Performance Politics: Political violence and the challenge of Fascism in Europe

The political culture of much of interwar Europe, especially in Germany, Austria and Italy, was permeated by political violence. In its different forms - political murder, street battles, political purges and state terror – it fed on the imagination of an ongoing bloody civil war which fundamentally challenged liberal assumptions about compromise politics. By looking at these acts of violence in detail, their symbolic function and practical voluntarism, performance politics will be analysed as a political code for fascism in power – and more generally for modern fundamentalism.