Fascism - Special Issue: Fascist and National Socialist Antiquities and Materialities from the Interwar Era to the Present Day Helen Roche, Flaminia Bartolini and Timothy J. Schmalz, Dec 2019

While it is generally acknowledged that fascist movements tend to glorify the national past of the country in which they arise, sometimes, fascist regimes seek to resurrect a past even more ancient, and more glorious still; the turn towards ancient Greece and Rome. This phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of the two most powerful and indisputably ‘fascist’ regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The author suggests that this twin turn towards antiquity was no mere accident, but was rather motivated by certain commonalities in national experience. By placing these two fascist regimes alongside each other and considering their seduction by antique myths in tandem, it is argued that – without putting forward some kind of classicizing Sonderweg – we can better appreciate the historic rootedness of this particular form of ‘chronopolitics’ in a complex nexus of political and social causes, many of which lie far deeper than the traumatic events of the Great War and its aftermath.

This article analyses Francesco Giammaria’s Capitolium Novum, a Latin poem describing a tour of the historic center of Rome in 1933, in its historical, architectural, and intellectual contexts. It offers a detailed analysis of three key sections of the poem, which deal with the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, and the Ara dei caduti fascisti respectively. The authors show how Giammaria’s poem responds to urbanistic interventions in the city center during the ventennio, and specifically to the Fascist ‘recoding’ of the city as the ‘Third Rome’, with a narrative emphasizing the historically layered nature of Rome. Giammaria offers his own interpretation of the respective importance and interrelation of the city’s historic layers: the rhetoric of his poem is aimed at superimposing Catholic Rome over pagan Rome, and at framing all historical layers of the city, including the Fascist one, as part of its Christian mission and destiny. Thus, Capitolium novum resonates with efforts of intellectuals gathered around Carlo Galassi Paluzzi’s Istituto di Studi Romani, who aimed to promote a cultural reconciliation between Fascism and Catholicism.

This article considers the involvement of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It considers the form, function, and content of the Italian Pavilion designed for this fair and asserts that the prefabricated monumental structure would be best interpreted, not in isolation, but as an element of the larger architectural conversation which continued to unfold across contemporary fascist Europe. Such reconsideration of this building makes it possible to evaluate the relationship between Fascist design, the assertion of political will, and the articulation of national identity and cultural heritage within a larger, transnational context. The author also investigates the American exhibition committee’s earnest and persistent, yet ultimately unheeded, solicitation of Nazi German participation and argues that motives behind German withdrawal from this event had as much to do with the threat of popular protest as economic pressure.

At the time of German unification, politicians, historians and academics expressed concerns that the material legacies of National Socialism had become too integrated into Berlin’s urban fabric. Unification disrupted the status quo of several such buildings and campaigners sought to use this as an opportunity to facilitate increased engagement with their National Socialist layers. Through exploring the contests that surrounded three high-profile examples, the Aviation Ministry, Olympic Stadium and Tempelhof Airport, this article will reveal the contingent nature of post-unification responses to Berlin’s National Socialist layer. Firstly, it will analyse the debates that surrounded the buildings and demonstrate that the problematisation of heritage is a process, one shaped and mediated by myriad factors not necessarily relating to the trace itself. Secondly, it will show that the attempts to bring about increased engagement with each of the sites’ histories have been informed by a common rationale, namely, the development of a ‘palimpsestic’ approach to each building’s layers.

The Mediterranean has occupied a prominent role in the political imaginary of Italian Fascisms, past and present. In the 1920s to the early 1940s, Fascist Italy’s imperial project used the concept of mare nostrum – our sea – taken from the vocabulary of Roman antiquity, to anchor modern Italian imperialism within the authority of the classical past. In the postwar years, following decolonization in Africa, mare nostrum receded from popular discourse, previous claims to the Mediterranean suppressed. However, in the context of the so-called refugee crisis, Italy resurrected mare nostrum, in the naming of its military-humanitarian operation, a move rejected by the contemporary Italian far right. This article argues that configurations of the Mediterranean of ancient Rome have served to yoke Africa to Italy when articulated into a Fascist, imperial ideology, as well as to reify the boundaries between Europe and the non-European other, in the xenophobic discourse of the contemporary Italian far right.

This article examines how the Southern proslavery defense produced a distinctly proto-fascist ideology. Rather than comparing the Antebellum South to twentieth century racist regimes, this study compares Southern fascist thought to Germany’s nineteenth century Völkisch movement. The author uses Roger Griffin’s Palingenetic Ultranationalism to explore how the Antebellum South promoted an illiberal vision of modernity. The author argues that proto-fascists rejected liberalism, had a profound sense of social decay, and advanced a vision of a new man, new political structure, and a new temporality. The striking similarities between nineteenth and twentieth century fascist movements mandates that the Antebellum American South should be included in comparative fascist studies. The results of this study contextualize the comparisons made between American racism and fascism along with deepening our understanding of fascism’s protean qualities.