Fascism and the Cult of the Male Body

Donald's Orange Make-up, JD's eye liner, Hegseth's tattoos: par for the course.

Arno Breker, “Die Partei” (“The Party”}, 1945. Wikimedia Commons

Nobody would ever be allowed to forget that Hitler, the failed painter, was hell-bent on stealing every truly valuable piece of art in the whole of Europe. He was going to build a fantastic museum, partially financed by the gold fillings dug out of the teeth of the Jews, communists, gays, and dissidents he had murdered. The complex, to be built in Linz, would be full of the masterpieces that belonged to the broadest possible definition of the European soul, crafted by the geniuses of its every culture. In 2013, artists created a historically true set of Hitler’s dirty dream. He was still admiring himself in its image in the tawdry bunker in which he would die in 1945.

The set of Hitler’s Führermuseum from the movie Monuments Men (2013). Studio: 20th Century Fox.

And Hitler had his very, very favorite artists: Leni Riefenstahl with her Christ-symbol stuffed films, conductor Herbert von Karajan (maybe the only one that deserved admiration) with his extremely exact style, and Arno Brecker, the architect if the Third Reich’s quintessential images of Nazi manhood.

One of the central tenets within every non-propagandist definition of fascism the best historians and the most astute political and social observers. Here are just a few:

Umberto Eco / Author:

Fascism includes "both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."

Stanley G. Payne / Historian of the Spanish Civil War

"Fascist style" is seen in its emphasis on violence and authoritarianism, and its exultation of men above women, and young above old. … It places “extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing a strongly organic view of society.”

Luis Britto García / Essayist

"Fascism is misogynistic": Women are not represented as being independent or recognized for their achievements in fascism.

Kevin Passmore / Historian of Fascism

Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism.

Helen Graham / Spanish Civil War Historian

Much of what was at stake in Spain remains in present-day dilemmas at whose heart lie issues of race, religion, gender, and other forms of culture war that challenge us not to resort to political or other types of violence. In short … we should not mythologize our fears and turn them as weapons on those who are different. The Spanish Civil War and all the other civil wars of Europe’s mid-20th century were configured in great part by this mythologizing of fear, by a hatred of difference. The greatest challenge of the 21st century is, then, not to do this.”

Scott Burnett and John Richardson / “Breeders for Race and Nation”

Rigid articulations of sex and gender, of sexuality and, especially, of fecundity, are fundamental to the racist imaginaries of far-right and fascist discourse. The demographic threat of racialized Others often features in rationalizations for racist atrocities, such as misogynistic fantasies about socialists and women allowing Muslims to ‘swamp’ Europe (expressed by the perpetrator of the Utøya massacre in 2011).

And it is this elevation of the masculine we will see in Breker’s work—and indeed in all Nazi poster art and stylized celebration.

Arno Breker was born in 1900, a brilliantly talented sculptor and painter. By the early 1930s, he had already written far-right treatises, and by 1932, he was taking commissions from the Nazis. Hitler considered him the quintessential Nazi artist, his work lauded as the diametrical opposite of “degenerate art” (where, for example, you’ll find Kandinsky and the entire Bauhaus movement).

Arno Breker painted both men and women, but his speciality was the model Aryan subject with the chiseled face and the clenched jaw.

The Aryan male, rendered in Breker’s neo-classical style, is the quintessence of beauty, and as such he is nothing like the sloppy, paunchy Adolph Hitler, who was a rather pathetic wannabe.

Arno Breker, “The Force”, 1939. Public domain.

Arno Breker, “The Mission” 191. Public domain.

Arno Breker sculptured the good Nazi woman, too, but she’s demur. But then, the “demur” part is for public consumption. Here’s how Breker viewed women more privately. Here are two examples from his bronzes. Undated.

I dunno, but for me, those don’t have quite the nobility of the sculptures of males.

So, what’s going on here with this hyper-noble, hyper-masculine, hyper-attractive male specimens? They are idealized to an extraordinary degree. And in every sculpture or painting in which women also appear, they appear behind the man, as in this bas-relief of Orpheus and Eurydice—again the demur female and the god-like image of the noble male leading on.

Enter Spanish Civil War expert Sebastiaan Faber—who, among other things, studied Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant first Spanish Civil War film The Devil’s Backbone. In this film, the character of Jacinto represents this idealized — and cruel and vain and narcissistic and arrogant and fragile and weak — image of the glorified male body.

Eduardo Noriega as “Jacinto” in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone. El Deseo, Canal+ (French TV channel), Anhelo Producciones, Tequila Gang, Sogepaq. Distributed by Sony. Available to stream on Amazon Prime. Watching this film!!! It’s a brilliant study in fascism. Follow it with Del Toro’s ravishing Pan’s Labyrinth

In “A War of Values,” the preface to Criterion’s special edition of The Devil’s Backbone, Faber refers to the “cult of the body” in Spanish fascism (AWV). George L. Mosse, in his Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, observes that “male eros tended to haunt modern nationalism” (31) and that the impulse of fascist movements “was built upon the ideal of manliness” (64).

In “The Beautiful and the Monstrous Masculine: The Male Body and Horror in El Espinazo del Diablo,” Ann Davies points out the “relationship between nationalism and the male body as beautiful” (137), and Mosse writes that the virile masculine “was drafted by European nationalisms into service as a national symbol or stereotype” (31). This cultural iconography was more pronounced in Italian fascism and German Nazism than in Franco’s propaganda (Davies 137). Although Jacinto’s dark coloring stands in contrast to the Aryan blonde-and-blue-eyed ideal (137), he nonetheless “stands as virile male.”

This is a display, Chris Perriam writes in his review of Alejandro Amenábar’s Abre Los Ojos for Spanish Popular Cinema, of “perversity and psychosis enwrapped in extreme masculine beauty” (219). Faber illumines the source and nature of Jacinto’s character:

If you really think about the origins of fascism, the origins of racism, the origins of the genocide, it is really fear and insecurity and wanting to destroy what you don’t know, what you don’t understand, wanting to destroy what’s other, what’s different. And the way that Jacinto kills what he loves most … for the sake of honor and not losing face shows really clearly what fascism is about: It’s a morally perverse honor, because it’s the honor of the right of the strongest, the honor to do whatever he wanted to do, because he believes that he is entitled to it. (AWV)

The Twisted Masculine

Fascism is, among other. things, masculinity in trouble. A few years ago the McCain Institute asked a really devastating question: Is all terrorism at core really misogyny veiled as something else?

We are going to take up this question in depth in future articles, but the answer may be yes—at least in the modern period. It’s more complex than just warped masculinity and male rage: Hitler went nuts for many reasons, but was likely already dangerous unbalanced by the end of World War I. He bought into a depth of anti-Semitism that can hardly be imagined. Mussolini bought into his own male ego fantasies and dragged an entirely culture to hell with him. Franco thought he was favored of god and, allied with what was perennially the most vicious form of Catholicism on the continent, tortured the communists, liberals, and thousands of the Spanish “New Women”—and bombed his own cities, espousing infants to shelling. In the Director’s Commentary of The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro says:

The Republican (liberal not conservative) government [of Spain] represent[ed] the best possible leftist government that has ever taken place on earth—women were emancipated, education was very experimental, culture was booming—and yet it all went to hell. (DBDC)

The Imagery of American Fascism

Next time … we talk about Trump, Vance, Tarrio, Tate, and Hegseth, and the imagery of American fascism — and about the delusions of personal beauty suffered by almost all of them. We’re near email max length. Laters, dear ones.