From the onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, artists in Europe and the Americas took positions in the struggles between parliamentary democracies, fascist dictatorships, and left-wing regimes. The single best-known artistic product of that historical moment is undoubtedly Picasso’s Guernica, which was hung in the modernist pavilion of the embattled Spanish Republic at the World Exposition in Paris in the summer of 1937. However, the Spanish display was overshadowed at that time by the towering neoclassical pavilion of National Socialist Germany and the dynamic masses of its Soviet counterpart on the exposition’s main axis. The standoff between those two highly visible structures attested not only to their respective states’ comparable political importance but also to their apparently implacable opposition. It is precisely that symbolic showdown that appears on the cover of Karen Fiss’s impressive and important Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France. To the left is the imposing German pavilion, blocking the forward momentum of the Soviet pavilion on the right, capped by Vera Mukhina’s icon of Communism, the colossal statue of the Worker and Collective Farm Girl. Sandwiched between them is the Eiffel Tower, the familiar vestige of an artistic and political culture that, according to the story Fiss tells, may have seemed irrelevant to many of those in the foreground who took in the spectacle. Look where they were gazing.

Fiss’s book is a study of the German contribution to the Paris exposition, “the most elaborate production of National Socialist political theater during this period” (3). Making excellent use of archival and primary sources, and building on the ideas of German intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gisele Freund, and Siegfried Kracauer, the book’s five chapters examine in illuminating detail and with critical acuity the German effort in all its spectacular forms. The first chapter describes the cultural politics of Franco-German rapprochement after the First World War, ending in its transformation by the National Socialists and their French sympathizers from a notion of peaceful political coexistence into an essentializing, anti-modern conception of national identity. The second and third chapters investigate the production and reception of the German pavilion and its contents in the summer of 1937. The fourth chapter details the role of film at the exposition as part of an older effort to secure a foothold in the French market. The fifth considers the aesthetics of Nazi pageantry and its effects on French political discourse.

It is unsurprising that Fiss, having first established the historical preconditions for the exposition of 1937, devotes her second chapter to a nuanced discussion of the German pavilion in Paris and the objects exhibited within it. The pavilion was important. After long negotiations between German and French officials to secure special conditions that would ensure the Germans a particularly dazzling presence on the exposition grounds, the pavilion was designed by Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, and was realized at extraordinary expense. Analyzing the negotiations, the construction process, the finished building and its contents, Fiss describes the pavilion as a carefully calibrated, subtly modulated allegory of a new, powerful but peace-loving Germany under the wings of National Socialism. Balancing political symbolism with aesthetic pleasure, it constituted a “symbolic cocoon” for works of art and other impressive goods—luxurious bronze chandeliers, powerful engines, gleaming cars, and advanced technologies such as television—made with fine workmanship and possessing a powerful sensuous appeal. The “parlor aesthetic” of the pavilion’s interior, a term Fiss borrows from Bloch’s analysis of the roots of National Socialist culture in bourgeois society, sought to make National Socialist propaganda imperceptible, to project a mythological image of a unified Germany meant to render the contradictions of Hitler’s regime invisible.

As the cover indicates, however, the pavilion was only a focal point within a wide field of representation; hence, the book is as much about photography and film as architecture, painting, and sculpture. At the end of the first chapter, before she turns to the pavilion, Fiss analyzes a number of photo-essays on peasant life published between 1937 and 1939 in a Franco-German journal to promote a right-wing form of “European identity politics” (27). The analysis of Speer’s building is followed in the fourth chapter by a history of the German film industry in France. Fiss raises the question of the function of seemingly apolitical entertainment in a racist dictatorship and offers close readings of two allegorical feature films shown in Paris in 1937, namely Karl Ritter’s Patrioten (Patriots) and Veit Harlan’s Der Herrscher (The Ruler). Fiss then explores the aesthetic power of the “mass ornament” of Nazi pageantry, with its abolition of figures of individual subjectivity in favor of a total visual synthesis of the heroic Gestalt characteristic of fascist modernism. In particular, she draws attention to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg that was a “resounding success” in Paris in 1937.

Indeed, for all of its acute examinations of images and objects, Fiss’s book is a transnational history of cultural politics and critical reception as much as anything else, suggesting the misguidedness of writing National Socialism out of twentieth-century art history. It aims to show “how National Socialism’s sophisticated self-production prevailed over historical reality by shaping French public policy and popular opinion,” and how “the power to represent became a force of devastating political consequences” (2, 218). In her first chapter, Fiss outlines an increasingly dominant disposition in France in the mid-1930s: a defeatist mentality and the desire to avoid a recurrence of the devastation of the First World War at all costs; the growing temptation of extreme-right organizations (even at the peak of the Popular Front movement in 1936–37); and the willingness to believe in the image of a strong yet peaceful nation projected by National Socialist propaganda and hence to appease German demands. In particular, she suggests that an “analysis of French reactions to the German pavilion and National Socialist mass cultural production illuminates how certain aspects of fascist ideology achieved a dangerous normalcy in prewar France” (5). In the chapters that follow, Fiss makes a compelling case for this claim. She presents evidence not only of individual compromises but also of the Popular Front government’s appeasement of German officials when, among other things, it came to financing the pavilion, to using German workers to avoid French labor laws, and, most abjectly, to suppressing the anti-fascist activities of German exiles in Paris. Most French critics, irrespective of their politics, expressed distaste for the art exhibited in the German pavilion. Fiss shows, however, how deeply impressed they were by German technology and design, by the architecture (and smooth, timely completion) of the German pavilion, by German films, and by National Socialist pageantry (which the Popular Front government sought to emulate in a form of what she calls, following Denis Hollier on Georges Bataille, “mimetic subversion” (188)). They were continually prepared to affirm the aesthetic value they perceived, to speak the language of art while turning a blind eye to the political. The aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin described in his famous essay on the work of art in the age of photography did its magic, Fiss argues. But rather than secure the willingness of the working class to participate in its own destruction, as Benjamin suggested, National Socialist spectacle led French intellectuals and politicians to fantasize that reconciliation with Hitler was possible. Culture played a crucial role in the French capitulation, long before hostilities broke out once again.

Grand Illusion is a tightly focused yet wide-ranging addition to the literature on the art and culture of National Socialism as a form of reactionary modernism. Certainly, it leaves the reader with a few questions. Its consideration of the German contribution to the Exposition, officials of the Popular Front government, and the bourgeois and right-wing press—and their equation with France or the French—inspire a desire to learn more about other pavilions and their reception, about whether Communists and other leftists were so easily seduced. Fiss’s use of the ideas of Bataille, Benjamin, Bloch, Freund, and Kracauer (supplemented by more recent critics and scholarship) as authoritative analytical tools and synthetic frames, rather than as primary sources pertinent to the history of the German exile community and to left-wing intellectual life in Paris, prompts reflection on the relationship between historical research and critical conceptualization. Such questions, however, do nothing to take away from the contribution that this empirically rich, intellectually sharp, and compellingly written piece of scholarship makes to the discipline.

Readers encounter not only serious analyses of major works by Speer and Riefenstahl, among others, but also learn of the contributions of a few well-known modernists to the German pavilion and program: Lily Reich (and possibly Mies van der Rohe) worked on its displays, and Walter Ruttman made a film. High regard for the German pavilion was expressed by Waldemar George and Amedée Ozenfant, and prominent painters—Othon Friesz, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, André Derain—undertook an official good-will tour of Germany after the French defeat in 1940. In a word, by conceiving the production of this event as part of a long and broad history, by emphasizing the viewer as much as the artist, by indicating how successful these strategies were, and by offering an account of contemporary delusion and compromise rather than of modernist achievement and dissidence, Fiss makes clear how mistaken the almost total art-historical avoidance of this material has been. She points to the stubborn limits and repressions of the discipline, takes up the challenge of Nazi art, and offers an example of art history not as a form of affirmative aesthetic judgment but rather as a critical historical science.