The artistic and literary worlds played an important part within the regime's strategy as far as cultural policies were concerned. This prominence derived to a large extent from their ability to exercise a degree of resistance and to some extent counteract the dictatorship's plans for totalitarian control over society and the individual, especially in the 1930s. More specifically, intellectual engagement through aesthetic and literary endeavours calls into question the boundaries between the public and private spheres, and also those between action as transformation and action as acceptance of the status quo. In other words, the intellectual élites used their modernist internationalism and cosmopolitanism as a forma mentis to react again the crisis of Western civilization and the crisis of reason orchestrated by the European totalitarianisms. Such forms of resistance through the arts found their embodiments in artworks, theatre and the debates in literary journals.
The relationship between the dictatorship and Italian intellectuals was necessarily a rather complex one. Its first major defining feature was the divide between elite and popular culture, which in Italy was particularly clear because of the economic structure in place to support cultural organizations. In line with its anthropological revolution, since the 1925 Manifesto of Fascist intellectuals the regime had understood culture as another facet of action. Particularly after 1932, the regime concentrated its efforts on building consensus amongst the popular classes, without visibly obstructing the intelligentsia. It operated through more or less wide-reaching structures of patronage spanning national and international exhibitions, such as the Biennali, Triennali and Quadriennali, along with prizes and the provision of financial support to publishers and stipends to authors
In the age of totalitarianisms in Italy, this intellectual indifference translated into a multi-faceted form of engaged indifference, which sought aesthetic innovation and intellectual exchange while mostly avoiding direct political confrontation. While Futurism and Novecento were vying to become the official arte di Stato, the more radical intellectual debate occurred in the cosmopolitan circles of the cultural elites.
During the Ventennio, the role of the State, and that of the arts within it, was very clearly defined in terms of totalitarian and hierarchical control over the social sphere. The institutional apparatus of the State had to join forces with the arts in order to organize forms of social life. If we look closely at the aesthetics promoted by modernist magazines, or by the elites who found their voices in those outlets, and the official debate on the arts and their place within the Fascist state, we can find some similarities (Carlo Emilio Gadda and Elio Vittorini). The official debate on State Art and the debate among the intellectual elites addressed similar concerns; namely, the universal imperative of using the arts as a platform for fostering social modernization in the civic sphere. From the point of view of the regime, art, as Giuseppe Bottai from Critica Fascista often repeated, had to be art-action – 'azione per l'arte' – and the regime had to act as an organizing force and not simply as a patron. While, with Primato (1940-43),Bottai advocated the well-known 'coraggio della concordia', the Premio Bergamo praised Guttuso and the Corrente Movement together with nationalist works (Pietro Gaudenzi). And, finally, sacred art and sculpture played an important role in consecrating, from a non-Fascist point of view, the dictatorship within the social sphere (Giacomo Manzù, Fausto Melotti).
Literary and cultural journals encouraged intellectual exchange and debate, thereby helping Italian culture to survive the dictatorship. Through the publication of translations and articles on foreign literature, such journals played a fundamental role in fostering international dialogue, thereby preserving Italian culture from marginalization. Margherita Sarfatti herself organised several exhibitions of the Novecento movement, from Europe to Latin America until the early 1930s. Throughout the Ventennio, Marinetti and the futurists relentlessly continued to enter into dialogue with other avant-garde movements, seeking to expand their horizons and young directors were making their ways into the film industry (Alberto Lattuada, Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti). Translations of foreign novels were the main literary successes of the day and sold more copies than Italian novels. And, finally, architecture was heavily indebted to foreign examples. In other words,what defined the cosmopolitan ethos was a competitive desire to compare Italy with other cultures in order to maintain a position of cultural centrality within the European sphere.
Theatre and cinema were both powerful tools for manipulating citizens. If cosmopolitanism and the participation in the debate about the arts enabled a fair number of intellectuals to be legitimised and to avoid being confined to the peripheries of the international cultural landscape, many artistic products served the purpose of providing easy forms of entertainment, thereby distracting and manipulating citizens. The cinema of the telefoni bianchi or the bourgeois theatre were for example amongst the privileged channels through which common citizens could be entertained, manipulated and/or indoctrinated (Mario Camerini, Mario Soldati, Aldo De Benedetti, Cesare Vico Lodovici, Ettore Petrolini). This form of production tended to have a set of common features: simplified story-lines, love stories and a dream-like atmosphere (occasionally set in exotic locations), or unproblematic forms of humour. These works functioned through a process of identification and alienation. The public could dream of a glamorous and adventurous lifestyle but spectators also had to accept that such a lifestyle could not be part of the everyday reality of a morally-sound Fascist citizen (Luigi Chiarini, Alessandro Blasetti, Max Neufeld).
Goethe saw it coming: the crisis in bourgeois education. He confronts it in Wilhelm Meister. He characterizes it in his correspondence with Zelter. [N8a, 5]. (Benjamin, 472)
The artistic and literary worlds played an important part within the regime’s strategy as far as cultural policies were concerned. This prominence derived to a large extent from their ability to exercise a degree of resistance and to some extent counteract the dictatorship’s plans for totalitarian control over society and the individual, especially in the 1930s. Thus the question of intellectual engagement under totalitarian rule here, once again, revolves around the definition of spaces. More specifically, intellectual engagement through aesthetic and literary endeavours calls into question the boundaries between the public and private spheres, and also those between action as transformation and action as acceptance of the status quo. This said, modernist and experimental aesthetics were neither a space of acceptance nor one of resistance. Rather, they occupied a ‘zona franca’ (Braun, 90) of indirect resistance, which used rationalist principles to articulate socio-political reform. In other words, the intellectual elites used their Modernist internationalism and cosmopolitanism as a forma mentis to react again the crisis of Western civilization and the crisis of reason orchestrated by the European totalitarianisms. Such forms of resistance through the arts found their embodiments in artworks, theatre and the debates in literary journals.
Cantiere, Il Convegno, Corrente, Critica fascista, la fiera letteraria, Letteratura, Occidente, Orpheus, Pegaso, Primato, Il Saggiatore, Lo spettatore italiano, La Ronda, Solaria.
The relationship between the dictatorship and Italian intellectuals was necessarily a rather complex one. Its first major defining feature was the divide between elite and popular culture, which in Italy was particularly clear because of the economic structure in place to support cultural organizations. In line with its anthropological revolution, since the 1925 Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals the regime had understood culture as another facet of action. Particularly after 1932, the regime concentrated its efforts on building consensus amongst the popular classes, without visibly obstructing the intelligentsia. It operated through more or less wide-reaching structures of patronage spanning national and international exhibitions, such as the Biennali, Triennali and Quadriennali, along with prizes and the provision of financial support to publishers and stipends to authors. If examples of explicit resistance to the regime can be found in the political and cultural work produced by the likes of Antonio Gramsci, Piero Gobetti and the Rosselli brothers, to name just a few, the role played by intellectuals and artists in general is more difficult to define because of the rhizomatic intersections between the regime and the artistic and cultural worlds. Was the rise of Fascism just one of the many manifestations of the lack of public engagement endemic amongst Italy’s leading elites? Or might one rather suggest that Stefan Collini's notion of Italian intellectuals as ‘absent minds’ describes a particular cultural and artistic system that regarded the practice and attitude of sustained indifference not simply as a form of escapism, but rather as an effective means of reacting against the regime’s myopia? Some answers to these questions may be found by examining examples of artistic production in theatre, literature and the visual arts, which actively challenged the position of the arts towards the dictatorship and show how aesthetic innovation, often via cosmopolitan dialogues, could function as a counterculture working from within the system, without confronting the regime openly.
In the age of totalitarianisms in Italy, this intellectual indifference translated into a multi-faceted form of engaged indifference, which sought aesthetic innovation and intellectual exchange while mostly avoiding direct political confrontation. While Futurism and Novecento were vying to become the official arte di Stato, the more radical intellectual debate occurred in the cosmopolitan circles of the cultural elites. In this respect, such an attitude could mainly and more explicitly be found in the extensive publication and dissemination of elite, small-format Modernist magazines as fora for topical debate. Because of their size – and hence their relative invisibility –, the regime could largely ignore such venues, implicitly labelling them as self-sufficient and peripheral, and treating them as publications existing on ‘a self-financing footing’. We shall therefore argue that, despite their differences and their often apolitical claims, these journals played a major role in allowing the Italian elites to promote change and innovation through their indifference and without directly confronting the Fascist regime. How did these venues encourage young Italian intellectuals to occupy a privileged cultural space from which to promote Modernist innovation, and specifically the transition from aestheticism to realism in the arts? How did these elite, small-scale publications enable this ‘ruling class’ to transform itself from the liberal intellectual to the new intellectual who would populate the post-war public sphere? Such journals had a clear cosmopolitan ethos, which featured heavily in their choice of contributions. Amongst the intellectual elites, their cosmopolitan attitude acted according to the principles of 1) equal worth and dignity (dialogue between communities); 2) active agency, personal responsibility (taking an active role as a national cultural agent); 3) consent (open debate); 4) collective decision-making, inclusiveness. Cosmopolitanism was thus not simply an elite practice under a nationalist, repressive regime but a force for cultural and aesthetic survival, which filtered through the regime’s nationalist cultural agenda and assisted the development of new configurations of aesthetic and political engagement.
The inter-war years were not just a time of intellectual indifference. They were also the opposite, as Frank Kermode showed in his analysis of the intersections between bourgeois writing and political affiliations. In History and Value, Kermode drew a clear connection between aesthetics and politics in the literature of the 1930s on the strength of its ‘conscientious conviction that borders and frontiers need to be crossed’ with the ‘vast historical change, […] revolution and war […]’ that necessarily ensued from such transits (22). In other words, in the age of totalitarianisms, it was inevitable that ‘Conscience was reinforced by intellect’, albeit not always explicitly, so.’ The system of patronage orchestrated by the regime enabled form of more oblique resistance where innovation could be presented as fascist modernity (Salvagnini) and a space for both the ‘intellettuali militanti e funzionari’ (Isnenghi). Kok-Chor Tan, for instance, has argued for the compatibility of liberal nationalism and cosmopolitanism for the construction of identity. In order to preserve their identity, the Italian elites had to adjust to a cosmopolitan ethos of shared justice above the state – but were forced to act within the state. Under totalitarian rule, cosmopolitanism was an elite aesthetic practice, which enabled the circulation of ideas well beyond its traditional elite limits and allowed the arts to preserve a form of national identity.
Hannah Arendt described totalitarian power as omnipotent, but not always to the same degree, thereby allowing some spaces of resistance and counteraction. Sociologist Mabel Berezin, meanwhile, claimed that ‘the split between the public and private self’, the fundamental requirement for the existence of Western democracies, was erased during the years of the Italian totalitarian rule. We, therefore, need to consider which subject position the self, once made public as in the profile of the public intellectual, is able to take under totalitarianism. In order to assess the position of an intellectual agent within the public sphere, we also need to evaluate the relationship between theoretical knowledge and practical action, following Arthur Melzer’s remarks regarding the intellectual freedom, which can be gained outside the boundaries of State Art. In his argument, Meltzer also indicated that the modern intellectual is often caught in the paradox of detached attachment, between platonic forms and Socratic questions, which Sartre would translate into the major philosophical interrogation, ‘who is the other?’, or what is the appearance of the other. To a certain extent Melzer’s theoretical questions are less relevant when discussing a cultural or public system, which fails precisely to guarantee the existence of the Ego in the rhetorical form of self vs. other. Nor can such questions explain what public role an intellectual could assume, if by public role we solely mean a force for change and transformation and progress against the constraints imposed by a totalitarian State. While Italian intellectuals possessed no legitimate public voice in the way that their counterparts in democratic systems had, the regime nonetheless legitimised some of its intellectuals by allowing them to take part in the public debate occurring in the public sphere via their contributions to journals or by allowing them to stage or exhibit their artistic works and publish their literary creations. This was once again a question of boundaries and visibility.
During the Ventennio, the role of the State, and that of the arts within it, was very clearly defined in terms of totalitarian and hierarchical control over the social sphere. The institutional apparatus of the State had to join forces with the arts in order to organize forms of social life. If we look closely at the aesthetics promoted by modernist magazines, or by the elites who found their voices in those outlets, and the official debate on the arts and their place within the Fascist state, we can find some similarities (Carlo Emilio Gadda and Elio Vittorini). The official debate on State Art and the debate among the intellectual elites addressed similar concerns; namely, the universal imperative of using the arts as a platform for fostering social modernization in the civic sphere. From the point of view of the regime, art, as Giuseppe Bottai from Critica Fascista often repeated, had to be art-action – ‘azione per l’arte’ – and the regime had to act as an organizing force and not simply as a patron. While, with Primato (1940-43), Bottai advocated the well-known ‘coraggio della concordia’, the Premio Bergamo praised Guttuso and the Corrente movement together with nationalist works (Pietro Gaudenzi). And, finally, sacred art and sculpture played an important role in consecrating, from a non-Fascist point of view, the dictatorship within the social sphere (Giacomo Manzù, Fausto Melotti).
Literary and cultural journals encouraged intellectual exchange and debate, thereby helping Italian culture to survive the dictatorship. Through the publication of translations and articles on foreign literature, such journals played a fundamental role in fostering international dialogue, thereby preserving Italian culture from marginalization. Margherita Sarfatti herself organised several exhibitions of the Novecento movement, from Europe to Latin America until the early 1930s. Throughout the Ventennio, Filippo Marinetti and the Futurists relentlessly continued to enter into dialogue with other avant-garde movements, seeking to expand their horizons and young directors were making their ways into the film industry (Alberto Lattuada, Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti). Translations of foreign novels were the main literary successes of the day and sold more copies than Italian novels. And, finally, architecture was heavily indebted to foreign examples. In other words, what defined the cosmopolitan ethos was a competitive desire to compare Italy with other cultures in order to maintain a position of cultural centrality within the European sphere.
Theatre and cinema were both powerful tools for manipulating citizens. If cosmopolitanism and the participation in the debate about the arts enabled a fair number of intellectuals to be legitimised and to avoid being confined to the peripheries of the international cultural landscape, many artistic products served the purpose of providing easy forms of entertainment, thereby distracting and manipulating citizens. The cinema of the telefoni bianchi or the bourgeois theatre were for example amongst the privileged channels through which common citizens could be entertained, manipulated and/or indoctrinated (Mario Camerini, Mario Soldati, Aldo De Benedetti, Cesare Vico Lodovici, Ettore Petrolini). This form of production tended to have a set of common features: simplified story-lines, love stories and a dream-like atmosphere (occasionally set in exotic locations), or unproblematic forms of humour. These works functioned through a process of identification and alienation. The public could dream of a glamorous and adventurous lifestyle but spectators also had to accept that such a lifestyle could not be part of the everyday reality of a morally-sound Fascist citizen (Luigi Chiarini, Alessandro Blasetti, Max Neufeld).