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This chapter focuses on Yasuda Yojūrō's “Japanese Bridges”, an essay about the cultural and literary meanings of Japanese bridges. The essay evokes moments of authenticity or purity—beauty that can be evoked beyond the fractured space of modern life and consciousness. These moments form Yasuda's fascist aesthetic. Though they may feel merely aesthetic, they are rife with political implications and suggest an endorsement of violence. Indeed, from innocent musings on bridges Yasuda arrives in “Japanese Bridges” at a spiritual glorification of the shedding of blood. How he makes this aesthetic and ideological leap—or, to use his metaphor, how he bridges this gap—is the driving question of the chapter.

This chapter considers the close connection between modernism and fascism in Japan. It discusses how Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's modernism displays the origins of a distinctly Japanese fascist aesthetic. Though Akutagawa died before Japan's entry into war and totalitarianism and never married those aesthetics to a politics of violence or death, we might wonder still whether his aesthetics would have led to such a politics. It is argued that Kobayashi Hideo's modernism, so richly informed by Akutagawa's, made that very turn.

This book has explored some of the voices that contributed, through a kind of synergy with their historical context, to creating a formal environment that helped bind Japanese subjects to the state and its demands. It has paid particular attention to the timbre of those voices, understanding that their power to convey and promote acts of binding relied as much on the form of their expression as on the content. Aesthetic fascist language worked as a balm to soothe the agitations, and smooth out the complexities, of the fracturing forces of modernity. Often it was a rhythmic language of surfaces lulling readers into unreflective assent to the urgings of beautifully rendered aesthetic moments—moments that promised the comfort of giving oneself over, in quiet avowal or passionate self-sacrifice, to tradition and the state. Writers of the fascist aesthetic were acutely attuned to the sensuous power of language, and they channeled that power in precarious directions. Yet the fact that there were writers writing against the fascist aesthetic reminds us that reading beyond the mesmerizing surface of prose can undo its power.

The introductory chapter clarifies the goal of the book, which is to question the monolithic understanding of wartime film and to focus on the complexities and contradictions of national identity formation of cultural texts in this period. The chapter begins by providing a brief summary of the era’s film industry. Then, it introduces the state of research of wartime Japanese film studies through an examination of the definition of ‘national policy film’ or kokusaku eiga. Finally, it underlines the significance of interdisciplinary and relational approaches to wartime Japanese film by discussing the methodologies and narratives of other national film histories that have informed this project. (105 words)

Francoist kitsch aesthetic and its proximity to the realm of political power is best exemplified by the film Raza (Race, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, 1941), whose screenplay was written, under a pseudonym, by Franco himself. This chapter argues that the film exemplifies what Hermann Broch and Saul Friedländer have pinpointed as the essence of kitsch—the mixing of aesthetic and ethical categories culminating in the fetishization of suffering, violence and death.

This chapter traces the history of Arnold Fanck’s S.O.S Eisberg (1933), a Hollywood-Germany co-production released in separate versions in English and German by Universal Studios. Starring Leni Riefenstahl, the film tells the story of a scientific expedition lost in Greenlandic ice fjords. Körber considers the film in relation to the rugged, purity-of-nature Bergfilm (‘Mountain film’) genre and examines its proto-Nazi leanings, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ (1975). She also analyses Fanck’s perhaps spurious claims about the authenticity of his representation of the Arctic, which were used as promotional material for the film, and signals their connection to the close collaboration with Knud Rasmussen, who was filming The Wedding of Palo (1934) in Western Greenland at the same time.

This chapter begins with Mary Wigman’s 1930 Totenmal collaboration with Swiss poet Albert Talhoff. The multimedia spectacle’s invocation of the World War I dead was meant to be “apolitical” even though it has retrospectively been read ideologically in terms of a proto-fascist aesthetic. Soon after, Wigman toured her solo dance cycle Opfer around the United States. This chapter considers watching as a form of political activity by comparing divergent audience responses on both sides of the Atlantic to these two late Weimar-era performances that were constructed from similar components and addressed themes of sacrifice and human fate. By focusing on the ideologies of reception, including the multiple models of community in play and the power of underreading, this chapter locates the politics of dance in how its spectators negotiated its meaning. In so doing the chapter offers a new perspective that neither situates dance as a dress rehearsal for German fascism nor neglects its continuities.

This chapter takes up larger questions of retrospective watching through the post-World War Two moment at which understandings of Weimar dance were consolidated. Beginning from the copyright suit that Kurt Jooss filed against the musical revue film Sensation in San Remo after the return of his 1932 Green Table to West Germany in 1951, the chapter shows how one of the pieces most directly associated in retrospect with connecting inter-war and post-war German dance figured actively in reconstituting a postwar dance community. Returning from 19 years of exile, Jooss’s stylistic fusion was cited as an unfinished form of late Ausdruckstanz and used to bridge interwar and postwar dance, in the process justifying continuities with fascist aesthetics through, rather than despite, the legacy his work carried. This chapter thus historicizes how Weimar-era dance came to be understood in relation to successive generations of German dance, including dance theatre.