Category: Fascism

Laughing at fascists

“I will have free speech at my meetings,” the statuesque teenage heiress Eugenia Malmains insists, in Nancy Mitford’s 1935 novel Wigs on the Green. Eugenia, a fascist, has been interrupted mid-harangue by her nanny, who thinks Eugenia is disgracing herself. Eugenia proceeds to threaten her nanny with violence: “Now will you go of your own accord or must I tell the Comrades to fling you out?”

From time immemorial, the rage of fascists has styled itself as more-grown-up-than-thou, but in feeling-tone it in fact more closely resembles that of teenagers—grandiose, spirally, counterdependent. If only we lived in a world where it was safe to believe that it was just as harmless! And if only the right little old lady could be found to tug every fascist down from her washtub. Further deflating fascism’s pretensions in this particular case: In Mitford’s novel, Eugenia is seen largely through the eyes of two gold-digging cads, Jasper Aspect and Noel Foster, who don’t take her politics very seriously (“batty” is the word one of them uses) because they regard her not as a person but as an opportunity to marry into the moneyed aristocracy.

“Oh! I think that’s all a joke,” a middle-class woman in the novel protests, when her left-wing bohemian-artist friends upbraid her for being swept up in the fascist excitement. But what kind of a joke is it, exactly? Some of the novel’s humor takes advantage of fascism’s abrupt rhetorical extremes. On several occasions, Eugenia calls for “jackshirt justice,” i.e., beatings or worse, but when a flapper heiress wants to ditch a husband who has grown tiresome, Eugenia insists on the sanctity of marriage. “Well, well, what a governessy little thing it is,” Jasper observes. Even from the distance of nearly a century, Mitford makes clear how hackneyed and familiar fascist language was, much as it has become to us in the past few years. “Let me see, where had I got to—oh! yes,” Eugenia resumes, once she has surmounted her nanny’s interruption:

Patriotism is one of the primitive virtues of mankind. Allow it to atrophy and much that is valuable in human nature must perish. This is being proved today, alas, in our unhappy island as well as in those other countries, which, like ourselves, still languish ‘neath the deadening sway of a putrescent democracy. Respect for parents, love of the home, veneration of the marriage tie, are all at a discount in England today, society is rotten with vice, selfishness, and indolence.

Viktor Orban could do no better. An idealized past? Check. A hearkening back to patriarchal morals? Check. A jeremiad against sexual sophistication? Check. Scorn for democracy? Check. Fetishization of patriotism and strength? Check. Not to mention indignant cries of “free speech” at even the mildest interruption.

Even the great replacement theory, as it is now called (aka racial purity, as it was known then), puts in an appearance, a few scenes later. When Jasper makes a casual reference to beautiful women and their lovers, Eugenia reproves him: “Under our régime, women will not have lovers. They will have husbands and great quantities of healthy Aryan children.” Also familiar is Eugenia’s persistent dunning of her audience. Fundraising may be done to MAGA followers by text message today but in the early 20th century, it had to be inflicted in person. “You are asked to pay ninepence a month, the Union Jack shirt costs five shillings and the little emblem sixpence,” Eugenia says, to almost everyone she meets, in almost every scene in which she appears.

Is it okay to laugh at all this? Humor has become suspect lately, because of rightwingers’ strategy of using it to normalize racist and misogynist ideas—dodging them past the moral censors under cover of unseriousness. It is true that Mitford plays Eugenia’s calls for violence, for example, for laughs only. Eugenia is always talked out of her momentary enthusiasms—her nanny is not actually ever beaten up—so her talk never has consequences, and the danger remains hazy.

Confusingly, if one turns to Mitford’s letters, one finds her claiming that her mockery of fascism was meant, of all things, fondly. The inspiration for the book, it turns out, was the avid fascism of two of her sisters, Unity and Diana. Unity signed letters, “Heil Hitler,” and wrote home swoonily from Munich about conversations with the Fuhrer, and Diana was to marry Oswald Mosley, the leader (or “Leader,” as he was styled by his followers) of the British Union of Fascists—a political party that Nancy, too, for a while joined, as Charlotte Mosley explains in her introduction to the 2010 (pre-Brexit, pre-Trump) Vintage paperback edition. Having written a novel satirizing her sisters’ fervor, Nancy faced some tricky family diplomacy. She boldly told Unity that the novel was “about you” and assured her that the portrait was so attractive that “everyone who has read my book longs to meet you.” At the end of another letter to Unity, however, she took the opposite tack and drew a caricature in which Unity’s head is labeled “bone” and her heart “stone,” while one of Unity’s hand holds an object labeled “rubber truncheon,” and a foot is shod in what is described as a “hobnail boot for trampling on jews.” Yikes. There’s nothing so openly anti-Semitic in Wigs on the Green, but the ugliness of the caricature reveals that in 1935, at least, Nancy either didn’t understand that the brutality in fascist rhetoric was eventually going to be realized, or didn’t much care so long as it looked as though the violence was going to be inflicted on people outside her family’s social circle.

By means of flattery and kidding, Nancy seem to have succeeded in jollying Unity out of being offended by the novel’s satirical portrait. Diana, however, was not so easy to placate. In an effort to appease her, Nancy removed nearly three chapters about “Captain Jack,” a character modeled on Oswald Mosley. (In the novel as published, the character appears only off-stage.) Far from arguing that her humor cuts fascism down to size, as a modern antifascist reader might hope, Nancy tried to convince Diana, in a letter written on 18 June 1935, that humor like hers couldn’t possibly do fascism any harm:

Honestly, if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half an hour I would have scrapped it, or indeed never written it in the first place. The 2 or 3 thousand people who read my books, are, to begin with, just the kind of people the Leader admittedly doesn’t want in his movement. . . . I still maintain that it is far more in favour of Fascism than otherwise. Far the nicest character in the book is a Fascist, the others all become much nicer as soon as they have joined up. But I also know your point of view, that Fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all. Surely that is a little unreasonable?

Appeasement seems not to have worked. After the novel’s publication, Diana kept Nancy at a distance for years.

The awkward truth seems to be that Nancy was to some extent complicit with fascism when she wrote Wigs on the Green, thanks to family ties, personal history, and, to put it politely, thoughtlessness. But she went on appreciate fascism’s threat more keenly. In 1940 she wrote to the Foreign Office that Diana, though a British citizen, should be imprisoned as a Nazi sympathizer, and Diana was in fact imprisoned. In 1943, Nancy wrote again, to urge the government not to release her sister yet—she was still too dangerous. Half a dozen years after the war, she told Evelyn Waugh she was ruling out a reprint of Wigs because humor about Nazis, including her own, couldn’t at that point be in “anything but the worst of taste.”

Is it tacky that I enjoyed her disowned novel anyway, even though (because?) we’re currently living through a resurgence of fascism? Much of the book’s humor is Waughian: comely young heroes and heroines, some of them sickeningly rich, have spines too weak to resist louche and alcoholic pleasures; practically the only devoir they can manage with rigor or regularity is the application of face cream. The fascism in the novel could almost be incidental, if the contrast between the Jazz Age demoralized irony and fascism’s grotesque earnestness weren’t so perfect. As Nancy suggested in her 1935 letter to Diana, her crowd is what fascism defined itself against: dissipated, cosmopolitan, promiscuous. Despite Nancy’s attempts to butter up her sisters in private, it’s clear who she sides with in the novel: the hopeless sophisticates are us, and the fascists, them.

Maybe what I enjoyed was that the novel allowed me to visit a time before fascism was world-historical—before it had murdered so many people that it had to be taken seriously. In the world of Wigs, it still seems as if, were you to point out with sufficient perspicuity how laughable fascism is, its devotees might blink a few times and walk away, wondering what they had been thinking.

The worst possibility is that humor about fascism is a sort of sundial of history. A big question weighing on me lately is where we are in the cycle—toward the end or still only at the beginning? What if I’m able to laugh at Mitford’s novel now because we’re only at the dawn of the current outbreak, and some day, when its shadow has lengthened, I, like the author, won’t be able to find it funny any more?

Readings

“. . . to live like a soldier but not as a soldier, figuratively but not literally, to be allowed in short to live symbolically, spells true freedom.” —Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence-Man

“The art of life, of a poet’s life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.” —Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, 29 April 1852

“I think she regarded my career as akin to a religion she didn’t understand but would of course respect.” —Siobhan Phillips, Benefit, describing how a scholar of English literature feels she is perceived by a former classmate who has gone into consulting

A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave
Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea.
—George Meredith, Modern Love

“She neither embroidered nor wrote—only read and talked.” —Henry James, “A London Life”

“And so for me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them. And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations.” —Thom Gunn, “Writing a Poem,” Occasions of Poetry

“. . . so I went on leisurely, as a trifling man does, sometimes writing a sentence—then taking a turn or two—and then looking how the world went, out of the window . . .” —Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

“You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.” —Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“. . . for beauty with sorrow / Is a burden hard to be borne . . .” —Walter de la Mare, “The Old Summerhouse,” in Reading Walter de la Mare, ed. William Wootten

Swimming in the undertow

My first inkling that Trump was where something had gone badly wrong in the American psyche came in the fall of 2015, when Peter and I went to a bar in Williamsburg to hear a friend read a short story. The emcee took a turn at the microphone himself, as his reward for having organized the literary evening, but instead of reading a story or poem, he read aloud from one of Trump’s ghost-written books. The choice of text was meant to be a joke, I think. A few sentences would have conveyed the gist: the book was horrible, and obvious in its horribleness, and representative in its horribleness of the person whose name was on the cover. The emcee, however, read for what felt like an hour.

It was excruciating. If the point was that we Brooklyn literary hipsters were superior to someone like Trump, and knew better than to be taken in by him, why was the emcee reading so many of his words? And why were we listening? I couldn’t figure out what was going on or what the emcee was getting out of it. He seemed to be in the grip of something, and we were in his grip. It was all happening under the sign of irony, but irony wasn’t the right word exactly. In retrospect I should have taken warning; at the time, of course, I just wanted it to be over.

I’ve thought back to the night many times in the past four years. It came to mind most recently when I was reading The Oppermanns, a remarkably lucid novel by Lion Feuchtwanger set in, and written in, 1933. The book, recently reprinted by the British feminist press Persephone Books, describes the lives of four Jewish siblings in Berlin, owners and managers of a chain of furniture stores, as they try to adjust to the rise of Hitler, referred to in the text only as “the Leader” or as “the author of the book called Mein Kampf.”

About a third of the way in, one of the siblings, Gustav Oppermann, who’s a bachelor and a bit of a playboy, in a bibliophile kind of way, is visited by a friend, Alfred François, the rector of an elite high school where two of Gustav’s nephews are students. One nephew has recently had a run-in with a new teacher, who happens to be a Nazi, and the rector wants Gustav to persuade his nephew to apologize. It has become dangerous to make Nazi enemies, and François intuits that he won’t be able to continue protecting Gustav’s nephew indefinitely. Once Gustav hears the story, however, and realizes that his nephew was in the right, he refuses to intervene, as a matter of principle, and the rector amiably gives up. After all, he doesn’t really want Gustav’s nephew to knuckle under. Having tried their best, to no avail, he and Gustav retire with relief to Gustav’s library, to chat about books. They are the most erudite characters in the novel, and Feuchtwanger pokes gentle fun at their erudition: the rector is said to be writing a book about the influence of the ancient Greek hexameter on an 18th-century German poet, and Gustav, to be writing a biography of a philo-Semite playwright from the same period. As a slightly perverse hobby, Gustav collects editions of the infamous anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, then back in the zeitgeist, thanks to the rise of Nazism. After showing off his newest copy of the Protocols, Gustav picks up Mein Kampf and starts to “read some particularly juicy passages to his friend.”

Rector François covered his ears. He did not want to listen to the incorrect, distorted German of the book. Gustav spoke to him soothingly. On account of his repugnance for the style, he had evidently missed the comic quality of the content. He refused to be dissuaded from quoting a few passages.

Gustav proceeds to read aloud a few samples of Hitler’s name-calling, allegations, and conspiracy theories. “Rector François, disgusted as he was, had to laugh over this accumulation of nonsense,” Oppermann writes.

I felt the edge of this passage’s irony rather keenly.

I’ve been trying to stay logged out of Twitter, so I don’t know whether this week we’re making fun of people who see analogies between Trumpism and Nazism, or making fun of people who resist such analogies. In either case, I admit that as I read The Oppermanns, the analogies seemed to draw themselves. A character insists to himself that he still loves his country, despite what it has become. A character discovers, to his chagrin, that even people dear to him would rather minimize the new outrages to decency than see them for what they are (“It was disgusting to read the papers and disgusting to hear the row the Nationalists made. But who took that seriously?”), and that even people who are hurt by the new regime quickly accept their injury as part of a new status quo (“It was an old story that the Nationalists were dirty dogs. There was no need for anyone to come and tell them that”). What little I know of Q-Anon sounds very silly, but you would probably laugh over the claims in the Protocols of Zion, too, if, like François, Gustav, and (in 1933) Feuchtwanger, you didn’t know what they led to.

After a while, exhausted by my pessimism, I started to check my analogical bent by telling myself that it makes a difference that Trump does not have a paramilitary force at his command, independent of government control, as Hitler did, and that the misguided anarchists of our day have broken shop windows and mau-maued outdoor diners but have not yet given white supremacists the pretext that they are looking for—that is, our anarchists have not yet burned down the American equivalent of the Reichstag. And then I learned this week that a teenage white supremacist Trump supporter, responding to a call for law and order on Facebook, gunned down three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two of them, and that the shootings were later characterized by several pro-Trump TV pundits as a natural response to the protests in Kenosha, which the pundits saw as civic breakdown. So now the threat of attacks from vigilantes is indeed part of our political reality, and so is disingenuous justification of such attacks, and I have to fall back on consoling myself with the thought that the white supremacist in this case was a volunteer, not part of an organized militia. At least so far as we currently know. (A more sturdy consolation is that the American communities of color dog-whistled about and gaslit by Trump and the Trumpists are much more numerous, and therefore much less vulnerable, than Germany’s Jewish citizens were in 1933, when they comprised less than one percent of that country’s population.)

There’s a minor character in The Oppermanns named Friedrich Wilhelm Gutwetter who might be a portrait of Martin Heidegger. (Of course it’s possible that Feuchtwanger didn’t mean the reference to be that specific; there were no doubt many quisling intellectuals at the time.) At the opening of the novel, Gutwetter is a harmless-seeming, starry-eyed writer who happens to be fashionably pessimistic about the prospects of Western civilization. Since he’s oblivious to mere worldly concerns, it’s convenient that he is supported financially by Gustav Oppermann, who believes in his genius. When Gustav goes into exile, Gutwetter regrets his patron’s decision to leave with a curiously intense indignation, telling a mutual friend,

This country is about to give birth to a great new type of humanity. We have the enormous luck to be present at the birth of this gigantic embryo and to hear the first babblings of the noble monster. And our friend Gustav goes and runs away because one of the outcries of this nation in travail is offensive to his ears?

Gutwetter’s obliviousness to worldly matters, the reader senses, is starting to acquire an edge of intentionality. Gutwetter brings himself to accept Gustav’s exile to the extent of asking if he may borrow books from the library that Gustav has had to leave behind. Of course Gustav says yes. Before long Gutwetter succeeds in working his ideas about the new era’s new man into print, and soon he is enjoying a popularity that he believes to be world-historical:

He was not surprised that history had now, at last, made his, the poet’s, vision come true. The Nationalists, however, were surprised to find such a voice as his raised on their behalf. Almost all scholars, almost all artists of any standing, had turned their backs on the Nationalists. What a bit of luck it was that a great writer should now suddenly come forward to espouse their cause!

Feuchtwanger also makes an intriguing attempt to fathom the economics of fascism. He imagines that the Oppermanns have a less-successful rival in furniture-making, Heinrich Wels Junior, “a hard-working, reliable, slow-thinking man” whose error, in business strategy, is that he persists in having his employees craft tables and chairs by hand. By standardizing the designs of their furniture and by producing them more cheaply in factories, the Oppermanns have long been able to undercut his prices. “Had the recognition of solid merit died out in Germany?” Wels asks, aggrievedly. Well, no, Feuchtwanger explains; it’s just that most consumers care more about price. When Nazism comes along, Wels embraces it because “it freely expressed what Heinrich Wels had long secretly felt, namely that the Jewish firms with their cut-price methods were responsible for Germany’s decline.” After the Nazis put a higher tax on goods from the Jewish firm’s larger stores, Wels is able to come a little closer to competing with the Oppermanns on price—close enough that the new social stigma associated with buying from Jews is sometimes able to make up the difference.

A disconcerting aspect of The Oppermanns is that its moral universe seems continuous with ours—it’s a world in which people envy their neighbors’ apartments, and have mixed feelings about some of the poems in the national literary canon, and in which teenagers jockey for a chance to drive the family car—and incommensurate with that described in such Holocaust literature as Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. And yet one world turned into the other. Feuchtwanger is aware that the Nazis were setting up concentration camps, and even arranges for one of his characters to be imprisoned in one, but he doesn’t understand the full human meaning of such an institution; no one at the time could have. The book takes on an extratextual pathos; the reader realizes, that in 1933 Feuchtwanger couldn’t imagine that expropriations, beatings, humiliations, exile, and assassinations weren’t as bad as it could get.

An afterthought: While reading Jamelle Bouie’s roundup of the rightwing pundits who are acclaiming Kyle Rittenhouse for killing protesters in Kenosha, a link to which I have added above, I realized that the Rittenhouse story has a more specific parallel in The Oppermanns: When a teenager in Alfred François’s school, stirred up the new Nazi teacher’s fiery rhetoric, stabs to death a journalist who has made fun of Hitler’s writing style, Nazi pundits extenuate and even praise the murder in terms very much like those that Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, and others have used to justify Rittenhouse’s killings: “It soon turned out that [Rittersteg] was no scoundrel but a hero. The Nationalist newspapers published his photograph. They pointed out that, although the young man’s deed could not be unconditionally approved of, it was nevertheless easy to understand that a German youth would be aroused to do violence on account of the dead man’s dastardly assertions.”

A precedent for the violence at Trump’s rallies

There’s a precedent for the symbiotic relationship between Trump and his protesters. Here’s a description of ritualized violence at the rallies of the English Fascist Oswald Mosley in the 1930s:

Violence was implicit in every aspect of the movement from the day of its foundation. Apart from the para-military character of the whole organization, the system on which meetings were run was deliberately provocative. The speaker would arrive in uniform accompanied by a uniformed escort. As he mounted the rostrum his escort would greet him with the Fascist salute and then form up in front of him, facing the audience, and assume a truculent attitude. The speaker would then warn his audience that any attempt to disrupt the meeting would be met by force, and frequently it was. This technique reached its height at one of Mosley’s biggest demonstrations at Olympia. 15,000 tickets were sold, mostly through the theatre ticket booking agencies, with considerable publicity engineered through the Daily Mail and the rest of the Rothermere press. A phalanx of uniformed Fascists filled the steps of the main entrance and the hallway, checking tickets and frisking suspected members of the public. The aisles of the hall were lined with other members, whose function soon became apparent. Mosley appeared to a fanfare of trumpets and started to make his speech. Before he had completed his first sentence someone in the audience got up and shouted a protest. Mosley immediately stopped speaking, a spotlight picked up the offender in the darkened hall, and a body of stewards ran in, beat him up and carried him outside. This process continued for more than two hours. Outside the hall there was an opposition meeting of 100,000 protestors, with a force of 700 foot and mounted policemen attempting to keep the two factions apart. The atmosphere became increasingly tense as the interrupters were ejected: many of them showing clearly the injuries which they had suffered. The whole affair was not finally over before the early hours of the morning.

The description comes from Jason Gurney’s memoir Crusade in Spain (Faber, 1974).