6 neocleus 2005 - long live death

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Long live death! Fascism,resurrection, immortalityMARK NEOCLEOUS

Politics Division, Brunel University, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK

ABSTRACT This article argues that we need to take seriously the centrality of thedead to fascist ideology. Organized around the fascist slogan Long Live Death!,the article examines a host of fascist claims and practices centered on the dead.These include Martin Heideggers suggestion that we can be with the dead, and arange of provocations, tropes and ceremonies which suggest that the dead areeither still present or are about to be resurrected. Through a critique of othercategories which have been used to grapple with this dimension of fascismnecrophilia (Fromm), suicide (Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari), survival(Theweleit)the article argues that fascism is animated by ideas aboutresurrection and assumptions about immortality.

Why do fascists love desecrating graves? The interpretation peddled by the mediaand liberal intelligentsia presents grave desecration as a senseless and offensiveact of pointless violence, designed to upset civilized sensibilities and illustrating

just how far fascism is beyond the social democratic pale. Part of the intention ofthis article is to suggest that there is a lot more to grave desecration than thisinterpretation suggests, because grave desecration, I argue, takes us to one of thecore dimensions of fascist ideology: the dead. Saul Friedlander once wrote that tounderstand the phantasms that underlay many Germans relationship to Hitler, thefrenzy of their applause, their attachment to him until the last moment, it isnecessary to take into account their perverse rapport with a chief and a system forreasons that certainly were not explicit and would not have shown in an opinionpoll: the yearning for destruction and death.1 Im not convinced Friedlander doesthis in his book, and I have neither space nor inclination to discuss the yearningof many Germans. But Friedlander nonetheless hits an important nail on thehead: to understand fascism, one has to think through the question of the dead.

That this is so has become even more pressing given the recent work on fascismas a political religion. If this idea has any substance then the question of the deadmust surely come to the fore. For as Elias Canetti puts it, no-one who studies theoriginal documents of any religion can fail to be amazed at the power of the dead.2

In the most thorough account of fascism as a political religion, Emilio Gentile

Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2005),10(1), 3149

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/05/010031-19 q 2005 Taylor & Francis Group LtdDOI: 10.1080/1356931052000310272


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comments that fascism deals with death like any other religion: by using it to exaltthe communal feeling that integrates individuals into the group, through the ideathat those who die gain immortality by entering the mystical world of collectivememory.3 I want to take this idea and push it as far as it can go. Specifically, I wantto argue for the centrality of the dead to fascism, captured in the fascist sloganLong Live Death!. By focusing on this slogan I aim to draw out the importanceof ideas about resurrection to fascist ideology and to suggest that the mysticalworld in question is less the world of collective memory and more the world ofimmortal being.4

The idea of resurrection will for many people conjure up the idea of rebirth andwould therefore seem to place the article on the terrain mapped out by Roger

Griffins argument concerning fascism as a palingenetic myth.5

Stemming fromthe rising again of Christ after death, resurrection does indeed connote rebirth inthe literal sense, but is also used to describe the rising again of mankind at the Lastday; it is the literal process of individual and collective rebirth as part of a new era.But resurrection is also a stronger and more useful category than rebirth. The ideaof rebirth in and of itself is hardly fascistwitness Griffins situating of therevolutions of 1789 and 1989 into the structure of palingenetic myth6 or, morerecently, the plethora of claims and texts on the rebirth of Britain after 1997. Thepolitical trope of rebirth can have all sorts of implicationsreviving certaininstitutions, playing a role on the world stage, giving voice to young generations,and so onnone of which have any connection with the dead. Thus, when itcomes to defining fascism in terms of a palingenetic ultra-nationalism, what isstressed is the rising of the new (man, order, nation) out of a period of decadence:

a radically new beginning which follows a period of destruction; a new birthoccurring after a period of perceived decadence.7 Because of this, the place of thedead has been relatively unexplored in the literature on the palingenetic mythrelatively unexplored, that is, beyond general points about sacrifice, martyrdom,and creative destruction. Indeed, even the fascist stress on sacrifice andmartyrdom is presented as simply an imaginative version of the cult of the fallensoldier common to all the combatant powers of the First World War, or merelyanother dimension to the aestheticization of politics which no more betokens thepresence of a death cult than does the ceremonial honoring of the dead of the twoworld wars that takes place annually at the Cenotaph in London.8 I want to arguethat there is in fact much more at stake when fascism talks about the dead. In thissense, the idea of resurrection is a far more telling category than rebirth. Forresurrection, as Mussolini comments, has to begin with the dead.9 The limitationsof leaving the discussion at the level of sacrifice/martyrdom/destruction can beseen by asking a rhetorical question: if fascism has a vision of the resurrection ofits own dead, what about the enemy dead? In other words, if fascism can indeed bedefined according to its powerful sense of the importance of resurrection andimmortality, then surely it might also possess an equally powerful sense that itsenemies may also be resurrected and/or immortalthat the mystical world inquestion contains enemies and well as friends? This has not been explored in theliterature on palingenesis.

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The last few sentences should suggest to the reader that this article will end interritory which is more than a little esoteric. To get there, however, I begin onfamiliar terrain: the cult of the fallen soldier.

Remembering the dead

In Mein Kampf Hitler comments that one of his main aims is venerating thosewho traveled the bitter road of death for their German people.10 Commenting onthe post-war settlement in which four years of war brought nothing more thanuniversal suffrage, Hitler accuses the politicians of vile banditry in steal[ing] thewar aim of the dead heroes from their very graves.11 Hitler here picks up on what

will become a key theme within fascist ideology: the war dead. AlfredRosenbergs Myth of the Twentieth Century, for example, is dedicated to thememory of the two million Germans who fell in the First World War. Rosenbergclaims among other things that the stab in the back following the first World Warmight well be the basis for a new movement: in the bowed souls of the survivingkin of the dead warriors, that mythos of the blood for which the heroes died wasrenewed, deepened, comprehended and experienced in its most profoundramifications . . .. The mythos of the German people demands that the two milliondead heroes have not fallen in vain.12

In one sense Hitler and Rosenberg are here saying nothing particularly original.It is well known the dead soldier became in all European countries an icon thatcarried the meaning of the war back home, an emblem in the political culture ofancestor worship that constitutes a crucial dimension of nationalist politics. But

where for most political movements the question of the dead and the practice ofcommemoration centered on theme of homecoming or the return of the dead totheir homeland, of putting the dead to rest in their own soil, the emerging fascistmovements more forcefully raised as a political and historical issue the meaning ofthese deaths. In the two major countries in which fascism was to eventually triumphthe cult of the fallen took on a special significance, becoming central to thenationalization of the masses and thus the consolidation of fascism as a politicalideology.13 It was thus initially in the name of the war dead that fascism sought todefend the nation and build a movement for achieving national greatness again.

Part of this special significance was to turn the dead into heroes. Even before theNazi seizure of power those on the far Right were proclaiming the political andhistorical significance of those who died at Langemarck. Josef Magnus Wehnergave a speech of dedication at one memorial in 1932: The dying sang! Thestormers sang. The young students sang as they were being annihilated:Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in der Welt . . .. The dead heroesbecame an omen for the German people.14 Fascism turned such ideas into aphilosophy of life, with the coming new age to be founded on the heroism of thedead. The myth of Langemarck, for example, quickly became a basic componentin the repertoire of National Socialist propaganda, with annual ceremonies andeminent figures such as Martin Heidegger addressing rallies on the historic event(in November 1933).

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In standard mythology, the hero tends to be an exceptional being or an ordinarybeing who performs an exceptional act. Butfor fascism, everybody is to be educatedtobecome a hero. If everyoneis educatedto becomea hero, and onlythe deadare thetruly heroic, then everyone must be being educated for death. Gregor Ziemersresearch into how Nazis were being made in Germany is telling here. Calling hisbookEducation for Death, Ziemer comments that during his time in Nazi Germanyhe visited institutions of every nature: pre-natal Nazi clinics . . ., sterilizationhospitals, schools for infants, schools for the feeble-minded, schools andinstitutions for boys and girls of all ages, colleges, and colonial schools. I tookreams of notes, whichI wroteout in detail at theearliestconvenience . . ..AndIdrewone conclusion. Hitlers schools do their jobs diabolically well. They are obeying

the Fuehrer. They are educating boys and girls for death.15

This is clear from thepopular songs produced by and for the fascist movements: Clear the streets, the SSmarches . . . /Let death be our battle companion/We are the Black Band.16 Thechorus of Heroic Thirds, a Spanish hymn to the Legionnaires, ran Legionaries, tofight/Legionaries to die./Legionaries to fight/Legionaries to die. The RomanianIron Guard similarly liked to sing Death, only death, legionaries, is a joyful bridefor us./Legionaries die singing and sing dying. Such songs were by no meansrestricted to the military. One Nazi pre-school nursery song ran as follows:

We love our Fuhrer,We honour our Fuhrer,We follow our Fuhrer,

Until men we are;

We believe in our Fuhrer,We live for our Fuhrer,We die for our Fuhrer,

Until heroes we are.17

The veneration of the heroic dead thus figures as a major component of fascistideology and the political rituals of fascist regimes. The body of the dead becomesthe sacred body of a dead hero, giving rise to the cult of the dead in the most literaland obvious sense: the sanctification of the dead. If fascism is a political religion,then the halo of sacredness is emancipated of any religious content and taken overby secular and politically charged concepts such as the fallen soldier. At the sametime, its most holy places are those where men have fought and died for the nation.As Rosenberg put it, sacred places are all those upon which German heroes havedied for these ideas. Sacred are those places where memorial stones and monumentsremember them.18

But note the important slippage that has begun to take place in the last fewparagraphs: from sacrifice for the nation (as exemplified by the war dead) tosacrifice for the fascist movement and regime. Fascisms expertise at ideologicallyobliterating the differences between groups, forces and powers (there are no classdivisions, the Party is the people, the leader is the state) combined with the fact

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that many of those returning from the war became members of the Freikorps inGermany and the Arditi del Popolo in Italy, which in turn became central to thefascist movement, meant that the sanctification of the war dead was easily turnedinto the sanctification of those who died for the movement. The fallen ofLangemarck merged with the martyrs of the Felderrnhalle, the cult of the fallensoldier was transformed into the cult of the fallen fascist, and the Unknown Soldierbecame the Unknown SA man. Thus, when individual heroes were singled outthey often turned out to be heroes in both the military (WWI) and political (fascist)senses. Mussolini even describes activists who died in the rising fascist movementas the latest to fall in the Great war.19

On this basis the regimes in both Germany and Italy introduced a range of

paraphernalia regarding death, from the squadrista emblem of a skull with daggerbetween the teeth and the Totenkopfring (Deaths Head Ring) worn by the SS tofar more elaborate public shrines and exhibitions to commemorate dead heroes.The regime in Italy produced I caduti della milizia [The Fallen of the Militia ](1932) offering biographies of 370 Black Shirts who had fallen for the FascistRevolution between 1923 and 1931. Every branch party kept a shrine, pennons offascist groups were named after the fallen, and new works or classrooms in schoolswere often dedicated to the memory of fallen heroes. The 1932 Exhibition of theFascist Revolution to celebrate ten years of fascist rule in Italy contained aGallery of Fasci dedicated to the fasci di combattimento, and a hall dedicated tothe martyrs of the fascist revolution, the Martyrs Sanctuary, universallyacknowledged to be the masterpiece and focal point of the exhibition. In GermanyHitler commissioned Konigsplatz tombs to hold the party martyrs, drew up

plans for a gigantic Soldiers Hall in Berlin to honour dead heroes, a mausoleumand two cemeteries of honour. In addition the Nazis also planned a network ofgigantic Totenburgen, citadels to the dead, to be placed at key battle sites acrossthe empire.

This notion of sacrificial death was also important to the ideological inter-pellation of women. Mussolini, for example, encouraged women to attend thecemeteries to honour the war dead, and to participate in the Day of the WeddingRings(1935) in whichthe fascists collectedhundreds of thousandsof gold weddingrings from women in exchange for iron rings from the Duce in a mystic marriageunder the sign of Birth and Death. Mussolini also invented the female deathsquadron, which included widows and mothers in mourning or semi-mourning,and devised a black uniform with a skull on the breast for the women squadronmembers who attacked communists. Mussolinis speeches to women from 1936 to1941 referred to them as widows, mothers, sisters and daughters of dead soldiers,and were made against the backdrop of a deathly black scenic display and the skulland crossbones which the fascists had hoisted on their flags. It was not just cradlesbut also coffins that occupy fascist speeches and writings on the place of women.

Tributes and references to the dead were thus present in nearly every fascistceremony. The dreary nod to traditional folklore in activities such as the dancesaround the Maypole, which commentators have discussed time and again, werenothing compared to the impressive displays invented to ecstatically celebrate and


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worship the dead. Behind the pomp and circumstance of fascist spectacle, deathalways stood waiting in the wings, ready to take center stage.20

Being with the dead

This process of commemoration often singled out individuals for seriousadoration, such as Horst Wessel. I want to say just a little about another, butslightly lesser known, hero, Albert Leo Schlageter, in order to begin broadeningthe argument out a little.

Schlageter had fought in the war, apparently with extreme bravery, eventuallybeing promoted to lieutenant and awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class.

A short spell at Freiburg University following the war only served to increase hissense of frustration at the post war political settlement, and so he quickly joined theFreikorps. As a member of the Freikorps, Schlageter was deployed in the campaignagainst the Bolsheviks in the Baltic, liberating Riga in May 1919, engaging inbloody class warfare at Bottrop in 1920, and supporting the Lithuanians in theirstruggle with Poland. In 1921, as a member of the Spezialpolizei, he took part in arange of undercover operations such as penetrating the Polish underground. InBerlin in 1922 he joined the Nazi party, and during 1923 spent much of his time ontrying to subvert the French control of the Ruhr region, including dynamitingrailway lines to stop the transport of German coal to France. Following one suchdynamiting operation, Schlageter was arrested by the French, tried by a militarycourt, sentenced to death, and executed on 26 May 1923.

Following his death Schlageter quickly became a hero for the German right. On

the morning of Schlageters burial a crowd of around 25,000 came to hear a eulogyfor him in Munich given by the young political activist Adolf Hitler. Encouragedby the Schlageter-Gedachtnis-Bund (closely allied with National Socialism interms of membership, ideology, use of symbols and, not least, its desire to glorifydead heroes), Schlageter became a popular subject of heroic music, with annualmemorial services conducted at his graveside. The high point of this glorificationwas the Schlageter National Memorial, unveiled in 1931 amid great pomp andattended by notables from the political and business world. On the Memorial itselfa Christian Cross of iron towered over the hearth where he died, suggestive ofthe promise of resurrection, while at the base of the monument Albert LeoSchlageter was inscribed. Inside the marble crypt one could then find the names ofall those who had died in the battle for the Ruhr.

The Nazis had throughout the 1920s sought to control the Schlageter legacy.In Mein Kampf, for example, Schlageters name appears at the very beginning ofthe text, just after the dedication to those who died at the Felderrnhalle. It tooklittle effort to fully control the legacy after the seizure of power. The tenthanniversary of Schlageters death in 1933 coincided with the Nazi seizure ofpower, and 20 April that year saw the premier of Hanns Johsts play Schlageter,showing at the official state theater in Berlin, and dedicated to Hitler (on hisbirthday); unsurprisingly, the popular play (audiences reached 35,000 in 1935 and80,000 in 1943) functioned as praise for both National Socialism and Schlageter.

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Countless other commemorations took place in the first year of power, includingone in Dusseldorf that lasted three days. By the end of 1933 Schlageter had beendeclared the first National Socialist German soldier and thereby took his place inthe pantheon of dead Nazi heroes.

All in all, then, Schlageter was easily incorporated into the pantheon of Naziheroes and the cult of the fallen; as such, there might not be much else to say. Butone of the memorials held on 26 May 1933 was at Freiburg University, and one ofthe speakers there was none other than Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had alreadyhad quite a busy month, having been appointed as rector of the University on 21April and having joined the Nazi Party on 1 May. Heideggers speech at theprogrammatic rectorship address held on 27 May, Die Selbstbehauptung der

Universitat [The Self-Assertion of the German University] has been the focus ofmuch of the debate about Heideggers ideological affiliations with NationalSocialism. But actually, one can learn a lot about these affiliations and, conversely,learn a lot about fascism, by considering Heideggers speech at the memorialservice for Schlageter the day before.21

In his speech Heidegger speaks of Schlageter in terms which on one level aresimilar to terms used in all the other speeches about him. Let us honor him byreflecting, for a moment, upon his death; With a hard will and a clear heart, AlbertLeo Schlageter died his death; Student of Freiburg, let the strength of this herosnative mountains flow into your will; and so on. At the final words, we honor thehero and raise our arms in silent greeting, the thousand or so present in the crowdraised their arms in silent memory. In many other ways Heideggers speech is alsocontinuous with National Socialist aims regarding Schlageter. He makes no

mention of Schlageters religious motivations, for example, which suited thecharacter of the event organized by a section of the Nazis that excluded anyconnection with Catholic groups. But beyond these points, Heideggers speech alsohad a far more systematic political and philosophical meaning, because at criticalpoints it followed the lines of the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time.

The existential analysis of death in Being and Time is founded on theassumption of Daseins totality, and the idea that the Being of this wholenessitself must be conceived as an existential phenomenon of a Dasein which is in eachcase ones own.22 As much as this gives self-preservation a key ontologicalposition in the analysis of existence, so death also becomes centrally important:By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it is at all . . .. Withdeath, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.23 Deaththus becomes the constitutive element of Dasein and thus the key to the ontologyof Being and Time; only death can provide existence with the dignity of totality.This Being-towards-death means that

death, as the end of Dasein, is Daseins ownmost possibilitynon-relational, certain and as

such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Daseins end, in the Being of this entity

towards its end . . . . The problem of the possible Being-a-whole of that entity which each of

us is, is a correct one if care, as Daseins basic state, is connected with deaththe uttermost

possibility for that entity.24


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In his eagerness to push the idea of death as the ontological foundation of totality,Heidegger distinguishes authentic death from death as an everyday event subjectto the idle talk of the They. The they have already stowed away an inter-pretation for this event . . .. The expression one dies spreads abroad the opinionthat what gets reached, as it were, by death, is the they . . .. Dying is levelledoff to an occurrence which reaches Dasein, to be sure, but belongs to nobody inparticular.25 But since Heidegger wants to present death as Daseins ownmostpossibility, it must become manifest to Dasein that in this distinctive possibility ofits own self, it has been wrenched away from the they. This means that inanticipation any Dasein can have wrenched itself away from the they already.26

Saved from the constant tranquillization about death provided by the They,

death becomes authentic, bringing Dasein face to face with the possibility of beingitself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, inan impassioned freedom towards death.27

In the short speech Heidegger comments several times that Schlageter died themost difficult and the greatest death of all. He died the most difficultof all deaths.Not in the front line as the leader of his field artillery battery, not in the tumult ofan attack, and not in a grim defensive actionno, he stood defenseless before theFrench rifles. And so, Heidegger goes on, in his most difficult hour, he had also toachieve the greatest thing of which man is capable. Alone, drawing on his owninner strength, he had to place before his soul an image of the future awakening ofthe Volk to honor and greatness so that he could die believing in this future. In theterms of Being and Time, Schlageters death was non-relational, certain and assuch indefinite, not to be outstripped. The historically contingent circumstances

which led Schlageter to his execution and the actual historical characteristics ofSchlageter as a personpost-war alienation and political disaffection leading tomembership of the volunteer corpsare ignored in favor of an ahistoricalexistential conception of pseudo-political compulsion: Schlageter had to achievethe greatest thing; he had to place a certain image before his soul, he wascompelled to go to the Ruhr, compelled to go to the Baltic, compelled to goto Upper Silesia.28 (And note that the places he had to gothe Baltic,Upper Silesia, the Ruhrare the places in which the volunteer corps weremost active.29) In other words, he had to die.

In political existentialism everything becomes focused on the most extremecrisis: the state of exception, the emergency situation or, more broadly,death.30 To the extent that Heideggers philosophy can be described as a form ofpolitical existentialism, it has to be said that Heidegger participates in nothing lessthan the cult of death, engaging in a philosophical strategy that is inherentlyfascist. Victor Faras claims that Heidegger saw personified in Schlageters deaththe fate of the German people following the end of World War I, and that thisaccords with the polemic of the extreme right and especially of the NationalSocialists.31 This is undoubtedly the case; but there is more to the story than thequestion of individual sacrifice and national standing. The references to themountains and valleys of the Black Forest which helped shape Schlagetersclarity of heart and harden his will show a significant development of

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the argument in Being and Time. Where in Being and Time Dasein exists for-itselfin the world (Welt), the Schlageter speech (and other speeches) of 1933 has a farless abstract concept of space: it is the mountains, forests, and valleys of [the]Black Forest, the home of this hero.32 The references to the common homelandand a common origin are not just a way of registering with the listeners but alsobecome, for Heidegger and fascism, the fundamental raison detre of death. Indying for his homeland and the German people Schlageter could become asymbol of a death that is non-relational, certain and as such indefinitenot to beoutstripped. Schlageters individual death is in the speech presented anew in termsof the collective future of Germany and as an example for German youth. Thebasis of Schlageters ambitions was the greatness of the awakening nation and

the future awakening of the Volk. He therefore died for the German people andits Reich. Or as Heidegger was to put it in another speech a year later about thosewho had sacrificed themselves: Our comrades died an early death; this early deathwas, however, the most beautiful and greatest death. The greatest death because itdared to be the most supreme sacrifice for the fate [Schicksal] of the Volk.33 Thusthe analysis of individual death in Being and Time shifts in the speech onSchlageter to a Dasein which oscillates between universality and the particularpolitical collective of a German Dasein. Freedom towards death becomes, withinthe horizon of popular community, the sacrifice of ones life for the nation. Theviolence inherent in Heideggers philosophy is thus a violence that lies in theconstellation of forces which unite collective Being and death.

For fascism, then, the cult of the fallen soldier and the memory of the dead goesfar beyond commemoration; rather, it is a philosophy of lifehence the phrase so

loved by fascists everywhere: Long Live Death! Death is, says Heidegger;Long Live Death!, cry the fascist activists. I suggest that with this latter phrasewe are at the core of fascist theory and practiceboth past and present.34 But thisbegs the obvious question: what does it mean?

It would be easy to take the slogan at face value: if nothing else, it might explainwhy fascists seem to like killing lots of people. Contemporary fascists (or, as theytend to prefer, racial nationalists or revolutionary nationalists) insist that theslogan is not the advocacy of genocide. Rather, they claim, it is the fraternalsalute, the greeting which acknowledges that Revolutionary Nationalists areprepared to sacrifice all in service of their noble cause.35 A comment made byGoebbels is telling on this score. Speaking at the funeral of Nazi hero HansMaikowski on 5 February 1933, just days after the seizure of power and in thepresence of some 40,000 SS, SA and Hitler Youth, Goebbels commented: here westand at his open grave, and this proverb surely fits the one we are about to returnto the bosom of mother earth: Perhaps we Germans dont know much about living,but as for deaththat we do fabulously! This young man knew how to die, this hecould do fabulously.36 Likewise, Mussolini and Gentile comment that the mostimportant element in the rise of fascism was that it preferred action and battle toresearch and debate: discussions there were, but something more sacred and moreimportant was occurring: death. Fascists knew how to die.37 So maybe, if thefascists are right, the slogan is about nothing other than knowing how to sacrifice


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ones life for the nationdying fabulously, being a hero, taking the part of thefallen soldier; many commentators have indeed been willing to leave it at that.

But maybe there is more to be said. What I aim to tease out from the slogan ismore than just a question of sacrifice or heroism. Rather, I aim to tease out theinherent identification of fascism and death. Not real or everyday death and itsmundane but individually tragic banality, but death in its most political andaestheticized form. Attempts to compare fascism with other forms of genocide interms of a death countthe Holocaust compared to the Gulag, X millioncompared to Ymillion dead, and so onmiss this point of the centrality of death tofascism; they miss, in other words, part of its qualitative specificity. But thisspecificity lies not just in the fact that fascism constitutes a movement geared

towards the production of a society which has the death camp as it greatestachievement. It lies also in the fact that an active embrace of death is core tothe theory and practice of the movement. This active embrace in turn rests on theassumption that the dead are never really dead and, as such, the belief that thedead can be made to once again fight the battle. What I aim to tease out, in otherwords, is what makes resurrection one of fascisms central categories.

Waking the dead

The term Long Live Death! came to be used by nationalist groups in Europebetween the first and second world wars. It was made famous by DAnnunzioslegionnaires and adopted by the Italian Arditti, but became better known in the

context of the Spanish Civil War. Viva la Muerte! was a favorite motto ofGeneral Millan Astray of the Spanish Falange. In a confrontation between Miguelde Unamuno and Millan Astray at the University of Salamanca in October 1936one of the Generals followers is reported to have shouted the slogan from the backof the hall during a speech by Unamuno. Unamuno commented:

Just now I heard a necrophilious and senseless cry: Long live death! . . .. I must tell you, as

an expert authority, that this outlandish paradox is repellent to me . . .. This is the temple of

the intellect. And I am its high priest . . .. You will win, because you have more than enough

brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to

persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right.

During the last comments Millan Astray is said to have shouted in reply: Death tointelligence! And long live Death!. In a nice touch illustrating that he was asinterested in the practice as well as the theory behind the slogan, he orderedUnamuno out of the University at gunpoint.

We might note that the confrontation encapsulates the nature of fascismsessentially irrationalist response to rationalist political doctrines such asliberalism and Marxism, but that is not the real concern here. My interest, rather, isin Unamunos suggestion that the cry is necrophilious. Out of this suggestion andthe kind of cult of death I have been discussing, Erich Fromm has argued thatfascism is a necrophiliac phenomenon driven by necrophilious leaders and main-tained by necrophilious followers. This picks up on the tendency towards what

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many commentators like to call creative destruction within fascism. This ten-dency is, for Fromm, part of a passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed,putrid, sickly. It is the passion to transform that which is alive into somethingunalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction . . .. It is the passion to tear apartliving structures.38 Conversely, Elias Canetti has argued that at the heart of masspolitics is the question of survival; the dead are thus important symbolically. Inthe eyes of those who are still alive everyone who is dead has suffered a defeat,which consists in having been survived.39 The sense of defeat experienced by thedead is matched by the feeling of superiority felt by the survivors, a feeling mostmarked in those who fought in war. Simply because he is still there, the survivorfeels that he is better than they [the dead] are. He has proved himself, for he is

alive. He has proved himself among many others, for the fallen are not alive.40

Klaus Theweleit has applied this argument to fascism, suggesting that it is notcorpses that this man [Hitler, but the point stands for fascists in general] loves; heloves his own life. But he loves it . . . for its ability to survive. Corpses piled uponcorpses reveal him as a victor, a man who has successfully externalized that whichis dead within him, who remains standing when all else is crumbling. 41 There issome strength in this argument, although it might be accused of suffering from thesame ahistorical characterological definitions which weaken Fromms account.

In contrast to both Fromms argument and Theweleits reading of Canetti, it hasalso been argued that fascisms destructive tendency means that it is driventowards neither the love of death nor the accumulation of the experience of death,but to its own destruction: the final program for Germany was national death . . ..Hitler condemned Germany to national death.42 As Albert Speer comments

following his own part inside the Third Reich, Nazisms final swansong was thedeath sentence of the German people.43 Fascism in this sense can be read as anideology of suicide, and the fascist state a suicide state. Foucault comments thatthe objective of the Nazi regime was . . . not really the destruction of other races.The destruction of other races was one aspect of the project, the other being toexpose its own race to the absolute and universal threat of death. 44 Accepting thelikelihood of total destruction was thus central to the fascist project, which had toreach the point at which the entire population had to be exposed to death, aswitnessed by the flurry of decrees between March 18 and April 7 1945 in whichHitler appeared to order the destruction of Germanys infrastructure. The suicideepidemic of February to May 1945 (in which several thousand Germans took theirown lives) captures this well, but Hitlers decision to blow out his own brains issurely the highpoint of this suicidal tendencythe suicide of the leader asemblematic of the suicide state. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari thus claim that:

In fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than it is suicidal. There is in fascism a realized

nihilism. Unlike the totalitarian State, which does its utmost to seal all possible lines of flight,

fascism is constructed on an intense line of flight, which it transforms into a line of pure

destruction and abolition. It is curious that from the very beginning the Nazis announced to

Germany what they were bringing: at once wedding bells and death, including their own

death, and the death of the Germans. They thought that they would perish but that

their undertaking would be resumed, all across Europe, all over the world, throughout


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the solar system. And the people cheered, not because they did not understand, but because

they wanted that death through the death of others . . .. Suicide is presented not as a

punishment but as the crowning glory of the death of others. One can always say that it is not

just a matter of foggy talk and ideology, nothing but ideology. But that is not true. The

insufficiency of economic and political definitions of fascism does not simply imply a need

to tack on vague, so-called ideological determinations. [Thus] Nazi statements . . . always

contain the stupid and repugnant cry, Long live death!, even at the economic level, where

the arms expansion replaces growth in consumption and where investment veers from the

means of production toward the means of pure destruction.45

Foucault makes the point more starkly: we have an absolutely racist state, anabsolutely murderous state, and an absolutely suicidal state . . .. The three were

necessarily superimposed.46

Necrophiliac? Survivalist? Suicidal? These claims have an obvious appeal,offering a nice way of explaining the transformation of the blood myth into theblood bath and the mechanisms by which a whole society might become gearedtowards the production of corpses; it is surely much easier to legitimize massmurder when your slogan is Long Live Death!. So in that sense necrophiliac,survivalist and suicidal seem to go some way to explaining the tendencytowards creative destructionto capture the idea of fascism as, in JeanBaudrillards terms, an aesthetic perversion of politics, pushing the acceptance ofa culture of death to the point of jubilation.47

Butand it is an enormous butthis is not quite enough. There is a sense inwhich these interpretations are just a little too neat. For all their purportedradicalism, they offer a rather easy interpretive option, for taken either together or

individually the interpretations encourage us to box fascism into the cornermarked death and leave it at that.

The problem with the idea of fascism as necrophiliac survivalist, or suicidal isone which takes us to the heart of the issue. That is that in many ways the fascistdoes not love death per se, so to speak. Rather, fascism thinks of the dead as insome sense either alive or as possessing the possibility of becoming alive oncemore. After all, one cannot escape this world entirely.48 Remember: Albert LeoSchlageter lives!. In his speech on Horst Wessel Memorial Day, 1933, Hitlercomments that with his song, which is sung by millions today, Horst Wessel haserected a monument to himself in ongoing history which will last much longerthan this stone and iron memorial . . .. Horst Wessel, who lies under this stone, isnot dead. Every day and every hour his spirit is with us, marching in our ranks.49

Horst Wessel is not dead. This was a point made time and again by leading

figures. At the 1935 commemoration for those who died at theFelderrnhalle, for example, Hitler comments that they are an example because for us they are not dead.50 Or as the obituary of Wessel in Goebbelss Der

Angriffput it: The deceased who is with us, raises his weary hand and points intothe dim distance: Advance over the graves! At the end lies Germany!.51

This was also a prevalent theme in a great deal of fascist propaganda. Forexample, the film Hitler Youth Quex (1933), which tells the story of the youthfulexploits of Heini Volker, son of a communist who gradually comes to realise that

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the future lies with National Socialism not communism, ends with the murder ofHeini at the hands of a communist. The film ends with a montage in which Heinisdeath is replaced by masses of feet marching forward towards the camera as if tomarch off the screen and into life as if to convey the message: the dead carry onmarching.52 Similarly, while Leni Riefenstahls Triumph of Will posits the idea ofa future (modernized, technologically advanced) Germany, it is pitched ultimatelyat the dead. Laurence Rickels explains: the Nazi slogan for the future of a new ortrue Germany thats been evoked above, around and inside those present . . . isultimately pitched to the war dead. And yet the war dead are not dead: as we getready to take off for a Germany thats part crypt, part airspace, we still hear thevanishing point thats made in Germany: the lost warriors are undead.53

Of course, the difficulty with suggesting that the dead are not dead is that theyare clearly, on one level, really dead. The ideological solution to this is to presentthem as either living in the sense that they are immortal, or as in the process ofbeing resurrected as part of the greater future. Hence the comments fromGoebbels and the SA poet Heinrich Anacker on Wessel: his soul was resurrected,to live among us all . . . he is marching in our columns (Goebbels); you [Wessel]had first to pale in death/before becoming immortal for us (Anacker).54 MeinKampfis a call not just to the German nation, but to the German dead; a call for theresurrection not just of the nation, but of the dead themselves. The first steptowards the nationalization of the masses, then, is to win the masses for anational resurrection: without the clearest knowledge of the racial problem andhence of the Jewish problem there will never be a resurrection of the Germannation. Not a mechanical restoration of the past, but the resurrection of our

people.55 Thus the spirits of the dead. . .

quicken: Would not the graves of allthe hundreds of thousands open, the graves of those who with faith in thefatherland had marched forth never to return? Would they not open and send thesilent mud- and blood-covered heroes back as spirits of vengeance to the homelandwhich had cheated them with such a mockery?56 Or as Hitler put it in his 1935speech commemorating the Felderrnhalle dead:

These sixteen soldiers have celebrated a resurrection unique in world history . . .. They are

now attaining German immortality . . .. Yet for us they are not dead . . .. Long live our

National Socialist Germany! Long live our Volk! And may today the dead of our Movement,

Germany and its men, living and dead, live on!57

This is the real theme of fascist songs:

Ring, thou Bell of Revolution!Ring and call the fighting warriors,Call the graybeards, call the young men,Call the sleepers from their couches,Call the young girls from their chambers,Call the mothers from their cradles.Let the air be shrill with warning,With a warning of dire vengeance!


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Call the dead from mouldering grave vaultsWith a thunderous cry for vengeance.

Vengeance! Vengeance!Germany Awake!58

Now, calling girls from their chambers and mothers from their cradles is one thing;calling the dead from their grave vaults quite something else. But what is beingstressed here is the fascist conception of a continuum between life and death. Thisexplains why the Nazis eventually came to attack the cult of the UnknownSoldieron the joint grounds that the fallen were not dead but alive and becausethe dead had been reunited with the living through their shared faith in Nazi

Germany. It also explains Maurice Barress myth ofdebout les morts, which toldof dead soldiers coming to the aid of the living in battle, revived after the war intexts such as Henri Bonnets Almanach du Combattant (1922) and RolandDorgeless Le Reveil des Morts (1923) aiming to show that the fallen werenot really dead and to argue that, given their sacrifice, they should be consultedabout the future of France.59

For fascism, the process of commemoration is not just about memory, but aboutimmortalizing the dead. Commemoration, Mussolini comments, means enteringinto the community of souls that binds the living and the dead.60 As oneLangemarck veteran was to write in 1935, the graves of Langemarck glow with anew heavenly light. The dead have returned home in us.61 The choir of HitlerYouth on memorial day proclaimed the best of our people did not die that theliving might die, but that the dead might come alive.62 Thus when Josef Magnus

Wehner praises the dead of Langemarck, as seen above, it is to show that the deadare not dead: The dying sang! The stormers sang. The young students sang as theywere being annihilated: Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles in derWelt. But by singing this song, they were resurrected once more, a thousandtimes, and they will rise again a thousand times. Although dead, the faces of theheroes of Langemarck show nothing but the eternal happiness of the immortal . . ..They are more alive than we.63

Now, there are three ideas here which ideally we should be able to distinguishand identify independently but which overlap in ways that make them more or lessidentical for fascism: the idea that the dead are not dead, the idea of resurrection,and the idea of immortality. The dead are not dead precisely because they areimmortal. Their immortality allows them their resurrection, and their resurrectionshows that they are not dead. This overlap is yet another example of fascism beingable to operate with seemingly contradictory ideas. But it is important,nonetheless, to recognize its centrality to fascist ideology. For the dead, on thisview, are present. The aforementioned I caduti della milizia opens with thefollowing invocation: make me always more worthy of our Dead so that theythemselves . . . respond to the living: PRESENT!.64 Similarly, on the steppedwhite marble architrave of the ossuary at the most grandiose of the final burial sitesfor the Italian war dead (at Redipuglia, where over 100,000 bodies were eventuallyburied), the word PRESENT was carved over and over again in a kind of roll call

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of the dead. Funerals of fascists killed in action also played on this idea of theircontinued presence. As Gentile points out, the culminating moment of the funeralceremony was the roll call in which one of the leaders of the squad would call outthe dead mans name, and the crowd, on its knees, bellowed Present!.65 Abovethe names of dead heroes in the Martyrs Sanctuary at the 1932 Exhibition of theFascist Revolution in Italy the word PRESENT! was repeated, and a metal crosswas inscribed with the phrase per la patria immortale! (For the ImmortalFatherland!).

This idea of the presence of the dead was a perennial theme in Hitlers speechescommemorating the Feldherrnhalle dead: they too are present in spirit in ourranks, and in eternity they will know that their fight was not in vain, he comments

in November 1934.66

Joachim Fest describes the ceremony held by the Nazis oneyear later, again commemorating the Feldherrnhalle dead:

The architect Ludwig Troost had designed two classicistic temples for Munichs

Konigsplatz; these were to receive the exhumed bones, now deposited in sixteen bronze

sarcophagi, of the first martyrs of the Nazi movement. The night before, during the

traditional Hitler speech in the Burgerbraukeller, the coffins had been placed on biers in

the Feldherrnhalle, which was decorated with brown drapes and flaming braziers for the

occasion. . .. With raised arm, Hitler ascended the red-carpeted stair. He paused before each

of the coffins for a mute dialogue. Six thousand uniformed followers, carrying countless

flags and all the standards of the party formations, then filed silently past the dead. On the

following morning, in the subdued light of a November day, the memorial procession began.

Hundreds of masts had been set up with dark red pennants bearing the names of the fallen of

the movement inscribed in golden letters. Loudspeakers broadcast the Horst Wessel song,

until the procession reached one of the offering bowls, at which the names of the dead werecalled out . . .. Then solemn silence descended while Hitler laid a gigantic wreath at the

memorial tablet. While Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles was payed at a mournful

tempo, all began to move toward Konigsplatz down a lane of thousands upon thousands of

flags dipped in salute to the dead. United in the March of Victory, the names of the fallen

were read out in a last roll call. The crowd answered PRESENT! in their behalf. Thus, the

dead took their places in the eternal guard.67

The presence of the dead explains why we raise our arms in silent greeting(Heidegger, greeting Schlageter), for these processions and commemorations arefascist rallies of a particular kind: they are rallies of the undead, taking place insome indeterminate other world, where historys victims are forever present toeach other.68

In other words, what motivates and mobilizes fascism is not necrophilia,

survivalism or suicide, but the desire to be with and in that sense to resurrectthedead. Germany awake! becomes a cry to the dead as well as the livinga demandfor resurrection as well as political action. Better still: a demand for resurrection aspolitical action. Thus, we might say that central to the ideology of fascism is theattempt to instill in the masses the idea of resurrection as a key political idea. Forthis reason, fascists are never more at home than when communing with the dead.This is Heideggers point about the need to be with the dead. In tarrying alongsidehim [the dead] in their mourning and commemoration, those who have remained


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behind are with him . . .. In such Being-with the dead, the deceased himselfis nolonger factically there. However . . . those who remain can still be with him.69

Schlageter, and the dead, live on: immortal, resurrected, on the verge of return. Inthe fascist imagination the dead are not dead. They are Undead.70

But if the dead are in some sense Undeadare immortalthis poses a majorproblem for the fascist. If the dead are still with us or due for return in an act ofhistorical vengeance, then is this not also true of the dead enemy? In other words,if good Germans do not die, but remain immortal as part of an eternal struggle,then is this not true of communists, Jews, gypsies, and so on? After all, are they notalso part of the eternal struggle? Remember that for all the talk about thebiological basis of race, Hitler was still compelled to think of Jews as an abstract

race of the mind, and to therefore note the obvious: a race of the mind is moresolid, more durable than just a race, pure and simple.71 The enemy can thus alsotake the form of the undead. And of course the undead do not die, but go on addingnew victims and multiplying their forces.

This is why concentration camp guards so hated it when prisoners committedsuicide. In The Inoperative Community Jean-Luc Nancy cites one concentrationcamp prisoner as suggesting that prisoners often thought of killing themselves, ifonly to force the SS to run up against the limit of the dead object one will havebecome.72 Nancy thinks of this in the way that most others probably think of it:killing themselves would be a form of resistance for the prisoner because theguards would suffer the worst frustrationone cannot discipline or torture a deadobject. But if my argument here has any substance then the reason the SS foundprisoners killing themselves so frustrating is more because of the guards

understanding that the prisoners were not really deadthat they had entered therealm of the undead where they could continue the business of world dominationwithout this or that particular guard being able to interfere. What fascism fears, itseems, is that its dead enemies are not properly deadthat they too might well beresurrected or immortal. And this, finally, takes us back to the question of gravedesecration. Jewish law suggests that treating a corpse disrespectfully implies abelief that death is final and irreversible.73 But such a view obscures the fact thatgrave desecration is an act of utmost importance to fascism: for it is a way ofattacking the dead precisely because the death is neither final nor irreversible.In desecrating graves fascism is merely carrying on the struggle. Indeed, one mightsay that fascists are ideologically obligedto desecrate graves since their struggleagainst the enemy must necessarily also take place partly on the terrain of the dead.In other words, fascism fears that their dead enemies are not properly dead.Unable to actually engage in this struggle in the world of the undead, the fascist isforced to the next best thing: attack the grave. All of which serves to reinforce theultimate point: if we lose the battle against fascism, not even the dead will be safe.

Notes and references

1. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (1982), trans. Thomas Weyr(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 75.

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2. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960), trans. Carol Stewart (London: Victor Gollanz, 1962), p. 262.3. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (1993), trans. Keith Botsford (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 66.4. This argument is based on a wider argument that one can distinguish between political viewsspecifically

conservatism, Marxism, and fascismon the basis of how they think about the dead This is in turn linked tothe idea of the undead. The argument is made in my book The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx,Fascism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005).

5. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993).6. Griffin, ibid., p. 34.

7. Griffin, ibid., pp. 33, 36.8. Roger Griffin, Shattering crystals: the role of dream time in extreme right-wing violence, Terrorism and

Political Violence, 15/1 (2003), pp. 5795, at pp. 7677.9. Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography, trans. Richard Washburn Child (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), p. 119.

10. Adolf Hitler,MeinKampf(1925),trans. Ralph Manheim(Boston,MA: HoughtonMifflinCompany, 1943), p. 687.11. Hitler, ibid., p. 199.12. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual

Confrontations of Our Age (1930), trans. Vivian Bird (California: Noontide Press, 1982), pp. 460461.13. George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); Fallen Soldiers:

Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).14. Cited in Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana

University Press, 1990), p. 8.15. Gregor Ziemer, Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi (London: Constable, 1942), p. 21.

16. From the SS Liederbuch [Song Book], cited in Heinz Hohne, The Order of the Deaths Head: The Story ofHitlers SS (1966), trans. Richard Barry (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 2.

17. Cited in Ziemer, op. cit., Ref. 15, p. 45.18. Rosenberg, op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 463.

19. Mussolini, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 121. This shift can also be seen in the new law passed by the Nazi regime inFebruary 1934 which held that those who had fought for the National Socialist movement were to be granteddamages in the way that those who had fought and become victims of WWIsee Konrad Heiden, DerFuehrer, Book Two, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Victor Gollanz, 1944), p. 575.

20. I am paraphrasing Adorno on Wagner: Behind Wagners facade of liberty, death and destruction stand

waiting in the wingsTheodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner (1952), trans. Rodney Livingstone (London:New Left Books, 1981), p. 14.21. Heideggers speech, Schlageterfeier der Freiburger Universitat [Freiburg Universitys Celebration of

Schlageter] can be found in translation as Schlageter, in Richard Wolin (Ed), The Heidegger Controversy(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 4042.

22. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1967), p. 240.Page references areto theoriginaledition,givenin themarginsof theEnglishtranslation.23. Heidegger, ibid., pp. 240, 249.

24. Heidegger, ibid., pp. 258259.25. Heidegger, ibid., p. 253.

26. Heidegger, ibid., p. 263.27. Heidegger, ibid., p. 266, both emphases in original.28. See here Karl Lowith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, trans. Gary Steiner, Richard Wolin (Ed)

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 161, 220.29. Victor Faras, Heidegger and Nazism (1987), trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia, PA:

Temple University Press, 1989), p. 93.30. Herbert Marcuse, The struggle against liberalism in the totalitarian view of the state (1934), in Negations,

trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Allen Lane, 1968), p. 36.31. Faras, op. cit., Ref. 29, p. 91.32. Heidegger, op. cit., Ref. 21, p. 41.33. Martin Heidegger, 25 Jahre nach unserem Abiturium: Klassentreffen in Konstanz am 26/27 Mai 1934, in

Reden un andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, Gesamtausgabe Band 16(Frankfurt am Main: VittorioKlostermann, 2000), p. 279.

34. A measure of its continued importance can be taken from the websites of the range of groups which go undertitles such as revolutionary nationalists, white nationalists, racial nationalists, third positionists, andso on.To give just a coupleof examples here, seethe posteditemon thefinalsolution at http://www.rosenoire.org/essays/final-solution.php.html, or the essay on the need for mass murder at http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/gba.html. For a musical connection see http://unitedskins.com/interviews/razon.htm.


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35. Nationalist Fanzine, http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/finalconflict/a11-4.html, accessed 26 February 2003.

36. Cited in Baird, op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 97.

37. Benito Mussolini, in collaboration with Giovanni Gentile, Foundations and Doctrine of Fascism (1932), in

Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Ed), A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000),

p. 52. Likewise, in his Autobiography (op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 124), he comments of a young fascist stabbed to

death by communists: he declared himself glad and proud to die and that from me he knew how to die.

38. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 441.

39. Canetti, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 263.

40. Canetti, op. cit., Ref. p. 2, 228.

41. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 2Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans.

Chris Turner and Erica Carter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 19.

42. Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler (1979), trans. Ewald Osers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,

1988), pp. 150, 158. Such an interpretation is fairly commonplace. For another example see J.P. Stern, Hitler:

The Fuhrer and the People (London: Fontana, 1975), p. 209.

43. Albert Speer,Inside the Third Reich (1969), trans. Richard andClara Winston (London:Sphere, 1971), p. 591.44. Michel Foucault, Lecture, 17 March 1976, in Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the

College de France, 197576, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 260.

45. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian

Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1987), pp. 230231.

46. Foucault, op. cit., Ref. 44, p. 260.

47. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993),

p. 186.

48. Entry for 23rd September 1941, evening, and Entry for 13th December 1941, midday, in Hitlers Table

Talk, 19411944, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (London: Phoenix Press, 1953), pp. 38, 144.

49. Hitler, Speech on 22 January 1933, in Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 19321945, Band I

(Wiesbaden: R. Lowit, 1973), p. 181. For a slightly different translation see Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches

and Proclamations, 19321945, Volume One: The Years 1932 to 1934 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), p. 220.

50. Hitler, Speech of 8 November 1935, in Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, 19321945,

Volume Two: The Years 1935 to 1938 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992), p. 728.

51. Cited in Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000), p. 119.

52. For a discussion of the film along these lines see Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions

of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 253273.53. Laurence Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1: Only Psychoanalysis Won the War (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 76.

54. All cited in Baird, op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 83, 86, 87.

55. Hitler, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 336, 339, 364, 494, 534.

56. Hitler, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 201, 205, emphasis added.

57. Hitler, Speech of 8 November 1935, in op. cit., Ref. 50, pp. 726728.

58. The song is from the childrens bookEin Kampft fuers Neue Reich by Minni Groschtells, which tells the story

of German youth fighting communists, cited in Ziemer, op. cit., Ref. 15, p. 87.

59. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 105; George L. Mosse, National cemeteries and national revival:

the cult of the fallen soldiers in Germany, Journal of Contemporary History, 14 (1979), pp. 120, 7, 15.

60. Benito Mussolini, Battisti!, 12 July 1917, in Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, Vol. IX (Florence, 1952).

61. WilhelmDreysse, DieDeutschen von Langemarck, 22 October 1935, cited in Baird, op.cit.,Ref. 14, p.10.

62. Cited in Mosse, National Cemeteries, op. cit., Ref. 59, p. 6.

63. Cited in Baird, op. cit., Ref. 14, p. 8.

64. Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1997), p. 202.65. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 27.

66. Hitler, Speech of 8 November, 1934, in Domarus, Hitler, Volume One, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. 542.

67. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler (1973), trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977),

pp. 761762.

68. See Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Epic demonstrations: fascist modernity and the 1932 exhibition of the fascist

revolution, in Richard J. Golsan (Ed), Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover: University Press of

New England, 1992), p. 30.

69. Heidegger, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 238.

70. I am playing here on the links between the undead and the monstrous. This is most fully developed in my

Monstrous and the Dead.

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71. Entry for 13th February 1945, in The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents,FebruaryApril 1945, trans. Colonel R. Stevens, Francois Genoud (Ed) (London: Icon Books, 1962), p. 65.

72. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, et al. (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991), pp. 158159.

73. Rabbi Yitzchok Breitowitz, Jewish law articles: the desecration of graves in Eretz Yisrael, http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/heritage.html, accessed 18 August 2003.


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