HUMSS - Sabine Hake

Beauty of Labor, Aesthetics of Politics Revisited

Walter Benjamin’s diagnosis of fascism as the aestheticization of politics continues to inform studies on the fascist aesthetic and the role of art in authoritarian societies. However, actual examples of aestheticization reveal a much more complicated picture. Instead of politics, it is the problem of labor and industry that inspired the most ambitious and consequential initiatives during the Third Reich. This lecture will look at the Office “Beauty of Labor” within the German Labor Front to show how modernist principles, socialist ideas, corporate interests, and communal traditions were all placed into the service of Nazi biopolitics.