The Damp and the Dry

A penetrating investigation into fascist psychology and language, written by the author of The Kindly Ones.

The Damp and the Dry is a critical biography and theoretical case study by Jonathan Littell of Léon Degrelle, Belgium’s highest-ranking Nazi collaborator and a fanatical Waffen-SS officer who fought on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Admired by Hitler and Mussolini and later sheltered by Franco in Spain, Degrelle embodied the figure of the fascist true believer long after the defeat of the Third Reich.

Originally published in French as Le sec et l’humide (Gallimard, 2008) and translated into numerous languages, the book subjects Degrelle’s extensive autobiographical writings—especially his memoir The Russian Campaign—to a forensic reading. Littell dissects Degrelle’s prose to expose what he terms an “anatomy of fascist discourse”: a recurring set of metaphors, obsessions, and psychic structures through which fascist ideology understands the body, violence, purity, and the enemy.

Building on the work of German sociologist Klaus Theweleit, whose Afterword accompanies the text, The Damp and the Dry moves beyond biography to reveal how fascism thinks and speaks. It is a disturbing and incisive study of authoritarian mentality—one that illuminates not only the history of twentieth-century fascism, but its enduring rhetorical and psychological appeal.