The Abyss Of Fascism

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This essay is part of a series on “Freedom,” the theme of the 2026 Cleveland Humanities Festival.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. 

-Orwell, 1984

You are born in 1879 in Switzerland, a frail kid, son of a music teacher. As a teen you’re bored by the violin and begin painting. You write in a notebook, “A line is a dot that went for a walk.” Your paintings are quirky, unique: child-like doodles, abstract folk tales, dreams. 

By 1921, at 42, you’re a renowned artist teaching at the Bauhaus school of design, in Weimar, Germany, with Kandinsky. Your chalkboard lessons—birds and fish, glyphs and puppets, bizarre playful hieroglyphs—are devoured hungrily by the young artists. 

The darkness growing around you in the Weimar Republic is hard to see because you are not cynical. Despite your ferocious face and your strict teaching, you have play in your bones. Your paintings are games, riddles a genius child might think up. It’s hard for you to believe people are cruel. 

In the late 1920s, the Nazi party denounces the Bauhaus as “cultural Bolshevism.” You keep working, confident that kinder minds will prevail. Of course you hear the news all around you: freedom of the press abolished, unions dissolved, opponents imprisoned, Jewish people barred from civil service, everyone forced to swear loyalty to the Führer. When Hitler becomes Chancellor in 1933, the Gestapo raids your studio. You’re fired from Bauhaus, called “a Jew” in the press (you are not Jewish), and forced into exile in Switzerland.

Four years later, the Nazis organize Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art Show”), where the greatest artists of that time—Chagall, Dix, Schiele, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso—are piled on the wall haphazardly, a demonstration of the decay of modern culture. 

They included seventeen paintings by you, Paul Klee. 

The day before, down the road, was the Great German Art Exhibition (Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung). Hitler curated the show and spoke for two hours at the opening, describing what he deemed “healthy” art: muscular Aryan nudes, peasants at work in fields, idealized mothers with children. 

Such work sustains a propaganda surface designed to be seamless, idealized, romanticized. Monumental neoclassical scenes incapable of challenging, or wounding, the viewer. 

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Meantime, just to the south, Mussolini was meticulously constructing a similar system. 

Ignazio Silone, in his novel Fontamara (1933), runs his hand aross the portrait Italy was painting of itself. Although Mussolini—who coined the word fascism in 1919 to describe his new political party—is not mentioned in Fontamara, and the word fascism appears just once, Silone’s book enacts the terrible damage the new system was creating for real human beings.

Silone—born in 1900 in Fucino, a small town in Abruzzo—was the son of a landholder. When Silone was fifteen, his whole family, aside from his younger brother Romolo, was killed in an earthquake. Afterwards, he witnessed one of his uncles stealing the wallet from the dead body of one of the victims. Another time, coming out of church, Silone saw a aristocrat sic his dog on a seamstress; when she took the aristocrat to court, the magistrate decided against her and made her pay costs. 

Silone became a communist. Fontamara—published outside Italy, in Switzerland, when Mussolini’s fascism was at its peak—is set in the titular, fictional Abruzzo town, similar to the town Silone was from. The book was handed back and forth between excited hands. Orwell, in a review, described Fontamara as “the most moving account of Fascist barbarity I have yet read.” 

Rather than philosophical concepts, Silone uses human beings to describe fascism. The narrative voice shifts between three local rustics. Nothing much has ever changed in the lives of these peasants, and they are unaware of the calamity about to strike. They accept injustice and fate with as much wisdom and humor as they can muster.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the local Fontamaresi—who live in the Fucino plain, with its rich soil—are being exploited left and right: by a prince who’s their absentee landlord; by devious lawyers. And finally by “Those men in black shirts”: the fascist police that arrive at night, in groups. Townsfolk are tricked into signing a petition for their own water: they’re asked to surrender water for “ten lusters” (meaning “50 years,” but they don’t know what a luster is). Pelino—a high-ranking official on the side of the Blackshirts, wearing a fat ring enscribed with “His Excellency”—lies to them, saying 

There are new authorities in office now, who hold the peasants in high esteem and wish to give consideration to their views. So I appeal to you to give me your signatures. Show your appreciation of the honor that the authorities have done you in sending an official here to discover your wishes. 

The Fontamaresi respond to Pelino’s edict by burning his property—and then the Blackshirts arrive. While the menfolk are at work, Blackshirts rape the women. 

The government keeps changing the rules on the poor locals, stealing everything the locals own. By the end, most of them have been murdered by Blackshirts. Just a few escape over the hills, some to America.

The survivors ask, in the last words of the novel: “What are we to do?” 

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The Fontamaresi feel the abyss of fascism acutely, but when they try to look at it, or name it, it slips away. They believe they’re living in a certain kind of system—one which, one would assume, rewards farmers for farming—but the world has changed in the night and the explanation for that change is invisible and untraceable. One day they’re promised compensation for their grain, the next they are fined for not delivering enough; yesterday’s official is gone, today there’s a new guy in a different uniform. Townsfolk ask for explanation. Answers collapse in thin air.

The present moment is hard to see. Lacan described his elusive concept of the Real as the truth of the present moment: not reality, exactly, but what lies beneath all stories, beneath all explanation, beneath all understanding. The unrepresentable trauma that can’t be put into language or symbol. Lacan’s Real is not the stories and laws which we think make up reality, but the raw void that appears when those stories and laws collapse. An abyss just out of reach, forever. 

For Klee—at the height of the Weimar Republic, in the rise of Nazism—the abyss of the present moment remained half-hidden from his non-cruel perspective. For the Fontamaresi, who understand the world in a pre-fascist way, the present moment is the new system that permits, or actively encourages, cruelty to flourish. For them the abyss comes out of nowhere: the floor drops away: the how and why of it are unclear. We can see the raw void appear in the character of Elvira. Berardo, the hero of the village who protests the Blackshirts, is in love with Elvira, a saintly character with “extraordinary modesy and reserve.” She witnesses the Blackshirts rape of Maria Grazia, which leaves Elvira shocked. Such shock is one way of thinking of the abyss: it’s a state of speechless trauma, of drowning in inexpressible pain; a rupture in the societal fabric. 

To Roland Barthes, certain powerful images contain a punctum: an unexpected detail that wounds or triggers: a “sting, speck, cut.” The punctum disrupts our ordinary perception, providing a look at what’s beneath. Elvira’s response, as we read about it, is full of punctum. The effect of the Blackshirts’ raw act of cruel power is that Elvira—and the village that adores her, and Berardo who adores her—are left paralyzed. 

The scorching darkness underneath fascism is due, at least in part, to the way fascism replaces human beings with abstractions: race, purity, nation, rules. Abstractions suddenly mean more than people’s lives. In his speech at the “Great Exhibition of German Art” in 1937, Hitler tries to claim the language of contemporary art: in place of the “artifactitious stammerings” and “claptrap” of artists like Klee and the German Expressionists, he alone has access to the value of art that speaks for the people

Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc., have nothing to do with our German people for these concepts are neither old nor modern, but are only the artifactitious stammerings of men to whom God has denied the grace of a truly artistic talent, and in its place has awarded them the gift of jabbering or deception … All those catchwords: “inner experience,” “strong state of mind,” “forceful will,” emotions pregnant with the future,” “heroic attitude,” “meaningful empathy,” “experienced order of the times,” “original primitivism,” etc —all these dumb, mendacious excuses, this claptrap or jabbering will no longer be accepted as excuses or even recommendations for worthless, integrally unskilled products

In response to such pugnacious and humiliating rhetoric, artists are urged to keep silent, keep working, keep saluting. And, crucially, not to make radical art.

Like capitalism, fascism conceals its abyss in daily normalcy: propaganda and administrative obfuscation, masking a naked will to power. In contracts, uniforms, rituals of loyalty which seem ordinary at the time, there is always hidden violence. 

For us, looking back on fascism, it’s anything but ordinary. Yet it can begin—slowly, day after day—to seem normal.

And there’s a high cost, Orwell points out, to accepting such normalcy: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”