German honorary begins totalitarian regimes lecture series with a look at Germany, Italy

Home News German honorary begins totalitarian regimes lecture series with a look at Germany, Italy
German honorary begins totalitarian regimes lecture series with a look at Germany, Italy
Assistant Professor of History Anna Vincenzi speaks on Italian fascism and totalitarianism

All political regimes, including the U.S. government, potentially lead to totalitarianism, said Assistant Professor of History Anna Vincenzi in a Delta Phi Alpha German honorary lecture on Tuesday.

“You don’t need to be a monster to remake reality,” she said.

Vincenzi joined Assistant Professor of German Jeffery Hertel for the reiteration of the honorary’s Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) Colloquium Series entitled “Controlling People and Public Opinion in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships.”

Vincenzi spoke on Jewish German political philosopher Hannah Arendt and how her theories on totalitarianism relate to Italian Fascism in the 20th century.

Vincenzi spoke about Arendt’s clarification of the difference between traditional dictatorship and the totalitarianism of the early 20th century.

Both traditional dictatorships and totalitarianism violate the law, but totalitarian regimes replace the law with a new positive law, which they insist to be “the only natural law that fits with history,” Vincenzi said.

Vincenzi looked at totalitarianism’s use of ideologies to enforce these new laws.

“The core of totalitarianism is ideology,” Vincenzi said. “Ideologies don’t necessarily lead to totalitarianism, but all have the potential to become totalitarian.”

“-isms” and ideologies were a product of 19th-century thinking, Vincenzi said. They claimed to have total knowledge of the past, present, and future.

“Ideologies take one principle and make it representative of everything,” she said.

Vincenzi said Arendt claims this comes from the new type of thinking and rights of man introduced during the French Revolution, when man’s own thinking, not God’s command or history, began to influence law.

“Man’s nature is self-defined by man,” she said. “It makes man totally abstract, independent of any natural and historical realities.”

Vincenzi said Arendt believed totalitarian regimes spread these new ideas by propaganda, organization, and the police.

While Arendt claimed Italian Fascism was more like traditional dictatorship than totalitarian, Vincenzi cited some of Arendt’s marks of totalitarianism in the Italian government.

Vincenzi said fascists used propaganda to get rid of the anti-fascist press and used organizations like the National Afterwork Organization to fundamentally reorder people’s lives by scheduling hiking trips and other activities outside of work hours. 

“Even your free time is an opportunity to make you a good fascist man,” she said.

On the other hand, other organizations taught good women how much pasta to buy during wartime. Others taught children to be fascists.

Even Mussolini himself saw fascism as different from previous dictatorships, which pointed out how fascism was indeed totalitarianism, Vincenzi said.

Vincenzi said this topic is relevant today because totalitarianism is a modern invention which is relevant to contemporary contexts.

In addition, she said it is important to see the banality of evil, as Arendt did herself when she witnessed some of the post-World War II trials in Jerusalem, Vincenzi said.

“They were perfectly normal people who stopped thinking,” she said. “The people who started these regimes were not monsters.”

Hertel’s presentation, on the other hand, looked at the German Nazi regime and told how a monopoly on language led to their absolute control of the country.

Hertel said that just as people use language to express concepts and make themselves, the limitations of speech can be detrimental.

“The power to speak and act is important,” Hertel said. “When speech is controlled, the public is more early controlled.”

Long before Germany was a nation-state, Germany united its identity through its common tongue. When Nazism destroyed this free act of speech, it was taking away part of what it meant to be German, Hertel said.

It did this in many ways, from posting words on posters, working places, and even concentration camps.

“The Nazis were masters of the slogan,” Hertel said.

It also controlled language through euphemisms, like calling the abduction of certain people, “liquidation,” and calling gas chambers only “bathhouses.”

Viktor Klemperer, who wrote on the language of the Third Reich, said the main problem wasn’t the flags and idioms, but how the Nazis used single words to change meaning and reality, Hertel said.

“‘Words can be tiny doses of arsenic,’” Hertel said, quoting Klemperer, “after a little time, the toxin reaction sets in after all.”

Junior Gabe Gainer, who attended the talk, said he found the lecture to be a fascinating insight into the way simple ideologies can develop into totalitarian regimes.

“It’s important that we know how such regimes get their start so that we can prevent one from ever forming within our own society,” Gainer said.

The Colloquium will continue with lectures on Thursday, March 24 at 4 p.m in Lane 125 from Assistant Professor of History Edward Gutierrez and Assistant Professor of French Anna Navrotskaya on East German and Soviet Union dictatorships, respectively. To conclude, a roundtable of all four speakers will take place on Friday, March 25 at 3 p.m.