Chapter One
LOOKING FOR
THE FASCISTS
`I don't want to dominate anyone
I don't need money
I don't need power
Truly I need nothing.
But here I am, at home where I should be—and all these
Jews fuck me off ...'
—CÉLINE, Bagatelles pour un massacre
It was in Argentina that I was first confronted by the true faceof fascism. In the mid-1970s, I spent time in Buenos Aires exploringthe ambiguous memory of Eva Perón. Flying from New York,it was the mode rétro of fascist Argentina that struck me most of all.The city seemed just like a portion of Europe, except that itscrumbling facades and endless peeling posters gave it the air ofdecadence expensively sought after for the anti-fascist epicsBernardo Bertolucci was making at the time. But I wasn't preparedfor the pervasive fear that seemed stamped on every face.Nothing in my own European past had prepared me for the muffledhorror of a civil war in which enemies were daily carted off inanonymous cars, tortured, shot, or—it happened many times—dumpedin the river from aircraft while still alive.
Nor, walking about empty streets and looking behind me, wasI familiar with the way in which everything could be tarnished bythe exercise of political violence. It was clear to me that the militarygovernment was composed of fascists. But it took me a littlelonger to realize that the guerrillas, too, despite the Marxist-Leninisttheology in which their actions were cloaked, were notdemocrats. The Montoneros (they were named after a brutalleader in the racist gaucho wars in which Argentina's Indians wereexterminated) robbed banks, took hostages, executed an ex-presidenton the grounds that he had violated Eva Perón's body, andheedlessly abandoned their followers to the mercy of the torturerswhile they acquired villas in the south of France.
Torture or incarceration under socialism retained some faintappearance of rationality. You knew roughly why someone hadbeen airbrushed, tried, imprisoned or caused to vanish. The systematicexercise of injustice was conducted with reference tonorms of civilization, fraudulent though these might be. InBuenos Aires I began to understand that it was possible to envisagea world in which nothing was fully comprehensible except thesudden, arbitrary exercise of violence. I learnt, too, that it wasn'tentirely fanciful to speak of fascism as a virus of sorts or a disease.In Argentina the fascist idea had begun with the Peróns, and withtheir fancy-dress imitations of Mussolini. It was given significancein vast and repetitious parades in which the love of Juan and Evitafor the descamisados was commemorated, attaining a bizarre apotheosisin Evita's long, public death, in which participation was formallyrequired, with punishments for those who declined to do so.Now fascism appeared to have infected an entire society, to thedegree that one might wonder whether it would ever be possiblefor Argentina to return to something like normality. The people Iwas interviewing were worried about being associated with a foreignreporter, but some of them did speak to me. I remember awoman who told me, sobbing, that she knew no family in whichsomeone had not disappeared. `I know no one who has beenspared,' she repeated. `No one in Buenos Aires. It affects all of us.'
Walking about the streets after meeting the woman, I waspicked up by a black car containing three men in suits. I had mypassport and I showed it to them. They asked me a few, mainlyperfunctory questions. The men in the car sat silently, impassivein the dusk. They were dressed in old shiny suits. There was asmell of American cigarettes and one of them was chewing gumnoisily, without stopping. From time to time a short-wave radiocrackled. They drove me around and let me out far from the citycentre, on a piece of wasteland. When I left the car, I felt that Ihad been holding my breath for the past half hour and I wantedto go somewhere, anywhere, far away. I remember sitting on thepavement, vomiting until I was utterly exhausted.
Friends told me that I had been stupid, and that I was lucky toescape with my life. However, I suppose I should feel grateful tothose men because they gave me a lifelong interest. I now wantedto know about the moment at which whatever it was that causeda society to close up, destroying itself, usually irreversibly, becamefully operative. In the short term, returning from Argentina, Ifound that I didn't believe in very much. (This, I discovered, wasa syndrome—other people plunged into situations similar to theArgentine darkness were affected in the same way, and it tookthem longer to recover the more intense or more hazardous theexposure had been.) Over the years, among other interests, Ibegan to read and think about fascism. I wondered whether itwould ever be possible to say why people were attracted to hatred.I wanted to know whether it was indeed possible to speak of a fascistor authoritarian personality. And I suppose I also wonderedwhether what we called fascism might return in a different guise.
I now knew that, given the chance, cruelty bred more cruelty.I had developed a practical sense of fascism, framed around thequestion of what, if anything, might be done to impede its return.Meanwhile it was those who had chosen fascism as an alternative,and who had bequeathed us their reasons for doing so, who nowspoke to me. They were the Hamlets, not the Iagos, of internationalfascism. They would tell me more about why it remainedattractive. I could also see their descendants at work and play inParis. A forgotten aspect of the 1970s is the fear of fascism thatexisted at the time. Around the playgrounds of the West werehighly remunerated freelancers like Carlos. But European stateswere also menaced by domestic terrorists from the Extreme Leftsuch as the Italian Red Brigades, who kidnapped Aldo Moro orthe German RAF, popularly known as the Baader Meinhof gang.An unhealthy ambivalence existed towards such figures. Thequestion discussed in those days was not merely whether theseterrorists were `fascists'—much ink was spilt on this matter in astyle of which Orwell would rightly have disapproved—butwhether, through excessively brutal responses to them, so-calledliberal states like Italy of the Federal Republic of Germany hadnot also revealed themselves in their true authoritarian-fascistcolours. Of course, the purpose of the terrorists was to show upwhat they regarded as the brutal `fascist' mechanisms behind thesham Potemkin Village front of democracy—but there were manyoutside their ranks who found these arguments attractive.
In 1968 Pier Paolo Pasolini annoyed his admirers by criticizingrioting students:
When yesterday in the Valle Giulia you came to blows
With the cops,
I sympathized with the cops!
Because the cops are the sons of the poor.
What Pasolini called `sacred hooliganism' was in reality animpatience with the boredom levels implied by bourgeois politics.This was still a freely available attitude in the 1970s. It appearedthat hostility to democracy had never wholly been extinguished inEurope. Most students from what would become known as thegeneration of 1968 declared themselves to be left-wing. But aminority, particularly in France, retained more ambiguous allegiances.Fashion encouraged such lengthy flirtations.
My friend Patrick loved to talk about ideology in the way thatothers went on about rock groups or, in our time, Internet sites.Too refined, messed-up in an over-educated way, dropping namesover cup after cup of black coffee, he would never be mistaken fora `son of the poor'. He had been a Maoist in 1968, during theParis uprisings, but by the time we met he appeared to belong toan extreme-right group called Nouvel Ordre, though he impliedthat this was only temporary. Exactly whom or what he was busyinfiltrating and on whose behalf was never self-evident. At thattime he was always travelling at short notice to odd places in theMiddle East. He appeared to know something about makingbombs. Patrick was tallish, with stringy, faux-Aryan dyed fair hairand a half-distracted manner, and he was usually dressed in black.I felt he liked to look like the Prince of Darkness. He was alwaysen route—going from one potential assignment to another. ForPatrick the sociopathic present evoked rich possibilities ofintrigue. Les réseaux—networks—were the staple of his monologues.Everyone was connected to everyone else, right as well asleft. I realized rapidly that I had no means of knowing whethermuch of what he was saying was true or not. It was possible thathe worked for the DST—the French Secret Service—and what hedescribed as his family's military background appeared to renderthis likely. This might explain his half-earnest cultivation of anEnglish reporter. But it was just as possible that Patrick had noserious connections to the red and black underground, and that hemerely liked hanging out in cafes.
I knew a bit about what was now called Vichy, and its brotherphenomenon of collaborationism; but it was Patrick who firstfilled me in. Presciently, he was convinced that the imaginativepower of communism was waning, and that we would all shortlyrealize that the true importance of Europe—its dirty half-secret,if you like—was its history of blackness. Patrick was very intelligentin the best French way, nuanced but flaky. At that moment,books and films about the collaborationist past were just beginningto appear in large quantities, and he was scathing aboutthem. `Don't bother,' he would say. `They are ridiculous.Bertolucci is Hollywood, Malle is worse.' Instead I must knowabout the French official class who were all around me. Peoplewent along with things in France; they were expensively encouragedto do so by the conformist education system. But I must alsoencounter the true believers. To do so I must disabuse myself ofthe very English notion that cynicism or despair precluded belief.The example of France during the 1940s overturned this notion. Imust understand that although these people had made the wrongchoices, they had been right to make them. They were believers.In another of our sessions he talked about boredom, and how anysociety, even the most sophisticated one, required the cultivationof signs, symbols and collective rituals. In this respect fascism, heimplied, had an edge over its rival, socialism. The buckles, marchingsongs, uniforms were of superior quality—just look at theircontinuing appeal to collectors. He was sure that the Europeanroots of fascism went deep. No one should imagine that it had simplygone away. `Look around you,' he said. `Just look around you.'The last time I saw him he was off on another trip and I asked himfinally whether he thought of himself as a fascist. All he did wasshrug. `You can be a fascist without fascism,' he said.
Now I heard that Patrick was married to someone with ahyphenated first name and safely lodged in one of the stuffiestFrench state companies. There were rumours of his involvementin one of the large-scale scandals of the late years of French socialism.As I found my way around the contemporary scene I recalledhis views about the fascinations of fascism. Not that we lived in aEurope that resembled the one of the 1930s, far from it—but itdid indeed seem as if something central to the idea or practice offascism just wouldn't go away.
I packed many history books on these voyages, carting themfrom one hotel room to another and reading late at night; and Iwas surprised to find how many of the best books about fascismwere written by English or Americans. Like most Anglo-Saxons,I found fascism fascinating because (with the exception of BuenosAires) it was so far from my own impeccably calm historical experience.But I was also wised up enough to know early on that theword fascism, in the sense conventionally given to it, posed manyproblems. George Orwell, among others, doubted that it hadmuch meaning. It had been used about farmers, tobacconists,Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, astrology, women, and evendogs, he noted:
Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning ... even the people who recklessly fling the word `fascist' in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By `fascism' they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working class. Except for the relatively small number of fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept `bully' as a synonym for `fascist'. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
Good for a scary evening in 1944, when the V1s were passing overLondon, this wasn't quite enough for the present. It didn't explainwhy so many people had taken the bullies seriously and had beenprepared to die for them. And it didn't explain the fascinationexercised by the movement or its aesthetic properties—the blackboots, the silly buckles and funny hats, the endless wasteful performanceslaid on in the name of solidarity organized aroundcommon hatred. By the time he wrote 1984, just before his death,Orwell appeared to have tired of fascism, regarding it as a mid-centurydead end no longer capable of capturing the imagination.A totalitarianism the more shocking because it derived from thehumanist pretensions of socialism now triumphed. By comparisonwith the horrors of Ingsoc, the vanished world of the mid-centurydictators seemed small beer. Orwell chided the anti-fascists. Theywere looking backwards and they were also committing seriouslinguistic abuse. He came to believe that anti-fascism merely disguisedthe awful things going on in the so-called socialist world,perpetrated in the name of freedom and justice.
`If nationalism is the excessive distortion of patriotism,' thehistorian Eugen Weber wrote, `fascism is a similar distortion ofnationalism: militaristic, aggressive, totalitarian in its exclusionof alternatives.' He might have added that it was also irrational,and thus (for its practitioners at least) had the advantage that itcouldn't be argued with. As doctrine, fascism was concerned withthe fetishistic aspects of the world: it succeeded best where, out ofinjured pride or anger, totems could be conjured up. Only themaddest of its fellow-travellers, such as the socialite UnityMitford, paid much attention to the idea that the movementmight reach across cherished frontiers, uniting its believers in thecommon ground of embattled nationalist differences. However,the melody of fascism was a different matter. Leave aside suchmundane differences of uniforms and the music remained. And itwas composed in equal parts of pessimism and redemption.Fascism relied on the attractive and simple presumption accordingto which immorality, exercised on behalf of shared prejudiceor hatred, was legitimate. Simply, it told people the world was sounutterably awful that any means of shared self-redemptionwould be allowed. It meant that groups of people could, and did,do what they felt like to make themselves feel better.
After the Leader—a figure considered essential to fascism,and of whom I was to encounter a copious supply of candidates—anotherfascist type was the Doomed Hero. Flops were toleratedif they crashed their planes or wrote bad poetry. Converts to fascismbecame its staunchest believers, but they could also nudgealong as ballast in the movement—all they had to do was seemelegant or merely cynical. Now that the principal aspect of fascismhad disappeared, which was its total control of the modern state,it was possible to see that the movement had to a large degreebeen composed of people who didn't really believe in anythingat all. There were plenty of those around in Europe, and theyconstituted the decorative class of fascism. To use communist terminology,they were the fellow-travellers of the movement. Theirexistence established beyond doubt the fact that, given some sortof choice, a great many people disliked the implications of democracyand wouldn't plump for what they saw as the arbitrarydestructiveness of capitalism.
The publication in 1992 of the memoirs of Drieu la Rochellerevived the memory of this type. Drieu was a half-successful 1930snovelist (his best book, Le feu follet, about a suicide, was lateradapted by Louis Malle) who lived at the edges of the Paris beaumonde, seducing the wives of industrialists and toying with theend of democracy between the good meals still to be had duringthe Occupation. He was too lazy, and also too stuck in his weariness,to think of joining de Gaulle. In 1940 he was approached bythe German invaders and asked to become the head of theNouvelle Revue Française, France's best-known literary review. Hewas to be a figurehead of the new European culture imposed onFrance by its occupiers. By all accounts Drieu did a perfectly goodjob, even advancing the prospects of those he knew to be opponentsof the regime, but whom he nonetheless judged to be goodwriters or merely braves types. However, his diaries show him tohave been at odds with the morosely dutiful personnage he dailypresented to his German friends. In between worrying about hishaemorrhoids or his sexual performance and reading Indian mysticism—serenityeluded him, as one might have expected—heentered a spiral of depression. When it was clear that Germanyhad lost the war he resolved to kill himself, and he did so with hisusual sense of style, hiding out in a country estate at the end of1944 while his enemies tracked him down.
By now the Occupation and its horrors had become the stuffof kitsch fiction. This was not why Drieu interested me. Instead Iwas concerned with the degree to which, as a type, he resembledso many people whom it was my privilege to know, professionallyand personally. I was becoming familiar with the notion of cynicismas a belief system. It seemed that Patrick had been right: youcould simply believe in nothing at all, turning the absence ofbelief into a creed of sorts. However, this required the presence ofincreasing quantities of hatred, and Drieu, like many of the peopleI was meeting, was what contemporary psychologists wouldcall an addictive personality. Hatred, rather than food or sex, washis principal addiction. Drieu's fruitcake high style was miles awayfrom the semi-literate outpourings to be found on the Internet,but the emotions (and the posturing) weren't so different:
I wish to die as a Roman ...
I loved England, the greatest success of nordic [sic] civilization. But I abandoned her because she was rendered rotten by too much success.
I hate Jews. I always knew that I hated them. When I married Colette Jéramec [his first wife] I knew what I was doing and what an idiocy I was committing. I never could fuck her because of that.
The Germans are assholes, too. Complete assholes, arrogant, clumsy. But they are also passionate, like myself. They are all I ever wanted to be. I only wish to die with them.
The sense of never quite belonging was often to be foundamong fascists, and this was why the impoverished Drieu resentedhis moneyed wife. But anti-Semitism was also what held hisworld—what there was of it anyhow—together. It explained thesocial or cultural decline that appeared to threaten him personally.Among those I met who professed to believe that it was theArabs or Islam that now posed a greater threat to Europe, I wasinterested to find that a distrust of Jews nonetheless prevailed. Ithad become a primary hatred, legitimating the elevation of lesseraversions. As long as there was hatred in Europe, I knew that thelong shadow of anti-Semitism would be there, too.
In 1997, a friend in Paris gave me a copy of what proved to bethe most distasteful book I had ever encountered. This was notMein Kampf, which was by comparison boring and evasive; norwas it the odious La France Juive by Edouard Drumont, publishedat the time of the Dreyfus affair; nor indeed the notoriously fakedProtocols of the Elders of Zion, still available in the 1990s onMoscow bookstalls. Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Bagatelles pour unmassacre was first published in 1937, selling very well, and it wasreprinted in the war, when paper was scarce. After the war Célinenever mentioned the book. Although his works were tastefullyassembled in the Pléiade collection, a certificate of literary preeminence,Céline's estate never allowed Bagatelles to be reprinted.
At the time Céline's outburst appeared its author was knownas a novelist whose best work, Journey to the End of the Night, hadappeared to presage a new democratic form in which the anonymousand hopeless were given expression against the existingrules of the game which specified that only the bourgeois wereworthy of fictional attention. Céline became what was probablythe first instance of anti-celebrity—a man who thrived from thehatred he incurred. Like his hero Bardamu, he appeared to hismany admirers to be the forgotten man of 1930s Europe. He hadbeen in the trenches during the Great War and he had wanderedaround the worst corners of the French Empire, in West Africa.Also, he had been to Chicago and Los Angeles where, like mostFrench people, he found much to dislike. The Communist Partyacclaimed Journey to the End of the Night; it was thought to becapable of telling the comrades what a life lacking a consciousnessof the future might consist of. Céline was a dog lover and a vegetarian,and was married to a woman who taught progressivedance. He made his living as a doctor, usually in the most impoverishedareas of Paris. But few were prepared for the revelationthat he was also an impassioned anti-Semite.
Céline's paranoid, atrocious ideas (many, many times he suggestedin print or to friends that Jews should be exterminated, andhe wasn't joking) existed in mysterious counterpoint with his literarygenius. Even as he comprehensively denied humanity to onegroup of people he could evoke the utmost feelings of sympathyfor his hopeless paumés—the lost ordinary Frenchmen of his time.In that respect, considered merely as a literary problem, Célinewas far more intractable than genteel anti-Semites like T. S. Eliot.However, I became interested in his work for entirely differentreasons. Nowadays Céline was a cult writer of the Far Right andmany of his ideas closely resembled those of the National Frontpolemicists. Céline's racism, for instance, which was of the deepest,blackest kind, was based on his conception of culture. Hebelieved that civilization, if it meant anything at all, should befounded on the difference between groups or individuals. Célinewas sufficiently well educated to understand that the race theoriesimplied by German anti-Semitism were nonsense—indeed hefound the seriousness of Germans ridiculous. But culture wasimportant to him, and he believed that a culture could die aseasily as any other organism. Looking around him, Célineannounced that France was mortally threatened. The last vestigesof Frenchness would be extinguished in the next war. The`bagatelles' of which he wrote were a form of consolation offeredbefore the imminent prospect of Armageddon, and they consistedof telling fellow Frenchmen that it remained the obligation ofevery Frenchman to hate Jews. For Jews were the founder membersof the international class of capitalists. They were middlemen(like many anti-Semites, Céline believed that Jews didn't makeanything except money) of popular culture. Jews were those onbehalf of whom the next war would be fought. Jewishness foundexpression in the English language, which had been annexed anddestroyed in much the same way as French shortly would be.Above all Jewishness could be identified in the mass, homogenizedmulticulturalism of America, which would sooner or laterdestroy France. Jews and blacks were the enemies. Around theFront, and within French extreme right-wing circles, these viewswere widespread. They formed the basis of most of the pamphletsput out by GRECE, an influential organization purporting todefend European values. Each time I heard a Front speaker alludefatuously to their bêtes noires, Steven Spielberg and MichaelJackson, I thought of Céline.
His half-grammatical rants still have the power to shock. Likehis successors, Céline was skilled at evoking liberal rights evenwhile he destroyed them. He demanded the right to freedom ofexpression in order to spread poison. So-called free speech, hesuggested, meant that the world was infected by `Jew fascism'. Hewas claiming as his due the reciprocal right to be heard:
This is what I think of as the intermediary activity of Yids: editors, agents, publicists ... under the influence of films, Jewish scenarios, cultural hoodlums, rotten people ... it's an order, hidden or overt, that what remains of French artistic production, already so feeble, so little important, is in the process of dying and must die ... The Jews have to have everything, that's what it all comes down to ...
What all of us hate about Jews is their arrogance, their demands to have everything, the dervish-rhythms of their endless martyrology, their hideous tom-tom beat ...
In 1943 Céline encountered the German writer Ernst Jünger at atea party of the German Institute. Jünger's job was to look afterFrench writers who were suitable objects of German sponsorship,giving them handouts. He was a decorated war veteran, a fastidiousconservative, and a very serious man who believed inGerman-French fellowship. But Jünger was taken aback whenCéline asked him why the German army didn't just get on with itand kill every Jew. `I did learn something from listening to himspeak for over two hours,' Jünger wrote in his diary that day. `Heexpressed the monstrous power of nihilism. People like him hearonly one melody. They are like machines which go forwards untilthey are broken in pieces.'
Should racism be overtly expressed or not? At that time, as inours, good taste (or the lack of it) was considered to be an importantfeature of civilization. One might conclude that what Jüngerreally objected to was a lack of circumspection. For his admirers,however, Céline possessed the redeeming quality of authenticity.In 1944 he followed the ageing survivors of the collaborationistVichy government to Sigmarigen, a castle in Middle Germany,where the Germans kept them in a state of half-imprisonment,allowing Pétain and the motley collection of civil servants andretired generals who still surrounded him on short walks throughthe winter countryside. After the briefest sojourn in Denmarkafter the war, where he avoided imprisonment, Céline returned toFrance. He never apologized for his views; indeed, he continuedto hold them, entertaining visitors to his small house with thenotion that the Holocaust had never existed (`ces magiques chambersà gaz') even while he insisted, apparently with great seriousness,that one of the greatest outrages of the time was the Nobelcommittee's refusal to consider him seriously.
After the collapse of 1945, fascism was placed under interdiction.It was possible to invite ex-communists to colloquies at theheight of the Cold War and they might even be found jobs if theyrecanted publicly. But true fascists (as opposed to the many abettorsand place-servers, who were reclaimed, often with excessivehaste) remained beyond polite consideration. The fear of fascismremained, and it didn't go away. There were sightings of Nazisthroughout the world, particularly in Argentina and Paraguay.Parallel to the journalistic quests for these survivors, however, laya lesser-known enterprise. This consisted of trying to ascertainwhether fascism was capable of spreading beyond its Europeannexus, and thus might be considered as a phenomenon of universalsignificance. Led by Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, twoGerman émigrés from the Frankfurt School, a team of sociologistsinterviewed hundreds of people in the Los Angeles area in1950. They, too, were looking for fascists—but they went to thesuburbs of Southern California. `What tissues in the life of ourmodern society remain cancerous?' they asked. `And what withinthe individual organism responds to certain stimuli in our culturewith attitudes and acts of aggression?' Respondents were rankedaccording to various complementary scales, to give an idea ofthe degrees of anti-Jewish prejudice, ethnocentrism and `anti-democratic'feelings:
1-2. The Jews must be considered a bad influence on Christian culture and civilization.
1-5. One trouble with Jewish businessmen is that they stick together and connive, so that a gentile doesn't have a fair chance in competition.
1-8 Jewish power and control in money matters is far out of proportion to the number of Jews in the total population.
Adorno and his colleagues discovered that there was indeedsuch a thing as an `authoritarian personality'. It was to be foundusually (though not exclusively) among males who were notspecially well educated, and it went with patriarchal attitudes tothe matter of family authority. `Conservative embattled ...' wasthe authoritarian motto, and its adherents could be found inmany different places, in particular at the edge of disadvantage.Those who felt threatened in their jobs, or who were worriedabout a world changing too rapidly for them, were particularlyaffected. The armed forces appeared to provide a testing groundfor such types.
These were attitudes that I found in contemporary Europe.But I was interested to discover that, unlike the contemporaryEuropean sociologists I encountered, these Southern Californianpioneers were not pessimistic in their conclusions. They appearedto believe in a benign form of social conditioning. If it was possibleto think of an authoritarian type, created by circumstances,one might also conclude that people became tolerant or liberal-mindedfor reasons that could be fathomed. Adorno and his investigatorsexamined the tolerant and democratic in their sample.They were better educated, more frequently female. Their viewof life was more positive. Bigotry, the investigators concluded,might be vanquished through education and the beneficent influenceof popular culture. Peer pressure would assist in the struggle.In due course they could envisage a world where there would bemore democrats and fewer fascists.
But in Europe the situation was somewhat different. Here, incountries like Germany and Italy, substantial portions of the populationhad gone along with acts of cruelty, accepting the removalof democratic rights from minorities. Briefly, the occupying USforces ran de-indoctrination classes, but these were abandonedwhen the outbreak of the Cold War required the cultivation ofanti-communism. At a deeper level, unsusceptible to the analysesof social science, the fascist past posed an enormous problem. Itwas not so much a question of what should be done with the ex-fascists—manyof them occupied the same places they had done inthe previous regime—but of what lessons, if any, could be drawnfrom the entire experience.
Marcello Clerici, the hero of Alberto Moravia's 1951 novelThe Conformist, was molested as a child by a chauffeur, and he shotand killed the man. Horrified at what he had done, but eager toconceal the facts, he was in permanent flight. What seemed tohim to be an escape took him deeper and deeper into the spirit ofconformity—into a loveless marriage and meaningless spyingwork deep within the fascist bureaucracy:
He remembered that formerly he possessed a rich interior life, tumultuous and barely understood. Now everything about him was over-defined, as if he had been extinguished: a few simple ideas, a few over-rigid beliefs had replaced his generous and confused sense of self ... The most conspicuous change in his life during the past seventeen years was the utter disappearance of a vitality caused by so much unexpected and perhaps abnormal instinct. All that had been replaced by something grey and mediocre: a sense of normality.
Stripped of its mid-century bourgeois props, Clerici's abusedpast might not seem so unusual to us these days; but his solutionwas the one taken by many Europeans. Look, Moravia was saying,the danger never came from badges and uniforms, it came fromthe rest of us, who permitted all this to exist. And we should notthink that the system that permitted fascism to flourish was dead.But Moravia also meant Europeans to understand that post-warEurope was not so distanced after all from its forbidden past. Thesame sort of people flourished within identical, conformistbureaucracies. Moravia, who was a communist, could only beaware that he himself was still under surveillance, perhaps evenwatched over by the same people who had guarded him during thefascist era, and that they would retire in comfort, sunning themselvesin small villas by the Adriatic in the company of theirgrandchildren.
(Continues...)
Copyright © 2000 Nicholas Fraser. All rights reserved.
