Introduction: Situating Literary Journalism within Transnational Fascism

This article builds on two current tendencies in the study of transnational fascism: attention to applied aesthetic strategies of appeal and to temporal imaginaries responding to modernism’s crisis-ridden experience of time.Footnote ¹ While aesthetic research privileged (audio)visual media, this article shifts attention to literary journalism by unpacking the alternatively modernist speed-aesthetics of Juraj Gajdoš Breza (1913–2005), the most book-published reporter of the Slovak State, a German satellite from 1939 to 1945.Footnote ² By explicating his promotion of National Socialism as the mediation of speed- and pleasure-driven yet non-decadent modern experience, it demonstrates the potential of temporally- and montage-focused analysis to read literary reportage as a platform for conceptualizing self-situatedness within the fascist “New Europe” under east European conditions, oscillating between alternatively modernist and anti-modernist modes of expression.Footnote ³

Since 1934, Germany and Italy pursued a paradoxical project of antiliberal internationalism: integrating peripheral Axis regimes into their hegemony while granting them a self-legitimizing narrative of participation in the “New Europe.”Footnote ⁴ The current transnational turn in fascist studies highlights the importance of mutual receptions and cross-border interactions; particularly underexamined in relation to satellite and collaborating regimes in east central and southeastern Europe.Footnote ⁵ Parallelly, the cultural history of fascist internationalism also calls for closer attention to portable fascism as a migratory, ideologically and aesthetically adaptable phenomenon seeking appeal under locally specific conditions.Footnote ⁶

Alongside film and radio, journalism played a key role in spreading visions of global fascist interconnectedness and enabling cross-border reception among allied regimes. The 1941 founding in Vienna of the Union of National Journalists’ Organizations—building on earlier German-Italian cooperation—immediately included organizations from Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria.Footnote ⁷ Mutual journalistic visits were a key element of Slovak-German cultural cooperation: while Slovak journalists joined study visits to Germany from 1939 onward, over twenty German publicists toured Slovakia in 1942.Footnote ⁸

Studies of portable fascism highlight the important role of aesthetics in moments when fascism crossed borders to attract mass appeal both for its ideology and for its visions of internationalism.Footnote ⁹ Fascist(-affine) journalisms offer particularly fertile ground for poetological analysis due to their deep reliance on aestheticized expression. Precisely because of its dependence on the literary-rhetorical power of suggestion, disillusionment with literary journalism’s proven propagandistic effectiveness led to its temporary postwar rejection in Germany in favor of brief, quasi-objective, fact-based reporting.Footnote ¹⁰

The productivity of an aesthetic (respectively poetological) focus follows from fascism’s character as an irrationalist and argumentatively incoherent ideology. While all ideological appellation, however coherent, relies on aesthetic representation, fascism’s particular incoherence and “ideological vagueness,” as Julia Adeney Thomas argues—central to its success and adaptability across diverse regimes and movements—made its appeal depend primarily on emotional, non-rational reception and thus on aesthetic strategies that could sustain it.Footnote ¹¹

Walter Benjamin interpreted fascism as the aestheticization of political life—a radical aestheticism without aesthetic reflection that elevates war and technology to aesthetic objects and subordinates the individual to their self-serving, collectively-shared “beauty.”Footnote ¹² Against this backdrop, contemporary research demonstrates fascism’s reliance on a paradoxical counter aesthetic which, in line with the prefix counter, seeks to erase the recipient’s critical distance by masking representation, thereby undermining rational-critical reflection as the normative criterion of rationalist reception.Footnote ¹³ While literary reportage—alongside the feuilleton—established itself in the German-speaking world as one of the most popular literary-journalistic genres of the 1920s and 30s due to its capacity to meet readers’ growing demand for documentality, a demand spurred by the increasing popularity of film and photography, Benjamin criticized it in 1934 for its tendency to aestheticize social reality, turning it into “an object of enjoyment” by rendering it a captivating aesthetic experience.Footnote ¹⁴

In this sense, literary reporting—with its journalistic claim to reflect social reality—shows strong compatibility with the broader fascist-propagandistic effort to aestheticize that reality while concealing its literary-representational nature. In Nemecko mierové a bojujúce (Germany Peaceful and Fighting, 1940), Breza presents his “journalistic trip through Germany”—an April 1940 journey of fourteen Slovak journalists invited by Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich—through the immersive adrenaline of modern speed.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet the genre’s documentary grounding allows him to repeatedly frame his aestheticization as a “most faithful reproduction,” in which the “written word coincides exemplarily with existing reality,” or as an account “about the reality … experienced, felt, and seen with my [his] own eyes.”Footnote ¹⁶

The Nazi rise to power did not end literary reporting but subordinated its counter-aesthetic potential to propagandistic aims.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, at the Reich Press School, founded in 1935 and modeled on the literary-oriented Italian fascist tradition, reporting was a core part of daily training.Footnote ¹⁸ It also featured prominently in Signal (1940–45), a widely translated periodical promoting Germany in occupied or satellite territories.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet historical overviews of German literary journalism treat the Nazi period only briefly, a tendency that mirrors the lack of poetological research on its transformation under Nazism.Footnote ²⁰

In parallel, literary journalism also remains underexplored in the context of the Slovak state, despite an unprecedented surge in the book production of reportage literature during the regime.Footnote ²¹ This lack of poetological research on national (Slovak or German) journalisms hinders transnational analysis that could illuminate both shared and locally specific literary strategies for popularizing the “New Europe.”Footnote ²² The pro-regime literary critic Ernest Žatko, celebrated “political reportage” as the Slovak state’s “new genre” and major cultural achievement in a 1945 essay, highlighting Breza’s contribution.Footnote ²³ In parallel, Breza frames literary reporting as part of Nazi contemporaneity, subtly positioning his writing as integrative toward German cultural practices: “[I]n [German] bookstores, one sees a heap of new titles. Admittedly, current political, documentary, and reportage literature leads over entertainment, as the former apparently sells better given today’s psychological state.”Footnote ²⁴ Much like current research, Žatko, a philologist and scholar of Romance-language literatures, defines the genre through its hybridity: an oscillation between literary and journalistic systems, marked by the simultaneity of “the creative and artistic intention” and the (prevailing) “intention to educate or to document.”Footnote ²⁵

The lack of research on a genre that casts the author—as the introduction to Breza’s book on Germany suggests—as both a “journalist” and a “writer,” is striking in the Slovak context, given the status of literary reportage as the most propagandistically exploited genre related to artistic prose and thus a key site for exploring the regime’s literary self-aestheticization.Footnote ²⁶ While fiction allowed limited freedom (excluding criticism of Catholicism, the ruling party, or Jewish authorship), journalistic and, by extension, literary-journalistic output was—following the German model—tightly state-controlled, primarily through the Propaganda Bureau, tasked with promoting Slovak-German “friendship,” National Socialism, and dominated by the radically pro-German wing of the ruling party until at least 1941.Footnote ²⁷

Correspondingly, Bureau-employed Breza seeks to evoke sympathy for German National Socialism as “the basis of the best regime”:Footnote ²⁸ “[W]hen we will search for proven models to supplement our [Slovak] natural basis, we will look for them nowhere else but in Germany.”Footnote ²⁹ The second edition includes a preface by a chef of the Propaganda Bureau, whom the book “justifies … in the hope that the Slovak-German friendship and common future already have their qualified interpreters in Slovak writing.”Footnote ³⁰ This “friendship” is framed as inaugurating Slovakia’s stunning modernization, rendered appealing through the adrenaline-filled experience of speed as modern pleasure—a “new opiate” that Enda Duffy shows as “intimately woven into a new paradigm of the modern subject’s nexus of desires.”Footnote ³¹

Literary Reportage as a Mediator of Speed-as-Modernity through Montage

Criticism repeatedly thematized the manipulative potential of reportage literature through selection—the capacity to shape the image of social reality by ideologically motivated fragment choices presented as representative of the whole.Footnote ³² At this level, Breza seeks to impress readers from a primarily agrarian and under-modernized country with Germany’s technological and industrial might.Footnote ³³ His fragments describe a military training station with “most modern … technology,” the navy, industrial productivity, technologized agriculture, the Heinkel aircraft factory, highways and automobilism, Krupp’s factories with the “most modern equipment,” “communicational network,” “new modern [housing] objects,” or “the most modern types of German tanks and armored vehicles.”Footnote ³⁴

This focus on techno-modernity aligns Breza with a broader trend in Slovak state propaganda. Although aesthetic inquiry into the Slovak state is a relatively recent trend—largely because the post-socialist imperative to reconstruct and critically reassess this controversial period left little space, amid highly politicized discourse, for seemingly more “marginal” contexts such as aesthetics—existing research highlights the narrative of modernization as central to the promotion of Slovak-German “friendship.”Footnote ³⁵

As Hartmut Rosa argues, speed represents “the authentic nature of modernity,” its transcendence-like goal and expression.Footnote ³⁶ Aspiring to amaze readers with Germany’s modernity, Breza frames its capacity to sustain speed continuously as a means of generating awe. He describes building complexes as “completed in record time”; the air defense system as “lightning fast and with mathematical precision”; while “planes are made … at the fastest pace,” or embankments are built “in record time.”Footnote ³⁷ An entire chapter is devoted to the apotheosis of “fast, uncomplicated transportation” through the autobahn.Footnote ³⁸ Even books are “published in record time” and German guides “rush to answer the question.”Footnote ³⁹

While the rise of new technologies gave birth to a modernist “speed culture,” the mass mediation of speed as desire, as Enda Duffy demonstrates, occurred primarily not through technologies but through the arts, especially film, which—with its capacity for abrupt cuts, rapid motion, and fast-paced plot progression—mediated sensationally modern, speed-induced adrenaline as if experienced from within a fast-moving vehicle.Footnote ⁴⁰ With rapid transport and film as metonymies of modernity, Breza presents Slovakia as assimilating German modernity through film aesthetics and railway infrastructure: “A Slovak film expert travels to Germany to study the organization of German film work, a Slovak engineer travels there to study transportation problems or highway construction.”Footnote ⁴¹ Literary reportage, through its remediation of film, likewise has a capacity to convey the experience of speed-as-modernity.Footnote ⁴² Their simultaneous emergence produced a compositional affinity in the form of (textual or visual) montage, a filmic technique of cutting and arranging shots that translates into literature as an imitiation of filmic structural imperative to present the central event not as an abstract totality but through its fragmentation into separable parts—organizing narrative not into linearly descriptive plot-progression but into spatially, temporally, or locationally (semi-)autonomous fragments, each depicting only fragmentary part of the main event, which is thus continually “framed, like a depiction in cinema.”Footnote ⁴³

Filmic framing through montage led to the viewer’s inability to fixate on moving and rapidly alternating shots—producing a new modality of adrenaline-driven reception that displaced the possibility of critical reflection through the uncontrollable speed of shifting spaces, described by Benjamin as the replacement of “contemplation” with “distraction”: “The painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it, he can give himself up to his train of associations. Before a film image, he cannot do so. No sooner has he seen it than it has already changed. It cannot be fixed on.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Alternatively, Paul Virilio identified fast alternation of movie shots as immersing the viewer in a non-critical, hypnotized-like state through “the irregularity of the epileptic space, defined by surprise and an unpredictable variation of frequencies,” in which the inability to fixate on constantly moving objects lead to a dissociation from their phenomenological reality.Footnote ⁴⁵ Comparably, phenomenologist Merab Mamardashvili characterizes the state of cinema-watching as a “phenomenological reduction” in which “what appears to us as the products of our own thinking is merely the effect … of shots imposed on us. A series of … cinematic shots that fascinate us with their alternation.”Footnote ⁴⁶

As Christian Ernst Siegel observes, the literary reporter’s (like the filmmaker’s) arrangement of selected fragments of addressed empirical reality not only allows for its manipulation through selection, but also enables the literary imitation of cinematic speed through rapid, interruptive shifts in location as fragment alternation: a literary reproduction of the filmic “repeal of spatial continuity and temporal distance through cuts and transitions,” in which “not static self-recognition but rapidly shifting sequences” determine reception.Footnote ⁴⁷

While every work of literary reportage is neccesarily constructed through montage and therefore exhibits a certain (authorial) degree of literary cinematography, Breza makes particularly extensive use of its capacity to convey rapid, momentary (swiftly readable) shifts between temporally or spatially (semi-)autonomous fragments; replacing traditional, linearly-elaborated plot progression with a plenitude of alternating fragments.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his book on Germany, the twenty-three brief, swiftly readable thematic chapters span eighty-four pages, each composed of short, spatially or thematically autonomous fragments (averaging 100 words) that establish an intermedial reference to the rapid succession of film shots through transitional compositives: graphically distinct, time-space specifying textual units placed (in Breza’s case) at the start of each paragraph that through their quick readability abruptly dislocate the reader from the content of previous fragments by sharply specifying the new spatial or temporal coordinates of the new scene.Footnote ⁴⁹

Thus within the span of a single sentence, the reader is dislocated from a seventy-two-word fragment on Nuremberg: “On the outskirts of Nuremberg—that is already the world of the new Germany,” to a fifty-nine-word fragment on the graves in Munich: “In Munich—as I’ve already mentioned—Hitler’s political movement began”Footnote ⁵⁰ ; from an “armored military school” to “another place” (“and again, in another place, there are well-guarded spacious storage facilities”), or from the “Heinkel factory” to a “next day” and “flight school.”Footnote ⁵¹ Much like a film viewer gripped by the adrenaline of each unpredictable cut, Breza’s reader cannot foresee where they will suddenly find themselves with the narrator, the hastiness and alternation of whose observations echo the poetological cue: “As we traveled during the day, our German guides explained to us the peculiarities of the regions through which our express train had just been speeding.”Footnote ⁵²

The Slovak propagandist’s inclination toward literary-cinematic writing is, to some extent, motivated by the central role of the German Weakly Newsreel (Deutsche Wochenschau) in Germany’s foreign self-representation.Footnote ⁵³ In his domestically focused collection of short works of literary journalism, Dni obrody (Days of Rebirth, 1940), Breza presents film as an ideal propaganda medium that (implicitly in line with fascist counter-aesthetics) immerses the viewer in a desired, highly absorbing mode of reception through intense sensory “engagement.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Correspondingly, the reportage Joyful Traveling through Šariš and Zemplín, depicting the propagandistic tour of the pro-German politician Alexander Mach (then commander of the fascist militia, the Hlinka Guards) through rural eastern Slovakia, opens with a poetological reflection that frames its composition as film-like: montaged from “photographs” as fragments of empirical reality.Footnote ⁵⁵ The narrator introduces himself as a photographer (“I took up amateur photography”), positioning himself as the creator of autonomous, hectically arranged fragments:Footnote ⁵⁶ “One eternalizes familiar faces, tries to photograph a landscape here and there, takes a photo for a friend’s travel passport, and engages in all sorts of other photographic experiments during the week.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Then, the author likens himself to a film editor, constructing a quasi-cinematic experience through literary reporting by selecting and arranging fragments (photographs) into a sequential progression:—fragmenting the main event into “tiny scenes and details,” with the upcoming fast tempo of cinematic overflow signaled by the verb “flashes” (mihne):Footnote ⁵⁸

Both Mach and the narrator are in constant motorized motion; in a “fast train from Bratislava” and subsequently in a “car caravan” whose associative link with speed is underscored by the motif of fast pace:Footnote ⁶⁰ “At a fast pace they [the bouquets] piled up in Šaňo Mach’s car.”Footnote ⁶¹ Just as in the reporting on Germany, transitional compositives here, too, mimic the observation of alternating sceneries in motorized movement or the rapid change of film shots, swiftly separating numerous short fragments as they appear at the beginning of individual paragraphs and abruptly introduce the spatial and temporal coordinates of a newly arisen, dislocating situatedness: “On Saturday evening it was still raining.”; “And already we’re farther along”; “Again and again we stop in villages along the road”; “After a longer stop in Vranov, we hurry toward Michalovce”; “Finally, Trebišov arrived, the main destination of our journey.”Footnote ⁶²

The Alternative Modernism of Breza’s Literary Reporting

Much debate has focused on fascism’s characteristic, contrastive adoration of both a distant past and a radically new future, its simultaneity of modern (avant-garde, futuristic) and traditionalist (völkisch or classicist) imagery; its attempt to, in George L. Mosse’s formulation, reconcile “a search for tradition and an obsession with the speed of time.”Footnote ⁶³ This inner contrast is exemplified by a sentence from Breza that exalts future-oriented technological progress while referencing a timeless divine order: in Krupp’s factories, “[l]ocomotives are produced as many as there are days in a year, that is, one per every God’s day.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Following Roger Griffin, this contrasting referentiality stems from fascism’s status as a temporal utopia, an attempt to resolve modernity as a crisis-ridden experience of historical time brought about by modernization and secularization: a dislocation from premodern cyclical temporality into a pessimistic linear one marked by metaphysical uprootedness and cultural decadence.Footnote ⁶⁵ While fascism often invoked national “tradition” and was thus frequently viewed as anti-modern, Griffin influentially demonstrated its incompatibility with the regressive, past-oriented sentimentalism of conservatism.Footnote ⁶⁶ Fascism’s characteristic reference to the national past does not reject the linear temporality of the historical present but legitimizes its appropriation within a constructed modernity: framing its future-oriented, revolutionary drive for palingenetic renewal as non-decadent through its connection to “tradition.”Footnote ⁶⁷ According to Breza’s articles, it strives “to build what has never been built,” as “a new Europe is about to be created,” one that “will reshape … the ideological current of all humanity,” all while suggesting this radically modernist (novum-creating) effort is grounded in the “distant past” and represents “the lively continuation of a tradition.”Footnote ⁶⁸

By referencing tradition, fascism aspires for an alternative modernity without decadence, such that would seize contemporary, downward-flowing (decadent) linear time and reorient its course into an upward (optimistic) trajectory—assimilating contemporary temporal experience for the sake of its proceeding toward a new, non-decadent, harmonious temporal order, echoing the premodern (traditionalist) one.Footnote ⁶⁹ This striving toward a progressive, anti-decadent temporality is exemplified by Breza’s article:

While modern temporal experience is marked not only by decadence but also by speed and acceleration, fascism proposes an optimistic (anti-decadent) embrace of this experience by assimilating and intensifying its velocity, in Fernando Esposito and Sven Reichardt’s formulation, by seeking “to speed up profane time via revolution” in order “to (re)enter the sacred, mythical, … halted time of the eternal nation …”Footnote ⁷¹ Correspondingly, Breza styles the Slovak state as an anti-decadent, tradition-preserving “harmonious progression” of the nation’s “eternal motion,” one that, however, accelerates its historical being for the sake of national survival amid modernity’s “light-fast changes … of today’s politics” and the “swift … pace of contemporary life.”Footnote ⁷² In parallel, he presents the impressive modernity (speed) of Nazi Germany as a seizing of the historical present in the service of a redemptive, past-preserving national future: “The life of a nation consists of the past, the present, and the future… . Adolf Hitler recognized this very early and very clearly… . Understanding history is the foundation of his politics.”Footnote ⁷³

In line with the alternatively modernist aesthetic tendency Eric Michaud identifies in Nazi aesthetics—reconfiguring the futurist cult of speed not as a break with history but its natural national outcome, reconciling “the most rapid of movements with the most assured stability”—Breza’s reporting on Mach’s journey absorbs references to traditionalist, cyclical temporality into a rapid, modern-linear one.Footnote ⁷⁴ While the future-shaping, uniformed actors move in motorized motion—textually evoked through the dense alternation of short, swiftly readable fragments (“At nine in the morning our motorcade set off from Prešov”)—their modern speed is portrayed as serving the preservation of the traditionalist cyclical temporality of farmers, glimpsed from the moving car as a pastoral idyll and expressed through motifs of “harvest,” “mass,” “grain,” and “soul”:Footnote ⁷⁵

Pro-German fascists—moving through fast, space-shifting, future-oriented time, while “possess[ing] only one square decimeter of land at home in the flowerpot”—are styled as modernists in the service of the immobile farmer, rooted in a quasi-premodern, cyclical temporality defined by the repetitive rhythms of agricultural and religious life.Footnote ⁷⁷ In parallel, reporting on Germany repeatedly emphasizes that the impressively portrayed Nazi modernity (speed) does not sever ties with tradition:

Assimilating the German “new national rhythm” as grasping the present for the sake of the future implies aligning with its rapid, history-making pace. While in the domestically focused reporting “the express train from Bratislava is late,” in Breza’s Germany “the trains run constantly according to a fixed timetable and arrive on time under almost all circumstances.”Footnote ⁷⁹ While the Slovak state is described as “a machine and the party [as] the oil for the intricate cogs of its mechanism,” the German state is repeatedly presented as a “flawless machine” or a “machine [that is] … precise and enduring.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Thus, alongside speed, a leitmotif of the reporting on Germany is the very notion of pace as something to be “understood” and assimilated in order to mimic German acceleration of the historical present: “We have felt … the new pace of work and the new spirit that emanates from all manifestations of life in the Reich.”Footnote ⁸¹ The motif of pace is presented as inseparable from each selected theme: “I have written about the foundations that precisely condition the successful pace of German life in all areas.”Footnote ⁸² The motif not only accompanies the entire text (“The pace of work in the shipyards could not be more rigorous”; “The image of nighttime Vienna or Heidelberg is the same when it comes to the uninterrupted nighttime pace”), but also concludes it, as the narrator remarks on having had “the opportunity to admire and understand the pace of German life.”Footnote ⁸³ Breza’s alignment with alternative modernism—a heuristic term rooted primarily in the fascist centers of Germany and Italy—is unsurprising, given his affiliation with the Propaganda Bureau, the only institution to involve a German advisor even before the Salzburg negotiations formalized German oversight.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, in the east European context, this congruence was not necessarily a given.

As fascism migrated across eastern Europe—a region more sharply positioned between tradition and belated modernity and lagging behind the west in middle-class development, industrialization, urbanization, and secularization—it came to coexist in a syncretistic way with conservative-religious nationalisms, the region’s dominant ideologies.Footnote ⁸⁵ The leading ideologue of the Slovak state was priest-president Jozef Tiso, head of the less pro-German, more Catholic-conservative nationalist wing of the ruling party, whose fascistization has been recently described by James Ward as “Christian-National Socialism,” a paradoxical fusion of Catholic conservatism and secular fascist progressivism, or by Miloslav Szabó as “clerical fascism.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The Catholic wing enjoyed greater trust among the highly religious Slovak public than its radically pro-German counterpart.

Since fear of German National Socialism’s dismissive stance toward the Church hindered its popular appeal in a predominantly Catholic society, Breza constructs a counter-narrative against what he calls “false propaganda,” casting himself as a religiously minded sympathizer of Nazism, claiming to “pray, whether at home under the Tatras or anywhere in a foreign land,” and reassuring readers that Nazi Germany permits “complete freedom of religious expression” and that Berlin’s “Sunday morning begins with church, just as it does back home, say, in Bratislava or Trnava.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Due to their coexistence with conservative, religious nationalisms, east European fascisms—unlike their more modernity-assimilating and more socially reformist western counterparts—were marked by a stronger rejection of lagging modernity, “extreme romanticism,” a deeper fusion of political and religious referentiality, and a more pronounced messianic urge to rupture with the modern condition.Footnote ⁸⁸

Correspondingly, Sorin Antohi and Balázs Trencsényi propose expanding Griffin’s heuristic model for the east European context by adding the category of anti-modernism, implying a stronger rejection, rather than assimilation, of modern temporal experience within the framework of modernity, through inclinations toward religiosity, alternative spiritualities, and national metaphysics privileging local ethno-spirituality over self-evaluation by western standards.Footnote ⁸⁹ Contrary to the alternative-modernist optimistic assimilation of modernity’s linear-historical temporality through acceleration, anti-modernism prioritizes “alternative models of temporality, such as the cyclical one,” reflecting a stronger desire for situatedness “outside history and historical temporality.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Tiso-aligned philosopher Štefan Polakovič advocated for aligning the German “social method” with a supra-historical Christian world-progression.Footnote ⁹¹ Anti-modernist sentimentality also characterized Polakovič’s prominent counterpart in theorizing “Slovak National Socialism,” the theologian Ladislav Hanus, who at the time, as Miloslav Szabó puts it, succumbed to “clerofascist temptation,” culminating in his 1941 lecture portraying Hitler as the patron of a “Christian New Europe.”Footnote ⁹² Hanus’s essay Slovak Statehood (1941) layers the Nazi biologically rooted concept of the nation with that of a national-theological soul, thereby enabling hope for a near-future return from the “catastrophe” of a recent past marked by a “liberal attitude” (decadence) to a cyclical order of ever-reemerging values and the restoration of the Catholic (cyclical) ordo.Footnote ⁹³

His essayistic, nature-focused works of literary journalism from neutral Switzerland (1939–40), published in one of the most prestigious literary periodicals, Slovenské pohľady (Slovak Glances), align with an anti-modern aversion to situatedness in modern historical time. They are not propagandistic celebrations of National Socialism, unlike Breza’s, instead focusing on the divinity of timeless nature rather than the historical present. Nevertheless, they display an implicitly sympathetic stance toward the “New Europe” by: romanticizing its cultural center as a nature-affined “nation” (“Germans have the closest relationship to the mountains; the Alps are for them not merely a matter of tourism, but above all a spiritual experience”); calling for the cultivation of a relationship to “Lebensraum” (životný priestor); affirming antisemitic tropes (“ruthlessness” and “ambition” as “Jewish traits”); or endorsing a Christian-critical affirmation of the Nietzschean cult of elites (although the anti-Christian Nietzsche “could not have been born on Slovak soil,” he nonetheless inspires the need to “cultivate a spiritual aristocracy”).Footnote ⁹⁴

In contrast to Breza’s alternatively modern self-positioning within a fast, accelerated, and technocentric historical present, Hanus’s R. M. Rilke’s Requiem (1939) offers a narrative of deceleration and adopts a critical stance toward technological speed. The essayistic reportage opens with a rapid alternation of spatial units—reflecting the perceptual situatedness on a moving train—as this motion induces distress due to its overstimulating intensity: “Overwhelmed by the rumble of darkness, the roaring of waters, the splashing of foam, the cracking of edges, stone and metal, by the scale of nature and technology, I suffered though pressed to the window.”Footnote ⁹⁵ This distressing experience of mobile perception is accompanied by a relativization of the modernist tendency to privilege secular and technological progress over nature’s divinity: “Technology, especially railways and dams, represents a fierce struggle between human ingenuity and the elements. The victory of either is only temporary and partial.”Footnote ⁹⁶ A satisfying resolution to rapid movement is found in leaving the train behind and embracing its antithesis—walking—allowing time for reflective observation of rural and natural sceneries (“You walk around the whole church.”)Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, Engadin and F. Nietzsche (1940) is a narrative of revealing the Godly eternity of nature slowly (by walking): “I don’t know how many areas we’ve already passed through. With every step higher, solitude strikes. It was a long journey! There is no memory of its beginning.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The concept of the “New Europe” resonates in eastern Europe through both center-integrating, alternatively modernist (pro-linear, accelerative) and self-centric, ethno-spiritual, anti-modernist (cyclical, decelerative) discourses. Breza’s striving to win appeal for the German, modernizing, more socially reformist, and less spiritual National Socialism through a sensuously pleasurable, adrenaline-charged experience of speed becomes apparent at the level of text-velocity: the reader’s authorially encoded temporal experience, shaped by formal-compositional and stylistic parameters (such as fragment length influencing reading time, and stylistic devices that either emotionalize and accelerate reception or, conversely, produce resistance to fast-paced reading).Footnote ⁹⁹

The Velocity of Breza’s Montage Compositions

Following Enda Duffy, speed was a modernist sensation not of changed temporal experience (a new, strenuous mode of social functioning), but of transformed experience of space: as the thrilling possibility of “traversing space more quickly,” turning it from a once-perceived obstacle into one of non-resistance to motorized (or cinematic) movement.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Correspondingly, while Breza seeks to impress the reader of an under-motorized country with the vastness of quickly traversable space (“We have been in the great, friendly German Reich for a full 15 days…. On our journey through Germany we covered over 4000 kilometers in total”), the sensational sublimation of space is carried through sharp transitions across spatially significantly distinct fragments, reconfiguring space from a limiting to a desensitized category and echoing the opening proclamation:Footnote ¹⁰¹ “At night, transportation over longer distances is handled exclusively by trains made up entirely of sleeping cars. And so a person is carried from region to region without any impression of being on the journey, without any sense of distance.”Footnote ¹⁰² In one four-page chapter, places such as “Düsseldorf,” “the Bavarian regions of the Reich,” “Prussia,” “Berlin,” and “Würzburg” appear within just two pages.Footnote ¹⁰³ The chapter The Peaceful Run of Life evokes more of a “run” rather than “peace” in its spatial dynamics. Before the mention of “Heidelberg,” we read:Footnote ¹⁰⁴ “We were in Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Kiel, then in Essen, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Munich and elsewhere.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Similarly, another chapter compresses impressions of the “Rhine,” “Würzburg,” “Essen,” “Düsseldorf,” “Wiesbaden,” “Nuremberg,” and “Munich” into just four pages.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Likewise, the domestic reporting on Mach’s journey desensitizes space through the enumeration of many spatial units in quickly readable intervals: “After a long stop in Vranov, we hurried to Michalovce… . And so we arrived at Michalovce perhaps a quarter of an hour ahead of schedule./ Finally we reached Trebišov, the main destination of our journey.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The frequent, brief mentions of spatial transfers—ten within a relatively short, four-page text—such as “from Prešov,” “on a roundabout route through Šariš and Zemplín,” “north of Prešov,” or “from the south of Košice, from Rozhanovce through Vajkovce and Budimír,” structure the reading experience.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While each paragraph introduces a new spatial setting via a transitional compositive, the deliberate brevity of these spatially divergent yet still inherently space-alternating textual fragments enables a rapid, film-like experience of what might be called (with Virilio) an “epileptic” spatiality.

In the reporting on Germany, a seventy-two-word fragment describing the “outskirts of Nuremberg” and its “party rally stadium” is abruptly followed by a fifty-eight-word fragment on Munich’s graves, then by another with spatial relocation to its monuments, within which spatial alternation intensifies through the enumeration of eight smaller locations within just sixty-two words; the lack of detail conveys a sense of speed as absence of time for their description:Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The domestic piece of literary reporting The Cursive about Road and Brave Winter establishes the impossibility of prolonged spatial fixation from its very first sentence: “At least four times a month I take the road from Prešov over Branisko to Poprad.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Accordingly, each transitional compositive at the paragraph’s beginning introduces swift abandonment of previous spatial and thematic content by indicating movement in the style of “We are going further”:Footnote ¹¹² “And again a different image appeared to human eyes later,” “When we roll down the winding road over Branisko, …”; “The phenomenon of natural contrast is truly touching when, in Nový Smokovec, you see a flower bed… .”Footnote ¹¹³

Interestingly, such constant spatial alternation also characterizes the best-known representative of Soviet factographic reportage literature, Ilʹia Erenburg, whose late-1920s and early-1930s writing was popularized in Slovakia through numerous translations in the communist periodical Dav (The Crowd). Dav’s associated authors—especially Eduard Urx and Peter Jilemnický—were the first to actively promote the genre of literary reportage in Slovakia. It is likely that the young Breza was receptive to the reporting discourse of his ideological opponents: while Erenburg’s reporting on Slovakia, published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, caused a literary sensation, in 1934 the critic Móric Mittelmann Dedinský named Breza in a polemical article attacking several young poets as “consciously fascist, or inclined toward fascism.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

As Aleksandr Federyakin demonstrates, since the 1920s Erenburg had systematically developed a literary-cinematographic style of writing in which “the focus of action shifts from one location to another.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ His reporting on the February 1934 Civil War in Austria, published that same year, likewise employs localization-specifying transitional compositives at the beginning of brief, spatially-distinct fragments:

In contrast, Hanus stages rapid movement only to abandon it for its liberating effect. The opening paragraph of R. M. Rilke’s Requiem shifts through numerous spatial units (“Gotthard,” “Ticino,” “Lötschberg Tunnel,” “Valais,” “Sion’s quays,” “the Bishop’s Castle,” “Valeria”).Footnote ¹¹⁷ However, once the train is left behind, the textual space is no longer fragmented into sharply distinct locations. Moreover, the initial experience of speed is deliberately condensed into two lengthy opening paragraphs (290 and 478 words) that—unlike Breza’s shorter paragraphs—encourage a slower reception of the theme of speed due to their length, thematizing it more through content than through the experienced graphic form.

While the first sentences of individual paragraphs typically indicate only minor spatial changes, the reader is often alerted to the nature of the upcoming shift. This markedly weakens the gripping dynamism of a quasi-filmic observational situation, relying on the unpredictability of the upcoming space, as can be seen in the transition between the opening fragments: “Out of nowhere, three rusty humps jump out down below, as if a camel were crossing sideways. These are the Sion hills (Sitten in German), the Bishop’s Castle, and Valeria—the dominant landmark over Valais. Doesn’t it remind you of Liptov?/Even for the Swiss, Valais is an unfamiliar corner.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ In contrast to Breza, Hanus employs the montage technique primarily to convey abrupt shifts not in space but in time, thus sustaining a limited, adrenaline-tinged engagement through the unpredictability of temporal progression. Yet these less frequent cuts serve not to induce immersive, reflection-complicating overstimulation through “epileptic” spatiality, but to build narrative tension that sustains engagement with broader, intellectually demanding fragments, which appear chiefly for their thematic content rather than their (secondary) abrupt transitions. While Breza aims to cover as many spaces as possible in a short time, Hanus’s use of transitional compositives repeatedly chooses the static over rapid alternation, valorizing fixed, observed space through its historicization: “Rilke came to Valais in 1921, exhausted, and above all mentally drained by the world war”; “Oh, Engadin is not just a scenery… ./In the demonic solitude of Engadin, Also sprach Zarathustra was born.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

While for Hanus the natural slowness of textual reception aligns with decelerative, space-valorizing aims, Breza—seeking to immerse the reader through reflection-inhibiting, adrenaline-driven “epileptic” spatiality—encounters a translational obstacle: the literary medium is not an overstimulating film, and regardless of the number of “gripping” transitions, readers have far more space for distanced reception than viewers, as they can set their own pace of engagement, including a critical one. To compensate for this literary “deficiency” in terms of fascist counter-aesthetics, Breza overuses stylistic devices that emotionalize—and thus accelerate—the reading process, compelling the anticipated reader to internalize the authorially-imposed rhythm. In doing so, he not only forces abrupt shifts between spatially distinct fragments but also—pursuing a gripping, quasi-filmic immersion—encourages fast reading of each fragment as a swift “passing through” from one transitional compositive to the next. This is achieved through the frequent use of compound sentences that—via abrupt, comma-induced pauses—accelerate reading by associatively linking it to movement, mimicking the need to stop and speed up again, and thus functioning as a stylistic device that quickens reception through emotionalized association with motion:Footnote ¹²⁰

Parallel to the frequent use of compound sentences, Breza extensively employs phonetic repetition, which likewise emotionalizes and accelerates reading by evoking a sense of being carried along in a rhythmic, forward-moving flow:Footnote ¹²²

The anticipated reader “dives” into an authorially determined rhythm, in which frequent phonetic repetitions—uninterrupted by cacophonous (rhyme-disrupting) or semantically demanding, constructions that slow reading—produce a sense of maximal textual non-resistance, experienced as immersion in a flowing rhythm.

Furthermore, these repetitions accelerate reading through the reader’s intuitive anticipation of recurrence, sustaining gratifying immersion in rhythmic movement as they swiftly read toward the upcoming pleasurable affirmation of rhythmic return:

Importantly, these omnipresent phonetic repetitions accelerate reading not only within individual paragraphs but also across them—particularly through transitional compositives as space-shifting units—inviting the reader’s swift traversal of distinctive spatial shifts: “And this is something a future engineer, skilled mechanic, or pilot must be aware of from an early age …/This is what our guide at the Heinkel factory told us about the aforementioned boys.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The frequent occurrence of movement-associated lexical units likewise encourages faster reading by creating a subtle, emotionally charged association with movement.Footnote ¹²⁶ To illustrate, only one page in the reporting on Mach’s journey includes “we hurry”; “waited”; “come”; “arrived”; “came”; “waited here”; “coming,” “pass”; “come”; “not sit”; “dance”; and “returned.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Their excessive use far beyond the operative necessity is characteristic also of the reporting on Germany, where life does not “begin” but “gets in motion” (rozhýbe sa): “Just as the sun advances across the sky and its rays gain in intensity, Berlin life also gets in motion.”Footnote ¹²⁸

All of the aforementioned reading-accelerating devices—especially phonetic repetition—find precedent in the Slovak translation-based reception of Erenburg:

However, Breza employs these devices with greater density.Footnote ¹³⁰ He surpasses his communist predecessor in textual speed primarily through his overuse of ellipsis—a stylistic device of incompleteness and underexplication—whose very presence unsettles the reader, emotionalizing and thereby accelerating the reading process.Footnote ¹³¹

As Enda Duffy argues, the modern, film-disseminated sensation of seeing from within rapid, motorized movement finds cultural-aesthetic (visual and literary) expression primarily in “blurriness”—a reflection of the inability to fix moving objects in static wholeness, which forces the driver or viewer to quickly select and edit what is seen, leaving much of the potentially observable behind.Footnote ¹³² Masking the textual medium’s static nature, Breza’s intermedial referencing continually emphasizes selection in motion, replicating an “as-if” situatedness within a sequence of film shots that resists the fixation of objects in static entirety. Foregrounding the montage nature of his text, each fragment is explicitly, partially autonomous and interchangeable with another (unobserved and uncaptured) view:

Likewise, domestic reporting subjects the reader to adrenaline-mediated filmic dynamism through constant reminders of perceptual incompleteness, underscored by the motif of blurriness-implying “dustiness” as a consequence of observation in motion:

In contrast, Erenburg—who, since the 1920s had been developing, in Anna Griboedova’s formulation, an “aesthetic wholeness,” aiming “to align every component with the overall whole and to convey that whole in every individual detail”—does not incline toward elliptical constructions.Footnote ¹³⁵ Breza—who characterizes National Socialism as “no high political science”—aligns with its ideological vagueness by prioritizing the reader’s adrenaline-driven experience of speed as a source of appeal that, by suppressing critical distance, seeks to secure acceptance of what he calls “the rightness of certain slogans.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Contrarily, Erenburg treats rapid movement not as a goal in itself but as a secondary foil for “showing” a coherently constructed world-image, persuasive by virtue of its claimed totality of comprehension, as if echoing the clarity-suggesting (contra-blurriness) formulation: “The Austrian workers were shown the way.”Footnote ¹³⁷

Hanus—true to the inherent literary cinematography of reportage literature—makes limited use of immersion-enhancing lexical repetitions but balances this with expressions that slow the reading process by demanding concentration (“It is a voluntaristic, biological atheism”).Footnote ¹³⁸ Above all, the speed-affine montage writing is counterbalanced by the “slowness” of the narrator’s movement—by moments of perceptual fixation rather than phenomenological reduction—through observations that render space as static totality, evoking a sense of ample time for unhurried description. This is evident, for example, in a 314-word fragment on the Alps, which, rather than fragmenting them through mobile perception, aspires to a panoramic, wholeness-encompassing view from a stationary vantage point, encouraging self-experience not through technological speed, but through the timeless stillness of divine creation:

Breza’s high textual velocity has both a counter-aesthetic and an alternatively modernist dimension. It seeks to induce a cinematic effect of—borrowing from Virilio or Mamardashvili—phenomenological derealization or reduction through immersion into destabilized, “epileptic” spatiality, heavily exploited in Nazi propaganda as a tool for inducing recipients’ internalization of ideological postulates by disabling critical distance to representation through adrenaline.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ At the same time, his strategic choice to render the German protector appealing as a mediator of adrenaline-inducing speed as modern pleasure suggests that, even before the systematic influence of German advisors following the Salzburg negotiations, he arbitrarily anticipated within a predominantly rural, conservative-Catholic society a desire for alternative modernization, one that promised entry into sensational modernity without sacrificing rootedness in tradition.

Furthermore, Breza’s aestheticization of Germany as accelerating the historical present also functions as a legitimizing narrative for the Slovak state. While, in his own words, the German “new type of totalitarian state” requires a “new national rhythm,” the pleasure generated by its speed appeals to the Slovak reader’s voluntary self-emergence into this rhythm as an acceleration of present-historical, future-shaping time embodied in the Slovak “running of the state machine,” which is presented as assimilating Germany’s fast-paced “motion,” within which “the individual loses all significance before the nation.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

While criticism of literary reportage conventionally emphasizes selection, its study in fascist and east European contexts also calls for equal attention to text-velocity, both due to the centrality of temporality in disseminating the fascist “New Europe” from center to the east European periphery and due to its locally characteristic coexistence with anti-modernist sentimentalities. While Breza presents the “New Europe” as a Slovak opportunity to assimilate a transferable, history-progressing, hastened “pace,” Hanus, by contrast, frames the new cultural order as an invitation to decelerated, ethno-spiritual self-experiencing that transcends the linear temporality of historical progress.

While questions remain about the extent to which Breza’s text-accelerating techniques are individually unique or shared within the Slovak or broader east European context—whether literary reporting and its capacity to convey a modernization narrative through speed aesthetics were employed across other satellite or collaborationist regimes, or conversely, how German or Italian literary journalisms aestheticized its “under-modernized” satellites—the text-encoded temporality offers a valuable tool for poetological and systematizing comparison. It enables the classification of self-alignments with the fascist “new cultural order” within the modernist crisis of afflictive time, through a historically and culturally grounded rather than narrowly politicizing lens.Footnote ¹⁴²