It will surprise nobody who knows me that I’m starting to miss home; I am, after all, the consummate homebody. I am, in fact, one of those rare people who found the early days of lockdown more healing than hard, though some of that may be because I was also in mourning for my father. Still, we’ve been away from home almost exactly a month, and I miss my mother, and I miss my dog, and I miss the ease of just being where I’m used to being and knowing what I’m used to knowing.
I’m learning a lot of things on this trip that discomfit me, which is both the point and very, very difficult.
Our AirBnB has a huge picture of Bowie on one wall, but it’s Bowie from the Thin White Duke era, when he made (possibly in-character) statements that were at best problematic and toyed with the aesthetics (and maybe the politics) of fascism. It’s particularly disconcerting since we’re in Austria.
I struggle with the aesthetics of fascism myself; there is no denying The Triumph of the Will is a masterful piece of cinema or that Hugo Boss made some very snazzy uniforms for the Nazis. I want to believe that good art is always based on good intention, but that’s clearly not the case: one can make good art out of terrible ideas. And so what is the point of art?
Many writers like to say that art can change things for the better by changing how people understand the world, but don’t engage with the equally true opposite: art can make things worse in just the same way.
I read a fascinating article today by by George L. Mosse entitled Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations. The paper posits the idea that aesthetics help create fascism as a “civic religion, as a non-traditional faith that used liturgy and symbols to make its belief come alive.” I’m uncomfortable with the way we can see this playing out on both the right and the left at this moment, when membership in discourse communities is tightly policed and there is no conversation between these discourse communities that makes meaningful progress.
I suppose what I’m saying is that we’ve reached the point in the trip where I’m tired enough to lose the thread of the research I’m meant to be doing, and subsumed by things I’m finding that I didn’t expect to find. I certainly never expected to be doing this work amidst a Russian war of aggression that claimed it was “denazifying” a government with a Jewish head of state, or to encounter so many instances when the only Jews I could find were ones who’d been murdered generations ago.
What do we do with the idea of fascism, of antisemitism, when it’s baked into our arts and our cultures? How do we get rid of it when we insist on holding those works as central elements of our shared culture? Or, do we give up on that project and fracture into ever shrinking identity groups where membership is determined by increasingly narrow definitions of belonging?
Let’s hope this is a turning, rather than a stopping, point in the research and that tomorrow or the next day I discover some reason to be hopeful. We need hope to spur us toward action.
Don’t we?
Thank you to my cousin Seth, who noticed that spellcheck had changed Mosse's name to Moss! Fixed.