Abstract
In a recently published text from his literary estate, the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard argued that “the cold increases with the clarity.”1 This was the leitmotif of his address on receiving the Bremen Literature Prize in 1975, and it defines the view of “modernity” adopted in the present work.
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Notes
See Manfred Frank, “Das Motiv des ‘kalten Herzens’ in der romantisch-symbolischen Dichtung,” in Frank (ed.), Kaltes Herz, unendliche Fahrt, neue Mythologie. Motiv-Untersuchungen zur Pathogenese der Moderne, Frankfurt/Main 1989, pp. 11–49.
See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, MN 1984.
Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” in Hans Reiss (ed.), Political Writings, 2nd edn, Cambridge 1991, p. 58.
On the concept of nomos, see Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY 1967.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge 1991.
Wulf Bley, “Vorwort,” in Bley (ed.), Deutschland zur Luft, Stuttgart 1936, p. 9.
On the “other modernity,” see Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933, Paderborn 1999.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, New York, NY 2000 [repr.], p. 115.
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, New York, NY 1965 [orig. 1915], pp. 244–45. Following Durkheim’s definition of totem, the aviator and the airplane would be society itself, “objectified and represented in the mind.” On the liberal codification and instrumentalization of aviation, see Chapter 1.1 below: Idea non vincit; and, on the Soviet equivalent, Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air.
On the “substructures of thought,” see Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, Ithaca, NY 2010, p. 5.
On the politics of time, see Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Modernity and the Avantgarde, London 1995. On fascism and anthropological revolution, see inter alia: Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, Princeton, NJ 2006, pp. 46–7; and “Il uomo nuovo del fascismo. Riflessioni su un esperimento totalitario di rivoluzione antropologica,” in Gentile, Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione, Rome 2005, pp. 235–64.
See my definition of fascism in Section 1.3 below: “Definition of the Central Analytic Categories.” It has not been possible to examine here the Stalinist-Marxist blueprint for modernity. On the comparison between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, and for a survey of the literature, see Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler. The Age of Social Catastrophe, London 2007;
Michael Geyer/Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism. Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Cambridge 2009;
Richard J. Overy, The Dictators. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, London 2004. Wolfgang Schivelbusch contrasts Germany and Italy with the United States in his Three New Deals. Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, New York, NY 2006. On Germany and Italy
see Richard Bessel (ed.), Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Comparisons and Contrasts, Cambridge 2000 [repr.] and
Armin Nolzen/Sven Reichardt (eds.), Faschismus in Italien und Deutschland. Studien zu Transfer und Vergleich, Göttingen 2005.
Hans-Georg Soeffner, “Flying Moles (Pigeon-Breeding Miners in the Ruhr District). The Totemistic Enchantment of Reality and the Technological Disenchantment of Longing,” in Soeffner (ed.), The Order of Rituals. The Interpretation of Everyday Life, New Brunswick, NJ 1997, pp. 95–116; here p. 96.
See Lutz Raphael, “Ideen als gesellschaftliche Gestaltungskraft im Europa der Neuzeit. Bemerkungen zur Bilanz eines DFG-Schwerpunktprogramms,” in Lutz Raphael/Heinz-Elmar Tenorth (eds.), Ideen als gesellschaftliche Gestaltungskraft im Europa der Neuzeit. Beiträge für eine erneuerte Geistesgeschichte, Munich 2006, pp. 11–27.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, London 1989.
Nikolaus Buschmann/Horst Carl, “Zugänge zur Erfahrungsgeschichte des Krieges: Forschung, Theorie, Fragestellung,” in Buschmann/Carl (eds.), Die Erfahrung des Krieges. Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, Paderborn 2001, pp. 11–26.
For a survey of discourse history, see Achim Landwehr, Geschichte des Sagbaren. Einführung in die historische Diskursanalyse, Tübingen 2001;
Jürgen Martschukat, “Geschichte schreiben mit Foucault–eine Einleitung,” in Martschukat (ed.), Geschichte schreiben mit Foucault, Frankfurt/Main 2002, pp. 7–26;
and Philipp Sarasin, “Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse,” in Sarasin (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse, Frankfurt/Main 2003, pp. 10–60.
For a survey of conceptual history and the history of metaphor, see Hans-Erich Bödeker (ed.), Begriffsgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte, Göttingen 2002;
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Dimensionen und Grenzen der Begriffsgeschichte, Munich 2006, esp. pp. 7–36. See also the “founding texts” of German conceptual history:
Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung,” in Otto Brunner/Werner Conze/Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1, Stuttgart 1972, pp. XIII–XXVII
and Rolf Reichardt, “Einleitung,” in Rolf Reichardt/Eberhard Schmitt (eds.), Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680–1820, vol. 1/2, Munich 1985, pp. 39–148.
Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx, Surveys from Exile, London 1973, p. 146.
See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edn, Oxford 1958.
Philipp Sarasin, “Subjekte, Diskurse, Körper. Überlegungen zu einer diskursanalytischen Kulturgeschichte,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig/Hans-Ulrich Wehler (eds.), Kulturgeschichte Heute, Göttingen 1996, pp. 131–64; here p. 142.
George Lakoff/Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, IL 1980, p. 77.
Reinhart Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’–Two Historical Categories,” in Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, Cambridge, MA 1985, pp. 267–88.
Herf, “The Engineer as Ideologue,” p. 646. Here and on the following, see also Riccardo Bavaj, Die Ambivalenz der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus. Eine Bilanz der Forschung, Munich 2003, pp. 48–52.
Conversely, we may say that the third period of research in the English-speaking countries–which was geared to cultural history–largely overlooked the socially oriented studies of fascism published by Wolfgang Schieder and his circle since the 1970s, which had emphasized such aspects as the transfer between Italian Fascism and National Socialism. See Wolfgang Schieder, Faschistische Diktaturen. Studien zu Italien und Deutschland, Göttingen 2008;
Christof Dipper/Rainer Hudemann/Jens Petersen (eds.), Faschismus und Faschismen im Vergleich. Wolfgang Schieder zum 60. Geburtstag, Cologne 1998;
Christof Dipper/Wolfgang Schieder (eds.), Faschismus und Gesellschaft in Italien. Staat–Wirtschaft–Kultur, Cologne 1998;
Wolfgang Schieder, “Die NSDAP vor 1933. Profil einer faschistischen Partei,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 19/1993, pp. 141–54;
Wolfgang Schieder (ed.), Faschismus als soziale Bewegung. Deutschland und Italien im Vergleich, Hamburg 1976.
On the following, see: Arnd Bauerkämper, Der Faschismus in Europa 1918–1945, Stuttgart 2006, pp. 18–24;
Renzo De Felice, Le interpretazioni del fascismo, Rome 2001 [repr.]; Payne, A History of Fascism, pp. 441–50;
Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism. Critical Concepts in Political Science, vol. 1, The Nature of Fascism, London 2004;
and Wolfgang Wippermann, Faschismustheorien. Die Entwicklung der Diskussion von den Anfängen bis heute, Darmstadt 1997, pp. 11–57.
See Norbert Frei, 1968. Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest, Bonn 2008, pp. 84ff.
Wolfgang Wippermann, “The Post-War German Left and Fascism,” in Journal of Contemporary History 11/1976, pp. 185–219; here p. 193.
See also Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism. The Inner History of the Cold War, New York, NY 1995.
See, among others: Eckhard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Bilanz der internationalen Forschung, 2nd edn, Baden-Baden 1999;
Hans Maier (ed.), Totalitarianism and Political Religions. Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships. Theory and History of Interpretation, 3 vols., New York, NY 2004–2007;
Wolfgang Wippermann, Totalitarismustheorien. Die Entwicklung der Diskussion von den Anfängen bis heute, Darmstadt 1998.
Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism. Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, New York, NY 1969, Appendix A, p. 571.
See Roger Eatwell, “On Defining the ‘Fascist Minimum.’ The Centrality of Ideology,” Journal of Political Ideologies 1/1996, pp. 303–19;
and Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London 1993 [repr.], p. 38.
Ernst Nolte, Die Krise des liberalen Systems und die faschistischen Bewegungen, Munich 1968, p. 385.
Thomas Nipperdey, “Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche. Zu den Werken von Ernst Nolte zum Faschismus,” Historische Zeitschrift 210/1970, pp. 620–38. See Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, p. 539.
George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, London 1966 [repr.].
George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution. Towards a General Theory of Fascism, New York, NY 1999, p. x.
Emilio Gentile, The Origins of Fascist Ideology, 1918–1925, New York, NY 2005 [repr.].
Emilio Gentile, “The Myth of National Regeneration in Italy. From Modernist Avant-Garde to Fascism,” in Matthew Affron/Mark Antliff (eds.), Fascist Visions. Art and Ideology in France and Italy, Princeton, NJ 1997, pp. 25–45; here p. 41.
Stanley G. Payne, Fascism. Comparison and Definition, Madison, WI 1980; and A History of Fascism, p. 14.
On the use of this term, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London 1994.
See Roger Griffin, “Introduction,” in Roger Griffin (ed.), International Fascism. Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus, London 1998, pp. 1–20; here p. 14.
See Osborne, The Politics of Time; and Roger Griffin, “‘I Am No Longer Human. I Am a Titan. A God!’ The Fascist Quest to Regenerate Time,” in Roger Griffin (ed.), A Fascist Century. Essays, New York, NY 2008, pp. 3–23.
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity. An Unfinished Project,” in Maurizio P. d’Entrèves/Seyla Benhabib (eds.), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, Cambridge, MA 1997, pp. 38–55.
Geoff Eley, “The British Model and the German Road. Rethinking the Course of German History Before 1914,” in David Blackbourn/Geoff Eley (eds.), The Peculiarities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford 1984, pp. 37–155, pp. 154–55.
See Detlev J. K. Peukert, “Die Unordnung der Dinge. Michel Foucault und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft,” in François Ewald/Bernhard Waldenfels (eds.), Spiele der Wahrheit. Michel Foucaults Denken, Frankfurt/Main 1991, pp. 320–39.
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth/C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology, Boston, MA 1948, pp. 129–56.
Anson Rabinbach, “Nationalsozialismus und Moderne. Zur Technik-Interpretation im Dritten Reich,” in Wolfgang Emmerich/Carl Wege (eds.), Der Technikdiskurs in der HitlerStalin-Ära, Stuttgart 1995, pp. 94–113, here p. 98. With The Dialectic of Enlightenment in mind, Rabinbach points out that for Bauman “a modernity defined by the rationalization of means” ultimately presupposes “the irrationality of ends.”
Cf. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence; and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, NJ 1998.
See among others: Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism. The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939, Durham, NC 2007; Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities;
Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, New York, NY 2000;
Patricia Chiantera-Stutte, Von der Avantgarde zum Traditionalismus. Die radikalen Futuristen im italienischen Faschismus von 1919 bis 1931, Frankfurt/Main 2002;
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, The Fascist Spectacle. The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, Berkeley, CA 2000 [repr.];
Claudia Lazzaro/Roger J. Crum (eds.), Donatello among the Blackshirts. History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy, Ithaca, NY 2005;
Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State. Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy, Princeton, NJ 1998;
Frank Vollmer, Die politische Kultur des Faschismus. Stätten totalitärer Diktatur in Italien, Cologne 2007.
Giulia Brogini-Künzi, Italien und der Abessinienkrieg 1935/36. Kolonialkrieg oder Totaler Krieg, Paderborn 2006;
Aram Mattioli, Experimentierfeld der Gewalt. Der Abessinienkrieg und seine internationale Bedeutung 1935–1941, Zurich 2005.
On the ethos of modernity, see Eva Erdmann/Rainer Forst/Axel Honneth (eds.), Ethos der Moderne. Foucaults Kritik der Aufklärung, Frankfurt/Main 1990.
See Ute Schneider, “Spurensuche. Reinhart Koselleck und die ‘Moderne,’” in Lutz Raphael/ Ute Schneider (eds.), Dimensionen der Moderne. Festschrift für Christof Dipper, Frankfurt/Main 2008, pp. 61–71; and Christoph Cornelißen, “Ein ständiges Ärgernis? Die Moderne in der (west-)deutschen Geschichtsschreibung,” in ibid., pp. 235–48.
See Max Weber, “The ‘Rationalism’ of Western Civilization,” in Stephen Kalberg (ed.), Readings and Commentaries on Modernity, Malden, MA 2005, pp. 53–64; and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1930], New York, NY 1992.
On the role of this process in Weber’s theory, see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Boston, MA 1984, pp. 143–242;
and Wolfgang Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism. Max Weber’s Developmental Theory, Berkeley, CA 1981.
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, “Konturen von Ordnung in den Zeitschichten des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Thomas Etzemüller (ed.), Die Ordnung der Moderne. Social Engineering im 20. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld 2009, pp. 41–64;
Gabriele Metzler, “‘Geborgenheit im gesicherten Fortschritt.’ Das Jahrzehnt von Planbarkeit und Machbarkeit,” in Matthias Frese/Julia Paulus/Karl Teppe (eds.), Demokratisierung und gesellschaftlicher Aufbruch. Die sechziger Jahre als Wendezeit der Bundesrepublik, Paderborn 2003, pp. 777–97;
and Dirk van Laak, “Planung. Geschichte und Gegenwart des Vorgriffs auf die Zukunft,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34/2008, pp. 305–26.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA 1993.
See also Hartmut Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur. Eine andere Theorie der Moderne, Reinbek 2006, pp. 22–3.
See Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789–1848, London 1962. Elsewhere, Bauman refers to the impossibility of periodizing modernity. But he calls modernity the “historical period that began in Western Europe with a series of profound social-structural and intellectual transformations of the seventeenth century and achieved its maturity: (1) as a cultural project–with the growth of Enlightenment; (2) as a socially accomplished form of life–with the growth of industrial (capitalist, and later also communist) society.” Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 4.
See Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy, esp. pp. 22–6. On the absolutism of reality, see Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, Cambridge, MA 1985.
See Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, Cambridge 1988.
Now also see Aleida Assmann, Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne, Munich 2013;
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Unsere breite Gegenwart, Berlin 2010;
François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris 2003; Hunt, Measuring Time;
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, London 1983;
Achim Landwehr, Die Geburt der Gegenwart. Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/Main 2014;
Chris Lorenz/Berber Bevernage (eds.), Breaking up time. Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future, Göttingen 2013 and especially Koselleck’s Futures Past and Osborne, The Politics of Time.
Osborne, The Politics of Time, pp. xi and ix. See also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Modern, Modernität, Moderne,” in Otto Brunner/Werner Conze/Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 4, Stuttgart 1978, pp. 93–131.
On acceleration, see Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity, New York, NY 2013.
Cf. Bedrich Loewenstein, Der Fortschrittsglaube. Geschichte einer europäischen Idee, Göttingen 2009.
Michael Makropoulos, Modernität als ontologischer Ausnahmezustand? Walter Benjamins Theorie der Moderne, Munich 1989, p. 148, and “Crisis and Contingency. Two Categories of the Discourse of Classical Modernity,” Thesis Eleven 111/2012, pp. 9–18.
Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” in Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford, CA 2002, pp. 170–207.
See Peter Fritzsche, “Historical Time and Future Experience in Postwar Germany,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig (ed.), Ordnungen in der Krise. Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands 1900–1933, Munich 2007, pp. 141–64, here p. 141.
See Frank Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie. Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich, Paderborn 1998.
For surveys of philosophical myth-theory, see Emil Angehrn, Die Überwindung des Chaos. Zur Philosophie des Mythos, Frankfurt/Main 1996;
Wilfried Barner/Anke Detken/Jörg Wesche (eds.), Texte zur modernen Mythentheorie, Stuttgart 2003;
Christoph Jamme, Einführung in die Philosophie des Mythos. Neuzeit und Gegenwart, Darmstadt 1991.
Solidly grounded analyses of the phenomenon of myth and modernity may be found especially in Karl Heinz Bohrer (ed.), Mythos und Moderne. Begriff und Bild einer Rekonstruktion, Frankfurt/Main 1983;
Manfred Fuhrmann (ed.), Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption [Poetik und Hermeneutik, Arbeitsergebnisse einer Forschungsgruppe IV], Munich 1971;
and Christoph Jamme, “Gott an hat ein Gewand.” Grenzen und Perspektiven philosophischer Mythos-Theorien, Frankfurt/Main 1999.
Here and below, see Manfred Frank, Gott im Exil. Vorlesungen über die Neue Mythologie, Frankfurt/Main 1988, pp. 15ff. On myth as statement and (secondary) semiological system
see Roland Barthes, Mythologies, New York, NY 1972, pp. 109 and passim. See also Münkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Mythos und Vernunft,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, Ästhetik und Poetik, Tübingen 1993, pp. 163–69; here p. 165. On the legitimation of knowledge through narrative, see Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, esp. pp. 27–36.
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), in Heidegger (ed.), Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege], Cambridge 2001, pp. 67–85. “Understood in an essential way, ‘world picture’ does not mean ‘picture of the world’ but, rather, the world grasped as picture. Beings as a whole are not taken in such a way that a being is first only in being in so far as it is set in place by representing-producing (vorstellend-herstellend) humanity. Whenever we have a world picture, an essential decision occurs concerning beings as a whole. The being of beings is sought and found in the representedness of beings.”
see also Frank Reichherzer, “‘Das Wehr-Denken ist deutsch, nationalsozialistisch.’ Zum Verhältnis von wehrwissenschaftlichem Denken und nationalsozialistischer Ideologie in der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in Käte Meyer-Drawe/Kristin Platt (eds.), Wissenscha ft im Einsatz, Munich 2007, pp. 243–67.
On “family resemblances,” see Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I: 59ff., Oxford 1968, pp. 31ff.
On D’Annunzio’s “theologeion of salvation,” see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “I reden-tori della vittoria. Über Fiumes Ort in der Genealogie des Faschismus,” in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht/Friedrich Kittler/Bernhard Siegert (eds.), Der Dichter als Kommandant. D’Annunzio erobert Fiume, Munich 1996, pp. 83–115.
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Esposito, F. (2015). Introduction. In: Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362995_1
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