Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity

Fernando Esposito

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137362995
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Geschichte & Theorie der Politik

Flying and the pilot were significant metaphors of fascism's mythical modernity. Fernando Esposito traces the changing meanings of these highly charged symbols from the air show in Brescia, to the sky above the trenches of the First World War to the violent ideological clashes of the interwar period.

Part I

Longing for Order

1

Idea non vincit: Warburg and the Crisis of Liberal Modernity

Four reasons suggest themselves why this study of aviation discourse and its links with war, fascism and modernity should begin with the art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg. First, Warburg deserves attention from the point of view of theory and methodology; he sets an example for a “cultural history” that escapes interdisciplinary “border guards.”¹

Second, in our present examination of the character of modernity, Warburg plays a dual role vis-à-vis his contemporaries. On the one hand, he is a source who needs to be interrogated concerning an earlier historical period; on the other, he clearly protrudes forward into the present day. As a theorist who himself sought an answer to the question of modernity, he influences the understanding of modernity that underlies our own study. This makes it essential to historicize his own person as much as the impulses we have received from him.

Third, as the scion of a leading Jewish banking family, Warburg described himself as “ebreo di sangue, Amburghese di cuore, d’anima Fiorentino” (“a Jew by blood, a Hamburger at heart, a Florentine in spirit”).² We portray him as a paradigmatic representative of liberal modernity, central aspects of which may be identified with reference to him as an ideal type. This background serves as a contrasting foil to emphasize the mythical modernity that is the subject of this book.³

Fourth, Warburg is a speaker in the discourse of aviation. In 1926 he designed a postage stamp and handed it to the foreign minister of the day, Gustav Stresemann. Its main graphic element, an airplane whose wings are adorned with the motto Idea vincit, will be interpreted here as a condensed symbol of liberal modernity, though not strictly in the sense of Warburg’s or Panofsky’s iconography. The stamp, on which Warburg commissioned Otto Heinrich Strohmeyer to do further work, met with no greater success than the republic it was supposed to represent. But it is significant as one of the voices in a discourse that would no longer be given a hearing. This story will be told here in stages, though not always chronologically.

Bourgeois, citizen of the world, Bildungsbürger

“But the influence of the Warburg Institute, if profound, was narrow.”⁴ Although Warburg is better known outside the circle of art historians than he was when Gay’s book first appeared in 1968, his life and theoretical contribution still require contextualization. He was born in 1866 into a German-Jewish family, whose bank M. M. Warburg & Co. had been founded in 1798 and had become one of the leading houses in Hamburg, or indeed Germany, active on the international stage.⁵ Despite the distinctive haut bourgeois milieu of Wilhelmine financiers from which he stemmed, Warburg’s habitus was more in keeping with that of the Bildungsbürger, the cultured middle classes.⁶ In parallel with the description of himself as “a Jew by blood, a Hamburger at heart, a Florentine in spirit,” we might therefore say that Warburg was a bourgeois by blood, a cosmopolitan at heart and a Bildungsbürger in spirit. These three categories help to place him socially, but above all in a “space of experience.” The nexus of bourgeoisie, culture and liberalism, also including Warburg’s “Jewishness” and rational, progressive worldview, can here be only intimated rather than exhaustively explored.⁷

A central concern here is the role of scientific rationality in strivings for a liberal order. The stress on an approach to the world guided by reason had its origins in the Enlightenment and its promise of an end to man’s “self-incurred immaturity.”⁸ At an individual level, this impetus joined up with the ideal of a cultural-educative formation (Bildung). This in turn, understood as a project for the cultivation of mature human beings, was a prerequisite and reflection of progress in history. It was a liberal Enlightenment conception, found in the person of Warburg and given objective form in his design for a postage stamp.⁹

The story was told in the family that Warburg renounced his rights of primogeniture at the age of 13. His younger brother Max promised in return “to buy him all the books he wanted.”¹⁰ From 1905 on, the cultural studies library he founded in Hamburg, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.), was run on a semipublic basis; it comprised more than 16,000 volumes when it and its staff emigrated to London in December 1933, four years after Warburg’s death.¹¹ Warburg may not have entered the family bank, but the K.B.W. – which both embodied and facilitated his thinking – could never have existed without it. One would not be doing justice to the relationship between bankers and scholars, however, if one described Warburg as a supplicant. It was customary among Wilhelmine industrialists, financiers and so-called Kaiserjuden to make a social commitment and to act as sponsors of learning. According to Ulrich Raulff, the K.B.W. bestowed legitimacy on the Jewish banking house, and with that behind him Warburg managed to build his “model institute” as a home for the history of modern art and culture.¹²

But Warburg distanced himself from his brothers’ bourgeois lifestyle and “ostentatious consumption.”¹³ He thought of himself as bourgeois only “by blood,” that is, by origin. Since scholars or intellectuals “are hard to accommodate in the house of social stratification,”¹⁴ it anyway seems more important to situate Warburg in the context of the Wilhelmine and Weimar intelligentsia. Although he was rooted socio-economically in the world of high finance, his cosmopolitan and Bildungsbürger aspects open up the main perspective in which his testimony should be read.

The concept of cosmopolitanism allows us to situate Warburg in the society of the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic, for it rises above the mostly negative connotations of things foreign during both periods, as well as the self-perception resulting from them. As we have seen, Warburg came from a Jewish family. He himself did not practice the Jewish faith – although or precisely because he had been brought up in strict orthodoxy – and he married a Protestant woman, Mary Hertz. His Jewishness consisted “only” of a cultural heritage, in which he participated by virtue of his upbringing. To the majority German society, however, he remained “a Jew” – or at best a “German Jew.” The ambivalence of such multiple identities, and of the (possibly plural) solidarities bound up with them, was perceived as a danger; it seemed to place a question mark over claims to an exclusive, homogenous national identity.¹⁵ A similar threat seemed to come from Ultramontane Catholics and “rootless” Social Democrats “without a fatherland.” But, at the latest with the Judenzählung of 1916 – the “head count” of 1916 in the army, designed to confirm accusations that Jews were underrepresented at the front – the anti-Semitism always latent in the country came to the fore in the trope of Jewish “internationalism.”¹⁶ The unwillingness of the majority to allow room for plurality or ambivalence forced those facing exclusion to revalue the niche existence and identity imposed on them. Many affirmed the complementarity of cosmopolitanism and (German) national sentiment; Friedrich Meinecke, for example, indulged “bearers of German culture” with the idea that “the true, the best German national feeling also includes the cosmopolitan ideal of a humanity beyond nationality and that it is ‘un-German to be merely German’.” Only “so-called public opinion” saw a contradiction between the two.¹⁷

As the example of Warburg plainly shows, there was indeed no contradiction. For assimilated Jews, who saw themselves as part of German culture, the accusation that they were insufficiently patriotic was a baseless and unpardonable insult; there was no reason to doubt their patriotism.¹⁸ Thus, on May 6, 1915, shortly before his 49th birthday, Warburg wrote to his disciple Wilhelm Waetzoldt, the future director-general of the state museums in Berlin:

Should Italy really opt for betrayal, the question will arise for me as to whether I can somehow make myself militarily useful. Physical incapacity (you know I have been seriously afflicted for years) means no direct service at the front; can I not sit the interpreters’ exam, so that I can be used in our country or in Italy? Or might my real-life experiences in Italy spare me this exam, even though I did my year’s service in 1894 only as an NCO (unqualified, of course, because unbaptized)? Best of all, I would like to go to preach in an Italian prison camp, though not as an NCO.¹⁹

Warburg remained a staunch nationalist at least until 1918, and as late as 1917 he still fervently believed in a victorious peace.²⁰ Warburg’s nationalism softened after the war, however. Like many other Jewish intellectuals, who increasingly saw nationalism as a dead end in the face of war and growing anti-Semitism, he felt proud of belonging to the German Kulturnation. The more tangible the drive to exclude them became, the more clearly German Jews (referring to Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and Humboldt) invoked the liberal, (neo)humanist and universalist ideals of the German tradition. Warburg packed this bourgeois-universalist utopianism into the bridge-builder image that is often found in his correspondence. In a letter from 1918 to the art historian Gustav Pauli, he writes:

Until now Germany has had no solid bourgeoisie capable of standing on its own two feet and advancing criticisms of its own. Natural aristocrats, temperamentally if reluctantly believing in freedom, were lacking as leaders, and there were too few bridge-builders. ...