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Poison pen | page 1, 2
In his psychological dependence on myth and symbol, moreover, and his scorn for politics and economics, he eerily mirrors Hitler himself. As Albert Speer records, Hitler was famously always pining for the day he could retire from "filthy politics" and become an "artist." The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach By Alice Kaplan
Brasillach himself wrote the following of his visit to the Nuremburg Rally of 1937: Faced with this serious, delicious decor of an erstwhile romanticism, faced with this immense flowering of flags, faced with these crosses from the Orient [swastikas], I asked mysel f ... if anything goes ... The fragmentation of the quote itself seems to hint at the inner dissolution of the individual in a moment of mass hysteria. And this brings us to the heart of Kaplan's quest to uncover the psychic dynamics of her subject. What, she asks, were the sexual pathologies underlying Brasillach's infatuation with orgiastic Nazism? It is, of course, a much-pondered question, most famously in the heretically Freudian work of Wilhelm Reich and in Klaus Theweleit's 1978 "Male Fantasies," a somewhat overworked Reichian exploration of the sexual pathology of fascism. This is interesting if murky territory. And fascism does indeed lend itself to such lurid deconstructing. For where communism seems drably asexual, the quasi-erotic swagger of Nazi regalia, symbolism and uniform seem equally undeniable. Hitler's sexual relation to his audiences, whom he called "my bride," was legendary. What is at work here? In the case of Brasillach, Kaplan deals head-on with his reputed homosexuality and its relation to Nazi ritual. It's a theme Genet also explored in his wild account of the male sexuality of the Occupation, "Pompe Funebre," with its glamorous and virile blond Nazi lover figure. In his Occupation diary, quoted by Kaplan, the Parisian writer Jean Guehenno wrote in 1941: "Sociological problem: Why so many pederasts among the collaborators?" Kaplan distances herself from the dated tone of this rhetorical (and perhaps tongue-in-cheek) question. But the collaborationist gay scene, she points out, was indeed very conspicuous in Paris (just as it had been among Hitler's SA). None of this matters, of course, except insofar as Kaplan is able to suggest that Brasillach had a kind of homoerotic relation with fascism -- just as Genet had described it. According to writer Jean-Louis Bory, the German army exercised a distinctly sexual allure. It consisted, he claimed, in "a taste for boots, leather, metal, and the famous Nuremberg masses in which ... someone like Brasillach could find the exaltation of a humanity to their liking." And Kaplan herself concludes : "Whatever the reality of his sexual life, Brasillach's writing suggests a homoerotic attraction to the rituals of fascism." But Kaplan also shuns any simplistic explanations along these lines. There were many possible psychological roots for fascism. "How many children of men killed in the First World War," she asks, "were there among the fascists?" The orphaning and brutalizing effects of the First World War on this generation have been inadequately understood. The roots of Brasillach's tragic pathology, in other words, were unfathomably complex, and they disturb us precisely because we also do not really possess a convincing explanation for fascism itself. Despite the lakes of ink expended on its analysis, deep down we remain baffled by it. We are obsessed by fascism and its terrors, as any evening spent watching the History Channel will prove. They are our principal collective nightmare, which we cannot intellectually resolve and from which we do not seem able to escape. More important, however, are the unanswerable questions about Brasillach's fate. Why, Kaplan asks, was Brasillach shot while Rene Bousquet, the head of the Paris police who oversaw the infamous roundup of Parisian Jews, was given only two years of a suspended jail sentence? She suggests that it's partly a question of timing. The legal definition of "crimes against humanity" is a fairly recent invention; the trial of men like Klaus Barbie was not possible until its advent. Brasillach, too, was tried while the war still raged. Passions were high, and De Gaulle perhaps needed a symbolic execution to close one era and begin another. Yet there is also the question of Brasillach's undeniable guilt in committing technical treason, the crime for which he was actually shot. And there is the more obscure question, too, of his actual involvement in denouncing Jews in hiding in the pages of Je Suis Partout. It was never proved beyond doubt, but clearly the intent to harm existed. It's an open question whether such ambiguities merit death. In a society at peace, it is difficult to judge the mood of a place like wartime France, where words could literally kill. "Hate speech" still arouses passion because of the Nazis, essentially, and because of men like Brasillach. We have seen the horrors they are capable of. But Kaplan, like de Beauvoir, is right when she points out that executing people because of their words is a dubious path to tread. If words are actions, after all, why not have a thought police and arm them to the teeth? Brasillach would have approved.
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