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The Departments of German Studies, Italian and History invite to a

PUBLIC LECTURE:

Geoff Eley (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) 

This lecture interrogates the perception of fascism’s public self-representation as pre-dominantly a certain kind of visually imposing spectacle, whether in the artfully stage-managed newsreel and photographic record of the time, in the countless cinematic and documentary representations since, or in recent scholarly treatments of the “aesthetics of power,” from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens [1935] to Peter Reichel’s Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches [1991] or Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi’s Fascist Spectacle [1997]. Walter Benjamin’s aestheticization thesis – “the logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life” – has become our default way of understanding how fascism in Hitler’s Germany sought to visualize itself. Certainly many photographs from this era bear out this view of a fascist aesthetic of ardent presence where beautiful spectacle fills in the spaces of social alienation.

But how far must we continue to think within these same terms? Is there a necessary connection between the photography of presence and fascism as a political structure? What happens if we shift the perspective elsewhere by developing a different lens to consider other aspects of fascism or another kind of fascism? How might we rethink the spectacular photographic presences in Germany? How might an understanding of the way absences, the unseen as well as the seen, serve fascism permit us to ask what is absent from Nazi photography? How might this comparison enable us to complicate the Benjamin-derived trope of aestheticization?

All welcome