HE SLAPDASH SERIES OF NEWSPAPER articles in which Lewis conveyed his impressions of Berlin immediately after the first great Nazi victories in the Reichstag in September 1930, and which were published as Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), are as notorious as they are unread: the following brief account of this work, whatever its general usefulness, will indeed lead us to some unexpected conclusions.
With his satirist’s feeling about cities, Lewis could hardly omit an initial tableau of Berlin (“Chicago, only more so if anything, but minus Bootleg, and with that great difference—that politics account for much of the street violence” [18]). The political point made here is that Nazi street violence is essentially a reaction to Communist violence and provocation; yet the inevitable narrative point is rather different: “But elegant and usually eyeglassed young women will receive [the tourist], with an expensive politeness, and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home…. Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees) after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish sightseer that they are men. …” (24). With this characteristic and obsessive motif out of the way, we come to the political analysis proper, which I will resume as a series of theses:
1. “Adolf Hitler is just a very typical german ‘man of the people’. … As even his very appearance suggests, there is nothing whatever eccentric about him. He is not only satisfied with, but enthusiastically embraces, his typicalness. So you get in him, cut out in the massive and simple lines of a peasant art, the core of the teutonic character. And his ‘doctrine’ is essentially just a set of rather primitive laws, promulgated in the interest of that particular stock or type, in order to satisfy its especial requirements and ambitions, and to ensure its vigorous survival, intact and true to its racial traditions” (31-32). This is very different from the hero-worshipping tones with which Pound salutes Mussolini’s “genius”; it also conveys the stance of Lewis’ articles. He means to convey the spirit, to the British public, of a phenomenon culturally alien to it; he intends to translate and to explain the Nazi movement as a matter of some historical significance, but not necessarily to endorse it. “It is as an exponent—not as critic nor yet as advocate—of German National-socialism or Hitlerism, that I come forward” (4). It seems to me that this didactic stance is essential in grasping the symbolic value Hitler (and Germany) had for Lewis: not only are they doubly oppressed—by Marxist provocation and by the Versailles Treaty—but this oppression is formally inscribed within his text as the misunderstanding and miscomprehension of the British reader, against which Lewis must write.
2. The Nazi conception of race is a welcome antidote to the Marxian conception of class: “The Class-doctrine—as opposed to the Race-doctrine—demands a clean slate. Everything must be wiped off slick. A sort of colourless, featureless, automaton—temporally two-dimensional—is what is required by the really fanatical Marxist autocrat. Nothing but a mind without backgrounds, without any spiritual depth, a flat mirror for propaganda, a parrot-soul to give back the catchwords, an ego without reflection, in a word a sort of Peter Pan Machine—the adult Child—will be tolerated” (84).
3. Hitler’s program is exemplary as a defense of Europe, at a time when Europe’s intellectuals are at work undermining its legitimacy through their “exotic sense” (a “sentimentalizing with regard to the Non-White World” [121]). In effect, the Hitlerist has this message for the ruling classes of other European countries: “When, respected sir, and gracious lady, are you going—oh short-sighted, much indulging, sentimentally-renegade person that you are!—when may we hope that you will turn for a change to more practical interests? How about giving your White Consciousness a try for a little—it is really not so dull as you may suppose! A ‘White Australia’—that may be impracticable. But at least there is nothing impracticable about a ‘White Europe’. And today Europe is not so big as it was. It is ‘a little peninsula at the Western extremity of Asia’. It is quite small. Why not all of us draw together, and put out White Civilization in a state of defense? And let us start by mutually cancelling all these monstrous debts that are crushing the life out of us economically” (121).
4. The Nazi program recapitulates many of Lewis’ most deeply felt polemic themes: “A ‘Sex-war’, an ‘Age-war’, a ‘Colour-line-war’, are all equally promoted by Big Business to cheapen labour and to enslave men more and more. I do not like the present Capitalist system” (97). Hitlerism not only repudiates the call to hatred and division of Marxian class war, and the pernicious “trahison des clercs” of the “exotic sense,” it also gives the welcome example of a transformation of Western “youth cults” into a genuine political movement (97).
5. “Race” essentially stands for the affirmation of the specificity of the national situation: this is the sense in which Lewis deals with Nazi antisemitism. The latter is, according to him, a German national characteristic, however unlovely, and must be understood as such. But here Lewis has a counter-sermon for the Germans themselves, as they try to explain themselves to other nations: “The Hitlerite must understand that, when he is talking to an Englishman or an American about the ‘Jew’ (as he is prone to do), he is apt to be talking about that gentleman’s wife! Or anyhow Chacun son Jew! is a good old english saying. So if the Hitlerite desires to win the ear of England he must lower his voice and coo (rather than shout) Juda verrecke! if he must give expression to such a fiery intolerant notion. Therefore—a pinch of malice certainly, but no ‘antisemitism’ for the love of Mike!” (42).
6. Hitlerian economics are those of the German peasant, essentially an anticapitalist attack on banks, loan-capital, and the War Debt. Hitler is a “Credit Crank.” The Nazi opposition to Communism (“which has taken the mechanical ways of Megalopolis into the villages”) “attacks the substitution, by the Communist, of the notion of quantity for that of quality…. Upon some points, of course, the Communist and the Nationalsocialist are in considerable agreement. Ultimately, the reason why their two doctrines could never fuse is this: the Marxist, or Communist, is a fanatically dehumanizing doctrine. Its injunctions are very rigidly erected against the continuance of ‘the person’. In the place of ‘the person’ the Communist would put the thing—quantity in place of quality, as it is stated above. … So, even if Hitlerism, in its pure ‘germanism’, might retain too much personality, of a second-rate order, nevertheless Hitlerism seems preferable to Communism, which would have none at all, if it had its way. Personality is the only thing that matters in the world” (182-183). Thus, “the Weltanschauung of the Hitlerist or his near-relation (the egregious ‘Credit-Crank’) is laughing and gay compared to that of his opponent, the Communist. … On principle—for his is a deliberately ‘catastrophic’ philosophy (the word is Marx’s)—the Communist views everything in the darkest colours…. The Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity—leisure and abundance. It is, with them, Misery-spot against Golden Age!” (183-184).
Most discussions of this book (which is generally passed over in embarrassed silence) have centered on the false problem of whether, on the strength of this “misguided” assessment of Hitler before he came to power, Lewis is to be thought of as a fascist or fascist sympathizer. The reader is generally reminded that Lewis changed his mind, and on the eve of World War II wrote an anti-Nazi counter-blast, The Hitler Cult and How It Will End (1939). But Lewis’ opinion of Hitler is by no means the most significant feature of the earlier work.
What is essential from our point of view is that Hitler is informed by all the ideological positions which will remain constant to the very end of Lewis’ life: those fundamental themes do not change, even if his view of Hitler did. Among them, and far more central than his attitude towards Hitler as a historical figure, is his attitude towards fascism as a historical force. Here, but to the end of his career, fascism remains for Lewis the great political expression of revolutionary opposition to the status quo. This fundamentally historical vision of fascism—this structural place of “fascism” in Lewis’ libidinal apparatus—is not altered by his later (and impeccable) anti-Nazi convictions, and is in fact recapitulated in Monstre gai, published only two years before Lewis’ death in 1957:
Hyperides represented the most recent political phenomenon—hated or disliked by everybody. Here was the Fascist, the arch-critic of contemporary society. On earth this newcomer proposed to supplant the enfeebled Tradition, of whatever variety, no longer able to defend itself. So this enfeebled Power of Tradition, and its deadly enemy, the Marxist Power, joined forces to destroy this violent Middleman (a borrower from both the new and the old).
(MG, 220)
Coming in the midst of the Cold War, and after the utter annihilation of Nazism as a presence on the world political scene, this retrospective evaluation of World War II may seem anachronistic, and the reader may be tempted to see it as a tired survival of thoughts that were alive for Lewis in the 20’s and 30’s. Yet the fact that fascism continued to stand as the political (and libidinal) embodiment of Lewis’ chronic negativity, his oppositionalism, his stance as the Enemy, long after the defeat of institutional fascism itself, may, I think, be better grasped from a somewhat different perspective. The figural value of fascism as a reaction is determined by the more central position of Communism, against which the anticapitalist posture of protofascism (of which Lewis approved) must always be understood. We have touched on a number of reasons why Communism could not, for Lewis, be a satisfactory solution. The ultimate one now proves to be his feeling—paradoxical after all that has been said—that Communism was a historical inevitability, and thus, in a sense, the final and most irrevocable form of the Zeitgeist, that against which the oppositional mind must somehow always take a stand.
In this sense, and in the spirit of the present study, which has been an immanent analysis of Lewis’ works, disengaging the self-critique always structurally implicit in them, we may allow his own truth-in-jest to have the final word:
I know that at some future date I shall have my niche in the Bolshevist Pantheon, as a great enemy of the Middle-class Idea … I say: “I shall be among the bolshie prophets!” My “bourgeois-bohemians” in Tarr—and oh, my Apes of God!—will provide ‘selected passages’ for the schoolchildren of the future communist state,—of that I am convinced—to show how repulsive unbridled individualism can be.
Fables Ofaggression ...
Frideric Jameson
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