Introduction

What is fascism? What is Nazism? What impact have extreme right wing and racist politics, ideologies, and regimes had on Western culture and institutions? In what ways have these politics, regimes and ideologies—as well as their legacies—inflected our reading of history, our interpretive practices, and our intellectual and artistic traditions? What challenges, what dangers, does the phenomenon of fascism pose in all of these areas? Since the early 1980s (and in a number of instances and circumstances, well before) numerous efforts to answer these questions have been undertaken in the disciplines of history, philosophy, critical theory, and political science, as well as more interdisciplinary fields of inquiry such as Holocaust studies. In part, these efforts have been stimulated precisely by attempts to come to grips with, to understand, and to contextualize in historical terms the meaning and impact of the Nazi Final Solution and the extermination of European Jewry. Issues related to the Holocaust have become central, but not simply because the event itself was poorly understood and even occulted during much of the postwar period. Rather, recent genocides in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda have brought the horror of such events home to the contemporary world, and in the case of Yugoslavia, raised the specter of a new European fascism and an explosion of racist and ethnic hatreds culminating in murder, "ethnic cleansing," and other terrible crimes.

Other issues besides the Holocaust, its legacy and meaning, and subsequent genocides have also contributed to a renewed interest in fascism, Nazism, and extreme right wing and racist politics. These include the re-emergence—and electoral successes of—extreme right wing political movements and parties in Western Europe, most notably in France, Austria, and Italy. But, apart from the world of politics, they also include revelations of the extent to which our intellectual and cultural practices, through the dubious pasts and politics of influential writers and thinkers, have been "tainted" by the ghosts of fascism, Nazism, and anti-Semitism. In this country, and within the academy itself, revelations concerning the Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man's collaborationist and anti-Semitic past during World War II and Martin Heidegger's longstanding and profound commitment to Nazism made headlines outside the academy, prompting heated debates concerning deconstruction itself and Heideggerian existentialism. The issue was, of course, the degree to which the political engagements by the two men affected their theoretical writings and philosophy, respectively. Given the enormous influence both enjoyed in European and especially American universities, the question arose as to what extent (if any) contemporary critical and philosophical practices were "contaminated" by the political pasts and beliefs of the two men.

In literary studies as well, the legacy and impact of fascism and anti-Semitism also emerged, or re-emerged. The debate had of course arisen in a number of earlier situations and circumstances, as, for example, during the controversy surrounding the awarding of the first Bollingen Prize for poetry to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos in 1949. Pound's overt anti-Semitism, his support for Mussolini's Fascism, and his wartime radio diatribes against the Allies were not only offensive in their own right, but they also raised the question as to whether his poetry was tainted by these attitudes. The issue of Pound's fascism and anti-Semitism was taken up again in the 1980s, as were the distasteful politics of other figures including T.S Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and other literary modernists. This was the case not only where Anglo-Saxon literature was concerned, but where other European literatures were at issue as well. The list of great writers who embraced unsavory fascist and racist politics includes the likes of Céline in France, Pirandello in Italy, Benn in Germany, and many more.

In this issue of the South Central Review, the legacy of fascism and right-wing extremism on our intellectual and cultural practices, as well as our institutions—including religious institutions—is explored in six stimulating and provocative essays by American and European scholars. The first three essays, by Claudio Fogu, Nitzan Lebovic, and Simonetta Falasca Zamponi deal in different national and cultural contexts with the...