Introduction: Some Notes on Postfascism

Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018) is an adaptation of Anna Seghers’s homonymous antifascist novel that engages with the history of forced migration of European refugees in Marseille trying to flee fascism in the hope of getting asylum in North and South America. In Petzold’s adaptation, Seghers’s novel has been reworked to address contemporary political contradictions. The film’s central anachronism is that although it is set in the past, it is filmed in the contemporary spaces of Marseille, thus foregrounding a dialectical tension between the history of fascism and the present reality of forced displacements, exile, and militarized border controls in Europe. Petzold justified this choice, explaining that the film seeks to identify the parallels between the past, rising neo-fascism, and the refugee crisis in Europe. As he states, “my aim was not Brechtian disruption, but to emphasize correspondences between then and now.” Indeed, scholars have been quick enough to recognize the film’s references to the current refugee crisis, but nobody has paid attention to the issue of the rising fascism mentioned by the filmmaker. In this chapter, I suggest that the film’s anachronism points to the contemporary reality of postfascism, a term predominantly associated with the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás and secondarily with the Italian historian Enzo Traverso, both of whom argue that reactionary practices of exclusion that we identify with the history of European fascism have been embedded in mainstream politics. Postfascism, for these scholars, therefore refers to a historical period in which policies and ideas associated with the extreme right have become part of mainstream liberal politics. This leads also to the rise of neo-fascist movements precisely because their political narrative seems to have been vindicated by the (neo)liberal mainstream. Before analyzing the film, some further comments on postfascism are in order.

Introduced by Tamás in 2000, the term postfascism describes the present historical experience when contemporary fascism does not operate as a form of counter-revolution against international Socialism as it was the case with its twentieth-century precursor. Tamás suggests that contemporary liberal democracies are postfascist because they have undermined “the Enlightenment idea of universal citizenship,” according to which every individual irrespective of race, class, origin, gender, and nationality should be part of the civic community. Socialist internationalism embodied this desire to complete the Enlightenment project that could not be realized in bourgeois societies.