Wolfgang Schivelbusch - Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939

FROM ONE OF THE WORLDS PREEMINENT CULTURAL HISTORIANS, AN ORIGINAL AND CONTROVERSIAL LOOK AT THE HIDDEN COMMONALITIES AMONG FASCISM, NAZISM, AND THE NEW DEAL

Today Franklin Delano Roosevelts New Deal is regarded as the democratic ideal, the positive American response to a crisis that propelled Germany and Italy toward National Socialism and Fascism. Yet in the 1930s, shocking as it may now seem, these regimes were not considered entirely antithetical. In this groundbreaking work, Wolfgang Schivelbusch investigates the shared elements of these three new deals to offer an original explanation for the popularity of Europes totalitarian systems.

By reconstructing Depression-era attitudes toward society and government, Schivelbusch traces the emergence of a new type of stateone bolstered by mass propaganda, led by a charismatic figure, and designed to project stability and power. The gigantic public works programs favored by all three regimes not only put people back to work, they also convinced them of the governments unshakeable authority.

Schivelbusch uncovers stunning commonalities: the symbolic importance of the TVA dams, the German autobahn, and the reclamation of the Pontine marshes; the seductive persuasiveness of Roosevelts fireside chats and Hitlers mass rallies; the vogue for monumental architecture; the omnipresent banners, badges, and buttons enlisting citizens as loyal followers and supporters of the state.

Writing with flair and concision, Schivelbusch does not equate the political systems identified with Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini or minimize their acute differences. Rather, by exploring their similarities, he both deepens our understanding of the New Deal and puts forward a provocative explanation for the still-mysterious popularity of Europes most tyrannical regimes.

Also by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

The Culture of Defeat

The Railway Journey

Disenchanted Night

Tastes of Paradise

THREE NEW DEALS

Reflections on Roosevelts America, Mussolinis Italy, and Hitlers Germany, 19331939

WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH

Translated by Jefferson Chase

Metropolitan Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com

Metropolitan Books and are registered
trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright 2006 by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 1941
Three new deals: Reflections on Roosevelts America, Mussolinis Italy,
and Hitlers Germany, 1933-1939 / Wolfgang Schivelbusch.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7452-9
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7452-X
1. New Deal, 1933-1939. 2. United StatesEconomic policy1933-1945. 3. United StatesPolitics and government1933-1945.4. Italy Economic policy. 5. ItalyPolitics and government1933-1945. 6. GermanyEconomic policy1933-1945. 7. GermanyPolitics and government1933-1945. I. Title

HC106.3.S3246 2006
330.9043dc22 2006044947

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First Edition 2006

Designed by Victoria Hartman

Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

As force is always on the side of the governed,
the governors have nothing to support them but opinion.
It is, therefore, on opinion that government is founded;
and this maxim extends to the most despotic and the most military
governments as well as to the most free and popular.

David Hume

THREE NEW DEALS

In September 1946, Sigfried Giedion, probably the most renowned historian of modern architecture, gave a lecture before the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. The editors of the Architectural Review were so taken with Giedions ideas that they convened a symposium to discuss them, inviting such leading architects and architectural historians as Walter Gropius, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Gregor Paulsson, William Holford, Lucio Costa, and Alfred Roth, as well as Giedion himself. The symposium took for its title that of Gideons original lecture: The Need for a New Monumentality.

For the first time in the history of modern architecture, the discipline was subjecting itself to fundamental self-criticism. The chief insight to emerge was that modernists, in their struggle against the historicism of the nineteenth century,

Most of the participants agreed that they should have been more receptive to such expectations in the years before World War II. In the wake of World War I, modern architects had aspired to provide structural expressions of social revolution to the masses, by and for whom it had been carried out. But the masses had never understoodmuch less likedmodern architecture. And during the Great Depression, capitalisms period of crisis, they were drawn to modernisms bitterest enemies, National Socialism and Fascism, because these offered them something they wanted and needed, something that modernism had refused to provide them: monumentality.

The conflation of monumentalthat is, backward-looking, neoclassicalarchitecture with the Third Reich and the other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century reflects the political and ideological oppositions of the 1920s and 30sas does the association of modern architecture with liberal democracy and the social-welfare state. The underlying assumptions

For decades critics ignored, or chose to ignore, the fact that neither Italian Fascism nor early Soviet Communism fit the paradigm. They also disregarded the affinities many leading practitioners of the modernist New Architecture movement in Germanyincluding Mies van der Rohehad felt with Fascism during the initial years of the Third Reich. It took an entire generation after World War II before scholars, as part of a general effort to locate Nazism within a wider historical context, came to todays consensus that the earlier equations were too simplistic. Suddenly they woke up to the fact that neoclassical, monumental buildings had been constructed in Washington, Paris, London, and Geneva during the 1930s, just as they had in Berlin, Moscow, and Rome. They recognized that Mussolinis program of architectural functionalism, or rationalism, was nothing other than an extension of modernism and that even the Third Reich, the great exemplar of antimodern philistinism, had taken a modernist approach when dealing with function rather than representation. They acknowledged that there had been architecturally modern Fascists and architecturally traditional liberals and that 1930s neoclassical monumentalism

Critics began to ask why a majority of democratic nations in 1927 rejected modernist designs for the headquarters of the League of Nations, choosing instead a neoclassical, monumental one, why the Third Republic in France built the neoclassical Palais de Chaillot for the 1937 Worlds Fair, and why the architecture of Washington, D.C., received a monumentalist infusion under Roosevelts New Deal. The answers were the same. Scholars gradually recognized neoclassical monumentalismwhether of the 1930s, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic empirefor what it is: