Fascism’s violence initially registered as absurdity rather than politics for the Existentialists

Evidence

Sartre and Beauvoir did have a disturbing encounter with its Italian form in the summer of 1933, just before Sartre’s move to Berlin. They travelled to Rome with a discount offer from the Italian railways and, walking around the Colosseum late one evening, found themselves pinned by a spotlight and shouted at by men in black shirts. It shocked them, but did not politicise them greatly. … But when she went again in June and travelled back with him from Berlin through Dresden, Munich and the Nazis’ favourite city of Nuremberg, the military marches and half-glimpsed brutal scenes on the streets made them both eager to get out of the country for good. By this time, Sartre was having nightmares about rioting towns and blood splattering over bowls of mayonnaise. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the psychology of gradual political awakening in totalitarian contexts, echoed in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy’s protagonist trajectories. — connects to: Europe’s 1930s political chaos formed the backdrop for existentialism’s rise — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 399; Modernist violence is pseudoevent imposed by the novelist — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 401