Fascism then and now

The Schattendorf cycles oppose the conversion of a shared world into the expression of one authorized will. They examine how a public injury becomes a leader’s unchallengeable personal mandate, how useful protection becomes enforced dependence, how differences become signs of disloyalty, and how violence acquires a story of national necessity. That purpose joins their historical setting to their formal construction. Who arranges the voices, which account becomes public, and who can interrupt the arrangement are political questions enacted by the writing.

The German cycle makes collective life possible across people who cannot be reduced to Hermann’s artistic development or an editor’s explanation. Lord Alistair’s English cycle gives an equally substantial collective world to a narrator who understands much of it and wants it to depend on him. His intelligence sharpens the problem. Someone can know what others need and still deny their right to decide what follows from that knowledge. The reader encounters the attractions of his access while learning to distinguish insight from an entitlement to command.

These are also novels of painting, desire, family, music, ghosts, and humor. Such lives give the political argument its substance. A person needs a room in which to work, an evening for a story, a route home, and relationships whose value does not depend on usefulness to a movement. Their pleasures and disagreements remain worth attending to before anyone turns them into an example.

For this reading, authoritarianism concerns weakened contest and limits; personal rule concentrates loyalty around a leader; populist rhetoric claims a privileged relation to “the people.” Fascism concerns a more specific project of national regeneration, exclusion, anti-pluralism, and coercive mobilization. These distinctions sharpen the novels’ opposition to domination. They permit an explicit anti-fascist argument without making every act of authority or every historical comparison equivalent.

Source: English Reader’s Guide, pp. 7–8 and 26–30; the current novels. This essay develops the companion’s political reading.

Schattendorf’s killings on January 30, 1927, the acquittal on July 14, and Vienna’s protest, fire, and police gunfire on July 15 are distinct events. The Interval lets readers inhabit possibilities before later catastrophe seems to explain everything. Josef Grössing and Matthias Csmarits are the historical victims; the novels’ household and political careers are fictional.

In March 1933 a parliamentary procedural crisis was followed by Dollfuss’s use of police to prevent the National Council’s resumption. February 1934 brought the violent suppression of the Social Democratic opposition; the authoritarian constitution followed. Nazi Germany’s annexation in 1938 was a further destruction, of Austrian independence. Resistance to annexation did not make the preceding Austrian regime democratic.

The distinction matters to the novels’ anti-fascism. A state can promise national independence while dismantling its own citizens’ capacity to oppose it. A procedure can retain an official name after its practical force has changed. There is no need to invent an innocent Austrian state merely because Hitler threatens it, or to turn every earlier decision into a step that could only have ended in 1938. Political responsibility requires attention to what particular people and institutions could do at the time.

Sources: The historical foundation; Austrian Parliament, “Das Ende der Demokratie”. English Reader’s Guide, pp. 20–25.

Hermann’s invented government career puts the attraction of state capacity inside the story. Private sympathy does not repair a tenant’s roof. Official paper can obtain an inspection, and an intervention can change a dangerous public encounter. The benefit gives the next compromise a reason beyond vanity. The novels ask what can be surrendered in acquiring a power that genuinely helps.

In English Novel III, the proposed power to halt an operation becomes permission to request a halt that needs a minister’s or the Chancellor’s countersignature before taking effect. Three other safeguards survive. The distinction is crucial: the bargain is neither wholly fictitious nor the arrangement Hermann sought. While another signature is being obtained, the operation need not stop. The reader must follow what the clause permits, rather than accept the institution’s reassuring description of responsibility.

The German cycle distributes this problem across the movement, household, records, and officials. Alistair’s English account adds a narrator who knows how to exploit a partial truth about it. The state and Alistair remain separate powers with their own purposes. Dictatorship has institutions, personnel, and practical means; the supernatural villain does not explain them away.

Passages: English Novel II, pp. 261–269; Novel III, pp. 89–90. English Reader’s Guide, pp. 23–24 and 28. The appointment is fictional, not an addition to Austria’s historical cabinet record.

At the Republican convention on July 21, 2016, Donald Trump linked exceptional knowledge of the political system to the declaration “I alone can fix it.” The speech also claimed a voice for neglected people. The connection examined here is the passage from understanding a problem to claiming singular authority over its remedy. Read the speech transcript.

Alistair makes that passage a difficult literary experience because his knowledge is often real within the fiction. In the housing episode, he knows about an old woman’s cough and about a mattress delivered to another household. He chooses the cough for an account exposing municipal failure and omits assistance he witnessed. The suffering is real. So is the omitted help. His selection makes the truth serve a claim that the fuller scene does not sustain.

The reader’s task therefore exceeds finding lies. What has been left out? What is a true detail being asked to establish? Can the person whose suffering makes the story persuasive refuse its use? The novel also gives Alistair a more unsettling admission: a resident might accept a room, complain about its window, and decline to credit either him or the city with authorship of her life. That independence leaves the self-appointed defender without the debt he wants to inherit.

Passages: English Novel II, p. 115; English Reader’s Guide, pp. 26–27. The comparison concerns the structure of a claim to representation; Alistair is not a disguised portrait of Trump.

At CPAC on March 4, 2023, Trump’s progression through the roles of voice, warrior, and justice culminated in “I am your retribution.” The grammatical center of the promise is the speaker who will act for the injured. The novels ask what happens when another person’s hurt becomes the protector’s standing authorization. Read the dated transcript.

Anni’s requests offer a practical alternative. She wants Dollberg’s useful protection recorded accurately. She wants the same escort again. She also wants a reliable finishing time, decides where the armed escort must stop, and refuses to become the woman on a publicity notice. Gratitude for help does not settle any of those further decisions. The protector has performed a service; he has not acquired her experience as political property.

Lukas makes a different request because armed accompaniment would endanger his lodging and work. His refusal does not invalidate Anni’s need. A collective practice must act on these differences, with named responsibilities and real risks. Merely announcing that all dependence is suspect would leave both people with less protection and the critic with an undisturbed principle.

Passages: English Novel II, pp. 213–217 and 235–236; English Reader’s Guide, pp. 27–28. The contemporary connection is an interpretation of political rhetoric, not a claim about every supporter’s motives.

The February 18, 2025 order “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies” directed greater presidential supervision of independent regulatory agencies. Section 7 made presidential and Attorney General legal interpretations controlling for executive employees acting officially. It did not make those interpretations binding on courts. Read the issued order.

This dated text supplies a comparison about the direction of answerability. An official can become more accountable upward to the office directing policy while people affected by an action gain no corresponding capacity to require reconsideration. Hermann’s altered stopping clause gives the reader a concrete question: who can suspend what, and when? The shared word “accountability” cannot answer it.

The comparison does not identify a US executive order with the destruction of Austrian parliamentary government. Their constitutional settings and consequences differ. It examines a recurring institutional operation: the language of responsibility can accompany a change in who actually has the power to object, review, or stop. These paragraphs concern the issued document and its use in the companion, not its current enforceability or later litigation.

Source: English Reader’s Guide, p. 28.

The January 20, 2025 federal order on sex and gender prescribed binary, immutable sex categories and directed their use in federal identification and records. Those categories are the directive’s claims, not this website’s account of trans existence. Read the issued text.

Hermann’s encounters with forms, salutations, garments, and family names make naming an action with a speaker and a consequence. Julia’s “Papa” belongs to their particular history. An official form that refuses Hermann’s requested name exercises another kind of power. The relevant question is who can impose a designation and what it enables or obstructs.

Hermann’s womanhood does not depend on the success of her art or the virtue of her politics. She can accept a dangerous bargain and disappoint her daughter without forfeiting recognition. This matters to the anti-fascist undertaking: a person’s existence must not become a permission awarded for conformity to an approved story. It also prevents her body from becoming an allegorical explanation for national catastrophe. The contemporary reference concerns the order as issued, not a current guide to document access or legal rights.

Sources: English Reader’s Guide, pp. 29–30; English Novel III, p. 90.

Sive calls the practical counterpart of the literary method Dialogic Pragmatism. It asks how people can investigate, decide, and protect one another while retaining the ability to challenge what has been done. Sources, affected people, disagreement, named responsibility, material consequences, review, and stopping conditions become parts of an action that someone can inspect and contest.

A meeting must decide who opens the exit. A carrier needs a route before every question about the record has been settled. A refusal needs somewhere to go if the owner disagrees. The method’s positive purpose is effective collective action whose terms remain alterable by those affected. It cannot guarantee wise decisions or abolish unequal force. Its value must appear in the arrangements it changes.

Twelve-Tone Writing and the fugue make these pressures available to a reader over time. Objects return under other hands; different accounts occupy the same scene; a public office interrupts a recital without taking its final beat. The Möbius frame brings the arranging voices into the world they judge. Form gives the political question a duration and a difficulty. It does not certify its maker or narrator as virtuous.

Read further: Dialogic Pragmatism; The literary achievement; Alistair and Doktor Faustus. English Reader’s Guide, pp. 26–32, extends the contemporary comparisons.