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CHAPTER ONE Re-Enchanting the Commodity Nazi Modernism Reconsidered One of the most curious things about contemporary academic culture is the amount of recent attention devoted to what is now known as “fascist modernism.” These days there seems no end to the intense international preoccupation with a subject that only a generation ago was routinely regarded as reckless and even repugnant, more recycled Third Internationalism than legitimate scholarship.1 This was especially true during much of the Cold War in Western Europe and the United States, where fascism and modernism were typically treated as intrinsically antithetical and morally incompatible. What has emerged quite clearly since the events of 1989, however, is the extent to which these perceptions were products of the Cold War. Nowhere was this more apparent than in West Germany, where cultural imperatives often went hand in hand with political ones. Because the overriding task of the late 1940s and early 1950s was to integrate this new postfascist polity into the charmed circle of the liberal West as quickly as possible, the postwar period soon gave rise to a distinctly transatlantic campaign to neutralize the toxic cultural legacy of Nazism. Often this meant recasting fascist culture as a “regressive interlude ” in an otherwise redemptive tale of modernism triumphant.2 While dissenting voices challenged the supposedly elective affinity of liberalism , progress, and modernism with increasing intensity from the 1960s on, it is really the end of the Cold War that has spurred new curiosity about the shadowlands of modernism.3 That this interest has extended well beyond Germany and Italy to include Austria, France, and Spain only highlights its broadening appeal.4 Although it is scarcely surprising that Nazi Germany remains the focus of this broader reappraisal, the degree to which new accounts of Nazi 23 culture have gone well beyond old Cold War battle lines is striking. The once central questions regarding how class-determined, “polycratic,” or modern Nazism really was have given way to less ideologically driven reassessments. Older stories of all-powerful elites and manipulated masses have been replaced with more nuanced cultural histories of ideas, institutions, and everyday practices.5 Some writers have expanded the story, arguing that the Third Reich’s infamous state culture was really the dark star of twentieth-century modernism. In these renderings, Nazi culture has emerged as a contemporary allegory of the radical instrumentalization of art, the liquidation of the avant-garde, and/or the hothouse fusion of violence, myth, and aesthetics.6 In each case, histories of industrial design have played a leading role in exposing what Peter Reichel ironically calls the “beautiful illusion” of Nazi modernism. After all, these histories were among the first to attack the reigning Cold War image of Nazi culture as essentially Teutonic pastoralism, Speer-esque monumentalism, and/or “blood and soil” reaction by recalling the Third Reich’s widespread enthusiasm for automobiles, airplanes, and modern consumer gadgets.7 In so doing design studies helped enlarge the picture of Nazi material culture beyond “Home Sweet Heimat,” while at the same time shedding light on its surprising continuities with both the 1920s and the 1950s.8 In large measure this was because design was barely affected by Nazi Gleichschaltung, or policy of coordination. Unlike other cultural spheres, it remained uniquely pro-modern in both rhetoric and styling from the very beginning. As such, design served as a crucial site for massproducing German “fascist modernism.” Nevertheless, the subject of Nazi design is a delicate business. Much of the problem pivots on the very ubiquity of design itself in Nazi Germany. What first appears as a flippant question is on closer inspection deadly serious: what ultimately did not count as industrial aesthetics in the Third Reich? Certainly mass political rallies, monumentalist architecture, propaganda films, Thing theaters, street parades, and radio broadcasts are commonly cited as part of the well-known catalog of Nazi cultural tools and techniques. But could it not be argued with equal validity that yellow stars, Gothic script, Iron Cross medallions, eugenics, concentration camp architecture, the V-2, the bureaucratic “death speak” of organized mass killing, and even the “Final Solution” itself were also expressions of the industrial design of Nazi ideology? If so, this raises thorny methodological issues. For it is one thing to say that all aesthetics were political , but quite another to somehow discern the sound of jackboots, sirens, and Panzer divisions in every exhibition vitrine. In other words, what 24 Chapter One [3.15.27.232] Project MUSE (2024...

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