Modernism and the Psychoanalysis of Fascism, 1894-1945
The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have
suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. — George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State” (1941)
It seems to me a monstrosity; by that I mean something that is altogether beyond the
bounds of common sense, truth and justice, a blind and stupid thing that would drag us
back centuries in time, ultimately a thing that would lead to religious persecution, which
is the worst of abominations and would bathe every country in blood. — Émile Zola, “A Plea for the Jews” (1896)
There were other swastikas. They were the chalk ones now; I followed them down
Bergasse as if they had been chalked on the pavement especially for my benefit. They led
to the Professor’s door— H. D., Tribute to Freud [1933]
This seminar explores the critical and analytical writings of those whose experience of European fascism was visceral and immediate. We will proceed for the most part chronologically to perceive the unfolding of history as these key witnesses experienced it. We will assess this living history of the period both for its penetrating insights into the reality of things and for its dialectically potent forms of misrecognition. Invariably “alive to reverberations of the future” (André Breton qtd. by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”), these authors could not always know how the story would end.
Activities and assignments will include a seminar presentation and a close reading of a selected passage. Students will also write one three-page essay, to be distributed and read aloud, and one final research paper.
We will seek the definition of the key words of the seminar–modernism, psychoanalysis, fascism–as it flows up from our reading. Since we can read only a practical selection of the following reading list in our allotted twelve weeks (the final reading schedule will be available this summer), students will be invited in their independent research projects to explore some of the readings not covered in our weekly meetings.
Reading List (in progress):
- Émile Zola, “A Plea for the Jews” (1896)
- Émile Zola, “J’accuse!” (1898)
- F.T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909)
- F.T. Marinetti, “Let’s Murder the Moonshine” (1909)
- Franz Kafka, “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” (1909)
- W.E. B. Du Bois, “World War and the Color Line” (1914)
- Richard Harding Davis, With the Allies (1914)
- Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915)
- Edith Wharton, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915)
- Ellen La Motte, The Backwash of War (1916)
- Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (1929) [1914-18]
- Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925) [1914-15]
- Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (1916)
- Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)
- Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (1920)
- Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)
- Ernest Hemingway, “Mussolini: Biggest Bluff in Europe” (1923)
- Ernest Hemingway, “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” (1927)
- Henri Barbusse, Thus and Thus (1927)
- Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
- Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews (1926-7)
- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) [1929]
- Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellectual” (1929)
- Walter Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism” (1930)
- William Faulkner, “Dry September” (1932)
- H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Tribute to Freud (1956) [1933-44]
- Victor Klemperer, Victor, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (Volume 1, 1998)
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935)
- William Faulkner, Pylon (1935)
- Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter” (1935)
- Ernest Hemingway, “Wings Always Over Africa: An Ornithological Letter” (1936)
- Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair (1947) [1930s and 40s]
- Kenneth Burke, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle'” (1939)
- George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State” (1941)
- Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (1942)
- George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951) [1944]
- Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism” (1975)
- Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992)
- Timothy Snyder, “Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?” (2011)
- Christopher R. Browning, “Hitler’s Enablers.” New York Review of Books LXXI, November 7, 2024, pp. 52-54.
Suggested General and Preliminary Reading:
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
- Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (1995)
- Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011)
- Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010).
- Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (2015)
- Maurice Samuels, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Centre of the Affair (2024)