The writer most conspicuously associated with fascism is Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961), the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, a practicing physician, who used his writing as an outlet for the extraordinary hatred and contempt he felt for human life in all its forms. The publication in 1932 of his most famous work, Journey to the End of the Night (1932), created a literary sensation, both for its tone and its content. The tone derives from the language and attitude of its first-person narrator, Bardamu, who raises vituperation and hatred to the level of art. (This is at least the opinion of some readers; others are so repelled by the novel's nihilism as to deny it the label art.) Its story begins with the narrator's impulsive enlistment in the army prior to the outbreak of World War I. His description of the generals, politicians, profiteers, and passive, ignorant citizenry amounts not just to a denunciation of war but of the entire civilization. After the war, Bardamu goes to West Africa (Cameroon), where the evils of colonialism are matched, in the narrator's view, by the inferiority of the African race. From here he travels to America, affording him the opportunity to denounce the greed and materialism of American society. (His one exception is American women, whom he celebrates.) Unable to find any satisfaction in these places, he returns to Paris to work as a doctor in Clichy, a working-class section of Paris. There he ministers to prostitutes, pimps, and criminals. But by this time it's clear that it's not the sordid society that is the subject of the novel but the impact of that sordidness on the disordered mind of the narrator. His reaction to the disease of modern life is so extreme that he looks for an apocalyptic resolution, the blood and fire of a cleansing war that brings his vision into line with that in Hitler's Mein Kampf. And just as Hitler did, Celine sees the source of the decay of modern civilization in the Jews.

In and of itself, Journey is more nihilist than fascist, but as the 1930s moved on, Celine's nihilism steadily metamorphosed into fascism. His next novel, Death on the Installment Plan (1936), focuses on the childhood and adolescence of its main character, Ferdinand. As in Journey, the outline of the events closely corresponds to Celine's own life history. These incidents are not really autobiographical; they are distortions of his actual life designed to make them appear infinitely worse than they appear to have been. Between 1936 and 1941, he wrote several virulently anti-Semitic pamphlets; in one he called for a Franco-German alliance that would get rid of Jews and their influence on the culture. His collaboration with the Nazi occupation of France forced him to escape to Germany before the liberation of Paris. After the war, he was imprisoned for a brief period, but eventually he was allowed to return to France and to practice medicine until his death in 1961.

The debate as to whether Celine was truly a fascist or merely a half-mad misanthrope is important only to those who see Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan as works of genius. In any case, his two novels exist as reminders that even true works of art can be malevolent when they appear to justify brutality and mass murder.

An early and notable example of antifascist literature is Thomas Mann's (1875-1955) novella Mario and the Magician (1930). In 1926, Mann and his family vacationed at a resort in Italy, four years after the newly Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini had come to power. During their stay, the family attended a performance by a magician and hypnotist that both impressed and disturbed Mann. A few years later, confronted with the rising tide of fascism within his native Germany, Mann recast the Italian experience into the story of a German family on vacation who notices the changes in attitude of the Italian guests at a resort, as they demonstrate an increasingly obvious hostility to foreigners. The climax of the story is a show put on at the resort by Cipolla, a renowned hypnotist. During the performance, Cipolla hypnotizes a young waiter into imagining that he is standing with the young woman he loves and incites him to kiss his "beloved," Cipolla himself. Humiliated by the audience, the awakened young man rushes out and returns to kill the hypnotist. Clearly the allegorical implications are strong: The rhetorically powerful performer, relying on illusionist tricks, hypnotizes his people into loving him. But eventually he goes too far and triggers a retributive reaction.

Another renowned 20th-century novelist, the Austrian Hermann Broch (1886-1951), relied on an allegorical form to examine the appeal of fascism. In The Spell, which Broch wrote in 1935, later revised and published in German in 1953 (English translation, 1987), the residents of a beautiful mountain village become enthralled by the itinerant stranger Marius Ratti, a mesmerizing public speaker. Rejected at first as a crackpot, Ratti steadily wins over the villagers, aided by some rich farmers in the region, who stand to gain by his success. Ratti preaches the necessity of returning to a mythic past of purity and love of nature, but his doctrine also includes hatred of the enemy, embodied here in the figure of an insurance salesman who becomes the local scapegoat. The story is told by the village doctor, a man who prides himself on his scientific rationalism, but who also succumbs to Ratti's mysterious power. The climax occurs at the village fair where mass hysteria grips the crowd, resulting in a tragic death. Eventually the village resumes its normal pattern of life, but it has paid a price, "a portion of humaneness has been lost forever."

Although the Hitler analogy is clear throughout, Broch sees the appeal of fascism as a specific instance of a broader phenomenon--the human longing for some type of absolute, one intimately associated with nature, that seems destined to lead to the diminishing of human values. The complexity of his ideas matches the complexity of his style: long, cadenced sentences that make for difficult reading but that often achieve an austere beauty.

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