Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism": Wolcott v. Malcolm

Susan Sontag (Photo by Richard Avedon)

Two recent contrasting views of Susan Sontag’s powerful 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” (The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975; included in Sontag's great 1980 collection Under the Sign of Saturn):

1. James Wolcott, in his “All That Gab” (London Review of Books, October 24, 2019), a review of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life, says, 

“Fascinating Fascism,” Sontag’s dismantling of the cult, canonisation and revisionist whitewashing of Leni Riefenstahl, struck like lightning when it first appeared in the New York Review with its bravura last sentence – ‘The colour is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death’ – but reprinted in book form, the parallels Sontag drew between the Nazi aesthetic and the physique of Nubian tribespeople seemed unpersuasive, leaned on, and the rhetoric overdone.

2. Janet Malcolm, in her “The Unholy Practice” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019), also a review of Moser’s book, refers to 

Sontag’s thrillingly good essay “Fascinating Fascism,” published in The New York Review of Books in 1975 and reprinted in the book Under the Sign of Saturn, in which she justly destroyed Leni Riefenstahl’s newly restored reputation, showing her to be a Nazi sympathizer in every bone.

I agree with Malcolm. Sontag’s essay isn’t just good; it’s thrillingly good. It’s riveting. It deconstructs Riefenstahl’s book of splendid colour photographs and shows it for what it really is – not a lament for a vanishing tribe (its ostensible subject), but a continuation of Riefenstahl’s fascist aesthetic.

Here’s a sample:

The introduction, which gives a detailed account of Riefenstahl’s pilgrimage to the Sudan (inspired, we are told, by reading Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa “one sleepless night in the mid-1950s”), laconically identifies the photographer as “something of a mythical figure as a film-maker before the war, half-forgotten by a nation which chose to wipe from its memory an era of its history.” Who but Riefenstahl herself could have thought up this fable about what is mistily referred to as “a nation” which for some unnamed reason “chose” to perform the deplorable act of cowardice of forgetting “an era”—tactfully left unspecified—“of its history”? Presumably, at least some readers will be startled by this coy allusion to Germany and to the Third Reich.

If you relish painstaking analysis, passionate argument, and vigorous writing, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism.” It’s one of the most memorable essays I’ve ever read.