JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 9 NUMBER 2 (APRIL 2005) ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/05/020133–17 © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/14797580500063556 Gothic Fascism Mark Neocleous Taylor and Francis Ltd RCUV106338.sgm 10.1080/14797580500063556 Journal for Cultural Research 1479-7585 (print)/1740-1666 (online) Original Article 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd 9 2 000000April 2005 MarkNeocleous Politics Division, Brunel Business SchoolBrunel UniversityUxbridgeUB8 3PHUK mark.neocleous@brunel.ac.uk This article explores the place of fear in fascism - the fear experienced by fascism, as found throughout Hitler’s writings and speeches, and the fear fascism fabricates in order to sustain itself. The article suggests that this fear overlaps and intersects with a shift in the culture of the Gothic in the late-nineteenth century, such that fascism’s enemy comes to be interpellated as a truly monstrous figure. An exploration of the shifting place of the vampire in late-nine- teenth century Gothic culture creates the possibility of exploring the Gothic opening through which fascism came to both articulate its own fear and to gener- ate a more widespread political fear and social insecurity. If there is one thing generally said about fascism, one image that might be said to dominate commonplace and academic discourse about it, it is that it is terri- fying. Key figures such as Hitler are almost always presented in the literature as a combination of homicidal maniac, despotic tyrant, racist fanatic and vicious madman. At the same time, fascism itself glorifies struggle and violence, stresses the Machiavellian point that sometimes one has to rule through fear, and produces leaders who seem to love bragging about their own toughness and strug- gles for success. Add to this the memory of the murder of millions and fascism easily comes to figure in the political and cultural imagination as a powerful and terrifying force. But what happens if we turn this picture on its head and think of fascism and its main protagonists not as terrifying, but as terrified? In other words, what if Hitler and other fascists are, first and foremost, simply scared? If one reads Mein Kampf with this in mind one notices something rather odd: Hitler really is quite scared. In the opening chapters in particular Hitler is simply terrified. Germany and everything German is under attack. Sitting eating his lunch alone while his fellow workers eat together on the building site in Vienna, Hitler notes how the men rejected everything—the nation, fatherland, authority of the law, school, religion: “there was absolutely nothing which was not drawn through the mud of a terrifying depth”. Social democracy is understood as an “infamous spiritual terror”, imposing “terror at the place of employment, in the factory, in the meeting hall, and on the occasion of mass demonstrations”; trade unions are “instruments of terror against the security and independence of the