Notes on Fascism and Bohemia
HAROLD ROSENBERG
"You don't have a taste, sir, for the Sublime-or the Ridiculous?"
"Perhaps," Rowe said, "I prefer human nature plain."
GRAHAM GREENE-The
Ministry of Fear
Modern Man-An Object of Suspicion
That Modem Man could tum Nazi-this
is
the Sphinx that
challenges every moralist and psychologist of our day.
It is not that Nazism suddenly made one aware of the human
capacity for crime. Mter all, this generation had been nourished
from infancy on daily dispatches of murder, rape, individual and
mass lynching, atrocities. New territories of Man's viciousness–
sadism, real and symbolic-were as familiar to us as ghosts and
witches to our ancestors.
·
Not increased familiarity with viciousness but a revelation of
the viciousness of the familiar was the Nazi contribution towards
making Man once more an object of suspicion. That a nation, a
whole society-milkmen, mothers, schoolboys, policemen-should
have given itself up easily to a community policy of blows and tor–
ture, seemed proof that the monster is lurking in the average and
everyday. In this respect the triumph of the Nazis in Germany paral–
leled, on a more obvious and threatening plane, the disclosures of
Dr. Freud.
Thus, at first glance, a certain reassurance seems offered in the
explanation of Konrad Heiden's
Der Fuehrer*
that the Nazi uprising
was the revolution of a special group, "the armed bohemians." We
think of "bohemians" as social outsiders, inhabiting small isolated
pockets, and generally consider them to be eccentric and far from
typical people. Commonly, the word designates artists and late sleep–
ers, who live in odd neighborhoods of big cities. Heiden uses the
term in a broader meaning: with him, as with Karl Marx, "bohe–
mian" means the offscourings of all classes- gangsters or international
*
Houghton Miffiin. $3.00.
