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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLIII | Number 2 | 2022 | 69–88 | cc by-nc-nd 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.43.2.03
* Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Lidija Šumah*
The Final Countdown: Fascism, Jazz, 
and the Afterlife
Count till All
It is well known that Mussolini was not a fan of opera. Instead, he praised and 
advocated for the “theater of masses,” which could accommodate a large num-
ber of people.1 Though a theater of the masses in its own right and in its own 
time, opera houses could no longer keep up with the political demands for 
mass-consumable culture.2 In the early 1920s, beginning with the Milanese La 
Scala, the Italian regime started undermining and reorganizing the so-called 
ente autonomo model of the opera houses to bring all private and public opera 
1 This article is a result of the research project J6-2590 “Hegel‘s Political Metaphysics” 
and the research program P6-0252 “Philosophical Investigations”, both funded by the 
Slovenian Research Agency. The author would like to thank Bozena Shallcross, Simon 
Hajdini, Yuval Kremnitzer, Primož Krašovec, and Eric L. Santner for their insightful sug-
gestions and comments.
2 I quote Benito Mussolini: “The time has come to prepare a theater of masses, a theater 
able to accommodate fifteen or twenty thousand. La Scala was adequate when, a cen-
tury ago, Milan‘s total population equaled 180,000 inhabitants. It is not today when the 
population has reached one million. The lack of seats creates the need for high prices 
which drive the crowds away.” (Quoted from Roberto Dainotto, “The Saxophone and the 
Pastoral. Italian Jazz in the Age of Fascist Modernity”, Italica, 85 (2–3/2008), pp. 273–294.) 
Cf. Michael Steinberg: “Opera, most specifically Italian opera, plays a surprisingly scant 
role for the fascist regime. […] Benito Mussolini was not interested in opera. He favored 
the kind of spectacle that could be matched with new technology – film and sound am-
plification – and that could reach at least 30,000 spectators at once. The confines of the 
theater had no place in his fascism of immense scale.” (Michael Steinberg, “The Politics 
and Aesthetics of Operatic Modernism”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 36 (4/2006), 
pp. 635–636.) For a detailed analysis of the relationship between fascism and the use of 
(new) technologies, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Fascist Mass Spectacle”, Representations, 43 
(1993), pp. 89–125, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and 
the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution”, in R. I. Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics, 
and Culture, Hanover, NH, University Press of New England, 1992, pp. 1–37. For the colli-
sion of politics and popular culture with national identity and technology in fascist Italy, 
see Anna Harwell Calenza, Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy 
and Sinatra, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017.
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houses under its control.3 In the early 1930s, all the main opera houses “trans-
ferred the property of the theater building from ente autonomo to the municipal-
ity, and dictated that the president of the institution was to be appointed by [...] 
Mussolini” himself.4 Consequently, the opera repertories, informed by national-
istic ideology and subject to censorship, drastically changed, and the selection 
process tended to favor (living) Italian composers. By the time anti-Semitic legis-
lation came into force in 1938, most major compositions were already ignored or 
began to systematically disappear from programs. At La Scala, for instance, one 
could no longer listen to Rossini’s Mosè or Verdi’s Nabucco. However, works by 
Arnold Schoenberg, Felix Mendelssohn, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, 
Paul Hindemith, and other (living) Jewish composers were intentionally over-
looked, too.5
That is why it is all the more surprising that in an interview from 1932 Mussolini 
defined race as a feeling and not a reality. The political censorship of the aes-
thetic was itself grounded in an aesthetic dimension of the political. I quote 
from Mussolini’s interview with Emil Ludwig:
Of course, there are no pure races left; not even the Jews have kept their blood un-
mingled. Successful crossings have often promoted the energy and the beauty of 
a nation. Race! It is a feeling, not a reality; ninety-five per cent, at least, is a feel-
ing. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown 
to exist today. […] No such doctrine will ever find wide acceptance here in Italy.6
Mussolini juxtaposes race as a feeling to race as reality, seemingly delivering it 
of its absolute dependence on supposed biological substance. Racism thus con-
strued pertains to subject rather than substance. However, while Mussolini may 
be said here to deliver race of its absolute dependence on presupposed (biolog-
ical) substantiality, he does not deliver it of absolute dependence itself. Race is 
3 Cf. Paola Merli, “La Scala in the Aftermath of the Liberation, 25 April 1945 to 22 June 1946”, 
The Musical Quarterly, 100 (2/2017), pp. 155–198.
4 Paola Merli, “La Scala in the Aftermath of the Liberation, 25. April 1945 to 22 June 1946” 
(pre-published version), p. 8. Available at http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/51214/.
5 Ibid., p. 18.
6 Emil Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini, Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, 1933, pp. 69–
70 (my emphasis). Quoted from Frank M. Snowden, “Race Propaganda in Italy”, Phylon 
(1940–1956), 1 (2/1940), p. 104.
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the final countdown: fascism, jazz, and the afterlife
posited here as a matter of belief, and racists are absolutely dependent on it. 
We may be reminded of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s notion of religious faith as 
being entirely dependent on a feeling of absolute dependence.7 Furthermore, 
we should remind ourselves of Hegel’s reply to Schleiermacher: “[Then] a dog 
would be the best Christian, for it possesses this [felling of absolute depend-
ence] in the highest degree and lives mainly in this feeling.” Dogs that are fed 
the bone of race so as to secure their own “salvation”8 are racist. 
After the official implementation of the Manifesto of Race,9 the state apparatus 
stripped Italian Jews of their citizenship and prohibited them from participating 
not just in opera but also in jazz and swing music, which at that time started to 
massively increase in popularity. Manifesto of Race was first published on 14 July 
1938 in Il Giornale d’Italia under the title “Il Fascismo e il problema della razza” 
and republished a month later in La Difesa della Razza in an attempt to popular-
ize racism. It was written by the members of the Fascist Party and several estab-
lished scientists who, in the form of ten propositions, delivered biological expla-
nations of and justifications for the notion of race. Significantly, a month before 
the document was made public it was circulated anonymously under the title 
Il Manifesto degli Scienziati Razzisti (Manifesto of Racist Scientists).10 But what 
was distinctive about the Manifesto was not so much the ongoing hostile atti-
tude towards Jews, but also the introduction of a hostile attitude toward people 
of color.11 This turn from anti-Semitism to racism, however, did not undermine 
the hostility toward Jews, but rather strengthened it even further. The Manifesto 
effectively reduced the “intolerance” within its own, already fascist-oriented 
group and increased the difference between Italians and “the rest”.12
Another distinctive feature of the Manifesto is summed up by the old accusa-
tion against Jews as being mere usurers and emotionally inert people not ca-
7 See Richard Crouter, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism, 
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
8 Quoted from ibid., p. 91.
9 For a more detailed account, see Snowden, “Race Propaganda in Italy”, pp. 103–111.
10 Cf. “The Italian Racial Laws”, Centro Primo Levi, New York, October 2011, https://pri-
molevicenter.org/events/the-italian-racial-laws/.
11 Cf. ibid.
12 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, in A. 
Arato and E. Gebhardt, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, New York, Continuum, p. 
130.
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pable of producing the real passions necessary to produce music. Similarly, in 
his controversial article “Judaism in Music”13 Wagner posed a question of “how 
it grew possible to the Jew to become a musician” and claimed that if “we hear 
a Jew speak, we are unconsciously offended by the entire want of purely-hu-
man expression in his discourse: the cold indifference of its peculiar ‘blubber’ 
(‘Gelabber’) never by any chance rises to the ardour of a higher, heartfelt pas-
sion. […] Never does the Jew excite himself in [a] mutual interchange of feelings 
with us, but – so far as we are concerned – only in the altogether special ego-
istic interest of his vanity or profit […].”14 In making his anachronistic claim, 
Wagner draws on, in a sinister spin, the Kierkegaardian idea of music as a me-
dium of sensuality – a point to which I return in the third section of this text.15 
However, Wagner names exceptions to this rule. First, he speaks favorably of 
Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Heine, Mendelssohn, etc. A few paragraphs later, he 
approvingly mentions – and capitalizes – only three (Jewish) names, namely 
Mendelssohn,16 Heine,17 and Börne, and then, in the very last paragraph, he 
highlights a single name, the one true exception: BÖRNE, who
came among us seeking for redemption: he found it not, and had to learn that 
only with our redemption, too, into genuine Manhood, would he ever find it. To 
become Man at once with us, however, means firstly for the Jew as much as ceas-
ing to be Jew. And this had BÖRNE done. Yet Börne, of all others, teaches us that 
this redemption can not be reached in ease and cold, indifferent complacence, 
but costs – as cost it must for us– sweat, anguish, want, and all the dregs of suf-
fering and sorrow. […] But bethink ye, that one only thing can redeem you from 
the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus – Going under!18
13 Richard Wagner, “Judaism in Music”, trans. W. A. Ellis, in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 
Volume III. The Theatre, London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., 1907, pp. 79–100.
14 Ibid., p. 85.
15 For an extensive analysis of Kierkegaard’s thesis on the ultimately Christian invention of 
carnal sensuality, see Simon Hajdini, Na kratko o dolgčasu, lenobi in počitku, Ljubljana, 
Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 2012.
16 “FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY […] has shown us that a Jew may have the amplest 
store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and the 
tenderest sense of honour.” (Wagner, “Judaism in Music”, p. 93.)
17 “He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern 
Civilization.” (Ibid., p. 100.)
18 Ibid.
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the final countdown: fascism, jazz, and the afterlife
Here, I propose reading the above-mentioned old accusation against Jews against 
the backdrop of the claim that every virulent anti-Semitism depends on making 
an exception (which in turn proves the rule). In order to truly hate something 
in its entirety, one needs to make an exception. Within the context of Wagner’s 
essay, this implies that to “exclude” all Jews, i.e., everybody, from the domain 
of music, one needs a figure of the Jew that stands for Judaism disembodied. 
And that is precisely what Wagner does when subtracting, counting down: first, 
Wagner discusses a series of artists; then, only Mendelssohn, Heine, and Börne 
are left; until – finally – only Börne is left standing in this final countdown.
Here, a type of exception is announced that follows the logic of count till none 
and to which I will return in more detail in the final section of this text. For now, 
I would like to claim that every addition comes at the expense of subtraction; 
whenever we add up, something must necessarily be subtracted so as to arrive 
at the desired result. Concretely, while adding seats at the opera houses, for ex-
ample, Mussolini simultaneously excludes/subtracts Jewish composers. Or, to 
take another example, from Arthur Rosenberg, who in his 1934 analysis of the 
origins of fascism19 famously argues that the distinctive feature of fascism is not 
its ideology but rather its origin myth, entirely premised on the operation of ad-
dition: according to the myth in question, Hitler started with six followers, who 
then became a thousand, then a million, then 40 million, until finally encom-
passing the entire German nation.20 Or, in the case of Italy, how on 23 March 1919 
in Milan, when the first Congress of the Italian Fascists took place, there was a 
gathering of 145 people, which finally grew to encompass the entire Italian na-
tion.21 While counting “their own” (till all are included), the fascists at the same 
time exclude “the others” (Jews, people of color, homosexuals, etc.). Put differ-
ently: the fascists simultaneously count till all (are included) and count till none 
(are left). This double count provides the model and basic mechanism of racism.
19 Arthur Rosenberg, “Fascism as a Mass Movement”, Historical Materialism, 20 (1/2012), pp. 
144–189. Cf. also Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”, in Visions of 
Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, A. Stoekl (ed.), Minneapolis, Minnesota University 
Press, 1985, pp. 137–160.
20 Rosenberg, “Fasicsm as a Mass Movement”, p. 144.
21 Ibid.
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lidija šumah
The point I am trying to make here is that counting alone, either forward, as was 
the case with the myths that sustained the fascist mass movements, or in re-
verse, as is the case with Wagner’s count, already makes the difference.
Dubbed Music
But let me return to the relationship between Judaism and music, specifically 
jazz in fascist Italy. In 1940, an article appeared in Minerva that claimed that 
“Jews have used jazz for economic reasons only: this music has become an in-
strument for ideological propaganda and for the corruption of our spiritual 
health.”22 However, at that time in Italy, but also in the rest of Europe, especial-
ly in France, Germany, and England,23 it was not only Jews and people of color 
who were not allowed to produce jazz, as it was banned in general. Although 
the reception of jazz in Europe varied, it was generally perceived as a “foreign” 
and “degenerate” art form, originating in African American culture. Jazz first ar-
rived in Italy in 1924 with American soldiers. It soon became associated with the 
wealthy bourgeois and other nobles, who could afford to travel abroad, while sig-
naling the barbarism and corruption synonymous with capitalism.24 Moreover, 
the corrupting nature of jazz was further accentuated by its close relationship to 
dance, further signaling perversion and testifying to corrupted morals.25
All these negative connotations leading up to the prohibition of jazz music pre-
sented the political regime with an additional problem: jazz was precisely the 
art form that attracted large crowds, the form of evental gathering that Mussolini 
was opting for. In his brilliant essay “The Saxophone and the Pastoral: Italian 
Jazz in the Age of Fascist Modernity,” Robert Dainotto points out that in Italy jazz 
was marked by a specific ambiguity: on the one hand, it was unwelcome due to 
its African American roots, and as such did not adhere to or glorify the Italian 
22 Max Merz, “Noi E II ‘Jazz’”, in Minerva, Rivista delle riviste, 22 (1940), no pagination. Cf. 
Dainotto, “The Saxophone and the Pastoral”, p. 279.
23 Most scholars agree that the birthplace of jazz is New Orleans, where it developed in the 
1910s, and that it first arrived in Europe after the end of World War I. Cf. Calenza, Jazz 
Italian Style, p. 4.
24 Calenza, Jazz Italian Style, p. 4.
25 However, that which was seen by some as perversion, meant liberation for others, espe-
cially women. It is widely accepted today that the jazz age, which began in the 1920s, goes 
hand in hand with the women’s rights movement.
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tradition; but on the other hand, jazz served very well to protect the “national 
interests in the light of mass society.”26 Along the same paradoxical lines, Ruth 
Ben-Ghiat has argued that although jazz was imported, the Italian regime was 
able to paint it as both fascist and Italian.27 Ben-Ghiat speaks of this paradox-
ical process in terms of a “politics of display and appropriate.” To a surprising 
extent, fascist Italy was able to absorb, assimilate, and recreate “that which it 
has received from other races, making it something entirely [Italian].”28 Jazz, so 
it seems, although officially banned and undesired by the State, was effectively 
appropriated and put to use by the State in order to lead the country into a new 
era. Following Adriano Mazzoletti’s Il Jazz in Italia, Roberto Dainotto further 
shows that no jazz concert was ever cancelled in Italy and that no other country 
broadcast as much jazz music on the radio as fascist Italy. The peak of this ac-
celeration was seen especially from 1938 to 1942, when the strictest racial laws 
were in force. Alessandro Pavolini, the then Italian Minister of Popular Culture 
who ordered the writing of the Manifesto, considered listening to jazz a “fascist 
duty.”29 When trying to understand this strange phenomenon, one is led to con-
sider the question and problem of exceptionality, i.e., of what type of exception 
had to be operative in Italy for this to have been possible.
One of the most thoughtful answers to this question was provided by Dainotto 
who, echoing Paul Gilroy’s Against the Race, claims that
the racial element associated with this music represented for Italian fascism, es-
pecially after the racial laws of 1938, an opportunity, rather than a problem, to 
“aestheticize” the entire political question of race. […] In [1935], Louis Armstrong’s 
February concert in Turin was organized with the full support of the regime, espe-
cially of Vittorio Mussolini. In 1936, in a climate of full cultural autarchy, virtually 
everything could be broadcasted as long as Louis Armstrong would be introduced 
26 Dainotto, “The Saxophone and the Pastoral”, p. 279.
27 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, Berkeley, University of California 
Press, 2001, p. 3.
28 Ibid., p. 33. Cf. Dainotto, “The Saxophone and the Pastoral”, p. 280.
29 Cf. Gianlorenzo Capano’s review of Camilla Poesio’s “Everything is Rhythm. Everything 
is Swing. Jazz, Fascism, and Italian Society”, Difesa, https://en.difesaonline.it/eviden-
za/recensioni/camilla-poesio-tutto-è-ritmo-tutto-è-swing-il-jazz-il-fascismo-e-la-soci-
età, accessed 5 September 2022. Cf. Camilla Poesio, Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing. Il Jazz, il 
fascismo e la società italiana, Milano, Mondadori Education, 2018.
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as Luigi Braccioforte, and Benny Goodman as Benito Buonuomo – as if to signal 
the autarchic capability of Italian culture to absorb and appropriate any alien el-
ement.30
Domestication of the names of foreign jazz artists31 is only one side of the coin, 
the other one being the introduction of the comical element. Trivially speak-
ing, to some jazz enthusiasts, not necessarily familiar with the Italian language, 
Luigi Braccioforte or Benito Buonuomo already sounds comical. The names 
have the same effect as revoicing or dubbing, as if these artists were the very 
first proponents of the dub.
According to Dainotto, Louis Armstrong’s quirky stage persona was the first in-
stance of this merging of jazz music with the comic: “It is exactly this associa-
tion of jazz with the comic, I believe, that explains the surging popularity of jazz 
in the years following the implementation of the racial laws. More than the mere 
lure of the exotic, jazz could banalize and trivialize the entire question of race, 
which could thus be reduced to a comical episode on the path to Italy’s histori-
cal realization of its own Aryan-ness.”32 It seems that this excessive disregard for 
one’s own dignity turned out to be the only way to circumvent the laws.
In retrospect, this comical aspect of jazz is perhaps best captured by a flood of 
sitcoms and movies attempting to embody the spirit of fascist Italy. Here, the two 
most notable characters come to mind: the annoying captain Alberto Bertorelli 
(from the British sitcom Allo Allo!) with his catchphrase “What a mistake-a to 
make-a!”, and Ferdinando “Nando” Mericoni (from An American in Rome), who 
one day realizes that his future is not in Rome, where he was born and raised, 
but in the United States. Nando Americanizes his life by mimicking the sounds 
of the English language and by trying to live out everyday situations as though 
30 Dainotto, “The Saxophone and the Pastoral”, pp. 280, 285.
31 In her Everything is Rhythm. Everything is Swing, Camilla Poesio lines up various replace-
ments and periphrases used to replace originally Anglo-Saxon words: most notably, jazz 
with “giazzo” or sometimes simply “musica ritmica”, and, perhaps most unusually, “ac-
cordion” instead of “saxophone”. (Poesio, Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing, pp. 87–88 and 115–
116, quoted from Ben Earle, “Camilla Poesio, Tutto è ritmo, tutto è swing. Il Jazz, il fascismo 
e la società italiana”, Transposition, 8 (2019), https://journals.openedition.org/transposi-
tion/2908.
32 Dainotto, “The Saxophone and the Pastoral”, p. 290.
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the final countdown: fascism, jazz, and the afterlife
he was a character in some Hollywood movie. Both Nando and captain Bertorelli 
are irreducible to the role they imagined for themselves. Their irreducibility to 
an American identity (in the case of Nando) or to captainship (in the case of 
Bertorelli) resembles Wagner’s depiction of a Jew and his “peculiar blubber,” 
which is irreducible to the highest passion necessary to produce music.33
Here, I would like to direct my focus at the question of the fascist regime itself 
and its leader, which had a stake in sustaining this type of excessiveness. In his 
analysis of Freud’s theory and the structure of fascist propaganda, Adorno ar-
gues that the key feature of a fascist leader is his “orality,” or more specifically, 
his “compulsion to speak incessantly and to befool the others.”34 For Adorno, 
the sole reason for the leader to deliver these kinds of speeches was not to per-
suade the masses with his arguments. Such freely “associative speech” involved 
occasional absence of self-control, “a temporary lack of ego control”: “[i]n order 
successfully to meet the unconscious dispositions of his audience, the agitator 
to speak simply turns his own unconscious outward.”35 One could argue that in-
stead of entering analysis, the fascist leader exits analysis, deciding to display 
his unconscious in front of everybody, thus turning the multitude of his follow-
ers into his mass analysts, or into a crowd of analysts. While the “psychology of 
fascism,” as Adorno would have it, is manipulative through and through,36 and 
serves one purpose only, namely to subjugate the masses, this subjugation is 
not achieved through the repression of the masses as correlative to the speaker 
holding back and repressing his own true views, but rather through the process 
of externalizing or publicizing his own unconscious desire, thereby conferring 
it on the listeners. Thus, the crowd is not a proper Freudian analyst. On the con-
trary, the crowd identifies with the leader’s displayed desire, his meaningless 
babble, which is the minimal mark of its submission. At the same time, this is 
the first step toward reducing any intolerance within one’s own group, which, 
by extension, then entails greater hostility toward groups deemed foreign.
To return to Ben-Ghiat’s “politics of display and appropriate,” we can claim 
that the fascist leader displays his unconscious in front of the masses, while 
33 A Jew’s song, Wagner writes, “is just Talk aroused to highest passion,” and not a “speech 
of passion” that defines the properly musical. (Wagner, “Judaism in Music”, p. 8)
34 Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, p. 132.
35 Ibid., p. 133 (my emphasis).
36 Cf. ibid.
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the masses, the addressees of his unconscious babble, appropriate his uncon-
scious by identifying with it. Moreover, this identification, as both Adorno and 
Dainotto claim, entails a specific comical element that often takes the form of 
mockery (of the object of identification). That is why captain Bertorelli, for ex-
ample, is so funny to watch. Instead of being a true invader of France, he is re-
duced to a comical figure incapable of causing any real harm. The funniest thing 
about him is precisely his irreducibility to the role entrusted to him. He is not a 
captain; he is the guy next door, a nobody, masquerading as somebody wearing 
a ridiculous peacock-feathered hat. Put differently, the solemn and serious core 
of fascism in fact amounts to an object of ridicule – however, this ridiculous 
aspect of fascist domination is the lever of its authority. Recall Adorno’s warn-
ing: in Nazi Germany, “everybody used to make fun of certain propagandistic 
phrases such as ‘blood and soil’ (Blut und Boden), jokingly called Blubo, or the 
concept of the Nordic race from which the parodistic verb aufnorden (to ‘north-
ernize’) was derived.”37
In order to unpack this thesis, let us return to the figure of Il Duce. Romano 
Mussolini, his fourth child and an ardent jazz pianist (!) provided some val-
uable insight into Il Duce’s musical taste. Here is a quote from his memoirs: 
“Everybody knows of the Duce’s passion for the violin: my mother once told me 
he used to play near [my sister] Edda’s cradle, in order to calm her down when 
we used to live in the house of via Merenda. Some reader will be surprised, but 
the Duce was also a jazz lover.”38 Though not a fan of the opera, Il Duce, as well 
as the rest of his extended family,39 were fans of jazz. But what exactly does this 
imply? Dainotto’s claim that the regime was never serious in its intention to ban 
jazz music falls somewhat short and requires further unpacking and specifica-
tion so as to account for this apparent contradiction.
In their Dialectics of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer provide a key to 
understanding this seeming contradiction with a reference to the schema of the 
37 Ibid.
38 Romano Mussolini, II Duce Mio Padre, Milano, Rizzoli, 2004, p. 72; quoted from Dainotto, 
“The Saxophone and the Pastoral”, p. 281.
39 “Yet, the fact remains that Romano, starting his career in 1948 as the accordion player 
of Ugo Calise’s Star Jazz Quartet, grew up to become a leading pianist of the Italian jazz 
scene; that his brother Vittorio was, in fact, a renowned jazz critic in the thirties; and that, 
at a closer look, the regime never meant seriously to suppress jazz music at all.” (Ibid.)
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anti-Semitic reaction. When something prohibited is identified with the prohib-
iting agency, the forbidden becomes allowed:
That is the schema of the anti-Semitic reaction. The anti-Semites gather to cele-
brate the moment when authority lifts the ban; that moment alone makes them 
a collective, constituting the community of kindred spirits. Their ranting is or-
ganized laughter. The more dreadful the accusations and threats, the greater the 
fury, the more withering is the scorn. Rage, mockery, and poisoned imitation are 
fundamentally the same thing. The purpose of the fascist cult of formulae, the 
ritualized discipline, the uniforms, and the whole allegedly irrational apparatus, 
is to make possible mimetic behavior. […] The Führer, with his ham-actor’s facial 
expressions and the hysterical charisma turned on with a switch, leads the dance. 
In his performance he acts out by proxy and in effigy what is denied to everyone 
else in reality. Hitler can gesticulate like a clown, Mussolini risk false notes like a 
provincial tenor, Goebbels talk as glibly as the Jewish agent whose murder he is 
recommending […]. Fascism is also totalitarian in seeking to place oppressed na-
ture’s rebellion against domination directly in the service of domination.40
Bertorelli is funny and harmless until he is not. Blubo and aufnoredn are funny 
until they are not. Mussolini may sound like a clownish provincial tenor, but ul-
timately the joke is on the listeners, with the clown grabbing hold of them (tenor 
comes from teneō, “I hold”). Through the act of the simultaneous suspension of 
the ban and appropriation of the banned, that which is considered rebellious 
and is thus prohibited is made to directly benefit this oppression – such was the 
dialectics of racism in fascist Italy.
The mechanism continues to be relevant today. Many Holocaust scholars, for 
example, would read it as a corollary to the logic of de-humanization that sus-
tained the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps.41 However, Italian fascism 
may have gone furthest in exploiting this clownish suspension of the prohibi-
tion. Consider the following quote from Dainotto: “While Hitler sent trains to 
Auschwitz with Teutonic eagerness, Italy, engaged exactly in the same process, 
40 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment. Philosophical 
Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 151–152.
41 Cf. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man, trans. S. Woolf, New York, The Orion 
Press, 1959.
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accompanied its trains with a note of humor and commedia. If Primo Levi theo-
rized de-humanization as the logic sustaining the violence of Auschwitz, I won-
der if we should not theorize a different form of de-humanization – the reduc-
tion of the human to clown – as the logic sustaining the Italian concentration 
camps in Manfredonia and Fossoli.”42
Minding the gap indicated by Dainotto, fascist de-humanization was not one of 
reducing the Other to bare, de-humanized life. Fascist de-humanization of the 
Other coincided with its cartoonization. But what is its function? Is the Other 
thereby reduced not to bare life (which can be legally extinguished), but rather to 
bare afterlife, i.e., to a non-human, creaturely substance situated beyond life and 
structurally akin to a cartoon character perpetually surviving its own death?43
Count till None
In this section, I would like to highlight and unpack the type of exception in-
dicated at the end of the first section and associated not with jazz but with its 
opposite, i.e., with so-called “serious music”. For Adorno, every representation 
of suffering eliminates “our shame before the victim.” While delivering us of 
shame in the face of the victims, such representations also nourish the “bar-
baric” assumption that even in the most extreme of situations “humanity flour-
ishes.” Representations of extreme suffering are impossible in the sense that 
they (inadvertently or not) effect the opposite of what they intend. However, one 
cannot overlook the peculiar exception to this rule – an exception that is all the 
more peculiar because its source is Adorno himself:
42 Dainotto, “The Saxophone and the Pastoral”, p. 290.
43 In his reading of Adorno and Benjamin’s interpretations of animated films, Simon Hajdini 
comments: “Benjamin sees cartoon characters as creatures of satanic laughter that have 
‘thrown off all resemblance to a human being,’ while Adorno reduces these same char-
acters to symptoms of traumatized bourgeois subjectivity. Their resilience and literal ‘de-
structive plasticity’ (to use Malabou’s term), their immeasurable capacity for enduring vio-
lence place them beyond the concept of trauma. The new subjectivity emerging from the 
burning ground of experience therefore disrupts ‘the entire hierarchy of creatures that is 
supposed to culminate in mankind,’ that is, in man as a reservoir of tradition and ‘inner 
life.’ The new subject is emphatically a subject without a biography: its life cannot be writ-
ten because it is situated beyond life.” (Simon Hajdini, “Ste slišali tistega o Benjaminu?”, 
Problemi, 59 (9-10/2022), p. 148.)
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the final countdown: fascism, jazz, and the afterlife
Schoenberg […] suspends the aesthetic sphere through the recollection of experi-
ences which are inaccessible to art. Anxiety, Schoenberg’s expressive core, iden-
tifies itself with the terror of men in the agonies of death, under total domination. 
The sounds of Erwartung […] finally meet what they had always prophesied. That 
which the feebleness and impotence of the individual soul seemed to express testi-
fies to what has been inflicted on mankind in those who represent the whole as its 
victims. Horror has never rung as true in music, and by articulating it music regains 
its redeeming power through negation. The Jewish song with which the A Survivor 
from Warsaw concludes is music as the protest of mankind against myth.44
Adorno is referring to Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw. A quick overview of 
this rather unknown piece seems in order. A Survivor is a six-minute cantata set 
for narrator, male chorus, and orchestra. The piece has a tripartite structure; in 
the first part the narrator depicts the story of a survivor from the Warsaw ghetto 
during Second World War. One day, in the ghetto, the Nazi authorities held a roll 
call of a group of Jews. The group tried to assemble, but there was confusion, 
and the guards beat the old Jews who could not line up quickly enough. The 
Jews left on the ground were deported to the death camps. The guards then ask 
for a faster and faster head count, and the work culminates as Jews begin to sing 
the prayer Shema Yisroel (Hear, O, Israel). The work was composed in August 
1947. Considered one of the first musical depictions of the Holocaust, it is often 
referred to as the “Holocaust cantata”. The piece premiered in November 1948 
in New Mexico by the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra under the baton 
of Kurt Frederick. According to Schoenberg’s biographer Stuckenschmidt, the 
audience was so stunned by the composition that the work had to be performed 
twice: “After the first time the audience of 1,500 sat in astonished silence; after 
the second the applause was stormy.”45 Another reaction to the performed work 
was provided by the conductor himself. In a letter to Schoenberg, Frederick in-
formed the composer of the huge success the work had achieved and of the audi-
ence’s persistent requests for an encore: “The audience of over 1,000 was shak-
en by the composition and applauded until we repeated the performance.”46 A 
Survivor’s success continued the following year in New York, when the piece 
44 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. Weber and S. Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge (MA), MIT 
Press, 1981, pp. 171–172 (my emphasis).
45 Hans Hein Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. H. Searle, 
London, John Calder, 1977, p. 485.
46 Ibid.
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was performed under the direction of Dmitri Mitropoulos. According to Musical 
America, “the listeners cheered and would not let the performers leave the stage 
for the intermission until the conductor had broken a Philharmonic Symphonic 
precedent”47 and the performance was repeated.
A Survivor was indeed a huge success, and despite Adorno’s comment, we should 
take note of this overexcitement, bordering on obscenity. Two things need to be 
noted, one particular and one more general. First, Adorno later revoked his fa-
vorable mention of A Survivor, which is a point worth mentioning. And second: 
amongst all of the art forms, music is possibly best equipped to encapsulate and 
trigger the most extreme of emotions; as such, music has, in the history of phi-
losophy, held a privileged position. Suffice it to recall Nietzsche’s first book, The 
Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, or Kierkegaard’s analyses of Mozart’s 
Don Giovanni. In the context of this text, it is possible to claim that the Holocaust 
finds its only adequate representation precisely in music. Where words fail, mu-
sic succeeds in representing the impossible. However, one can also claim that 
music is the ultimate fetishistic art form. Mladen Dolar, in his book A Voice and 
Nothing More,48 has drawn attention to the fact that music is somehow imme-
diately understandable, that it emanates sense immediately understood by 
any listener. However, Dolar adds, this characteristic of music as emanating an 
immediately comprehensible sense coincides with its opposite, i.e., with mu-
sic’s ultimate meaninglessness. As listeners, we immediately, without thinking, 
without any apparent mediation, “get the gist of it”; we immediately know what 
it means, but once asked to convey this meaning we resort to empty phrases and 
commonsensical descriptions. Music means that it means, and that is all that it 
means. Its aura of deep meaningfulness is immediately confronted with its ul-
timate meaninglessness. Music’s meaning is the embodiment of an absence of 
meaning, just like a fetish is the embodiment of an absence, a stand-in, covering 
up the hole at the core of reality.
But if ever there was a musical piece that is the Platonic Idea of such a notion 
of music as conveying the highest of meanings, it is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. In 
47 See http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.1/mto.13.19.1.argentino.html, accessed 2 
September 2022.
48 Cf. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge (MA) and London, MIT Press, 
2006.
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his book on Beethoven’s Ninth, Esteban Buch succinctly designates Beethoven’s 
symphony as the fetish of Western civilization, “an aural fetish in the Western 
world.”49 If we follow Adorno in reading Schoenberg’s A Survivor as an adequate 
representation of the Holocaust, it is no surprise that after the 1960s a strange 
ritual emerged, namely that of performing Beethoven’s Ninth immediately af-
ter Schoenberg’s A Survivor. The film documentary Following the Ninth: In the 
Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony mentions one performance that joined 
the two pieces as follows: “In a tremendous symbolic gesture, the Beethoven 
Orchestra of Bonn plays Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ and without a 
pause goes straight into the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven. The Jewish prayer is 
joined by Beethoven’s.”50 Although the documentary does not mention the exact 
date of the performance, the pairing of Schoenberg’s cantata and Beethoven’s 
Ode to Joy in fact occurred on numerous occasions,51 gaining additional popu-
larity in recent years. In 2012, The Cincinnati Symphonic Orchestra and its musi-
cal director Louis Langrée announced the initiative “One City, One Symphony”. 
The initiative was described as a “journey from tragedy to triumph,” i.e., as a 
journey from the split to the restoration of totality.52 I want to propose two possi-
ble interpretations of this curious match.53
49 See Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. R. Miller, Chicago, The 
University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 4.
50 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Survivor_from_Warsaw.
51 For instance: on April 1969 under the baton of Erich Leinsdorf, the musical director and 
conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This was Leinsdorf’s farewell concert. A 
recording that combined A Survivor and Ode to Joy was made on 14 March 1986. This, 
too, was the farewell concert of the conductor and musical director of the Cincinnati 
Symphony Orchestra, Michael Gielen. In the CSO program book that Gielen wrote for the 
concerts held in March at Music Hall in Cincinnati, we read that he juxtaposed the two 
pieces because he wanted to combine the old and the new, to see how the old music would 
react to new music and vice versa, adding that at “first there seems to be no connection – 
but they are related. The connection is dialectical and not easy for me to describe.” (See 
http://www.musicincincinnati.com/site/commentary_2013/Michael_Gielen_Musical_
Visionary_for_Cincinnati.html, accessed 2 September 2022.)
52 Ibid.
53 Throughout recent history, especially in the last decade, Schoenberg’s A Survivor has been 
performed alongside many symphonies. In 2012, for instance, Kurt Masur and the Israeli 
Philharmonic Orchestra released an album that pairs Schoenberg’s piece with Anton 
Bruckner’s Seventh, while Simon Rattle paired it with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 
(known as the Resurrection Symphony). For my present purpose, I will focus only on the 
pairing with Ode to Joy.
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The first possibility would be to interpret the pairing of the two musical piec-
es in terms of an ultimate obscenity. A deep wound of the Real, opened up by 
Schoenberg’s piece and producing traumatic effects, is sutured by the fetish of 
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The most radical split of the social is thus amended, and 
society – after performing the traumatic duty of listening to Schoenberg’s piece 
– is once again restored in its unproblematic, harmonious totality. In his analy-
sis of ideology, Dolar often uses the paradigmatic Brechtian example of a capi-
talist who enters the stage and declares the following: “I am a capitalist, and my 
sole aim is to exploit the workers.” Dolar argues that such a statement can never 
properly function in ideological discourse, since it unveils the (hidden) back-
ground of the ideological intention itself. Ideological discourse remains ideo-
logical only insofar as it does not proclaim itself to be ideological, thus masking 
and obfuscating its ideological pretext. The direct assertion of the capitalist’s 
interest would thus mark the very impossibility of ideological discourse.
However, in A Survivor, this ideological appendage is fundamentally lacking, a 
step away from the Thing, a withdrawal from the Real, comes to the fore only via 
its add-on, namely by way of adding to the cantata Ode, which has not only the 
capacity to restore the harmonious totality but also the ability to insert the miss-
ing ideological framework.54 The main fetishizing effect of Ode to Joy is not only 
that it covers up the “horror ringing true” in Schoenberg’s cantata, but that by 
adding to the Survival’s prayer its own, joyful one, celebrating life and the flour-
ishing of all humanity, it effectively sublates the suspended aesthetic sphere 
of Survivor, thus eliminating “its redeeming power through negation.” As in-
dicated by Adorno, the lesson of such an endeavor is that it falls into the abyss 
of its opposite, into aesthetic pleasure that erases the dimension of the trauma. 
No wonder, then, that the audience of “One City, One Symphony”, when asked 
54 The Brechtian procedure is discernible in Schoenberg’s libretto for A Survivor. For in-
stance: “Faster! Once more, start from the beginning! In one minute I want to know how 
many I am going to send off to the gas chamber! Count off!” The sergeant who is counting 
off people is indeed directly asserting the interest of the Nazis (“I am an SS officer, and my 
sole aim is to kill off the Jews”). However, this does not necessarily imply the above-men-
tioned impossibility of ideology. Here, one should take note of Adorno’s thesis regarding 
Italian fascism and its lack of Verfremdungseffekt (a distancing or alienating effect) as cru-
cial to the very functioning of ideology: “Fascism has in some respects realized this proce-
dure of Brechtian theater: it has directly asserted the demand for obedience […] but in such 
a way that it did not produce the distancing effect. Although faked, the fascination was 
there.” (Mladen Dolar, Strel sredi koncerta, Ljubljana, Cankarjeva založba, p. 158, note.)
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the final countdown: fascism, jazz, and the afterlife
to share their thoughts on what they had just heard completely forgot about A 
Survivor, instead praising Ode to Joy and expressing their gratefulness for being 
able to participate in this initiative. Reportedly, some even danced while drink-
ing their champagne in the reception hall.55 What is sublated here is precisely the 
suspended aesthetic sphere of A Survivor, and by way of abolishing this abyss 
of the Real opened up by Schoenberg’s piece, Ode remains the sole “survivor”. 
Differently put, Ode becomes the ultimate “truth” of Survivor. (One may note 
here that the original libretto was initially titled “A Survivor of Warsaw.”)56 The 
inner split, or inherent tension, in Schoenberg’s cantata is not abolished for the 
sake of some higher totality, of the unification of the human spirit. The Warsaw 
prayers do not praise the triumph of the human spirit. The ultimate tragedy of 
the Warsaw prayers is that they are praying for themselves – although they es-
caped the killings and the beatings in the ghetto; although they are still alive, 
they are already (un)dead. The name of the initiative “One City, One Symphony” 
should thus be read by the letter: the symphony serves not only as a fetishistic 
ideological appropriation of the musical piece, but also as the ultimate ideolo-
gization of the Holocaust.
From here, let us return to the problem of the (im)possibility of aesthetic rep-
resentations to point out two irreducible attitudes towards it. The first attitude, 
or theoretical stance, is in line with Adorno’s claim according to which such 
representations sublate “our shame before the victims” and thus turn into their 
very opposite, obfuscating or rather erasing the difference between the victim 
and executioner. The second option is provided by narratives that render nei-
ther facts (documents, testimony, etc.) nor ideological truisms, but opt for the 
subjective truth as provided by the victims. For Adorno, such “committed liter-
ature”57 translates and integrates the Holocaust into “cultural heritage,” conse-
55 “I thought it was incredible, I’ve never seen so many people this excited about a concert, 
it’s really kind of fulfilling for me to see that!” Another audience member commented: 
“Yes, I also loved it, it’s my third time seeing this symphony, and each time I like get a way 
bigger perspective on it.” (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7VK-fpeS7A, accessed 
2 September 2022.)
56 See Kurt List, “On the Horizon: Schoenberg’s New Cantata”, Commentary, https://www.
commentarymagazine.com/article/on-the-horizon-schoenbergs-new-cantata/, accessed 2 
September 2022, my emphasis.
57 Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment”, New Left Review, 1/87–88 (1974), no pagination, 
https://newleftreview.org/issues/i87/articles/theodor-adorno-commitment, accessed 30 
August 2022.
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quently allowing for its incorporation into the very culture that generated it. For 
Adorno, the insistence on impossibility is the only possibility. However, as em-
phasized by Wajcman, one has to avoid falling into the trap of praising this im-
possibility. In his The Object of the Century, Wajcman claims that the representa-
tion of the Holocaust as impossible is not enough; such a claim might as well be 
a call to forget, i.e., to paradoxically forget that which we cannot remember.58 A 
further impossibility needs to be added here: it is not merely impossible to rep-
resent the Real of the Holocaust; it is also impossible not to represent it, albeit 
in failed and ever failing attempts.
The “One City, One Symphony” initiative is nothing if not an appropriation of 
the Real, or of the lie about the truth. But this “lie about the Real” should not 
simply be read along the lines of Lacan’s famous claim according to which “the 
truth has the structure of a fiction.” Lacan’s point, of course, is not that no truth 
is possible; he is no postmodernist relativist proclaiming our structural embed-
dedness in the cobweb of fiction, while discarding the very notion of truth as 
something potentially “totalitarian”. To refer to one of Žižek’s arguments that 
points in the same direction: in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, the 
Real or the truth of this Real is not abolished by the fiction; it is rather the fiction 
itself that renders it visible in the first place. One ought to distinguish between a 
lie and a lie, i.e. between, on the one hand, a “true lie” (as in the famous title of 
the film True Lies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger), a lie as the structural com-
ponent of the very conveying of the truth, as its “medium”, and, on the other, a 
“false lie” (as brought about by Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as it sublates the horror 
of A Survivor). Ode is the epitome of a “false lie” which fails to encapsulate both 
the inherent impossibility (of aesthetization) and the (aesthetic) symbolization 
of the impossibility of the Real, or the formalization of this impossibility, serv-
ing as a means of its ideologization. However, if we follow the thesis about the 
Holocaust’s necessary elusion of representation, the failure of Ode could be said 
to be structural: there is no true lie about the Holocaust; all lies, all symbolic 
representations, amount to “false lies” and are thus manifested in the fetish, 
standing for the truth of this “false lie” itself.
Let us proceed with our second reading. What if we must abandon this simplis-
tic opposition and block our theoretical reflexes, and instead take this idea se-
58 Gérard Wajcman, L’objet du siècle, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2012.
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riously? What if such a denouncement of the succession of the two pieces is a 
way of escaping another, more fundamental truth? What if the simplistic oppo-
sition between Schoenberg’s Truth and Beethoven’s Lie is itself false and should 
be rejected? What could be this bitter truth that only comes to the fore if we 
abandon this opposition? It is the following, deeply unsettling one: There is no 
Schoenberg without Beethoven; there is no Auschwitz without the cartoonishly 
obscene rejoicing of humanity.
Can such a paradox serve as a potentially productive principle? Fascist moder-
nity seems to have managed to do just that: against the backdrop of a flexible 
national identity that followed Ben-Ghiat’s logic “of display and appropriate,” 
there emerged a new (monolithic) ethnic identity. And the paradoxical role of 
jazz within the fascist movement seems to have been the harbinger of just such 
a change. In short, the prohibited became a symbol of national identity. 
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