Jan Nelis

The Clerical Response to a Totalitarian Political Religion: La Civiltà Cattolica and Italian Fascism

This article offers a close reading of the discourse on Italian fascism within the authoritative Italian Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica. The author shows that, when confronted with the fascist movement, La Civiltà Cattolica made no moves to oppose the regime, instead positioning itself so as to negotiate with and accommodate the fascist rhetoric. This decision was driven in part by the close alignment between the politics of Catholicism and fascism, and further fostered by the absence of a viable alternative political power. The article also illustrates the manner in which Catholic intellectuals intuitively perceived some aspects of fascist totalitarianism and the ‘sacralization of politics’ as threatening, particularly when confronted with manifestations of what was termed ‘political heresy’, along with certain features of fascist associationalism. However, despite their concerns no explicit rupture between Church and regime ever eventuated; on the contrary, some accounts imply an intended merger, however unstable it may have proven, between the ‘religious’ and ‘totalitarian’ goals of both parties.

Modernist Neo‐classicism and Antiquity in the Political Religion of Nazism: Adolf Hitler as Poietes of the Third Reich 1

Abstract The debate surrounding the relation between Hitler’s interest in architectural neo‐classicism and his reception of antiquity has often proceeded from the assumption of a deep nostalgia for a (deeply mythicised) classical ‘Aryan’ past and an instinctive drive to use anti‐modernist art for solely propagandistic ends. Whereas some have attempted to invert this causal relationship, the present study situates Hitler’s artistic passion within his ‘biopolitical’ vision of the new Germany, cleansed of all that was deemed degenerate (entartet) and unassimilable within the national community (gemeinschaftsunfähig). Through an analysis of the Third Reich’s vast civic building programmes, which takes into account Hitler’s personal discourse on the ancient past, we will show how both elements, that is Hitler’s ‘modernised’ neo‐classicism and his view on antiquity, can be seen as essentially complementary, and integral to his political programme. We will do so by firstly presenting an overview of the most typical examples of Hitler and Nazism’s use of an idiosyncratic version of neo‐classically inspired civic architecture. After this we will focus on the Führer’s ‘artistic’ persona, both in the sense of his love for the arts, especially those referring to the formal language of antiquity, as in the sense of his biopolitical conception of Nazi life as a ‘work of art in progress’. Finally, Hitler’s vision of artistic renaissance is located within a discourse of racial renewal which embraced the past and future within a this‐worldly ‘eternity’.