This paper discusses the roots of fascist (and Nazi in particular) ideas, which were anchored in the aesthetic heritage of Romanticism, later developed by the Nietzschean vitalism and the modernist avant-garde. From the perspective of twentieth-century intellectual history, special attention should be given to the theme of violence committed in the name of beauty, as well as the relations between the initial romantic idea of art as Sturm und Drang, the concept of the artistic avantgarde attacking the world of bourgeois values and fascist shock troops.