Fascism in Focus
Gersh, Gabriel
Fascism in Focus Three Faces of Fascism, by Ernst Nolte. Translated by Leila Vennewitz. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 561 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Gabriel Gersh Ttalian Fascism and German Nation-al...
...Reviewed by Gabriel Gersh Ttalian Fascism and German Nation-al Socialism have been the subjects of a great deal of historical analysis, but such works often start with the implied assumption that both movements were aberrations from the mainstream of modern history...
...Nolte believes that the German people found in Nazism a response to a deep craving for unity and a revival of the sense of purpose destroyed by World War I. Whether one agrees with him, there is no doubt about Germany's belated unification having imparted a peculiar twist to the national consciousness...
...Nolte's portrait of Mussolini deflates the myth that he was an ignoramus who hastily took his ideas from Sorel and Pareto...
...ROBERT SKLAR is an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...
...Germany's economic miracle following World War II hardly compares to her pre-1945 political miracle: a nation previously torn by bitter antagonism between capital and labor, town and country, consumer and producer, speaking and thinking through one man for twelve dramatic years...
...Whatever the prospects of Fascism, it is important that we should understand the conditions that breed it...
...Mussolini was a Marxist and hardly a contemptible one...
...GABRIEL GERSH is a free lance writer whose articles have appeared in The Commonweal, The Christian Century, and The New York Times...
...He edited "Ambrose Bierce's America...
...HARRIS DIENST-FREY contributed the chapter on films in the anthology, "The New American Arts...
...Nolte's book is the most serious attempt yet to define the dimensions of this problem, and it is certainly the definitive study from which discussions of the subject must start...
...However, Nolte shows considerable -subtlety in examining the interdependence of doctrine and practice and in explaining how this differed in the three movements...
...Undoubtedly, regimes in many underdeveloped countries, notably those in Egypt and Ghana, have many of the features of the European Fascist regimes of the Twenties and Thirties...
...WILLIAM MATHES is a free lance writer and critic...
...more than compensated for their sense of political deprivation...
...LUCY JOHNSON reviews fiction frequently in these pages...
...This is not an easy book to read, and the combination of historical and biographical narrative with the interpretation of doctrine demands some previous knowledge of the main outlines of the story...
...No section of Three Faces of Fascism is more valuable than that on Mussolini, who is treated as more than a mountebank or a caricature...
...The difficult choices people had to make during the troubled days of the Weimar Republic afflicted many Germans with the paralytic condition Erich Fromm so aptly diagnosed as "fear of freedom...
...He is working on a study of D. W. Griffith...
...Yet, as the societies of the Third World become more industrialized, and disappointment with the results of independence begins to grow, it may be that movements on the Fascist pattern will arise...
...His Fascism—the "first Fascism"—had a strong socialist tinge...
...This mood, moreover, far outlasted the first euphoria of 1933, a fact which might have been explained by the Nazis' facility for making extreme promises to everyone...
...How can this be explained...
...If, however, one could not regard Nkrumah as a Fascist, it is because the Fascist phenomenon is associated with an attempt to solve the problems of a complex industrial society...
...As for capital and labor, we are told that although Hitler originally allied himself with the capitalists and Junkers, he subsequently disaffiliated from them and pursued his own course...
...The author is no partisan of the left, and he rejects the pseudo-Marxist oversimplification of Fascism as the last defense of the bourgeoisie...
...By taking as his third example of Fascism the Action Francaise (which he believes is closer to Nazism than was Italian Fascism), the author brings into focus the specifically national characteristics of the three movements...
...Nolte also deals with Fascism's complex relationship to Liberalism and Marxism...
...WILLIAM Mc-CANN reports regularly on significant paperbacks...
...This is not so, for Fascism is likely to continue with us for some time...
...Ernst Nolte's Three Faces of Fascism represents an original and coherent attempt by a German historian to fit the Fascist phenomenon into a context which stretches from the French Revolution through the technological and social changes and tensions of the subsequent era...
...Bliss was it on that day to be alive" not only describes Wordsworth's reaction to the Fall of the Bastille but sums up the emotion of half the German people at the beginning of the Third Reich...
...They still had great administrative power, and the Nazi war effort was directed largely by committees of industrial executives...
...Yet he is justified in describing the capitalist-sponsored Nazi Party as a "truly popular movement"—and this is, of course, one of the most important paradoxes of history...
...The Fascism that unfolded later—the "new Fascism"—was the creation not of Mussolini, but of Balbo and Grandi—hence the paradoxical but convincing conclusion that it was not Mussolini who led Fascism to victory in 1922 but a new Fascism that "shaped for itself a Mussolini after its own measure and image...
...My only regret about Nolte's book is that he regards Fascism as having ended in 1945...
...It is true that the old Establishment was deprived of executive power, but the privileges accorded them by the Nazis THE REVIEWERS LOUIS W. KOENIG, a professor of government at New York University, is the author of "The Invisible Government...
Vol. 30 • April 1966 • No. 4
