The Damp and the Dry

How do fascists think? An acclaimed novelists looks at the life and writing of a prominent Nazi collaborator to investigate the links between psychology, language, and action on the far right.

Léon Degrelle was 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.

In a richly illustrated text, Jonathan Littell here subjects Degrelle’s main autobiographical writings, his memoir The Russian Campaign, to a forensic reading, bringing it into confrontation with the work of a renowned writer on psychology and fascism, Klaus Theweleit, who provides an afterword to the book. 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.

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.