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Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Roger Griffin. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2007. Pp. xv + 470. $42.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
In Modernism and Fascism, Roger Griffin, a long-standing historian and theorist of comparative fascism, brings together his assertions about the origins, meanings, and character of two phenomena that determined twentieth-century history-modernism and fascism. At the core of his wide-ranging and rich analysis stands what he calls a "new metanarrative" about the constituitive relationship between modernism and fascism. He proposes that the two states in which fascist ideology became practice, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, were exemplary "modern states" only made possible by modernism in all its forms, from aesthetic to political. For Griffin, fascism was, above all else, a reaction to the spiritual, social, cultural, and political conditions of modernity in a fundamentally modernist key. This modernist key, according to Griffin, was most pronounced in fascism's promise of palingenesis (rebirth)-the promise to transcend the condition of modernity itself.
Griffin challenges what he declares the failure of scholars of modernism and fascism to confront fully the complex interdependency of the two phenomena. He argues that we have tended to reduce modernism to its aesthetic and avant-garde cultural manifestations. By contrast, in Modernism and Fascism, he gives us a "synoptic interpretation" which "shifts or renegotiates some of the conventional demarcation lines between the disciplines dealing with fascism, modernism, and modernity" (35). He sees the "cultural turn," which led to an acknowledgement of the connections between aesthetic modernism and fascism (such as Futurist art and Rationalist architecture), as productive, but as not going far enough in pursuing the connections between fascism and modernism. For Griffin, the focus on culture kept scholars from the "truths" and "big pictures" regarding modernism's contribution to fascism. Griffin breaks new ground by synthesizing developments in art history, anthropology, and literary theory, and intellectual, social, and political history into what he deems a "reflexive metanarrative" about the manifold modern aesthetic,...