerism—limited and tentative as they may seem in retrospect—became a source of apprehension for conservatives and the right-wing. Rejection of the materialistic aspirations of the masses was central to Nietzsche’s new elitist doctrines. “Life is a fountain of delight,” stated Zarathustra, “but where the rabble also drinks all wells are poisoned.” And he continued:
And many a one who turned away from life, turned away only from the rabble: he did not wish to share the well and the flame and the fruit with the rabble. […] And many a one who came along like a destroyer and a shower of hail to all orchards wanted merely to put his foot into the jaws of the rabble and so stop its throat.
(Nietzsche 1969: 120–122)
Very early in his philosophical career Nietzsche saw a strong correlation between the social empowerment of formerly disenfranchised groups, their political radicalization and their material aspirations. “Universal education,” he averred in 1871, “is but a preparatory stage of communism” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 7: 243). Such education, even under Bismarck’s conservative tutelage, inadvertently breeds the consumerism of the Last Humans—without using the exact term, which he coined much later—a working-class hedonism that Nietzsche associated, furthermore, with the demands of Ferdinand Lassalle. He accused the socialist agitator of teaching the common people that “having no needs is the greatest infelicity,” and instilling in them a lust for “luxury and fashion.” For Nietzsche, this explained the pernicious tendency of the workers’ educational associations to “generate needs” (Nietzsche 1988 vol. 7: 243).
Some 50 years later, how did fascism relate to mass consumption? Did it, in its basic posture, become heir to Nietzsche’s effort to conceal the well from the masses? Or was it, on the contrary, determined to share the fruit with the rabble? According to many philosophers and social scientists, and lately many historians, too, the latter is exactly what it did—or at least attempted to as best it could.
Within the tradition of social critique inspired by the Frankfurt School, the so-called consumer society is often presumed to be a thinly veiled form of fascism. In the introduction to a recent book on Japanese fascism, for example, the anthropologist Marilyn Ivy (2009: x), subscribing to Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry, wrote about “the virtual fascism of the consumer.” Historians, however, have traditionally been much more careful in their evaluation of this topic, indeed have often pointed to the significant material deprivation suffered by the majority of the subjects under fascist dictatorships and emphasized these regimes’ ideological antagonism to consumerism. Still, in the last two decades or so, the picture has rapidly changed, almost to the point where it now seems to have been painted anew. There is at present a bulky and expanding literature that fundamentally challenges the old assumptions by claiming that fascism, particularly Nazism, brought about significant material benefits to the masses, and that, at the very least, the wish to ameliorate the material lot of the common folk was one of its main impulses. This initially revisionist, but now very prevalent, line has taken two main expressions, which need to be handled separately. After summarizing these arguments, it will be possible to proceed and examine them critically.
The first, and admittedly less successful, new argument concerns the objective material achievements of Nazism (on which we shall here focus, for this is the variant of fascism most insistently associated with enlarged consumption) in accruing benefits to ordinary Germans. These are emphasized particularly with regard to the Nazi war economy, which is said not only to have been conducted with particular care to not lowering the average German standard of living but also with the special goal, achieved until the late phases of the war, of showering all sorts of material spoils on the masses, hence gaining their broad consent for the brutal war of dispossession and extermination of foreign peoples and “races.” A still relatively cautious articulation of that claim was advanced by the celebrated social historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler (2003: 76), who argued that until very late in the war the German population was well provided for since food products were transported into the Reich from the occupied territories on a massive scale. Much more ambitiously, in a book arousing great controversy, Götz Aly (2006: 326) depicted the Nazi period, including most of the war, as a time of quick enrichment for the German masses, pampered by the Nazis’ “welfare state,” conducted along lines of “war socialism.” The war of extermination, according to Aly (38), brought Germans unprecedented rewards. It not only offered common Germans huge benefits, but also “drew its energy” from them. Nazi politics “oriented itself to meet the people’s welfare.” The masses are thus presented well-nigh as the prime agents behind the Nazi catastrophe, itself read as a vicious, gargantuan exercise in ethnic, state-conducted, mass consumerism. The Last Humans are cast as perpetrators, living at the cost of their foreign victims as well as that of their social betters: one of the book’s key points is that domestic Nazi socioeconomic policy was relentlessly anti-elitist, combining “taxation mildness for the masses” with “taxation severity against the bourgeoisie”—two subsections of a chapter instructively titled “the indulging dictatorship” (Gefälligkeitsdiktatur). While treating the subject matter in an incomparably more differentiated and complex way and fully acknowledging that Nazism was in many respects hostile to consumption, Shelly Baranowski, another historian of Nazi “consumerism,” nonetheless on occasion depicts the linkages between Nazi aggression, mass consumption and the welfare state in terms very close to those of Aly. She claims, rather extremely, that for “the military, entertainment, tourism, and consumption became not merely ancillary to combat, but the very ends of warfare” (Baranowski 2004: 224). “Consumption,” she argues (226–227), “saturated German imperial expectations” and “framed the racist assumptions of soldiers.” She also highlights the Nazi ambition to install “a massive state-financed and administered welfare state, which would parcel out rewards according to individual merit and racial fitness” (224).
Given the largely empirical nature of the claims made by Aly—by far the most radical and salient representative of this approach—they were quickly pounced upon by a host of historians, many of whom specializing in economic history, and subjected to devastating criticism. Led by Adam Tooze, these attacks have left Aly’s thesis in tatters. The numerous critics did not, needless to say, question the ruthless Nazi plundering of occupied countries or the dispossession of the Jews, both of which were never in doubt in any case; what they did dispute was the claim that this systematic pillage was sufficient to finance the war effort without causing much inconvenience to the German masses let alone provide them with a comfortable war-time cruise, amidst copious spoils and rising social egalitarianism.2 On the contrary, as the critics have compellingly argued, mass consumption by no means benefited from the war, and the ordinary German experienced much material hardship and deprivation even before the war’s tide started to turn against Germany. In Tooze’s words, written in a 2007 review of the English translation of Aly’s book, “as 18 months of sustained criticism in the German language media have revealed, Aly’s calculation is profoundly flawed. In fact, at least two thirds of the burden of the war was born by the Germans themselves, much of it falling on the working class, whose standard of living was significantly lower than that of their counterparts in Britain” (Tooze 2007).3 In a scathing critique, another notable British historian, Richard J. Evans dismissed Aly’s insistence that the Third Reich prioritized consumer satisfaction over attainment of military goals. “The leadership,” he observed (2016: 132), “did not divert resources to fulfilling consumer desires ‘to the detriment of rearmament’—rather, the opposite.” Elsewhere (2010: 18), Evans countered Aly by pointing to the fact that, already in the 1930s, far from building up “socialism,” the Nazis imposed numerous sacrifices on common Germans in order to promote their war preparations, and with the onset of the war, these only increased steeply. In another noteworthy, empirically founded counter-argument, which includes a detailed overview of the consumption levels of key food items between 1937 and 1944, the economic historian Christoph Buchheim refused any notion that average consumption rose under Nazism, insisting that “civil consumption remained in general massively limited,” and that the regime’s socioeconomic policy was all about “ensuring the provision of the most necessary things, not with permitting ‘good living’” (Buchheim 2010: 301).
Aly’s attempt to undermine the long-standing notion that Nazism curtailed civil consumption and kept the Germans’ standard of living low, as compared to its massive investment in war, can thus safely be said to have failed. There seems to be little ground to question the conclusions reached by past historians concerning low consumption under Nazism, a scholarly tradition of which the following references are meant to serve as mere examples. According to Mary Nolan (1994: 233), “Militarism, not mass consumption, was the Nazis’ preferred solution to the problem of demand for the expanded productive capacity.” Norbert Frei (1987: 134) documented the Spartan existence of most Germans before the outbreak of the Second World War. David Bankier (1996: 99) discussed the prospering of weapon manufacturers under Nazism and the comparative difficulties of “consumer-goods manufacture.” Ian Kershaw (2002: 124), similarly, in a study of conditions in Bavaria, underlined the fact that under the Nazi regime “morale was poor in those branches of business dependent on increased consumer spending.” Richard Overy (1995: 215) explained that during the late 1930s in Germany the “pressure of consumer demand was relieved by withholding goods from the shops, by high taxation, and through propaganda campaigns to encourage savings and investment.” And long after Aly, Geoff Eley (2013: 69) asserted that the hectic rearmament effort of the 1930s “translated necessarily into a running squeeze on consumption.” In a useful survey of the debate, S. Jonathan Wiesen (2013: 446) perceptively commented, “If Götz Aly writes of a fundamental level of satisfaction during the war, we are forced to question what it means to be satisfied during a period of rationing, wartime controls, and dying loved ones.” During the fascist era in Italy, we may note in passing, individual per capita consumption virtually stagnated, albeit especially with the regards to foodstuffs, whereas non-foodstuff consumption did increase. And while the regime boasted of an expansion of “the welfare state,” its “social security provision was not particularly impressive,” and pioneering steps towards making national insurance for pensions compulsory were undertaken by the liberal government in 1919—at a time, that is, when the working class was at its strongest and most militant (Zamagni 1993: 315; see Chapter 10 for a good overview of the “slow social progress under fascism”). According to Robert Soucy, the standard of living of Italian workers and peasants steeply declined under Mussolini. “Between 1928 and 1932,” he writes, “real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Between 1926 and 1934, the purchasing power of Italian farmworkers declined by 50 to 70 percent” (Soucy 1995: 13).
If, in terms of objective conditions, the consumerist interpretation of Nazism, if it may be called that, is very much a tiny minority’s position, matters are quite different when it comes to assessing the subjective aspect of consumption. For as most historians linking Nazism with consumerism in fact concede, the linkage had little to do with actual improvement in the standard of living, which was at most modest, partial and temporary, and more with subjective expectations of common Germans under Nazism. The masses are said to have believed, even without much tangible evidence, that the regime was committed to furnishing them with the consumer goods they so craved. Among the many scholars embracing this view, a rough distinction can be drawn between three main subgroups.
The first consists of those who claim that this widespread belief was the result of skillful propaganda on the part of the ruling Nazi élite, deft at hoodwinking their followers into believing that they were busily at work ushering in a bright future for them. This is what one historian aptly described as the Third Reich’s “beautiful façade” (Reichel 1991). Such historians see consumerism largely as a dummy tantalizing the populace, deceitfully employed by the rulers who had little intent of keeping their promises, but used them to induce consent to political disenfranchisement and acquiescence in the face of war preparations. In this literature, emphasis is often put on the “virtual consumption” characteristic of Nazi Germany. As Hartmut Berghoff claimed, while “suppressing overall consumption” the Nazis were “making noticeable concessions and […] impressive as well as credible promises.” He underlined the way in which “the regime created virtual consumption by opening up new horizons and promising unprecedented advances into modernity. To make this propaganda effective it concentrated on prestigious consumer goods with high levels of symbolic meaning, such as cars and holidays” (Berghoff 2001: 173). The cynicism behind this tantalizing pseudo-consumption is evident in the way Berghoff ends his essay (183–184) by discussing how the regime, reluctant to alarm the people by fully exposing its military project, encouraged saving for the future purchase of consumer durables, such as cars, houses and even sail boats, and then confiscated this money for armament.
If a mere “enticement” was all there was to it, there would have been little reason to revisit the older theories stressing limited consumption, apart perhaps from taking into consideration the expectations of the populace in explaining relatively weak resistance to the regime. A second group of historians, however, goes significantly deeper than that surface level to insist that the Nazi leaders themselves, from Hitler downward, sincerely believed in the cause of German mass prosperity and directed as many economic resources as they could afford to, under adverse conditions, in order to obtain it. If consumption during the 1930s and 1940s remained fundamentally restricted, and even underwent further reductions in some areas, this was because the objective economic conditions did not enable the Nazis to do otherwise. Discussing “the failure of Nazi consumer society,” Wolfgang König argued that the Nazis were arduously trying to create their own brand of völkisch consumerism, marketing a whole series of mass-produced goods to which the term Volk had been affixed—the people’s car, the people’s radio and so on. This project, however, was doomed from the start given the unfavorable context in which it was embedded—that is, the world economic crisis—and, most particularly, since it conflicted with the regime’s ultimately more primordial goals, those of rearmament, autarky and expansion. But a failed consumer society, of course, is a qualitatively different thing from a deliberately deceptive one (König 2004). In a comparable study, S. Jonathan Wiesen (2010) closely examined the approach to consumerism in Nazi Germany and found a contradictory mixture of ideological repulsion, on the one hand, and a consumerist policy, on the other hand, finding expression in marketing and publicity.4
If, in this account, a tension still sharply splits the consumerist goals of Nazism and its military ones, a third group of historians goes even further by deconstructing this very dichotomy. For them, the Nazi regime did not simply use consumerism to cover up the path to war, nor was it forced to subordinate consumerism to militarism. The war itself, rather, was significantly motivated, in some accounts even primarily so, by the desire to raise the German standard of living. From this perspective, virtual consumption was not so much a ploy, but the best the regime could put on offer until Germany won “the living space” it required to become an economic superpower. Newly examined, argue these scholars, taking the consumerist interpretation of Nazism to its utmost limits, the Nazi alternative was not between consumption and war, but rather between poverty and war. The war was meant as a passageway to a better future, where ordinary Germans, deserving members of the master race, could finally enjoy the material standard of living of other Western nations, in particular the United States. “Talk of the primacy of an arms policy that overshadowed consumption,” a representative of this approach recently argued, “is far too sweeping. Besides, arms and consumption were interlinked. The regime declared that consumption was important for its arms policy: it was part of the psychological arming of the civilian population for total war. Conversely, sacrifices for the sake of a build-up of arms were not necessarily a rejection of consumer society, but could be seen as an investment in the future” (Kundrus 2014: 163). According to Adam Tooze, in an acclaimed work on the economics of the Third Reich, the conventional macroeconomic opposition of “guns versus butter” is inadequate in capturing the essence of Nazi policies, which were characterized precisely by a conviction that guns—military investment—are the precondition for attaining butter—consumer goods (Tooze 2008: 62–65). In the Nazi ideology, certainly, military vigor was seen as indispensable for economic expansion. Addressing German industrialists in 1932, Hitler spelled out his vision of a military-industrial complex:
There is no thriving economy, which does not have at its front and at its back a thriving, powerful state to shield it, there was no Carthaginian economy without Carthaginian navy and no Carthaginian trade without a Carthaginian army. And naturally in modern times too, when the going gets rough and the interests of the nations come to a collision, there can be no economy unless it has behind it the absolutely powerful and determined political will of the nation.
(In Domarus 1973, vol. 1: 80)
This interdependence between economics and politics has thus led some scholars to conceptualize the Nazi socioeconomic model in terms of a consumerism projected onto the future, a form of delayed gratification, as it were. For Baranowski (2004: 74), the anti-consumption of the regime was not least the product of its pro-consumption: “The permanent solution for a high material standard of living—a land empire—necessitated rearmament and war, neither of which could tolerate rising wages or an inflated consumer demand.” By the same token, Nazi anti-materialism was ensconced in materialism (221): “In the future, the master race would revel in material largesse after Germany won the war, no longer bound by the antimaterialism of the regime’s pre-war definition of the standard of living.” Building on Tooze’s work, Geoff Eley (2013: 72) concluded that for “Hitler and the Nazi leaders, the dialectics of guns and butter always involved a wager on deferral,” and that the imperial project for the acquisition of Lebensraum was geared towards future prosperity. Paradoxically, although soundly defeated on the objective terrain, Götz Aly is smuggled in through the back, subjectivist, door: the war may not have actually brought the German masses the material benefits they sought, but it was conducted with their material well-being very much in mind. In essential consonance with Aly, the war is seen not least as a big consumerist gambit, meant to procure the Germans welfare and comforts; the main difference is that in this version the war quite literally misfired.
While there is a measure of truth in this approach, there are obvious limits to its interpretive reach. It radically downplays the reservations, and often outright enmity, of the Nazis toward mass consumption, which were many and variously motivated. There was, to begin with, the strong Nazi affiliation with small-business owners and shopkeepers who resented the big department stores catering to the masses at low costs as well as the workers’ consumer cooperatives; representing a significant part of the Nazi party social base, the ideology of these middle-class sections impinged on Nazi ideology and rhetoric (Schanetzky 2015: 19). In cultural terms, Nazism absorbed many of the classical sensitivities and grudges of the Bildungsbürgertum, whose members—as was seen above in the discussion of mass culture—were particularly prone to lament “massification,” “commercialization” and the proliferation of “kitsch,” as well as so-called Schund und Schmutz cultural products. As will also be recalled, this opposition was not simply aesthetic, but profoundly political inasmuch as mass culture was perceived as subversive of the social order, challenging the hegemony of the old élites (with which the Bildungsbürger felt largely emotionally affiliated). Finally, there was a strong economic rationale in opposing mass consumption, since it was closely associated with the socialist and trade-unionist demand for higher wages for workers, which German business obviously resisted and which the Nazis strongly disapproved of since it conflicted with rearmament.5
Thus, in objective terms, it cannot be emphasized enough that, whatever its future goals, the Nazi drive to war meant a curtailment of mass consumption in the present and overwhelming state investment in military industry from which civilians did not gain. Tooze himself discusses a good case in point, by looking at an industrial sector which was totally negligible prior to 1933: production of airplanes. “In 1932,” he recounts,
the German aircraft industry employed 3,200 people and had the capacity to produce no more than a hundred aircraft per year. Less than ten years later, [it] employed at least a quarter of a million people and was capable of turning out every year more than 10,000 of the most sophisticated combat aircraft in the world. Of all the industrial effects of rearmament this was by far the most significant.
(Tooze 2008: 125)
The case of the aircraft industry is highly revealing in that, unlike other industrial branches whose benefits were also civilian, its goals were purely military. Similarly, Germany was covered during the 1930s with a network of fast highways, whose role in wartime was enormous whereas its benefits for German citizens, the huge majority of whom did not have cars, were minimal. This gave occasion to Brecht’s satirical poem “On a Milepost of the Motorways”: “We who built these roads/Will drive on them only/In tanks and trucks” (In Möser 1998: 221). These policies dramatically lowered the number of the unemployed—from six million in 1933 to one million in 1937—yet the workers’ wages were also significantly reduced in this period, while their weekly working hours grew (Evans 2005: 328–333). As D.G. Williamson (2002: 154) points out, “the Nazi regime was able to keep down wages with considerable success. Profits, on the other hand, rose by 36.5 percent between 1935 and 1939.”
Yet subjectively, too, the attempt to wed Nazism and consumerism is fraught with problems. Regarding Nazi military policies centrally as long-term economic investment greatly exaggerates the rational and instrumental nature of the regime, at the expense of its ideological commitments. The notion that behind the sacrifice of millions of German lives and the enormous hardships of war—to leave the non-German suffering out of it, for it clearly counted for nothing as far as the Nazis were concerned—stood a simple vision of German welfare and higher standard of living, and that the war was conceived as a long detour to consumer satisfaction, is unconvincing, to put it mildly. This neglects the fundamental, existential, quasi-libidinal investment of the Nazi worldview in war, and its no-less visceral opposition to peace as a way of life (a mindset discussed in Chapter 3, with relation to the enthusiastic welcoming of the First World War, which clearly escapes a merely utilitarian explanation). And peace was despised not least on account of its association with consumerism, the cowardly and hedonistic fixation, precisely, on welfare and higher standard of living. The Nazi plunge into war was less a deed of homo economicus and more an act in accordance with Nietzsche’s dictum (1997: 112): “I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing, animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible.”
Surprisingly, Tooze offers little textual evidence in support of the overarching claim of his book, that is, that Nazi economic policy, and hence foreign policy as well, were geared towards future consumerism and were seen as the only means available to Germany of matching the United States’ emerging power. In fact, his case hinges heavily on the following quotation from Hitler’s Second Book, which is described as one of the book’s “key passages”:
The European today dreams of a standard of living, which he derives as much from Europe’s possibilities as from the real conditions of America. Due to modern technology and the communication it makes possible, the international relations amongst peoples have become so close that the European, even without being fully conscious of it, applies as the yardstick for his life, the conditions of American life.
(Hitler, in Tooze 2008: 10)
Given that Hitler regarded America’s enormous territory and internal market as the vital conditions of its prosperity, he concluded that only territorial expansion in the sole direction available to it—that is, eastward—would allow Germany to catch up with the standard of living of the United States. “Fordism, in other words,” Tooze sums up (10), “required Lebensraum.” While this inference seems plausible enough, and without a doubt, attaining economic greatness and independence was a pillar of the Nazi project, can one really place consumerism at its heart? Was the future buying power and pleasures of ordinary Germans really such an indispensable, let alone central, aspect of Hitler’s imperialistic vision? There is ample reason to be wary of such a thesis. In fact, one needn’t go further than Hitler’s Second Book, where one finds another passage that deals with the challenge of the United States, but with very different implications. It deserves being quoted at some length:
[T]he danger arises that the significance of racially inferior Europe will gradually lead to a new determination of the fate of the world by the people of the North American continent. In any case, a few already recognize that this danger is threatening all of Europe. But the fewest want to know what this means for Germany. If in the future our people continues living with the same political thoughtlessness as in the past, it will ultimately have to renounce the claim to international significance. It will become more and more stunted racially, until it finally deteriorates into degenerate, brutish gluttons who will not even remember the past greatness. In the context of the future international state hierarchy, it will be at most what Switzerland and Holland were in the previous Europe.
(Hitler 2006: 111–112)
What is noteworthy about this passage is the way Hitler here by no means suggests that the rationale of the National Socialist movement is to raise the German standard of living, or that consumerism can only be obtained via a colossal push to the East. On the contrary, he tacitly admits that consumerism and a decent standard of living for the German masses can be obtained without Nazism. Yet he rejects precisely that as the nightmarish scenario of the Last Humans, in which Germans will become “degenerate, brutish gluttons.” Gluttons, needless to say, are well fed and live comfortably, nay luxuriously. But this is not what Hitler is after: what he desires is political greatness, world power. Notice again that Switzerland and Holland, which Hitler uses as admonitions to Germany, were by no means examples of impoverished countries whose civilians suffer deprivation. On the contrary, they were, and remain, prime examples of prosperous nations, which enjoy a high standard of living based on thriving economy and commerce. Yet, from Hitler’s fundamentally Nietzschean perspective, they lack “greatness.” “That,” he goes on (112), “will be the end of the life of a people whose history has been world history for two thousand years.” Thus, at stake is not consumerism, but “world history,” which Hitler of course understands not as the Hegelian-Marxist process of the emancipation of the masses, but in the sense of an imperial bid for world domination.6
In general, the consumerist interpretation of fascism, particularly in its radical variant, has little use for the visceral Nazi opposition to consumerist values, an opposition which, at most, it cursorily handles. But it is highly questionable if in the absence of such opposition, one can truly make sense of the distinctiveness of Nazism (and fascism) as historical phenomena. It is useful in this context to recall Hitler’s horror, cited above, at the thought that historical trends seemed to “remodel the whole world into one big department store” (Hitler 1999: 157). Consumerism, for Hitler, was not merely a contemptible pursuit as compared to the heroism of war; it was actively opposed to such heroism, compromising the nation’s will to fight. But here he believed Germany held a decisive advantage, precisely on account of its low level of consumerism. During the Second World War, he expressed his confidence that the United States, with its “hen-brained” populace spoiled by consumerism, would hardly prove a serious challenge to Germany, whose “standard of life” was admittedly “lower,” but boasted of an incomparably superior culture. “Why,” he mused, “should a people of that sort fight—they’ve got everything they want! Anyway, the ardour for battle will soon wane when the individual finds himself called upon to endure a further curtailment of the amenities of life!” (Hitler 2000: 605). Hitler’s reasoning distinguished mass luxuries, such as refrigerators, superfluous goods that serve to spoil one’s character and generally debilitate a nation, from modest consumption needs, which he countenanced, affirming in the same book that, if “we make things uniform, the masses will be able to enjoy the material amenities of life,” and mentioning the typewriter and the radio (Hitler 2000: 75). He deemed variety of consumer goods and choice between different versions of the same product the results of mere money-grabbing on the part of greedy merchants: “These practices exist only because they give shopkeepers a chance of making more money. That’s the only explanation of this infinite variety. In a year or two from now, this scandal must have been put a stop to” (75). And while the consumerist interpretation stresses the Nazi concern for generalized prosperity, Hitler could be heard, as late as 1942, warning precisely against such prospect, significantly in private conversations not meant for the wider public:
If England will come to lose India, the English plutocrats would be forced to tighten the belt as well.
This statement should not be misunderstood, as if he [Hitler] had something in principle against rich people. As long as their political influence is held within reasonable limits, their existence is by no means to be negated. For since a rich man cannot eat ten times as much as a poor man, the nutrition capacity of a people in hard times would not be taxed so heavily by a hundred thousand rich people amongst seventy millions, as when the poor people will suddenly become well-off bourgeois [Mittelständler] and would triple their previous food consumption. The rich person as such is thus no harmful social phenomenon.
(In Picker 2003: 299)
Hitler, certainly, had intimate knowledge of what he was talking about, for he was at this point a very rich man, enjoying a wartime diet infinitely superior to that of the German everyman (a point which will be revisited below).
A denunciation of mass consumption ought to be seen as part of the pessimist tradition denigrating the worthless civilization of the Last Humans. This is a tradition that Nazism, far from interrupting, brought to a climax. An interesting case in point of this pessimistic discourse is Ernst Jünger’s influential essay On Pain, which was written and published in 1934. Very much in Nietzsche’s spirit, Jünger deprecated consumerist modernity as a pseudo-culture characterized by a superficial attempt to deny the inexorability of pain and create a heaven here on earth. Jünger (2008: 12) zoomed in on the way in which mass democracy and mass entertainment intertwine:
The breadth of people partaking of goods and pleasures is a sign of prosperity. Perhaps most symbolic are the grand cafés […]. They can be called the true palaces of democracy. Here one senses the dream-like, painless, and oddly agitated ease that fills the air like a narcotic. On the streets it is striking how the masses are dressed in such undeniable poor taste, yet in a uniform and “respectable” fashion. Bare and blatant poverty is rarely seen.
From Jünger’s elitist vantage point, such unheard-of degree of mass comfort is indeed consternating. Yet the essay displays a sense of satisfaction and assurance, which is explained by the fact that it was written at a time and in a place in which “the palaces of democracy” had already been toppled. Writing a year after Hitler’s rise to power, Jünger (2008: 13) felt that he could afford to pronounce the Last Human a disease from which humanity had recovered: “The prophecy of the Last Human has found rapid fulfillment. It is accurate—except for the assertion that the Last Human lives longest. His age already lies behind us.” The materialistic utopia of the masses must be exposed as an illusion; and what better candidates for demolishing the popular palaces of democracy than cannons and machine guns? Jünger recalled how in 1921 he witnessed how three policemen with a machine-gun clashed with a demonstration of thousands of participants. Once the order to fire was given, the demonstrators disappeared from the scene even though nobody had actually been injured. To Jünger (2008: 24–25) this proved that
The masses are nothing other than an abstract idea […]. The sight of this event had something magical about it; it evoked that deep sense of delight which takes hold of one when an ignoble demon is unmasked.
In 1932 he had a similar experience in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, when a police wagon “cut right through” the impotent masses, forcefully repelling their “unfounded claim to authority.” Fascist military dictatorship in this way cuts short the progress of history and eliminates the project of the masses. This was written in 1934, the same year in which, returning from a visit to Berlin, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, one of the most important French fascist intellectuals, praised the Nazis for lowering Germany’s standard of living. “I found,” he reported, “that Berlin seemed poorer, Germany seemed poorer. […] Fascism facilitates the open acknowledgment of one fact: universal impoverishment, the necessary reduction of the general standard of living. But this poverty can be richness” (In Soucy 1979: 139). In Drieu La Rochelle’s opposition to mass consumption, as in that of so many of his contemporaries, the fear is clearly discernible that consumerist capitalism would lead, via democracy and creeping egalitarianism to socialism, or worse. “Capitalism,” he insisted (135), “wishes to communize consumption, that is to say, it wants to render it egalitarian; standardization can mean nothing else.” This explains his gratification at the way Hitler had managed, in his view, to lower consumption. He praised the historical phenomenon of Hitlerism for arresting the encroachment of European decadence, and envisioned it as an enlivening cure to the depressing complacency of the French Last Humans: “At bottom, the French want above all to sleep, to go fishing, to enjoy their cuisine, to make love a little, and to read news items which vaguely remind them of a time when there were still passions” (101). For Drieu La Rochelle, fascist anti-materialism supplied encouraging evidence that “there is in Hitler’s Germany a moral force as there is in Mussolini’s Italy” (140).
And indeed, Italian fascism exhibited similar trends. From its embryonic stages, it was saturated with a critique of the materialistic spirit of the masses and their socialist leaders, a materialism which a timid bourgeoisie did not dare resist, and which was corroding the unity of the nation and weakening its moral stamina. As early as 1903, Enrico Corradini, the ardent nationalist whose ideas and agency were vital in creating “the fascist synthesis,” (Sternhell 1994) diagnosed mass materialism as the main hindrance to national regeneration:
All the other classes were outlawed in favor of one class alone and the manual laborers’ wages became the be-all and end-all of human society. Every value came under furious attack from the masses. And before those massive hordes, there came the onslaught of the frenzied men of Saturn, malevolent and faint-hearted, little men who, thanks to the baseness of the age, represent a deadly peril like to that of shrill-voiced Byzantine eunuchs.
(Corradini in Lyttelton 1973: 137–138)
Worse still, this mass Saturnalia was met with a degenerate bourgeoisie, encumbered by “outmoded respect for transient human life, outmoded pity for the weak and humble.” Everywhere, Corradini fumed (139),
the greater is driven out by the less, […] driven out of teaching, literature, art, the theater, philosophy, science, history, wherever the materialistic democracy of tiny little men could drive out an idea and replace it by matter.
And this antagonism to materialism when espoused by the masses remained at the heart of Italian fascism for its entire career. Mussolini paid lip service to the cause of elevating the Italians’ standard of living but more than once exposed his own objections to that very cause. “Many of the crowds which the Socialists sway,” he declared in July 1919, “are not worthy of blandishments, because they consist of masses of brutes infected and barbarised by the ‘Red’ gospel.” “We must not,” he continued, “present ourselves to the masses as charlatans, promising Paradise within a short time, but as educators […]” (Mussolini 1923: 94). He then went on (94–45) to promote a productivist ethic, as opposed to a consumerist one:
Produce! Produce! Produce! […] It is pleasant to provoke loud applause by telling the audience at meetings that we are overstocked with commodities, and that they can consume without limit and enjoy comfort by imposing wages proportionate to their desires without increasing production. […] Courage lies in saying that an economic revolution draws substance from labour, and that it is strengthened, advanced, and carried out by the intensification of production whether in the fields or in the factories.
Some 15 years later the productivist credo remained unaltered, its ascetic undertone, if anything, further accentuated. In May 1934 the Duce publicly declared:
It is clearly easier to stand before a crowd of workers and say: “we will raise your wages.” This will win the speaker much applause. But the contrary duty of the fascist is to say: “make this sacrifice, for it will allow us to face competition in international markets, enhance our export, give you continual work and new jobs for those who are unemployed. (vivacious applause) We are nearing a period in which mankind will find its equilibrium on a lower standard of life. But this ought to give no cause for anxiety. That mankind can be a strong mankind, capable of both enthusiasm and heroism.
(Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 251–258)
Directly continuing (259), Mussolini clarified that one should not recoil from war, because, as Heraclitus said, it is “the origin of all things.” In another speech, the Duce spurned the lamentable demographic trend of bored people “rushing” from the countryside and the small towns to the metropolis, with its consumerist temptations, “the big cities, where one can find all pleasant and silly things” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 22: 367).7 Elsewhere, Mussolini (1958, vol. 34: 126) credited Ernest Renan with “prefascist intuitions” and cited his fear that democracy would culminate in “a social state in which a degenerate mass would have no concern beyond that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar human being.” In direct polemics against “historical materialism,” the Duce affirmed that fascism denies “the equation well-being = happiness, which will have human beings reduced to animals concerned with one thing only: to be fed and fattened, thus reduced to pure and simple vegetative life” (125). It can be observed how closely akin were Mussolini’s and Hitler’s views on “the brutish gluttons”: their way of satirizing the Last Humans. Mussolini repeatedly rebuffed the concept of happiness as implying social tranquility and material well-being. He dismissed, for example, as “morbid” the 18th-century notion promoted by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that “it is possible to reach ‘happiness’ on earth,” and proclaimed that “we fascists reject any static concept of material or moral happiness. Our happiness is in the struggle” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 25–26). In 1939 Goebbels, for his part, made a point of underlining the unanimity of fascism and Nazism in that respect. “National Socialism and fascism,” he wrote, “have in common above all the contempt for a comfortable and therefore pleasant life.” This was stated in an article dedicated to chastising the spoiled “coffee aunts,” who bemoan the shortages of coffee in the shops at a time when the nation requires individual sacrifices (Goebbels, 1941: 64). Similarly, according to Hermann Göring’s famous dictum, “Ore has always made an empire strong. Butter and lard, at most, have made a nation fat” (In Schanetzky 2015: 7).
One way to conceptualize this anti-consumerist stance is to situate it in the context of what Victoria de Grazia, in an important contribution to the historiography of modern consumerism, has referred to as the entrenched European resistance, up until the 1950s, to the American mass-consumption model mainly associated with Fordism and revolving around mass production, large-scale retailing, relatively high wages and low-cost products. In Europe, by contrast, the “bourgeois” and “neo-mercantilist” mode of consumption, which centered on small retailers, resisting demands for rising wages and conducted at the expense of consumers, prevailed. It is somewhat difficult today, given the post-1968 anti-consumerist slant of the Western Left, to mentally recreate the conditions of the first half of the 20th century, when social democrats and communists were incomparably more supportive of workers’ demands for higher wages and increased consumption, whereas opposition to mass consumption came very much from the Center and the Right. The élites and middle classes struggled to regulate mass consumption to match their ideological and socioeconomic interests, and specifically to press consumption into “national,” rather than “class,” patterns (De Grazia 1998: 78). A nice illustration of the gap between the old and the new Left, is obtained when one compares one of the well-known anti-consumerist slogans of the 1968 student movement: “Consommez plus, vous vivrez moins” [The more you consume, the less you live] with the older motto of French cooperativism: “Je depense, donc je suis” [I consume, therefore I am] (De Grazia 1998: 77). Furthermore, while fascism cannot be said to have been strictly anti-Fordist—for one thing, mass-scale production offered obvious advantages when it came to quick militarization—it clearly took over many of the central tenets of “the bourgeois mode of consumption,” such as the subordination of consumption to national goals; fundamental suspicion toward large retailers and preference, albeit largely rhetorical, for small ones; denigration of the supposed deterioration in quality of goods and services associated with massification or the denunciation of “Americanism” (the latter, a point that will be pursued toward the end of the chapter).
In the attempt to curb the expansion of mass consumption, was there not a significant exception in the form of “the people’s car,” the Volkswagen (the name itself was not a Third-Reich innovation, but was mentioned during the 1920s [Möser 1998: 219])? Hitler effusively promoted the mass production of cars that an average German could afford. For that purpose, a special factory was established in Wolfsburg under the aegis of the state, since private industry saw no prospect for profits in a car so priced. Yet the Volkswagen is only a partial exception to the rule we have been outlining. First, the project did not deliver on its promises during the Third Reich. It was based on a weekly saving plan, in which the customer puts aside a sum of five Marks in order to finally obtain the car, at the total price of 990 Marks: “5 Mark die Woche musst Du sparen—willst Du im eigenen Wagen fahren!” (Five marks a week you must save, if you want to drive your own car!) went the advertisement. Four years of savings were therefore needed to obtain the car, a model in which ascetic self-denial was at least as important as the act of consumption proper. It is telling that in his recent critical history of the idea of austerity, Mark Blyth (2013: 132) identifies the mid-20th century German notion of “Erst sparen, dann kaufen!” (First save, then buy!) at its very center. In the end, none of the tens of thousands who invested in the program—of whom only about 5 percent were workers to begin with (Schanetzky 2015: 113)—received a car. The war completely changed the plans—unless of course one was to suspect that it was meant to disrupt them in the first place. Be that as it may, the project was undeniably attractive from a military point of view, since thousands of new cars that could be confiscated for military purposes in times of emergency would have been an asset of some strategic importance. For that reason, the Nazi “support of consumerism in the field of vehicles also had a very real military context” (Möser 1998: 219).8 Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that the car industry of the Third Reich, Volkswagens apart, was decidedly a luxury business, providing extravagant vehicles to a narrow élite of rich and privileged, among them of course the members of the Nazi leadership. Mercedes-Benz’s prestigious models were particularly salient, produced according to a notion of quality, distinct from the mass production that aimed to reduce costs by standardization and leaving out special luxury additions. The prices were accordingly exorbitant. Hitler himself owned several such cars, in which he made spectacular public appearances.
The centrality of consumption for Tooze’s understanding of the Nazi economy becomes evident when one considers how he extrapolates from the domain of militarism to that of consumption. At one point he asserts that “there can be very little doubt that rearmament in the 1930s was as much a popular spectacle as it was a drain on the German standard of living, a form in other words of spectacular public consumption” (Tooze 2008: 164). Popular enthusiasm for the renewed strength of the Wehrmacht, and workers’ pride in producing and handling hugely expensive military equipment, is construed as a manifestation of vicarious consumerism: “Whatever the limitations on the supply of sophisticated consumer goods to civilian society, the Wehrmacht enrolled especially the male population in the collective consumption of the full fruits of industrial modernity” (164). Similarly, one might question Baranowski’s readiness to associate war pillage with “consumption,” referred to above. On such terms, Attila the Hun’s hordes may be described as proto-consumerist, too. If that is “consumerism,” then it clearly has nothing to do with the “little pleasures” of the Last Humans, but rather with orgiastic destruction unleashed by self-proclaimed overmen, a consumerism predicated not on peace, but on war.
Then again, here, perhaps, an avenue is opened through which one might salvage something of the consumerist approach to Nazism, especially in the more insightful way framed by the likes of Tooze and Baranowski, who emphasize the uncanny Nazi linkages between war and consumption. With the aid of Nietzsche, it is possible to draw a distinction between two kinds of consumption that are not only different, but also implacably opposed: the consumption of the Last Humans and that of the blond beast. In On the Genealogy of Morality, as part of an endeavor to facilitate a renaissance of the morality of the masters, Nietzsche famously characterized the noble man as one who freely defines himself, creating and affirming his “goodness” in his own terms, as opposed to the base man of ressentiment who can only define himself in opposition to the nobleman whom he morally vilifies. Yet Nietzsche fully admitted that, dealing with their enemies, particularly foreign ones, these noble men became the most savage conquerors and torturers. What Nietzsche described reads almost as if it were written in anticipation, and confirmation, of Elias’ thesis on Nazism as a “breakdown of civilization.” Shaking off all the inhibitions of civilization, which noble men strictly obey amongst themselves, “they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey in the world outside where the strange, the foreign, begins.” Here, moreover, the nobility, the masters, are seen not simply as a narrow caste, but as a race, a broad collectivity assaulting foreign, weaker ones and, in a sense, consuming at their expense:
There they enjoy freedom from every social constraint, in the wilderness they compensate for the tension which is caused by being closed in and fenced in by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters […]. At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory.
(Nietzsche 1994: 25)
While Nietzsche makes clear that such predatory, noble races, can have different ethnic roots—he mentions “Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings”—in European context they are historically above all of Germanic provenance.
The deep and icy mistrust which the German arouses as soon as he comes to power, which we see again even today—is still the aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries.
(25)
Immediately thereafter Nietzsche stresses that “between the old Germanic peoples and us Germans there is scarcely an idea in common, let alone a blood relationship.” But is this to be understood as a critique of German national chauvinism, as numerous Nietzsche defenders insist? Or is it just as much a taunt, a challenge? The following passage, written some two years earlier, strongly supports the latter possibility. “Could one,” Nietzsche asks (1988, vol. 11: 238),
find this German Reich of interest? Where is the new ideal [Gedanke]? […] Peace and laissez-faire are no politics I hold in respect. To rule and to help the higher ideal to attain victory is the only thing which might interest me in Germany.
At any rate, modern Germans were quick to demonstrate that if imperial aggression, consisting of a “hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture” (Nietzsche 1994: 25) be the measure of nobility, they were not quite as detached from the idea of the blond beast as Nietzsche was prone to assume.
Germanic or otherwise, the blond beast does not appear in isolation in Nietzsche’s discussion; significantly, it is soon followed by the Last Human, albeit without using that exact term. Nietzsche laments the way in which “a tame and civilized animal, a household pet” was bred “out of the beast of prey ‘man,’” and the slaves, those who have done the taming, are now in control. And he leaves little doubt as to where his preferences lie (26):
These […] descendants of all European and non-European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan population—represent the decline of mankind! These “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to man, more a grounds for suspicion of, or an argument against, “culture” in general! We may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the blond beast at the centre of every noble race and remain on our guard: but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned?
We are therefore confronted with two distinct models of consumption: the one massified, peaceful and egalitarian, earning the fascist contempt; the other neo-aristocratic, operating under Nietzsche’s aegis and based on violence, plunder and war. The Nazi aim, seen from this angle, was to decouple material pleasures and consumption from their long-standing association with peace and commerce and affiliate them with war and conquest instead. In Werner Sombart’s (1915) famous dichotomy, the goal was to transfer consumption from the English Händler (merchants) to the German Helden (heroes).
A model of mass leisure and recreation that was acceptable for fascists, indeed avidly driven by them, were the cultural, touristic, sporting and vacation activities organized by the state, notably as part of the huge Nazi enterprise of Kraft durch Freude, in which tens of millions of Germans have taken part in the late 1930s, but also the after-work activities and events of the Italian variant, the dopolavoro. Prima facie, the KdF at least, being infinitely more ambitious than the dopolavoro, seems to fly in the face of Nietzsche’s elitist invectives against the Last Humans and vouch for a strongly opposing, populist Nazi tendency to gratify average and below-average wage earners. Indeed, what could be further removed from Zarathustra’s strictures against the little pleasures of the masses than the massive campaigns to cater to the tastes of the common Aryan and satisfy his appetites for travel, sight-seeing and cultural edification, often done in explicit espousal of egalitarianism and proud claims to having transcended class snobbery? Indeed, as already discussed in the former chapter, many historians have regarded the KdF as evidence of the Volksgemeinschaft’s radical break with the class rigidity underlying both conservative and capitalist politics. However, deeper scrutiny of both its intellectual provenance and its social goals reveals the conservative, rather than radical, nature of the KdF. Indeed, such a closer look exposes the KdF, alongside the concomitant organization of Robert Ley’s German Labour Front (DAF), the Schönheit der Arbeit (SdA, Beauty of Labor), as a profoundly Nietzschean project.
While the KdF and SdA can be construed as a partial fascist accommodation to consumerist motifs, they were more fundamentally modes of channeling mass recreation in ways that harmonized with the regimes’ ideologies and served their purposes, diverting the masses away from consumption9: the emphasis was placed not on buying power and individual choices, but on strengthening the bond between the people, homeland and national heritage, achieved through spending time in natural surroundings, concerts and other happenings that highlighted the achievements of German culture and so on. Enjoyable as these activities were, they were undertaken under the grim shadow of militarism and fitted its ambitions: physical exercise was also meant to steel the people for the imminent war effort. The very term, “strength through joy,” indicates the instrumental view it implied of joy per se, and the real order of priorities underpinning the enterprise. As nicely put by Hermann Weiß (1993: 302) in a very useful short overview of the KdF’s history, activities, and rationale, “The defining factor of the National Socialist vacation-politics was not regeneration, but socialization.” Moreover, such activities were, to a large extent, a continuation of decidedly anti-modern and anti-consumerist traditions, notably the conservative Wandervogel youth movement, founded in the late 1890s, with its stress on a necessary return to nature, away from decadent urban life.
In many ways, the activities of the KdF and SdA were meant as forceful antidotes to consumerism, substituting non-commercial recreation for actual buying, removing advertisements from the shop floors, promoting a “straightforward rejection of materialism,” (Baranowski 2004: 143) and, in general, aiming to show that the workers’ standard of living could be enhanced spiritually and culturally, rather than materially, and that low wages were no hindrance to their well-being. The latter point is crucial in grasping the main difference between the Nazi model of “consumerism”—if that name is at all applicable—and its competitors, the American Fordist variant and the socialist one. Both of these, albeit parting from radically different political perspectives, advocated greater workers’ buying power.
As for organized labour, the demand for higher wages was inextricable from the demand for fewer working hours. As Mary Nolan observed,
Social democrats and trade unionists viewed mass consumption as necessary but […] encountered staunch capitalist resistance to their proposals for mass-consumption in the earliest stage of the debate about Fordism and rationalization, and would continue to encounter it throughout the late 1920s.
(Nolan 1994: 118)
In his critique of the austerity measures advocated by German industry during the 1920s, the influential Social Democrat and trade unionist Fritz Tarnow argued that “the economic recipe of working more and consuming less is just as sensible as ordering a fever patient to take aspirin tablets and then lie naked in the snow” (In Nolan 1994: 53). Rhetoric of honoring labor aside, the Nazis strove to achieve the exact opposite: keeping wages low and increasing working hours, which was precisely what German business was insisting should be done throughout the years of the Weimar Republic.10
The ambivalence, or rather double purpose, characteristic of the KdF and the SdA, the willingness to concede in order better to control, is by no means a departure from a supposed Nietzschean intransigence; far from it, it corresponds quite closely to Nietzsche’s own stick-and-carrot approach to the workers: while denying any degree whatsoever of workers’ autonomy and self-determination vis-à-vis the masters, he had shown himself at various points not averse to the idea of social policies taking into consideration the needs of the workers in order to pacify them into compliance and further subordination, assuring the long-term endurance of social hierarchy. The following passage, where Nietzsche criticizes naked exploitation of labour for the way in which it exacerbates class hostilities, perhaps best encapsulates this pacify-and-conquer scheme:
What we now refer to as justice, is from this point of view a highly refined usefulness, which does not take in consideration only the present moment and exploits the opportunity, but rather reflects with responsibility on the lasting consequences, therefore taking care of the well-being of the worker as well, of his physical and spiritual satisfaction, in order that he and his descendants will continue to work for our descendants, and will be available for a longer period of time than a single individual’s life. The exploitation of the worker was, as one now understands, a stupidity, a ruthless enterprise at the cost of the future, which endangered society.
(Nietzsche 1988, vol. 2: 681–682)
These observations, in a book published in 1880, registered fundamental agreement with the double-strategy employed by Bismarck at roughly the same time: welfare measures, on the one hand, combined with the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878. Yet the continued thriving of socialism underground and the refusal of the workers to abandon their radical aspirations, resulted in disillusion with the conciliatory path. Towards the end of the 1880s Nietzsche lamented the very weakness that allowed “The labour question” to become one at all, since “about certain things one does not ask questions: first imperative of instinct.” The European worker, Nietzsche continued,
finds himself far too well placed not to go on asking for more, or to ask more and more impudently. After all, he has the great majority on his side. […] But what does one want?—to ask it again. If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.
(Nietzsche 1990: 106)
One of the most promising solutions Nietzsche envisaged to this conundrum was a restructuring of employer-worker relations along military lines, where instead of the mediocre and uninspiring industrial boss, charismatic figures would take over capable of drilling the workers while simultaneously winning their trust and obedience.
On the lack of noble manners.—Soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So far at least, culture that rests on a military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture […]. The manufacturers and entrepreneurs of business probably have been too deficient so far in all those forms and signs of a higher race that alone make a person interesting. If the nobility of birth showed in their eyes and gestures, there might not be any socialism of the masses.
(Nietzsche 1974: 107)
Elsewhere he put forth the proposition that “workers should learn to feel like soldiers” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 12: 350). These ideas became the bread and butter of the DAF ideology, which was centered precisely on the claim of a quasi-military camaraderie uniting workers and employers. “Then and today—we remain comrades” proclaimed a 1933 DAF propaganda poster showing a worker and an engineer holding hands, while in the backdrop a silhouette of two helmeted soldiers drives home the message of a strife-free war community still in vigor.
Quite in the spirit of Nietzsche’s propositions, DAF propaganda emphasized the mutual bond between a genuine industrial leader and his workers, and the notion that the boss was not—or was no longer under National Socialism—a greedy exploiter bent on private profit, but a committed member of the Volksgemeinschaft working toward the common good of the nation, who deserves obedience and loyalty. The proper employer-worker relationship, established under Nazism, was thus the one between a leader (Führer) and his followers (Gefolgschaft) requiring discipline and readiness to sacrifice. In a DAF publication, the indefatigable pedagogue and propagandist Karl Arnhold asserted that under Nazism the essential transformation had taken place from the anonymous industrial “management” of the Weimar Republic years, where narrow-minded materialism and class struggle between mere “employers” and “employees” were rife, to the present condition in which proper industrial leaders (Betriebsführer) earn the due allegiance of their Gefolgschaft (Arnhold 1938: 33). In another publication, Arnhold (1939) drew a direct analogy between military service and labour achievement, speaking about “the commitment of the soldiers of labour.” The leader-principle was upheld not just in the workplace, but also during tours and excursions, where vacationers were repeatedly reminded of their duty to obey the directives of the tour guides, behave in a disciplined way and, in general, like good Aryans, make their personal wishes subordinate to the collective purpose (Baranowski 2004: 138).
Nietzsche’s legacy, it is important to clarify, was not restricted to creating a general intellectual climate that came to infuse National Socialism (a process that in itself is a highly significant one, to be sure). The analogies drawn above between the philosopher’s ideas and the ideology of the DAF are more than simple affinities; they should be seen as a culmination of a very real line, leading from Nietzsche’s texts to National Socialist labour policies. The key intermediary link here is the Dinta Institute (German Institute for Technical Labour Training), founded in 1925 by the aforementioned Karl Arnhold and a group of Ruhr industrialists at the head of which stood Albert Vögler, later one of Hitler’s financers, in order to try to change labour relations and draw the workers away from socialism and communism. The organization was welcomed by the managers into numerous firms and was quickly becoming so pervasive as to elicit the following alarmed observation from Social Democrat Fritz Fricke:
A great enveloping assault by German industrialists on the soul of the German worker is in progress. The goal of this attack consists in nothing less than a complete restructuring of the mentality of millions of male and female workers.
(In Nolan 1994: 179)
Among the main intellectual influences behind Dinta were the brothers Ernst and August Horneffer, both of whom were leading exponents of Nietzscheanism. They worked at the Nietzsche Archive and edited the philosopher’s Nachlass, and Ernst had delivered the funeral oration at Nietzsche’s grave in 1900. They espoused Nietzsche’s elitism and contempt at materialism, and tried early on to find ways to wean the German workers off their consumerist ambitions and political aspirations and integrate them, fully re-educated, into a reborn Germany.11 Another key player in Dinta’s inception was Oswald Spengler—himself profoundly indebted to Nietzsche of course—who impinged on Arnhold’s ideas.
Many of the supposedly most distinctive innovations of the KdF and SdA were in fact organically linked to Dinta—beatifying of the work environment, after-work “community” activities, promotion of a new work ethic and so on—and thus not only to the Weimar Republic, but also specifically to the efforts of German industry to integrate and disarm the workers (cf. Mason 1997: 162). During the Third Reich, Dinta and many of its key ideologists, including Arnhold and the Horneffer brothers, were smoothly integrated into the new regime. In 1934 Ernst published a short book explaining how Nietzsche had been a forerunner of Nazism (Horneffer 1934). The seamless absorption of Dinta into the DAF is indicative of a very important point, which is often marginalized by discussions of the Volksgemeinschaft: far from representing an introduction of socialism or even egalitarianism into German society, the Nazi work and consumption policy signified in many ways a continuation of initiatives originally made by German capitalists. Somewhat amusingly, in fact, as Baranowski recounts (2004: 108), Karl Arnhold found cause to disagree with the Nazis not on account of going too far in placating the workers, but because he found them too lenient towards the employers, preferring to persuade them via patient aesthetic means, whereas he would have better liked straightforward indoctrination. In the final account, thus, Peter Stearns’s (2006: 73) judgment appears quite sound, claiming that the KdF was “an alternative to any significant consumer gains,” and that the dopolavoro movement “was designed to wean workers […] from both socialism and consumerism.”
It is possible to question the extent to which the fascist recoil from consumerism was specifically an anti-mass move, an attack on the Last Humans and their horizontally distributed happiness; might it not have been part of a general alternative ethos, embracing Spartan and ascetic values, in a way which affects the masses, certainly, but not them alone or especially, but society as a whole, including the elites? If fascists abhor comfort and luxuries, why should they make an exception of the common people? Yet here as elsewhere it would be a mistake to take fascist rhetoric at face value. In reality, behind the attacks on consumerism conducted by the fascists, their leaders and their entourages conducted lives that were often extravagant. The demand to settle for little and make sacrifices in times of economic hardship was broadcast to the masses but did not form a binding code of behavior as far as the upper circles were concerned. It was seen how the Nazi bigwigs vied with each other for the acquisition of enormously valuable art collections; and this was no isolated instance. It reflected, rather, the general glamour and comfort to which they treated themselves. Many details on these various pleasures are provided by Fabrice d’Almeida in his exploration of Nazi highlife. While Nazi propaganda disseminated an image of the leaders as simple men, with modest habits like those of the people, reality was very different. For example, Hitler and Ribbentrop had billiard rooms, and Göring was fond of astonishing his guests by showing them a room entirely dedicated to miniature trains. The French ambassador reported that in order to make a strong impression on him,
one of Göring’s nephews asked Göring to start up ‘the French train.’ The marshal approached the table and threw several switches. Then François-Poncet saw an aeroplane attached to a wire fly over the train and drop a small bomb with an explosive cap that made the train go off the rails.
(d’Almeida 2008: 132)
This was, without a doubt, an emphatic way of combining luxury consumption with properly heroic and manly virtues. During the war, when ordinary Germans had to tighten their belt and reduce their daily calorie intake, the Führer was described by official propaganda as satisfied with modest portions, and newsreels showed him eating his soup standing, like the common soldier. In fact, his doctors’ reports indicate that Hitler was gaining weight at the time (d’Almeida 2008: 208). Many other historians, among them Claudia Koonz, drew attention to the deceit involved in the public image of Hitler and his cohorts as ascetic people, giving up, for Germany’s sake, the pleasures of this world. One poster presented Hitler sitting on a bench, in natural surroundings, laughing. The caption explained this to the readers:
Relaxation. Far from the noise and disorder of the cities, here the Führer recovers from the stress of the struggle. In the broad meadow near his little house, he reads opponents’ newspapers. How he laughs at the tales of his champagne cellar, Jewish mistresses, luxurious villa, and French funding.
“In fact,” Koonz (2003: 78) comments, “Hitler enjoyed a sumptuous lifestyle but hid from public view his luxury automobiles, private art collection, and lavishly furnished homes.”
The double standard in the Nazi attitude to consumerism—preaching against the search for comfort of the common citizen while the upper-classes lead a profligate, neo-aristocratic existence—was well represented in the propaganda against the alleged lack of patriotism of spoiled middle-class characters, as in the caricatures that were distributed in Austria in 1942, depicting Frau Keppelmeier and Herrn Semperer—from the verbs keppeln and sempern, to criticize and to complain in the Austrian and Bavarian slang. These figures were shown, for example, rushing to the black markets to satisfy their hedonist whims.12
In reality, the true profiteers from the black market were not, as suggested here, typical middle-class individuals, for they did not have high enough incomes to cope with the soaring prices of unofficial markets. Those who could avail themselves of black-market goods even at such costs were the members of the tiny circle of the truly rich, both of the pre-war society and the new rich in and around the Nazi party’s highest echelons. In his methodical dismantling of Aly’s notion of “popular good life” at the expense of the bourgeoisie during the Third Reich and the war, Christoph Buchheim reaches the opposite conclusion: that the income gulf that already existed during the 1930s between the “highest earning one percent of the population” and “the mass of the German people” directly expressed itself during the war in their respective consumption levels (Buchheim 2010: 324). Apart from the sheer income gap, protection and corruption were significant as well in making the war a much more agreeable time for the privileged upper class. Buchheim (323) tells an anecdote concerning a certain luxury food shop in Berlin that was investigated in 1942 for irregularities, in the process discovering that “big quantities of delicacies were delivered without the necessary food stamps to a whole series of ministers, heads of police and presiding judges, as well as other prominent individuals.” Amongst the greatest beneficiaries was Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, to whose household were supplied enormous quantities of various high-quality provisions. In order to avoid a public outrage, the affair was handled discreetly, which in that case meant that no prominent buyers were harmed, and only the shop owner was arrested for investigation and committed suicide. One is reminded of Zarathustra’s defiant affirmation: “The best belongs to me and mine; and if we are not given it, we take it: the best food, the purest sky, the most robust thoughts, the fairest women!” (Nietzsche 1969: 296). Far from ushering in an egalitarian Germany, the war, Buchheim concludes (328), “cemented the elevated position of the upper layer” and “created new, and sometimes unexpected, dividing lines.”
In concluding the discussion of fascism and consumption—the focus here was mainly on Nazism, but it should be emphasized again that this choice is justified since this is the variant of fascism that has been most insistently associated with consumerism—there seems to be ample reason to distance oneself from the consumerist interpretation of fascism. Particularly in its objective form, but also in its subjective ones, the consumerist interpretation has difficulties in grasping the specificity of fascism which more traditional approaches were better able to capture, regarding it as a sharp reaction against mass consumerism. In spite of its vast ambitions, the new approach does not do enough to justify a fundamental revision of such traditional views. A more productive interpretation could perhaps emerge, however, were the consumerist view as it currently stands to be boosted by a distinction between the consumption of the blond beast and that of the Last Humans. While fascism was strongly opposed to mass consumption within the framework of a peaceful, democratic and egalitarian society, it was considerably more willing to countenance “consumerist” practices, if they may indeed still be called such, which were predicated on aggression, national and racial aggrandizement, war and conquest—a consumerism, in other words, that shifts its center of gravity from peaceful enjoyment to the ecstatic sensation of power. Nietzsche, once again, is very useful in drawing a sharp demarcation line between the life-denying welfare signified by socialism and the exciting alternative based on the redeeming quality of pain:
To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief—and in the last analysis socialists and politicians of all parties have no right to promise their people more than that—or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet, … making new galaxies of joy flare up.
(Nietzsche 1974: 86)
But such an alternative conceptualization would not signify a simple fine-tuning; it would alter the very prism through which fascism is seen: no longer as a plebeian-driven movement busily catering to the masses, as the consumerist interpretation habitually suggests, but as a Nietzschean one, aiming at an aristocratic renaissance to terminate the reign of the Last Humans.
In Chapter 2 we have seen how one of the loci of the critiques of mass society was its identification, on the part of conservatives, with developments grouped under the title “Americanism,” which included, among other things, cultural democratization, expansion of consumerism and a symbolic undermining of canonic culture. Fascism largely inherited this discourse. Hitler, for example, shared the conviction that Europe and Germany were culturally superior vis-à-vis affluent but philistine America:
[T]he German Reich has two hundred and seventy opera houses—a standard of cultural existence of which they over there have no conception. They have clothes, food, cars and a badly constructed house but with a refrigerator! This sort of thing does not impress us. I might, with as much reason, judge the cultural level of the sixteenth century by the appearance of the water-closets of the time—an apartment which was not then regarded as of particular importance! […] To sum it up, the Americans live like sows—in a most luxurious sty!
(Hitler 2000: 605)
Europe was often presented by conservatives as the beleaguered fortress of culture and the old world, inveighed upon by the new, collective spirit, emanating in unison from West and East alike, from both capitalist America—Europeans generally found little cause to disagree with the United States’ appropriation of an entire continent’s title—and communist USSR, whose common denominator seemed broader than the diverging aspects. This trope was also taken over by fascism. As expressed in 1935 by Martin Heidegger, by that time formally a Nazi philosopher:
This Europe, […] lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same […]. [W]hen time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?
(Heidegger 2000: 40)
As an alternative to such worldwide degeneration, in which Americanism and communism jointly lead the way in “the reduction of human beings to a mass,” Heidegger (41) summoned the Germans, “the metaphysical people,” to a spiritual reawakening, that will allow it to break free of the American-Bolshevik “pincers.” This spiritual revival was envisioned as the profound essence and mission of National Socialism. The analogy drawn between the United States and the USSR and the presentation of Germany as embodying a sublime cultural content, was wholly in line with Nazi propaganda of the same years (cf. Zimmerman 1992: 86). During the Second World War, in 1942, Heidegger ascribed to Germany the task of enacting the role of a modern Greece, protecting the heritage of the West from the United States, whose civilization is a shallow, rootless and non-historical concoction of “the bourgeois democratic sprit” and “Christianity” (Tertulian 1992: 224). And comparable positions were defended by many other fascist intellectuals, such as the Italian Julius Evola (1995: 357), who wrote about the mass danger represented by the “communist world and America, […] persuaded of a having a universal mission to accomplish.” The similarities between these two countries were so great, that Evola—“a vociferous pro-Nazi fascist” (Griffin 2007: 39)—believed they could be seen as “two faces of the same coin” (Evola 1995: 356). In a strange confirmation of the clichéd, standardized and repetitive nature of the narrative of individuality and originality, he claimed, in a manner nearly identical to Heidegger, that “Russia and America are like two ends of the same pair of pincers, that are closing in from the East and the West around the nucleus of ancient Europe” (344). This conviction reappeared with different stresses, but nearly always revolving around the idea that both communism and Americanism are united by their massification. “What in Bolshevism was programmed” as a “systematic activation of the masses, in America found its equivalent long ago but on a larger scale and in a spontaneous form” (356). America was therefore deemed an even greater menace than Bolshevism, since it reflected the masses’ own desires rather than a top-bottom phenomenon. America thus represents “a mankind that accepts and even wants to be what it is, that feels healthy, free, and strong and that implements the same tendencies as communism” (356). Or, consider the following dismissal of mass culture qua communist in spirit:
In the early days of Bolshevism somebody formulated the ideal of a cacophonous, collectivist music […]. This is what America has realized on a large scale and spread all over the world through a very significant phenomenon: jazz. In the ballrooms of American cities where hundreds of couples shake like epileptic and automatic puppets to the sounds of black music, what is awakened is truly a “mass state” and the life of a mechanized collective entity.
(355)
Drieu La Rochelle, the fervent French Nietzschean, was long convinced that communism and Americanism are intimately interconnected. “Ford and Lenin,” he wrote, “are like two miners who are pick-axing their way toward one another along two dark tunnels” (In Soucy 1979: 126). A similar belief that America and communism were interchangeable and that the former represented the ultimate adversary of Europe and Germany was expressed in the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps, in the aforementioned article addressing Americanism. There, too, the attack on the Last Humans permeates virtually every line. Americanism consists of a complete trumping of political and national duty by a reckless pleasure-seeking, an orgy of mass culture orchestrated by the conniving Jew, which could only be resisted by the National Socialist mobilization of “a common Germanic will, a common European will”:
Americanism […] leads those who fall prey to it away from political thinking, away from responsibility, even to their nation, away from decency, even from national decency. […] Americanism is a splendid method of depoliticization. The Jews have used jazz and movies, magazines and smut, gangsterism and free love, and every perverse desire, to keep the American people so distracted that they pay no attention to their own fate. Even in politics, they are no longer influenced by the head, only by what is under the belt.13
For the Nazi author Adolf Halfeld, writing in 1941, the United States was the country which had “cultivated in its ideal purity the modern mass man,” (Halfeld 1941: 168) and which stood at the vanguard of a leveling attack on the spiritual foundations of Europe (20–21). Already in 1927 Halfeld was writing extensively on the dangers of American mass society, engaged in nothing less than a “transvaluation of all values” (Halfeld 1927: 121, 146). That this cultural subversion was clearly not the one Nietzsche had in mind but its very opposite, becomes perfectly clear when the author cites Nietzsche’s early criticism of German materialism in the aftermath of the foundation of the Reich, as relevant for 20th-century America. And to similar views, another important fascist thinker, Carl Schmitt, continued to adhere even after the demise of fascism. Writing in 1952, he criticized the masses of both the American West and the Soviet East for clinging fast to the Last Humans’ philosophy of history, at the center of which stand the belief in progress and material welfare:
The masses however are not interested in such doubts and probably consider the fragmentation of the concept of progress a mere sophist talk on the part of a decadent intelligentsia. They persist by their ideal […] of a unified world, proclaimed by Lenin, when he talked about the unity of an electrified earth. Here, Eastern and Western beliefs converge. Both claim to be the true humanity, the true democracy. And they have the same origins, in the philosophy of history of the 18th and 19th centuries. […] West and East are today separated by an Iron Curtain but the waves and corpuscles of a common philosophy of history penetrate the curtain and form the imperceptible unity.
(Schmitt 1995: 503)
In all this, the fundamental contours of Nietzsche’s geopolitical vision appear vindicated. At one point, Nietzsche (1988, vol. 11: 584) preached the need for Europe to overcome petty state feuds, discard “the rule of ‘public opinion’ and of parliament,” close ranks with England and its colonies, and coalesce into an empire that will be able to contend for world supremacy. Against whom will the fight for “the government of the Earth” be waged? Nietzsche merely stated, cryptically, that “it is self-evident against whom this battle will be directed.” Elsewhere, however, he provided us with what looks like a vital clue, when pointing out the urgency of an alliance with Russia, and adding (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 11: 239): “No American future! […] I don’t think we wish to constrain ourselves within neither Christian nor American perspectives.”14 That Nietzsche would have found a Bolshevik, as opposed to a Czarist Russia, just as little attractive as Christianity and Americanism, if not in fact more repellent, may be safely assumed. When these propositions are compared with the future course taken by the Nazi bid to unite Europe, the single major difference that stands out—a very substantial one, certainly—is Nietzsche’s conviction that the supposed financial wizardry of the Jews will not be an obstacle to an imperial Europe but its indispensable ally: “We also absolutely need the most skillful money men, the Jews, in order to obtain mastery of the Earth” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 11: 238). One might object that the war with England also departed from Nietzsche’s “script,” but it should be remembered that Hitler was keen to obtain British acquiescence with his plans, was willing to respect the integrity of the British Empire as long as it accepted the new German empire, and blamed Churchill alone (apart from Jewish influence, of course) for undermining these prospects.15 “I will not experience it myself,” Hitler reputedly said in September 1941, “but I am happy for the German people, that it will one day see England and Germany unite to take on the USA.” Uncannily reproducing Nietzsche’s scheme, the Führer went on to affirm the philosopher’s pan-European and anti-American vision: “If one considers together the creative powers slumbering in the European space—in Germany, England, the Nordic countries, France, Italy—then one has to say: compared to that, what are the American possibilities?” (Picker 2003: 95–96)
Alongside these struggles against the egalitarian and democratic implications of mass society, the fascists enthusiastically took over techniques of advertising and suggestion developed by public relations experts, which they then deftly employed for their anti-mass and bellicose goals. Goebbels, the propaganda master, was apparently greatly influenced by the methods devised by Edward Bernays, who is regarded as the great pioneer in the field of public relations and the attempt to shape public opinion via carefully staged campaigns and gimmicks. In his autobiography, Bernays (1965: 652), a Jew and Freud’s nephew, recalled how amazed he was to learn that Goebbels took inspiration from his books in his campaigns against the Jews.16 In Mein Kampf, Hitler expected political propaganda to conduct itself according to the same criteria which one uses when promoting ordinary consumer goods:
What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as “good”?
We would only shake our heads.
Exactly the same applies to political advertising.
The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.
(Hitler 1999: 182)
In that regard, the fascists were entitled to see themselves as faithful disciples of Gustave Le Bon, the avowed connoisseur of the mass psyche. Yet it should not be forgotten that Le Bon considered such knowledge a useful means to combat the ascendancy of the crowds, and provide their leaders with tools which will allow them as far possible to control and neutralize them. “To whom,” asked Hitler (179), “should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.” And yet, as we have seen, Nazi propaganda harvested its greatest success precisely among the educated classes, those considered immune to manipulation, while the allegedly susceptible masses proved significantly more resilient.
How did fascism stand with relation to other important facets of mass society? It generally applied a twofold strategy of rejection, on the one hand, with selective appropriation, on the other hand. In that way those massified aspects that disturbed the fascists were repressed or eliminated, while other aspects, of “national” or elitist potential, were absorbed into fascist practice, often in exacerbated form.
The fascists made a great investment in sport, for example. Like all other political regimes in the 20th century, sport was widely employed by fascism for propaganda purposes and self-aggrandizement. Yet it identified in sport several aspects which were particularly favorable from its point of view: the stress on a healthy and well exercised body dovetailed to perfection with the ideal of the soldier, prepared at all times for military action. Thus, on the one hand, the Spanish fascist Ernesto Giménez Caballero lamented the way “international” modern sports, such as golf, tennis and particularly boxing and football, increasingly displace the hallowed “national” ritual of bullfighting, which seemed to him to be undergoing a process of “decadence.” “With the French Revolution, in the modern age,” he argued, bullfighting “ceases being aristocratic and becomes bourgeois, gets plebeianized” (Giménez Caballero 2005: 12). On the other hand, however, he identified the redeeming aspect of modern sport in its converse effect of enhancing national pride and in its potential contribution to military prowess (10):
I do not know why Unamuno has insisted so much against football. When the majority of Spain’s boys will possess the sufficient vigour that sport demands, things of some importance can take place. In case war starts, for one thing, they will not go to it, as happened in Morocco a few years ago,17 out of sorts, intimidated, ridiculous. Maybe they will seek to confirm in other spheres the fortitude which they feel today on the sporting field. If there was of late an encouraging international politics, we owe it to the footballers, who have given a new respect, a new impulse, to the word Spain.
International tournaments likewise corresponded to the fascist belief in the necessity of competition over primacy among the nations and the races, and achievement at such competitions was seen as indicative of the nation’s value and its rank—a dimension, certainly, which preceded fascism and continues, albeit in milder forms, in our own times.
An interesting example of the fascist concept of sport is provided by someone who was not strictly speaking a fascist, Richard Washburn Child, the United States’ ambassador in Italy from 1921 to 1924. Child was a keen supporter of Mussolini and advocate of fascist politics and culture on the international arena. His affinity with Italian fascism and intimacy with the highest echelons of the regime was such that in 1928 he even ghost-wrote Mussolini’s My Autobiography, which was published serially in the United States. In June 1923 he delivered a speech in Rome in which he sang the praises of the new political order. Mussolini was struck by the way the ambassador’s words “reveal an exact understanding of the phenomenon and of our movement,” a fact that was all the more remarkable since most strangers, he said, cannot fully comprehend fascism. “You, Mr. Ambassador,” Mussolini affirmed (1923: 341),
constitute the most brilliant exception to this rule. Your discourse, I say, contains all the philosophy of Fascismo and of the Fascismo endeavour, interwoven with an exaltation of strength, of beauty, of discipline, of authority, and of the sense of responsibility.
Interesting in the present context is the way Child underscored the importance of sport in attesting to national vigour, cohesion and obedience to the leader:
It is a fact which goes almost unnoticed, that the training of masses of youth in the spirit of discipline and fair competition and of loyalty to a cause is largely to be found in athletic games. It is a fact which almost always is forgotten, that nations of history or those of to-day which have engaged in athletic games are the strong nations, and those which have had no athletics are the weak nations. […] There must be a voluntary submission to discipline and absolute loyalty to a captain in order to avoid the humiliation of disorganisation and defeat. Athletic games are not for the weak and complaining, but for the strong and for the lovers of fair play. Finally, they furnish oft-repeated lessons of the truth that when flesh and muscles and material agencies seem about to fail, human will and human spirit can work miracles of victory.
(339–340)
Italy won the football world cup twice during the 1930s, and hosted the 1934 tournament, assiduously propagated and exploited by Mussolini, who was indifferent to the game itself but not to its wider implications (Cavallaro 2009). During the quarter-final match of the 1938 tournament, held in France, the Italian players even wore the black shirts. In 1936 Germany, the triumph of boxer Max Schmeling over the black American Joe Louis was widely celebrated; two years later, during the re-match which saw Louis beat Schmeling in a first round knockout, the disappointed Nazis interrupted the broadcast. The famous apex of the fascist employment of sport for international vindication was the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. Germany finished at the top of the medal-winners list, earning 33 medals more than the country ranked second, yet the dazzling success was somewhat marred by the many achievements of black American athletes, especially the four Gold medals harvested by sprinter Jesse Owens, as if in defiance of the theory of Aryan superiority.
Fascists therefore harnessed existing sports for their specific goals, while loading them with added meanings: national, racial, imperial. Certain sports fitted particularly well the fascist ethos, underlining the way it strove to rekindle illustrious past traditions such as hunting, especially promoted by Göring, “Reich Master of the Hunt,” and horse-riding, which involved the breeding of fine animals, in a way which tallied with racial improvement ideology, and corroborated the claim of the Nazi élite to form a new nobility (D’Almeida 2008: 123–125, 168). These sports revolved around the motifs of physical struggle and risk taking, which explains the fascist attraction to another sport—motor racing. Here the Futurist fixation on speed and dynamism could find a fitting outlet. Italian fascism went to considerable length in this direction when, under the initiative of Alessandro Pavolini—one of the most brutal and excessive figures in the fascist leadership, who was also one of the better educated: his father was a famous linguist and he himself an outstanding student—the regime revived the ancient renaissance tradition of Calcio fiorentino, a form of pre-modern football, pronouncedly aristocratic and violent, in which skill and finesse are marginal. It is still played several times a year today, and remains particularly appreciated by right-wing and conservative circles: a 2012 contest in Florence gave rise to a public outcry after one of the players boasted a Neo-Nazi tattoo.
Fascist use of sport was thus both similar and different to that made elsewhere. Perhaps the main distinction to be noted is the fact that, unlike its common function in mass society, sport under fascism was not a surrogate for war and violence, a way of adding spice to everyday life by way of escapism, the vicarious participation of mass spectators in agonistic exploits and a “quest for excitement” (Elias and Dunning 2008). In modern sport, too, a civilizing process is observable, towards greater sublimation and regulation of violence, largely if imperfectly internalized by players and spectators alike. Even the long-term retreat in the West of a sport once so popular as boxing, nowadays considered by many as barbaric, seems to confirm the general trend, although such a decline gained in momentum especially after the period we are addressing in this study (Grasso 2014: 522). Modern sport still contains, of course, highly popular games which are markedly rough, for example rugby, yet even here a tendency to delimit violence has historically asserted itself (Elias and Dunning 2008: 227–229). For fascism, on the contrary, one of the main purposes of sport was to prepare and habituate the population to war and violence. In Italy, via Mussolini’s image as an avid athlete and aviator relishing extreme physical challenges, sport was conceived as corresponding to the Nietzschean injunction to “live dangerously” (Pivato 2005, vol. 2: 662). If, as we have seen, Giménez Caballero (2005: 13) saluted modern sport in so far as it boosts military potential, he equally protested against the way the plebs dilute the barabaric, cruel and sanguinary aspect of bullfighting, “drifting away from the idea of danger,” and introducing into the ancient, tragic event, a comic and pathetic element, which “only the rabble finds amusing.” Fascism—Calcio fiorentino being perhaps the best example—tapped the past precisely for pre-civilized resources, harking back to epochs and traditions in which violence was not yet as closely monitored and stigmatized as in modern mass society. Italian fascists approached sport “in more or less paramilitary terms,” rather than seeing it as an end in itself; they were therefore troubled when athletes and champions became celebrated in terms worthy of real heroes, truly contributing to national greatness. Similarly problematic from a fascist point of view was the commercialization of sport which resulted in audiences “passively” consuming mass sporting spectacles. (See Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 240–242, 276.) The latter point compares very interestingly with Elias’s suggestion that one of the most characteristic developments of the civilizing process and its concomitant “humanization” is the fact that, with increasing regulation of violence and inhibitions placed on physical expression, pleasure becomes in general a much more visual experience, proper of the spectator. This applies to spectator sports as well as to the cinema: “in a similar way to the ear, or perhaps even more so,” wrote Elias (2000: 171) in the late 1930s, the eye “has become a mediator of pleasure.” It is highly unlikely that this was written with Marx in mind, yet the elective affinity with the latter’s youthful vision of a state in which, with increasing social emancipation, the senses themselves are humanized is striking nonetheless:
The suppression of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes […]. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object […]. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. […] Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crude non-human eye, the human ear in a different way from the crude ear, etc.
(Marx 1992: 352)
Fascism, for its part, aimed to restore the immediacy of violent and “crude” physical experience, and reverse the modern process of humanization and sublimation. An important forerunner of this de-surrogating, as he was of other fascist tendencies, was Ernst Jünger. Writing in 1922, Jünger had recognized, so to speak with Elias, the way that modern mass entertainment supplants the violence of the past; he, too, realized the process whereby the eye replaces the hand. Yet for him this was precisely a reason to resist sublimation and inhibition and call for an unleashing of the passions:
In sites where the people are looking for intensified life, in every funfair, every amusement-park, it is horror which attracts, painted on the screen with lurid colors. Lust murders, executions, wax bodies covered with purulent boils, a long series of anatomical atrocities: he who puts this on display knows the mass and fills the purse. Often and long did I stand in front of such dens and examine the faces of those coming out. There was almost always a laughter, yet one which sounded too strangely embarrassed and constrained. What did this laughter conceal? And why did I stand there? Was it not my craving for horror? The craving of children and the populace is foreign to no one.
(Jünger 1980: 18–19)
From these observations, Jünger proceeded immediately to justify war, presented as a direct realization of the repressed desires of the human, better said male, psyche. “The baptism of fire!” he enthused. “Oh, the hearts of men, capable of such emotion!” From a (proto)-fascist perspective, thus, the whole point is for the hand to follow the eye. Satisfying themselves for any length of time with sheepish laughter is not for real men but for the Last Humans, those who Jünger, as will be recalled, will pronounce dead in 1934.
* * *
In 1908, the cultural critic Werner Sombart, who began his career as an important Weberian sociologist and ended it endorsing the “German socialism” ushered in by the Third Reich (he died in 1941), wrote an article lamenting the eroding egalitarianism brought about by democratic capitalism. Reflecting widespread dejection amongst the German Bildungsbürgertum, he decried the spread of mass culture, “the collectivization of consumption,” the “leveling-down” caused by universal, simplifying education, and the fact that Berlin has declined into a mere suburb of New York, which itself, with its traffic, theaters and amusement parks, was a “a big graveyard of culture.” The main culprit in all this was in his eyes “the mass,” which had signified “the end of the Volk’s forms of life [volkstümlichen Lebensformen].” Using strikingly Nietzschean terms less than ten years after Nietzsche’s death, Sombart equated the mass with “the proletarian transvaluation of all values” (In Bollenbeck 1999: 166). Soon enough, however, forces came to power, first in Italy and then in Germany that were able to stop the rot. Combining direct attack with more sophisticated tactics of appropriation and neutralization, the fascists made sure that, for as they long as they reigned, the Last Humans will not march on.
1The discussion of fascism and consumption is a revised and extended version of materials that were first published as the following essay: Ishay Landa, “‘A Shower of Hail to All Orchards’: On the Consumerist Interpretation of National Socialism,” Dapim, Studies on the Holocaust, 2017.
2Aly’s approach was also repeatedly chastised for its crude materialism, neglecting the ideological sources—anti-Semitism, fervent nationalism, etc.—for the support given to the Nazis. For one example, see Friedlander (2007). This, however, is a point which need not concern us in the present context.
3For his influential original intervention, see Tooze (2005).
4See also Wirsching (2014). A similar argument distinguishing the objective reality of consumer scarcity under Nazism from the subjective commitment to increasing consumption is advanced in Schanetzky (2015: 3–4, 19, 69–71).
5In the first chapter of her study of Nazi “consumerism,” Shelley Baranowski in fact usefully summarizes those main sources of Nazi rejection of consumerism. One of the subsections of this chapter is instructively titled “Taming Mass Consumption: Nazism’s ‘German’ Capitalism” (Baranowski 2004: 25). This makes the book’s argument somewhat difficult to classify, for it documents Nazi anti-consumerism just as often as it does consumerism. However, by choosing to theoretically foreground the latter aspect, the author creates, perhaps against her intentions, a problematic impression.
6Tooze (2008: 11) paraphrases this passage but without drawing from it what seems to me the unavoidable conclusion, namely that Hitler considered economic well-being for the Germans feasible within a peaceful framework but contemptuously rejected such an option.
7See also, for a nuanced account of Italian fascism’s approach to consumerism, De Grazia (1996).
8For a study dedicated to the history of the Volkswagen, see Rieger (2013).
9The most comprehensive single study of the subject matter, Baranowski (2004), is instructive in both regards but, as observed, tends to foreground pro-consumerism.
10Concerning the broad, although not universal, agreement among German socialists and trade unionists on the tenet of “shorter hours, higher wages,” see also Campbell (1989: 234–235).
11For further details, see Campbell’s painstaking exposition of German attitudes to work (1989: especially pp. 245–250). Also useful on the Horneffers’ Nietzscheanism, though without touching on the practical import of their interventions, is Aschheim (1994).
12“Herr Semperer und Frau Keppelmeier! Propagandaaktion gegen Gerüchtemacher und Meckerer im Gau Steiermark,” Der Propagandist. Mitteilungen des Gaupropagandaamtes Steiermark, November-December 1941, pp. 6–8.
Internet source: < www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/steiermark.htm> Last accessed, October 2015.
13“The Danger of Americanism,” (1944) Das Schwarze Korps, 14 March: 1–2. <http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/sk03.htm> Last accessed: May 2017.
14For two detailed expositions on Nietzsche’s affinity and support for imperialism, see Domboswky (2014); Conway (2002).
15On Hitler’s general admiration for the English, particularly their empire, see Milton (2007).
16While Bernays was shocked by such use of his ideas, it is worth mentioning that he himself by no means recoiled from putting public relations at the service of blunt political use, and he is attributed an important part, for example, in the military coup organized by the CIA against the democratic government of Guatemalan president, Jacobo Árbenz.
17The reference is to Second Moroccan War of the early 1920s, where Spanish forces performed poorly.
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Arnhold, Karl (1938) Das Ringen um die Arbeitsidee, Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Arbeitsfront.
Arnhold, Karl (1939) Wehrhafte Arbeit: Eine Betrachtung über den Einsatz der Soldaten der Arbeit, Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut.
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Baranowski, Shelly (2004) Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berghoff, Hartmut (2001) “Enticement and Deprivation: The Regulation of Consumption in Pre-War Nazi Germany,” in The Politics of Consumption. Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, M. Daunton and M. Hilton, eds., Oxford, New York: Berg: 165–184.
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