The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the ...

The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory

Also by Dan Stone BREEDING SUPERMAN: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain COLONIALISM AND GENOCIDE (co-editor with A. Dirk Moses) CONSTRUCTING THE HOLOCAUST: A Study in Historiography HANNAH ARENDT AND THE USES OF HISTORY: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide (co-editor with Richard H. King) HISTORIES OF THE HOLOCAUST THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GENOCIDE (editor) THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE HOLOCAUST (editor) HISTORY, MEMORY AND MASS ATROCITY: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide THE HOLOCAUST AND HISTORICAL METHODOLOGY (editor) THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF POSTWAR EUROPEAN HISTORY (editor) RESPONSES TO NAZISM IN BRITAIN 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust THEORETICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUST (editor)

The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory Essays in the History of Ideas Dan Stone Professor of Modern History, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

© Dan Stone 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–02952–2 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Libby, Greta and Clem

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction: History and Its Discontents

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Part I Interpreting the Holocaust 1 Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War

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2 Raphael Lemkin as Historian of the Holocaust

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3 Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Historiography

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4 The Holocaust and ‘The Human’

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Part II Fascism and Anti-Fascism 5 Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution to Defeating It

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6 The Mein Kampf Ramp: Emily Overend Lorimer and the Publication of Mein Kampf in Britain

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7 Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi?

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8 Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain between the Wars

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9 The Uses and Abuses of ‘Secular Religion’: Jules Monnerot’s Path from Communism to Fascism

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Part III Politics and Cultures of Memory 10 Genocide and Memory

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11 Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: The Future of Memory after the Age of Commemoration

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12 Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The chapters in this book have been published previously, though they mostly appear here in a slightly altered form. Their first versions were as follows: Chapter 1: ‘Beyond the “Auschwitz Syndrome” ’, Patterns of Prejudice, 44, 5 (2010), 454–68. Chapter 2: ‘Raphael Lemkin on the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research, 7, 4 (2005), 539–50. Chapter 3: ‘Nazi Germany and the Jews and the Future of Holocaust Historiography’, in Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (eds), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Continuum, 2010), 343–57. Chapter 4: ‘The Holocaust and “the Human” ’, in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 232–49. Chapter 5: ‘Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution to Defeating It’, in Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 183–201. Chapter 6: ‘The “Mein Kampf Ramp”: Emily Overend Lorimer and Hitler Translations in Britain’, German History, 26, 4 (2008), 504–19. Chapter 7: ‘Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi?’, in Matthew Jefferies and Michael Tyldesley (eds), Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 151–68. Chapter 9: ‘The Uses and Abuses of “Secular Religion”: Jules Monnerot’s Path from Communism to Fascism’, History of European Ideas, 37, 4 (2011), 466–74. Chapter 10: ‘Genocide and Memory’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 102–19. Chapter 11: ‘Memory Wars in the “New Europe” ’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 714–31. Chapter 12: ‘Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: The Future of Memory after the Age of Commemoration’, in Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (eds), The Future of Memory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 17–36. viii

Acknowledgements ix

For permission to reprint these previously published articles, I am very grateful to the publishers. Additionally, Chapter 8 has appeared in French as ‘Ruralisme et droite radicale en France et en Grande-Bretagne dans l’entredeux-guerres’, in Philippe Vervaecke (ed.), À droite de la droite: Droites radicales en France et en Grande-Bretagne au XXe siècle (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012), 107–35. This is its first publication in English. For permission to cite material in the epigraphs, I am grateful to the following: Professor John Haldane (Aurel Kolnai, Chapter 5), Taylor & Francis (Jules Monnerot, Chapter 9), Verso Books (Régis Debray, Chapter 11) and the University of Chicago Press (Paul Ricoeur, Chapter 12). Every effort has been made to trace rights holders for Evan John’s work (Chapter 6), but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be pleased to acknowledge the relevant individual or publisher in any future edition. For permission to access and cite the papers of Aurel Kolnai, I am very grateful to Professor Francis Dunlop (University of East Anglia, UK) and Professor John Haldane (University of St. Andrews, UK), and for permission to cite the papers of Rolf Gardiner, I am grateful to Mrs Rosalind Richards. Finally, my thanks go to Jenny McCall and Clare Mence at Palgrave Macmillan, who supported the publication of this book and whose help made its preparation such an easy process.



This book deals with some of the key problems of modern and contemporary history: intellectuals’ responses to fascism; how to write the history of the Holocaust; and the relationship between history and memory, especially with respect to major, traumatic events such as genocide, revolution and other forms of large-scale social change. It offers a synthesis of discrete but related themes which together chart the rise of certain key ways of negotiating the recent past. The historiographical chapters in Part I offer ways into thinking about the origins and nature of the Holocaust; the essays on fascism and anti-fascism in Part II are mostly focused on individual thinkers, but in ways which raise questions about the ideas, fantasies and social trends which provided the settings and frameworks for Europe’s great mid-twentieth century catastrophe; and the final section on memory probes the reasons why so much contemporary history has been addressed through the concept of ‘memory’ and why this notion remains so hotly contested in today’s debates over the meanings of the past. In this Introduction, I will not systematically describe each chapter in sequence but will address them thematically. For despite their different focuses, the chapters overlap considerably and provide different points of access to the big issues of twentieth-century history mentioned in the previous paragraph. The question of history and memory, for example, is tackled in several chapters. My argument is that whilst they belong inseparably together, history and memory are not the same, and they serve different purposes: analysis and elucidation in the case of the former, identityconstruction and commemoration in the case of the latter. Their tasks overlap when historical narratives offer a variety of understandings that are as empathetic as they are dispassionate. Where the Weberian tradition of Verstehen meets the future-oriented commemorative goals of memory, history and memory intertwine.1 In Chapter 3, I show that one reason for the success of Saul Friedländer’s two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews is that it combines historical analysis as it is traditionally conceived – especially with respect to source critique – with a commemorative impulse that lends 1

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the text a melancholy air, allowing it to be perceived as a major work of scholarly history and a gift of memorialisation. Friedländer historicises the Holocaust without obliterating it from the present. Taken together, these chapters provide resources for thinking about several of the key events of twentieth-century European history. ‘History’ is itself a contested concept, and much of this book’s concern is with the ways in which history as a form of scholarly writing (historia rerum gestorum) and history as a sequence of events (res gestae) collide in different understandings of the world. In the Nazi Weltanschauung, history can be understood as a philosophy of struggle illuminating the belief that human affairs are driven by the conflict between ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ or, in a more social Darwinist register, between the strong and the weak.2 This is a version of the speculative philosophy of history, where the events of the past – and therefore of the present and future – are believed to be inherently directional, that is, history is seen not as a random sequence of events but as a path along which a necessary and predictable process unfolds. In this understanding of the past, the job of the historian, philosopher or theologian is to discover and bring to light the meaning that is already present in the sequence of past events. History can also be perceived as a challenge for those who grapple now with the Holocaust, which is widely felt – in many of the scholarly works on the problem of representing the Holocaust – to call into question many basic tenets of history writing, such as narrative, causal explanation or even the use of sources. This is a problem of historical theory, which asks how we give meaning to the events of the past, rather than a question of unveiling the supposedly inherent meaning or direction of historical change. In other words, it is a question of how we go about historicising events such as the Holocaust which continue to have an impact on everyday life.3 As a result of these challenges in representing the past, history is also often said to be in need of the complement of memory, given the ‘age of testimony’ in which we now live. This is a metahistorical problem because the problem of understanding the past is a quasi-philosophical question of the role played by history in the present and of whether (and how) meaning should be generated by history or memory. Memory speaks ostensibly about the past but looks towards the future.4 In each case, history in its different guises – as the past itself, the passage of time or the way in which we write about the past – has its discontents, whether that means those who want to overcome historicity, freezing time in an eternal present (or in a golden age, which amounts to the same thing) or those who seek new ways to represent the past in the light of events which question the validity of established methodologies. This book brings together a wide range of themes and topics, which add up to a searching reinterpretation of modern history, both the past itself and the ways in which it is written. In this Introduction, I will bring out explicitly what those themes and topics are and will develop the argument that in order


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to find meaningful ways into twentieth-century history through the history of ideas, one has to do more than situate ideas in context. This is the starting point, and here I agree with Tony Judt that although textual, intellectual, cultural or economic contexts are all important, the political context in which texts are written is the most compelling way to situate them.5 But beyond that process of historicising ideas in their political and other contexts, one also has to reflect simultaneously on the process of writing history. So the chapters in this book attempt to problematise the writing of history at the same time as they seek to explain or to extract meaning from the past. This double approach – writing history and thinking about the process of writing history simultaneously – can itself be historicised: it is a late twentieth/early twenty-first century phenomenon, with its emphasis on the need for historians to be ‘self-reflexive’, on the significance of ‘memory’ for grappling with the past, on the newfound interest in the historian’s text as a historicisable object and on openness to methodological experimentation. Methodological pluralism here goes hand in hand with historical theory, or, less grandly, one can simply say that there are many ways to write about the past; in order to choose between them, the historian has also to think about the ways in which he mediates the past and the present, and readers (whether other scholars or laypeople) have to find the historian’s arguments not only empirically sound but also capable of providing meaning in the present.6 Historicism and presentism are bound unavoidably together. ∗ How then are the events with which this book deals and their narration connected? First of all, the events and the narration thereof are only theoretically separable; we can conceive of ‘the events’ of the past just as we can discuss how they should be written about, but in practice the two go hand in hand. The realm of popular history might be at one end of a spectrum where history is written as if the text were a window on the past, and where the narrator is as unobtrusive as possible, giving the impression that the past is accessible in the present and that no human agency or creative act is necessary to retrieve it. Ironically (although often quite rightly), this sort of history is admired precisely for the power of the narrative, and its historians are lauded for being expert craftsmen exactly because they write themselves out of the text. At the other end of the spectrum lie metahistorical works which narrate (or analyse) the past by theorising about how it is or was possible to write about it, or which may take the shape of philosophical discussions of historical representation which do not attempt to narrate the past at all. Most of the chapters in this book fall somewhere in between these two positions and share a concern with historiographical or metahistorical issues: that is, they show that the narration of the past is shaped by how historians

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write about it, and thus argue that it is important for students of the past to be able to analyse historians’ strategies, for otherwise they fall prey to a realist fallacy. The latter can be a source of compelling narrative but does not necessarily indicate to readers that there are alternative ways of understanding how and why things happened in the past or, importantly, that things could have turned out differently. The more strictly ‘historical’ chapters, mostly those in Part II, are studies in the history of ideas which are focused more on reconstructing past ideas than on considering the metahistorical question of how to do so. But the two concerns are nevertheless still inseparable. Indeed, if this book as a whole is subtitled Essays in the History of Ideas, it is because historiography and methodological questions can – and should – themselves be historicised, and the surest way of doing so is to consider them as competing ideas, transmitted and debated in the manner of, say, the history of political thought or of one of the other disciplines which form the mainstay of the history of ideas. Beyond this connection of the past and its narration, this book also brings together themes which share a natural affinity but which tend not to be studied in conjunction with one another. Most obviously, and highly surprisingly, fascism and the Holocaust are rarely considered together by historians. On the one hand, this separation is a result of the fact that Nazism is considered too different from fascism (especially the paradigmatic Italian Fascism) for the murder of the Jews to seem a defining feature of fascism. Likewise, and connected to the issue of genocide, many historians argue that the Nazi state’s obsession with race constitutes a major difference from Italy. On the other hand, perhaps this divorce is a result of the fall into desuetude of the concept of ‘fascism’ as it was used in the 1960s, that is, as an explanatory framework which regarded fascism as a cynical tool of big business. Or it could be one aspect of the fallout of the ‘uniqueness’ argument of the 1980s and 1990s, which carefully policed any attempt to connect the Holocaust with either other cases of genocide or European traditions of violence in Europe or in Europe’s overseas colonies. This is a subject that still raises hackles, albeit with the sentiments of the West German Historikerstreit of the mid-1980s reversed: now the liberal position advocates contextualising the Holocaust whereas defending Holocaust uniqueness or unprecedentedness has become an increasingly conservative position.7 Whatever the case, two discrete bodies of scholarly literature now exist: that on fascism tending more towards social scientific typologising and the search for a generic definition, which thereby tends also to overlook the particularities of the Holocaust, and that on the Holocaust which tends to be driven more by carefully delimited empirical historical analyses of Nazi decision-making or of Jewish responses. On the question of the connections between fascism and Nazism, Tony Judt’s work is worth considering, as his ideas on this subject illustrate the two different directions that historians have favoured. On the one hand,


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Judt argues that Nazism was different from other varieties of fascism in that it spoke uniquely to Germans, whereas other fascisms – for example, Italian or Romanian – ‘operated in a recognisable framework of nationalist ressentiment or geographical injustice that was not only intelligible, but which had and still has some broader applicability if we wish to make sense of the world around us’.8 In contrast to this notion of the singularity of Nazism, Judt later goes on to say, quite rightly, that Nazism had ‘a certain European appeal’. The Nazi idea of Europe, Judt suggests, was one which meant a ‘post-democratic, strong Europe, dominated by Germany, but in which other countries, Western countries, would benefit as well’.9 As he says, this vision appealed to many intellectuals in the West. This is a claim which is borne out by my studies in Part II, which also speak against Judt’s first assertion, suggesting instead that Nazism was, as Federico Finchelstein puts it, not the ‘ideal type of fascism’ but fascism’s ‘most radical possibility’.10 If this is correct, then the links between fascism and the Holocaust are perhaps not as tenuous as many scholars of both subjects think. Finchelstein, in fact, is one of the very few scholars who have attempted to bring together the literature on fascism with that on the Holocaust and to show that the two need not be mutually exclusive. He has pioneered the study of fascism as a transnational phenomenon, showing how despite seeming to be an oxymoron – an ultra-nationalist, exclusivist ideology does not seem the most promising place to look for cross-border cooperation – the concept of ‘transnational fascism’ actually reveals a good deal about the aspirations and connections of fascists in the interwar period.11 With respect to the Holocaust, Finchelstein shows that scholars’ tendency to treat it in isolation from fascism means that they ‘often overlooked the actual ideological connections between the global intellectual history of fascism and the historical conditions for the Holocaust’.12 These links include the following: the fact that fascists defined themselves and their community through a radical exclusion of ‘the enemy’ – as recent literature on the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft shows, one cannot have the cosy, safe Aryan community without the eradication of those, that is, the Jews and other so-called pollutants, who would sully it13 ; the structural violence that was fundamental to fascist ideology and action, and which reached its most radical conclusions in the death camps; and, importantly, the fact that actors at the time understood Nazism to be ‘German fascism’ and, thus, that its crimes were, by extension, prefigured in the very essence of fascism per se. This ‘radical possibility’ of Nazism is also traceable in reverse, that is to say, in the history of anti-fascism. Quite large sections of the European population were amenable to fascism for various reasons. The threat, or supposed threat, posed by communism, the strength of irredentist feeling after the post-World War I settlements and, most of all, the inability of the existing regimes, especially in the newly created ‘successor states’ of central and eastern Europe, to respond imaginatively to the economic crisis of 1929

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onwards were all grist for the fascist mill. Above all, the feeling – which is hard to imagine now – that the liberal democracies (in any case a minority of states in Europe by the mid-1930s) were exhausted and would soon be overtaken and replaced by more youthful and dynamic fascist regimes was very widespread, even (or especially) among democracy’s defenders. The latter feared that they were unable to mobilise the same sort of passionate defence of their favoured system that the fascists were able to do for theirs. Yet only the most radical of fellow travellers threw in their lot with the Nazis. In Britain this is especially clear: where Italian Fascism and Spanish Francoism both attracted considerable sympathy in the pages of the rightwing press (and sometimes in certain sections of the left), fewer were prepared to follow Hitler in a consistent fashion. As Hitlerism itself grew more radical, so did the number of British apologists for it grow smaller. Between 1933 and 1938, one could find numerous more or less positive assessments of the ‘achievements’ of the Third Reich, for example, its cleanliness, order and apparent unanimity. But after Munich, and certainly after Prague, only the most hard-line sympathisers remained unbending, and as soon as war was declared, only a handful of traitors actually stuck out their necks to the extent that they continued to support Hitler in opposition to British war aims – and thus left their necks susceptible to the hangman’s noose.14 What this potted history means is that the history of anti-fascism confirms Finchelstein’s argument about fascism: if Nazism was fascism’s most radical possibility, then anti-fascism reached its apogee in the face of the growing challenge from Nazism. Where during the period of Italian Fascist dominance, anti-fascism had been confined (for the most part – there are of course important exceptions) to sections of the left, as the threat to European peace grew more acute under Hitler’s influence, so did anti-fascism become a more likely possibility for many strata within European society, including the ‘apolitical’. At the same time as many individuals and groups across Europe fell prey to the Hitlerite ideology of a ‘united Europe’, so an equal number realised that they had to try to resist it. Anti-fascism also confirms the links between fascism and the Holocaust. Especially in the popular literature that was produced in the United Kingdom and the United States before and during World War II, the link between fascism and the persecution of Jews was often made, in ways which might seem surprising today, when the weight of Holocaust historiography means that it is easy to overlook the first scholarly analyses which were produced simultaneously with the events they described. Nazism radicalised both fascism and anti-fascism. ∗ The title of this Introduction, ‘History and Its Discontents’, is meant to work in several different registers. The first we have just seen – that is, discontent with certain trends in historiography, in particular the isolation of the


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scholarship on fascism and the Holocaust from each other, which is a concern throughout this book but especially in Part I, which deals with the frameworks of the particular body of historiography concerned with the Holocaust. Examples of the sorts of concerns currently being expressed by Holocaust scholars include the following: a dissatisfaction with the focus on the Holocaust, not necessarily at the expense of other genocides – although some scholars do think this is an issue – but at the expense of understanding what genocide really is, and why it is not synonymous with mass killing or the attempt to kill every member of a group (Chapter 2); a worry that remaining at the level of empirical work might come at the expense of getting to grips with the anthropological revolution of Nazism (Chapter 4); and discontent with the reifying gaze of positivist historiography and the need to find a way of historicising the past without objectifying it (Chapter 3). In each case, I argue for the usefulness of taking such concerns seriously, whilst always carefully trying to circumscribe their reach. For these are discontents of a limited sort. They do not suggest that there are fundamental problems with the historiography of the Holocaust, but only that such a massive body of sophisticated – often brilliant – historical scholarship has room for further innovation and theoretical debate.15 Indeed, one could argue that it is precisely where one finds large, complex bodies of scholarship that the best opportunities for future innovation will arise rather than, as one might intuitively expect, in fields that are underresearched.16 There is no question of a fundamental rejection of the status quo, in the manner of some of the individuals who form the subjects of Part II of this book. There is no comparison, for example, between current forms of discontent at historiographical practice on the one hand and the urgent rejection of the Whiggish view of history, which prevented otherwise thinking people from recognising the threat posed by fascism in the interwar years, on the other hand (see Chapter 5). With one proviso: the comparison works in that it reveals how risky but necessary it is, today just as in the 1930s and 1940s, to try to go beyond empirical reconstruction and ask questions of the unconscious or of the ‘deep essence’ of phenomena such as Nazism. As Chapter 3 shows, the necessity of thinking theoretically about issues such as the meaning of historicisation is borne out when such apparently arcane issues unexpectedly acquire importance in refuting logically and morally dubious ideas. In this instance, Martin Broszat’s insistence that the traumatic (and, as he hinted, vengeful) memory of the Jewish victims was incompatible with rigorous historical analysis has been exploded by Friedländer’s practical reconciliation of historicisation and memory. That said, it remains worth asking whether we have really overcome what Dan Diner calls the ‘crisis of historiography’ engendered by the Holocaust or just chosen not to think about it any more.17 The explosion of archival research on the Holocaust has been immensely valuable, but this focus has meant that many of the issues concerning what it all means and how history

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constructs and narrates the Holocaust which seemed so pressing in the 1990s have not been resolved but simply left unaddressed.18 If there is a sense of urgency in Holocaust historiography, it concerns the extent to which the gulf between popular commemorations and perceptions of the Holocaust and the detailed historical knowledge appears to widen even in the face of efforts to bridge them (for example, through Holocaust education). The ‘crisis’ diagnosed by Diner concerned the internal methods of history itself in the face of Nazi genocide. That question of historical representation is perhaps less pressing today as a matter internal to the discipline; as opposed to thinking innovatively about methodology, few historians reject the historical attempt to grapple with the Holocaust per se. Instead, there is growing concern at the contrast between the bowdlerisation of the Holocaust in the public sphere and its scholarly representation. The former – that is, the Holocaust in the public sphere – is where concerns over the ‘limits of representation’ now primarily reside. And, as Chapter 12 shows, this is especially true in current political debates concerning the idea of ‘double genocide’ in Eastern Europe or the attempt to make Holocaust commemoration and education a central pillar of the European Union’s (EU) ‘memory project’. This mention of popular history is a reminder that this book’s remit goes well beyond Holocaust historiography to take in some other major themes of recent historical research, in particular ‘memory studies’. The topic of ‘memory’, as already noted above, has been one of the most productive of research fields for the last 20 years. The field has developed, in history at any rate, from a focus on representations of memory at lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) such as memorials to stress instead the social dimension of memory. By this is meant the fact that competition over memory – that is, over whose image of the past prevails in public discourse – is irreducibly about power. Criticisms of memory studies to the effect that it has stripped social history of its political charge and has remained interested only in aesthetics or representation have not always been wrong, but memory studies need not neglect the social and the realities of struggles for power. As the chapters in Part III indicate, the political context in which contests over control of memory take place is indeed the key one. There are, of course, other sources of discontent with the ‘memory discourse’ of recent years. Perhaps the most compelling, from a historian’s point of view, is the claim that the fascination with memory has gone too far, sometimes going beyond the methodologically unproblematic fact that memory can be the subject of historical study (how actors in the past created, contested and eliminated ‘collective memory’) and instead making ‘memory’ synonymous with ‘history’ or even making ‘memory’ the master concept over and above ‘history’. History remains necessary, even when we are confronted with events which are ‘archive breakers’, that is to say, events which fundamentally challenge our ability to order them, cognise their occurrence or turn them into objects of research.19


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By the same token, it is easy to find discontent with the ‘optimistic’ version of memory studies, according to which memory studies deals with reconciliation, overcoming the past and psychic closure. Rather than promoting such desirable outcomes, could it not be that memory is more likely to fuel the same hatred, division and violence, which brought about the disasters that are now being ‘remembered’ in the first place? Perhaps collective memory – especially the sort that satisfies a public need for easily digested, uncritical narratives about the in-group – risks perpetuating those same emotions, as well as others, such as resentment, humiliation and shame?20 Even well-meaning attempts to regulate memory in the public sphere can end by inadvertently revivifying the trends that such regulation is designed to dissipate.21 Sometimes forgetting might be the more fruitful act.22 By contrast, history might – just might – find a way of negotiating between different, even competing communities and providing dispassionate, non-partisan accounts of the past. This is an idealised version of what history can achieve, indeed it is one which has largely been dismantled, thanks to memory studies itself, but still, it is one to which we ought to pay more than lip service. Even if memorialisation can in fact, as has been shown empirically, play a valuable role in stabilising societies in transition, it will not always do so, and such memorialisation in any case needs to be underpinned by historical research and an agreed version of the past.23 These are examples of discontentedness with history understood as the writing of the past, historia rerum gestarum. On a different register are those discontents, examined in Part II, who objected to the status quo and, in particular, who did so through advocating what are today considered ‘rejected’ ideologies. This form of discontent could be seen in the late 1930s and the war years (Chapters 7 and 8) or in the postwar context (Chapter 9). We might call this a sort of ‘historical discontent’ as opposed to a ‘historiographical discontent’. The argument in Part II is not just that these individuals and movements are fascinating footnotes in the history of the twentieth century but that the key events of the twentieth century did not emerge out of nowhere and that, even if one takes a materialistic approach – one for which I have sympathy, for ideas do not exist in a free-floating sphere and the reasons why they either become operational or harmlessly dissipate are not solely related to their intellectual power – events are underpinned by the intentions and actions of thinking people. The point is not only that people make history but that they do so in circumstances which are not of their own making; it is also that ‘thinking people’ think and do things that are not rational or instrumental, or which, from an ‘objective’ point of view, run against their own interests. Here ideas, especially ideas of the proto-fascist, fascist or ‘neo-fascist’ variety, can be of great help in understanding the appeal of movements and ways of thinking that would prove catastrophic not just for their enemies but also for their advocates. Fascist

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ideas might not always prove the surest guide to fascism in action, but they do help to explain why people became fascists and what their hopes and fears were about the world in which they lived. As with the historiography of fascism, this claim is also true in reverse, that is, with respect to anti-fascism. As Chapters 5 and 6 show, the ideas that drove anti-fascism were just as important to its success, intellectually and institutionally, as its ability to organise and mobilise campaigners. The war of ideas over fascism was a key part of the broader war, both before 1939 and from 1939 to 1945. If individuals such as Kolnai or Emily Lorimer can be labelled as discontents, the label is less about the way in which they perceived society to be moving and more because of their frustration at what they felt to be the complacency of those around them. In the face of the fascist threat, such equanimity was, they believed, tantamount to unwitting collaboration. The anti-fascists’ discontent grew out of a sense that all that the liberal democracies held dear was being betrayed by those who subscribed to their values, precisely because they were unable to appreciate the severity of the threat facing them. Many of the key events of the twentieth century, then, have emerged out of contexts which were created by, and which in turn have further given rise to, discontents with history. This is true whether one thinks of history as being synonymous with past events or of history as the account of those events. For example, fascists objected to the ways in which societies and cultures had, according to them, become more effete and backward over time and wanted to ‘recreate’ martial, organically rooted, future-oriented, racially unified societies – this illustrates how some were discontented with history as events. And especially when it comes to narrating or explaining the terrible events of the twentieth century wrought by fascism, history as the narration of events has bred many discontents, who find not just that the discipline lacks the tools necessary to take account of such dreadful occurrences, but, in some cases, even that the aspirations of history – to totality, to objectivity, to historicisation – are themselves somehow fascistic in tenor. My aim in this book is to show that on both grounds, the discontents are only partially justified. Fascists in the first half of the twentieth century were often right to diagnose problems with their societies; communists and many others did so too. But where fascists claimed to be dealing in eternal verities – of nation or race – we can see now that their ideologies emerged out of specific historical conjunctures: the collapse of the European empires, World War I, colonial violence, the rise of mass society and, above all, the Great Depression. Whether French leftists radicalised by the Great War or Italian syndicalists joining together with nationalists to rebel against the liberal mainstream, the supporters of these traditions which were already emerging before 1914 received a tremendous shot in the arm by the war and subsequent events, all of which made attacks on bourgeois democracy not only fashionable but


11

apparently credible.24 In certain circumstances, notably the Romania of the 1930s, the fascist intelligentsia typified by Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran represented mainstream opinion. Furthermore, as well as ritual and violence, one finds within the various strands of thought, which made up the complex mix of fascism, ‘serious debate over the meaning of corporativism, serious rethinking of the Hegelian ethical state for a mass age, serious discussion of the scope for new forms of education, serious assessment of the legacy of Giuseppe Mazzini in light of the outcome of Marxism’.25 It is insufficient to condemn these theorists for abandoning the liberal-democratic tradition, though we might do that too. Rather, a historian’s job is to try and understand why at a certain moment in time the rejection of liberal democracy seemed so plausibly attractive and to show why that way of thinking quickly ran its course, destroying itself along with its putative enemies. In contrast with those whose discontent with history is with the actually existing status quo, those ‘historiographical discontents’ who fear the consequences of historicisation do so on more sympathetic grounds: that their communal scars will be smoothed over and that their community’s suffering will soon go unrecognised or forgotten. But they pick the wrong target. In fact, one could say that given the discontent with history that fascism displays (the impatience with facts is a key component of fascism), the discontent with history-writing and the turn to more emotionally gratifying but uncritical and even selective or partisan ‘memory’ may be rather closer to fascist ways of thinking than such discontents would like to think. It is ironic indeed that a way of thinking that clearly derives from disgust at the ‘achievements’ of fascism risks, in its more extreme versions, rejecting facts in a way that uncomfortably replicates fascist propagandising. Memory might provide comforting forms of community cohesion, but it runs the danger of doing so by mythologising the past. All of which goes to show that history is always changing. That is obviously true of our day-to-day existence, when periods of apparent stability can be shattered in a moment, whether by isolated events – earthquakes, accidents, random killings – or by sudden, major structural collapses, such as financial crises. It still surprises people, however, to learn that the same is true of historiography. There is no last word on any subject because the aim of history is not to provide the fullest account possible, such that there are no more facts left to discover (the impossible dream of objectivity mocked by Borges and Foucault); rather, it is to provide meaningful accounts of the past in the present, that is, substitutes for the past which satisfy those in the present by speaking to their concerns. What those concerns are is, of course, constantly changing and so, therefore, is what counts as a satisfactory account. Thus, there is an intimate connection between discontent with history as a concatenation of events – those who dislike ‘the way things are going’ – and discontent with history as a narration of those events – those who worry at history’s response to the past. This book investigates both and

12


tries to show that those who fall in the former category of those who dislike the current state of affairs are also likely to fall in the second category of those who dislike the dominant narrative of past events. The same is not true in reverse, however; critical historiography does not entail sociological churlishness. Rather, the aim of critical historiography is, or should be, to inculcate a sense of humility at one’s own fleeting moment on this earth and an awareness that, since all things must pass, there is little to be gained from the vanity of certainty.

Part I Interpreting the Holocaust


1 Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War

Lev Rozhetsky was a schoolboy when the Romanian army, the Wehrmacht’s largest ally, occupied south-western Ukraine. His memoir, recently published in English translation in the important collection The Unknown Black Book, is full of terrible stories: girls being tossed into latrines; Jews being tormented, tortured and shot; dogs growing ‘fat as rams’ on the bodies. The perpetrators in this region, usually led by a thin layer of German commanders, included Romanian gendarmerie and local Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans). What Rozhetsky also observed was the involvement of locals, not always in the murder process itself, but in the looting that accompanied it: ‘Having caught the scent of booty, all sorts of dirty scoundrels came running from every direction’, as he put it.1 Another survivor, the student Sara Gleykh from Mariupol in Ukraine, wrote that ‘The neighbours waited like vultures for us to leave the apartment.’ The same neighbours then ‘quarrelled over things before my eyes, snatching things out of each others’ hands and dragging off pillows, pots and pans, quilts’.2 As historian Joshua Rubenstein notes, in the Baltic region and western Ukraine especially, but generally throughout Eastern Europe, ‘it was as if the population understood, without much prodding by the Germans, that there were no limits on what they could do to their Jewish neighbours’.3 From Horyngrad-Krypa in Volhynia, where Ukrainians armed with axes, knives and boards spiked with nails murdered 30 local Jews, to Kaunas where the famous ‘death dealer’ of the city was photographed clubbing Jews to death with an iron bar, there is no shortage of evidence to back up Rubenstein’s claim. Such narratives, apart from adding to the store of horror, from a historian’s point of view, also reveal that the dominant historiographical explanations of the Holocaust need to be rethought. Historical scholarship on the Holocaust has been, until fairly recently, under the sway of an analysis that sees the murder of the Jews as an ‘industrial genocide’, implemented on the basis of a eugenic worldview that regarded Jews as an inferior ‘race’, and which came into being in an ad hoc or reactive fashion, as changing circumstances 15

16

Interpreting the Holocaust

in the war narrowed the Nazi regime’s future horizons, necessitating the urgent execution of a programme that might have looked very different had Germany won the war. More recent, micro-historical studies are beginning to reshape this picture. For some time, historians have put an emphasis on Nazi ‘ideology’, especially antisemitism, as opposed to ‘structure’, with the aim of proving the importance of agency and showing that the Third Reich’s leaders believed what they said.4 But newer studies add nuance to this picture, which appears too neat. Replacing ‘structure’ with ‘intention’, even if one talks of a ‘modified intentionalism’,5 offers perhaps too coherent an image of the Third Reich and how it functioned.6 If the historiographical consensus now seems to suggest that centre-periphery relations were key to the decision-making process and that Jewish policy was made on the hoof, but always in the context of the perpetratrors’ broadly shared antisemitic consensus, it has also become clear that below the highest leadership stratum, participation in the killing process itself and its bureaucracy cannot be put down simply to antisemitism. Plunder and economic gain have again come to the fore, although, as we will see, in a different way from the interpretations of the 1960s. And the murder of the Jews, whilst still retaining its significance as the most urgent and most complete of the Nazis’ genocidal projects, is increasingly seen as but one of several interlocking and inseparable projects of genocide.7 This insight in turn leads historians to see the Holocaust in the context of Nazi empire-building and to ask whether this history might be connected to earlier histories of European overseas colonialism. On the one hand, then, the picture is messier – with a wider range of perpetrators participating for various reasons – and broader – the Holocaust is situated in the context of broader Nazi demographic schemes and the context of world history – but without, hopefully, losing a sense of the ideological basis of the whole project that the Third Reich’s leaders insisted upon and which gave coherence to the whole process. In what follows, I will pick up these themes and show how since the end of the Cold War, the ‘discovery’ of Eastern Europe as the heart of the genocidal process is reshaping our understanding of the Holocaust. In Western Europe, our image of the Holocaust centres on AuschwitzBirkenau, the infamous death camp that has become an icon of evil. This fame is quite justified: after all, Auschwitz was, as one historian puts it, the ‘capital of the Holocaust’, where Jews and Romanies from all over Europe were sent to be killed.8 With its numerous auxiliary camps spread around the area of Upper Silesia, Auschwitz was also a major centre for slave labourbased industry (which, economically speaking, achieved little, but caused unfathomable misery and pain to many tens of thousands of inmates).9 Yet Auschwitz is not synonymous with the Holocaust per se, which was a Europe-wide phenomenon, much of which appears more akin to colonial massacres than the iconic image of the death camp; rather, an aptly named

Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’

17

‘Auschwitz syndrome’, which has kept us fascinated by the apparent paradox of modern technology being employed in the service of mass murder, has stopped us from seeing other aspects of the Holocaust.10 If one really wants to look into the heart of darkness, then the relatively unknown Operation Reinhard camps come quickly into view. Along with Chełmno in the Warthegau (part of western Poland incorporated into the Reich), where Jews were first murdered using gas vans, the small Aktion Reinhard camps (named after Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the RSHA murdered by Czech parti˙ sans in 1942) of Bełzec, Sobibór and Treblinka were responsible, in the short period of their operation – all were dismantled by the end of 1943 – for the deaths of more than 1.5 million Jews.11 Established by Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) in Lublin, these were ‘pure’ death camps, serving no other purpose than murder, and the process was unpleasant beyond belief. For too long we have talked about the ‘modernity’ of the killing process, shielding the reality from ourselves with talk of ‘industrial genocide’, as if it were a clean, smooth, technical matter. In fact, the motor engines which produced the carbon monoxide (zyklon B was used only at Auschwitz and Majdanek) often broke down, causing an excruciatingly slow death. Besides, these sites were brutal and violent; situated in the ‘wild east’, the guards – again, a thin layer of German officers and then mostly Ukrainians (former Soviet POWs) – were often drunk, and a wild atmosphere prevailed, as the wealth that accumulated from the transports attracted prostitutes and bounty-hunters.12 But fewer than half of the victims of the Holocaust were killed in camps, and of those that were, some 1.2 million died in concentration camps proper, that is, those camps run by the SS’s IKL (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager) and WVHA (Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, or Economic Administrative Main Office), not the ‘pure’ death camps.13 Before the Nazis set up death camps in occupied Poland in 1942, about 1.5 million Jews were shot in face-to-face massacres. Some historians have observed that a ‘festive’ or ‘carnivalesque’ atmosphere dominated at the mass shootings that took place in the first sweep through eastern Poland and the Soviet Union in 1941–42.14 Photographs depicting laughing perpetrators at forest clearings and cheering locals in German and Eastern European towns are not hard to find. Auschwitz remains central to our understanding, but the history of the Holocaust has become much more complex, as historians discover more about the other death camps, about perpetrators other than the SS (for example, the German Order Police, the Wehrmacht, local gendarmerie and auxiliary police – more than 100,000 men served in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine’s police force), about the role played by concentration and forced labour camps (as opposed to death camps), about the almost inexplicable death marches15 and about motivations for local participation other than the catch-all of antisemitism, such as greed. As Timothy Snyder points out, although Auschwitz is located in Poland, actually very few Polish or Soviet

18


Jews were killed there, and thus the largest victim groups – religiously orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe – are excluded from the most famous symbol of the Holocaust.16 Historians such as Snyder and Omer Bartov have also started investigating local ethnic relations before the war in the complex societies of the Eastern European borderlands, whose ethnic homogeneity today (a result of the communists finishing off in the immediate post-war years what Hitler had begun) is a far cry from the melange of populations that existed before 1939. They show that before the war, many places, such as western Volhynia, descended from a place of relative ethnic harmony to ‘the battlefield of a multi-sided civil war’ by 1943, ‘with Soviet Ukrainian partisans, Ukrainian nationalist partisans, Polish self-defense outposts, and the German police all engaged’.17 This renewed emphasis on plunder and looting is applicable at the macro level too, not only to individuals. In the 1960s, there was a fashion for the Marxist idea that Nazism was a creature of big business, that is, the claim that Hitler was bankrolled by capitalists who unleashed fascism to protect their interests and to prevent the masses from recognising theirs. In the wake of the emphasis on ‘race’ and ideology of the last 20 years or so, that paradigm virtually disappeared. It became clear that the regime controlled big business, not the other way round, and that the leading Nazis believed in their ideology, especially in what Saul Friedländer calls ‘redemptive antisemitism’.18 In recent years, however, historians have once again started talking of the Third Reich as a ‘gangster regime’ or as a ‘kleptocracy’, albeit this time round without assumptions about the priority of economic motives. Jonathan Petropoulos, for example, remarks that ‘the Nazis were not only the most notorious murderers in history but also the greatest thieves’.19 At all levels, individual, institutional, state-led and Europe-wide, the killing process was accompanied by plunder on a fantastic scale.20 The Holocaust was not driven by economics, but it is clear that the possibility of financial gain was a motivating factor. The Nazis carefully calculated the value of the goods taken from the Jews at death camps, and they fleeced occupied countries such as the Netherlands in a remarkably thorough way. Agencies such as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) were set up to coordinate the theft of artworks across Europe, and the German population was rendered complicit in the murders by the distribution of clothes from dead Jews through the ‘Winter Help’ charity or ‘Jew markets’, such as those which took place in Hamburg.21 Studies of perpetrators have revealed that they were not all dyed-in-the-wool antisemites but took part in killing operations for many reasons, including peer pressure, the influence of alcohol and the expectations of their comrades and superiors.22 Similarly, the locals across Eastern Europe were not simply antisemites who killed their neighbours at the first opportunity but people who, in a desperately poor region, saw the ‘elimination’ of the Jews as a chance to acquire some material goods. Extermination and enrichment went hand in hand, as all across Europe, at


19

individual, agency and state levels, greed, corruption and plunder proved inseparably appealing from the process of murder.23 Antisemitism remains key because it was the regime’s driving force, that is, the framework that permitted various actors with different motives to come together. But the complexities of real life mean that we should not be satisfied with antisemitism as an explanation; antisemitism had long existed, and one needs an explanation as to what generated genocide at this particular point in time, in a region where Jews and Gentiles had co-existed for centuries. One reason, of course, is that the regime and thus the state believed in the paranoid conspiracy theory that the Jews were colonising Germany and were a threat to world stability; previously, antisemitism had remained at the social level. But that explanation concerns only the core of the Nazi regime and does not account for the continent-wide participation in the killing process. There are cases of people, such as Metropolitan Sheptytsky, head of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, who both condemned and condoned the Nazis at different junctures. One helpful approach is to think of an ‘antisemitic consensus’: whatever the actual motives of perpetrators, whether greed or envy or hatred, they knew that the regime was fighting a ‘war against the Jews’ and that they could get away with just about anything as long as they paid lip-service to this framework.24 As Wolfgang Seibel, one of the foremost historians of the polycratic organisation of the Holocaust, observes: Utilitarian motivation of institutional actors was, presumably, the main source of radicalization. Anti-Semitism and state coercion, nonetheless, remained the constitutive basis of persecution. . . . [A]nti-Semitism represented a kind of convertible currency. Whatever the personal Weltanschauung, as soon as peripheral actors had something to offer the ‘center’ that fitted the anti-Semitic agenda they could expect advantages in exchange.25 Investigations into motivation do not seek to exculpate but to provide answers to the question of how antisemitism could be activated and radicalised at a certain moment. If we do not ask these questions, we end up with the ‘lachrymose narrative’ of Jewish history which is unable to distinguish the Holocaust from a nineteenth-century pogrom. For the Jews who were killed, of course, the result was the same: the motivating factors and the backgrounds of the perpetrators may have been heterogeneous, but the murderous effect was strikingly homogeneous.26 But to ask after perpetrator motivation leads one ultimately to a dead end: the individual psychology of perpetrators cannot be isolated from more important social factors. That is why so much research has been done on the conditions under which the murder process took place. However, although the vast majority of Jews murdered in the Holocaust came from and were

20


murdered in Eastern Europe, we know far more about the Holocaust in Western Europe. We know about survival rates, resistance, opportunities for hiding, rescue attempts, the role of local police forces and bureaucracies in listing, rounding up and deporting Jews, and we have very precise lists of deportations, especially for France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The stories of rescue in Denmark and Italy have been told many times, even if the temptingly pleasing notion of Italians as brava gente has come in for something of a battering recently, with historians arguing that the Italians’ refusal to deport Jews (until the chaotic and brutal final stages of the war in the Salò Republic) owed more to a desire to establish their sovereignty vis-à-vis Nazi Germany than to altruism pure and simple.27 Again, for the Jews concerned, whatever the case the result was the same. Where Jews survived it tended, paradoxically, to be in Axis countries whose regimes sought to assert their independence from German authority, as in the case of Italy, Finland or Bulgaria (excluding Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia), or places where the German occupation was thin on the ground and the power of the SS to urge on the local police was therefore relatively thin, as in France, where 75% of the Jews survived the war.28 But for Eastern Europe, only since the 1990s have historians been able to produce detailed studies of places such as Serbia, Belarus, Galicia, Lithuania, Estonia or Transnistria, as previously inaccessible archives were opened, at least for long enough for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to acquire copies of most of the documents. Histories of the ghettos, for example, especially ghettos about which almost nothing was known, such as short-lived examples in the USSR, are now being written.29 They back up on the one hand the apparently ‘functionalist’ argument that there was no single ghettoisation policy or experience and that local conditions led to varying outcomes. On the other hand, it is clear that, as Sara Bender writes, for all their differences, ‘all the ghettos had one thing in common: they were all doomed to extinction’.30 Ghettoisation may not have been undertaken with a view to deporting Jews to death camps, but they marked a significant milestone on the road to genocide, and they were themselves genocidal.31 Once again, the existence of an antisemitic consensus amongst the perpetrators seems clear, as debates between so-called ‘attritionists’ and ‘productionists’ (who wanted to keep Jews temporarily alive for labour) show that, ultimately, both were in accord about the eventual aim.32 To give another example, where very little was known about the Holocaust in Romania, now there are numerous studies which show in great detail something that Nicolai Ceau¸sescu’s ‘national Stalinist’ regime wanted to hide: that Romania undertook to solve the ‘Jewish question’ in ‘the Romanian way’. That is to say, the Jews of Romania (not including Northern Transylvania, which was ceded to Hungary in 1940) and Transnistria were mostly killed not by Germans but by Romanians. Ion Antonescu, Romania’s ruler, did not have to be bullied by Hitler into deporting the Jews, nor was


21

Hitler able to prevent Antonescu from ordering plans to deport the Jews of the Regat, the ‘old kingdom’ of Moldavia and Wallachia, to be halted as the fortunes of war began to turn against the Germans, which is why the Jews of Bucharest mostly survived the war.33 In Antonescu’s understanding of the world, like Himmler, who entertained negotiations with Jewish groups on the same basis in the war’s late stages, the Jews were omnipotent; thus, protecting the Jews of the Regat would, he believed, win him some sympathy from the Jewish-controlled Allies.34 Romania is exceptional, as although it was firmly within the Germans’ orbit, it remained a sovereign state and was never occupied by the Wehrmacht. But other countries, such as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), often referred to inaccurately as a ‘puppet state’, and Slovakia, under the rule of ‘clero-fascist’ Jozef Tiso, also to some extent forced the pace of Jewish policy. In German-occupied Eastern Europe, especially Poland, the lands of the western Soviet Union, including the Baltic States, Ukraine and Belarus, historians can now show in great detail how the ‘final solution’ developed in different places at different times as a result of interaction between local commanders and central directives from Berlin. They also show that although the Holocaust was a German-led project, there should be no surprise that throughout Europe it proved possible to mobilise large numbers in a project of killing Jews.35 The pace of killing was quickened especially when ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ met, as when Himmler visited his men in the field in Ukraine or Lithuania.36 Although it is now clear, as ‘functionalist’ historians long maintained, that there was no single, simple plan to murder the Jews of Europe and that policy developed reactively and in an ad hoc manner, on the basis of considerable competition between different Nazi agencies, it is equally clear that the various perpetrator groups shared the objective of eliminating the Jews. As historians have analysed in detail the complex reality on the ground in a series of ‘regional studies’,37 so they have begun to describe the occupation and population policies the Germans undertook there as akin to overseas colonialism. Indeed, few historical debates have been as controversial as that concerning the applicability of the term ‘colonialism’ to the occupation of Eastern Europe or ‘colonial genocide’ to the treatment of the Slavs and, especially, the Jews. With the rise of world and transnational history, historians have increasingly been tempted to understand the Holocaust as one case of genocide among many. ‘Genocide studies’ as a discipline has itself undergone considerable change in the last decade, mainly thanks to a renewed focus on the work of Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term ‘genocide’ in his 1944 classic work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.38 Lemkin argued that the destruction of a people that he termed ‘genocide’ was not synonymous with mass killing. Rather, the process ‘has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’. Lemkin’s stress on

22


the interaction of two groups and the ultimate overcoming of the one by the other sounds, as historians have noticed, much like a description of colonialism. Can the Holocaust be understood as a ‘colonial genocide’?39 First, such an understanding requires finessing the commonly held definition of genocide as state-led mass murder. If genocide occurred in the European overseas colonies, such as in North America or Australia, it usually did so without explicit orders from the colonial authorities, even if the colonial project as such implicitly authorised the process. But the Holocaust was a state-led crime. Furthermore, attacks on indigenous people in overseas colonies were carried out in order to acquire their land. But the Jews in Europe were for the most part not landowners, and they were a minority population across the continent (albeit, in Poland, the western Soviet Union and a few major cities and regions, a substantial one). So, where the occupation of Eastern Europe and the treatment of the local populations, especially in Ukraine and Poland, can be seen as akin to colonial treatment of ‘natives’ – forcing them to live in very poor conditions, eliminating leadership and educated strata, denying cultural expression and restricting food supply – the way in which the Nazis dealt with the Jews was altogether different and much more radically straightforward. Jews simply had no place in the Nazi universe.40 Although we now know that surprisingly large numbers of Jews survived in forced labour camps that were outside the SS-run camp system, there can be little doubt that their deaths were merely being deferred.41 These important differences between the treatment of Jews and Slavs notwithstanding, many historians have found the vocabulary of colonialism and imperialism fruitful for thinking about Nazi rule in Europe. From tracing lines of continuity (in personnel, military practices or ideas about cultural superiority) from the German colonies, especially Southwest Africa, where the Herero and Nama people were victims of genocide in the war of 1904–08, to analysing Hitler’s admiration for British rule in India or the United States’ westward expansion, the Holocaust is increasingly set into a world historical framework. Although some fear that this process will lead to the Holocaust losing its supposed ‘uniqueness’, the cohort of historians that has done the most to advance comparative ‘genocide studies’ in recent years (Jürgen Zimmerer, Donald Bloxham, Dirk Moses, Scott Straus et al.) is careful to stress that, even if one can establish broad frameworks for understanding, this need not come at the expense of the specificity of any particular event. The argument about colonialism is meant to supplement not replace other sources for understanding the forces that drove the Holocaust, and the discussion of the Holocaust in the context of comparative genocide is not undertaken with the aim of ‘downplaying’ the Holocaust, whatever that might mean in the context of other terrible atrocities.42 The end of the Cold War and the opening of archives in the former communist countries has helped to reignite interest in the explosive issues


23

of slave labour reparations, Nazi gold, victims’ bank accounts and looted art, now combined with a sophisticated methodological approach to Nazi perpetrators drawn from management theory with its vocabulary of ‘networks’, ‘competencies’ and ‘inter-agency competition’.43 German firms have opened their archives, and detailed studies of business during the Third Reich now exist, ranging from company histories (such as Volkswagen or Deutsche Bank) to analyses of the insurance and banking systems in the Third Reich. All make clear the extent to which the ‘ordinary’ institutions of a modern capitalist society functioned, in the Third Reich, as agents of theft, impoverishment and, ultimately, murder.44 One other function of the end of the Cold War has been an increasing awareness that the Holocaust was a transnational phenomenon involving almost every state in Europe. Hence countries from Portugal to Latvia have established national commissions into their role in the Holocaust, and hence the decision at the Stockholm Forum in 2000 to make 27 January ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’. This is by no means an uncontested decision: as historians expose the continent-wide dimension of the genocide, so the caricature of Nazism as the product of ‘evil’ that has nothing to do with ‘us’ dissipates and so the resentment at what many regard as the tarnishing of national honour increases. Nowhere is this process clearer than in post-communist Eastern Europe, where struggles over memory have resurfaced after being suppressed by Cold War realities and where the meaning of World War II is inseparable from the ‘second dictatorship’ of post-1945 communist rule. Remarkably, the further we get from World War II, the more its meaning is being contested.45 The end of the Cold War’s brutal stability means that views that were previously marginal or even lunatic have resurfaced, and the antifascist consensus on which post-war Europe was built has been radically challenged. In many countries, that consensus has been more or less totally dismantled. In Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy, for example, the so-called ‘post-fascist’ narrative that all Italians were victims became the norm. It is no coincidence that anti-immigrant violence and the politics of celebrity are notable features of the current Italian scene.46 In Russia, by contrast, the anti-fascist narrative that provided moral legitimacy to the communist regimes, sustaining them for longer than might otherwise have been possible, has been reinforced, albeit in caricatured form. The Great Patriotic War (the Russian term for World War II, 1941–45) was a source of great pride in the Soviet Union, and it is thus hardly surprising that Putin and his successors have tried to maintain its presence at the forefront of Russian minds, as one of the few sources of national pride.47 In that context, the Holocaust is certainly abused, but it is also brought to the fore in ways and in places where it was previously unknown or massively bowdlerised. For example, in museums from Budapest to Tallinn, the murder of the Jews is often presented as little more than a sideshow compared with the ‘second Holocaust’ of the Hungarian/Estonian people. Here,

24


on the one hand, memory of the Holocaust is placed at the service of an anti-communist narrative, and national heroes are drawn from the pantheon of interwar nationalists, antisemites and fascists.48 On the other hand, the countries of Eastern Europe also place new emphasis on the Holocaust because the European Union (EU) has enshrined Holocaust memory in its mission. At the same time as Eastern European history books and museums challenge what they perceive as ‘smug’ Western narratives about the defeat of Nazism – in countries where there was no subsequent experience of communism – they also promote Holocaust memory as a way of proving that they are ‘on board’ with the mainstream European understanding of the past.49 By bringing out the massive complexity of the event, the new narratives of the Holocaust also contribute to new contests on Europe’s ongoing memory wars, as I discuss in Chapter 12. The way in which they are resolved will be an important barometer of the state of European civilisation.

2 Raphael Lemkin as Historian of the Holocaust

‘Genocide studies’ involves the scholarly attempt to overcome the claim that any one case of genocide is unique and to build an analytically rigorous framework for understanding how and why genocides occur. Despite being well known today as one of the key sources of inspiration for this field of study, Hannah Arendt was in fact opposed to the idea that the Nazi murder of the Jews could be compared to previous atrocities: For the moral point of this matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realise that this happened within the framework of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shalt kill’, not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian considerations. The killing program was not meant to come to an end with the last Jew to be found on earth, and it had nothing to do with the war except that Hitler believed he needed a war as a smoke screen for his non-military killing operations; those operations themselves were intended to continue on an even more grandiose scale in time of peace.1 Although in some ways, their ideas were remarkably similar, Arendt’s position as the intellectual inspiration for ‘genocide studies’ is in many ways harder to understand than Raphael Lemkin’s.2 But even Lemkin’s contribution to the historiography of the Holocaust has been neglected. Raphael Lemkin (1901–59) is, after many years of obscurity, today well known as the man who coined the term ‘genocide’ and who tirelessly campaigned for the framing and adoption of the UN Convention on Genocide in 1948.3 He is, in other words, remembered as a human rights campaigner and international jurist. As a historian he has been neglected. Yet his work was 25

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based on substantial historical scholarship, since only with reference to mass killings throughout history, from ancient times to his own day, was Lemkin able to formulate clearly the notion of ‘genocide’ to his own and, eventually, others’ satisfaction. Lemkin did not restrict the definition of his term so that it referred solely to the murder of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and his interest in the nullification of peoples emerged in his teenage years, around the time of the Armenian genocide,4 but it was the genocide of the Jews, above all, that provided him with the main impetus for his research and for his campaign to have the crime of genocide incorporated into international law. In this chapter, I will examine what Lemkin knew about the genocide of the Jews – not yet called the ‘Holocaust’ – as he was writing his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) and ask to what extent his analysis of the situation as presented in that book and his other writings on Nazi Germany have stood the test of time. Given the size and sophistication of the historiography of the Holocaust, it would be tedious merely to measure Lemkin’s achievement against what scholars now know. Yet I will argue that Lemkin’s insights into the persecution of the Jews under Nazi rule, though partial, were largely accurate and able to grasp the extraordinariness of what was transpiring in a way that few other commentators managed at the time. In order to understand the conceptual framework through which Lemkin understood what we now call the Holocaust, a lengthy quotation from Axis Rule is necessary. Here Lemkin sets out what is meant by the term ‘genocide’: Genocide is effected through a synchronized attack on different aspects of life of the captive peoples: in the political field (by destroying institutions of self-government and imposing a German pattern of administration, and through colonization by Germans); in the social field (by disrupting the social cohesion of the nation involved and killing or removing elements such as the intelligentsia, which provide spiritual leadership – according to Hitler’s statement in Mein Kampf, ‘the greatest of spirits can be liquidated if its bearer is beaten to death with a rubber truncheon’); in the cultural field (by prohibiting or destroying cultural institutions and cultural activities; by substituting vocational education for education in the liberal arts, in order to prevent humanistic thinking, which the occupant considers dangerous because it promotes national thinking); in the economic field (by shifting the wealth to Germans and by prohibiting the exercise of trades and occupations by people who do not promote Germanism ‘without reservations’); in the biological field (by a policy of depopulation and by promoting procreation of Germans in the occupied countries); in the field of physical existence (by introducing a starvation rationing system for non-Germans and by mass killings, mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes, and Russians); in the religious field (by interfering with the activities of the Church, which in many countries provides not only

Raphael Lemkin as Historian of the Holocaust

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spiritual but also national leadership); in the field of morality (by attempts to create an atmosphere of moral debasement through promoting pornographic publications and motion pictures, and the excessive consumption of alcohol).5 It may seem strange at first to see listed side by side the mass murder of population groups and the promotion of pornography and alcohol consumption. For some scholars, it is already unacceptable to mention the mass murder of the Jews in the same breath as that of other groups. Yet, Lemkin employed a logic that is clear in his explanation of what constitutes genocide. Genocide, according to Lemkin, does not simply mean mass murder – this remains a common misconception today; the UN Genocide Convention is quite clear on this point – but can be brought about by various means. ‘Generally speaking’, Lemkin writes: Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. . . . Genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.6 Indeed, although in the 1930s Lemkin used the term ‘extermination’ before he coined his neologism,7 it was likely, he argued in 1945, that ‘the machine gun’ would be used ‘as a last resort’ rather than as the first instinct of the oppressor.8 The recent revival of interest in prosecuting genocide has also led courts to interpret the Convention along the same lines.9 The destruction of human groups, the crime that came to be known as genocide, and the destruction of cultural and artistic works of these groups, that came to be known as cultural genocide, were originally termed by Lemkin the new crimes of barbarism and vandalism.10 The latter, to Lemkin’s regret, was not explicitly incorporated into the UN Genocide Convention.11 Lemkin’s definition of genocide, the way in which he helped frame the UN Convention on Genocide, and the subsequent uses to which that convention have been put are not, however, the main concerns of this chapter. Bearing in mind his definition, I will here analyse Lemkin’s writings on Nazism and the Holocaust. Although Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was Lemkin’s crowning achievement, it is important to note that he wrote several other studies of Nazism: one untitled, full-length manuscript that was envisaged as a section of his projected three-volume history of genocide, published in 1992 by Steven Jacobs, and an unpublished (and probably unpublishable) manuscript, a sketchy first draft entitled The Hitler Case.12

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Each contributes to our understanding of Lemkin’s position and reveals the extent to which his insights adumbrated later historiographical concerns. Yet Lemkin, it is important to remember, was not writing as a historian. His methodology was not one that would be regarded today as satisfactory for producing significant contributions to the historiography of Nazism and the Holocaust. Rather, he saw his studies as contributions to jurisprudence and international law, in particular to defining and explicating the crime of genocide. In undertaking this task, though, Lemkin necessarily studied and categorised past events in some detail. Even more important, when writing about Nazism in particular, Lemkin was writing about events that were either still ongoing (Axis Rule) or were in the very recent past (TNG, HC). This makes his achievement in identifying many of the issues that were to become central to later historiography all the more striking. It also means, however, that his writings were written neither as historical narratives nor even as systematic analyses of the nature of the Nazi regime. They are, rather, detailed guides through the mass of evidence compiled at the Nuremberg Trials supplemented by Lemkin’s stress on legal matters and his tantalisingly brief comments and framing information. What is immediately striking about Lemkin’s interpretation of Nazi genocide – as the epigraph from Arendt indicates – is the fact that law lies at its centre. Law was, unsurprisingly, key to Lemkin’s thinking, and most of Axis Rule is devoted to setting out the legal framework of the German occupation regime, analysing decrees and the nature of the administration. In his Thoughts on Nazi Genocide this insistence on law led Lemkin to overemphasise the importance of Hans Frank, leading Nazi lawyer and later General Governor of Poland (the General Government was the part of central Poland occupied by Germany but not incorporated into the Reich). The space that Lemkin devoted to Frank is understandable in terms of Lemkin’s legal approach, but it does not accurately reflect Frank’s (comparative lack of) importance in the regime, especially where Jewish policy was concerned.13 Lemkin’s emphasis on Frank is a reminder that he was writing before the mass of historical research on the Third Reich and the Holocaust that exists today. Unsurprisingly, then, Lemkin did not always get things right. In the same way that the judges at Nuremberg refused to believe that no gassings took place at Dachau, Lemkin was under the impression that Bergen-Belsen was an extermination camp, which it was not. Similarly, he placed more emphasis on the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 than most historians would do today, seeing it – quite understandably – as the moment at which the ‘final solution’ was decided on. These errors are forgivable if one considers the fact that Lemkin, like other early scholars of Nazism, relied primarily on the documents gathered at the Nuremberg Trials for his information. These had not yet been examined in the kind of depth that would clarify the nature of the various institutions and decision-making procedures in Nazi Germany. Nor, as courtroom


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documents, were they arranged in order to facilitate the work of historians. Nevertheless, through his own substantial reading and working through the documents available to him, Lemkin identified a number of key issues. These merit further examination, since they remain central to debates on the nature of Nazism and the Holocaust. The first of these is what is now referred to as ‘political religion’, a formula that has been used in recent years (especially since the end of the Cold War and the return to popularity of totalitarianism theory) to explain the appeal of both fascism and communism. It is intended to suggest that what motivated followers of these ideologies had less to do with rational choice and more to do with a kind of need for community and devotion in a modernised world in which ‘traditional’ forms of affiliation had broken down. Anthropologists, and anthropologically minded historians and philosophers, especially, have indicated how the rituals, structures and rhetoric of these regimes gave rise to forms of emotional attachment that liberal parliamentary regimes rarely create.14 As Lemkin noted, ‘modern technical means alone do not explain the Nazi enigma. It is an enigma how a highly civilized nation like the Germans could have been led to acquiesce in a regime of oppression and murder’ (TNG, 189). And he went on to provide an explanation that accords well with the findings of those who employ the idea of Nazism as ‘political religion’: ‘We find a leader, bewitched by his own twisted conviction and an enormous power to bewitch others. We find a small clique of followers, imbued by the same fanatical spirit and willing to execute his orders, and we find a large mass of people who follow blindly or remain indifferent, except for few who either go into exile or underground’ (TNG, 189–90). Even the genocide committed by Nazi Germany could be seen, according to Lemkin, as part of a spiritual or sacred project to revitalise the German Volk or to bring about its salvation: ‘Germany has transformed an ancient barbarity into a principle of government by dignifying genocide as a sacred purpose of the German people.’15 But he added a more prosaic explanation, one that accorded well with the idea of totalitarianism that was current as he was writing in the 1950s: ‘crime committed by the State in a regime in which a state and party are one, and in which popular control is prevented by the absence of freedom of thought, freedom of expression and free election is, from the point of view of the criminal, the easiest to commit’ (TNG, 287). Having written these words, though, Lemkin appears to contradict them when he goes on to describe the killings themselves. The notion of genocide as a ‘sacred purpose’ does not necessarily imply that its perpetrators act in a frenzy or out of bloodlust,16 but it still comes as something of a surprise when Lemkin writes that ‘Almost the most frightening aspect of the Nazi mass murders is the cold, scientific manner in which they were committed’ (TNG, 226). With these words, Lemkin appears to anticipate the arguments of the functionalist historians of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Martin Broszat

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and Hans Mommsen, although the notion of ‘factory-line murder’ was also commonplace in the early studies of the Holocaust. Léon Poliakov, for example, devoted a whole chapter of his pioneering study, Harvest of Hate, to ‘the industry of death’ and opened it by asserting that ‘German technical genius made it possible to set up an efficient and rationalized industry of death within a few months’.17 But Lemkin also seems to foreshadow the ‘ordinary men’ debate of the 1990s,18 noting that ‘The striking fact emerged at Nuremberg and at the subsequent trials that most of the defendants had come from good homes, had had good education and somehow continued to convey the impressions of normal good citizens. They did not look like fiends and they used the words “good” and “bad” as if they had the same meanings for them as for their listeners’ (TNG, 229). This combination of cold-blooded, scientifically planned mass murder being carried out by men who were in all respects thoroughly unremarkable (save, in a rather circular way, that they were perpetrators of genocide) appears to sit uneasily with the view put forward by Lemkin of Nazism as a radical racist ideology to which its followers adhered as if it were a deeply held faith. But Lemkin, writing before these historiographical debates that were to follow, provides little in the way of analysis in order to unite these potentially contradictory explanations. There are other instances where Lemkin anticipates later historiographical concerns. For example, he devoted considerable space to discussing the role of the Wehrmacht, a subject that was far from popular at the time he wrote his manuscript Thoughts on Nazi Genocide, and which still has the power to provoke strong emotions, as the storm in Germany over the Wehrmachtsausstellung recently revealed. Lemkin quotes the infamous directives given by von Reichenau and von Brauchitsch in 1941 and asserts unequivocably that ‘The Army cooperated closely in the wholesale slaughter of Jews’ and that ‘Even where the Wehrmacht did not actually participate in the killings, they assisted by arresting Jews and turning them over to the Einsatzgruppen’ (TNG, 274). In the 1950s, when most Western governments were busy finding reasons to exculpate leading Wehrmacht generals leaving them fit to fight the Cold War against the common communist enemy, these were brave words. In another instance, Lemkin refers to a subject that has only very recently been investigated in detail by historians: the plunder of Jewish property. Historians have for decades written about the economic isolation of the Jews in Germany and have discussed in outline the process of ‘Aryanisation’. But recently there have been studies of Aryanisation on a local level that reveal the extent of complicity of ordinary citizens (for instance, in buying goods at ‘Jew markets’).19 Similarly, the continent-wide scale of the robbery of Jewish-owned art and property has come under close scrutiny of late.20 Key to this enormous process of robbery, which was a Europe-wide and not solely a German effort, was the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter


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Rosenberg, an outfit that has only been researched in any detail very recently by historians such as Martin Dean and Frank Bajohr. In the chapter of TNG entitled ‘Losses’ (again, note the legal framework), Lemkin noted the importance of this unit. Although Lemkin clearly knew little about it and offers little information other than the fact of its existence, he nevertheless showed that he was able to identify certain aspects of the Nazi genocidal machine – by virtue of the fact that he was interested in processes other than simply killing – that have started to occupy historians only in the post-Cold War context of understanding the massive complicity that underwrote what previously was seen as solely a German undertaking. Lemkin noted in the context of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg that ‘Side by side with the extermination of “undesirables” went a systematic looting of artworks, books, the closing of universities and other places of learning, the destruction of national monuments’ (TNG, 299). Again, it is because Lemkin had a concept of cultural genocide that he was as sensitive to these aspects of Nazi occupation as he was to the mass murder that they had committed. There are then several themes in Lemkin’s work that connect with recent trends in the historiography of the Holocaust: the ‘return of ideology’, the role of the Wehrmacht and agencies other than the SS in the genocide, the theft of Jewish property across Europe, Nazism as a ‘political religion’, the genocide of the Jews being only one aspect of Nazi ambitions where ‘population policy’ was concerned, the links between Nazi genocide and other genocides. But it is the last two that mark Lemkin’s real achievement as a historian of the Holocaust. On population policy, the favour with which Lemkin’s work is currently viewed is soon explained. Lemkin set out quite clearly that Nazi genocide was one of the most clear-cut examples of stated intention that one could hope to find: ‘Seldom in history has a murderer so cynically announced his intentions as did the Nazis. With them, murder was neither defence nor did they try to masquerade it in any way. They intended to do away with the Jews, the Gypsies, the “inferior” races like the Poles and other Slavs – with the exception of the strong, dumb workhorses’ (TNG, 154). But he understood what we know as the Holocaust only in the broader context of Nazi demographic plans: ‘The Nazis were out to eliminate not only groups of people like the Jews, but to destroy all the inhabitants of an area, along with all their cultural manifestations, in order to create “space” for their own people’ (TNG, 168); ‘Genocide was not restricted to extermination of the Jewish people or the Gypsies. It was applied in different forms to Yugoslavia, to the non-German inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, to the people of the Low Countries and of Norway. The technique varied from nation to nation, from people to people. The long-term aim was the same in all cases’ (TNG, 171). The example of the Holocaust, then, which many scholars see as unique, suggested to Lemkin by contrast not only that mass killing is not the only way

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to carry out genocide but also that ‘genocide’ rather than ‘mass killing’ is the more helpful ordering category. Thus he subsumed the attacks on the various occupied people of Europe under that term, without seeing the different approaches to those peoples taken by the Nazis as of prime importance.21 Nazi policies as a whole led Lemkin to argue, at the very start of Axis Rule, that ‘The picture of coordinated German techniques of occupation must lead to the conclusion that the German occupant has embarked upon a gigantic scheme to change, in favour of Germany, the balance of biological forces between it and the captive nations for many years to come.’22 The most significant aspect of his analysis of Nazi genocide, then, is the fact that at every turn Lemkin does not distinguish between the fate of the Jews (‘the Holocaust’) and that of other victims of Nazism; rather, he sees Nazi genocidal policy as a unitary phenomenon, although he does distinguish between ‘racial genocide’ such as characterised the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies, and ‘national genocide’, as was committed with the aim of acquiring Polish, Russian and Ukrainian territory (HC, 1–2). For example, when discussing the establishment of extermination camps and slave labour plants Lemkin notes that ‘These two plans were inconsistent because a Jew consigned to the gas chamber was a worker lost and because the conditions in which slave workers were forced to live ensured that they would not be fit to work for very long.’ Lemkin does not see the fate of the Jews as somehow ‘special’ or separate from broader Nazi ambitions of reshaping Europe’s demography through radical measures of extermination, expulsion and forced resettlement. Similarly, Lemkin devotes considerable space to the fate of Soviet Prisoners of War (POWs) under the Third Reich (TNG, 99–102) and civilians (TNG, 102–110). Lemkin’s picture of the Holocaust, then, was one that was based on immensely detailed knowledge of the occupation regimes, especially their legal frameworks. He relied heavily on official Third Reich publications, such as the Reichsgesetzblatt (Reich legal code), and corresponding publications from German-occupied and Axis lands, such as the Romanian Monitorul oficial or Vichy France’s Journal officiel de la République Française. In quoting the Polish Fortnightly Review, he showed his awareness of the extermination of the Jews in death camps and stated plainly that ‘The rounding up of the Jews in all the occupied countries and deporting them to Poland for physical extermination is also one of the main tasks of the Gestapo and SS units.’23 Many of the characteristics of Nazi rule that Lemkin identified have become key to the historiographical debates that have raged ever since. But perhaps Lemkin’s most original contribution, and one that is really only now being appreciated, is his inclusion of the murder of the Jews in a wider policy for the demographic reshaping of Europe. Historians such as Götz Aly, Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt have shown the extent to which the genocide of the Jews was part of a broader plan for the ‘resettlement’ of ethnic Germans and the expulsion of the murder of millions of Slavs,


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as encapsulated in the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East). Where Lemkin does not adumbrate contemporary concerns is in his failure to see the attack on the Jews as driven by a radical ideology. Rather than seeing racism as central to Nazism, he argued, in the manner of Franz Neumann, that ‘race theory served the purpose of consolidating internally the German people’ (HC, 2).24 Today historians accept that the murder of the Jews was not the full extent of the Nazis’ ambitions, but they understand that there are good reasons why the Jews were targeted first and most tenaciously, and equally that the Jews held a special place in the Nazi Weltanschauung. Nevertheless, Lemkin’s contribution to the historiography of the Holocaust lies in his incorporation of the genocide of the Jews in the broader framework of Nazi population policy. As he noted at the start of The Hitler Case, ‘The Nazi plan of Genocide was related to many peoples, races, and religions, and it is only because Hitler succeeded in wiping out 6 million Jews, that it became known predominantly as a Jewish case’ (HC, 1). Lemkin wrote more about the Holocaust than about any other genocide. But it is vital to bear in mind that just as he did not separate the fate of the Jews from that of Nazism’s other victims, so he did not single out the genocide of the Jews as falling into a separate category (as some historians today distinguish ‘Holocaust’ from ‘genocide’). His comments on the Holocaust make sense only in the light of Lemkin’s detailed studies of other genocides, from examples in antiquity to the annihilation of the indigenous Tasmanians to Armenia. Indeed, these earlier genocides provided Lemkin with a conceptual framework for understanding German actions: that of colonialism. Given the extent to which scholars today are pursuing the links between colonialism, genocide and the Holocaust, it is striking to read Lemkin writing decades ago that ‘Nazi Germany embarked upon a gigantic plan to colonize Europe, and since there are no free spaces local populations had to be removed in order to make room for Germans. Nazi Germany did not have a fleet to protect overseas colonial possessions. Moreover Germany had never [sic] good experiences in the past with overseas colonization. It was thus much simpler to colonize the European continent’ (HC, 1). He placed more emphasis on Alfred Rosenberg than many other historians did or still do (for the obvious reason that he, like Frank, was not the real wielder of power in the Nazi empire), and noted especially Rosenberg’s imperialist ambitions. Lemkin had a personal connection to the Holocaust in a way that he did not have with the other events he studied; this, the extremity of the Holocaust, and the simple facts of where and when he wrote mean that the Holocaust loomed large in his oeuvre. But it did so in order that Lemkin could formulate a broad theory and definition of genocide, in which the Holocaust served as a prime example, not as an exception. Numerous scholars have raised objections to Lemkin’s and, subsequently, the UN Convention’s definition of genocide – for being both too narrow and too wide – but in this context it suffices simply to note that for Lemkin the genocide of

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the Jews illustrated not a ‘unique’ occurrence but a phenomenon that had a long and ignoble history. However, Lemkin was of course not the only person writing on the genocide of the Jews at this time. Although, as many historians have noted, the first decade or so after the war were marked by a striking silence on the issue where professional historians were concerned – in contrast to the efforts of survivor groups to produce memoirs and Yizker-Bikher, or mainstream society to find ways of not talking about it – there were nevertheless some attempts made to open a scholarly discussion of what was naturally still a raw and emotionally debilitating open wound. Indeed, Lemkin himself relied heavily on the works of some of these scholars, such as Max Weinreich and Joseph Wulf, in his own research. For example, the publications of the New York-based Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA) are proof that it was possible, from the late stages of the war onwards, to produce balanced and clear assessments of what was occurring under Nazi rule without underestimating the extent of the catastrophe. Gerhard Jacoby’s 1943 discussion of the occupation of the Czech lands is a case in point. Like Lemkin, Jacoby relied heavily on a legal framework in order to make sense of what was going on. And he did not shrink from portraying the extent of the Jews’ suffering. Much of the book is taken up with a sophisticated rendering of the gradual process of the appropriation of Jewish property and the deprivation of the Jews’ legal existence in Bohemia and Moravia, leading step by step to the ‘complete physical extinction’ of the Jews, ‘in full accord with the example of Germany itself’.25 Jacoby provides an in-depth analysis of the decrees and various offices involved in this process and notes the ‘legal’ organisation of a ‘racial state’: ‘The Nazi masters of the Protectorate did not neglect the final steps of liquidating the Jews of Bohemia-Moravia “legally”, as well as in fact.’ But he finally also notes the inevitable failure of the racial principle for ordering society: ‘The racial caste state could not form the basis of an organized society; Nazism could accomplish only organized annihilation.’26 In 1943, this understanding of the centrality to Nazism of race and law as intertwined principles was quite an original insight. Lemkin was not the only one to make it. Nor was he the only one to articulate with clarity what was happening to the Jews and why. It has been well established that in the liberal democracies the idea that the Jews were being exterminated was hard to grasp because of the history of World War I terror propaganda and because (according to some historians) the targeting of particular groups for no reason other than their membership of that group ran counter to the ‘liberal imagination’. The publications of the IJA sought to dispel these comforting thoughts, and to drive home the racist principles on which Nazism lay, and the consequences to which this state-led racism had led. In his study of the persecution of the Jews, Boris Shub, the Editor of the IJA, spoke in a most unambiguous way about the annihilation of the Jews and argued that ‘Only about 8 percent of


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the Jewish dead [of 3,000,000] have fallen in actual warfare. The other died because they were Jews.’ And he put forward a description that comes close to Lemkin’s notion of ‘cultural genocide’: Finally, for the 3,300,000 who may still be alive, even the spiritual consolation of their faith and their way of life has been ruthlessly assaulted. Their schools have been closed down, their libraries, museums and other cultural treasures plundered, their synagogues destroyed or desecrated. And with each day of continuing war, the threat of total extermination, so often voiced by Hitler and his lieutenants, comes closer to fulfilment.27 After the war too, the foundations were laid for later Holocaust historiography, in the pioneering works of Philip Friedman, Gerald Reitlinger, Léon Poliakov, Joseph Tenenbaum, Samuel Gringauz and others. In this respect, Lemkin was not the only trailblazer. But all of these other scholars identified a Jewish tragedy and not a general Nazi policy of genocide of which the Holocaust was part. Lemkin was of course quite correct to note that the Nazi assault on the Jews was only one part of the occupation regime, albeit ‘one of the main objects of German genocide policy’ for they ‘are to be destroyed completely’.28 The extent of the persecution of Romanies, Poles, Yugoslavs, Russians, Serbs and other nationalities by the Germans is horrifying and has rightly become a significant part of the historiography of World War II. Where Lemkin challenges contemporary orthodoxy is in his implication that the notion of a ‘Holocaust’ as a specifically Jewish tragedy makes no sense because the genocide of the Jews was just one aspect of a broad Nazi demographic plan based on racial fantasies. Most historians of the Holocaust would probably respond by noting that Lemkin’s portrayal does not sufficiently indicate the depth of feeling, the passionate belief, held by the leading Nazis, that the Aryan struggle against the Jewish Gegenmensch held the key to Germany’s redemption. As early as 1935, Aldous Huxley noted that ‘in Nazi Germany, the sacramentum, or oath of allegiance, has taken on all the religious significance it had in Rome under the Empire. The dictator’s name and title, like those of the emperor, are used liturgically, as though they had the force of magic spells.’29 Central to this Nazi Heilsgeschichte were the Jews, for their force was the one thing in the way of the Germans attaining salvation. But this is of a different order of analysis. The ‘metaphysical’ position held by the Jews in Nazi ideology certainly differentiated them from Nazism’s other victims. But from the legal point of view of prosecuting a criminal regime for committing crimes against humanity, there is no difference between the death of a Jew and a Catholic Pole. Whether or not the treatment of the occupied territories of Eastern Europe constitutes genocide or not is debatable; there seems little evidence that the Nazis intended to seek

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the destruction of the Poles or Ukrainians as such, as opposed to reducing their numbers and leaving the remaining population in the position of slaves. But there is plenty of evidence for the commission of cultural genocide; after all, Hitler, Himmler and Frank agreed that the Poles – like other Slavic populations – should not be in a position to do more than write their own names and make basic calculations. Given the current historiographical trend that sees the Holocaust as on a continuum (albeit an extreme variant) with earlier, especially colonial genocides, and given our understanding of the Nazis’ grand population policy plans, Lemkin’s challenge – to view the genocide of the Jews not as sui generis but as one, if unusually significant, part of Nazi genocide, and as one, albeit extreme variant of genocide – remains to be satisfactorily addressed by historians of the Holocaust and by comparative genocide scholars.

3 Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Historiography

Saul Friedländer is the ‘theorist historian’ who, more than any other scholar, has made major contributions both to writing the history of the Holocaust and to the theoretical discussions about the metahistorical issues at stake in this history-writing. In this chapter, I want to ask whether Friedländer has conformed to his own theoretical guidelines concerning the writing of Holocaust history in The Years of Persecution and The Years of Extermination and to consider what the answer to this question tells us about where Holocaust historiography now stands. Steven Aschheim suggests that there is no reason why Friedländer’s theoretical writings should mesh exactly with his ‘concrete history’,1 but even so it is instructive to note where the gap between the two lies. I argue that where narrative structure, multivocality and the incorporation of memory and testimony are concerned Friedländer’s two-volume history does indeed follow quite closely his theoretical demand to produce an ‘integrated history of the Holocaust’ that does not domesticate the past.2 But I go on to suggest that, somewhat ironically, by conforming to his own guidelines, Friedländer has brought about precisely that which he appeared to want to resist: the historicisation of the Holocaust. I will not argue that this is a bad outcome. Instead, Friedländer’s achievement rests in bringing about a practical reconciliation between himself and Broszat by furthering a process of historicisation (Broszat’s aim) but maintaining the Holocaust as the central point of importance in the consideration of the Nazi regime (the loss of which was Friedländer’s fear in the exchange). The Years of Extermination shows that the historian is able ‘to consider the Nazi era as any other era, in terms of historical analysis’ and reveals how Friedländer was working in the book towards proving his earlier assertion that ‘historicization can be completed only if the crimes of the Nazi regime are entirely integrated within a complex historical context’.3 One could go so far as to say that with his historicisation of the Holocaust, Friedländer finally emerges victorious on a practical level (he had always been victorious on a moral and theoretical level) in his debate with Broszat. 37

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In revisiting the famous ‘controversy’ with Broszat on the question of historicisation, I want first to suggest that Friedländer has made a major contribution to the historicisation of the Holocaust despite his earlier warnings about the risks of such an attempt. Although there are many seminal texts on the historical representation of the Holocaust (one thinks of the writings of Dominick LaCapra, Berel Lang, Lawrence Langer and Dan Diner among others4 ), the Friedländer–Broszat exchange has been described as ‘perhaps the exemplary document of a tough, entirely candid, post-Shoah German-Jewish dialogue’.5 It speaks to the preoccupations of the generation of historians who had lived through the war (and in Broszat’s case, though it was not known at the time, he had applied to join the NSDAP in 1944 as a young man6 ) and who wanted to write the history of the war and the Holocaust but equally feared the consequences of doing so. The exchange thus foreshadowed the thrust of the debates about Holocaust representation that were just beginning to take off in the late 1980s, debates which centred around the question of ‘postmodernism’. The questions raised by historians like Friedländer and Diner, in Nicolas Berg’s opinion, ‘were so important in the case of Germany because they pointed out at an early stage of the historiographical debate the theoretical shortcomings of descriptive and purely empirical research’.7 The implications of these objections were felt much more widely in the historical profession and were not confined to Germany, although the continued stress on a more or less positivist methodology in the history-writing of the Holocaust – especially in perpetrator research – suggests that this debate needs reviving.8 But, as Berg notes, ‘No document in the history of historiography has revealed with such clarity the blind spots in German historiographical research’ as the Friedländer–Broszat exchange.9 I will not provide here a detailed summary of the well-known encounter.10 The basic disagreement between the two historians rested on their understanding of whether representatives of the perpetrators and victims could present objective scholarship on the subject. Broszat maintained that Jewish historians, by virtue of their subject position, could not do so, but that non-Jewish German historians could. He further argued that the process of doing so would contribute to the desirable outcome of historicising National Socialism. The ‘epistemological difference’ between them consisted in Broszat’s attempt ‘to ascribe the opposition between “history” and “memory” to the respective situations of the writers concerned’.11 For Broszat ‘memory’, which was legitimate in its own right, was ‘a matter for Jews’ and their experience of mourning, but Jews could not be expected to write ‘history’, which is scientific and objective. Friedländer, by contrast, ‘regarded the binary visions as fundamental to both sides’,12 that is, he believed that German historians were every bit as likely as Jewish historians to base their choice of interpretive perspective on their personal experience (whether consciously or unconsciously). Both ‘memory’ and ‘history’, for Friedländer,

Saul Friedländer and Holocaust Historiography

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inhered in the process of writing history, and historicisation that aspired only to the latter at the expense of the former would be sterile and morally problematic. It is important to recall that Friedländer was never opposed to the idea of historicisation per se: ‘for any historian, historicization, understood in its most general sense as the approach to the Nazi era with all the methods at the disposal of the historian, without any forbidden questions, is selfevident’.13 His fear was that a certain form of historicisation, notably that which focused on the ‘normal’ aspects of the Third Reich, would miss the point that our interest in that regime is generated by its extraordinary crimes and our post-Holocaust inability fully to incorporate them into existing frameworks of thought. Thus, he wrote to Broszat: I agree with you that the historian, as historian, cannot consider the Nazi era from its catastrophic end only. According to the accepted historical method, we have to start at the beginning and follow the manifold paths as they present themselves, including numerous developments within German society which had little to do with Auschwitz, and this throughout the history of the era. But the historian knows the end and he shares this knowledge with his reader. This knowledge should not hamper the exploration of all the possible avenues and interpretations, but it compels the historian to choose the central elements around which his unfolding narrative is implicitly built. In short, we come back to the problem of the dominant focus.14 Or, as he wrote elsewhere, ‘if one admits that the Jewish problem was at the center, was the very essence of the system, many of these studies lose their coherence, and historiography is confronted with an anomaly that defies the normal interpretive categories’.15 No wonder that he could claim, in 1994, that Jewish historians too were at a loss to produce an overall history of the extermination of the Jews of Europe that is not a mere textbook presentation, or an analysis of the internal cogs and wheels of the destruction machinery, or a compendium of separate monographs. The ‘Final Solution’ in its epoch has not yet found its historian; and the problem cannot be reduced to a mere technical issue.16 Still, by the time the first volume of Nazi Germany and the Jews appeared just a few years later, as Aschheim notes, Friedländer ‘considerably modified his opposition to what he took to be a crucial methodological tool of historicization – Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) – and his suspicion that it essentially served “normalizing” tendencies’.17 In fact – and perhaps contrary to the expectations of some historians18 – the process of

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writing the history of everyday life under Nazism as it transpired in the post-unification context of the 1990s did not promote apologetic tendencies. Rather, German historiography of the Holocaust has not only grown in size and sophistication but also retained its position as a barometer of the German public sphere. In fact, focusing on ‘normality’ need not be a zero-sum game with the focus on genocide, as Charles Maier presciently pointed out some years earlier when – in reply to the question ‘must the effort at “historicization” end in apology?’ – he argued that ‘it must risk apology but need not lead to it’.19 What Friedländer achieves with The Years of Extermination, in fact, is a historicisation that preserves the Holocaust as the centrepiece of the Third Reich and thus of the historical enterprise. One can still write histories of aspects of Nazi Germany that are not directly about the persecution of the Jews before World War II or the Holocaust, but it is no longer possible to write about the Third Reich without mentioning racial policy, antisemitism, the exclusion of ‘others’ from the Volksgemeinschaft or genocide as the culminating point of the regime, just as it is no longer possible for serious historians to write histories of the war – even strictly military histories – without referring to the murder of the Jews.20 Even if, as some have started to assert, the ‘racial state’ paradigm overstates the extent of the Third Reich’s internal coherence and takes the regime’s selfimage too readily at its own word, yet the importance of the Holocaust for understanding the Third Reich as such is now very widely accepted amongst historians. Apart from the fundamental issue of historicisation, Friedländer also penned a number of essays in the 1980s and 1990s that dealt with historical methodology. Among his concerns were, as I suggested at the outset, questions of narrative structure, multivocality and the incorporation of memory and testimony into the historian’s text. Let us see how the structures and guidelines laid down by Friedländer in those essays correspond to his practice in the two volumes of Nazi Germany and the Jews and, more important, whether they brought about the kind of results that Friedländer anticipated. In order to combat the problems of mythologisation, avoidance and traumatic transference, Friedländer proposed a number of desiderata for future historians. Foremost among them was the ‘self-awareness of the historian’ which necessitates ‘the sporadic but forceful presence of commentary’. The voice of the historian should be clearly heard, Friedländer recommended, in order not to succumb to what we might call the ‘mythical real’ or the ‘idyllic law’ of narrative, that is, the sense that a compelling narrative describes the world fully, transparently and with mimetic accuracy.21 ‘The commentary’, Friedländer continued, in a much-cited passage, ‘should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure.’ Friedländer’s belief was that this insertion of the historian’s voice into the text, fragmenting its narrative progression, would ‘allow for an integration


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of the so-called “mythic memory” of the victims within the overall representation of the past, without it becoming an “obstacle” for “rational historiography” ’.22 Here one sees a methodological statement put forward in order to help the reader understand what Friedländer wanted to achieve in the two volumes of Nazi Germany and the Jews. In volume one, The Years of Persecution, readers noted the interspersing of Nazi decrees with diaries and letters of their victims; they noted Friedländer’s sensitivity to the responses of the churches and the world of arts and letters to the persecution of the Jews, his keen eye for the telling details: the moving letter or powerful speech. Over the course of the book, certain individuals recurrently appear, their fates standing for the steadily worsening situation for the German Jews. Thus, on the one hand, we see Friedländer fulfilling his requirements for a historical narrative that is fragmented, splintered and fractured by the historian’s voice and by the twists and turns of a text that moves ceaselessly between ‘official’ discourse, that is, Nazi documents, the victims and the bystanders. As he wrote, ‘The Alltagsgeschichte of German society has its necessary shadow: the Alltagsgeschichte of its victims’,23 and they do indeed co-exist in Friedländer’s text. And yet, on the other hand, the text is constructed masterfully, with a sure guiding hand and the control of an apparently all-seeing narrator. As Confino notes, Friedländer presents an ‘overall interpretative framework’ with the result that we are presented with ‘a sort of a total history (in a historiographical age that repudiates it) that “penetrates all the nooks and crannies of European space” ’.24 There is indeed a paradox here: in seeking to stay true to (for want of a better term – I suspect that Friedländer, like Hayden White, dislikes it) ‘postmodern’ dictums of resisting closure, offering multiple voices and fracturing the narrative so as to break with what Barthes called the ‘effect of the real’, Friedländer actually produces a text that is impressively coherent, carefully structured and beautifully written. Precisely insofar as it succeeds in achieving its goals, the demand for an alternative history has actually produced the epitome of Holocaust historiography, since it appears to cover almost everything (though this effect disguises the fact that certain major aspects of Holocaust historiography such as perpetrator research are only dealt with fleetingly, at least on an explicit level) and to have contained all this information within a narrative frame that is at once highly readable, controlled and clearly argued. Even the intrusion of the historian’s voice does not alienate but provides a curious comfort, as one senses that one is in the hands of a sure guide. Friedländer will not be dissatisfied with this outcome. As noted above, in his exchange with Broszat he did not oppose historicisation as such. Thus, if he has succeeded in historicising the Holocaust in such a way that it contains the ‘mythic memory’ of the victims and ‘rational historiography’ in a single structure then this would appear to be a victory of historical methodology

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over oft-heard mystical demands to maintain the Holocaust as an event ‘outside of history’, for fear that in historicising it, it would lose this ‘sacred’ aura. Friedländer wants to say that one can treat the Holocaust as history, like any other event, and still retain a sense of the tremendum. This is not to say that objections against the book cannot be raised. In the light of the last two decades’ research on the decision-making process for the ‘Final Solution’, Friedländer’s strongly intentionalist perspective seems at times a somewhat blunt instrument. Nevertheless, Friedländer is explicit about his explanatory framework, noting his belief in ‘the centrality of ideological–cultural factors as the prime movers of Nazi policies in regard to the Jewish issue’.25 Even so, by making ‘redemptive antisemitism’ function as his overall explanatory and interpretive framework – a stance that he had long held, of course26 – the ‘postmodern’ textual devices such as fracturing the narrative are well contained. Thus the sense of order and continuity that is the overall impression one takes from reading the book: the narrative may be broken, multiple voices may inhabit its pages, but the analytical tool holding it all together is clear and straightforward. Interestingly, in an age of testimony and autobiographical fiction where we have become accustomed to hearing the author’s voice and to chronological acrobatics, Friedländer’s conceptual framework is more controversial – certainly amongst Holocaust historians – than the self-consciously ‘literary’ devices he uses in constructing the text. Whilst there has been a ‘return of ideology’ in the historiography, the many ‘regional’ and institutional studies that have appeared over the last decade or so, and especially the rapid growth of ‘perpetrator research’ (Täterforschung), suggest that the interplay between centre and periphery and between ideological and ‘pragmatic’ factors (such as greed) as motors of the killing process is extremely complex.27 For many historians, ‘redemptive antisemitism’, especially as it was adhered to by only a minority – albeit the most influential – of the Nazi leaders, may be a necessary but not a sufficient explanation. Perhaps more worrying is the fact that Friedländer’s emphasis on bringing in the ‘voices’ of the victims perpetuates, according to one critic, the divide between the German and European history of the Nazi genocide on the one hand and the Jewish history of the Shoah on the other. Friedländer handles testimonies and diaries far more sensitively than most historians of the Holocaust and writes at the outset of his book that ‘The voices of the victims will be heard in this volume, and yet all of them, as different as they may be, offer but a faint glimpse of the extraordinary diversity that was the world of European Jewry on the edge of destruction.’28 However, as Amos Goldberg explains: Jewish sources indeed play a major role in the book, but they always appear as ‘voices’. Contrary to the integration of the perpetrators’ personal accounts into the narrative, the integration of the victims’ diaries


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and accounts lacks almost any synthetic, analytic or conceptual framework. They are simply there, somehow piercing or punctuating the narrative. They therefore re-present the bare experience of the victim within the historical account. Thus, while the perpetrators have a narrative and a history the victims have only experiences and voices.29 Goldberg’s argument is that in the ‘era of the witness’ in which we now live it is not so daring to bring out these voices as it was, say, when Gideon Hausner made the same decision at the Eichmann trial in 1961, allowing witness after witness to take the stand, even though this was not strictly necessary for the purpose of proving Eichmann guilty.30 By appearing in a way that is more or less expected in a culture suffused with narratives of victimhood, Friedländer’s strategy means that ‘these voices also function as creating a kind of melancholic pleasure’.31 Instead of a situation where disembodied ‘raw voices’ appear as bearers of the disbelief that Friedländer hopes to sustain, Goldberg proposes to make these texts ‘objects of rigorous scrutiny in order not only to sense disbelief but also to conceptualize and better understand what this disbelief is made of’.32 All great works of history appear both as the last word on their subject and act as spurs to more research and debate. By bringing about this remarkable synthesis, historicising the Holocaust in a context that ensures its centrality to the history of the Third Reich and World War II, I agree with Alon Confino that The Years of Extermination marks in some ways the end-point of Holocaust historiography as it has thus far been conceived.33 In the remainder of this chapter, I want to consider how the The Years of Extermination opens up new ways of thinking. ∗ Friedländer has written that the problem of incomprehension, of the feeling of opaqueness that remains after all explanations have been offered, results from the breaking of a taboo, possibly the most fundamental of all taboos: the Nazi perpetration of systematic, prolonged extermination of categories of human beings considered as non-human. Such behaviour causes instinctive repulsion at the level of the species as well as that of the individual. The very disappearance of these psychological (or sociobiological) barriers concerning the ‘scientific’ mass killing of other human beings represents, it seems to me, the first and foremost issue for which our usual categories of interpretation are insufficient.34 He is quite right, of course, to note that some aspect of the Holocaust remains, for want of a better expression, ‘mysterious’; indeed, I would argue that that is a good thing, for to have concluded otherwise is a quite

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frightening prospect and would go beyond merely historicising the Holocaust. But I would also argue that these conclusions apply not only to the Holocaust. How will scholars, artists and politicians ‘explain’ the essential about the Rwandan genocide? Friedländer’s comments about the limits of representation are quite correct, but no less applicable to other genocides or, as Kershaw notes, to writing the history of Soviet society under Stalin.35 Furthermore, if Friedländer is right that the overcoming of the normal barriers of ‘civilisation’ constitutes the main blockage of our comprehension, then perhaps we can expect to go no further than his remarkable polyvocal and multi-narrative synthesis, since it marks the end-point of the historicisation process. Incorporating Alltagsgeschichte and the voices of the victims, breaking the linear narrative and taking numerous vantage points, The Years of Extermination is not only the culmination of the theoretical guidelines Friedländer has set out over many years but also proof that irrespective of the innovativeness of the narrative there remains ‘an opaqueness at the core’. I assume that Friedländer would be more worried if we were to conclude that such opaqueness was not present. Just as Raul Hilberg once (somewhat unexpectedly) voiced the concern that ‘some people might read what I have written in the mistaken belief that here, on my printed pages, they will find the true ultimate Holocaust as it really happened’,36 so Friedländer’s magnum opus implies the same fear, although there is a remarkable tension between the all-encompassing nature of his massive narrative and the desire, implicit in it and on the basis of Friedländer’s earlier theoretical writings, to ‘question any partial conclusion, to withstand the need for closure’.37 Whilst I share Friedländer’s sense that Nazism’s radical anthropology – the attack on the human species qua species – takes us to the heart of its ideology and worldview, and thus to the Holocaust, I would like to develop this point by suggesting that precisely in this claim lies a clue to one of the ways in which Holocaust historiography will develop in the near future. In fact, the breaking of this barrier – which I prefer to call ‘anthropological’ rather than psychological or sociobiological – is the concern of scholars, such as Alon Confino, who are starting to look at Nazism and the Holocaust through the lenses of cultural history. Although several of these scholars, notably Amos Goldberg and Manuela Consonni, are using cultural history to think about Nazism’s Jewish victims, the future of Täterforschung lies, in my opinion, less in social psychology (in the manner of Harald Welzer, Steven K. Baum or James Waller) or prosopography (such as Michael Mann’s large-scale study of perpetrator biographies) and more in cultural history, by which I mean (pace Lynn Hunt) the study of the past from a symbolic point of view, the search for meaning in the past rather than for causal explanation.38 To take one example, Goldberg has written that the way in which Nazi ideology worked was to unite the signifier, the signified and the real referent, so that real Jews became inseparable from what was said about them: ‘a Jew as a signifier is a


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Jew as a concept is a Jew as a real material body’. They were reduced (dehumanised, in the usual vocabulary) to their representation, blocking any vital and open identity and bringing about their ‘symbolic death’. ‘The subject’, writes Goldberg, ‘receives the imposed signifier in a way that fills all voids and lacks in his or her being; the search for a transformative identity and for new objects of desire comes to a halt and the subject of desire is murdered.’39 This is a suggestive line of argument and is of a piece with Goebbels’ words of November 1941, following the introduction of the yellow star in Germany: ‘There is no difference between Jews and Jews.’40 I suggest that it can be equally usefully applied to the perpetrators, for they too imposed on themselves ‘total identification with symbols that represent[ed] them’; that is to say, those that made up the ‘true believers’ reduced themselves in a not dissimilar way to the way in which they reduced their victims. As Arne Johan Vetlesen has argued, in cases of human evil we witness the phenomenon of ‘double dehumanisation’, in which perpetrators dehumanise their victims but also themselves: ‘In making the ends of a master into his own ends, the individual allows himself to turn into a mere means in his persecution and eventual killing of persons who are regarded not as (Kantian) ends in themselves but as mere means.’41 Or, more poetically, in the words of Edmond Jabès, racists are ‘people who refused their differences, but acted on this position only with regard to others’.42 In the light of the recent explosion of Täterforschung mentioned above, we can see that there is much to be gained by a cultural historical exploration of the world of the perpetrators.43 The vast literature on perpetrators encompasses biographies of leading figures in the Third Reich,44 studies of groups or institutions such as the Order Police or the RSHA45 and examinations of the interplay of the various motives that underpinned participation in violent and/or criminal acts.46 In terms of explaining the complexities of human behaviour, this body of research has considerably deepened our understanding of perpetrators, who are no longer viewed as sadists on the one hand or driven solely by ideology on the other. We now know that the same person could be both a ‘desk killer’ and a ‘shooter’47 and that even those who most decisively and radically attacked the Jews as the root of all evil could also engage in or excuse looting, that is to say that a ‘high-minded’ belief in the Nazis’ ‘world-historical mission’ was compatible with base violence and gangsterism.48 These studies, however, all examine perpetrators ‘from outside’, so to speak, that is to say based on their writings, speeches and actions, in the way that historians might write about a group of coalminers or Renaissance scholars. We need instead to focus on perpetrators ‘from the inside’, in other words, to grasp the ways in which they sought to shape and to understand the world. Two examples will serve to show what I mean: Thomas Kühne’s study of male bonding in the Wehrmacht and Michael Wildt’s work on the symbolic use of violence in the creation of the people’s

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community (Volksgemeinschaft). In his work on Kameradschaft (comradeship) in the Wehrmacht, Kühne argues that German soldiers fought so bitterly not only because they were hardened antisemities or because they unquestioningly followed orders but also because of their desire to create a community, which they did through mass violence. Kühne cites Michael Geyer’s concept of the ‘Vergesellschaftung der Gewalt’ (‘socialization of violence’) and argues that Kameradschaft is a guiding concept through which to provide an ‘experience history’ (Erfahrungsgeschichte) not only of National Socialism but of Germany’s transition from Nazism to democracy.49 In other words, Kameradschaft was a symbolic form that provided a way for the war generation to understand itself, although not all soldiers identified with the myth of Kameradschaft to the same extent. Even so, Kühne argues that although there was ‘a plurality of experiences’ among soldiers, these led in the direction not of ‘cultural pluralism’ but of ‘social unity’: ‘the cohesion of the National Socialist “Volksgemeinschaft” and its soldiers in the war’. Kameradschaft is the Leitbild and myth that held the Volksgemeinschaft and soldiers together and provided this conjunction with continuity.50 Thus, Kühne expands his argument out from the military to say that the Volksgemeinschaft ‘presented itself as a total society of comrades’.51 Kameradschaft became official state doctrine under Nazism. Whilst the home front was of course not equivalent to a barracks on the eastern front, this is an insightful concept for understanding the self-identity of the Third Reich. What applied to the Wehrmacht, Kühne suggests, was applicable to the Third Reich in general, for the military was held up as the embodiment of German values. Michael Wildt’s study of the development of the Volksgemeinschaft shows not only (particularly through some striking photographs) how rapidly and wholeheartedly the majority of the ‘Aryan’ population adapted themselves to the new racial paradigm but also that this development was double-edged. Nazi culture, Wildt explains, meant the entwinement of the cosy and gemütlich with extraordinary violence: From the very start, the inclusive moment of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ was bound together with the violent exclusion of the so-called ‘asocial’, of the supposedly hereditarily inferior and, above all, the Jews. What former ‘Volksgenossen’ eagerly wanted to keep separate in their memories, namely the persecution of the Jews and the experience of community under National Socialism, belonged inseparably together, indeed made up the two sides of a political project: the destruction of civil society and the building of a new, racial order. . . . Antisemitic violence not only represented a tool of National Socialist politics; violence against Jews was the core of this politics.52 Or, as he writes elsewhere, ‘The Nazi regime communalised violence [vergemeinschaftete die Gewalt], permitting “Volksgenossen” to participate in it.’53


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Here we can profitably bring in Eelco Runia’s provocative claim that ‘People start to make history not despite the fact that it is at odds with – yes, destroys – the stories they live by, but because it destroys the stories they live by.’54 The examples of the Wehrmacht and the Volksgemeinschaft, as explicated by Kühne and Wildt, show this process in action: even as they ended up destroying themselves, these institutions acquired more and more prestige and devotion to them grew ever more frenzied. Part of the problem in commemorating the destruction they wrought – apart from guilt and resentment – has been the sense that Runia describes of feeling severed from the past because although we cannot deny that terrible actions took place, ‘we cannot really imagine the position from which we came to commit them’.55 Importantly, for our topic, Runia also notes that the incommensurability between these acts (which he calls ‘sublime “acts of people” ’) and the ability to acknowledge having committed them stems from the fact that the explanations for the acts are under-determined and that the sense of loss to which this feeling gives rise ‘expunges the thought that we could ever have jumped upon it – and it miraculously transforms agents into victims’.56 It is true that Runia runs the risk of importing the past into the present, as if it were a living thing, and I do not wish to suggest that I agree with Runia that the past is enduringly present.57 But for our purposes here, it suffices to suggest that one way of understanding the Third Reich and its agents from within is by asking after their construction and destruction of the stories by which they made sense (and non-sense) of the world around them.58 The approach that I propose here is not a biopolitical one derived from Foucault or Agamben, as one might suspect when confronted with Friedländer’s reference to the threat to ‘the species’. It is rather a cultural history that seeks to understand the past through symbolic action, in particular through the stories that actors in the past told themselves.59 Such an approach has become possible, thanks in part to the work of Friedländer – especially his Reflections of Nazism (1982) – and other leading historians of the Holocaust. We have, in The Years of Persecution and The Years of Extermination, the culmination of the great narrative analyses of the Holocaust. It is an extraordinary achievement. But Friedländer’s text – precisely because it incorporates so generously many different voices and approaches to the past – seems less of an artifice and more of an allinclusive narrative than his theoretical writings suggested such a text would be; thus it pushes the historicisation process forward maybe even more than he expected or desired. In other words, it is in some ways a victim of its own success, although whether or not Friedländer consciously decided to give up the ‘productive tension’ between his meta-history and his ‘concrete history’ in favour of the latter remains to be determined. Thus, if we want to rest assured that the ‘opaqueness at the core’ remains apparent, the best way to do so now is to probe it directly, not with the hope of rendering it transparent, but perhaps arriving at a state of translucence. Here then we

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must push at the issues that leave us uncomprehending, most notably the Nazi breaking with the moral law in favour of redefining ‘the human’.60 This behaviour does indeed repulse us at the level of the species as well as the individual. But with ‘traditional’ Holocaust historiography, based on archival documents and a quite restricted methodological repertoire, now reaching its logical end-point in The Years of Extermination (precisely because that book is more far-reaching methodologically and stylistically than most synthetic histories, not because it is ‘restricted’), the way is now open for some meta-historical reflection to take place, something which has been off the agenda since the considerable impact of Friedländer’s Probing the Limits of Representation of 1992. On the one hand, this opening will permit the consideration of broad historical–philosophical questions of epistemology, understanding and the meaning of the past. Perhaps of more significance, it will also permit the development of innovative historical methodologies, with historians breaking free of what Friedländer himself described many years ago as a ‘moral imperative’ to talk of the Holocaust only within ‘certain accepted norms of aesthetic collaboration or intellectual discourse’.61 These norms meant that the field was dominated – as it still is – by a more or less positivist recovery of archival material described in the style of political history, with little space for social, cultural, intellectual or oral history. That situation is now changing, not in the sense that Broszat’s call for historicisation has triumphed, but through a historical reckoning that resists the closure of refamiliarisation being encouraged through methodological variation. With such research, we will still be left with a feeling that, as Friedländer put it, quoting Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Shoah carries an excess, and this excess cannot be defined except by some sort of general statement about something “which must be able to be put into phrases [but] cannot yet be”.’62 Indeed, the new research is aimed at producing neither synthetic narrative accounts of the ‘how’ of the Holocaust, its ‘mechanics’, nor even an all-embracing history of the victims. Rather, it seeks to remain true to the historian’s dictum, ‘always historicise!’ but by expanding the aspects of the past that can be historicised, including the cultural, intellectual and emotional aspects. One can investigate emotions in the past but cannot indulge in sentimentality or mawkishness. Thus, historical explanation can probe deeply into the mindset of the Nazis but without providing emotional respite, thereby resisting Friedländer’s fear that ‘whether one wishes it or not, the very momentum of historiography may serve to neutralize the past’.63 Saul Friedländer has not only pointed the way since the 1970s by being a rare example of a historian who is willing to go beyond the normal domains of historical research (think of L’antisémitisme Nazi, History and Psychoanalysis and Reflections of Nazism), but is also, now, the author of the most ambitious narrative history of the Holocaust, one that combines scholarly rigour with dignity and, if it is not too oxymoronic, an emotional dispassion.

4 The Holocaust and ‘The Human’

According to the unreliable Hermann Rauschning, Hitler once proclaimed the following: Two worlds face one another – the men of God and the men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god. He must have come from another root of the human race. I set the Aryan and the Jew over against each other; and if I call one of them a human being I must call the other something else. The two are as widely separated as man and beast. Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.1 It may or may not be the case, as an eminent literary critic wants us to believe, that Shakespeare is to be credited with inventing our notion of ‘the human’.2 It is, however, apparently clear who destroyed it. ‘It seems’, Jacob Talmon wrote almost 50 years ago, ‘that nazism achieved considerable success in stifling in many of its adherents the sense of the unity of the human species’.3 On the one hand, then, we should not be surprised to find critics such as Aimé Césaire talking of ‘pseudo-humanism’ in the wake of colonialism and the Holocaust. Césaire says of humanism that ‘for too long it has diminished the rights of man’ and is thus tempted to dismiss any notion of ‘the human’ as ‘sordidly racist’. On the other hand, one might be justified in arguing, with Martha Nussbaum, that the Nazis’ attempt to exclude certain groups from its purview should lead us back to the search for a minimal definition of ‘the human’ from which no one can be excluded.4 Despite being sympathetic to the first view, in what follows I argue that after Auschwitz, and following Arendt, rather than rejecting humanism tout court, a notion of ‘the human’ that is neither divisible nor imperialist, racist or paternalist needs to be found. This is what Paul Gilroy calls ‘planetary humanism’, a humanism that seeks to mediate between the local or culturally sensitive and the universal.5 49

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At the heart of Nazism lay a radical philosophical anthropological challenge: a calling into question of what it means to be human. In this chapter, I respond to this challenge by showing what it is about the Holocaust that demands our continued attention; in other words, what it means to take the ‘post’ in ‘post-Auschwitz’ seriously. I will do so by appealing to the notion of ‘the human’. In the process, I will not comprehensively trawl through all recent Holocaust historiography but will range widely but selectively through some of that literature, applying to it concepts borrowed from Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, one of the most insightful critics of Nazism, it was precisely the fact that the totalitarian regime destroyed the possibility of political action, depriving its victims of the anthropological status of human beings, which constituted the awful uniqueness of the Holocaust.6 Sadly, Arendt’s view was achieved only at the price of a certain ethnocentrism, which meant that she valorised the sufferings of the Jews over earlier genocides, particularly those of antiquity. In Queensland, colonial settlers regularly referred to the Aborigines as ‘pests’ to be ‘got rid of’; as George Carrington put it in 1871, the Aborigine ‘has come to be considered in the light of a troublesome wild animal, to be shot and hunted down, whenever seen in the open country’.7 Similarly, Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to Turkey, had already described the genocide of the Armenians in similar terms: ‘When the caravans first started, the individuals bore some resemblance to human beings; in a few hours, however, the dust of the road plastered their faces and clothes, the mud caked their lower members, and the slowly advancing mobs, frequently bent with fatigue and crazed by the brutality of their “protectors”, resembled some new and animal species.’8 More disturbingly, this ethnocentrism left Arendt apparently less moved by the treatment of colonial subjects during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonialism’s victims fell, in her terminology, into the category animal laborans, ‘natural’ men who had not developed the capacity for political activity and whose murder therefore lacked the same poignancy as that of civilized people.9 Nevertheless, Arendt’s insight that the essence of the Holocaust lay neither in the number of victims nor even in the use of modern technology and bureaucracy to implement it, but in its anthropological assault, ‘making human beings as human beings superfluous’,10 carries great weight, and need not be exclusively reserved for the genocide of the Jews. In what follows, I argue that the reason for the Holocaust’s enduring power to fascinate and repel, to draw us recurrently into the depths of depravity even as it forces us away, lies precisely in this all-out war against the notion of ‘the human’ that had characterised Western thought since the days of Shakespeare (whether or not he was the major architect of this new creature, a claim, it has to be admitted, which stretches the imagination somewhat). I will, however,

The Holocaust and ‘The Human’

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make this claim in the light of other such attacks, in particular the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in order not to follow Arendt’s ethnocentric presumptions. For, whilst I believe that the Holocaust does demand our special attention, it should not do so at the expense of other victims of Western duplicity. In a famous letter to Jaspers, written shortly after the war, Arendt first put forward an insight that she would develop in her subsequent works: ‘Perhaps what is behind it all is only that individual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but that an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being.’11 Although in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt set out an argument that was meant to apply equally to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, her claims have stood the test of time far better where the analysis of Nazism is concerned, as the following discussion will show. Although Arendt’s claims about both systems carrying out terror in the name of Laws of History are correct,12 her analysis turns again and again to the death camps, a feature not of the Soviet Gulag (whose atrociousness lies elsewhere – this brief discussion is not meant to downplay its significance or horror) but of the Nazi regime. Arendt’s basic claim, then, is that the camps lie at the heart of the Nazi project, for they were the places where human nature was to be reshaped according to ‘the very realistic totalitarian attempt to rob man of his nature under the pretext of changing it’.13 Thus, it is not actually so much a question of ‘reshaping’ human nature as attempting to deny it altogether to certain categories of people. Both [totalitarian systems] mean to make human beings in their infinite variety and their unique individuality superfluous. . . . the camps serve, among other purposes, as laboratories in which human beings of the most varied kinds are reduced to an always constant collection of reactions and reflexes. . . . The concentration camps not only eradicate people; they also further the monstrous experiment, under scientifically exacting conditions, of destroying spontaneity as an element of human behaviour and of transforming people into something that is even less than animal, namely, a bundle of reactions that, given the same set of conditions, will always react in the same way.14 There are two slightly different arguments at work here. One concerns the inmates of the camps, those who were being ‘re-educated’ or ‘taught’ to behave and think differently; this applies both to Nazism and Stalinism. Here Arendt observes the ways in which the two regimes tried to mould human beings so that they conformed to the same laws or norms of behaviour and thought. The other concerns the death camps, which applies only to the

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Third Reich and in which Arendt observes the Nazis’ attempt to rid the world of certain people, primarily Jews, in order to redefine what it is to be human. The first may be summarised by Arendt’s claim: Totalitarian lawfulness, executing the laws of Nature or History, does not bother to translate them into standards of right and wrong for individual human beings, but applies them directly to the ‘species’, to mankind. The laws of Nature or History, if properly executed, are expected to produce as their end a single ‘Mankind’, and it is this expectation that lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments.15 The second may be summarised as follows: it is surprising to see how, for all practical political purposes, these ideologies always result in the same ‘law’ of elimination of individuals for the sake of the process or progress of the species. . . . this mankind which is the end and at the same time the embodiment of either History or Nature requires permanent sacrifices, the permanent elimination of hostile or parasitic or unhealthy classes or races in order to enter upon its bloody eternity.16 Both, however, come together to the extent that ‘The purity of the experiment would be compromised if one admitted even as a remote possibility that these specimens of the species homo sapiens had ever existed as real human beings.’17 Thus, whether through the harsh regimes of the concentration camps or the policy of annihilation carried out at the death camps, Nazism sought to realise the ‘Laws of Nature’ – that is, to bring about the triumph of the Aryan race, thus ending the struggle between the forces of good and evil that drove History – by redefining ‘the human’. The final goal of both Nazism and Stalinism, according to Arendt, was not a ‘traditional’ one of territorial or imperial domination or of revolutionising political systems; rather, it was something more frightening: ‘What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.’18 ∗ From a historian’s perspective, Arendt’s insights are useful where they reveal the conceptual limits of the current historiography of the Holocaust. Although the detailed empirical research on the Holocaust continues to expand and to make imaginative and innovative use of previously unused archives, especially in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, it is often undertaken with scant regard to broader interpretations of the Holocaust, the reasons that have given rise to such enormous interest in the


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subject in the first place. Arendt’s theorising about the Holocaust and ‘the human’ provides a helpful theoretical supplement to much of the empirical scholarship. Recent historical research has started uncovering in great detail the ‘mundanities’ of the genocide of the Jews. It seems that the murder of the Jews in the occupied eastern territories was first begun under ‘economic’ pressures: the necessity of feeding an occupied population and a huge occupying force in the autumn and winter of 1941. Only later, in this reading, with the declaration of war against the United States, was the step to full-scale murder of all the European Jews taken.19 Hence the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 has, in the eyes of at least one scholar, regained its historiographical status as the vital meeting to determine the course of the ‘Final Solution’ that most historians have long denied it.20 Yet whilst this pattern of events is clear enough – and it is, of course, open to dispute – it does not really explain the choice of the Jews as the victims. Only a more ‘traditional’ emphasis on Judenpolitik, that is, on Nazi ideology (without necessarily seeing the command structure of genocide in the anarchic-occupied territories as the rigid pyramid of the Führerprinzip), can help in showing why the Jews became the victims of this ‘rationalising’ decision-making process. Once one sees this fact, it is also clear that the emphasis on the economic or logistic aspects of the decision for genocide omits something vital. Although the – mainly German – scholars who have undertaken this research in the newly available Eastern European archives are to be applauded for expanding our knowledge of the course of events in 1941–42, they do a disservice to understanding the origins of the Holocaust if they take these logistical problems to be the cause of the murders in anything but the most limited, short-term sense. One does not need to think of ideology in terms of a monolithic propaganda machine bearing down on the subjects and soldiers of the Third Reich, as in a typical 1950s’ understanding of totalitarianism. Rather, the workings of fantasy, of the desire to murder the Jews or even the belief that the world would be a better place without them, with no accompanying feelings of enjoyment, purification or ecstatic participation in the community’s destiny, are all essential for understanding the background to the decision to murder the Jews (and not some other dispossessed group), and these precede any problem of military supplies or occupation economics. Philip Gourevitch writes, in the context of the Rwandan genocide, that ‘For those who set about systematically exterminating an entire people . . . blood lust surely helps. But the engineers and perpetrators of a genocide . . . need not enjoy killing, and they may even find it unpleasant. What is required above all is that they want their victims dead. They have to want it so badly that they consider it a necessity.’21 We know that only a minority of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were fanatical Nazis. For most, murder became something they felt had to be done, as the numerous letters

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and diaries written by the participants testify. Peer pressure to participate may, as Christopher Browning asserts, have played a role,22 but without a sense that what they were being asked to do was in some sense right, the ‘ordinary men’ of the Holocaust would have surely taken longer to become used to their work. When one member of Sonderkommando 4a (a subdivision of the Einsatzgruppen) testifies that ‘It’s almost impossible to imagine what nerves of steel it took to carry out that dirty work there. It was horrible . . . ’,23 it becomes clear that participation in murder must have been with the feeling that one was serving a greater good, not simply obtaining for oneself and one’s colleagues larger food rations. One must remember that, for the Nazis, ‘all roads lead to the Jew’.24 The same applies to the later, so-called industrial stage of the genocide, the use of gas chambers to murder the Jews en masse without the killers having to involve themselves in nasty, face-to-face operations. But there is more to the camps than simply the final developmental stage of Nazi murder, ‘the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realized’, the ‘anus mundi’.25 They embody the Nazi understanding of the world, as Alain Finkielkraut, following Arendt, explains: In such a system, the concentration camps are perhaps not economically useful, but they are ontologically necessary. Because, in order to assure the reign of the single will [la volonté unique], it is at the same time necessary to liquidate the Enemy of man, and to liquidate in man spontaneity, singularity, the unforeseeable, in short everything which makes up the unique character of the human person. The mills of death are equally laboratories of humanity without human beings.26 It is necessary to back up these claims. I will do so in two ways: first, by referring to the writings of Holocaust victims – diarists and survivors – in order to establish how they perceived themselves during the period of the genocide and how the perpetrators viewed them. Second, I will develop what these testimonies reveal about the concept of ‘the human’ by framing it in a discussion of the Holocaust’s implications for the concept of anthropology. This discussion will, of necessity, be no more than a pointer to future work, work which will need to consider the anthropological implications of the Holocaust in the light of other genocides, especially that in Rwanda. ∗ In his description of Treblinka, Jankiel Wiernik paints many horrific scenes, of which the following is typical: One of the Germans, a man named Sepp, was a vile and savage beast, who took special delight in torturing children. When he pushed women


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around and they begged him to stop because they had children with them, he would frequently snatch a child from the woman’s arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away. Such incidents were by no means isolated. Tragic scenes of this kind occurred all the time.27 Wiernik’s description is of the variety that often gets dismissed in Holocaust literature as an ‘exception’, an interruption by a rare moment of sadism to the relentless rhythm of industrial murder. But murder in the death camps was not self-sustaining, mechanical; it required the brutal participation of many guards, often Balts and Ukranians, and SS-men. Sepp’s murderous activities were in fact part of the everyday reality at Treblinka just as they were of the other concentration and death camps. What permitted such outbursts of rage and destructive violence? There are many psychological studies of aggression which show that violence need not be instrumental and that in an environment where the usual, ‘civilised’ checks on behaviour are withdrawn, whether through personal choice or through state decree, people will exercise ‘barbaric’ instincts (a word we still insist on using, as if to comfort ourselves, despite all that happened in the twentieth century, that there is something atavistic about violence and that it surely cannot be typical of modern societies28 ). Nevertheless, in the case of sustained murder, there must be more to the killings than a sudden outburst of energy or repressed rage. Perpetrators must also believe that their victims are unworthy of life. In the case of the Holocaust there is much to be said, especially in the face of the academically successful interpretation of the murders as industrial and somehow ‘neat’, for seeing the genocide as an outburst of excess energy.29 However, without the years of Nazi ideology portraying the Jews as ‘counter-human’ (Gegenmenschen) it is not possible to understand why the outburst, when it occurred, focused especially on the Jews.30 The first thing to note is that, in contrast to the scholars who are fascinated by the concept of ‘factory-line death’, Holocaust testimonies are pervaded by this atmosphere of violence, an all-encompassing mood which regularly breaks open into actual acts of violence, like those described above by Wiernik, a ‘work-Jew’ in Treblinka. The contrast is equally noticeable in the difference between the photographs taken by the SS of the killing process in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 (the so-called Lili Jacob Album), which depict the scene as orderly and tightly controlled, and the drawings made after his liberation by child survivor Thomas Geve, whose innocent eye reveals far more about the chaotic reality that actually prevailed.31 Most importantly, many of them voice the profound feeling – the feeling that broke so many of their comrades or fellow-Häftlinge – that they are no longer human or will shortly cease to be so. A few examples will suffice to illustrate this point.

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Many survivors testify to the feeling of being excluded from the ranks of humanity or to the fact that others were so excluded. Primo Levi knew his work-mate Null Achtzehn only by number: ‘He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.’32 Rudolf Reder, one ˙ death camp, noted of the ‘workof the two known survivors of the Bełzec Jews’ in his 1946 testimony that ‘We moved around like people without a will of their own: like one body. . . . We were just carrying on this dreadful existence mechanically.’33 The writings of the Sonderkommando men in Auschwitz, known as the ‘Scrolls of Auschwitz’, also testify to this denial of human status to the victims and to their own sense of dehumanisation. For example, Zalman Gradowski, the most literary of the writers, invited his future readers to ‘Forget your wife and children, your friends and acquaintances, forget the world you came from. Imagine that what you are seeing are not people, but despicable animals, animals which must be eliminated, for if not – your eyes will grow dim.’34 And this perception applied just as much to the ghettos as it did to the camps. In Łód´z, for example, the young diarist Dawid Sierakowiak noted on 20 May 1942 that ‘We are not considered humans at all; cattle for work or slaughter.’35 Or, as the Polish underground courier Jan Karski said of the Warsaw ghetto, which he had visited after being smuggled in by two Jewish leaders: ‘It was not a world. It was not a part of humanity. I was not part of it. I did not belong there. . . . I was told that these were human beings – they didn’t look like human beings.’36 Karski’s testimony in Lanzmann’s Shoah actually follows very closely what he had written over 30 years earlier in Story of a Secret State, the book he published on his arrival in the United States in 1944. There he wrote of how hard it was to describe the ghetto: ‘A cemetery? No, for these bodies were still moving, were indeed often violently agitated. These were still living people, if you could call them such. For apart from their skin, eyes, and voice there was nothing human left in these palpitating figures.’37 Jews in all circumstances during the Holocaust experienced this same sensation of fighting to hold on to their human status. Naomi Samson has recounted how, in hiding in a small underground shelter in Poland, she began to feel as if she were becoming an animal. Through a crack in the shelter, she could see animals eating on the farm in which she and her family were being hidden: My eyes nearly popped out watching them chew and drool over the food as they were eating. As I felt my tears and my saliva dripping onto my cold hands, I licked my hands without taking my eyes from those animals, ‘Lucky animals!’ I thought. Why couldn’t I be one? (Actually, I felt I was an animal in those days – an underprivileged animal.)38


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Of course, many of the Jewish victims realised what was being done to them, and testified to it later on. In Warsaw, Adina Blady Szwajger, a nurse in the children’s home, understood what the ghetto was doing to its inmates. Recounting a conversation with Fajgele, one of the children, she writes: ‘Somehow it turned out that we were talking like equals. That we were all equally afraid and that we, too, didn’t have much to eat but if we wanted to survive, we had to try to live like human beings, we had to remain human because they wanted to turn us into animals.’39 Or, as another survivor put it, ‘from the instant I grasped the motivating principle . . . it was as if I had awakened from a dream . . . I felt under orders to live. . . . And if I did die in Auschwitz, to die as a human being. . . . And a terrible struggle begun which went on day and night’.40 Elie Wiesel goes even further with respect to Auschwitz, saying that ‘At Auschwitz, not only man died, but the idea of man.’ As the Warsaw diarist Chaim Kaplan wrote: ‘We are segregated and separated from the world and the fullness thereof, driven out of the society of the human race.’41 No more proof is needed of the truth of Arendt’s claim that ‘Extermination happens to human beings who for all practical purposes are already “dead”. ’42 These quotations then are not mere metaphors; they are rather literal descriptions of the victims’ condition. The figure of the Muselmann is the ultimate proof of this process of dehumanisation, for the Muselmann is the archetypal image of the ‘not-yet-dead’. Although the image of the Muselmann has had to serve as a trope, especially in the work of Giorgio Agamben, in actual fact the existence of these ‘dead on leave’ testifies to the extent to which the Nazis realised their ambition of creating human beings without human status and annihilating human beings as if they were not part of the species.43 Indeed, the Nazis, who referred to the Slavs as Untermenschen (sub-humans) but to the Jews as Gegenmenschen (counterhumans) were all too aware of this aim. Goebbels, for example, noted in his diary: ‘We travel through the ghetto. We get out and observe everything in detail. It’s indescribable. These are not human beings any more, they are animals. Therefore, we have not a humanitarian task to perform, but a surgical one. One must cut here, in a radical way. Otherwise, one day, Europe will perish of the Jewish disease.’44 Nazi ideology envisaged redeeming the world from the threat posed by Jews masquerading as human beings.45 ∗ I have so far chosen to back up Arendt’s claims with reference to the Holocaust, since it was Nazism that Arendt herself examined (more compellingly than her analysis of Soviet Communism) in order to arrive at her claims about the nature of the camps. But the genocide of the Jews is no longer the only example of such anthropological refashioning, if it ever was. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 is equally instructive in this regard. Advocates of the uniqueness of the Holocaust must surely run up against the strongest

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challenge to their claims in the slaughter, in 100 days, of some 800,000 Tutsis by their Hutu neighbours in the spring of 1994. Although, on the one hand, the Rwandan genocide seems to fit the pattern of most ‘conventional’ genocides – interethnic competition flaring up in the context of longstanding political and economic rivalry – there are, on the other hand, many similarities with the Holocaust (apart from the fact that in the Holocaust there were not, as in most genocides, two warring factions). Take, for example, the language used. Just as the Nazis referred to the Jews as ‘vermin’ (Ungeziefer), so the Hutus called the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’ (inyenzi): ‘A cockroach gives birth to another cockroach . . . The history of Rwanda shows us clearly that a Tutsi always stays exactly the same, that he has never changed. The malice, the evil are just as we knew them in the history of our country.’ Just as the Nazis used euphemisms like ‘special treatment’ to mean murder, so the Hutu génocidaires spoke of ‘work’, setting the murder process into a familiar cultural framework of village labour service (umuganda).46 Take also the fact that the genocide was organised at the highest levels of state, something which Holocaust scholars such as Eberhard Jäckel or Steven Katz see as unique to the murder of the Jews. Take, as a corollary to this, the network of guilt established throughout Rwanda. In Germany, scholars have shown the extent to which knowledge of the murders was widespread, even if direct participation was not (nor required to be).47 Hutu Power took this a step further, declaring over national radio (RTLM) that all those who refused to take part as themselves were likely to be murdered.48 A large proportion of the population thus became an accomplice to genocide, and so the Kagame regime tried to face the appallingly difficult task of trying the génocidaires or having local communities do so using the system of gacaca (‘justice on the grass’), since only a few very high-level perpetrators can be tried at the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. Or take, finally, the jusqu’au boutiste nature of the killing; unlike genocides, such as in East Timor, where mass murder is of the ‘pacification’ variety, designed to achieve a territorial– political goal, but not to murder every member of the targeted group, the Rwandan Tutsis were all marked out to die because they were Tutsis: ‘at the heart of what happened in Rwanda is the fact that Tutsis were killed for having been born’.49 No wonder then that one Rwandan journalist refers to Hutu Power as ‘tropical Nazism’.50 These similarities between Rwanda and the Holocaust should not blind us to the differences. In Rwanda, the history of Hutu–Tutsi conflict goes back long before 1994; it should come therefore as no surprise that the occurrence of the genocide is tangled up in a murky moral grey area, not least the genocide of Hutus by Tutsis in neighbouring Burundi in 1972 or the atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) troops after their overthrow of the Hutu Power regime.51 In the Holocaust, by contrast, despite Levi’s ‘grey zones’, we have a case in which, as one scholar notes, ‘the distinction between victims and perpetrators is surely as clear and as simple


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as it is possible to be in the realm of human affairs’.52 Furthermore, whilst the Nazis targeted Jews all over Europe, the Interahamwe did not envisage extending its operations into Burundi in order to target Tutsis there (although the RPF did subsequently become embroiled in a regional conflict in Zaire (subsequently the Democratic Republic of Congo) – though this owed as much to the control of natural resources as it did to freeing Rwanda from the threat still posed by former génocidaires).53 Nevertheless, far from being the actions of ‘natural men’, the genocide carried out by Hutu Power was based on a strong belief in the need to rid Rwanda of Tutsis and was justified with an ideological programme (in its most basic version, the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’54 ) that not only resembled Nazi antisemitism in terms of fantasies and phobias about the ‘polluting race’ but that required the removal of Tutsis from the category of ‘human’ in order to bring ‘peace’ to Rwanda. As in the Holocaust, this aspect of the Rwandan genocide was recognised by the victims and the perpetrators. One perpetrator refers to his victims in terms reminiscent of Agamben’s ‘bare life’ when he says that ‘They had become people to throw away, so to speak.’55 Another says: ‘We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps.’56 Yet another says: ‘We no longer considered the Tutsis as humans or even as creatures of God.’57 A witness to a so-called ‘pacification’ meeting in Kinyamakara reported the way in which the killings were discussed: ‘At the meeting, some asked, “Is it time to stop the killing while there are still Tutsi alive?” They had no shame asking that, even in public. It was the time to kill. They did not even see that it was a human being that they were busy killing.’58 Furthermore, in Rwanda, the discourse of ‘the human’ has also been used to criticise the failings of the international community: When UNAMIR was withdrawn, I heard that there were people at the United Nations who were saying that they couldn’t send their soldiers to be killed at the end of the earth without a good reason. This leads me to wonder about what humanity is, about who is included in humanity and who is excluded. Why didn’t the United Nations consider the people of Rwanda to be part of the humanity it is bound to protect? I haven’t found an answer to this question yet.59 Finally, it should be noted that the opposite applies as well, that is, that recognising the humanity of the victims is disastrous for the self-assurance of the genocidal killer: Still, I do remember the first person who looked at me at the moment of the deadly blow. Now that was something. The eyes of someone you kill are immortal, if they face you at the fatal instant. They have a terrible black colour. They shake you more than the streams of blood and the

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death rattles, even in a great turmoil of dying. The eyes of the killed, for the killer, are his calamity if he looks into them. They are the blame of the person he kills.60 ∗ Arendt’s claim about the camps as laboratories for the reshaping of ‘the human’ can easily be illustrated, as I have shown here. But what are the consequences of viewing the Holocaust and genocides such as that in Rwanda as having at their heart this ill-fated dream of refashioning human nature or redefining who counts as human in the first place? There are two points that need addressing. The first concerns the balance to be struck between the universal and the particular; the second concerns the implications of this ‘anthropological project’ for assessing the guilt of the perpetrators. In order to make these points clearer, I will turn to an important essay by Françoise Dastur, in which she put precisely these questions to Jacques Derrida in response to the argument in his Of Spirit about Heidegger’s relationship to Nazism. There are no simple answers, but in this section, I seek to problematise the use of ‘the human’ as a guiding concept, to note its shortcomings as well as its benefits. The first problem, then, is this: by talking of ‘the human’ do we not inappropriately use an all-embracing category to talk of a situation that demands careful attention be paid to specificity of perpetrators and victims, of time and place and of ideologies? By using the concept of ‘the human’ in this way do we end by suppressing difference and thus inadvertently re-victimising the victims? By seeking to extinguish the differences that animated the perpetrators, do we also accidentally do away with notions of difference that sustain any group’s identity?61 In Robert Antelme’s famous analysis of the SS – that they will never be all-powerful and in fact that their dream of changing the human race means that they are ‘mad’ – does this blanket category smother far more than it protects?62 Is it, in Arendt’s term, ‘hardly consoling’ to cling to a notion of an unchangeable human nature, since it leads to the conclusion ‘that either man himself is being destroyed or that freedom does not belong to man’s essential capabilities’?63 Do we, by contrast, need not a humanist ethic but an ‘antihumanist’ one? Or does seeing Nazism as a humanism only compound the problem?64 The second problem concerns how the crime of the Holocaust is understood by talking in anthropological terms. Although Arendt’s claims appear to provide us with compelling insights into the nature of the Nazi project, by referring to a ‘project’ to redefine ‘the human’, do we not thereby ascribe to the Holocaust a somewhat mystical sense of grandeur, precisely the feeling that the Nazis wished to generate in order to convince themselves that they were undertaking a work of great importance for the future of the Aryan race?


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There have of course been responses to the attack on ‘the human’ carried out by Nazism, as the UNESCO statements on race and the whole thrust of post-war biological anthropology show.65 But these have been aimed at racism as such and not at understanding why it is that Nazism has come to acquire such a perverse fascination for the Western (and not only the Western) mind as the embodiment of evil. Perhaps the fascination comes not only from the enormity of the crime but also from the problem that however one tries to conceptualise it is inadequate. As Arendt said, ‘The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness.’66 If one sees Nazism as an attack on humanism, one reinstates a potentially difference-denying universalism under the rubric of equality and ‘the human’; if one sees Nazism as a humanism, since it made (a certain, restricted definition of) man the ‘measure of all things’, one perhaps facilitates the removal of all checks on human behaviour, under the guise of either anti-humanist ethics or social constructivism. Can one reinstate a humanism that does not permit racism, that is, the claim that some people are ‘more human’ than others? Furthermore, the fact that Nazism can be seen as a humanism does not mean that the Nazis were in any sense relativists; rather, their stress on ‘the human’ was the result of very clear ideas of who was and who was not fit to inhabit the earth. Arendt’s notion of human nature as characterised by freedom (the ‘right to have rights’) is perhaps an answer here, since it makes no claims about physical or cultural essences, therefore it does not preclude group specificities, but nevertheless it remains at the level of universal (species) applicability.67 Here it is necessary to turn to Dastur’s essay, ‘Three Questions to Jacques Derrida’, to seek some clarification. Dastur’s paper is a response to Of Spirit, in particular to the metaphysics of evil that Derrida sketches there. Whilst sympathetic to Derrida’s attempt to understand evil, following Heidegger, as inscribed ‘in the profundity of the history of spirit as its internal duality or dissension [Zwietracht]’, Dastur notes that by doing so one ascribes to Nazism ‘a properly demonic dimension’, and this it is that worries her.68 It does so because seeing Nazism as demonic means that ‘it will become impossible for us to identify and judge those who were guilty, and we will be irresistibly inclined to take refuge in that “spiritual” construction named “the collective guilt of the German people” or even in “the guilt of the whole Platonic and Christian Occident” ’.69 As she goes on: What will be lost is the idea that crime is always singular and individual, so that the metaphysics of Geistlichkeit – of a spirit that unfolds its essence in the internal possibility of evil – will inevitably fall back into a mere metaphysics of Geistigkeit, that is, into a metaphysical construction that cannot account for the always individual deeds and that appeal to metaphysical entities in order to explain what factually happened.70

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The question here is whether we can talk about the Nazi assault on ‘the human’ yet still see the singular, individual crime. Dastur’s questions are as follows: is it possible to think Nazism without employing ‘metaphysical’ constructions – such as ‘the human’ – which we have tried to denounce in the context of the Holocaust as essentialisations? And, by naming Nazism as demonic, do we not thereby reassure ourselves that all European thought has not been contaminated? Yet if we do not, does evil become merely banal – as is implied in the work of historians such as Götz Aly – with the result that we abandon the attempt to understand what happened?71 The challenge is to be aware of both sides of the coin and try to talk of the Nazi assault on ‘the human’ yet still be able to see the singular, individual crime. Here Arendt can be of service, for rather than simply beginning by attributing to Nazism a ‘satanic greatness’, as Jaspers accused her of doing,72 and then changing her mind to affirm the ‘banality of evil’ in the wake of the Eichmann Trial, she points to a possible way out of Dastur’s impasse. Arendt did, as is well known, describe Eichmann as an example of the banality of evil, but at the same time she sought to dissociate Nazism from the Western tradition, denying that it had any affiliation with the history of Western thinking, even with nineteenth-century race-thinking and arguing that it came ‘from the gutter’.73 That is to say, Arendt did not seek to understand Nazism by using ‘metaphysical’ concepts, but she also did not as a result ‘take refuge in the limits of the ethical point of view’ and thus ‘renounce the effort to understand what happened’.74 Whether her disavowal of Nazism’s links with the Western tradition is convincing is, however, another matter.75 Simply asserting the banality of evil (even if this was meant only with reference to Eichmann) and denying that Nazism is linked to the Western tradition is really to suppress rather than to answer the question. Nevertheless, if one cannot say that Arendt satisfactorily deals with Dastur’s concern that focusing on a ‘metaphysical’ explanation of Nazism leads one to overlook individual guilt, at least we are made more strikingly aware of the risks involved in trying to understand the Holocaust in terms of an assault on ‘the human’. ∗ The fact that this attack on ‘the human’ lay at the heart of the Nazi genocidal impulse has been recognised by scholars since the end of the war. So too has its implications. In his pioneering study, Harvest of Hate (1953), Léon Poliakov wrote that the ‘deep essence’ of Hitlerism was: the fact that it was an explosion of hatred and blind fury which, in venting itself on others, in the last analysis turned against itself. From this, one may conclude that over and beyond the revolt which he led against the Judeo-Christian spirit and morality, the German Führer also sought to attack and destroy an essential component of all human society.


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It is inherent in man’s nature to recognise himself in others and to revere in them his own image and essence (the double meaning of the word ‘humanity’, which we find in all languages, can have only this significance). Mass slaughters of human beings are perpetrated on the battlefield, but by soldiers running the same risks in accordance with the rules of warfare – when one group of men slaughters another, not as adversaries and men, but as noxious insects, the price it pays for this is its own humanity.76 Fifty years later, in his book, The Open, Giorgio Agamben has noted that Linnaeus’ great achievement was to define man, Homo, as ‘the animal that is only if it recognizes that it is not’. In other words, there being no ‘generic difference’ between man and the apes as far as Linnaeus could tell, the definition of man rested not on a scientific description (as for all the other species) but on an injunction: nosce te ipsum (know yourself). Agamben explains: ‘man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself. Yet to define the human not through any nota characteristica, but rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human’.77 Perhaps what the Nazis did was to put the Jews in the place of the apes, thereby seeking to know themselves as human. What they did not realise was that – as in medieval iconography, in which ‘the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simia dei (ape of God)’78 – they thereby made themselves into something less than human, by ‘sinning’ against the indivisible unity of the human species. The Nazis did not simply object to cultural or ethnic differences; rather, they sought – following to its logical conclusion the thrust of nineteenth-century race-thinking – to divide the human species into separate races, and even, in the case of the Jews, to remove certain people from the category of human altogether. That they dehumanised themselves in the process shows both the extraordinariness of the ambition and its impossibility, its abject and horrific failure. ‘Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer “human” in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.’79


Part II Fascism and Anti-Fascism


5 Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution to Defeating It

The democracies . . . lead their people not to defeat but to collapse without fighting. In a word, it is not war but peace which seals the doom of liberal civilization. Aurel Kolnai (1939)1

Introduction Anti-fascism is, in a sense, a continental European idea and not a British one. The urgency of the fascist threat was never felt as keenly in Britain as on the continental mainland between the wars, and the instrumentalised ideology of anti-fascism as it informed the post-war communist republics was of course not experienced by the British people, even if pride in defeating Hitler became central to post-1945 British national identity. Thus, without overlooking the very real commitment to anti-fascism made by many in Britain – as Nigel Copsey points out, ‘far more people supported the anti-fascist cause than ever supported fascist organisations’2 – I want here to advance the argument that towards the end of the 1930s anti-fascist exiles contributed a theoretical seriousness, if not necessarily a practical pugnacity, to interwar anti-fascism in Britain. The British manifestation of what David Kettler refers to as ‘the legacy of Antifascism as total ideology’ was certainly driven, as Dave Renton reminds us, by the activities of anti-fascists (as opposed to those who were not fascist but did nothing to combat fascism), but the writings of these exiles, I submit here, were also forms of anti-fascist activity and ones that made no little contribution to bringing about an urgent realisation of what fascism meant.3 Furthermore, ‘anti-fascist culture’, as Enzo Traverso notes, was ‘to a very great extent, a culture of exile’.4 Its proponents were people who knew whereof they spoke and urgently felt a need to transmit their views to as wide an audience as possible in the hope of persuading the supposedly stolid and cynical British to take seriously what, from the editorial office of the Times, looked rather too ridiculous to warrant 67

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much attention other than to be praised occasionally for having supposedly saved Italy (and later, Germany) from left-wing militancy. This urgency was felt even more keenly in Britain given the relatively small number of exiles from Nazi Germany that settled in the United Kingdom, in comparison with France, Czechoslovakia or, especially, the United States.5 This chapter does not seek to call into question the historical significance of anti-fascist activity in the struggle against fascism. But I do argue that the attempt to understand fascism (especially Nazism) and the spreading of an émigré-driven intellectual anti-fascist literature should be seen not merely as a middle-class or academic anti-fascism (that is, one that ultimately does nothing) but as a key part of the anti-fascist movement. The history of anti-fascism in Britain needs to be internationalised. A number of studies have examined German exiles in Britain, their networks, their difficulties and their aspirations for their homeland.6 Others have investigated exiles’ plans for the restructuring of Germany after the war or their active participation in the war effort, especially on the part of the representatives of suppressed left-wing political parties and their links (or lack of) with the British authorities.7 But few scholars have looked at the exiles from the perspective of their attempts to influence the outlook of their adopted country, although Werner Röder claims that ‘Press services, announcements, speeches, contributions by émigré journalists to the press and radio of their countries of exile, books published by prominent politicians and well-known authors, as well as reports on the experiences of persecuted persons influenced international political opinion on NationalSocialist Germany.’8 Certainly their propaganda output riled the Nazis, who revoked their German citizenship and did all that they could to discredit them.9 In this chapter, I seek to show that at the level of ideas anti-fascist theory had developed a highly sophisticated critique of the nature of fascism by the late 1930s. This went far beyond the orthodox Marxist understanding of fascism as a form of capitalist crisis-management (fascism as the tool of big business) – although this was not without its merits – to include studies that somewhat dangerously sought to understand the appeal of fascism to its adherents, in order to be better able to combat it. The writings of Aurel Kolnai, Franz Borkenau and Sebastian Haffner that I examine in this chapter are especially important, for their writings exemplify the claims made for anti-fascism by Kettler and Traverso. What is noteworthy about these three authors is that none was British, although they published their major studies of Spain and Germany in English with British publishers (Gollancz, Penguin, Secker and Warburg). All were from central Europe, the first two of Jewish origin – though their Jewishness was of little significance to them as youngsters – and the third engaged to a Jewish woman, and the first two were both, for a time, communists. What is significant in their analyses of fascism is that they probed more deeply into the fascist mindset than did most studies of the period. Indeed, they explicitly referred, almost in terms of admiration, to

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the ‘energy’ that drove fascist movements and did so in order to stress how serious the threat posed by fascism was to the staid and soon to be superannuated democracies. In a sense their writings gave intellectual credence to the response of active British anti-Fascists, for whom, as Copsey notes, ‘evaluations of foreign fascism were important in shaping responses to domestic fascism’.10 These three were of course not the only émigrés involved in anti-Nazi activities; others included pacifist and writer Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, playwright Ernst Toller, journalist and former SPD member of the Reichstag Gerhart Seger, who spent a short time in the United Kingdom, sociologist Franz Neumann, who also soon moved to the United States, publisher and associate of Willi Münzenberg, Babette Gross, and businessman David Yaskiel, who was involved in the publication of the Brown Book of the Reichstag fire in 1934.11 Among interned ‘enemy aliens’, Heinrich Fraenkel’s book Help Us Germans to Beat the Nazis! (1941), which was published shortly before his release from internment, ‘served to familiarise the British with the aims of the refugee anti-fascists, and to promote their common struggle against National Socialist Germany’.12 This chapter will focus on these written critiques as a particular manifestation of this wider sphere of action. I draw out the main themes of their critique and will argue that it was no coincidence that it took central Europeans writing about Nazism rather than about Italian Fascism to produce a really insightful anti-fascist theory that challenged the British tendency to downplay the seriousness with which fascist movements took their own ideas. Italian anti-fascists did of course contribute to the attack, and had done so for longer, most notably Luigi Sturzo, formerly head of the now banned Italian People’s Party, and Gaetano Salvemini, whose Under the Axe of Fascism (1936) and Italian Fascism (1938) were published by the Left Book Club (LBC). But Salvemini referred dismissively to ‘Fascist “thinkers” ’ and dismissed the idea of the corporate state as a ‘corporative fairy-tale’.13 In general, whilst he spoke of the threat of ‘Fascist totalitarianism’, Salvemini regarded Italian Fascism as engaged in a battle with big business whose future was uncertain, though the thrust of his analysis made it clear that Fascism was by no means sure to win out. In other words, and as the title of George Seldes’s book on Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar, implied, there was little here that would make the average British reader feel that something that concerned them was at stake.14 Nazism, in the writings of the German émigrés, was presented as more imminently dangerous, not just for its internal enemies, but for the wider world.

Franz Borkenau George Orwell, reviewing Franz Borkenau’s The Totalitarian Enemy (1940), wrote: ‘We cannot struggle against Fascism unless we are willing to understand it, a thing which both left-wingers and right-wingers have

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conspicuously failed to do – basically, of course, because they dared not.’15 Borkenau, then, ‘one of the most valuable gifts that Hitler has made to England’,16 was conspicuous as one of the rare analysts of Nazism who were neither sympathetic nor, in the manner of many British commentators, opposed primarily because they saw Nazism as the inheritor and most recent manifestation of Prussian militarism. Nigel Copsey notes that the only people in Britain really to take the threat of fascism seriously in the 1920s were the communists (especially after the kidnapping of Harry Pollitt in March 1925). It is therefore more than coincidence that Borkenau (1900–57) was originally a member of the German Communist Party (KPD) who broke with the party in 1929, going on to become, especially after World War II, a vigorous Cold Warrior and advocate of the progressive mission of the west. In the 1930s, following his departure from Germany, he lived in Paris, Panama and then London, but he is remembered primarily for his trips to Spain during the Civil War, trips which resulted in his still-in-print classic work The Spanish Cockpit (1937). Indeed, the fact that Borkenau had experienced communism from within but then rejected it – he was actually arrested by the communists whilst in Spain – is the key to understanding his fierce antifascism and his attempt to go beyond the orthodox Marxist analysis of its origins and potential. In the British context, clearly the communists’ understanding of fascism drove the anti-fascist movement in terms of its action at street level – and there are many texts (again, mostly by émigrés such as Erckner or Henri, but also by officially non-aligned leftists like John Strachey) that equally slavishly follow the same analysis, both before and after Dmitrov’s famous definition – but here I want to suggest that Borkenau’s writings provided a level of sophistication that went beyond this communist analysis. Borkenau himself was, of course, vilified by the communists but the significance of his writings lies in the fact that he sought to reach out beyond the circles of communists and others who had concerned themselves with fascism since the 1920s and to mobilise a broader section of opinion, especially in terms of the threat posed specifically by Nazi Germany. Borkenau made a name for himself, then, with his studies of communism, The Communist International (1938) and The Totalitarian Enemy (1940). But in between those two publications, he published a book, number 33 in the Penguin Specials series, which was one of the more combative analyses of the Third Reich that had appeared at that point. The New German Empire, published just before the outbreak of war, looks at first glance like many of the books about the Third Reich that appeared at this time: a general discussion of the ‘Nazi crusade’ followed by an analysis of the regime’s approach to foreign policy that pointed to the Third Reich’s dream of acquiring, first, a European empire and, second, world domination. Yet the book is different in several important respects.


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First, Borkenau rejected out of hand any sense of ‘liberal’ compromise with the Nazi regime, arguing that British ‘reasonableness’ had thus far led only to capitulation and, if continued, would result in catastrophe. In an earlier book, he had already condemned the policy of appeasement by noting that the British were ‘far too greatly imbued with the soft and reasonable atmosphere of compromise prevailing in democratic countries, and instinctively expect the revolutionaries beyond the Rhine to come over, given only sufficient time and a willingness to grant concessions, to their own approach to politics’.17 Now he extended this critique, noting that, after the occupation of Prague, he had been proven correct and stressed the urgency of the situation. Rather than just condemn the softly-softly approach of the democracies, Borkenau contrasted this style of politics with that of the Nazis: The query is not whether Germany will now continue her course of indeterminate aggression or not. There can be no doubt that she will. The problem, and a very important one at that, is whether Germany is simply carrying out well-thought-out plans or is driven into limitless adventures by developments over which she herself is not the master. In the one case, we must still reckon with some rational plan on the part of Germany which it would be important to discover. In the second case, we are faced with an outburst of incalculable instincts which cannot but end in disaster, both for Germany and for others.18 Borkenau, then, rejected any sense of compromise with Nazism and made it his task to demonstrate that the regime was driven by an unstoppable dynamic towards war that neither internal nor external influences could hinder. In other words, trying to establish a Nazi ‘programme’ was pointless since the regime was consumed by ‘quasi-mystical fanaticism’ (21) and the idea of it settling down to some sort of ‘normalcy’ was ‘quite meaningless’ (22). Nazism could not be understood using the conventional tools of diplomacy or scholarship since it was ultimately driven by a ‘supernatural urge’ (26). We see here an analysis of Nazism that went way beyond the conventional idea that the democracies in general and Britain in particular were faced with an unusual political movement but one which could in the end be understood and brought to participate in the ordinary machinations of great power politics. Furthermore, with its focus on Germany (‘The Nazi disease . . . must be crushed, or it will crush civilization’19 ) it superseded any anti-fascist action that was driven by the need to keep fascists off the streets of East London, Birmingham or Liverpool. But it also provided fuel for the latter, ultimately backing it in its assessment that no compromise could be brooked with fascism and that the only way to tackle it was through violence.

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Aurel Kolnai If Borkenau became a critic of communism and, after the war, one of its most vigorous opponents, he nevertheless did not match the Cold Warrior credentials of Aurel Kolnai. Kolnai (1900–73) was brought up in Budapest, converted from Judaism to Catholicism and, after leaving central Europe shortly before war broke out, ended up after a convoluted passage, in London, where he taught philosophy at Bedford College. Before the war, and whilst still in Vienna, he wrote – in English in a Nazi café – one of the most powerful analyses of Nazi ideology of the pre-1945 period, The War Against the West (1938). Yet after the war, Kolnai regretted spending so much time on Nazism, seeing communism as a greater threat to world peace and security. Nevertheless, The War Against the West should be judged neither in the light of Kolnai’s subsequent Cold War activities nor by the fact that it was published by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club. For it neither discussed communism (or comparative ‘totalitarianism’) nor was it a standard, orthodox Labour socialist LBC work. Gollancz himself claimed that the book was ‘without exception, the most important book that the Club has yet published’ and referred to it as ‘the bible of anti-fascism’,20 quite a remarkable appraisal when one sees the extent to which it departs from the standard leftist analysis of fascism as ‘crisis capitalism with a cudgel’, what Orwell called the ‘Strachey-Blimp thesis’, in which ‘Hitler was a dummy with Thyssen pulling the strings’.21 Whilst Kolnai shared with Gollancz a variety of Christian Socialism, nevertheless Kolnai’s understanding of Nazism went way beyond that ordinarily associated with the LBC, and his personalist Christian conservatism – he sympathised, for example, with Hilaire Belloc’s description of the ‘servile state’ and the Distributist argument that freedom depended on the widest distribution possible of private property – would have been anathema to Strachey and Laski.22 His task, as he saw it, was to educate the British reader, making him realise the real meaning of Nazism: ‘English public opinion will have to learn that the mere removal of “injustices” and discriminations is far from touching on the core of the German problem, and the farthest possible from unseating National Socialism.’23 It should come as no surprise then that whilst the Manchester Guardian praised the book other reviewers were less impressed. The Sunday Times noted that the book sounded like Churchill, but that ‘its idiom was un-English’, and the TLS reserved its praise for Kolnai’s grammar. Many reviewers seemed to prefer Hermann Rauschning’s Germany’s Revolution of Destruction, also published in 1938 (in German as Die Revolution des Nihilismus, then in English in June 1939), a book whose emphasis was more on the Third Reich destroying itself than having to be destroyed from without.24


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Still, Kolnai understood Nazism in the same way that he later understood communism – as a ‘fall away from Christianity’25 – and fought it for its atheism and its rejection of reason. Nazism, he argued even before it came to power in Germany, represented no mere counter-revolution but an ‘overturning of values’ (Umsturz der Werte).26 Hence, like Borkenau he argued that there was no point in trying to compromise with Nazism; rather, one must understand it in order to combat it the better. Whilst this meant undertaking the distasteful task of entering into the thought-processes of Nazis, this was, he maintained, the only way of really getting to grips with the phenomenon. This methodology led to some potentially rather dangerous exercises in proximity. Kolnai sought, in a way that must have seemed quite shocking to British readers – for whom Kolnai explicitly wrote, in English – to elucidate the appeal of fascism to its adherents. English writers, such as R.G. Collingwood, who had previously tried this sort of approach found themselves isolated as intellectual renegades, but Kolnai did not face Collingwood’s problem of uppity Oxford colleagues, and picked up where Collingwood left off: ‘The National Socialist doctrines’, he argued, ‘though ultimately false and immoral, and liable to degenerate into comic vulgarity, are at their highest endowed with spiritual grandeur and relevancy’ (18). Outside of the descriptions of the Nuremberg rallies offered by fellow travellers of fascism, this sort of statement was not commonly heard, least of all in the LBC’s publications; they bespeak Kolnai’s intellectual bravery and his attempt to infuse anti-fascism with the sort of energy that drove the fascists themselves. In an article of January 1939 Kolnai wrote: We . . . are hugging the complacent belief that the essence of democracy is compromise; so we book ‘compromise’ with the fascists, of the Munich type for instance, as a triumph not only of peace but even of democracy. We only forget that there is a marked difference between compromise within democracy, which presupposes the common ground of democracy accepted by all the various competing groups of the people, and compromise with the convinced and uncompromising mortal enemies of democracy. We are extremely afraid of tarnishing the immaculate beauty of our democracy by any use of violence or display of intolerance; not, however, of compromising democracy in its integrity.27 Or, as he put it in his talk to the LBC summer school in 1939: The naïve people who in March 1939 accused the Germans of having committed a ‘breach of faith’, ‘deceived’ Mr. Ch[amberlain] at Munich, could have been spared their surprise and deception if they had not refused dogmatically to attach an importance to Nazi ideologies.28

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Thus, like Borkenau, Kolnai’s basic message was that attempting to understand Nazism through the tools of diplomacy, analysis of leaders’ speeches or Nazi legislation was fruitless. Rather, he argued that one had to grasp the will that drove the Nazi dynamic towards war and catastrophe: fascism, he argued, would make war not to placate its supporters or to counter popular discontent but ‘to save its soul: to stave off the revelation of its inner barrenness, the vacuum of despair at its core’ (637). Whilst this analysis necessarily took Kolnai – and his readers – too close to the core of Nazism for comfort, this was precisely the point, for treating Nazism as a difficult but otherwise ordinary political movement was, in his estimation, to set off down the road to ruin. Nowhere is this clearer than in his LBC summer school talk, for here he spoke of the ‘freedom’ of the fascist system, even if this was ‘the extreme opposite of what we are accustomed to understand by freedom’. What he meant was that fascism generated a ‘sense of an unlimited Power in which the subject is supposed to “participate” in a mystical way, as it were: through patriotic loyalty, kinship of “kind” as contrasted to “alien kind”, through the very fact of his absolute, total subjection’ (1). In order then to understand the appeal of fascism there was little point merely condemning it. Every sane person would do so, but this was insufficient to combat fascism. ‘We must have the courage’, Kolnai went on, ‘to fight an enemy, – or rather, to reject a creed – of which we recognise the grandeur, the positive implications, the creative power. Evil may be “ultimately” destructive, but no great evil is merely and altogether destructive. Else, it could not even be really, effectually destructive’ (3). Copsey has written of the LBC that it ‘became an important vehicle for promoting anti-fascism’. He then goes on to note that by ‘important’ he means that it assisted in the promotion of political activity: ‘Indeed, Club members would often use the “discussion groups” to organise concrete political agitation rather than merely discussing abstract ideas raised from current volumes.’29 My discussion of Kolnai is meant to suggest that it is not so easy to separate the ‘merely’ abstract ideas contained within the books from the political action; indeed, Kolnai’s important talk at the LBC’s summer school, along with Gollancz’s (and others’) estimation of The War Against the West, indicates that the contribution of the uncompromising stance towards fascism taken by the émigrés was indispensable. Kolnai – remember, no friend of communism – was open about the nature of the west and why it had to work harder than the Soviet Union to resist fascism: Berlin has incomparably more hope of engineering an ideological deception of the capitalist West, with its pacifist sentimentalism and its anti-proletarian instincts, than to allay the astute rulers of Russia, untrammelled by inhibitions prevailing in the West, into a common action against the Liberal world – whose downfall would immediately throw


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the Soviet Union upon the mercy of triumphant Central European Fascism. (561) Kolnai’s writings – which are inseparable from anti-fascism activity, as his LBC work shows – reveal that a theory proclaiming the need to crush fascism, not to compromise with it, had, by the start of the war, extended beyond the radical left and contributed to the hardening of resolve required to end rightist appeasement, leftist pacifism and armchair anti-fascism, and to take on the Third Reich in the only way possible. As Kolnai noted in his memoirs, ‘With the birth of the Third Reich, the Second World War had virtually begun, and anti-Nazi action came forthwith under the heading, not of domestic politics but of War operations.’30

Sebastian Haffner By the time of his death in 1999 at the age of 91, Sebastian Haffner (the pen name of Raimund Pretzel) had become famous as the author of The Meaning of Hitler and various other works in German history, and for his journalism in West Germany, to which he returned from Britain in 1954.31 He has since become even better known as the author of a memoir that he wrote as an émigré lawyer in London in 1939 and then put aside as events, he felt, had rendered it irrelevant or, at least, necessitated a new analysis. The memoir, published in 2002 as Defying Hitler, and the second study, Germany Jekyll and Hyde (1940), republished in 2005, are, taken together, among the more remarkable contemporary analyses of Nazism and the Third Reich. Here I will suggest that the latter work should be seen as a key contribution to the anti-fascist struggle, to be set alongside the works of Borkenau and Kolnai as well as other more famous works by German exiles such as Konrad Heiden and the former Nazi Hermann Rauschning. Germany Jekyll and Hyde was first published in June 1940, and its analysis of events – which was based on the circumstances of 1939 – rapidly became outdated with the end of the Phoney War, the Nazi invasion of Norway, Denmark and France and, not long after, the invasion of the USSR and the US entry into the war. This was most unfortunate for Haffner, since the unfolding of events, though it destroyed much of the book’s timeliness and left it more or less forgotten, by no means contradicted the analysis of Hitler and Nazism that underpinned it. Haffner’s combative and felicitous turns of phrase are deliciously citable, but it is also necessary to point to the limits of Haffner’s vision and to show where others have developed his claims. The book is split into eight simple units of analysis: Hitler, the Nazi leaders, the Nazis, the loyal population, the disloyal population, the opposition and the émigrés. The final chapter, ‘Possibilities’, contains some extraordinarily powerful assessments and is written in a dramatic prose that gives those of us who did not live through those days a sense of the urgency that

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characterised them. The way Haffner divides the book up may seem simplistic, but it actually reveals a very clear understanding of the nature of German society under the Third Reich.32 Haffner first deals with Hitler in what is in many ways the book’s most important chapter. Not because Haffner overestimates Hitler as a thinker or leader – far from it. Rather, Haffner shows the way in which the Third Reich is inseparable from Hitler’s person. It does not suffice, in Haffner’s opinion, to historicise Hitler, to try and understand him, as so many Allied propagandists did, as part of a German tradition: to tabulate Hitler, as it were, in the History of Ideas and degrade him to an historical episode is a hopeless undertaking, and can only lead to perilous miscalculations. Much more progress towards an accurate estimation of the man can be made if one takes exactly the opposite course and considers German and European history as a part of Hitler’s private life.33 Although it runs against commonsense to equate Nazism with Hitlerism, as Ian Kershaw has recently reminded us,34 the logic of Haffner’s claim is that the only way to deal with Hitler – and here Haffner sounds pleasingly unEnglish – is to eliminate him. This is not a question of being for or against Appeasement; rather, it is a simple necessity: ‘There is sufficient reason to destroy the man as a mad dog’ (10). Hitler cannot be treated as an extreme variant of the statesman; he is, rather, ‘a swindler in a statesman’s mask’ (9). And the only answer to this swindle is to kill it three times: as institution (the position of Führer), as a man (he must be killed) and as a legend (21). So far, so clear. There is thus no danger of misunderstanding Haffner when he attempts to rescue the German majority from being tarred with the same brush, an all-too common phenomenon in the middle of the war. Haffner next turns to the Nazi leaders. Although he condemns them individually as philistines, thugs and arrivistes (in the manner of Arendt’s claim that Nazism came ‘from the gutter’), this does not mean that Haffner underestimates their strength as a group. He is impressed by their ‘boundless corruption, boundless efficiency, and boundless cynicism’ (25), and dismisses any notion that Nazism as an ideology is worth considering: ‘What about the National Socialist world-conception?’ To which we must answer that, save for the title, it does not exist. Behind the ostentatious name there is nothing; or, at most, the doctrine that it is permitted and even commanded to rob, torment, and kill Jews. Somewhat scanty contents for a world-conception! . . . In fact, this world-conception is rubbish if not an impudent fraud. Moreover, none of the Nazi leaders take it seriously. The National Socialists are a reality, but their world-conception is not. (33–34)


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Most historians today – not to mention Kolnai and many Nazi theorists at the time – bristle at the claim that Nazi ideology was unimportant, but Haffner at least has the virtue of clarity. Besides, the fact that the Third Reich was ‘organised’ as a bandit kleptocracy is increasingly being revealed by historians such as Jonathan Petropoulos and Frank Bajohr in ways that echo the 1940s’ Frankfurt School analysis of Nazism as a ‘racket’.35 When Haffner goes on to claim that ‘The Nazi leaders aim at converting Germany into a gigantic sports club which is always winning “victories” – and thereby losing its happiness, character, and national identity’ (34), he provides a vision of the Third Reich akin to Georges Perec’s dystopian society in W and, more importantly, explains why, in his view, ideology is not the Nazi elite’s driving force.36 How then does Haffner explain antisemitism? He sees it as a kind of shibboleth, as a quasi-ritualistic way of binding the Nazis together: ‘The chief aim of anti-Semitism is to serve, firstly, as a kind of secret sign and binding mystery among Nazis, like a continuous ritual murder; and, secondly, as the conscience-killing course in the education of the second generation of Nazis’ (45). He thus concludes that it is mistaken to understand Nazism as one political position among others. Rather, it is an existential choice: ‘Nazism is no ideology but a magic formula which attracts a definite type of men. It is a form of “characterology” not ideology. To be a Nazi means to be a type of human being’ (46). The following chapters provide equally acerbic and penetrating insights into the various strata of German society. Along the way Haffner makes plain how unlikely it will be that Nazism will be overthrown from within (103); that the plan to force Germany to become a democratic state is doomed to failure (‘To wish to make a democratic power out of Germany is to look for apples on a rose-bush. There are none. There never will be’ (104)); that Nazism can be explained neither by Marxist or liberal frameworks (‘Nazism a “first” (original and new) form of radical nihilism, that equally denies all values, capitalist and bourgeois as well as proletarian’ (136)); and that the Allies are to blame for failing to recruit in large numbers potential émigrés (147) and for providing succour to the Nazis’ ambitions when they believed themselves to be doing the opposite (‘every agreement intended by the Allies to be a treaty of peace must appear to the Nazis, by reason of their inborn and unalterable mental outlook, as a tactical measure of war’ (170)). In other words, each of these brief quotations reveals that Haffner was an unusually hard-headed and unsentimental observer. His argument that only war can pacify a regime like Nazi Germany (159) and that the war should not be brought to too speedy a conclusion merely to save lives if doing so jeopardises ‘the very cause at stake’ – for example, by making a premature peace with the German Army – was remarkably prescient given the post-war efforts by many to defend the ‘honourable Wehrmacht’ and make plain that Haffner knew how deep the rot had got.

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Haffner’s vision, however, does not seem so convincing today, when Germany has become a parliamentary democracy. Haffner may have railed unequivocally against the Nazis but, like Kolnai and Borkenau, he was no orthodox leftist. His alternative vision for Germany is a conservative, aristocratic one. Seeing Nazism (here more conventionally than Borkenau or Kolnai) as a logical successor to Prussianism, Haffner believed that a period of conservatism would be the only way to restore Germany to peaceful neighbourliness. In one sense he was right: the Adenauer epoch in the Federal Republic was indeed a conservative one, politically, socially and culturally. Whether it also saw a restoration of worthwhile older values is another matter: It seems clear that for Germany, as for Europe at large, a conservative epoch is ‘due’ to follow the present crisis, such as succeeded the reign of Napoleon; a rehabilitation of the old and the oldest cultural values, a period of preservation, restoration, and healing. (129) Yet the way in which he saw this state of affairs being realised was through a political realignment that today seems fantastical: a return to the pre-unification world of German states: [I]f a real peace is possible, the spell must be broken. Which means: the German Reich must disappear, and the last seventy-five years of German history must be erased. The Germans must retrace their steps to the point where they took the wrong path – to the year 1866. No peace is conceivable with the Prussian Reich which was born at that time, and whose last logical expression is no other than Nazi Germany. And no vital ‘other’ Germany is anywhere to be found but that which in that year was worsted by the caprice of war – without ever totally succumbing. (183) Here events overtook Haffner. Yet, in pugnacious prose, the analysis of Nazism itself and Haffner’s level-headed assertions that no appeasement was possible with the Nazis make Germany Jekyll and Hyde far more than just a fascinating document. As Lothar Kettenacker notes, ‘it was precisely his reservations about a compromise peace with the old ruling classes which distinguished his position from that of Rauschning and gave his liberal views weight in official circles’.37 It remains an analysis of Nazism that merits serious attention and that, even in the context of war, will have seemed terribly outré to British readers accustomed to the idea that diplomatic channels were still possible or that a separate peace with the Axis might save the Empire. Since Defying Hitler was unpublished in his lifetime, one cannot argue that it contributed directly to the development of British anti-fascism. The book is worth reading in its own right as one of the more remarkable


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analyses of Hitler’s rise to power, and in this context it helps explain how those who had direct experience of fascism arrived at conclusions that few British authors came to independently. Although Haffner and the other émigrés were prevented from entering into real partnership with the British government where consultation on post-war Germany was concerned, Churchill certainly borrowed ideas from Haffner and others to feed his own prejudices.38

Conclusion Anti-fascism is more than just an ideology; it is a metanarrative of the twentieth century, albeit one that has suffered since the end of the Cold War at the hands of competing narratives based on nationalism and in the wake of the anti-communist backlash. As David Kettler says, ‘there is unfinished business with regard to the costs of treating Anti-fascism as nothing but an obsolete instrument of political manipulation’.39 Or, even more starkly, in Traverso’s words, ‘Anti-fascism cannot be reduced to a simple variation of Soviet Communism’.40 Borkenau, Kolnai and Haffner show the truth of these claims, and analysing their contribution to the anti-fascist struggle of the late 1930s makes clear how unjust the contemporary revisionist account of anti-fascism that does reduce it to a variant of Soviet communism is to the complex reality of the anti-fascist movement.41 All three men, but Kolnai in particular, went on after 1945 to become anti-communist Cold Warriors,42 but even during the fight against Nazism none subscribed (or, in Borkenau’s case, not for long) to the version of anti-fascism that some commentators would have us believe was the only one – the communist variant. Kolnai later wrote with some regret of his pre-war activities, stating not only that his belief that ‘ “anti-Fascism” must needs imply a resolute Leftism (short of Communism) as its foundation and operational frame’ had been an illusion but that ‘not only was there greater moral weight in combating Fascism on conservative grounds, even “anti-Fascism” as such made us miss the special edge of Naziism’.43 But even such claims – which today’s anti-fascists might find disagreeable – reveal that holding an anti-communist position should not automatically lead one to reject anti-fascism and that the tendency for the former (anti-communism) to lead to the latter (rejecting anti-fascism) can potentially take one in the direction of apologies for fascism. In the context of Britain in the 1930s, the basic position of the émigré antifascists – that there could and should be no compromise with fascism – was a shock to the appeasers, fellow travellers and opponents of fascism (whether pacifist or not) alike, with the exception of the active anti-fascist militants. For them, the writings of the exiles, if they read them at all, would have confirmed their belief that only street action was the answer, and heightened their distaste for what they saw as the inability of ‘liberal’ opponents to organise or to offer an alternative political vision. But the émigrés’ critique

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of ‘English’ liberalism, regarding its desire for conversation and diplomacy as inappropriate when faced with Nazism, brought a new seriousness to the understanding of what the Third Reich and, by extension, British Fascism, was all about, for they could not simply be lumped together with the communists and the small militant ultra-leftist anti-fascist groups that could so easily be discredited by the mainstream, middle-class press. The émigrés may have been regarded as extreme, but by the late 1930s a position that had been confined to the far left was now shown to be compatible with all shades of political opinion short of the extreme right. It is important to remember here that the books I have discussed were all published in the late 1930s, long after both the BUF’s success had peaked and the British anti-fascist movement, with all its strands and feuds, had developed, in the context of a wider acceptance of the need for rearmament and a deepening sense of the inevitability of war with Germany. Although the political émigrés tended to be overlooked by the Foreign Office,44 anti-fascist intellectuals had a greater impact in the public sphere. Where in the 1920s and early 1930s British antifascism had, understandably, been a response to the emergence of British fascism, the émigrés helped to prepare active anti-fascists and the politically inactive alike for the magnitude of the European and worldwide task that lay ahead.

6 The Mein Kampf Ramp: Emily Overend Lorimer and the Publication of Mein Kampf in Britain

To pronounce an opinion on the present state of Europe without having read Mein Kampf, is like looking for the North Pole without troubling to take a compass. Evan John1 In an article on Hitler’s desire for world domination, Milan Hauner, following Karl Dietrich Bracher, noted that one of the biggest problems of National Socialism ‘is that of its fundamental underrating’. As an example of this underrating, Hauner referred to Mein Kampf. He claimed that ‘in spite of its explosive content, or perhaps precisely because of its extraordinary verbosity, Mein Kampf was never taken seriously outside Germany’.2 Indeed, even many Germans held the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf to be irrelevant; Franz Neumann, for example, in his classic study of the Third Reich, Behemoth (1942), argued that ‘National Socialism has no political theory of its own, and that the ideologies it uses or discards are mere arcana dominationis, techniques of domination.’ He did, however, note that this meant ‘that the German leadership is the only group in present German society that does not take its ideological pronouncements seriously and is well aware of their purely propagandistic nature’.3 In this chapter, I show that, whilst the thrust of mainstream liberal thinking in Britain confirms Hauner’s position, there were nevertheless significant attempts made to alert the British public to the seriousness of Hitler’s intent as expressed in his Landsberg bible. I do so not to propose a naïve ‘intentionalism’ with respect to the Holocaust or to Nazi policies more generally but in order to throw some light on the way in which Nazism was understood in the years before World War II. Those in Britain who argued that Hitler’s writings of the mid-1920s should be taken seriously as a guide to his plans as Chancellor of Germany were in a distinct minority. One of the most interesting such efforts, because of what it also tells us about the activities of other, in some cases rather dubious figures’ interests 81

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in the book, is the campaign ran by Emily Overend Lorimer (1881–1949) to inform the public and, through private activities, influential political and literary figures to what she believed to be the real significance of Hitler’s book. In particular, her books What Hitler Wants (1939) and What the German Needs (1942), her translation of Artur Moeller van den Bruck’s Das Dritte Reich (1922, trans. as Germany’s Third Empire, 1934), her several articles and reviews in magazines and journals, her wartime work for the Ministry of Information and her unpublished manuscript The Mein Kampf Ramp (1941) add up to a significant attempt to break through the famous British underestimation of Hitler’s and his followers’ fanaticism. Unlike the majority of British commentators, her focus was squarely on Nazi ideology as expressed through published works; she devoted her attention to Hitler and Rosenberg in a way that many reviewers found rather silly, but she stuck to her guns in her assertion that their views needed to be considered seriously. In this stance she was ultimately proven right, even if individual assertions and ambitions from Mein Kampf were not to be realised (such as an alliance with Britain) or if other, major policies of the 1930s did not appear there (most notably, the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939). Lorimer’s comments on the story of Mein Kampf ’s publication in English certainly tell us a good deal about her own nervous fears about the British government’s unwillingness to face Hitler, fears that were often couched in sweeping and unfair condemnations of what was in reality a complex and difficult situation, both domestically and internationally. But, once one puts aside the ‘guilty men’-style rhetoric, Lorimer’s writings still provide numerous insights into the nature of British attitudes towards Nazi Germany before the war. What follows is not an attempt to approve Lorimer’s interpretation, thus putting forward a simplistic intentionalism or sweeping condemnation of the pre-war government’s foreign policy; rather, it seeks to show that those who did try and break through the veneer of respectability where pro-appeasement was concerned often had to do so in comically exaggerated ways in order to make their point at all. The kind of orthodoxy that Lorimer was up against is well represented by the military man Evan John, whose claim, used in the epigraph to this article, sounds so reasonable. But after noting the centrality of Mein Kampf to an understanding of Nazism, he went on to argue that only a reader predisposed to object to Nazism would be struck by ‘political fanaticism’, and he domesticated Mein Kampf by making it sound as though it had been penned by Hilaire Belloc: ‘we cannot call contempt of parliament a sign of the knave and traitor without accusing a large proportion of our countrymen of daily knavishness and treachery’.4 Emily Overend was born into an Anglo-Irish family in 1881 and was educated in Dublin. From 1907–10 she was tutor in German philology at Somerville College, Oxford, a position she resigned following her marriage to David Lockhart Robertson Lorimer who served in the Indian Army and Indian Political Service in many places, including Bahrain, Persian

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Baluchistan, Mesopotamia and Gilgit. She accompanied her husband to South Asia where, with her linguistic skills, she herself soon became deeply immersed in the local cultures. The Lorimers were at the heart of the expatriate community, Gertrude Bell describing David Lorimer as ‘an exceptionally able man’ and recording in a letter to her mother ‘the immense debt of gratitude’ that she owed the couple.5 In 1916, Emily became editor of the Basrah Times, a position she held until 1924 when the couple returned to England, where they lived in Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. In 1934, she again accompanied her husband on an anthropological and linguistic expedition to Karakoram. Her love of South and Central Asia did not dim and she wrote a great deal about the languages and peoples of the region until her death. She never lost her interest in German culture and politics, however, translating Ernst Kantorowicz’s Frederick II 1194–1250 in 1931, and Artur Moeller van den Bruck’s Germany’s Third Empire in 1934 as well as penning numerous articles and reviews on Germany for newspapers and journals. From an early stage, Lorimer charted Hitler’s rise to power, though not at first with the intense fear and mistrust that she later acquired. In October 1932, she wrote from Cologne to her mother in Dublin to express her excitement at having acquired a ticket for a reserved seat to hear Hitler address a ‘huge meeting’. The day after the talk she sent her mother a postcard referring to Hitler’s ‘splendid show’ at which there had been ‘quite 125,000 people’.6 In her major publication on Nazism, the 1939 Penguin Special What Hitler Wants, she referred to the notes she had taken at the time of the ‘Kundgebung’, in order to illustrate the development of her thinking. Her account of 1932 charted the mystical atmosphere of the meeting, a theme noticed by many British visitors who were favourably inclined towards Nazism. At the end of the meeting, she wrote, ‘The host of full an eighth of a million dispersed quietly and silently into the night. The spell still held. Scarcely a word was heard. [ . . . ] Across the water, behind the blaze of city lights, two immense spears thrust up towards heaven, spectrally silhouetted against a sky of indigo. Something of the spirit that reared the Cathedral of Cologne had been throbbing in the Messehalle to-night.’7 As she commented, she had not read Mein Kampf at the time of that meeting, ‘and Hitler was not yet being taken over-seriously by German public at large, certainly not by the circle in which my friends moved’. In 1939, she was pleased to be able to cite Calvin Hoover, who noted in his Germany Enters the Third Reich (1933) that ‘it cannot be too strongly reiterated that as late as a month before Hitler became Chancellor, his cause was still accounted hopelessly lost by responsible opinion’ (WHW, 37).8 Any sympathy she may have had for the sense of unity, belonging or purpose engendered by the Nazi meetings soon disappeared once Hitler came to power. The year after Hitler became Chancellor, Lorimer’s abridged translation of Moeller van den Bruck appeared. The book itself is noteworthy as one of the key formative texts of National Socialist ideology (it was first published in

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1922).9 But here her brief translator’s foreword is interesting, because of the light it sheds on her later attitudes towards the English translation of Mein Kampf : The method of condensation here adopted has been to preserve intact such passages and phrases as the author would have considered the ‘texts’ of his message to his fellow-countrymen, and to work through the intervening matter paragraph by paragraph, compressing where necessary, but never excising or rejecting anything vital to the argument or to its presentation. Nothing has been consciously heightened or toned down in deference to English feeling. It is hoped that the thought, argument and balance of the book have thus been preserved, and that the reader of Germany’s Third Empire will be fully conversant with the contents of Das dritte Reich as if he had read it in the original.10 Her book was one of a number of publications in the first two years of Nazi rule, including translations of key Nazi thinkers such as Ewald Banse, critical studies of the significance of the Third Reich and early reports on the persecution of the Jews.11 The appearance of these works, which were, significantly, considerably more forthright about the implications of Nazism for European peace than the British government at that time (or, for that matter, the British opposition) was ready to accept, meant that those with longstanding interests in German culture and history, like Lorimer, became increasingly vociferous in their opposition to Nazism. With the exception of a notable literature produced by fellow-travellers, many of the British writings on Nazism of the 1930s were highly critical warning signals, which took on the daunting task of displacing mainstream – and, importantly, governmental – attitudes to Nazism, which lay on a spectrum running from lack of interest to scoffing at its significance to appreciation of its aims in fighting Communism and regenerating the German nation. The words of Lovat Dickson, Banse’s English publisher, warning that ‘Many people believe that Germany is setting the pace for a new war which will outstrip in horror anything that occurred in the last struggle’,12 made a large proportion of what is known as the ‘reading public’ sit up and take notice, though it took longer before the same could be said of official policy, which was more concerned with balancing the budget and, not unreasonably, remaining in step with widespread public opposition to rearmament. For those like Lorimer who sought to warn people of the threats posed by Nazism, the publication in 1933 of an abridged version of Mein Kampf was a grave disappointment. This was so not because she did not want the British public to have access to Hitler’s views but because she wanted them to have access to all of them. The 1933 edition brought out by Hurst & Blackett,

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a subsidiary of Hutchinson Publishing Group, was heavily abridged, containing less than 50% of the full text, and the omitted sections were those relating especially to Hitler’s foreign policy ambitions.13 Philip Guedalla later described it as ‘that attenuated version in which it was presented to the delicate nerves of British readers’.14 Lorimer granted in her review that ‘Even the mutilated version, “My Struggle”, which has appeared in English (Hurst and Blackett, 18s.) suffices to show how his Austrian birth and the cosmopolitan conglomerate of Vienna fired his passionate German nationalism and concentrated the hate of a fanatic nature on the international Jew of whom Treitschke had said, “The Jews are our misfortune”.’ Indeed, like the Daily Telegraph reviewer, she saw that even in shortened form Mein Kampf was ‘marked by an appalling sincerity’.15 Nevertheless, she thought such an abridgement unacceptable in terms of explaining why it was that Mein Kampf was ‘indispensable to anyone seriously wishing to understand the Nazi movement and the mentality of its Leader’, not least because ‘The English is written by someone – a German, at a guess – who commands a large dictionary vocabulary, but not all the rudiments of English style or syntax.’16 Lorimer admired the few attempts to set the record straight, in particular the Friends of Europe’s pamphlet on the topic and, later, the efforts of R.C.K. Ensor,17 yet the failure of these specialist publications to penetrate into the public consciousness lay behind her own attempt to explain what Mein Kampf was really all about, in her Penguin Special. Lorimer was wrong both about the translator – actually E.T.S. Dugdale, the translator and journalist, whose wife Blanche (Baffy) was the niece of Arthur Balfour – and the reasons why Hurst & Blackett had published an abridged version – Dugdale offered his existing translation to the press (which they then had to cut further at the insistence of Eher Verlag, Hitler’s German publisher) whilst they were considering commissioning a full translation and thus allowed them to get the book out sooner, in the first flush of interest following Hitler’s accession to power. That Dugdale had a translation to offer should not be such a surprise, given that in an article on Nazism published in 1931 he had written of Mein Kampf that ‘When we consider that it is implicitly believed in by a large section of the German people, it seems not unimportant that English readers should get to know what the National Socialists intend to effect in Germany, if ever they get the chance.’18 Despite it being roused in error, the result of Lorimer’s ire, her own book, was an important contribution to the British debate about the meaning and implication of Nazism. Lorimer was not entirely alone in her quest to inform the public. In October 1938, one Arnold Hyde wrote to the Manchester Guardian to complain about the lack of seriousness with which the danger posed by the Third Reich was being taken in Britain: This ignorance of the ultimate aims of the Reich is due not to indifference or to wilful blindness but mainly to the fact that the full text of ‘Mein

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Kampf’ is not available to English readers. Many people who have read the English version, ‘My Struggle’, imagine they have read ‘Mein Kampf’ – whereas nothing could be farther from the truth. The English edition is a bowdlerised and emasculated version. ‘Mein Kampf’ contains 700 closely printed pages; ‘My Struggle’ contains 280 pages almost entirely devoted to an account of the rise of the Nazi party and its hatred of Jewry. Every indication of Germany’s aggressive intentions is removed. The amount of mischief that such an edition can cause is incalculable; it is far more dangerous to have a book set before us in this form than not to have it at all – as is the case in France, where Herr Hitler refuses to authorise its translation. Why may we not have the full text in English? If Herr Hitler refuses to grant the rights of a full translation surely we may have the main subjects of his foreign policy set out in pamphlet form?19 Hyde and Lorimer subsequently corresponded, and What Hitler Wants may be seen as Lorimer’s attempt to fulfil Hyde’s request that Hitler’s ambitions – not just in foreign policy – be set out in an accessible fashion for English readers. Lorimer explained her aims in the preface to What Hitler Wants. She uncompromisingly claimed that ‘British ignorance of the German language is convenient to the Germans. They can write and teach what they will, secure in the knowledge that scarcely one Briton in ten thousand – and apparently no Cabinet Minister – could read it if he would, and that still fewer will read it even if they can’ (WHW, 9). Yet, such an understanding was vital, for ‘Not a thing that Hitler has done, not even the official breaches of the Munich Agreement and the seizure of territories beyond even the Godesberg demands, but is foreshadowed in the modern German Bible, Mein Kampf ’ (WHW, 9). Lorimer went on to impugn the existing translation of 1933: ‘The “authorised” English edition would seem to have been drastically edited for British consumption, with many of the more vital teachings of the Führer omitted.’ She noted too the unhelpfulness of My Struggle’s publishers: ‘An inquiry made by my publishers as to the circumstances in which these omissions were made, elicited the reply that the publishers could not discuss the private affairs of one of their authors with another publisher’ (WHW, 10). Rallying to Hyde’s cry, Lorimer explained her decision to write the book: ‘In the profound belief that the Cause of Justice and Right can triumph only if the man and woman in the street learn the truth at last, I offer them this modest volume’ (WHW, 11). Actually, only the first section of the book is devoted to an exegesis of Mein Kampf ; Lorimer also examined Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of Twentieth Century, and the last of the three sections was devoted to ‘Nazism in Practice’, which looked at foreign and domestic policy and Nazi

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terror. Nevertheless, the bulk of the book was taken up by the analysis of Mein Kampf and the final section was intended to show how the principles expressed therein were being realised. What Hitler Wants was published in January 1939 and was, on the whole, well received, especially in the provincial press. Many reviewers regarded it as a substitute for Mein Kampf itself, which is just what Lorimer had intended. Time and Tide noted that ‘Most of us are too ignorant of the German language to read Mein Kampf as Hitler wrote it and as it is still presented as obligatory reading for German citizens. But from now on anybody with sixpence to invest can learn just what the Führer and his fellow gangsters mean to do and how they mean to do it.’ It recommended that a philanthropist ‘of the Nuffield type’ should distribute 20 million copies.20 Lorimer’s local paper, the Welwyn Times, noted the omission of much of the original in the English version and praised Lorimer for making it available. The Bolton Evening News and the Western Telegraph (Urmston) both praised ‘Mr. Lorimer’ (this gender assumption based on the fact that the book appeared only under the name E.O. Lorimer was presumably a deliberate strategy on Lorimer’s part) for making abundantly clear that ‘in the madman dreams of Herr Hitler all freedom loving people stand in peril’ and that ‘in reviewing Mr. Lorimer’s important book we are actually reviewing the book Hitler wrote 7 years before he came to power. [ . . . ] The obvious matter of importance which emerges from a study of Mr. E.O. Lorimer’s “What Hitler Wants” is that once more “You Have Been warned”.’21 The Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, was equally fulsome in its praise but drew more sinister and somewhat fantastical conclusions: it is essential that however ‘indigestible’ these two books [Mein Kampf ; Mythus] may be – and they are, from two different points of view: both the literary and the democratic – the British people should be fully acquainted with them. For they reveal the real aims of the people with whom the present British Government is working so desperately for an alliance. That is why, presumably, there exists no unabridged, undoctored translation of ‘Mein Kampf’ in this country.22 Numerous individuals, ranging from well-known politicians actively engaged in promoting anti-Nazism to letter writers to local newspapers, also wrote to Lorimer to congratulate her, often in response to the copy that she sent them. Edvard Beneš, soon to become President of the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London, who had turned down Lorimer’s request that she dedicate the book to him, wrote to congratulate her ‘on the impressive and intelligent way you have explained the whole danger which does menace Europe’.23 The Principal of City of London College, Sidney Daly, hoped that the book would be ‘read by every adult in the country’.24 Muriel

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Whitehouse, the Principal of Arley Castle School in Bewdley wrote to inform Lorimer that she was reading What Hitler Wants with the sixth form, and finding it ‘tremendously valuable’.25 And Sir Henry Strakosch wrote to tell Lorimer that he was sending out some 2,400 copies of the book, one to every MP in Westminster and to every member of both parliamentary houses in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Eire, India and the United States.26 But perhaps the most curious response to What Hitler Wants came from one Michael Barsley, who wrote to Lorimer to tell her that he had found the book ‘excellent reading, refreshingly different from the average book on Hitler’.27 Barsley was the author of ‘Grabberwochy’, a skit on Lewis Carroll, which he sent to Lorimer: Grabberwochy ‘Twas Danzig, and the Swastikoves Did heil and hittle in the reich, All nazi were the lindengroves And the neuraths julestreich.’ However, not all the reviews were so laudatory. The Times rather grudgingly declared that ‘The author of this book deserves great credit for having read Herr Rosenberg’s fantastic book, and her short summary includes most of the essentials.’ It then went on, in a fine illustration of the British establishment’s inability to take ideas other than its own seriously: One is tempted to ask, nevertheless, whether it is right to worry about its views and influence. Great nonsense was also talked during the middle stages of the French Revolution, and Russian Communism performed tricks with the interpretation of past history which run close to Herr Rosenberg’s efforts. Yet both in France and Russia time blew these fantasies away. The same thing, we hope, will happen in Germany.28 And the New English Weekly, the successor to the avant-garde early modernist journal the New Age and organ of social credit and the early organic movement, simply noted in its April review that What Hitler Wants ‘is rather superfluous now that “Mein Kampf” has come out in full’.29 Lorimer begged to differ and set out in various places why. Her response to the New English Weekly noted that it was ‘most natural for your reviewer to assume that the recent publication of a full, uncensored, unexpurgated Edition of Mein Kampf in English would have rendered my little book superfluous’. However, the opposite was true: ‘on the contrary it has made it more urgently necessary than before, for the modest aim of What Hitler Wants is to reveal to the English reader ignorant of German the full spirit and purpose of Nazism and the practical results of this spirit and purpose’.30

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This the new translation simply did not do, Lorimer believed. Elsewhere she explained why. In a letter to Arnold Hyde, Lorimer wrote that her suspicions about the source of the translation led her to check the book ‘phrase by phrase’ against the original German. What she found confirmed her in her worries: here is another most subtle and ingenious attempt to hoodwink the English reader as to the true spirit of the original. [ . . . ] It is infuriating to realise that Hitler will reap the enormous royalties from this ‘English’ version and the publishers of it harvest enormous profits while (I understand) its publication here was arranged in the nick of time to prevent the importation of the pirated American translation (wh. wd. I presume have been an honest one) the profits of which were to go [to] the refugee funds.31 A week later Hyde replied to Lorimer, with comments that strike at the heart of debates at this time: was the National Government furthering its policy of appeasement because it was the only way to gain enough time to build up sufficient military strength to take on Germany in the inevitably coming war or was it doing so because it was already some way down the path of introducing a form of fascism into Britain? Hyde first noted, echoing the Time and Tide reviewer, that ‘if the Government had issued a copy of “What Hitler Wants” to each household instead of the National Service Handbook, there would be some real enthusiasm for National Service!’ Then he turned to the difficult questions: All this is very well, but it is really depressing – and even alarming – to see such astonishment at truths of which every citizen in the British Isles ought to have been informed years ago. [ . . . ] It is inconceivable that our statesmen and publicists are unaware of the full implications of Nazi philosophy and ‘ideals’, and that being so, how can one assort their conduct with rational behaviour? [ . . . ] Even if one draws the rather dramatic conclusion that the ruling classes are Nazi at heart, you are still left with the problem of why they are anxious to assist in the destruction of the Empire.32 Here we see the perceived connection between the translation of Mein Kampf and the broader political situation. If commentators such as Hyde and Lorimer – like Wickham Steed, Leland Stowe, Robert Dell and many others – were most concerned with foreign policy rather than with, say, Nazi racial policy, in the way that historians tend to be today, this is a reflection of the fact that they feared that the British government was somehow complicit in helping Hitler achieve his goals, even at the expense, ultimately, of Britain and its empire. Rather paranoid this may have been, but it was

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certainly an opinion held by many serious students of Nazi Germany before Chamberlain’s demise. In another article in Time and Tide, Lorimer set out her own position, with a detailed analysis of the new ‘unexpurgated’ edition. She first outlined what she took to be the task of the translator: to give readers not just a literal rendition but to stir their emotions and to shake their aesthetic sense as if they were reading the original text. By this standard, she regarded the text as substandard: Mr. James Murphy’s translation is a travesty of Mein Kampf. With a few minor lapses which may readily be condoned in a work done as his must have been under time-pressure, he does give the English reader the literal meaning of each sentence in Herr Hitler’s book, BUT – and what a ‘but’ – he conveys not a hint, nor the shadow of a hint, of the gripping power, the dynamism, the fire, the vigour, the brutality, the passion of the original. In contrast with the German original, which ‘screams and screeches violence’ and is ‘a book to rob you of sleep o’nights’, Murphy’s English rendition is so respectable that ‘it might be a reprint of Johnson’s Tour in the Hebrides’; it is ‘a book to drop asleep over’.33 Lorimer offered numerous examples of what she meant, ranging from the presentation of the book, the layout of the page, to the grammar and vocabulary. For example, where Hitler talked of ‘Hottentots and Zulukaffirs’ Murphy talked of ‘Hottentots and Zulus’; where Hitler used the word ‘Vernegerung’ (‘negrification’), Murphy translated ‘becoming more and more obsessed by Negroid ideas’; and where Hitler referred to ‘Stimmvieh’ (‘voter cattle’), Murphy opted for the slightly more dignified ‘herds of voters’. All in all, Lorimer detected more at work here than just an inadequate translation: Thus by padding, by circumlocution, by the use of well-worn tag and cliché, by long Latinised words instead of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, by the avoidance of every term not found in standard dictionaries, by the substitution of conditional for indicative tenses, this ‘literal’ English translation subtly transforms Hitler’s breath-taking, sleep-destroying evidence into a draught of Mother Siegel’s Soothing Syrup.34 To prove that this domestication of Mein Kampf was no accident, Lorimer refers to Murphy’s introduction, in which he reminds the reader that ‘Hitler has also declared that, as he was only a political leader and not yet a statesman . . . when he wrote this book, what he stated in Mein Kampf does not implicate him as Chancellor of the Reich.’ In her turn, Lorimer offers this rejoinder:

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But it is Adolf Hitler, Führer and Reichskanzler, who makes Mein Kampf a compulsory text book for every German citizen, for every German boy and girl, and who has enriched himself by putting five million copies into enforced circulation. It is Adolf Hitler who by every act of violence that shocks the civilised world sets the seal on Mein Kampf.35 After a little more investigation, Lorimer found out that her suspicions were – she believed – confirmed. Murphy, it became known, had worked for four years for Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda (1934–38) and must therefore have been a convinced Nazi.36 Thus, Lorimer embarked on a further campaign to alert people to the new risks attendant upon the ‘unexpurgated edition’, which seemed to her even greater than those associated with the earlier, abridged version. She wrote, for example, to Robert Vansittart, probably the most vehemently anti-German of British statesmen, who replied: ‘I have only read Mein Kampf in German – a dreadful job – but had always heard there was no proper English edition. The bowdlerised form was all too prevalent, and I had heard the Murphy production criticised before I got your letter. I hope that the course of events will prove the best corrective of any illusions based on an imperfect view or version of Hitler.’37 And Vansittartism – the belief that only a total destruction of Germany’s infrastructure, a pastoralisation of the land and the break-up of the nationstate – seemed to appeal to Lorimer. She joined the Never Again Association, which, with Vansittart as its president, was pledged to preventing Germany from ever acquiring the capacity to wage war again, and produced articles for it that situated her at the more extreme end of post-war plans for the country. In one, she took to task an imaginary reader, who felt sympathy for the ‘ordinary’ Germans: ‘let him’, she wrote, ‘as he values our future hope of decontaminating Germany, read the books of those who know Germany and the Germans (as he himself does not) and face the stark and ugly facts like a man, rather than lazily – selfishly – disastrously – hug the fatal illusion that the Prussianised, Nazified German of to-day is a sane and decent human being, not in essentials different from ourselves’.38 Her second book on Nazi Germany, What the German Needs (1942), developed this theme, which is no doubt why it received considerably less publicity than What Hitler Wants, but she continued to write in a similar vein articles for the Ministry of Information to broadcast to Aden, and was well paid for her trouble.39 Yet her most important contribution to the controversy over Mein Kampf was not published, but was a privately circulated memorandum setting out the circumstances of the translation. In order to understand its sensitivity it must be made clear that the object of Lorimer’s attack was not only Murphy but his publisher Walter Hutchinson and the popular Tory historian Arthur Bryant. In other words, the point of her memorandum was to take on a

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broad swathe of right-wing opinion, not merely what she regarded as the mistranslations of a fellow-traveller of the Nazis. In the late 1930s, in response to Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club and to the extraordinarily successful Penguin Specials, the right in Britain attempted to fight back on the cultural front.40 The Right Book Club, under the aegis of Christina Foyle of bookshop fame, was founded early in 1937, publishing mainly reprints of existing works, from the nostalgic ‘Merrie England’ type to attacks on Communism to more aggressively-pro-Fascist publications, such as those of Gerald Wallop, the Earl of Portsmouth or Francis Yeats-Brown. And the National Book Association was launched by Arthur Bryant shortly after the appearance of the RBC (and much to his annoyance). Unlike the RBC, however, the NBA aimed to commission new works (like the LBC) and to tap into an influential network of Conservative Party institutions such as the Bonar Law Memorial College at Ashridge. He had support from Stanley Baldwin and the publisher Walter Hutchinson. And he aimed to absorb the RBC into the NBA.41 With the NBA’s decision to select the translation of Mein Kampf as its book of the month in February 1939, Baldwin resigned as President of the NBA. As Green notes, publishing Mein Kampf can be seen as the NBA’s attempt to give its ‘middle-ground’ readers some sense of political ‘balance’; after all, it had already published the old Bolshevik Victor Serge’s memoirs as well as a selection of Neville Chamberlain’s speeches. However, ‘it is also the case that the decision to publish Mein Kampf reflected Bryant’s own strong proGerman, and indeed pro-Nazi, sympathies’.42 Lorimer’s paper, ‘The Mein Kampf Ramp’, was written in August 1941 and was meant as an exposure of the machinations that lay behind this attempted publication by the NBA. ‘Ramp’ here may be understood in two senses: its dictionary definition is a ‘swindle or fraudulent action, specifically the action or practice of obtaining profit by an unwarranted increase in the price of a commodity’. But it might also be understood as the attempt to elevate Mein Kampf, to give Hitler’s stance heightened publicity. Either way, it is clear that Lorimer was furious and disgusted by this renewed attempt to propagandize on Hitler’s behalf. Indicting ‘as suspect quislings’ Hutchinson, Murphy and Bryant, Lorimer exploded forth: I found and find it beyond words disgraceful that a historian of repute, who could not conceivably be in ignorance of the fact that the book he was thus recommending was a dangerous, Nazi-produced fraud and that he was grinding a most prejudicial axe, should have been accessory to the hoodwinking of the members of the National Book Club [sic] and should have pressed on them this piece of Goebbels’ propaganda.43 Disgraceful it may have been, but, to Lorimer at least, it was not surprising. After all, Bryant had in 1940 published Unfinished Victory, an unashamed

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eulogy to Nazism. Remarkably, for this was during the war (although the so-called Phoney War had not yet ended), Unfinished Victory was largely well received by the press, and only the dawning realisation that rapidly changing circumstances were threatening him with internment led Bryant to buy up as many copies of the book as he could lay his hands on, and to write and publish in a matter of weeks his ‘apology’, the ‘island story’ English Saga. Lorimer was one of the exceptional reviewers who objected to Unfinished Victory, writing in Time and Tide, ‘All the best and biggest Nazi lies are here, presented with a garnish of scholarship and erudition. [ . . . ] Please God, your clever book has come too late to take any readers in.’44 The following year she drove the knife deeper in: . . . his Unfinished Victory of 1940 is a subtle, admirably written, plausible piece of pure Nazi propaganda, so skilful that it may well take in any reader not exceptionally well-informed and wide-awake, as it no doubt took in the reputable publishers Messrs. Macmillan, who I presume would not intentionally have lent themselves to Hitler’s service. It is significant that James Murphy had in fact been from 1934-1938 a hireling in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry in Berlin.45 Finally, Lorimer turned to Hutchinson, in a deeply sarcastic passage that exposes all the hypocrisies involved in Mein Kampf ’s publication history: When war broke out Hutchinson unctuously announced that he was giving to the Red Cross the royalties which would otherwise have gone to Hitler. (If Judas had thought of it he need not so precipitately have gone out and hanged himself; he could have handed his silver pieces to some fund for distressed Pharisees.)46 Indeed, Lorimer anticipated a scandal over royalties that echoed the debate in the United States in 1939 and that resurfaced again only recently.47 But if Lorimer was right about Bryant, her attack on Hutchinson was misplaced; the latter was no Nazi, and he went ahead with bringing out the ‘unexpurgated version’ despite Eher Verlag forbidding its publication and in order to not give the impression that Hurst and Blackett were suppressing important information about the Nazis’ true aims. ∗ Lorimer’s fierce attack on Nazism and on Mein Kampf ’s proponents in Britain place her in a somewhat exceptional position. It is all the more important, then, to provide some context that shows the extent to which she was a child of her time. To today’s reader the attacks on Murphy, Mein Kampf and the rebarbative Unfinished Victory all suggest a leftist pedigree for Lorimer.

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But this was far from being the case; rather, she readily identified herself as part of the ‘respectable’, professional middle-class, was favourably inclined towards eugenics and displayed a residual antisemitism that was typical of the time. For example, in What Hitler Wants, she wrote disparagingly of Hitler’s attacks on the Jews that this policy would only be harmful for Germany. The reasons seem curious today: The English reader, remembering with gratitude how much the stability of British finance has owed to the co-operation of generations of British Jews with English bankers, would like some indication of just how Hitler would prove Jewish finance was necessarily so fatal to Germany, but Hitler does not attempt to prove any of his amazing theses. (WHW, 49) Similarly, and more surprisingly, is the comment she made in private correspondence regarding Jewish émigrés. Browsing through a bookshop in Cambridge, Lorimer came across Joseph Leftwich’s anthology of Yiddish poetry. In considering some of its contents, she allowed her Vansittartism to get the better of her: Leftwich also quotes Geo. Eliot about Heine: ‘True, he is also a Jew, but he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English bird or a potato an Irish vegetable.’ This re-inforces my feeling of caution vis a vis [sic] our Jewish refugees. They must be fiercely anti-Hitler, granted. They are not necessarily anti-Deutschland über Alles or anti the Herrenvolk myth or anti-War or anti-Despotism. They may in their hearts be just as keen on German World Domination as Hitler or the Kaiser or the pan-Germans. Failing some spiritual X-ray apparatus or some very positive proof of bona fides, it is I think wise to suspend one’s judgment and beware of overtrustfulness.48 For a woman who had stressed the importance of Nazi ideology, this confusion of Nazism with Prussianism constituted a serious error of judgement, though one no more egregious than her confusion (echoed by the British state’s internment policy) of Jewish refugees with a potential Nazi fifth column. On the question of eugenics she was also ambivalent. In What Hitler Wants, Lorimer wrote of the Third Reich’s eugenic legislation: So much of Hitler’s doctrine runs counter to our every deepest instinct that we could applaud with real pleasure this sound eugenic principle of saving avoidable suffering to posterity if we had any confidence that it would be applied with scientific detachment. The columns of the Stürmer unfortunately bear witness to the vindictive manner in which

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Nazi Germany is using the sterilisation law of July 1933 for her own ends. (WHW, 65) In a review of a book by the eugenicist and anti-feminist (and, incidentally, pro-Nazi) Anthony Ludovici, Lorimer correctly observed that ‘Mr. Ludovici has a rare bonnetful of bees – fine savage bees bred to sting, and trained from the comb to go for a she-monster of his own creation which he calls a “Feminist”.’ However, she went on, considering some of his arguments about gender roles and breeding ‘sound stocks’ to claim that ‘Despite the buzzing of his bees, there is sound common sense in Mr. Ludovici’s main contention.’49 Anyone who has come across Ludovici’s arguments for infanticide, incest and selective culling would be hard pushed to agree with Lorimer’s assessment. As a final example, in a letter to her future son-in-law in 1940 she again expressed pro-eugenic sentiments, arguing that the professional middle classes were placed under a special burden of marrying late and maintaining status in a way that was ‘awfully bad for the country’: ‘It means later and smaller families (even the criminal one-child family) amongst the very pick of our stocks. It is a tendency against wh. I think wise parents – as contrasted with merely prudent one – sd. earnestly fight.’ Her advice to Neil was clear. Despite the ravages of the Great War, many couples chose to have children, and the same should apply now, during World War II.50 All of this simply places Lorimer in context, and none of it detracts from her visceral anti-Nazism, which she did so much to promote. The fact that in some minimal regard Lorimer shared a mental space with ideas that fed Nazism is simply a way of saying that Nazism did not come from nowhere, but was an extreme version of ideas that were commonplace throughout the Western world in the first half of the twentieth century. It was of course the case that people arrived at their attitudes towards Hitler and Nazism, whether in Germany or Britain, for many, complex reasons, not just on the basis of what they knew of Hitler’s intentions. Yet even anti-intentionalist post-war historians of Nazism nevertheless agree that Mein Kampf tells us a good deal about Hitler’s mindset, even if it can only be a rough guide to Nazism in action. In March 1939, following the occupation of Prague, J. L. Garvin, the editor of the Observer, wrote in his newspaper that ‘We can now see that certain passages in “Mein Kampf” expressed an illimitable infatuation, and that what he aims at is German supremacy in the world.’51 Emily Lorimer, unlike so many of her peers, had the courage to stand up and make this claim far earlier than most other commentators, to insist that the Nazis – as typified by Banse, Hitler and Rosenberg – meant what they said, and to do her utmost to counter the pro-appeasement stance that reigned in Britain at least until after Prague and, for many, until well into the war.

7 Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi?

Introduction Rolf Gardiner (1902–71) excites deep affection and instinctive dissent in equal measure. An inspirational man of boundless ‘energy and enthusiasm and tenacity’,1 he devoted himself unswervingly for 50 years to his cause of rescuing Western civilisation from soulless mechanisation. In their assessments of him, most scholars tend to be less provocative than the local man mentioned by Patrick Wright who, on making a delivery to Springhead, Gardiner’s old farm and the centre of his enterprises, asked ‘Is that where the Nazi lived?’2 but many have nevertheless readily pointed out aspects of Gardiner’s activities that supposedly tend towards fascism. Richard Griffiths, most importantly, included him among his collection of ‘fellow travellers of the right’, and Mike Tyldesley shows how despite Gardiner’s post-war claim to the contrary, before World War II he had proudly asserted the strong connections between the youth movement and National Socialism.3 Others disagree, claiming that Gardiner’s initial enthusiasm for the National Socialist revolution was born of political naivety and rapidly waned when he realised the true nature of the regime, or suggesting that Gardiner’s ‘proNazism’ only appears as such when his claims are taken out of context. Such ‘defenders’ include not just former colleagues such as Andrew Best, whose position among the apologists one might not find surprising, but more recent scholars such as Gardiner’s biographer David Fowler.4 Richard Moore-Colyer argues that the jury should remain out until a more thorough investigation of Gardiner’s papers has taken place, though his own writings have for the most part tended to give Gardiner the benefit of the doubt.5 In this chapter I will try as far as possible to shed some new light on this issue by reconstructing the extent of Gardiner’s engagement with Nazism as revealed by his unpublished papers. I will show that the argument about Gardiner’s ‘fascism’ is to some extent a red herring, because Gardiner himself attacked fascism, and carefully distinguished it from Nazism, thus in some 96

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ways allowing him to brush aside potentially awkward accusations. But at the same time he openly praised Hitler and the Nazis and, long after he is supposed to have changed his mind, maintained views – at least in private correspondence – that suggest considerable sympathy with National Socialist goals. Arguing about ‘fascism’, then, does not get to the heart of the matter. My aim here is neither to indict nor to exculpate Gardiner, but to situate him historically, thus illustrating how an unusual and original Englishman of the first half of the twentieth century could respond to a phenomenon that was widely perceived as ‘un-English’ in a way that was, at the very least, ambiguous. Rolf Gardiner was in one sense fairly typical of the age: after the cataclysm of the Great War and viewing events on the continent, he believed that the twilight of democracy had come and that national cultures would henceforth find their creative urges fulfilled in new kinds of vigorous regimes. ‘The English have now reached a point in their history where they must seek a new focus. The old urge and spirit of adventure which came to young manhood with the Tudors and which colonised the Empire is exhausted and can kindle our hearts no more.’6 He was less typical in that he saw Britain’s future most securely lying in a ‘northern federation’ with Germany and the states around the Baltic Sea. This was no doubt partly for reasons of biography, but also because Gardiner saw the part of Europe that stretched from the Adriatic to the Arctic and from the Vistula to the Atlantic as sharing ‘frontiers of race and culture’.7 Isolation was to bury one’s head in the sand and leave the future to be dominated by America and the Dominions (now freed from the Empire) on the one hand and Bolshevik Russia on the other. Nor was alliance with the United States feasible. Hence, in northern Europe, which Gardiner saw as culturally utterly separate from Mediterranean Europe, that is to say, in ‘Germanic unity’, lay Britain’s only meaningful future: ‘while between, say, Whitby and Luebeck, Elsinore and Danzig, there are many superficial differences, there is yet something familiar to them all. They are tied with the traditions of a great past, when Europe was a vital religious unity and correspondence between town and town was a thing more natural than our present abstract correspondence between nation and nation.’8 The alternative, Gardiner believed, was akin to Weber’s ‘polar night of icy darkness and hardness’,9 and his writings are suffused with the indulgent descriptions of future disasters typical of the cultural pessimism of the first half of the twentieth century across Europe – but which he maintained all his life. If anything, his analysis of the dangers of turning away from authentic traditions became sharper after World War II: ‘Our over-complicated civilisation is becoming more and more mobile and unrooted, and the sum result is an artificiality which sooner or later results in serious breakdowns, even to the point of cataclysm, such as seems to be overwhelming us now.’10 Gardiner acquired his belief in the unity of northern Europe and the need for a Germanic federation early on in life, when, as an undergraduate at

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Cambridge, he became dissatisfied with the mechanistic and materialist outlook of the dons. He despised ‘the University type’ who was, he argued, ‘like 99 per cent of our drugged upper classes, vitally fast asleep’.11 His search for an alternative led him first to look for inspirational leaders, such as D.H. Lawrence, and to join John Hargrave’s Kibbo Kift Kindred, itself a breakaway movement from the Boy Scouts,12 to the Social Credit movement and to a lifelong involvement with the German youth movement, especially the Bünde and the Deutsche Freischar that emerged from it. He took English groups on singing and Morris dancing tours of Germany, and arranged for reciprocal visits by German groups. He was involved in the establishment ´ anski of the Boberhaus in Loewenberg, Silesia (today Lwówek Sl ˛ in Poland), and the Musikheim in Frankfurt an der Oder, institutions that not only sought to promote traditional Germanic culture through work camps and cross-class cultural activities but that Gardiner explicitly envisaged as contributions to the German colonial settlement of the Ostmark, the eastern marches: ‘They are conscious of a task in which all the latent romanticism of young Germany may be turned to real account in fulfilment of a duty which Germany holds in trust for the rest of Europe.’ That is, to defend Europe from the encroaching ‘Asiatic desert’, which lay just beyond the Ostmark.13 The relationship between the German youth movement and Nazism has given rise to considerable debate amongst historians, and Gardiner’s own views on the subject are often cited because he, more than any other non-German commentator, understood the nature of the movement as both an insider and an outsider.

The youth movements and Nazism The consensus among scholars of the German youth movements seems to be that although there were ultra-nationalist and Nazi elements of the movement they were not synonymous with it as such. Walter Laqueur wrote 40 years ago, in what remains an authoritative study, that ‘All that Rolf Gardiner saw and so deeply appreciated in German youth did exist, but it was by no means the whole of the picture’, and he critically analysed Gardiner’s tenacious belief in the possibility of entente between the two countries.14 Accordingly, most scholars have been at pains to assert that the idea of a necessary link between the youth movements and Nazism derives from wartime propaganda.15 Peter Stachura, for example, in his widely cited work, suggests that historians have been deceived by statements made by spokesmen of the Bündische Jugend after 1933 in an effort to ingratiate themselves with the Nazis; not only were such overtures rejected by Schirach’s Hitler Youth, but in fact the ‘Bündische youth was ideologically neo-conservative rather than National Socialist or proto-Nazi’.16 More recently, Malcolm Chase and Mike Tyldesley have proposed a revisionist argument. The former notes the inter-penetration of German and English


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medievalism and argues that ‘The source of Gardiner’s largely uncritical stance towards Nazism lay in the depth of his commitment to German youth.’17 The latter shows how before the war it was commonly assumed by those involved in the youth movements on the left – like Leslie Paul (founder of the Woodcraft Folk) – and right – like Gardiner – that Nazism was the logical extension of the youth movements. Paul argued that ‘If one cannot saddle the Youth Movement with entire responsibility for Hitlerism, since the future, the end, was not apprehended in the romantic beginnings, equally it is foolish to talk of the betrayal of German youth by Hitlerism for this was the end to which their hunger led, and the evil was contained in it.’18 Gardiner severely criticised Paul, disputing his claim to speak with authority on the subject, and asserting that ‘quite an astonishing number of Hitler’s adjutants were previously Wandervoegel leaders. . . . The young people of Germany are to-day National Socialist because they own a creed daily made manifest in action, not conserved as a pious ideal or as a party programme.’19 Only after the war did they both change their position: Gardiner now claimed that there was no link and that in fact Nazism had betrayed the youth movements, and Paul, bowing to Gardiner’s greater experience, rejected that earlier part of his life as an embarrassment and turned to Christianity.20 In other words, the reputation of the youth movements is something that many have been concerned to rescue. It is all the more important then to note the keenness with which Gardiner in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi takeover of power rejoiced in the event specifically by referring to it as the culmination of the movement’s aspirations. Already in 1929 Gardiner had written that ‘The Jugendbewegung sought a new type of manhood, a new race; they felt themselves to be the sons of the gods, a race of heroes returning to conquer the kingdoms of the world.’21 That in itself was not a pro-Nazi statement, but it shows how Gardiner could be tempted to see in Nazism the crowning glory of the youth movement’s goals. Several of Gardiner’s unpublished manuscripts give us further clues as to how Gardiner perceived the Nazi takeover of power. One typescript entitled Stroemungen des englischen kulturellen und politischen Lebens (Tendencies in English Cultural and Political Life) is divided into three sections: ‘the English crisis’, ‘rebuilding and reality’, and ‘the bridge to Germany’. The first section presents a picture of England overrun by distasteful and inferior races – a portrayal that those who absolve Gardiner of antisemitism and racism (despite publishing alongside Lymington, Stapledon et al.) will find revealing: ‘England was being incessantly descended upon by foreign elements’ (England wurde unaufhörlich von fremden Elementen überfallen) he begins, and goes on to talk of the ‘cinemas and sports grounds for the masses, the large department stores, Jewish-American finance like Woolworth and Marks & Spencer, und everywhere the hideously-built [graßlich gebauten] villas of England’s “suburbia” ’. Eating away like a plague at everything organic and

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flourishing, ‘It is something totally foreign and un-English, and its JewishAmerican origin and stamp should not be overlooked [nicht zu verkennen]. London . . . is sinking under this flood of foreign modernity that is breaking over it.’22 Despite this bleak diagnosis, however, in the second section Gardiner does not recommend turning to Mosley’s version of fascism; rather he finds that the aristocratic-minded English Mistery represents far more convincingly a ‘pure community of breeding’ (echte Erziehungsgemeinschaft), comprised of men who are searching for a new leader (Führer) and a new aristocracy.23 The German Revolution, thinks Gardiner in the final section, should act as a spur for the English people to rally round this English Mistery vision: ‘The German Revolution is a moral warning [Gewissensmahnung] to the English people [Volk]. . . . Not that Germany should instruct England, but that England be brought to self-recognition of its ancient English values.’24 A similar plea for English national renewal in the light of the German one was made in a 35-page piece entitled Die Wende des englischen Volkes (The Turn of the English People), written at about the same time and, like Stroemungen, intended to be collected in a volume with the working title Ein Engländer spricht mit Deutschen (An Englishman speaks with Germans). Condemning the political establishment for failing to perceive ‘the endpoints of the English fate in the twentieth century’, and thus for ‘delivering itself and the people to foreign and destructive elements’, Gardiner argues that England has become more and more Americanised, mostly as a result of ‘Jewish-American money-influences’ which have led to ‘foreign poisoning’.25 And here Gardiner brings the youth movement in, linking it inseparably to National Socialism: . . . for any renewal of England must be a Germanic renewal. I hold that in the post-war years, the young English generation experienced the German youth movement as a kind of Germanic national conscience [Völkergewissens]. That this generation as a whole has still not understood the necessity and inner logic of the German revolution is primarily to be explained by the liberalised world view of English public opinion as well as the propaganda of a Judaised press.26 It is noteworthy that neither of these two manuscripts was published, though it remains unclear whether this was because Gardiner’s ‘real’ opinions are those represented by World Without End (1932) or just because Gardiner failed to find a publisher for his manuscript. In any event, in 1933 Gardiner did try and publish a letter in the Times that put forward a vigorous defence of the new Nazi regime by addressing head on one of the facets of the regime that had come under most scrutiny: its policy towards the Jews. Although the newspaper declined to publish the letter, it is worth


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reproducing as an example of how far Gardiner was publicly prepared to go in defence of the Nazi regime: The Germans find it difficult not to see in the ‘humanitarian’ protests of England against the ‘persecution’ of the Jews a subconscious outrage for an attack on the new social principles upon which they are reconstructing their life. . . . The Jews, say the Germans, have had their chance during the past dozen years. They have had an astonishing power in every walk of life and they have abused it in the eyes and conscience of the nation. The Jewish conception of art as well as of life and politics differs profoundly from that of the northern Europeans. Whereas Jewish art is analytic, individualistic and self-expressive, that of the best northern European is mythic, communal and religious in form. Jewish tastes have estranged the Germans from their own tradition. The purge, despite the hardship it will cause many thousands of Jews, will release the Germans from an alien spell.27 Gardiner’s attitude towards Jews can be summed up in a short piece that he wrote on Karl Marx, where he wrote simply: ‘As a Jew he was a foreigner in Europe . . . ’ and in a published article of 1933 where he referred to the Ostjuden in Germany as having ‘the smell of Asia still fresh in their beards’.28 Given his basic belief in the need for cultural and racial homogeneity – ‘The true wealth of a people, it seems to me, lies in the interplay of its generations and their devotion to the same soil and its continuous culture’29 – he thus took from the start a sympathetic approach to movements that sought to remove such ‘foreign elements’. Finally, in 1934, Gardiner wrote a striking 50-page paper, entitled A Survey of Constructive Aspects of the New Germany. Here Gardiner’s support for Nazism reached its peak, for he appears to exempt Nazism from his general fear that ‘isms’ promote only mindless, standardised masses and not strong individuals. Writing unequivocably that ‘The National Socialist Revolution may be stated to be in very many ways a translation of the experience of the German Youth Movement, which flourished between 1900 and 1930, into terms of mass and national efficacy’, he went on to say that ‘this movement is not a mass movement of the kind to be seen in Russia or Italy – that it does not seek to annihilate individual freedom and conscience, but to recreate personality, in a sense inherent in the world today but largely forgotten, to produce the individuality not the individualist’.30 This is perhaps the closest we come in Gardiner’s writings to a statement that sees Nazism in accord with his rejection of fascism. In the rest of the paper Gardiner set out how Britain could benefit from the ‘Nazi Revolution’. He recommended exchanges between the Hitler Youth and English work camps; enthused about the Deutsche Arbeitsfront; and lauded Darré’s attempt ‘to recreate a vigorous German peasantry through which a new and potent aristocracy might

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spring’.31 In general, while there were in this piece aspects of the regime that he chose not to touch on, he found that ‘nowhere but in Germany to-day is an attempt being made deliberately and courageously to stem the universal world tide of urbanisation and industrialism’.32 But perhaps more important than any of these manuscripts – and apparently unnoticed by Gardiner scholars with the exception of the author of his DNB entry – is the letter Gardiner wrote in April 1933 to Joseph Goebbels. This telling letter gives the lie to any claim that Gardiner wished to keep some distance between himself, the youth movement and the Nazis. Even if the letter is regarded strategically, as a way of alerting the Reich’s new propaganda minister to the fact that the outside world knew something of the history of German youth and was watching to see what would transpire, its unctuous tone and rebarbative toadiness makes it stand out in Gardiner’s voluminous correspondence. The letter begins: ‘Esteemed Herr Reichsminister, as leader [Führer] of a young English generation, which has, since the end of the war, tirelessly sought an honest engagement with the conservative-national section of German youth, I am daring to write to you and at the same time to express [Ausdruck zu verleihen] in the name of my comrades our joy at the renewal of the German people [Volk] and re-establishment of German national dignity.’ Gardiner goes on to explain that the liberal establishment in Britain is placing many slanderous obstacles in the way of people’s understanding of the true significance of the German ‘national revival’ (Erhebung), but that many English people would instinctively respond to the call of the Germanic revolution initiated by National Socialism, since Britain too belongs to the ‘Germanic world’. Gardiner then sets out his credentials: his involvement with the Deutsche Freischar, the work-camps; national and international youth tours; the defence of the German east symbolised by the Boberhaus and the Musikheim. And he explicitly links his conception of the youth movement with Nazism: ‘An entire old world stood opposed to our direction and wanted to reverse it. For we sought the new order of a third Reich, we wanted to bring about not brotherhood but spiritual combat [geistigen Nahkampf ]. We thought in an undemocratic and un-pacifist way.’ The new Germany, then, is the fulfilment of these dreams. Gardiner, appealing to Goebbels’ love of music, proceeds to an extended discussion of the Musikheim, suggesting to Goebbels that he will find there, under the leadership of Georg Goetsch, ‘a true executor of the ideas of the National Socialist state’. He ends by urging Goebbels to distrust what is widely perceived as English public opinion, and to remain attentive instead to those who greet the ‘great development of the German Volk’ warmly. ‘A tradition-rich [altersreiches] England and a future-oriented Germany could promote exchanges that would profit both countries’, Gardiner writes. And he promises Goebbels that ‘we will pursue our work of renewing Germanic values in all countries around the North and Baltic Seas with new strength.


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For we believe that the new German state will help us and will be our protector [Schirmherr]. You, Herr Reichsminister, will understand us and assess our path correctly. In this sense we English, through you, greet the new German state.’ As a postscript Gardiner offers to be of assistance with propaganda work coming out of the German Academic Exchange Centre in London.33 Unsurprisingly, Goebbels published the letter, seeing it as a propaganda gift. It is quite clear then that before 1933 Gardiner worked to promote AngloGerman friendship from the point of view of national revival that places him on the völkisch right if not National Socialist. In 1933–34 he spoke decidedly in favour of the Nazi regime, both in public and in private, including in his important letter to Goebbels. After 1934, though, this enthusiasm waned. There is no doubting Gardiner’s gradual disillusionment with Nazism; the question is whether this disillusion led him to reject or modify any of his views about modern civilisation and the need to save it through reconnecting with the soil and bringing Britain ‘back’ into its natural, Germanic orbit. The fact is that his rejection of Nazism did not go hand in hand with a rejection of any of his views. It is here that much confusion lies: to our ears much of what Gardiner had to say connects him easily with a National Socialist outlook, but his defenders are right to say that by historicising him we can see that it was possible (perhaps still is) to believe in the need for national renewal based on the land and a rejection of materialistic ideals and yet not succumb to Nazism. I have already suggested that Gardiner was not as free of racial prejudice as some have claimed. Nevertheless, Gardiner’s sort of racism was not uncommon in Britain or in Europe more generally at the time, even if his was articulated via an unusually clearly conceptualised worldview. It certainly does not qualify as the kind of racially determined view of the world that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology. Still, Gardiner believed firmly that the Jews in Germany were not blameless where their persecution was concerned and he campaigned against war with Germany in public right until the last possible minute, and privately thereafter. In 1939 when he invited Georg Goetsch to join the projected Springhead tour of Germany in 1940, he did so in the knowledge that Goetsch was a committed supporter of the regime,34 and his work for Lymington’s various organisations placed him squarely in the camp of the fellow travellers. In the end it seems that Gardiner’s only real objection to Nazism was that it forced the individual into the ‘serried ranks’ rather than empowered him to overcome his modern soullessness; Gardiner, in other words, like Martin Heidegger, discovered that Nazism was not the ‘spiritual’ movement that he had hoped for. Thus it is important to take Gardiner at his word when, after the war, he said that there was no link between the youth movements and Nazism: this was a way of stressing that he was not a Nazi sympathiser, as was his claim in England Herself (1943) that ‘In the first period following the revolution we

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endeavoured to continue those active exchanges which hitherto had proved so fruitful, and many German groups participated in work camps and summer schools at Springhead; but the personnel of these was drawn almost exclusively from those movements which only after 1933 were enclosed by the Nazi mesh.’35 Like many of his colleagues on the ‘cultural pessimist right’ in Britain, it took a long time to reach this position; as Laqueur put it, ‘Nothing short of the eventual mobilization could quite convince them that a totalitarian dictatorship openly committed to conquest cannot be appeased, and is totally unresponsive to good will.’36 Nevertheless, once reached – when admiration of Germany clashed directly with British (or ‘English’) patriotism – this was a genuinely held view, even if one not incompatible with a residual pro-Germanism. There is no evidence of any treasonous activity on Gardiner’s part during World War II. Gardiner rejected what he understood to be ‘fascism’ from the start and, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, also toned down his support for Nazism. But these facts should not confuse us into thinking that Gardiner’s aspirations had in any way altered. He remained wedded to Anglo-German federation and supported the creation of a yeoman peasantry that would lead to the dismantling of the flesh-pots that modern cities had become. He had simply come to the conclusion that Nazism was not going to bring about this vision, either in Germany or anywhere else. In that sense, he was correct to say – though perhaps romantically naïve – that the youth movement had been betrayed by Nazism.

Gardiner, fascism and organic farming Although it is revealing, the question of Gardiner’s relationship to Nazism is not exhausted by a discussion of the youth movement. His comments on the Nazi revolution went beyond that limited, though significant, sphere. First, long before the Nazis came to power, Gardiner had been espousing the notion of a bond between Britain and Germany, in which English patriotism and Germanic culture would merge. In a letter of 1930, for example, he wrote with passion of this bond: If we choose Germany as the heart of a new system, we have a future. We may pour the precious substance of English heritage into the German mould and help to give it forever an English content. Our generation has three tasks before it: to return to the England that was lost in the 17th century, to decentralize on our own soil, and to prepare for incorporation in a new system with Germany as the heart. This is not to be confused with the usual programmes of diplomatic journalists, economists and political schemers. It is a religious issue, fundamental.


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I say we have got to choose between subservience to America, and free allegiance to a greater Germanic Reich.37 Indeed, his work with the youth movements in both countries only makes sense when seen in the context of his belief in the need to bring the two closer together and to make each other recognise their spiritual and racial common heritage. The point is that for Gardiner all things German (at least ‘authentically’ so) were not ‘un-English’. Thus there was in his mind no inconsistency in condemning Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists as the un-English product of a suburban mindset – ‘The Union Jack plus football crowds plus the greyhound-racing industry – that approximately is the “Blackshirt Movement” ’38 – and in taking the line quoted above. It is worth considering here Gardiner’s discussion of fascism, since it has been the source of much confusion. Gardiner, it must be noted, explicitly condemned fascism. As early as 1923, at the age of 21, he attacked all ‘isms’ as mindless mass movements and manifestations of suburban soullessness, and looked instead for an aristocratic, vitalist alternative.39 As Moore-Colyer rightly puts it, an ‘unshakeable belief in natural aristocracy underscored his outlook and shaped his activities in the interwar period’.40 And although he famously wrote in 1932 that ‘Every nation to-day requires a form of Fascism to rescue it from the pitfalls of its own self-sufficiency’, he went on, in an important passage that gives us a powerful insight into his worldview: Fascism, Communism, and the inchoate forms of National-Socialism in Germany are genuine local expressions of a seething dissatisfaction with democracy: they are, in their very different ways, the clamour of men for their natural birthright of splendour, pride, glory and lordship. . . . But precisely since they are middle-class attempts at the restoration of male power, there is something hideously common, vulgar, mean in their expression. They are not aristocratic, nor are they popular in the sense of peasant rebellions; they are essentially urban, middle-class. And English New Party-ism will remain a rather pathetic attempt of suburbia to re-establish itself in the soil. It won’t work, however, in England, which is ultimately a land of aristocrats and yeomen. The yeomen and aristocrats of Britain – it is these who must re-establish themselves; and this will not be achieved by New Party-ism.41 And a year later, after the Nazis were in power, he wrote that ‘If Fascism is a movement to maintain the Capitalist order in its imperialist phase (the definition is John Macmurray’s) then the new Reich under Hitlerism is not Fascism. It may evince Fascist aspects, but its core is socialist and religious.’42 The problem here is that Gardiner took a communist definition of fascism in order to establish that he was not a fascist and that Nazism was

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not a form of fascism. Still, even if this is considered somewhat disingenuous, it is also clear that Gardiner’s palingenetic vision43 was not easily compatible with a statist, technocratic, populist form of fascism. This is why he was more comfortable with Viscount Lymington, Anthony M. Ludovici and the other men in the English Mistery/English Array/New Pioneer circle: men who espoused friendship with Germany and the avoidance of war at all costs; a rural revival based on the recreation of a sturdy yeomanry, the fount of a healthy English race; the elimination of non-productive (that is, Jewish) money interests; and the rejection of American culture, especially ‘racy’ jazz and Hollywood films; but also the rebuilding of a ‘real’ aristocracy, that is, a class who believed in ‘service’ and the meaningfulness of noblesse oblige; and the re-establishment of a powerful monarchy, designed to sit at the head of a corporatist state where all the estates were bound together by their common purpose of serving the crown, the soil and the race.44 Still, his rejection of fascism was perhaps one of the things that permitted Gardiner to carry on during the war without being interned: he could not be pinned down as a ‘traitor’ in the way of Mosley or Ramsey (though as Moore-Colyer and Conford show, MI6 did take an interest in his activities for a while45 ). Yet he continued to reject the official explanation as to why Britain was at war and he remained sympathetic to Germany – if not to Hitlerism – throughout, as his wartime correspondence and writings show, especially in the context of his organic farming colleagues. Apart from commenting directly on the Nazi regime in his writings, speeches and private correspondence, Gardiner’s activities as a farmer also offer important clues to his attitude towards Nazism. He is remembered today primarily as a pioneer of the organic movement, whose work at his farm in Springhead, Dorset, along with his later prominence in the Soil Association, remains inspirational. Those who seek to decouple a belief in the health and environmental benefits of organic farming from a broader ‘blood and soil’ philosophy can do so successfully today. There is no necessary brown–green alliance in the twenty-first century political context, as there was for Nazism,46 even if far right groups always make great play of their green credentials and use the same language of rootedness and territorial identity that their pre-war forebears used. But it is not possible to do the same for Gardiner. Certainly his commitment to organic farming now seems remarkably prescient, but it cannot be disconnected from his general outlook: the belief in healthy soil and the fear of its opposite, erosion, desertification and famine, went hand in hand with a belief in a healthy race of yeomen and a profound fear of and distaste for its opposite, decadence, materialism, urban weaklings – in short, modernity. Gardiner, and those like him across Europe, especially in Germany,47 who founded hiking clubs, Turnerschaften, and all manner of Körperkulturen, was of course nothing other than a product of modernity – the cry of ‘back to the land’ makes


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no sense in any other context – and his claim that England had to reclaim the spirit it had lost in the seventeenth century could of course only have been made in the twentieth. Thus, not only his involvement with Anglo-German cultural exchange in the youth movements but also his activities in the Kinship in Husbandry group have been subjected to considerable scrutiny. His praise for Nazism was partly based on its rural ideology – he believed that ‘The fundamental achievement of the German Revolution, so far entirely uncomprehended by English critics although shiningly apparent to all thinking Germans, lies in its resuscitation of yeoman, peasant values as opposed to industrial, urban, manufacturing values’48 – and his own role in the early organic movement was driven as much by the idea of racial regeneration through contact with the national soil as by environmental concerns; indeed, the two elements of his thought are inseparable. When later in life he described the Kinship in Husbandry as comprising ‘a new philosophy of the land, based on far-reaching considerations of health and wholeness, fortified by medical knowledge of nutritional factors and a scientific study of biological and ecological principles’49 he failed to acknowledge a considerable part of the group’s raison d’être, as do contemporary commentators when they whitewash the group as ‘concerned with the restoration of traditional agricultural practices in England through symposia, editorial collaborations and political lobbying’.50 As is well known, the Kinship in Husbandry group was established by Gardiner in 1941. Its members were all ‘concerned with countryside’51 and sought to share information about their organic farming practices, connecting these to wider issues affecting wartime Britain. This they did by means of ‘case books’ which they circulated and in which they recorded their thoughts, and through periodic meetings, the first of which took place in Edmund Blunden’s rooms in Merton College, Oxford, on 21 September 1941.52 Their forays into the wider world took place through the publication of edited collections and political lobbying, as has been noted, but their aims were not restricted to encouraging a wider use of organic farming methods. The broader ambitions of the Kinship in Husbandry can be seen throughout the group’s writings, from Gardiner’s circular to the twelve men who formed the original membership to the notes they made in the case books. Gardiner’s many essays on husbandry, too, connect the theme of the health of the soil with the strength of the people and the authenticity of their culture. Thus, in one piece written around the time that Gardiner conceived the idea for the Kinship in Husbandry, he exhorted English youth to ‘Remember you are Englishmen with memories of an eternal England in your veins.’ He claimed that ‘Much of the England of today is a betrayal of the England which has a great and powerful purpose in the Divine Plan’ and went on to claim that the ‘false England will crumble away in your time’ because ‘you

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will all become English yeomen and husbandmen again, and England will rise from the ashes of her commercialism, the protector of the earth and its resources, the servant of God’s divine purpose for her’.53 Similarly, in his 1943 book England Herself and in essays published in wartime collections devoted to the organic cause, Gardiner revealed that the ‘return to husbandry’ referred not solely to the soil. In a 1945 essay on forestry and husbandry, in which he spoke of different ‘races’ of trees, he wrote that ‘The art of the forester partly consists in blending species which will thrive together in sympathetic support of one another and the whole, and in excluding species which are either unsuitable to the district and likely to misaffect the soil or which will overrule the more valuable trees.’54 This sort of language is ripe with metaphorical implications which should not be exaggerated but should equally not be overlooked. Likewise the objection to pasteurised milk was of a piece with objections to the ‘pasteurisation’ of England.55 Despite basic agreement about the need to revive England’s agricultural tradition as a start to revive the race, it is notable that the Kinship group was strained by fears that its activities were attracting the unwelcome interest of the security services. Gardiner had in private condemned the British bombing of Hamburg and the Ruhr in 1943, and earlier in 1942, following the attack on Luebeck, he circulated to the KiH members a poem entitled ‘Totentanz’, which included the line ‘A thousand years will curse us for this evil’. Although many of the group’s members to a large extent shared Gardiner’s belief that war with Germany should have been averted, and that even in the first couple of years of war there were opportunities for peace which should have been taken, this sort of sentiment at this stage of the war made most of them distinctly nervous, especially those like Arthur Bryant who were already on MI6’s radar. The main exception was Lymington, who wrote to Gardiner that ‘We must not fail to keep our integrity as individuals or as a body of men trying to draw out the best qualities in each other. The proletarian “safety first” leads to your Totentanz.’56 Furthermore, Gardiner’s comments on Germany worried E. F. Bozman of publishing House J.M. Dent, whom Bryant had invited to become the group’s secretary in the hope of expanding its remit and influence after the war.57 A letter from Blunden to Gardiner commenting on the disquiet to which the matter had given rise is worth citing at length, since it hints at the ways in which for Gardiner and his closest associates the organic outlook was about much more than farming: Bozman does not say that your comments on that act of destruction in the German Farmlands were wrong, but that they might be misinterpreted (a casual mention or half-quotation might give an overpatriotic listener a notion that the Kinship was a political faction). Add that Bozman’s firm is apparently in some manner in the hands of the


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Government and it well appears that he and it must be quite clear from such misinterpretations. I agree that this means that even the Case-book is not free from censorship; but as the Kinship has developed this seems unavoidable. If I may say so, I’d rather not see you circulate the papers you’ve sent me beyond our old Group. The chance that somehow they might give an idea of our being actual political malcontents should be avoided, at this time. We must be Agriculturals.58 Gardiner did not wish to be merely an ‘agricultural’, though, and the result was his increasing ostracism within the group, which struggled on until 1952. What the Kinship shows is the profound love of and fear for the English soil that Gardiner had. But it also throws into sharper focus his pro-Germanism, his belief in authenticity and rootedness and, most significantly, the extent to which he was out of step with official and mainstream thinking by the middle of the war. Malcolm Chase notes that ‘The writings of Massingham on rural crafts, of Blunden on cricket or of the Kinship in Husbandry on farming came closer to German völkisch critiques of modernity than any other strand in British intellectual life.’59 In the context of his farming work and his establishment and running of the Kinship in Husbandry, although overtly pro-Nazi statements are hard to find, Gardiner’s own aristocratic blood and soil philosophy is clearly evident.

Conclusion Much has been made by his defenders that as soon as he recognised the brutal reality of Nazism, Gardiner abandoned his early, naïve support for the regime. And indeed, there can be no doubt that Gardiner was horrified by what we now call the Holocaust and by Nazi criminality in general. But what this meant was that after the war the Nazi vision of Europe no longer seemed to square so easily with his dream of a racially homogeneous yeoman-centred northern Europe, united in resistance to money power and American vulgarisation. This vision he never abandoned; as I have already noted, after the war his attack on Western civilisation – consumerist, standardising, materialist – became stronger than it had been before it. Thus, before approximately 1940 (perhaps earlier, but the evidence of England Herself suggests not) Gardiner hoped that Nazism would be the vanguard of the return to husbandry, meant in the broadest sense of racial, cultural and spiritual regeneration, not just with reference to farming methods, and after 1945 he understood that this hope had been misplaced. But this prompted him neither to alter his views on the nature of Western civilisation nor to question his pro-German beliefs.

8 Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain between the Wars

According to the historian of ecology Anna Bramwell, ‘between the wars German national socialism was alone among European fascist parties in expressing ecological concerns’.1 In some way this statement is correct, if we focus to the letter on ‘fascist parties’, that is, political parties that defined themselves as ‘fascist’ and contested elections or mobilised against parliamentary democracy, or if we see ‘ecological’ as being the intention of reshaping society on the basis of a holistic understanding of ‘nature’ rather than one, environmentally focused part of a broader political programme. Yet on closer inspection, it becomes obvious that whilst only in Germany did fascism with an ecological slant to its programme come to power, radical right groups across Europe engaged to a greater or lesser extent with ecological questions. Recent research shows that, like everything the Nazis touched, their programme for the environment did more harm than good2 ; clearly the dream of a bucolic, united peasant Europe did not apply when the scorched-earth policy was being applied in Lapland or Ukraine, and the environmental costs of total war hardly acted as a break on the Führer’s ambitions. Elsewhere, for the most part radical right groups did not get the chance to try out their theories, other than in collaboration with Nazism. But along with visions of urban reorganisation, often inspired by Le Corbusier, which sought to cleanse cities and expel from them their decadent, ‘Judaized’ elements,3 almost all fascist movements developed some form of rural revivalism. Here the concept of ‘reactionary modernism’ is useful (as long as we bear in mind that fascism was a broad church that could encompass both ‘reactionaries’ and ‘modernists’ and was not simply an amalgam of the two): along with the ‘modernist’ element of fascism that emerged from Futurism, with its stress on speed, technology and violence, went hand in hand a peasant-oriented vision of the rootedness of the race in the soil, with its stress on the paysan, yeoman or smallholder as the backbone of the nation and the cultivation of the earth as the best guarantee of the health and vitality of the race.4 Himmler and Darré dreamt about 110

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idyllic Germanic villages in the Reich or in occupied eastern territories; Speer provided the Autobahnen to get to them. In the cases that concern us here, however, Britain and France, we are for the most part not talking about fascism and fascists. Robert Paxton is correct when, in his study of Henri Dorgères’s Greenshirt movement, he says: ‘Let us put the issue of fascism behind us, for it can easily degenerate into facile name-calling that generates more heat than light.’ Thus, in this chapter I will not be concerned with ‘outing’ fascists, but showing how what Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra call ‘un fascisme de sensibilité, un romantisme’ is evident when one examines the rural revivalism of right-wing groups between the wars.5 Indeed, one can go further and say that when one examines the cultural politics of the radical right, one sees that fascism is not the master concept. Rather, fascism appears as just one arm of a generalised anti-modern revolt of the interwar years; as Marc Simard notes, ‘It seems to us that fascism, that of the intellectuals at least, ought to be perceived as one of the forms of the great anti-modern revolt of the years 1880–1945, the peak of which occurred during the 1930s. That is to say, it would be but one of the shoots growing in the fertile land of anti-modern thought.’6 The debate about the definition of fascism and its intellectual origins is fascinating, but in France – under the guise of the Sternhell controversy – it has tended to obscure research into the political circumstances of the 1930s. I will try to combine the two approaches here. Rural revivalism is my subject because it is more complex than it might at first appear in this quotation from Simard. On the face of it, ‘blood and soil’ would appear to be an obvious component of any radical right organisation, with its combination of anti-modernism, anti-capitalism and racial exclusivity. Yet the call to ‘return to the land’ was, at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, as likely to be an arrow in a leftwing quiver as a right-wing one. The attack on unhealthy cities with their foul atmosphere, and the metaphorical attack on cities as morally and intellectually degenerative because of their mollesse, was a familiar socialist cry, and hiking groups, athletics societies and rural work camps held an appeal that crossed political boundaries. Nevertheless, when one looks at the early history of the ecological movement, one sees a decidedly rightist, even radical rightist sensibility. With respect to youth movements, for example, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (a ‘traditionalist’ Catholic organisation rather than a radical right one) had 65,000 members by the mid-1930s, with its journal Jeunesse Ouvrière selling 270,000 copies per issue. By contrast, the Jeunesse Communistes had only 12,000 members in 1925, whilst the proposed PCF scout group, the Pionniers Rouges, never got off the ground.7 And even if fascist parties as such took little interest in agricultural affairs – the fact that they had agricultural spokesmen does not necessarily speak to the contrary – one can trace a widespread interest in rural revivalism (encompassing ecologism in the strict sense or advocacy of organic farming) that

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indicates that we are dealing with a cultural phenomenon that transcended the political sphere. But we are also not dealing with a simple rejection of modernity. Rather, in some thinkers we see the attempt to harness modernity to create a holistic, organicist vision of the race reborn, and in all cases it is necessary at the very least to recognise that rural revivalism was itself a symptom of modernity: the call to return to the land only makes sense in a context – that is, a modern one – when people for the most part no longer live on the land. Here we immediately see the first difference between Britain and France. Whilst in Britain in the interwar period more people already lived in towns and cities than in the countryside, France was still to a large extent a peasant, or at least agricultural country, in which the tentacles of Parisian centralisation reached far, but not yet into every corner of the hexagon; only as a result of the exode rural after World War I did the urban population exceed the rural one by 1931, and on the outbreak of World War II a third of the population still worked on the land.8 Nevertheless, the French urban elite did cultivate a rural nostalgia that can be seen as a cultural expression of the radical right (Valois’s Faisceau, especially) as well as a rural radical right movement in Dorgères’s Greenshirts. In this chapter, I will explore the similarities and differences of these French and British ruralist articulations, and argue that, whilst in formal terms the similarities outweigh the differences – indeed, both draw on a stock of images that is common to nationalist appropriations of landscape and heritage across the modern world – in political terms they were quite different. This difference did not consist in the articulations and representations themselves, but in the socio-political realities of interwar France and Britain; in the latter, rural revivalism, whilst attractive to the radical right, was also appropriated by a more moderate middle-ground associated with Baldwinite one-nation Conservatism. This was a tradition which trumped the organic farming methods being developed by some radical right rural revivalists, instead allowing bucolic fantasies of the land (on the part of people with no farming experience) to co-exist with increasing agricultural technologisation and state intervention, and ultimately, during and after World War II, the emergence of ‘productivism’, that is, modern agri-business.9 After the war, according to A.G. Street, ‘British farmers, by their meek acceptance of the Agriculture Act [1947], betrayed Britain’s country life for material security’ and, by sitting on the ‘fascist’ agricultural committees, ‘the yeomen of Britain’ became ‘the yes-men of Britain’.10 In France, by contrast, the agricultural crisis of the interwar years was on a larger scale and one sees a ‘last gasp’ of large-scale rural politics, with parties of the right and the left, including the Popular Front government, attempting to mobilise the vote in the countryside, and promoting regionalism.11 The power of the idealised image of the peasant – ‘a potent and highly manipulable (and manipulated) symbol of French culture, one on which a variety of ideas is


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projected and legitimized’ – was (and is) quite marked, especially between the wars.12 It is hardly paradoxical, then, to say that in Britain one can more easily find radical expressions of racialised organicism – I hesitate to use the term ‘eco-fascism’ since it has been so much abused – whereas in France one finds the sentiments expressed no less radically, but a greater political effect being achieved by genuinely rural radical (if not fascist) movements. As with all things associated with the triumph of the anti-Dreyfusards and anti-republicans that was the Vichy regime, the rural politics of Vichy – ‘le triomphe de l’idéologie agrarienne’ – were an attempt to promote the ‘traditional’ French smallholder over ‘capitalist’ farming, and to show that the policies associated with Vichy had their roots in the Third Republic.13 As Kevin Passmore and others who question the ‘immunity thesis’, that is, the notion of the inherent stability of French democratic institutions between the wars, have shown,14 the volatility of the French situation was a result of the fact that urban-based rural nostalgia (like in Britain) co-existed with radical movements that emerged in the countryside. The failure of these French movements can to a large extent be explained by two facts: first, the agricultural movements were unable to expand their appeal beyond their rural constituencies and, second, because urban elites were ultimately only interested in making use of idealised images of the land to promote their own agendas – those that came to power in 1940 – and did not take a great deal of interest in the substance of the peasants’ ambitions.15 We are in other words dealing with Anna Bramwell’s well-made distinction between ecological and peasant-oriented movements.16 Let us then turn to examining the evidence to counter Bramwell’s assertion that fascist parties outside Germany did not concern themselves with ecology. I will look first at several radical right thinkers who made rural revivalism central to their concerns, and I will then assess the differences between the French and British examples by looking at the policies and ideas of several radical right groups. From the foundation of the Third Republic, a connection between antisemitism and ruralism was quite prevalent in French political culture. Stephen Wilson notes that ruralism formed ‘a crucial component of the ideology of antisemites who were neither country dwellers nor noble. For them, the rural world with its roots in the past, its relative resistance to change, signified a set of stable values posited in the face of an urbanized world of confusion and flux. This idealization of rural society,’ he adds, ‘was a theme of very general provenance, and was lent new strength by the agricultural depression.’ Wilson notes that politicians from all parties sang the praises of ‘our dear French peasant’, but that ‘the theme enjoyed particular flavour on the political Right’. Charles Jacquier, for example, stated that ‘The land tempers the soul and is the great preserver of the race.’ And the Marquis de Morès, the leader of the Ligue Anti-Sémitique, who represented

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the aristocracy’s version of this position, claimed that ‘Castles and forests are passing into the hands of financiers, children of Israel, whose hands are not always pure. The proletariat and the old aristocracy, equally unfortunate, [are being] dispossessed of the soil of France, and between these two classes a parasitic growth [is] extending its tentacles monstrously everywhere.’ Drumont attacked the aristocracy for failing to play its traditional role in society and for abandoning the grandeur of noblesse oblige and leadership in favour of identifying with ‘the Jews, the bankers and the exploiters’, much like writers such as Arnold White and Anthony M. Ludovici did in Britain.17 Thus, from the publication of René Bazin’s La terre qui mort in 1899, which testifies to the equation of rural defence with a rejection of modernity, and which constitutes a condemnation of the aristocracy’s betrayal of its historical obligations towards the soil,18 the tendency of rural revivalism towards the radical right was well established by the time of the Dreyfus Affair and firmly embedded by the end of the Great War. Typical of the interwar fascists is Robert Brasillach’s Le Marchand d’oiseaux (1931), which contrasted the rootedness of peasant life with the shifting nature of city living. That is not to say that the right-wing groups that emerged in the 1930s, such as the Jeunesse Patriotes or the Croix de Feu/PSF, were simply inheritors of the ‘bonapartist’ tradition19 ; rather, they were part of a pan-European post-Great War phenomenon. The difference between French fascism and its Italian or German counterpart was, as Jenkins notes, a question of organisation rather than ideology, the fact that the French version failed to enter the mainstream political arena (and, of course, the fact that the Radical Party chose to keep them out).20 But the French cultural traditions on which they built had a rich history, although one must not overstate the importance of rural imagery; the ‘fathers’ of the French radical right, like Paul Déroulède (the founder of the Ligue des Patriotes), Edouard Drumont, Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès, and political movements like Boulangism, actually had less to say about rural issues than about their main focus, that is, reconciling the urban proletariat with the controllers of capital.21 In Britain, one finds an equally strong native tradition of ‘rural defence’ extending from the late nineteenth century through to World War II. As in France, the broad ‘back-to-the-land’ movement appealed to the socialist left, with its vision of a healthy working class enjoying its rights to use the land, as much as to the right. But, also as in France, the overall thrust of the early ecological movement tended to be rightward, as Richard Griffiths, Philip Conford and others have shown. A ‘rural nostalgic and usually organicist theme’, writes Richard Moore-Colyer, ‘formed a common thread woven into the policies of most ultra-Right groupings of the 1920s and 1930s.’22 As Alex Potts notes in his study of ‘Constable Country’, ‘it was only in the interwar period that a nationalist ideology of pure landscape came into its own. Theories of racial identity were transferred to the inanimate landscape, a kind of reification in which the people still living and working in the countryside


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were assimilated, not just pictorially and aesthetically, but also ideologically, to the landscape.’23 The fact that the environmentalist tradition in Britain – in particular, the organic farming movement – was so bound up with the radical right makes the British case especially striking. Among the founders of the Soil Association in 1946 – the body that today gives commercial certification to organic farms – were some of the most radical thinkers of the interwar period, including the Earl of Portsmouth (until 1943 Viscount Lymington), Rolf Gardiner and Jorian Jenks. As with most of the French thinkers, it is insufficient to label such people ‘fascists’; first, most of them objected to the label (though that is in itself hardly conclusive), but second, most, although they admired Fascist Italy and, especially, Nazi Germany, ultimately turned against Nazism, even if they only did so once their ultra-patriotism required it, that is, with the declaration of war in 1939 (or, in a few cases, with the end of the Phoney War in 1940).

Individuals as examples of similarities A good starting point here is Barrès, the ‘poet’ of the new right of the late nineteenth century, ‘whose works on Alsace-Lorraine and Gallic deracination schooled a generation of young Frenchmen in the redemptive concepts of the soil and the dead’24 : In a work published two years after his death, he wrote: In order to allow the consciousness of a country such as France to free itself, each person must be rooted in the soil and in the earth. This may seem too material an idea to anyone who thinks he has attained an ideal whose loftiness he judges according to the degree to which he has succeeded in suppressing the voice of his blood and the instincts of the earth. . . . The view that we have of the soil compels us to envisage an organization of the country by regions. The soil speaks to us and works with the nation’s consciousness quite as much as it cooperates with the dead. The soil gives the active life of the dead its efficacy. Our ancestors pass on as a whole the heritage accumulated in their souls only by the immutable vital activity of the soil. . . . It is only by drawing your attention to the resources of French soil, the efforts it demands of us, the services it renders, the conditions, in short, in which our race of foresters, farmers and winegrowers has developed, that you will come to understand our national traditions as realities and not mere words. . . . The administrator and the legislator might well take this grand principle as their inspiration: the spirit of our country is stronger in the soul of a man who has roots than in the soul of one who is rootless.25 In these writings of Barrès, as well as those of Valois and Edouard Berth, Sternhell detects, at least according to Winock, a ‘pre-fascism’; irrespective

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of the later changes of mind these writers underwent, ‘France experienced the real signs and formulated some of the first theories of a fascism before the fact.’26 Indeed, Valois himself recognised this fact when he lauded Barrès in Le fascisme (1927) as the person who foreshadowed fascism.27 Now, the point of Winock’s criticism of Sternhell’s history of ideas approach is to claim that Sternhell teleologically telescopes 50 years of rightist thought into the capitulation of 1940 and pays insufficient attention to the ways in which events influenced ideas. Attending to the social and political context, Winock argues, tempers the tendency of history of ideas to isolate extreme statements and to set them up as more important than they really were. Not every anti-democratic statement made, say, in the 1920s, is evidence of a fascism to come. And one must grant that Winock makes a good point, though one could accuse him of pushing the argument too far the other way, by suggesting that ‘since antiparliamentarianism was the response to a “real” malfunction in the system, fixing the problem was a neutral (and necessary) technical matter’.28 As Jenkins points out, ‘the tendency to measure French extreme Right movements against fully-fledged fascist regimes infringes one of the most elementary principles of the comparative method’.29 Thus, comparing France with Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy will inevitably lead to the conclusion that fascism was less threatening in France. But a comparison with Britain reveals that – putting aside the debate about ‘fascism’ – radical right movements existed in both countries that spoke vehemently against the perceived ills of liberal democracy and the threat posed by the left. Both shared many assumptions, including a turn towards the land as the basis of national life and hence of ‘national revival’, remarkably at a time when the ‘real’ peasantry was almost extinct. It is thus surprising, as Alun Howkins notes, that there exists no sustained comparative work in English on fascism and the rural areas.30 For example, a comparison of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Rolf Gardiner shows that both were radical right intellectuals who were generally ‘suspicious of movements that could elide individuality and impede the progress of the elite’.31 This anti-populism tends to mean that both avoided the mainstream of the interwar fascist movements (although Drieu, a member of the PPF, was more closely connected than Gardiner, who disdained all such movements as ‘middle-class’). As Susie Byers writes, ‘Drieu was not fundamentally a collectivist, not, as Bramwell suggests, because he was uninterested in nature but because his understanding of the non-human realm was based on elitism and individualism informed by a social Darwinist emphasis on struggle and violence.’32 And both stressed the role of masculine youth in overturning the flabby, decadent world of bourgeois democracy. Drieu, for example, wrote in 1936 that youth was everywhere bringing about the demise of the ‘irresponsible bourgeoisie’, which was being replaced by communism or the extreme right, and that in France only the latter


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could protect French vigour: ‘In light of this, Europe from North to South, and from West to East (Except in England), lives under regimes which have become more numerous and dedicated to authority and discipline – communism or fascism – the most admirable and formidable effort to reawaken the human race.’33 Drieu saw in fascism the ideal of the Männerbund34 and – despite the ill-developed nature of his ‘socialism’ or his ‘nationalism’ – hoped that fascism would provide a kind of Aufhebung (Hegelian sublation) of the two. ‘The opposition between nationalism and socialism’, wrote Drieu, ‘appeared irreducible in the parliamentary regime. The rescue operation of fascism consisted in negating the irreducible character of that opposition.’35 What Drieu objected to was that the ‘third force’ between liberalism and communism had itself become a mass party ‘which stifled creativity in the name of its truth and showed a willingness to assimilate the values of the bourgeois age which those advocating a “Third Force” could not readily accept’. So, although he joined Doriot’s PPF in 1936, Drieu left it two years later, only rejoining after the fall of France. Drieu’s suicide at the end of the war, Mosse argues, ‘was not merely the result of despair in the face of the Allied victory, but to a still greater extent despair at what fascism had made of itself’.36 This allegiance to an ‘authentic’ ideology of ‘national renewal’ is what connects Drieu to Rolf Gardiner and is also, I suggest, one of the explanations of their devotion to the land, contrary to the main thrust of populist fascism (which extolled the land in rhetoric only). Gardiner, inspirational youth leader and organic farmer, was, as shown in Chapter 7, the most significant of the English back-to-the-landers, and his reputation remains fiercely contested. Gardiner looked to Germany and the Baltic countries to form a northern federation which, he hoped, would enable Britain to climb out of the materialist, cosmopolitan morass into which it had long been sinking. Gardiner’s position was unusual amongst British cultural pessimists for the strength of his advocacy of union with Germany: ‘I say we have got to choose between subservience to America, and free allegiance to a greater Germanic Reich’, he wrote to a colleague in 1930. A few years earlier he had written: ‘Between the Adriatic and the Arctic, the Vistula and the Atlantic, there is a hidden kingdom to which we all, Scandinavians, Germans and English belong in our blood and our souls. This is a positive, organic kinship, slumbering within us, not an abstract brotherhood imposed by the ideal will.’37 This pro-Germanism led him to an initial burst of enthusiasm for Nazism, then disillusion as the revolution turned out not to fulfill his expectations. At the height of his praise for Nazism in the spring of 1934, he recommended exchanges between the Hitler Youth and English work camps, enthused about the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, and lauded Darré’s attempt ‘to recreate a vigorous German peasantry through which a new and potent aristocracy might spring’.38 In general, while there were in this piece aspects

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of the regime that he chose not to touch on, he found that ‘nowhere but in Germany to-day is an attempt being made deliberately and courageously to stem the universal world tide of urbanisation and industrialism’.39 Yet Gardiner, as we have seen in the previous chapter, soon lost some of this enthusiasm, as he began to suspect that Nazism, like the other ‘isms’, was not the vital expression of personality he wanted it to be, but was yet another movement of the soulless (sub)urban middle classes that would only perpetuate their enslavement to conformism.40 Indeed, this is where Gardiner gets interesting, for his writings after 1934 show that his sense of disillusion with Nazism did not alter his beliefs in the need for a return to the land and a rejection of materialist values in the name of national renewal. In fact, his rejection of Nazism appears to have strengthened this belief (along with a desire for Anglo-German federation), to which he clung tenaciously until his death in 1971. Thus, ‘fascism’ may not be the most helpful term for understanding either Drieu or Gardiner, nor does it suffice to say that both were simply responding to real problems in the liberal parliamentary system. Both, but particularly Gardiner, held themselves aloof from mass politics, at least once they realised that fascism was no ‘spiritual’ movement, though neither abandoned their ‘national socialist’ aspirations as a result. Fascist rural policy, as Moore-Colyer notes, faced the ‘fundamental conundrum’ of having to reconcile ‘the promotion of a peasant-based rural revival with the philosophical keystone of state corporatism’41 ; for Drieu and Gardiner, it failed the test. Finally, it is revealing in terms of the Anglo-French comparison that it was Gardiner in Britain, where rural politics was less prominent, who had a more developed rural revivalism and who devoted himself to the land more directly and actively than Drieu.

Groups as examples of differences Precisely because its palingenetic42 vision was not easily compatible with a statist, technocratic, populist form of fascism, the English Mistery is one of the more interesting of the fringe groups on the British radical right. Its attack on populism and devotion to aristocracy are reasons why Gardiner, for one, was more comfortable with Viscount Lymington, Anthony M. Ludovici and the other men in the English Mistery/English Array/New Pioneer circle: men who espoused friendship with Germany and the avoidance of war at all costs; a rural revival based on the recreation of a sturdy yeomanry, the fount of a healthy English race; the elimination of ‘non-productive’ (that is, Jewish) money interests; the rejection of American culture, especially ‘racy’ jazz and Hollywood films; the rebuilding of a ‘real’ aristocracy, that is, a class who believed in ‘service’ and the meaningfulness of noblesse oblige; and the re-establishment of a powerful monarchy, designed to sit at the head of a


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corporatist state where all the estates were bound together by their common purpose of serving the crown, the soil and the race.43 This ideological affiliation is the reason why Gardiner founded the Kinship in Husbandry in 1941. Among its members were Gardiner, Lymington, H.J. Massingham, Edmund Blunden and Arthur Bryant, and the group is noted as one of the first circles of men ‘interested in agriculture’ to discuss seriously the use of organic farming methods.44 It is important to remember that most of the members were not fantasists dreaming of a ‘picturesque countryside’ in the Baldwinite tradition but men with considerable experience of running farms and estates in Britain and abroad.45 Their prescience has been lauded as a forerunner of today’s organicism, which indeed it was, but their emphasis on correct farming methods was inseparable from a wider Zivilisationskritik that saw the strength of the race threatened by mongrelisation, erosion, nomadism, pasteurisation and standardisation. The rejuvenation of the soil, for the Kinship in Husbandry, was conceived as a key contribution to national survival in terms of the revivification of the race and its freedom from ‘money interests’. For example, one of the most influential associates of the group (he was not actually a member), Sir George Stapledon, a leading agricultural scientist and a man in many ways in favour of ‘progressive’, modern agriculture,46 argued in 1935 that ‘unless rural England is provided with the amenities and facilities necessary rural England and rural psychology are doomed – and then the driving force behind the English character would be lost’. Stapledon believed that it was almost too late to stop this demise, and that ‘only heroic endeavour will suffice’ to reverse the situation.47 And the Earl of Portsmouth, in a famous book of 1943 entitled Alternative to Death, the dust jacket of which shows an image of a starving English family on their parched farmland, put forward a ruralist philosophy that strongly attacked ‘Manchesterism’ and defended eugenicistorganicism: ‘the survival of the fittest, if it means the survival of the type which flourishes where our civilization has gone astray, is no easy excuse for degeneration’, wrote Portsmouth. ‘Like the husbandman’, he concluded, ‘we must distinguish between the weed and the desirable plant.’48 Malcolm Chase is thus right to say that ‘The writings of Massingham on rural crafts, of Blunden on cricket or of the Kinship in Husbandry on farming came closer to German völkisch critiques of modernity than any other strand in British intellectual life.’49 The Kinship in Husbandry provides the best example of a British articulation of an aristocratic blood and soil philosophy.50 By contrast with the Kinship in Husbandry, the BUF had no real major agricultural policy that can be understood as rural revivalism. Rather, it suggested that food supply should be ensured by control over the empire with Imperial Preference, not British self-sufficiency. Centralisation of control over land use was envisaged in BUF policy, but no major agricultural settlement in the manner of Nazi Germany.51 ‘In the BUF’s pre-war writings, the emphasis was on the ideal technocratic future: the garden city

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on stilts, walkways in the sky, and silent, clean, rapid public transport.’52 Certainly the BUF had nothing comparable to the Centre rural at the 1937 Paris Exposition, with its utopian depiction of French village life which sought to combine romanticism and modernity.53 Nevertheless, it is not quite right to claim, as Bramwell does, that the writings of the BUF’s agricultural spokesman (and associate of the Kinship in Husbandry) Jorian Jenks lacked a blood and soil component. His weekly column in the BUF’s paper, Action, ran from 1937 until it folded in June 1940, when he was interned. In one of his columns he wrote that ‘In every land where the Fascist banner has been carried to triumph the men on the land have regained the rights stolen from them in an era of national degeneration. It will be the same in Britain.’54 After the war he edited the Soil Association’s journal Mother Earth, even though he was still sitting on Mosley’s Union Movement Agricultural Council. As Philip Conford notes of Jenks, ‘in his person Fascism and organic husbandry merged most completely’.55 Still, Bramwell is right to note that within the ranks of the BUF Jenks was exceptional for his devotion to rural revivalism; besides, as Howkins notes, whilst there was considerable intellectual interest in agriculture on the British right, ‘what is striking is the almost total lack of success in practical political terms. . . . the importance of the political mobilisation around Gardiner, Lymington or even Williamson/Mosley was infinitesimal’.56 As with the similarities and differences between Drieu and Gardiner, the similarities and differences of British and French radical right responses to rural issues can be seen when one compares the English Mistery, the Kinship in Husbandry and the BUF with Valois’s Faisceau and Dorgères’s Greenshirts. What is most immediately striking is the difference between elite and elitist groups and populist agricultural movements, reflecting the different place held by agriculture in the lives of the two countries. With respect to the Faisceau, as indeed with other French fascist organisations such as Solidarité Française, Francisme, the PPF, La Cagoule or even the Croix de Feu, one is struck by the lack of attention to rural issues; the land is mentioned in rhetorical fashion in the manner of Barrès cited above, but there is no real policy of rural revival. But the Greenshirts are a different matter. Again, whether or not the movement was ‘fascist’ is not the point57 so much as the fact that it shows how in France a party devoted specifically to rural issues which was decidedly on the right could gain a mass following, especially in the West, North, the Paris region, the Nice region and Algeria. Perhaps the clearest example of the difference between British and French rural movements is provided by the case of Brittany, a region in which large-scale traditionalist movements enjoyed considerable success. There was nothing comparable to the Breton agricultural political movements in Britain, for all the strength of the National Farmers Union (NFU). For Breton agricultural movements, ‘In effect, the apology for the rural world only functioned in counterpoint to a negative portrayal of the town and of urban life,


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charged with all evils and accused of putting individuals and, even more so, whole societies at peril.’58 As le chanoine (canon) Lemoine put it in a Nantes Catholic journal, those who were attracted to the cities were soon disillusioned: Stuck in vulgar or coarse pleasures, they [elles] are unable to use their wings and wallow in the debilitatingly commonplace or the fetid dregs; seduced by subversive theories, they plunge into the pernicious quagmire of provocative agitation and sterile hatreds; driven into the gloom of indifference or of impiety, they can only weaken and perish.59 By contrast, ‘Intimately participating in the divine scheme, for Catholic traditionalist elites the peasantry therefore embodies the vital generational link, and through it the history of the country: “perpetuating ancestral traditions, rural values and the blood of the race”.’60 According to Bensoussan, in Brittany this long-developed glorification of the peasantry as the basis of social order enjoyed renewed vigour during the interwar period.61 Brittany was one of the strongholds of Dorgèrism and, as Bensoussan rightly notes, it is thus a good case study of the limits and obstacles faced by all such enterprises in the French rural world.62 Bensoussan writes that ‘it seems clear that Dorgèrism did not become a fascist movement above all because it was unable, historically, to become one’. Since it originally developed as ‘an expression of profound peasant discontent in the face of . . . a worsening economic situation’, Dorgèrism acquired a consistently supportive social base but one which, in the last analysis, ‘was too restrictive to secure a political dynamic capable of destabilising the regime’.63 In other words, Dorgèrism was circumscribed to the rural world and was thus unable to break out onto the political scene as a national political movement (as Sternhell also notes). In particular, in Brittany, dominated by Catholic institutions, a specifically fascist ‘liturgy’ could not compete with traditional religion.64 Besides, although it was an authentic peasant movement, Dorgèrism, ‘the first large popular peasant movement against the effects of capitalism, was nevertheless manipulated by those against whom it claimed to fight’.65 The Greenshirts did not generally appeal to the farm workers; in fact, they were involved in breaking farm workers’ strikes in the Paris basin in 1936 and 1937 and in the Pays de Caux in 1937, and in Brittany Dorgèrism only attempted to set up a workers’ group in 1936 when the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) moved into Finisterre.66 In Brittany one sees something more akin to Poujadism avant la lettre than rural fascism.67

Conclusion There appears to be a paradox: I have argued that rural revivalism emerged from a middle-class conservative milieu and not from the countryside itself,

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and thus that one would expect to see it more strongly articulated in Britain. The writings of Gardiner, Lymington and their colleagues, whether on the radical right or not, testify to the truth of this assertion. Yet it was in France that agricultural politics was of greater importance. This is actually not paradoxical: a focus on the countryside by parties of all political hues in France should not be equated with the blood and soil philosophy of fascism. Rural revivalism was the product of urban elites, but agricultural politics was a topic that needed to be taken far more seriously in France than in Britain. Hence the need to differentiate ecological and peasant movements, as Bramwell suggests. Thus, when it comes to ruralism and the fortunes of the radical right, we should not be surprised that in France there was insufficient support either for a rural fascism or for a fully fledged back-tothe-land movement, even though there were more peasants than in Britain (where the term ‘yeoman’ was used partly to disguise the fact that there were no longer any peasants). Where in Germany and Italy fascism initially took root in the countryside, in France (and Britain) the crisis of agriculture was not dire enough either to form the basis of or to sustain a nationwide fascist movement. Nor was there, as Paxton indicates (and Bensoussan’s work confirms), enough ‘space’ in rural social structures in France for the Greenshirts,68 or in Britain – where the National Farmers’ Union was extremely strong and willingly worked with the government – for the BUF.69 Rather, in France rural nostalgia became part of the authoritarian Vichy consensus that at first kept more radical versions of fascism at bay and that absorbed peasants into an authoritarian, corporatist structure (which many disliked or resisted), and in Britain it became channelled into the war effort and, after 1945, into the organic movement on the one hand and the heritage industry on the other. Rural revivalism was part of the radical right’s philosophy but was never enough on its own to sustain a political programme, as the failure of Valois and Dorgères proves. But that is a different story – the failure of fascism in Britain has been discussed in great detail elsewhere as has fascism’s channelling in France into the collaborationist Vichy regime. ‘In many parts of Europe’, Howkins notes, ‘the peasantry were “included” in essentially urban movements like Rex [in Belgium], NSB [in the Netherlands] or the NS [Germany]. It was an urban politics which used the peasant voice and the peasant strength, such as it was, to achieve ends which seemed unlikely in the long run to much benefit the peasantry.’70 The success of rural revivalism was in mobilising support for a broader programme; on its own, rural fascism had too small a constituency to threaten the established order, and it even alienated the very urbanites whose fantasies about the relationship between race and soil gave it a theoretical basis in the first place.

9 The Uses and Abuses of ‘Secular Religion’: Jules Monnerot’s Path from Communism to Fascism

How can one pretend that there is less magic in the world today? These words seem to work miracles: the child leaves its parents, the lover abandons her beloved, and brother is denounced by brother. Is there any more powerful drug today than certain words administered in regular doses? They are administered according to the most efficacious magic ritual of our time, by men who well know their effects. In massive doses, following well-tried prescriptions and a carefully perfected technique, these words can inspire heroism or the most craven inertia. They can turn whole crowds of men into lions or into sheep. They are our modern vampires. Jules Monnerot1 In May 1989, the 30th name on the Front National’s (FN) list of candidates in the European elections was one Jules Monnerot, ‘founder of the College of Sociology’. As Denis Hollier, one of the leading scholars of the College, notes, ‘it would be exciting – and enlightening – to learn what strategic logic led a former Communist student from Martinique, the author of the declaration presented on behalf of the French West Indies at the International Writers’ Congress for the Defence of Culture in 1935, to present himself 50 years later as a candidate on a cryptoracist platform’.2 Certainly those who had been involved with the College were outraged, as a letter by Pierre Klossowski and others to La Quinzaine littéraire on 23 May 1989 indicated: Monsieur Jules Monnerot has put himself forward for the European elections in thirtieth place on the list headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The title that one reads after his name gives him as ‘founder of the College of Sociology.’ This is a partial truth: he was one of six co-signatories at the founding, though before long breaking off with the College. And this is an act of treason: the history of the Contre-Attaque movement, like that of the College of Sociology, quite demonstrates that their inspirers cannot 123

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be confused with someone who agrees to sit in the same group as a representative of the German extreme right known for having served in the Waffen-SS. In using the College of Sociology to authorise his presence on the Front National’s list, Jules Monnerot has committed a fraud.3 According to Jean-Michel Heimonet, author of the only significant book on the writer, Monnerot’s increasingly rightward slide can be explained as the result of his analysis of the ban of affect from power in communist and democratic systems, a ‘repression-displacement [refoulement-déplacement]’ which ‘provides evidence of the decadence of the sacred in industrial societies’.4 This abolition, Monnerot believed, would lead to totalitarianism embodied in a ‘secular religion’ in the case of communism, and to ‘hyperhomogenization’ in the latter, in which individuals would be ‘reduced to their function, to their exchange value, circulating like commodities’.5 Heimonet describes this conversion in the terms set out by Roger Caillois as the ‘dialectic of the sacred’: traversing the ‘negative pole of repulsion to the positive pole of attraction’ in the years separating his major works Sociologie du communisme (1949) from Sociologie de la révolution (1969), the latter of which marks Monnerot’s arrival at fascism.6 It is of course debatable whether the FN, or for that matter, any post-war political movement, can be considered genuinely fascist. Some scholars distinguish between the ‘classic fascism’ of the interwar period and the radical right populist movements of the post-war period, arguing that the different contexts disallow any simple usage of the term ‘fascism’.7 Not only are post-war radical right movements – with the exception of openly neo-Nazi groups – integrated into the electoral system but also the imperatives that animated interwar fascism are mostly no longer relevant. Anti-communism has been replaced by anti-Americanism, antisemitism is openly espoused only by fringe groups, and has more recently been replaced (at least explicitly) by Islamophobia, and post-war radical right movements are not openly bellicose towards neighbouring countries. Nevertheless, I argue that the term ‘fascism’ remains appropriate here, for describing the FN and Monnerot’s position, for several reasons. First, all the post-war extreme right movements are, without exception, racist movements. Their racism, articulated mainly through anti-immigrant rhetoric, is little more than old wine in new bottles. Political circumstances have not allowed the radical right to return to power since 1945, although in some cases (for example, in Austria, Hungary and Italy), ‘post-fascist’ parties have entered or come close to entering government, but ideologically speaking these groups are remarkably consistent with their more successful interwar forebears. Thus, whether one talks about parties of ‘radical return’ or ‘radical continuity’, the contemporary radical right, with its national-populist agenda, remains close to interwar fascism.8 Besides, other scholars are less circumspect than Prowe. Jim Wolfreys, for example, argues that ‘the FN shares a core of basic

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characteristics with inter-war fascism, and possesses others in embryonic form’. Richard Griffiths, who provides a historically sensitive analysis of fascism, only demurs insofar as the term ‘neo-fascism’ is rejected by the parties so designated by their opponents, who wish to play down their links with fascism or Nazism.9 James Shields writes that ‘In its values, policies and discourse, the FN has . . . preserved its affinities with Vichy, whether in its conception of the nation and the family, its views on morality, education, women and abortion, its authoritarianism, its anti-communism, its exclusionary policy of “national preference”, or the antisemitism that breaks occasionally to the surface’.10 In addition, David Bell argues that the FN is nothing more than the extreme right renovated, ‘a populist and parliamentary formation adapted to the conditions of the Fifth Republic’, a definition which directly challenges Prowe’s assumptions.11 Andrea Mammone goes further arguing that the designation of parties such as the FN as ‘populist’ inadvertently legitimises movements that are as anti-democratic as their interwar forebears. Mammone identifies the FN’s fascist roots by offering a transnational account which shows how the French far right has shared ideas and strategies with Italian fascists since the interwar period.12 Even if (and this is by no means certain) the FN has moved gradually away from the views of its founders, in the 1970s and 1980s it retained very strong links with French fascism.13 When those who cut their political teeth during the interwar period, such as Monnerot, consciously turned towards the far right, collaborating with people such as Pierre Boutang, sometime supporter of Charles Maurras and Action Française, it would be hard to maintain that the concept of ‘fascism’ has no relevance. In what follows I lend support to Heimonet’s reading by showing that Monnerot’s gradual ‘fascistization’ can to some extent be helpfully explained by a close reading of his theory of ‘secular religion’, as he applied it to communism at the outset of the Cold War. I say ‘to some extent’ because one cannot simply read his later pro-fascism off his post-war concept of ‘secular religion’; the immediate context of the social and economic changes that took place in France in the years 1945–85 provides more proximate contextual background for his decisions. Besides, Monnerot’s views on communism were widely shared by anti-communists during the Cold War – most of whom did not become fascists – and thus his slide from rightwing Gaullist in the 1950s and 1960s to the Nouvelle Droite and the Front National in the 1970s and 1980s requires a more complex sociology of ideas that combines analyses of his writings with the changing circumstances of post-war France. Nevertheless, one can see that his theory of ‘secular religion’, which applied to fascism as well as communism in 1949, gradually gave way to an analysis that saw the radical right in France as the sole force able to resist the tendency, as Monnerot saw it, towards totalitarianism under communism or liberal democracy. I also show that, in consequence, accusations that the College of Sociology and its members were ‘fascists’ or

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‘proto-fascists’ are too simple to explain Monnerot’s post-war behaviour.14 Rather, the break between Bataille and Monnerot – whatever his role in its foundation, Monnerot refused to take part in the College’s activities, which he regarded as purely ‘aesthetic’ and insufficiently activist15 – shows that the complex and ambivalent position of the College cannot easily be subsumed under the heading of ‘fascism’. Monnerot’s trajectory towards fascism is best seen as a working through of his own conception of what the College of Sociology should have been, rather than what it was under Bataille and Caillois.16 The College of Sociology was founded in November 1937. Its founding members were Bataille, Caillois, Monnerot, Klossowski, Georges Ambrosino and Pierre Libra.17 Also in the group’s orbit, to a greater or lesser extent, were Michel Leiris, Alexandre Kojève, Denis de Rougement and occasionally Walter Benjamin and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Its aim was to understand the role of the sacred in society, particularly in an age in which the sacred seemed to have been expelled in favour of rationality and technocracy. Since the group believed that no society could function without some sense of the sacred, its ‘sacred sociology’ would study ‘all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear’,18 and try to figure out how such a society could revivify its sense of the sacred without succumbing to totalitarianism’s seductive pseudo-wholeness. In other words, the College would seek to apply Durkheim’s insights to ‘modern’ rather than ‘primitive’ societies. According to Caillois, a ‘preoccupation with rediscovering the primordial longings and conflicts of the individual condition transposed to the social dimension is at the origin of the College of Sociology’.19 Thus an interest in the intersection of religion and politics was fundamental to the group’s concerns, and dealing with the irrational or unconscious side of human life meant that the College favoured combating fascism on its own terms – via a redeployment of the irrational – rather than through the use of reason. In the two years of its existence, the College was barely known; yet it counted amongst its members some of the most influential and original men of letters in France in the 1940s and afterwards. And in the light of the revival of interest in, especially, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris and Klossowski in the wake of post-structuralism, the emergence of self-reflexive anthropology, and the whole intellectual phenomenon of postmodernism, considerable debate has emerged about the College’s real aims, about its relationship with fascism, about its coherence as a group and its ‘research’. Although scholars have argued about Bataille’s relationship with fascism, only Heimonet has addressed in any detail the question of how and why one member of the College, Monnerot, could, by the late twentieth century, openly self-identify with the French far right. Scholars of political religion have long known that Monnerot wrote about communism as a ‘secular religion’.20 However, none has as yet sought to provide an exegesis of it, to use it either to situate his ideas in the historical


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development of the concept of ‘political religion’ or to compare him with the other more famous members of the College of Sociology, an ‘institution’ that was set up in order to investigate the role of the sacred in everyday life. Although other French scholars of the post-war period who stood against the fashion for communism amongst French intellectuals – most notably, Raymond Aron21 – also employed the terms ‘secular religion’ or ‘political religion’ to understand communism, an analysis of Monnerot’s ideas in their social context contributes to an explanation of why his interpretation allowed him to move way beyond Gaullist anti-communism eventually to end in the camp of the FN. He was neither the only former communist to turn to fascism after 1945 – the ‘father of Holocaust denial’, Paul Rassinier, himself deported to Dora and Buchenwald, provides the most notorious example – nor even the last, as the case of Alain Soral, the former communist film-maker turned self-styled ‘dissident intellectual’ and, between 2007 and 2009, member of the FN indicates.22 But his involvement with the more avant-garde College, not to mention his far more sophisticated post-war writings, makes Monnerot’s case more interesting to the historian of ideas. Apart from helping to explain his unusual career trajectory, Monnerot’s use of the concept of ‘political religion’ also lends support to those who argue that the concept is suggestive but analytically limited. In an important article, Stanley Stowers has shown that terms such as ‘political religion’, ‘secular religion’ or ‘Ersatzreligion’ presuppose – often unwittingly – a notion of normative, orthodox, western, usually Christian understanding of religion, that necessarily also implies ‘a specific theory of secularization’.23 This ‘normative religion’ is taken to be authentic religion, even when the term ‘political religion’ is proposed by secular scholars. The result is that scholars who write from a liberal, secular position inadvertently buy into ‘the rhetoric of largely Christian anti-modern discourses that began to develop after the French Revolution’. Stowers, a professor of religious studies, notes that the concept of ‘political religion’ implies a romantic approach to religion that sees it as an expression of something ineffable, that is, ‘the sacred’. He proposes by contrast a ‘rational-cognitivist’ approach to religion, which sees religious language as ordinary language and religious belief as the belief in ‘human-like beings and qualities of the world that are normally nonobservable’.24 ‘Political religion’ does not refer to such ‘human-like beings’ and thus is an inappropriate use of the concept of ‘religion’. Scholars, such as Eric Voegelin, who write from an explicitly religious position, can thus use the concept of ‘political religion’ as a way of suggesting that Nazism subverted ‘true’ religion, but secular scholars need also to be aware of the implicit presuppositions that the concept contains.25 For Monnerot, this belief that modern ideologies functioned as substitute religions – ‘a direct link relation between eschatology and villainy’26 – meant that he accepted the need for an ‘authentic’ sense of the sacred; his rejection of communism

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as a false messiah meant that he nevertheless continued in his quest for a suitable alternative, in a way that anti-communist liberals such as Aron did not. His intellectual development thus exemplifies the risks involved in using the idea of ‘religion’ to describe modern political ideologies.

Sociology of communism Despite some harsh criticism, notably from Claude Lefort in Les temps modernes,27 in the context of the early Cold War, Monnerot’s Sociology of Communism was relatively well received, in the UK and US as well as in France.28 The book combined anti-communism with a certain strand of patrician anti-Americanism, thus giving it a resonance amongst liberals and the right in France, where anti-American sentiment has traditionally been more powerful and heartfelt than in other western European nations.29 During the war, Monnerot volunteered and fought with the infantry and, after being demobilised, joined one of the large Resistance groups in Paris, the Ceux de la Libération (CDLL), which was one of the eight large networks that made up the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR). After the liberation, he was involved in the founding of the journal Critique and became a member of the National Council of the RPF (the Gaullists), until he broke with de Gaulle in 1959. Along with his 1945 study, La poésie moderne et le sacré, Monnerot made his name with his 1946 work, Les faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses, a critique of Durkheimian sociology. Monnerot argued that it was not possible for the sociologist to step outside of the events, people and societies he observed, as if he were in a laboratory dealing with a ‘thing’ (chose) from a distance. Rather, inspired by his sense that neither Durkheimian nor Marxist theory could explain the mass movements of the mid-twentieth century, and following in a certain fashion Husserl’s phenomenology, he stressed the need for the sociologist to take the measure of ‘lived experience’ and to participate in events, even whilst resisting the urge to be subsumed by them.30 Monnerot remained, however, dedicated to explaining the role of the sacred in everyday life and to accounting for what Durkheim called moments of ‘effervescence’ and what he called ‘affective and nervous contagion’.31 Monnerot applied these strictures to his next book, Sociology of Communism. It is thus hardly surprising that one significant scholar of the College of Sociology claims that the ‘power and brilliance’ of Monnerot’s three postwar books, ‘more than anything produced by Bataille or Caillois, represents the real legacy of the College of Sociology’.32 As he explained in the appendix added to the 1979 third edition: If the programme of the College of Sociology consists in approaching ‘hot topics’ at times, we can expect to get burnt ourselves [ . . . ] When one describes politics in the making with veracity and relevance, one is already taking part [ . . . ] Beware! Social facts cannot be approached as if they were


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things. They may more accurately be compared to living beings, and as such they react with the highest degree of energy against any attempt at analyzing their structure and their nature, as if they were to be subjected to vivisection.33 The burden of the work was to explain communism as a religion. Calling communism the ‘Islam of the twentieth century’ or ‘an “Islam” on the march’, he saw in communism – as earlier in Islamic societies – the merging of the political and the sacred. ‘Communism’, he wrote, ‘like victorious Islam, makes no distinction between politics and religion, but this time the claim to be both universal State and universal truth applies not only within a civilization or world which co-exists with other different civilizations, other worlds, but to the entire terrestrial globe’. This comparison was, as Monnerot insisted, only an analogy, ‘but a necessary one’, for ‘Russia is to communism what the Abbasid empire was to Islam’. Communism was not the party of ‘foreign patriotism’, as Léon Blum called it; rather, ‘it is a religious sect of world conquerors for whom Russia is simply the strongpoint from which the attack is launched’.34 Here one should note that from 1951 until de Gaulle came to power in 1958, when he was stopped, Monnerot lectured at the École Superieure de Guerre, and it was in the context of the wars of decolonisation in Indochina and Algeria (1952–62) that his thinking radicalised. Taking part in the second colloquium of the clandestine Comité de Vincennes (a group, including most notably Georges Bidault, set up to help defend ‘L’Algérie française’) in November 1960, Monnerot set out his claim that the war in Algeria was not a colonial war but a war of subversion, underwritten by world communism and dressed up as a liberation struggle.35 Here one might also note the pied-noir origins of the FN, and the significance of Algeria more generally for the renewal of the French far right.36 In terms of the history of the ‘political religion’ idea, Monnerot adds little. His theory is very simple and, as a description of communism, unremarkable and fairly unobjectionable: ‘The community of those who know “the way of salvation” thus reappears in a modern, secularized version (in which the future does duty for the “Beyond”)’.37 As with a religion, the communist believer suspends his critical faculties in the face of power, and sharpens them against anything outside of it. ‘The secular religion is created’, Monnerot writes, ‘thanks to the affective communication which circulates energy among individuals, those open monads’.38 Communism is a secular religion because, like any other religion, it establishes sacred and profane spaces, because certain people and ideas become immune from criticism, and because one can recognise ‘the active presence of a faith, and of myths and dogmas’.39 Communism founds a society ‘upon service, labour, hierarchy, and a secular religion, unlike the nineteenth-century liberal capitalist society of the West, which was founded upon profit, property, risk, and personal initiative and independence’.40 It is the standard notion of ‘authentic’ religion

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being displaced into a form appropriate for a supposedly ‘secular’ modernity that has animated theorists from Voegelin to Gentile.41 Communism, then, is a secular religion that aims to establish a universal state. ‘As universal State it would abolish all the differentiations which keep the world divided into distinct and individual units (the most recent unit of this kind is the nation); and as secular religion it canalizes discontent, organizes and reinforces every impulse that sets men against their native society, and works pertinaciously to aid, abet, and accelerate the self-division and secession of part of their own vital force which plunge societies into dissolution and ruin.’42 Monnerot sees ruin and self-denial as the outcome of this process, but he believes that ‘The Campaign is what it is solely because it has proved capable of mobilizing and energizing a deep and powerful fund of affective impulses’.43 Thus, communism in the twentieth century, under Lenin, became a religion, and its ‘professional revolutionaries’ instigate ‘holy war’.44 However, Monnerot concludes that by comparison with National Socialism, with its ‘crude and brutal religion’, with Hitler’s ‘reign of the unconscious’ which was ‘a sort of volcanic sovereignty’,45 the role of the communist leader is less important than the party. For the Nazis, the Führer is deified, but in communism, the ‘process of deification is counteracted by optimistic rationalism, the secular philosophy of “progress”, and the spirit of technology’. What this means is that ‘Instead of an incarnate God, the communists offer a sort of “incorporated company God.” ’46 Where Nazism has no need for ideological justification, the Soviet Union has a ‘Koran’.47 From these comparisons with Nazism, one has the feeling that although Sociology of Communism is ‘about’ communism – this was 1949, after all – its real subject, if not a more appropriate addressee for the epithet ‘secular religion’, is Nazism, for Nazism is presented as more radical and, in the affective terms with which Monnerot describes it, more fascinating. Where Nazism is described in volcanological terms as pure affect, communism, in Monnerot’s description, functions like a religion; but it is one that, thanks to its scientism, seeks to contain, if not to banish, the sacred from everyday life. If Monnerot’s basic point about communism being a secular religion seems to undermine itself here that subtle shift in emphasis opens up a space whereby one can, in retrospect, see how Monnerot could return to the analysis of fascism with fresh eyes at a later date. Most suggestively for his own later biography, Monnerot writes of Georges Sorel that he wrongly sought in socialism the idea that would destroy society and take its place: ‘He sought for it in socialism, in revolutionary syndicalism, and even among the young men of the “Proudhon Circle”, whom in the end he failed to prevent from joining the Action Française. Here Sorel’s example has a prophetic quality; he foreshadows the attraction followed by repulsion which Marxism and communism (a combined religion, church, philosophy, and army) have inspired in certain “men of ideas.” ’48 All that is missing here for Monnerot to complete the analogy is to go beyond mere


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‘repulsion’ and, as a ‘man of ideas’, to find a new object of attraction and ‘to join the Action Française’.

From repulsion to attraction If the large and repetitive, but intellectually fashionable Sociology of Communism charted the communist movement’s appeal and rise to power, using insights from sociology and psychology, what was it that took Monnerot beyond his initial conversion from communist to anti-communist – a common enough biographical experience in the mid-twentieth century49 – to fascism? After Sociology of Communism, Monnerot wrote almost nothing substantial for 20 years, the only real exception being La Guerre en question (1951), in which he argued that racism was now more likely to be directed against the West by the masses of the colonised world than vice-versa and, revealingly, that it was a sign not of ‘a calm collective consciousness’ but of ‘a dangerous lack of self-certainty’.50 Then, just after the student revolts burst into life and the Republic was being severely tested yet again in what Monnerot regarded as a war for civilisation, he published his Sociologie de la révolution. In this large book, the sixth section, nearly 200 pages, was devoted to ‘the sociology of fascisms’. Building on Caillois’s Man and the Sacred, Bataille’s ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, and other key texts from the College of Sociology’s foundation, Monnerot showed how the College’s aims and aspirations could be channelled in the direction of fascism, giving it, as Heimonet writes, ‘the positive form of an ephemeral apotheosis’.51 According to Monnerot, fascism’s military success is a result of the presence of the leader, the radical ‘heterogeneity’ of whose person – his position as an outcast or pariah – allows him to appear as a mystical embodiment of the desires of the people.52 Or, as he put it in Sociology of Communism, ‘contemporary society re-creates for its own use the age-old figure of the person endowed with mana; and thus there is a sort of natural selection of suitable figures to incarnate the ego-ideal of men who feel themselves disinherited’.53 What Monnerot wants to account for is how someone who at first appears repulsive, the pariah, can suddenly engender the opposite force, attraction. But the phenomenon does not, in Monnerot’s approach, offer itself up for rational analysis; rather, the description of the heterogeneity of the leader’s irrational, affective relationship with the Volk is itself a definition of fascist seduction. The masses who make up the homogeneous society demand an affective life, a violation of the norm, and the leader is the person who helps them achieve it.54 Monnerot, in tune with the College’s investigations from the late 1930s, borrowed from William Robertson Smith, the anthropologist of religion, the idea that the sacred was ambiguous: ‘there are sacred beings or things which elicit attraction; sacred beings or things which elicit repulsion’.55 But why should Monnerot have become seduced by the very seduction he

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sought to comprehend? In a review of Les faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses, Bataille neatly underscored Monnerot’s point that in industrial society, the heterogeneous – everything that cannot be assimilated to the concept of use-value – is rigorously excluded. This means that social bonding, or community, which is ‘no less irreducible to homogeneity than rebels are, but no less differing from the latter than saints’, becomes an agent of destruction: ‘If you like, it could crudely be said that what is of a sacred nature founds the social bond in an authentic society, but within an aggregate that is no longer founded on social bonding but on personal interest it tends, on the contrary, towards its destruction’.56 Monnerot feared that communism, first, and western capitalist society, more insidiously and thoroughly, would attempt to destroy the sacred at the heart of society. But he perhaps did not see, as Bataille and Caillois did after the war, effectively reversing their pre-war position, that ‘It is time to confess that the nostalgia for the sacred necessarily can end in nothing, that it leads astray: what the contemporary world lacks is the offer of temptations’. In other words, the attempt to infuse the modern world with a sense of the sacred could be very dangerous indeed; for as Caillois noted in Man and the Sacred, if the festival in earlier periods ‘pantomimed the destruction of the universe’, then the effects of atomic warfare in the contemporary world ‘would definitely break the equilibrium in favour of destruction’.57 After World War II, Bataille wanted to ‘cast out modern man’s nostalgia for the sacred’,58 the very nostalgia to which Monnerot fell prey. In this, Bataille was to abandon the founding principles of the College, seeing their potential to legitimise fascism, but Monnerot was not, but remained, as Richardson notes, the sole member of the College who ‘remained committed to the sort of social critique the College had demanded’.59 Where the College was caught between the sterile, homogeneous world of liberal democracy and the blood and soil pseudo-community of fascism, Monnerot faced a choice between post-war parliamentary democracy, which placed huge psychological and economic pressures on its citizens to conform, and communism. Monnerot, overlooking Bataille’s and Caillois’s warnings, thus thought that he was fulfilling the College’s remit in locating the sacred in an alternative affective life, one that increasingly drew strength not just from anti-communism, but from antiimmigration, and, in the face of a globalising world, nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. In the post-war French context, Monnerot could comfortably feel that he could condemn Nazism as a twentieth century tyranny driven by ‘collective paranoia’,60 and still edge ever closer to the French right. He correctly asserted, in the manner of Weber, that the sacred does not disappear in the modern world, but is displaced.61 But is this mystical association religion? He naturally maintained that he was no fascist, and his Resistance credentials appeared to prove it.62 Let us for the moment accept Monnerot’s distinction between fascism, Nazism and the political point of view at which he had


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arrived by the 1970s, and even allow for a distinction between fascism and the FN, just as historians of fascism allow for distinctions between fascist movements. Still, there is a case to answer as to how a sociologist of tyranny, who had condemned Nazism almost in equal measure as communism in the 1940s, could end not only by representing the French far right but also influencing it: as we will shortly see, his articles of the 1950s onwards were often published in the journals of far right intellectual circles, such as, in the 1980s, the Club de L’Horloge.63 His influence on thinkers, such as Alain de Benoist, is clear and unequivocally admitted. Besides, whilst historians of fascism do indeed acknowledge the obvious differences between, say, Italian Fascism, the Action Française, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Spanish Falange, the British Union of Fascists and the German Nazis, most accept that these differences can still be encompassed under the term ‘fascism’, such that, as one scholar puts it, ‘without fascism, there would be no Nazism as we know it. . . . Nazism is not an “ideal type” of fascism but its most radical possibility’.64 Thus, it is important to assess Monnerot’s understanding of what had happened in recent French history. In an essay published in English in 1953, in a volume that sought to explain ‘what Europe thinks of America’, Monnerot argued that ‘The 1940 defeat had been a verdict of guilty against everything that resembled government by Assembly with a weak executive’.65 In other words, all reasonable Americans would recognise the failure of the Third Republic, and would sympathise with the aims of the anti-republicans and the post-war Gaullists. Thus, he sought to draw a correlation between the American constitution and the one that had been denied France by the Allies. ‘It is almost tragic’, he wrote: that well-informed and responsible Americans could even have thought that it would be a good thing to establish in France a government by Assembly with a weak executive. How far this is from the truth! The logical outcome of such a regime, if nothing intervenes, is totalitarianism – and for France this means communism. It is odd that American opinion should have been so hostile to General de Gaulle’s plans for a presidential republic that would have been so much closer to the American system. This would have taken care of the question of strengthening the executive, and would have profited from the lesson of the 1940 defeat.66 Whilst the first statement was a fairly common opinion on the Gaullist right – especially as it covered over the vast divisions in the Third Republic that animated its scandals from Dreyfus to Vichy and blamed the defeat on the French institutional framework instead – the second was untenable just a few years after communists had been excluded from government and at a time when France, in the context of the newly-created NATO, was in the process of negotiating the conditions under which West Germany could

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be rearmed. Although communism was intellectually influential in France, politically it had been emasculated, and there was no threat of a communist takeover in France in 1953 as there had been in Czechoslovakia in 1948, which coup Monnerot discussed at length in order to demonstrate communist perfidiousness.67 Nor did the first stirrings of European unification – the creation of the EU’s forebear, the European Steel and Coal Community in 1951 – signify, as Monnerot argued, the end of European power and significance.68 Rather, for those like Jean Monnet, who saw the ECSC as the first step towards a supranational federation, the process was meant to protect European power in the face of extra-European communism: ‘We are starting’, Monnet wrote, ‘a process of continuous reform which can shape tomorrow’s world more lastingly than the principles of revolution so widespread outside the West’.69 If it was untimely, Monnerot’s assessment went hand in hand with his analysis of the dictatorships or, as he called them, not without validity, ‘les dictatures plébiscitaires européennes’. For, as he wrote, the discrediting of these regimes, including that of Vichy, ‘led to the imposition of the type of regime that we now have and that up to now France had never been damaged enough politically to accept for a lengthy period of time’.70 In the late 1950s, Monnerot asserted that the term ‘democracy’ served a useful psychological purpose but that the French government was an oligarchy, not a democracy. He claimed that democracy meant nothing more than the self-perpetuation of the political class, backed up by the closed and homogeneous press, which he regarded as almost totalitarian. In Monnerot’s opinion, only restoring the monarchy or greatly strengthening the Republic could improve the situation.71 After 1959, when he broke with de Gaulle, Monnerot moved decisively into French monarchist and nationalist circles. Naturally, Monnerot later denied that he was a fascist, accusing France’s liberal elite of slandering all those it did not like, and having kept the country under tight control [quadrillé]: If you are called a fascist, you magically – and in such cases we are steeped in the irrational dimension of human behaviour – you magically become identified with a whole chain of signifiers. Fascist equals Hitlerite, Hitlerite equals torturer in a concentration camp. . . . Never mind real facts. Such as the fact that you have absolutely nothing in common with the Nazis and the Fascists.72 This is no more than one would expect from a person accused of being a fascist in the 1980s. Interestingly, Monnerot’s argument is the same one that is debated by historians such as Prowe or Soucy: whether the term ‘fascism’ can be applied to the post-war context. As I have already indicated, this is to some extent to dodge the substantive point, which is concerned less with pigeonholing than with understanding the ideological motives of such


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movements. Monnerot wrote that fascism should be understood as a movement that came to power in the period of distress following World War I, which aimed at renewing the state.73 According to him, it emerged most successfully ‘in countries afflicted with an inferiority complex in the matter of imperialism . . . The German Jews would no doubt have had less to suffer if Germany had possessed as many colonies as France’.74 Unlike communism, fascism did not destroy the existing social order (represented, for example, by private property and business), but rather subordinated it. Fascism made ‘the principle of social solidarity for creating an historic collective [le principe de la solidarité social pour une collectivité historique]’ the order of the day, a collective that was defined in national terms by Mussolini and ‘racial’ ones by Hitler. Fascism appealed to myth ‘so as to impose an irresistible power in the area where it is exercised’ and this myth functioned ‘so as to contribute to the realization of a common destiny’.75 Monnerot saw all this in rather ‘rational-functionalist’ terms, presenting fascism as a (psycho)logical outcome of the turbulence of the post-Great War period. It was not fascism itself that should be understood in ‘mystical’ terms, but the interpretation of fascism that was associated with the left, which Monnerot now regarded as little more than fantasy: ‘The idea that Hitler is some sort of monster spawned by finance capital is “magical” and puerile. The Hitlerite enterprise was no doubt subsidized by economic conglomerates, but it was not created by them’.76 Indeed, as is already clear from his comments on the events of 1940, Monnerot regarded this fascism as an understandable revolt against ‘government by Assembly with a weak executive’, a revolt that took place across Europe during the interwar period. This was consistent with the call for authority he had made in 1939, in an ideological survey conducted in the avant-garde journal Volontés, and was the focus of his work throughout the post-war period.77 It is also consistent with his brief discussion of the Jews, whom he presents as victims of Nazism not because they were Jews, but because they were ‘rationalists’, intellectuals who embodied the spirit of homogenising modernity which was incompatible with affective power.78

The ‘Colleges of Sociology’ These kinds of claims go some way to clarifying why Monnerot took the path he did, from surrealism and the extreme left to anti-communism and the far right. But only some way – after all, on the basis of Sociologie de la révolution as a text, one would not be able to describe Monnerot as a ‘fascist’. His trajectory also helps to illuminate the choices made by Monnerot’s erstwhile collaborator, the better-known case of Georges Bataille. Bataille is often regarded as a proto-fascist or, as Richard Wolin puts it, a ‘left fascist’, because of his calls for ‘action’ and because of his investigations into the irrational, such as inspired the journal Acéphale. Indeed, his antifascist activities

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necessitated an attack on the parliamentary democracy of interwar France, which, Bataille believed, were incubating fascism. As Hollier reminds us, ‘The struggle against Fascism, Bataille believed, had to undermine democratic procedure if it was to be effective’.79 In other words, anti-fascism was itself leading towards ‘the spectre of a military regime, the suspension of democratic freedoms’.80 Certainly, as conceived by Bataille, anti-fascism flirted with the very same sources of affect that drove the fascist movements.81 Given the tumult of the 1930s, it is easy to see why historians have regarded Bataille with suspicion. Yet, for all that one can see ‘the irony of an antagonistic complicity’ between Monnerot and Bataille, the latter ultimately rejected fascism.82 In his famous analysis, Bataille argued that despite the heterogeneity of the leader and irrationality of the affective relationship between the military, the masses and the leader, this affect was ‘returned’ to the sphere of the homogeneous. The affect that created and animated the movement was fed back into an exchange economy of military expenditure, social stratification and industrial projects that reinforced the rule of the traditional elites. In contrast, Monnerot seems to have taken his own advice in Les faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses too far, and ended by allowing himself to be subsumed by his subject. As Heimonet notes, ‘everything happens as if Monnerot attributed to fascism some sacred opacity, the type of climactic value that Bataille will not award it because he prefers to interpret it as the blind implementation of an abstract principle. What with the former fuels and unleashes the mythhistorical scene, gets seared and consumed as a text with the latter [vient se brûler et s’épuiser en texte]’.83 Indeed, Heimonet hints that as early as 1946, Bataille may have foreseen Monnerot’s later political trajectory. In turn, Monnerot condemned Bataille on the same grounds that he condemned Marxism: for its untenable, bastard mix of ‘science’ (political economy) and its opposite, the Hegelian dialectic inherited from Heraclitus.84 And, with the content of his argument in contest with its form of articulation, he argued that over-intellectualising the world, to the point where everything has been debunked, leads to totalitarianism. There needs to be some mystery left in the world.85 After heading the FN’s Conseil scientifique for several years during the 1980s, Monnerot withdrew from his collaboration with the FN in the early 1990s, after disagreeing with party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen over the stance that the party should take on the Gulf War, earning himself a rebuke from Bruno Mégret, Le Pen’s right-hand man, for his political weakness. By situating his later political commitment into the intellectual context Monnerot created with his major post-war work, Sociology of Communism, one can see how Monnerot arrived at the position of active engagement with the FN. Yet perhaps only if we bear in mind Monnerot’s earlier description of racism as an expression of ‘a dangerous lack of self-certainty’ can the context of France in the 1970s and 1980s provide a meaningful setting in which Monnerot’s


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earlier texts take on meaning they otherwise might never have acquired. The socio-economic circumstances of post-war France gave an impetus to his theory of secular religion that it might otherwise not have had, as France confronted the Cold War and its changing manifestations, decolonisation and the loss of great power status, the end of ‘les trentes glorieuses’ and the rise of neo-liberalism and the social challenges of mass immigration and postcolonial multiculturalism. Although Sociologie de la révolution is not a continuation of Sociologie du communisme – indeed, it is in some way an inversion of the arguments presented therein (for example, about the relationship of fascism and capitalism) – the earlier book put forward the theoretical arguments about the role of the sacred in the modern world that led Monnerot to abandon any critique of fascism that he might originally have shared with Bataille. By the time he had reached old age, Monnerot, confronted with the great social and cultural changes that characterised post-war Europe, saw in fascism pure religion or pure transcendence and was comparing Hitler to a ‘sacred actor in a lived mystery’.86

Conclusion: thinking ‘after Auschwitz’ Monnerot’s arguments can be usefully contextualised by contrasting them with those advanced by Hannah Arendt. She set out her conception of totalitarianism most clearly in her response to Eric Voegelin, who in his review of The Origins of Totalitarianism accused Arendt of positing an ‘essential nature’ for the phenomenon she was describing, thus depriving it of any historically meaningful development or explanation. Richard King explains: Although Arendt spoke of totalitarianism and related historical phenomena such as the ‘camps’ as having an ‘essence,’ such an essence was historical rather than ontological or metaphysical: it ‘did not exist until it [totalitarianism] had come into being. I therefore talk only of “elements” which crystallize into totalitarianism.’ From this point of view, Nazism as an ideology was not just the latest in the long decline of the West, as it was for Voegelin, nor was it a continuation of the religious anti-Semitism that was synonymous with the history of Christendom. Because totalitarian ideologies such as Nazism may have functioned like a religious ideology, did not mean that it was one. Functional similarity did not equal essential identity.87 Arendt made these points in even plainer terms with respect to Monnerot himself. In 1953, the year that Sociologie du communisme was published in English, Arendt published an article, ‘Religion and Politics’ in the young Henry Kissinger’s journal Confluence, in which she criticised those who used terms like ‘secular religion’ or ‘political religion’ for being an ideal type that bore little relation to historical reality. In reply, Monnerot complained that

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Arendt had failed to define either ‘religion’ or ‘ideology’. He stressed that ideology was only part of communism, and that its psychological success over its adherents was due to its faith-like qualities, with the ‘Human Species’ playing ‘the functional role of a sort of divinity’.88 Arendt’s simple reply was that, following Marx, religions are ideologies but that ideologies are not necessarily religions. There are religious and non-religious sorts of ideology. In contrast to what she saw as Monnerot’s sociologising, which she understood as a desire – ‘methodically ignoring chronological order, location of facts, impact and uniqueness of events, substantial content of sources, and historical reality in general’ – to force the complexity of history into neatly packaged ‘functional roles’, Arendt wanted to stress that a belief in God and a belief in a Law of History are two different things which do not play the same ‘functional role’.89 Arendt’s claims can in turn be criticised for caricaturing sociology and for being overly rigid; perhaps it might be possible to find a way of speaking of the role played by the sacred in everyday life or in totalitarianism without having to use the term ‘secular religion’ or ‘political religion’. For as Peter Baehr rightly notes, ‘The fact that religion, in the divine sense of the word, entails both a faith in God’s existence and a community of believers to which one is socially bound does not mean that one cannot have faith and communal obligation without a belief in God’.90 Yet unsurprisingly, in the early twenty-first century, many of these warnings and calls for careful analysis have been ignored, and Monnerot’s designation of communism as the ‘twentieth-century Islam’ has been revived, with bloggers and other commentators throwing aside scholarly caution and talking about Islam as ‘the communism of the twenty-first century’. Rather than a ‘necessary analogy’, one does indeed see functional equivalence being assumed, in a way that traduces the historical specificities of both early modern Islamic empires and twentieth-century communism. Indeed, Monnerot himself at the end of his life, following the demise of the communist regimes, saw Islam as the greatest threat to French cultural homogeneity and to the west as such.91 He condemned the ‘politically correct’ mainstream for substituting a real problem – the incorporation of ‘six million non-indigenous people’ into France – for the ‘vengeful homilies of racism’, claiming that it was ‘bad taste’ to accuse Jean-Marie Le Pen of all manner of evil, when the real problem was a ‘phenomenon of intellectual negligence’ which was leading to the ‘enfeeblement of the critical spirit in France’.92 Yet it will not help us to understand radical Islam as an ideology by thinking of it in these terms, which serve only to frighten because of the irrational adherence they suggest, an adherence which can be combated only by the same violence that characterises the suicide bomber. ‘Faith’, as Monnerot put it, ‘can hardly be vanquished except by another faith’.93 Is this a sure guide to twenty-first century international relations? According to the doyen of the nouvelle droite, Alain de Benoist, Monnerot became, at the end of his life, a victim of his ‘non-conformism’, as if


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confirming Monnerot’s claim that his contemporaries were ‘the most conditioned human beings in history’. Other commentators might prefer to think that his isolation was a fair reflection of his opinions. However, de Benoist does correctly note that Monnerot’s turn to the FN derived from his belief that every society has a need for the sacred, and that this need was being quashed by communism in the Soviet Bloc and by homogenisation in the West.94 De Benoist is by no means alone. In the mid-1980s, one German analysis of Bataille’s theory of waste ended by calling for ‘collective exaltation and orgiastic participation’ as the only way of ‘saving us from the catastrophic logic of capitalism’s production and destruction madness’.95 The dream of ‘immanent transcendence’ that characterises fascism has not gone away, but, as Bataille finally realised after World War II, the risks associated with transgressive ‘exudation’ in the contemporary world are perhaps too great to contemplate.


Part III Politics and Cultures of Memory


10 Genocide and Memory

Introduction We live in a memory-obsessed age. Western culture is suffused with autobiographies, especially with traumatic life narratives about the legacies of abusive childhoods. Tourism consists to a large extent of the consumption of ‘heritage’ such as castles and stately homes; memorials and museums increasingly dot the landscape, and commemorative events seem to occur with increasing frequency. The history of genocide is also affected by these broad cultural trends; indeed, in some respects it exemplifies them. The perpetration of genocide requires the mobilisation of collective memories, as does the commemoration of it. For the individual victims of genocide, traumatic memories cannot be escaped; for societies, genocide has profound effects that are immediately felt and that people are exhorted (and willingly choose) never to forget. ‘Dark tourism’ – visits to death camps or other sites of mass murder – is fully integrated into the tourist trail.1 Although thinkers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernest Renan, Paul Ricoeur and Marc Augé might be right to suggest that forgetting is essential for the health of society, genocide is less amenable to willed oblivion than most events because of the deep wounds it creates; thus, in the memory politics that surround it, genocide can scar societies long before and long after its actual occurrence. This chapter shows how genocide is bound up with memory, on an individual level of trauma and on a collective level, in terms of the creation of stereotypes, prejudice and post-genocide politics. Before demonstrating the validity of these claims, it is necessary to say something about ‘memory studies’. The basic premise of the study of ‘collective memory’ is not a quasi-mystical belief in the existence of a social mind, or that societies can be treated as organic wholes (in the manner supposed by many genocide perpetrators); rather, it is the claim that, in order to live meaningfully as a human being, that is, in order to have memories (for, as neurologists increasingly show, memory and selfhood are intrinsically linked), one has to exist in a social setting. This claim, which has its origin 143

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in the work of French sociologists Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs, and perhaps reaches its zenith in Ricoeur’s last major work, Memory, History, Forgetting (2000), overturns the intuitively appealing ‘methodological individualism’ of much twentieth-century thought, installing in its stead a ‘methodological holism’. Whilst groups do not have memories in the neurological sense and thus there is no organic basis to the term ‘collective memory’, nevertheless, ‘Collective memories originate from shared communications about the meaning of the past that are anchored in the life-worlds of individuals who partake in the communal life of the respective collective.’2 Thus collective memory becomes something that the historian or other scholar can study; memory can be a subject for critical historiography in the same way as gender or class. Historians can think theoretically about what collective memory is, how it is constructed and what it excludes, and they can provide detailed case studies, for example, in examining Italians’ memories of fascism or the ways in which the My Lai massacre has been domesticated in American collective memory. Most often historians have focused on what Pierre Nora calls ‘lieux de mémoire’, sites such as memorials, museums or significant buildings (like the Panthéon in Paris, the Neue Wache in Berlin or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC), showing how a group’s (usually a nation’s) self-identity is anchored in these sites of memory. What such sites exclude becomes as relevant for understanding collective memory as the narratives they promote. More recently, some historians have criticised this model for studying collective memory.3 It is too easy to do, they say, because it is focused on material objects or aesthetic representations whose meaning can be shown to change over time as people interact with them differently under changed circumstances. For example, the meaning of Auschwitz to Catholic Poles living under communism before 1989 was different from the meanings that the camp acquired after the end of the Cold War once the site became internationalised. From being a site that acted for Poles as a metaphor for the evils of foreign occupation, Auschwitz became a key site in the Europeanisation of Holocaust consciousness when, after the collapse of communism, its overwhelmingly Jewish victims were increasingly recognised. Far more meaningful than studying sites of memory, according to the critics, would be to trace the ways in which conflicts over memory affect social relations. In other words, we need to show how memory is linked with power. Doing so, argues Wulf Kansteiner, requires scholars of memory to think more carefully about their methodology. The scholarship, in his opinion, needs to delineate more clearly the distinctions between individual and collective memory and to think more about reception than about representation. It would benefit from adopting some of the vocabulary and methodology of media studies, with the result that collective memory would be understood as the result of the interaction of three ‘types of historical factors:

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the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artefacts according to their own interests’.4 But for historians memory is more than just a research topic.5 Historians are also part of the broader culture, one that already 15 years ago was diagnosed as suffering from a ‘surfeit of memory’.6 Critics of the memory culture argue that, like ‘heritage’, memory is exclusionary, reactionary and nostalgic; at its worst, it can be accused in its quest for authenticity and ‘re-enchantment’ of ‘projecting “psychoneurotic jargon” onto the memory of various national or (more often) ethnoracial groups’.7 Memory is, in fine, one of the more dangerous tools of identity politics. Thus, scholars need to consider their own investments in memory politics, especially when writing about subjects like genocide. Interventions in, for example, debates about commemorative practices in Rwanda, cannot be made on a whim. But finally, memory is inseparable from history, so that even when the current ‘memory obsession’ has passed, when the piles of confessional literature have been pulped and the commemorative ceremonies are unattended, still, as Ricoeur notes, memory will be the ‘bedrock’ of history. The fact that people can say that ‘this has happened’ remains the starting point for historiography.8 Studying the links between genocide and memory means, then, examining the ways in which collective memories of past humiliations or victories are mobilised in the present, showing how individuals and societies are traumatised by genocide, and analysing the ways in which post-genocidal commemorative practices sustain collective memories. In 1950, Champetier de Ribes, the French Prosecutor, stated that Nazi crimes ‘were so monstrous, so undreamt of in history throughout the Christian era up to the birth of Hitlerism, that the term “genocide” has had to be coined to define it’. As the legal scholar Alexander Greenawalt, who cites de Ribes, notes, the United Nations Genocide Convention (UNGC) was not merely a way of codifying individual guilt. The concept of genocide ‘is as much about questions of history and collective memory’.9 The background to the UNGC and questions of the definition of genocide have been explored elsewhere; here I wish only to develop the point that genocide and memory are inseparable, for reasons of the cultural freight that the term contains as well as, more obviously, the enormity of the crime itself. In what follows, I will analyse the nature of this relationship.

Memory as mobilization It is tempting, when trying to understand perpetrators of genocide, to assume that they are convinced of their own superiority, that they are the arrogant bearers of an ideology that requires the merciless elimination of the weak. For example, one interpretation of the Holocaust suggests that behind

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the murder of the Jews lay a deeper desire to overthrow the moral law – represented by the Ten Commandments, the basis of Judeo-Christian civilisation – and reinstate the right to commit genocide, as in the virile, martial societies of ancient Greece.10 Such rhetoric is not hard to find, especially in colonial settings where the social Darwinist notion of superior races ‘superseding’ the inferior was common. Yet, in fact, most genocides result from processes of worsening national or imperial crisis that give rise to a feeling of massive insecurity or existential threat among the perpetrators. A curious, paradoxical logic is at work: genocide perpetrators commit the most horrific crimes in the belief – always exaggerated and sometimes outright fantastical – that they are defensive acts to ensure that they will not suffer the same fate. In other words, barbaric actions are justified for fear of being subjected to barbaric actions. Germans in Southwest Africa (Namibia) ‘did not commit massacres in the colonies because they were in a strong position and had the power to decide on life or death of the indigenous population. On the contrary, German settlers felt unsafe and were afraid to lose their existence.’11 In some cases, as in Rwanda, a history of Hutu-Tutsi conflict from at least 1959 provided the background to genocide. In the Ottoman Empire, small numbers of Armenians joined revolutionary movements that defied the state.12 Yet in none of these cases was it necessary for the perpetrators to respond by seeking to slaughter the targeted population. What mobilised them to do so, what exacerbated the sense of threat to the point at which genocide became a viable and acceptable option, was fear underpinned by memory: of former oppression or supposed treason. Specifically, collective memories of past suffering are almost always brought to bear on current crises, lending them cultural meaning – the weight of dead ancestors weighing on the minds of the living – and imbuing them with added ferocity. Memory fuels genocide.13 Stalin’s Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia both illustrate the point. In the former, the construction of the ‘Kulak’, which began with Stolypin’s reforms before 1917, revived fears of starvation and social conflict. Belief that peasants were hoarding food, which would lead to death on a massive scale for urban dwellers, then permitted massive oppression.14 And in the latter, Khmer Rouge support was massively boosted by the effects of American bombing in the early 1970s. The response to this attack does not explain the ferocity of the ‘auto-genocide’ between 1975 and 1979, but memories of French colonial wars, Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s contempt for the majority rural population and the age-old fear of the Vietnamese certainly drove many ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, as did the regime’s revival of the grandeur of the Angkorian dynasty. As Ben Kiernan notes, ‘The total reshaping of Cambodia under Pol Pot may be said to demonstrate the power of a myth.’15 The Rwandan example is equally full of such fears and fantasies, based on the memory of Hutu-Tutsi conflict from at least the Hutu Revolution of

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1959 if not from the period of colonial rule (first German, then Belgian) from the late nineteenth century. Tutsi refugees and their children actively kept alive the memory of the land they had left (like Hutu refugees from Burundi in Tanzania16 ), so that even those young members of the RPF who had been born in Uganda and had never seen Rwanda felt that they were ‘returning home’ in 1994. And the memory of the colonial period, in which minority Tutsi domination was established according to the warped racial logic of the colonisers, was mobilised by Hutu extremists in the run-up to the genocide, especially as the framework for peace established by the Arusha Accords started collapsing.17 Here the point about memory not as an organic phenomenon but as a key component of political power is especially clear. For although there had always been tensions between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda since the colonial period, when the Belgian authorities institutionalised the distinction as ‘racial’,18 there was nothing like a permanent state of war between the two ‘communities’, which were, after the post-revolutionary violence of the early 1960s, in fact thoroughly mixed. Only with the threat of war did Hutu extremists revitalise the memory of pre-1959 Rwandan society, dominated by the Tutsi minority, and whip up fear among the Hutu population that they should eliminate the Tutsis because otherwise this same fate would be reserved for them. Indeed, as recent research shows, the speed with which certain parts of the country threw themselves into participating in genocide was determined less by the reception of infamous propaganda such as the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’, Kangura magazine or Radio Télévision Libres des Milles Collines, than affinity to the ruling MRND party, proximity to the front line and fear of the approaching RPF.19 And, indeed, the RPF made equally effective use of collective memories of expulsion and exile, with violent results both during and after the genocide. Since the RPF took power, the government has come under increasing scrutiny by Western scholars who have grown suspicious of its ‘harmonising perspective on pre-colonial society and history’. The fear that Rwandan memories of both the pre-colonial period and the 1994 genocide are being instrumentalised – for example, by labelling all Hutu refugees as génocidaires or by employing guilt discourses in the international arena – not only maintains RPF power but ‘perpetuates violence in the Great Lakes’.20 Perhaps the most infamous example of such memory mobilisation is the speech given by Slobodan Milošević in 1989 at the site of the Battle of Kosovo Polje that took place 600 years earlier on 28 June 1389. That battle (and that date – also the day of Gavrilo Princip’s shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914) is ingrained into Serbian memory as a moment of military defeat at the hands of the Turks, but a moment of moral victory, on the basis of Knez Lazar choosing a heavenly instead of an earthly kingdom for the Serbs. As well as confirming the Serb nation’s place in the divine realm, the myth established the continuity of the Serb nation

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across the centuries and confirmed Serbia’s right to its ancestral lands in Kosovo.21 It was also the source of the ‘betrayal syndrome’ – Serb allegations that Muslims in Yugoslavia are ‘that part of themselves which betrayed the “faith of their forefathers” ’.22 Milošević’s speech is regularly cited as one of the key moments in his rise to power; his use of the legend of the battle became a central component in his ethno-nationalist arsenal and in the building of a nationalist consensus in Serbia. Although its significance can be overstated, this manipulation of Serbian national memory – which of course required grassroots activity to operationalise it, not Milošević alone – is key to understanding the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that accompanied the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and, especially, the violent efforts to expel ethnic Albanians from Kosovo at a point when Serbia was already isolated as a pariah state in the eyes of the ‘international community’. Extremists prevailed over moderates in Serbia because they persuaded a large enough constituency that ‘the powerful can fear the weak’.23 More important even than the myth of Kosovo, which represents Serbian ‘deep memory’, was the memory of what had happened in World War II. In the 1990s, the self-identification of Serbian and Croatian paramilitaries as Chetniks and Ustashe respectively was a conscious echo of the war, when ‘Independent Croatia’ – which was more than just a Nazi puppet state under the leadership of the clerico-fascist collaborator Ante Pavelić – was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Romanies. No serious historian doubts that Serbs were subjected to a genocidal onslaught under the rule of Nazi-protected Croatia, but the manipulation of the figures of the dead in the 1980s and 1990s was a key contributor to the worsening of relations between the two major components of the Yugoslav federation. Croatia’s neo-fascist president, Franjo Tudjman, was not only a Holocaust denier but a belittler of Serb suffering during World War II, and Serbian historians and politicians regularly exaggerated the numbers killed at Jasenovac and elsewhere in order to spread fear throughout the Serbian population (especially outside of the borders of Serbia) as Yugoslavia was breaking apart. A figure of 700,000 Serb deaths at Jasenovac was commonly heard in the 1980s, when the true figure is likely to have been about 100,000. This strategy was highly effective, as fear of becoming victims of genocide divided previously mixed communities into ethnically separate groups: ‘Everyone was traumatized by all the talk of World War Two atrocities’, wrote Bogdan Denitch, ‘even those who had seemed immune to nationalism.’24 Reliable figures of the dead are still hard to come by, though the work of Tomislav Dulić, Robert M. Hayden and others has done much to bring clarity to this fraught issue – but scholarship alone is of course insufficient to quell ultra-nationalist ideologies.25 The Holocaust can also to some extent be seen through this lens. Dirk Moses argues that the Holocaust should be understood using a framework in which genocide is seen as a combination of colonial expansion, security

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fears and subaltern revenge. Hitler drew on the overseas colonial experience, especially in India and North America, for inspiration for his own vision of a colonised Europe. The treatment of Ukrainians, Poles and other conquered nations certainly conforms to this colonial pattern, in which the ‘natives’ were to become a reservoir of slave labour. And the murder of the Jews, according to Moses, was in part a subaltern genocide, through which Hitler aimed to ‘emancipate’ Germany from perceived ‘foreign occupation’, that is, Jewish rule. Thus, whilst Slavic populations were regarded as Untermenschen (subhumans), suitable for enslavement, the Jews were a source of fear, for they sought to take over the world, and their elimination was a project of ‘national liberation’.26 Genocide, in Moses’ formulation, ‘is as much an act of security as it is racial hatred’.27 It is worth noting that this stress on Nazi fears of Jews – as opposed to the standard narrative that stresses Nazi racial theory and the need to rid the world of inferior ‘non-Aryans’ – provides common ground between scholars who incorporate the Holocaust into the new comparative genocide framework and those who argue that the racial paradigm at the heart of the Nazi Weltanschauung ultimately owed less to race science than to a paranoid political conspiracy theory. This view suggests that the Nazis were not so much driven by their sense of superiority as by their fear of the power of ‘the Jew’. Hence the lengths to which Goebbels went in his propaganda output to convince the German public that ‘The Jews are guilty of everything!’28 The source of this sense of existential threat was the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend from 1918, the belief that Germany lost the Great War because the Jews had betrayed the country. Michael Geyer notes that ‘The rhetoric of Endkampf [final battle] found its most potent enemy in the figure of the Jew.’29 Indeed, the feeding through of the memory of 1918 into Nazi ideology is a textbook example of the power of traumatic memory, of what Mark Levene calls ‘the perpetrator’s “never again” syndrome’. ‘They should not have staged 9 November 1918 with impunity’, fumed Hitler to the Czech foreign minister in 1939, ‘That day shall be avenged . . . The Jews shall be annihilated in our land.’30

Post-genocidal traumatic memory What happens after genocide? When communities are devastated, often all that is left is memory, and that a ‘memory shot through with holes’.31 Thus survivors turn inwards, and focus on themselves and the need for familial and community repair. This process is intrinsically related to memory, in the production of memorial books and monuments and, in interacting with the wider world, in attempts to bring what happened to general notice and to bring perpetrators to justice. If collective memory is essential for mobilising perpetrators, it also underpins attempts to commemorate genocide in its immediate aftermath and to advocate on behalf of survivors in their quest for justice.

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A large literature now exists on reparations, compensation, restitution, war crimes trials, truth commissions and the developing international law on genocide since the founding of the International Criminal Court in 1999. In numerous contexts, from Guatemala to Poland, national commissions of enquiry have been set up to enquire into genocidal pasts. Austria’s amnesia as regards its Nazi past was only an extreme example of a common phenomenon, and most European states have now ‘discovered’ the fact that Nazism and the Holocaust were part of their histories too. Since the Stockholm Forum in 2000, many European states have commissioned official investigations into their experience of and, often, collaboration with Nazi occupation and genocide. For example, the question of the extent of Nazi looting and of restitution for victims of the Holocaust has been an area of remarkable scholarly activity since the end of the Cold War.32 Dan Diner has highlighted the relationship between memory and restitution in the light of the move to incorporate Holocaust Memorial Day into the European calendar and European cultural identity: ‘a basic anthropological assumption’ exists, thinks Diner, that presumes an ‘organic interconnection between restituted property rights and the evocation of past memories, or vice versa: Restitution of property as the result of recovered memory’.33 As he rightly notes, this link between memory and property is both plausible and problematic. The issue of property and restitution provides a link between issues of memory that are victim community-focused and those that are aimed at the wider world. Perhaps post-genocide trials represent the purest form of the latter. The image of the 22 leading Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg is one of the most memorable of the twentieth century, and the memory of Nuremberg informs the currently developing international law on genocide and human rights.34 Issues of compensatory and/or corrective justice, as well as penal/retributive justice, are in evidence in different sorts of trials, depending on whether these deal with reparations or punishment. The Eichmann Trial exemplifies a deliberately orchestrated attempt to bring Holocaust memory into the centre of Israeli public (as opposed to private) consciousness, and the significance of post-genocide trials for memory work is not to be underestimated. Even though it is widely acknowledged that the punishment in such cases can never fit the crime – ‘The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness’35 – the impact of such trials explains why they have been avoided in so many instances, from France to Cambodia, by the use of delaying tactics. Numerous scholars identify shortcomings in the UNGC, and some assert that these shortcomings have negative consequences for the establishment of collective memories of genocide36 ; but there is a good reason why the authorities often resist and place obstacles in the way of post-genocide trials.

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When memory is the subject, the focus of attention is usually on commemorative practices, monuments and museums. An enormous body of research now exists on Holocaust memorials and museums, of which there are many throughout the world.37 But it is not only the Holocaust that provides material to test James E. Young’s claim that monuments propagate an ‘illusion of common memory’. The desire to memorialise traumatic events such as the Holocaust ‘may actually spring from an opposite and equal desire to forget them’, since the assumption that the monument is always there tends to encourage a lack of engagement with the issues.38 A casual stroll through any major city, most of whose monuments remain unnoticed and, for the inhabitants, unidentifiable, suggests that Young has a point. Apart from the question of whether genocide memorials too readily take their cue from representations of the Holocaust,39 it is worth considering what forms of memory genocide memorials and museums are meant to encourage. One scholar suggests that ‘fear of denial and scarcity of resources has resulted in the most graphic genocide memorial in history: that of Murambi’ in Rwanda.40 At the school where the massacre of several thousand Tutsis took place, the remains of the dead were left as the monument, giving rise to a ‘traumatic silence’ amongst visitors. The same is true of the bones that function as memorials at Nyamata, Nyarabuye and Ntarama, where ‘the function of the memorials is not to obtain scientific evidence, but rather to produce an experience of memory’.41 In Cambodia, the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes and the Choeung Ek ‘killing fields’ site serve a similar function. They also aim to preserve the memory of genocide, but do so by shocking visitors (mostly Western tourists), partly by deliberately borrowing a Holocaust-inspired form of representation, and partly by instilling a new national narrative.42 And given that most of the Khmer Rouge leaders have escaped the trials that belatedly began in November 2007 with the trial of Kaing Guek Eav (the head of Tuol Sleng, known as Comrade Duch), their memorial function is somewhat soured. In both countries, however, the significance of the genocides means that the public display of body parts has been permitted, contrary to usual custom, although one should bear in mind that ‘the maintenance of a site to communicate its cursedness or ruination is itself a sustained act of intervention’.43 The sheer mass of bones in these monuments provokes the shock and horror that are appropriate responses to genocide, but their anonymity means that they also recapitulate the logic of genocide: the reduction of individual human beings to representatives of a (perpetrator-defined) group. Hence the importance of local memorials and commemorative festivals in Cambodia.44 And hence the great significance of naming in general, as seen in many memorial practices, from the post-Holocaust yizker-bikher (memorial books) to the recovery of names in Spain’s Todos los nombres project.45

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Remembering genocide, however, is only one side of the coin of responding to such traumatic events. The other is willed amnesia. The conscious turn to memory tends – though this is not always true – to require the passage of time, for in the immediate aftermath of genocide the scars are still too deep. Especially in instances where former perpetrators and surviving victims have to live together in close proximity, closing off memory, or at least trying to do so, is a meaningful way of dealing with the past. In Rwanda, for example, what is striking about Susanne Buckley-Zistel’s interviews with people from across the country’s diverse population is that, whilst they often referred to the 1994 genocide, ‘the causes of the genocide and the decades of tension between Hutu and Tutsi were ignored’.46 Precisely the years of tension from 1959 onwards that saw the mobilization of memory in the early 1990s were the years that had to be ‘forgotten’ (that is to say, left undiscussed), rather than the events of the genocide itself. Gacaca trials can address issues of who did what in the context of the genocide, but leaves the underlying causes unaddressed. Only time will tell whether the Rwandan government’s attempt to switch the country from a Francophone to an Anglophone position, to remove ethnic markers from ID cards, to rewrite Rwandan history and to advocate local as well as international forms of justice will help Rwandans to overcome these conflict-ridden memories. In Bosnia, Cornelia Sorabji shows that memories of traumatic events continue ‘to affect the social fabric’, possibly sustaining the sort of hostility that fuelled conflict in the first place.47 Sorabji correctly notes that the risk of analysing memory as a carrier of conflict is that it serves to perpetuate ‘ancient hatreds’ style arguments, which suggest that war in the Balkans is a more or less natural condition. Thus, she proposes to situate individuals and their memories – ‘real’ or ‘transmitted’ – into the context of the politics of memory, that is, the broader framework of competing narratives at group or state level that seek to ‘channel’ people’s memories in certain ways. For since ‘collective memory’ is not an organic process (there is no group mind), it follows that the interrelationship between individuals (‘memory users’) and the group (‘memory makers’) needs to be analysed. One should not assume ‘that human minds are endlessly manipulable and that schooling or the broadcasting of nationalistic commemorative ceremonies can fundamentally alter personal memories of strongly emotional, life-changing events such as violent bereavement’.48 Of course, one of the characteristics of traumatic memory is that it cannot be suppressed at will. It is by its very nature a memory that returns unexpectedly and uncontrollably to haunt individual victims and post-genocide societies. There is no need for memories of genocide to be ‘recovered’ – in the dubious manner of childhood abuse cases of the 1980s – since it has never gone away in the first place. Many scholars are now rightly critical of the view, fashionable in the 1990s especially in literary studies, that ‘traumatic memory’ is a widely applicable concept. The idea that whole societies

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can be traumatised has been subjected to serious criticism, so that what we are generally left with is a more or less appropriate metaphor, not a concept that carries any of the precise, clinical meaning that it does when applied to individuals (when used carefully, and not just in the vernacular, as in ‘what a traumatic day that was’). As Kansteiner notes, ‘none of the existing concepts of Holocaust trauma is well suited to explain the effects of Holocaust representations on individuals or collectives who encounter the Final Solution only as a media event for educational or entertainment purposes’.49 Still, in the case of societies that have experienced genocide, we are facing a situation where the concept of traumatic memory, if it has any use at all, is about as applicable as one can expect. This is why I noted at the outset that genocide is less amenable to willed amnesia than other events. What one actually sees, for example, in the cases of Bosnia or Rwanda mentioned above, is a form of repression, rather than a ‘healthy forgetting’ in the manner of Nietzsche. And what is repressed sooner or later returns, as we currently see with the memory of the post-Civil War ‘repression’ – a somewhat coy term for what some historians actually consider a genocidal onslaught – of the Nationalists’ enemies in Spain.50 The current tension in Bosnia and the desperate situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where estimates are that more than 5 million people have died in the post-1994 regional war, indicate that the politics of post-genocidal memories are matters of life and death.

Commemoration and memory conflicts In February 2008, Kevin Rudd, the new Australian Prime Minister, made a decisive break with the politics of John Howard’s conservative administration by making a public apology to the country’s Indigenous people for the suffering endured by the ‘stolen children’ and their families. This policy, which began in the early twentieth century and lasted until the 1960s, removed ‘half-caste’ children from Aboriginal communities, bringing them up in separated institutions with the explicit aim of assimilating Aborigines to ‘white’ culture. This was a change from the early twentieth-century approach of biological absorption, or ‘breeding out the black’, which aimed to prevent white Australia from being threatened – so the fear went – by ‘a large black population which may drive out the white’.51 But whilst the official programme of biological absorption came to an end around 1940, the policy of child removal continued for several decades, devastating Aboriginal communities and leading Sir Ronald Wilson to proclaim in his 1997 Bringing Them Home report that the policy constituted genocide under article IIe of the UNGC. Whether or not this was an appropriate designation is in this context not the point (Rudd, incidentally, denies that it was genocide), so much as the fact that the subsequent furore revealed the way in which controversy about genocidal origins haunts ‘national memory’ generations after the cessation of frontier conflict.

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The perpetration of genocide requires the mobilisation of memory, as does its punishment, though in the latter case there is a prima facie argument that ‘memory mobilises itself’. Post-genocidal conflicts over memory, especially national memory, reveal another aspect of the question: memory can intervene in national politics in unexpected ways and present challenges to long-held and cherished national narratives. This is particularly true of settler societies and is best illustrated by the Australian case. With the emergence of what its opponents pejoratively called ‘black armband history’, debates over Australian history overshadowed contemporary political debates concerning how best to deal with troubled Aboriginal communities. Conservative historians, most notably Keith Windschuttle, charged ‘politically correct’ historians not only with failing to appreciate the true nature of frontier conflict, in which mutual incomprehension rather than genocidal intent was at work, but also with deliberately exaggerating the numbers of Aborigines killed in massacres.52 Even official efforts at reconciliation were ‘framed in nation-building language which implicitly refused to accommodate indigenous aspirations of difference’.53 The ‘history wars’ that followed the publication of Windschuttle’s revisionist book have been described as an ‘Australian Historikerstreit’, a designation that is revealing, since the West German debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust that took place in the 1980s broke no new historical ground but was fundamental to the self-image of the Federal Republic. So in Australia, debates about how best to describe the past go to the heart of national narratives. The challenge to the Australian story of mates pulling together to create the ‘lucky country’ is one that did not sit well with the cultural politics of the Howard government, which was not open to the fact that historians of early Australia were not arguing that the colonisation of Australia was the same as the Holocaust, only that the similarities of the perpetrators’ discourses of race and security in both cases ought to offer food for thought, particularly where current-day policies towards Aborigines are concerned.54 But whilst debate rages in Australia – unlike in Germany – as to whether the country should be understood as a ‘post-genocidal society’, the fact that the colonisation process was ‘objectively lethal’ for the Aborigines continues to be overlooked.55 Irrespective of the statistics and other facts being debated by historians (and here the comparison with the Historikerstreit is unconvincing, for in West Germany no historians questioned whether genocide had occurred), the bigger point is that Australian collective memory was being deconstructed and reconstructed anew or, for conservative historians, being undermined by subversives bent on ridiculing national heritage. Even long after genocide has taken place, memory wars can erupt when group narratives are felt to be under threat. The history of nation-building is inseparable from the ‘memories’ that nations create, in the shape of the narratives or monuments they construct. Indeed, collective memory does

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not emerge after the process has come to an end but is an essential part of the process whereby a group constitutes itself as a group; as Jens Bartelson notes, ‘the coincidence of state and nation that we normally take to be the very culmination of a successful process of state formation had virtually been remembered into existence’.56 The motives of memory, as James Young reminds us, are never pure.57 It is hardly surprising, then, that especially in societies founded on colonial settlement, challenges to positive national narratives are considered problematic. In Australia, whilst the official discourse has changed since the Rudd administration took office, historians such as Tony Barta fear that the ‘public conversation’ will remain dominated by a ‘decent disposal’ of the difficult questions. Nevertheless, by comparison with the United States, where the genocide question is still almost wholly ignored, even by prominent scholars of genocide, or Israel, where the memory of the Holocaust continues to poison relations with the Palestinians with devastating consequences, at least in Australia these memory conflicts are being articulated in the public sphere.58 ‘Memory wars’ have characterised the whole world since the end of the Cold War, from Romania to Argentina, South Africa to France. In post-genocidal societies, as we see in Bosnia or the DRC, such conflicts are potentially destabilising and certainly have the power not only to inspire a cosmopolitan culture of human rights but also new outbursts of resentment and revanchism. The only sure conclusion is that memory cannot be ignored and that engagement with the issues – if not resolution of them – remains essential.

Conclusion In a key article on the historical study of memory, Alon Confino asks: ‘if the study of memory focuses creatively on how people construct a past through a process of appropriation and contestation, is the real problem not, perhaps, that people construct the past by using the term “memory” at all?’59 There is, in other words, a danger of studying a phenomenon (‘memory’) by taking it as its own explanation. This problem, however, is not merely a methodological one of memory studies but a reflection of the complex place that ‘memory’ holds in contemporary societies. For memory is not simply synonymous with the way in which the past is represented in the present; it is itself constitutive of the present. Memory and identity go hand in hand. Thus, irrespective of methodological problems, issues connected with memory will continue to resonate. Exclusivist, exclusionary memories remain powerful in many contexts; the generation of genocidal ideologies through the manipulation of memory is as much a possibility as it ever was. Indeed, memory wars by no means guarantee a peaceful resolution or mutually agreeable arbitration between competing versions of the past. As Peter Fritzsche notes, the reason that national memories ‘remain so resonant’

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is ‘not because they are more true, but because the narratives of collective guilt and collective victimisation that they generate have the effect of recognising and commemorating individual suffering in socially meaningful, if tendentious, ways’.60 ‘Memory studies’ is not an academic game but an investigation into a phenomenon that can be as dangerous as playing with fire. For this reason, memory cannot be avoided or swept aside. Despite the risks of perpetuating old divisions or reopening unhealed wounds, grappling with memory, especially after traumatic events like genocide, remains essential in order to remind the victims that they are not the worthless or less than human beings that their tormentors have portrayed them as. For nothing is more human, and thus more geared towards the generation of meaning where meaning is otherwise absent (or at least to ‘keeping watch over absent meaning’61 ), than the broad spectrum of practices that come under the heading of ‘memory’.

11 Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: The Future of Memory after the Age of Commemoration

History can expand, complete, correct, even refute the testimony of memory regarding the past; it cannot abolish it. Paul Ricoeur1 The ‘Mnemosyne Institute’ of my title refers to a story by Saul Bellow, ‘The Bellarosa Connection’.2 The narrator, whose name we do not find out, is the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia, and after 40 years of successfully training ‘executives, politicians, and members of the defense establishment’ in what would be known to the Greeks as mnemotechnia or the Romans as ars memoriae, he retires, wishing to ‘forget about remembering’. This aspiration, as he immediately acknowledges, is ‘an Alicein-Wonderland proposition’ (35) – as Paul Ricoeur notes, in order to succeed, forgetting would have to outsmart its own vigilance and, as it were, forget itself.3 And whilst he will no longer train professionals in the use of their faculties, he will instead recall his own life. After all, his ‘main investment was in memory’ (37) and he could not simply forget it. He already knew that he was, like Funes, burdened with ‘so much useless information’ (52). On his retirement, he tries, after an unexpected telephone enquiry, to track down old friends, the Fonsteins, with whom he has not been in contact for 30 years, only to discover that they are dead. In a conversation with a young man claiming to be a house-sitting friend of the Fonstein’s son Gilbert, our narrator is stung by the youth’s snide comments about his ‘timing’ being ‘off’ (88). The story ends with the narrator’s angry reflections that ‘modern mental structures’ such as those exhibited by this boy cannot be dismantled and that such people can never understand ‘the roots of memory in feeling’ (89). What is striking about this story – among other things that are less directly relevant here, such as the relation of memory to Jewish history – is that the narrator seems to lack an awareness, despite his distrust of modern ways, that his Mnemosyne Institute is itself a typically modern phenomenon. Perhaps 157

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its existence confirms Pierra Nora’s claim from the introduction to Les lieux de mémoire of 1984 that ‘we’ are so obsessed by memory and the need to recall because we no longer ‘live in memory’.4 Or, less nostalgically, it could prove Andreas Huyssen’s point that the turn to memory is a reflection of our ever-accelerating present and our loss of historical consciousness.5 Memory in this reading not only anchors us in a supposedly stable past, granting us a feeling of continuity, but also becomes one of the tools of modern, technocratic, managerial efficiency, as in the training of professional personnel. Thus, the Mnemosyne Institute, whilst it connects its students to tradition, is also a symptom of modernity, it is an icon of an age overburdened with memory and torn between a duty to remember the past, particularly its more terrible aspects, and a desire to break with tradition and celebrate the onward march of (technological) progress. An age, ours, which simultaneously does not know what to remember and what to forget, or how, and, as a consequence, is obsessed with commemoration. It is no surprise that between the publication of the first volume of Les lieux de mémoire and the third in 1992, Nora’s argument changed so that he now argued that his book had itself become emblematic of the shift towards an attempt to recover ‘national memory’, and thus provided further evidence of the fact that Western societies now live in an ‘age of commemoration’. This argument suggests that the age of obsessive commemoration in which we live is, in both Ricoeur’s and Tzvetan Todorov’s words, an ‘abuse of memory’. It is, in other words, a kind of phoney memory, one not ‘rooted in feeling’. The same, by implication, applies to the surging phenomenon of ‘memory studies’ that has been the scholarly equivalent of and contribution to this general cultural trend. Although the scholarly study of memory is not synonymous either with the contemporary obsession with commemoration or with the heritage industry and its ‘history spin’, nevertheless I will here run them together to some extent in the interest of provoking discussion. In this chapter, I wish to ask: What will be the future of memory and ‘memory studies’ after the age of commemoration? ∗ We have over the last few years become familiar with the wisdom of former US President George W. Bush. As Governor of Texas he reportedly once said that ‘The future will be brighter tomorrow’ and on another occasion that ‘I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.’ He was of course indicating to those in the know his careful reading of Derrida, whose deconstruction led David Farrell Krell to proclaim, perhaps in a different context from Bush’s (who does not, one may surmise, get the double meaning), that ‘the future will have been perfect’.6 In a sense, we have here a clear statement of the problem facing us – memory has become too bright, too perfect. No wonder that Charles Maier argued already in 1993 that ‘As a historian I want a decent public awareness of the

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past and careful reasoning about it. As a historian I want past suffering to be acknowledged and repaired so far as possible by precluding reversions to violence and repression. But I do not crave a wallowing in bathetic memory.’ He ended his talk with the ‘hope that the future of memory is not bright’.7 Although in a more recent talk, he distinguished between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ memory, with reference to the memories of Nazism and Stalinism, respectively, in a fairly uncritical way suggesting that he has come to terms with the vocabulary of ‘memory’,8 Maier’s earlier argument – which reminds us that Derrida’s ‘perfect’ means both faultless and already given to the past – still should give us pause for thought. In academia it will be no surprise to hear (again) that we have become obsessed by memory. In Holocaust studies, where this phenomenon has perhaps been most fully developed – though one should state explicitly that ‘memory studies’ is by no means a sub-branch of Holocaust studies or of the study of catastrophe in general – it is easy to find oneself ‘at the edge of memory’ (James Young), ‘preserving memory’ (Edward Linenthal) or ‘committed to memory’ (Oren Baruch Stier), examining the ‘vectors of memory’ (Nancy Wood) or ‘remembering to forget’ (Barbie Zelizer). One can all too easily find oneself a ‘bondage to the dead’ (Michael Steinlauf) or wandering through ‘a ruined garden’ (Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin). I am guilty of this myself.9 No better example of the problem that Nora, Todorov and Ricoeur, among many others (including Andreas Huyssen, Geoffrey Hartman, Nancy Wood, Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver, Avishai Margalit, Eviatar Zerubavel and Jan Assmann), have identified can be found than the various obsessive commemorations that have recently punctuated the ever-fuller commemorative calendar, which began around the time of the end of the Cold War with the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 and the now seemingly more insignificant celebration in East Germany of Berlin’s 750th birthday in 1987. We might mention, most recently, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain and across the European Union (EU), the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar in 2005 (note the thoroughly unappealing nature of the ‘celebrations’, whose fireworks display, according to one excited BBC reporter, were ‘even bigger than at Olympic Games in Athens’10 ) and the 60th anniversary of VE day, among many others we could easily add. We see here the truth of Paul Connerton’s point that social memory is constructed through performative commemorative ceremonies, and thus we need always to ask questions relating to control, power and audience with respect to such ceremonies.11 However, this memory obsession is of recent vintage and will not last forever. As late as 1990, Vera Schwarcz could complain that ‘Post-Cartesian Western thought’ has a ‘marked preference for amnesia, purging itself repeatedly of what Confucius called “love for the ancients” in the name of scientific rationality and cultural enlightenment’, and she claimed, in a way

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that would be unthinkable just a few years later, that ‘we moderns face the world with a much impoverished vocabulary for remembering – so diminished, in fact, that the most varied use of memory words is now found not in the realm of Mnemosyne’s daughter, history, but in computer science. We are in danger of abdicating memorial powers to machines of our own creation.’12 (It should, however, be noted that even at the time Schwarcz was writing, other commentators were already talking of a ‘memory movement’ that might be setting the world ‘on the track of peace and survival’.13 ) No wonder then that there are critiques and that their number is mounting. First, there are attacks on ‘memory studies’ in general. Among these Norman Finkelstein’s polemic against the so-called ‘Holocaust industry’ is probably the best known: ‘Currently all the rage in the ivory tower, “memory” is surely the most impoverished concept to come down the academic pike in a long time’.14 Indeed, Finkelstein’s ‘Holocaust industry’ could be seen as a subset of a wider ‘memory industry’ (Klein’s term). Others have questioned the very use of the term ‘collective memory’, suggesting that it is nothing more than a fashionable term for ‘myth’.15 A wide consensus seems to exist that ‘memory studies’ is academically sexy but politically quiescent. Even Dominick LaCapra, hardly an enemy of ‘memory discourse’, has spoken of a ‘fixation’ on memory.16 Most recently, Tony Judt has articulated the emerging consensus among historians that reconfirms Nietzsche’s claims from the second ‘untimely meditation’: arguing that post-1989 Europe ‘has been constructed [ . . . ] upon a compensatory surplus of memory’ that cannot possibly endure, Judt suggests that ‘Some measure of neglect and even forgetting are the necessary condition for civic health.’17 Second, there are careful critiques of the methodology and underlying, often unspoken, assumptions of ‘memory studies’. It is to these that I wish to turn here. Kerwin Lee Klein presents a fierce, compelling critique of the premises of ‘memory studies’ that links its rise to the emergence of identity politics and a postmodern sensibility that distrusts the determinism of totalising historical narratives – memory as ‘re-enchantment’, as ‘projecting immediacy’; as ‘projecting “psychoneurotic jargon” onto the memory of various national or (more often) ethnoracial groups’; as a quest for the authentic in an age that distrusts history; as nostalgic, sacralising, negative theology; as clinical, therapeutic.18 The danger, according to Klein, is that the approach that he calls ‘structural memory’ – examining the creation of collective memory through ‘practices or material artifacts’ (135) – elevates memory ‘to the status of a historical agent, and we enter a new age in which archives remember and statues forget’ (136). This ‘memory as re-enchantment’ (136) argument which sees the rise of memory discourse as tied intimately to identity politics in the United States in the 1960s is perhaps the most powerful challenge to scholars of collective memory. Klein’s arguments are to some extent replicated in another fine article, this one by Wulf Kansteiner. Kansteiner argues that collective memory is a


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meaningful term but that ‘memory studies’ thus far has not done enough to explain why. The scholarship, in his opinion, needs to delineate more clearly the distinctions between individual and collective memory; needs to think more about reception than about representation; and would benefit from adopting some of the vocabulary and methodology of media studies, with the result that collective memory would be understood as the result of the interaction of three ‘types of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artefacts according to their own interests’.19 Like Klein, Kansteiner argues that ‘memory is valorised where identity is problematised’, thus connecting ‘memory studies’ to identity politics, and he claims that ‘Memory studies presuppose a rarely acknowledged but not particularly surprising desire for cultural homogeneity, consistency, and predictability.’20 ‘Memory studies’, though not in this reading as contemptible as in Klein’s, certainly needs to set its methodological house in order. Similar points have recently been made by Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver in their introduction to The Memory of Catastrophe: ‘It is the attribution of qualities of spiritual or cultural transcendence to “memory” which most effectively limits the capacity of the critical method to gain purchase upon its historical operations.’21 However, these critiques can be rather exaggerated, as in this example: The utility, and the potentially unintended political consequences, of much of the recent literature concerning the ‘contemporary fascination’ (Ram) with collective memory needs to be challenged. ‘Memory’, it appears, has today assumed the role of a meta-theoretical trope and also, perhaps, a sentimental yearning; as the idea of an Archimedean Truth has slowly and painfully withered under the assault of various anti-foundational epistemologies, memory seems to have claimed Truth’s valorised position as a site of authenticity, as a point of anchorage – albeit an unsteady one – in a turbulent world stripped much of its previous meaning.22 This surely sets up memory as far more significant than most of those who study it presume it to be.23 Not every academic who works on ‘memory’ is secretly in league with Roy Strong, who in 1978 in a notable adumbration of the cultural politics of Thatcherism wrote that: It is in times of danger, either from without or from within, that we become deeply conscious of our heritage . . . within this world there mingle varied and passionate streams of ancient pride and patriotism, of a heroism in times past, of a nostalgia too for what we think of as a happier

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world which we have lost. In the 1940s we felt all this deeply because of the danger from without. In the 1970s we sense it because of the dangers from within. We are all aware of problems and troubles, of changes within the structure of society, of the dissolution of old values and standards. For the lucky few this may be exhilarating, even exciting, but for the majority it is confusing, threatening, and dispiriting. The heritage represents some form of security, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged. Our environmental heritage . . . is therefore a deeply satisfying and unifying element within our society.24 The same is true of the literature on trauma. ‘Trauma studies’ has become something of an interdisciplinary discipline in its own right, largely thanks to the achievements of Cathy Caruth. But once again, as with ‘memory studies’, we hear talk of the ‘passing of a genre’. Again, Kansteiner is perhaps the main critic here – his essay in Rethinking History is trenchant and combative, and Dominick LaCapra has also contributed to the attack in a chapter of his book, History in Transit (2004). But others have also argued, as does Ido de Haan, that the notion of ‘trauma’ is inapplicable to societies since it not only inappropriately medicalises them but, more troubling, flattens out widely different experiences under a standard psychological explanation.25 The pieces that stand out as a challenge to the ‘discipline’ of ‘trauma studies’ are Kansteiner’s.26 It should be noted, however, that by contrast Ricoeur argues quite unequivocally that ‘We can speak not only in an analogical sense but in terms of a direct analysis of collective traumatisms, of wounds to collective memory.’ He gives the example of mourning behaviours, especially the ‘great funeral celebrations around which an entire people is assembled’ to back up his claim.27 There is not enough space here to decide whether he is right, but it is certainly a powerful response to the ‘commonsense’ assertion that groups cannot have memory and thus cannot be traumatised as a group. Many of these points relate to scholarly procedures and methods. But academic work does not take place in a vacuum, and this blooming of ‘memory studies’ is a faithful replication of developments in wider society. These have been summed up well, if polemically, by the Romanian-Jewish author Norman Manea, a survivor of the horrors of the Romanian Holocaust in Transnistria who now lives in the United States. In his autobiography, The Hooligan’s Return, which movingly recounts the circumstances of his exile to the United States and his return trips to Romania since the ousting of Ceau¸sescu, Manea offers some provocative thoughts: ‘Public commemorations have transformed horrors into clichés, which have been worked over until they have become petrified, thus fulfilling their function, followed, of course, by fatigue and indifference.’28 Later he adds, with even greater invective:


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The trivialization of suffering . . . mankind’s endless enterprise. Only when it becomes a cliché does tragedy find a home in the collective memory. Memory must keep watch so that the horror is not repeated, we have been told over and over. We must hold on to identity, shared memory, race, ethnicity, religion, ideology. Having finally landed on the planet of pragmatism, you thought you might escape your past and your identity and become just a simple entity, as Gertrude Stein, the American in Paris, dreamed – only to find that Thursday’s atrocities have become grist for the mottoes on Friday’s T-shirts, an instantly marketable product for the collective memory.29 The duty to remember and the need to commemorate are here seen as empty, complacent rituals that serve only to pacify the past, making it safe for the present to ignore. Certainly, scholars of collective memory have long known that it is as important to take cognisance of what is forgotten or ‘overlooked’ as of what is remembered when studying the changing nature of memory. Manea’s criticisms, however, remind us that this is not an antiquarian enterprise or a fruitless postmodern game, as Finkelstein would have us believe, but that the study of memory may itself contribute to the creation of an ‘age of commemoration’ in which all memories other than the celebratory and efficacious are smothered or occulted. All of these critiques are timely and pertinent and should give us pause for thought about the oft-exhibited tendency to use the vocabulary of ‘memory studies’ in a rather thoughtless and self-explanatory way. But none of this should prevent us from either seeing the gains made by ‘memory studies’ (more than a ‘conservative’ or reactionary replacement for studying power or class) or from recognising the fact that memory is the ‘bedrock of history’, a claim to which I will return later. In what remains, I want to argue that talking of ‘collective memory’ remains valid and to suggest that despite many of the cultural critics’ objections to the current memory craze there is life for memory beyond the Mnemosyne Institute. Academia, like the wider world, is subject to the pressures of fashion, and the attack on ‘memory studies’ is in that respect hardly surprising. But I do not want to put forward a ‘defence’ akin to those who defend history from the ‘irresponsible claims of postmodernists’. Rather, I will proceed on the basis that the attacks are to some extent justified and will then propose why talking about memory remains not only valid but also a productive way of furthering scholarly research agendas. The critics, like Kansteiner and Klein, justifiably object to the solipsism of ‘confessional’ literature (the harder and more brutal the childhood the better) or autobiographies of underwhelming celebrities, which cry out for an old-school ‘culture industry’ critique (as in Andrew O’Hagan’s withering critique30 ). The critics object too, quite understandably, to the culturally homogenising and often nationalistic flavour of the increasing numbers of commemorative ceremonies that have become so visible a part of European

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life as well as to hackneyed and honeyed narratives of all genres that peddle nostalgic visions of authenticity, what LaCapra wonderfully calls ‘junk-Proustian Schwärmerei’.31 Nevertheless, this is not the sum of ‘memory studies’, and whilst it is possible for us to contribute – whether wittingly or not – to these cultural trends, it is important that we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Many of these critical positions (especially that of Gedi and Elam) essentialise ‘memory’ and thus do not satisfactorily explain what it is that scholars of memory have been doing in recent years. As Jonathan M. Hess writes of Pierre Nora, the claim (whether made positively, as by Nora, or critically, as by Klein and Kansteiner) that ‘memory’ is ‘authentic’ in contrast to sterile, homogeneous ‘history’ is ‘itself a product of a distinctly modern discourse, an elegiac view of the premodern world that marks Nora as the Romantic par excellence’. The result is that: Nora ignores the extent to which the nostalgic vision of the past that organises his discourse has its origins in precisely that modern world he seeks to overcome. In this way, he presents a classic modernist master narrative that essentialises collective memory, one that equates memory with authenticity, continuity, and presence and history with discontinuity, mediation, and absence. . . . In much contemporary discourse [by contrast], collective memory and history figure as interrelated and at times interdependent modes of constructing a community’s relation to its past, the difference between them being less a question of rigid opposition than one of differing sets of formal and disciplinary conventions.32 Thus, many of the critics of ‘memory studies’, whilst correctly identifying some of the less productive uses to which such study may be put, have as yet inadequately provided a counter-argument to Maurice Halbwachs, who holds the distinction of pointing out the obvious truth of the existence of collective memory. Prior to Halbwachs, memory had been held to be something possessed by individuals, and psychologists still find it difficult to jump from the individual to the collective.33 But as Ricoeur notes, psychologists, as scholars of individuals, did not at the time (and often still don’t) grasp the Durkheimian manoeuvre (‘methodological holism’) of taking individual memory to be the problematic case (‘psychologism’) and collective memory as ontologically given.34 In more up-to-date terms, they do not consider what Eviatar Zerubavel calls ‘sociomnemonic structures’. No one exists in a vacuum, and thus, as Zerubavel notes, ‘Being social presupposes the ability to experience things that happened to the groups to which we belong long before we even joined them as if they were part of our personal past. . . . Indeed, language allows memories to actually pass from one person to another even when there is no direct contact between them.’35 This is not the same as saying that groups have ‘memories’ in the neurological sense, or that ‘memories’ are mysteriously passed on by osmosis,


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nor to subscribe to the view (implied in the pejorative undertones that accompany the term ‘methodological holism’) that individuals and individualism are unimportant. But it is saying something stronger than that collective memory is just a fashionable term for mythic narratives or ideologically driven history. As Kansteiner allows, ‘although collective memories have no organic basis and do not exist in any literal sense, and though they involve individual agency, the term “collective memory” is not simply a metaphorical expression. Collective memories originate from shared communications about the meaning of the past that are anchored in the life-worlds of individuals who partake in the communal life of the respective collective.’36 Thus, collective memories are selective and are, almost invariably, ideologically driven versions of history (but then, what version of history is not?). But it would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater simply to say that collective memory is indistinguishable from myth and therefore not worth studying. Doing so would result in missing an opportunity to discover how societies operate, in particular how narratives and stories about the past structure societies in the present. Barbie Zelizer notes that collective memories ‘allow for the fabrication, rearrangement, elaboration, and omission of details about the past, often pushing aside accuracy and authenticity so as to accommodate broader issues of identity formation, power, and authority, and political affiliation’. So far, so familiar a complaint. She suggests, though, that these are precisely the reasons why collective memory is worth studying: ‘Memories in this view become not only the simple act of recall but social, cultural, and political action at its broadest level.’37 The scholarly study of ‘collective memory’ may be a branch of critical historiography, but memory itself is something different, if inseparable from, history. Some (necessarily cursory) examples would be useful at this point in order to illustrate why ‘collective memory’ is not simply synonymous with ‘myth’ or with critical history, and thus why it remains an important source of understanding of the world around us. 1) Kendrick Oliver shows what he calls the process of ‘detoxification’ of Vietnam memory in the United States – his study of responses to the My Lai massacre is a powerfully evocative example of the writing out of uncomfortable facts and the creation of more palatable narratives.38 It also shows that such dominant narratives come into being and prosper in spite of the fact that more reliable accounts of the past exist, and thus his work testifies to the power of what Kansteiner calls ‘memory makers’, especially the legal system, the media, government and experts, such as psychologists and other professionals. 2) Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, in their discussion of memory and power relations, have anticipated many of Klein’s arguments about representations and make a strong case for moving ‘memory studies’ towards

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investigating social relations, institutions and the state. The book that they have edited on German memory illustrates the possibility of orienting ‘memory studies’ towards analysing memory ‘as embedded in social networks’.39 This is a way of understanding memory that does not see it only as embedded in sites such as memorials; rather, Confino and Fritzsche point up the real weakness of Finkelstein’s claim, by showing how collective memories are created and passed on to some extent by design but also unconsciously, by virtue of, and in the process helping to define, existing social structures and networks. 3) The political implications of critical ‘memory studies’ are clearly shown in studies of the absence of Hiroshima from American collective memory (as in the work of Richard Minear) or the absence of any memory at all of colonial atrocity committed by the British, in Kenya and elsewhere (as in the work of Caroline Elkins and David Anderson).40 That is to say, it may in these instances not be the case that what is remembered is false – in the case of the United States, the significance of Nazi genocide – but just that a whole area of past experience that is difficult to deal with gets ‘forgotten’. This is a process that occurs as much by unconscious mechanisms that permeate a society as by design. 4) Barbie Zelizer has shown the way in which visual artefacts can help provide a mediating factor between individual and collective memory, thus illustrating the process of collective memory formation. Whilst this is, contra Confino and Fritzsche, to focus on representations, it is a good example of how close study can explain how collective memory is constructed, especially as it is influenced by the mass media.41 But it is also a reminder, as Geoffrey Hartman notes, that what is viable in the notion of collective memory ‘tends to be artistic rather than nationalistic’.42 5) And perhaps most importantly, we should note the way in which collective memory has helped reveal how ruling elites use collective memory as a tool to perpetuate their dominance, a fact that has been especially apparent in research on historically excluded groups, such as African Americans, American Indians, Romanies or Australian Aborigines. The Polish Institute of National Memory (IPN) has set out finally to question the long-held assumptions of nationalist narratives about Poland during World War II; the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification is doing something similar in revealing the suffering recently experienced by that country’s Maya population; and in Spain the attempts by grassroots organisations literally to dig up the memories of the Civil War and shatter the post-Franco silence all owe a great deal to this desire to right past wrongs and restore dignity and names to victims of the recent past, as does another such recent example – Adam Hochschild’s outrage at the official narrative presented in the ‘Memory of Congo’ exhibition at Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, which, he claims, gives insufficient space to the atrocities that characterised Belgian colonial rule.43 All


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of these approaches reveal a varied and fruitful research landscape, not all of which can be subsumed under the rhetoric of ‘re-enchantment’ or ‘cultural homogenisation’. And quite apart from these examples, which are mostly drawn from historians, the work of literary theorists and philosophers such as Geoffrey Hartman, Marianne Hirsch, Michael Rothberg, Avishai Margalit and Marc Augé reminds us that the study of collective memory is a very broad discipline and one that cannot be summed up by single-minded critiques that simply deny the term any validity.44 We can thus assert the continued usefulness and insightfulness of ‘memory studies’. But writing about collective memory is a currently fashionable scholarly procedure that chimes in with the wider cultural preoccupation with memory and commemoration. Long after it has become unfashionable, or just another aspect of historiography (in the way that gender history or microhistory have come to be accepted by the historical profession), still memory will have another relationship to history that goes deeper than being simply something that historians can choose to study. ∗ Taking into account these critiques of ‘memory studies’, how best to proceed? Kansteiner pointed out in his 2002 articles that ‘Memory’s relation to history remains one of the interesting theoretical challenges in the field.’45 Hence, I will try and respond to his and Klein’s attack on ‘memory studies’ by examining precisely this relationship between memory and history and, following Ricoeur, by asserting that there is a necessary connection between them that will continue to exist long after our current commemoration obsession has passed. This appeal to the link between memory and history is synonymous neither with Nora’s ‘romantically folkloric’ eulogy to memory as the basis of authenticity nor with Patrick Hutton’s appeal to ‘living memory’ as the basis of history, an appeal which hypostatises tradition and nostalgically invalidates critical reflection.46 Rather, it is an attempt to provide a critical understanding of the ways in which testimony, in the narrow sense, and memory in general, form the basis of history so that the two remain separate but interdependent. Let me first make a few general observations about some problems of which ‘memory studies’ needs to be aware and from which research agendas might emerge: 1) There is an apparent paradox of memory being future-oriented – we are familiar with the injunction to remember, which implies memory in the future – and simultaneously a danger of commemoration-obsession (Nora, Ricoeur) or of taking memory only as an object of history rather than regarding it as its ‘womb’ or ‘bedrock’.47

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2) It is important to bear in mind that memory is ‘a process, not a material object or outcome’.48 This is something that has thus far received relatively little attention from scholars, not least because writing about the ways in which memory is embedded in social relations is harder to do than writing about it as anchored in memory sites. Kansteiner is therefore right to say that we need more emphasis on the collective memory processes, along the lines of the essays in Confino’s and Fritzsche’s The Work of Memory or of the 2005 special issue of History & Memory edited by Alon Confino devoted to ‘Histories and Memories of Twentieth-Century Germany’. As Confino argues, ‘the task of memory studies may profitably be to explore not simply how people remember the past after the fact but also how memory structures behaviour and thoughts’.49 3) Memory, as Michael Rothberg stresses, is ‘multidirectional’. That is to say, there sometimes takes place ‘a process in which transfers occur between events that have come to seem separate from each other’.50 He gives the examples of the Holocaust and decolonisation, but there are others, such as slavery, the use of the atom bomb and genocide. ‘Memory studies’ might take into account the fact that often there is a tense dialectic between the memory of the Holocaust, which has been a spur to scholarly work on other genocides and to a widespread interest in the public sphere in that event, and the possibility that it is precisely the focus on the Holocaust that somehow prevents people from investigating or taking equally seriously cases which do not appear to be exactly like it. As Barbie Zelizer puts it, ‘It may be that we have learned to use our Holocaust memories so as to neglect our response to the atrocities of here and now.’51 Beyond these initial suggestions, there is also the more general consideration, as represented by Ricoeur, that memory is the ‘bedrock of history’ or the ‘womb of history’. What does he mean by this claim? First, it must be noted that Ricoeur does not mean to suggest that he enjoys the current fascination with memory, indeed he explicitly states at the start of his last book that he is ‘troubled by the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory – and forgetting’.52 He warns especially that ‘a certain demand raised by impassioned memories, wounded memories, against the vaster and more critical aim of history, lends a threatening tone to the proclamation of the duty of memory, which finds its most blatant expression in the exhortation to commemorate now and always’.53 With respect to the distinction between memory and history, Ricoeur notes that archival research constitutes a ‘victory over the arbitrary’.54 Historical knowledge thus has certain distinct advantages over collective memory: ‘the articulation between events, structures, and conjunctures; the multiplication of the scales of duration extended to the scales of norms and evaluations; the distribution of the relevant objects of history on multiple planes – economic,


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political, social, cultural, religious and so on’.55 Thus, what Ricoeur means by memory being the ‘bedrock of history’ is that in thinking about our ability to discuss the past at all, ‘we have no other resource, concerning our reference to the past, except memory itself. . . . we have nothing better than memory to signify something has taken place, has occurred, has happened before we declare that we remember it.’56 In other words, historiography is doing something different from memory, something important, valid and critical, but it cannot so easily be divorced from memory as Klein and Kansteiner – or Nora and Hutton – might wish. Collective memory, writes Ricoeur, ‘constitutes the soil in which historiography is rooted’; memory ‘remains the guardian of the entire problem of the representative relation of the present to the past’.57 And by ‘memory’ here Ricoeur primarily means testimony; as he writes, ‘whatever may be our lack of confidence in principle in such testimony, we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past, which someone attests having witnessed in person, and that the principal, and at times our only recourse, when we lack other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among testimonies’.58 This is not to say that Ricoeur’s claims cannot be questioned. It is worth asking: does Ricoeur take into account the fact that not everyone is freely able to give testimony or that power relations in most societies mean that some testimonies will be privileged over others, or even that some will not be heard at all? Bruce Baker cites the example of a black man, Richard Puckett, falsely accused of raping a white woman in South Carolina and lynched in 1913. Until the post-Civil Rights era, the man’s family’s testimony could not be heard.59 Furthermore, are Ricoeur’s findings suitable for dealing with the excess of the Holocaust? In an earlier study, Ricoeur made the argument (not unrelated to his Protestantism) that forgiveness understood as a kind of forgetting was beneficial: ‘on the political as well as on the private level, forgetfulness of revenge becomes a sign of grace. It is good for the health of our societies, so for life itself, that one should prescribe crimes which cannot be considered genocide or crimes against humanity.’ This sounds appealing, but Ricoeur does not consider how one should apply this dictum to crimes that are genocide.60 A similar problem emerges in Memory, History, Forgetting, if only because one sometimes feels that Ricoeur’s vocabulary does not respond adequately to the ravages of the twentieth century. How appropriate is Ricoeur’s use of organic metaphors (memory as the ‘womb of history’) in dealing with events – like genocide – that grow out of organicist–authenticist thinking? Does Ricoeur also, like Hutton, in the end present a view of memory’s link to history that implies a belief in ‘living memories’ as the site of authenticity? What is a ‘happy and peaceful memory’ at which Ricoeur says his book aims?61 Memory, as we know from Benjamin, can disrupt history, can be a transformative force. In Susan Handelman’s terms, it ‘is an act of compression

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which releases an otherwise unavailable meaning’.62 It generates action in a way that historiography cannot, for it flattens out the past, and this is why Benjamin tried to write ‘a different kind of history, but one which opposed the regressive and reactionary nature of “myth” ’.63 Similarly, is Ricoeur’s argument convincing that when historians write historically about memory, taking collective memory as their subject matter, this somehow confuses the relation between history and memory or constitutes an attempt ‘to abolish the status of the womb of history commonly attributed to memory’?64 And finally, is Ricoeur’s argument about the status of testimony really that convincing, in the light of the numerous other sources that we have at our disposal – whether historians or not – to prove the existence of the past? Has not this confidence in testimony been both shattered and paradoxically reinforced by the terrible events of the twentieth century? Those who have written theoretically on testimony (inter alia Geoffrey Hartman, Lawrence Langer, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub) might find Ricoeur’s claims not only persuasive – given the importance they accord testimony – but also curiously redemptive in the light of the ‘crisis of witnessing’ that has been diagnosed as the post-Holocaust condition. Irrespective of these challenges of ‘unhappy memory’ to Ricoeur’s argument and to history, I will end by tentatively suggesting that Ricoeur’s claim that memory constitutes the ‘bedrock of history’ remains true, and not just because the root of the word ‘history’ comes from the Greek for ‘eyewitness’.65 What meanings memory has for history are of course hotly debated, but that memory does have meaning for historical consciousness is, in Lucian Hölscher’s words, ‘unbestritten’ (undisputed).66 Although it is somewhat mawkish in its quasi-religiosity, Ricoeur’s comments on the relationship between memory and history that conclude his final magnum opus are also quite moving: The historical operation in its entirety can then be considered an act of sepulchre. Not a place, a cemetery, a simple depository of bones, but an act of repeated entombment. This scriptural sepulchre extends the work of memory and the work of mourning on the plane of history.67 One way of making this conclusion more palatable might be to draw a distinction between memory and commemoration. ‘Remembering’, Ricoeur argues, ‘quickly veers off into commemoration, with its obsession of a finite, completed history’.68 At the end of the era of commemoration, ‘sociomnemonic structures’ will remain key to the construction of individual and group identities – indeed it is impossible to conceive of society without such collective memories – and memory (contra Klein and Kansteiner?) will still remain the ‘bedrock of history’. It may well be that, after the end of the age of commemoration, we will still live in age in which the disjunction between Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘horizon of expectation’ and ‘space of experience’ is


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the ‘fundamental condition of societal relationships’ so that ‘anticipation of the future [will] work without deferring primarily to the authority of remembrance’.69 We may still be, in other words, what Peter Fritzsche memorably calls ‘stranded in the present’. This will not mean disregard for or ‘overcoming’ of memory. ‘Memory studies’ may, in Kansteiner’s words that are worth reiterating, evince a ‘rarely acknowledged but not particularly surprising desire for cultural homogeneity, consistency, and predictability’,70 or, as Klein puts it, ‘Memory appeals to us partly because it projects an immediacy we feel has been lost from history.’71 But it can do more than this, and the more the emphasis is put on processes of change and contestations over memory construction in the context of public institutions and the state, the less likely this is. Indeed, the role of memory in an age which does not defer unthinkingly to tradition becomes even more important – it is just that the memories that become dominant will do so not because they represent tradition but through a hard-fought process of negotiation and contestation. Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute and the era of commemoration, history will still be unthinkable without memory. Mnemosyne was, we recall, the mother of the nine muses, including Clio, the muse of history. As the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute says, ‘if you have worked in memory, which is life itself, there is no retirement except in death’.72

12 Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

An acceleration of history, like the one we are living through at the present, is not just a very quick passage from yesterday to tomorrow; it is also the abrupt reappearance in the present of the day before yesterday. Régis Debray1

Introduction Seventy years since the start of World War II, revisionists across Europe have been arguing that Stalin was as much to blame for starting the war as Hitler. No historical fact, it seems, not even the one that every school pupil knows – that Hitler was responsible for the war – is any longer secure. At the same time, the British Conservative Party, the party of Churchill, has aligned itself in the European Parliament with a far-right grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR), which includes the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party, whose former spokesman, Michał Kaminski, appealing to the old canard of Judeo˙ Bolshevism (Zydokomuna), explains the murder of Jews in Jedwabne in 1941 with reference to the ‘crimes’ supposedly committed by Jews during the period of Bolshevik rule in eastern Poland. As Adam Krzeminski rightly says, World War II is still being fought,2 and, we might add, more intensively today than at any point in the last seven decades. Today the study of memory has become so all-pervasive that it is hard even to keep up with the review articles on the subject.3 Yet, as the above example shows – and there are more every day – the study of memory is no idle academic pursuit but goes to the heart of contemporary understandings of the past and thus of attitudes towards the present and future. ‘Forgetting’ is as important here as ‘remembering’; in the case of communism and Nazism, for example, some participants in recent ‘memory politics’ debates seem to have forgotten (or want to forget) that if liberal democracy ‘defeated’ communism in 1989, then that defeat was only possible because communism 172

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had defeated Nazism in World War II.4 There is certainly a tendency, in Russia and elsewhere, to whitewash Stalin’s crimes, but correcting that pernicious line need not come at the expense of the victims of fascism and Nazism. Indeed, the Russian ‘defence’ of Stalin indicates that scholars who insist on the long-term and rather ironic resonance of communist structures of thought on post-communist Russian nationalism are right, for ‘a decade of post-Communist history in Eastern Europe suggests that Communist regimes did successfully indoctrinate several generations of their citizens with respect to certain key events – most notably, World War II and the Holocaust’.5 In this chapter, I do not present a methodological explication of ‘memory studies’; rather, I take a broad definition of ‘collective memory’, seeing it, with Alon Confino, as ‘a set of representations of the past that are constructed by a given social group (be it a nation, a family, a religious community, or other) through a process of invention, appropriation, and selection, and that have bearings on relationships of power within society’.6 This is a capacious definition, but it is useful to us here because the topic deals with more than just visual or material lieux de mémoire. It also explores contemporary power struggles over these representations and thus emphasises the element of selection. What is important is not just what is ‘remembered’ but what is omitted, distorted, falsified or ‘forgotten’ in the service of the present, and the process by which certain narratives of the past (or the ‘past’) come to prominence over others. Thus, ‘memory’ here refers not only to the academic study of memory – although the chapter is anchored in this literature – but primarily to the various manifestations of ‘memory politics’ that have characterised Europe since the end of the Cold War, that is, the contested accounts of the past that have given rise to controversies and debates in the public sphere. Far from signalling the ‘end of history’, the end of the Cold War gave rise to a ‘new world disorder’.7 This chapter will show that struggles over memory, in particular over the memory of World War II, lay, as they still lie, at the forefront of this process. In fact, rather than 1989 signalling the end of the ‘long Second World War’,8 the further from the post-war years we get, the more vigorously the memory of the war is being fought over. The significance of memory, both individual and collective, is that it mediates between past and future. Memory, as Hannah Arendt explained, resides between the ‘no more’ and the ‘not yet’ in the ‘space’ of the ‘timeless present’. She writes that it is ‘the function of memory to “present” (make present) the past and deprive the past of its definitely bygone character. Memory undoes the past.’ The result is that ‘memory transforms the past into a future possibility’.9 Control of the future demands control over the past and leads to greater contestation over which version of the past should prevail. The widespread sense that the collapse of communism had invalidated all future-oriented political projects proved a powerful impetus

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for turning to the past, and given that the past concerned involved war, genocide and many other forms of oppression, violence and trauma, acts which radically divided the original participants and which now divide their descendants, the contest over the past was and continues to be especially marked.10

Out of the Cold War freezer According to the senior Romanian communist and, after 1989, TV-show host Silviu Brucan: ‘Old grudges and conflicts from as far back as the Hapsburg and tsarist empires, marvellously preserved in the communist freezer, are floating to surface with the thawing of the Cold War and the lifting of the Stalinist coercion and repression. Territorial, religious, and ethnic claims long suppressed are striking back with a vengeance, while national liberation, secessions, and declarations of independence are coming first on the political agenda.’11 In this view, the years since 1989 are the ‘real’ post-war years, for only with the demise of the Cold War could a true debate over the meaning of World War II, in which all sides could be heard, take place. What has happened since the ‘post-war parenthesis’ ended can be regarded both as a liberation from tyranny (in the east) and as a chance to debunk longstanding myths, but also, more darkly, as a freedom to express views that were long regarded as dead or, at best, marginal (in the east and west). The years 1945–89 now appear as ‘an extended epilogue to the European civil war that had begun in 1914, a forty-year interregnum between the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the final resolution of the unfinished business left behind by his war’.12 Perhaps, as Geoff Eley suggests, the Cold War years, which brought social democracy and class cooperation to Western Europe, and welfare states of one variety or another to all of Europe, were an aberration in European history.13 Is Europe now reverting to type? Of course, it is not the case that there was no discussion of the past before 1989. In Yugoslavia, for example, a certain rendering of wartime atrocity was central to the Titoist slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’ (bratstvo i jedinstvo). The point is that what had gone before was distorted to fit new ideological realities, in this instance the deaths of some 300,000 Bosnians at the hands of Croatian fascist Ustashe and Serbian royalist Chetniks, which were subsumed into a narrative of the partisan, anti-fascist struggle.14 Similarly, indigenous fascism and support for Hitler’s New Order were brushed under the carpet in Eastern Europe, as the Soviet narrative of working-class anti-fascism was imposed from above, a process which facilitated the Soviets’ carrying out massive social restructuring through land ‘redistribution’. In the west, the suffering caused by the liberation process – through bombing, looting and sexual violence – was brushed aside by the Allies in favour of ‘triumphalist narratives’ that could compete with the Soviets’. Widespread collaboration with Nazism and the weakness of


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resistance movements were topics too uncomfortable to mention in liberated countries. Instead, mythic narratives of resistance, Allied solidarity and democratic renewal quickly took hold, in the interests of relatively frictionless reconstruction.15 In Germany an ‘exculpatory identity of victimhood’, based on an unwillingness ‘to accept the relationship between cause and effect’, coupled in the western zones with a useful anti-communist stance, swiftly did away with rare statements of guilt or remorse which had appeared in 1945–46.16 There were many commemorations of the war in the Cold War years, but they did not encompass all Europeans’ opinions. Those whose views did not conform to the anti-fascist consensus expressed them in private or not at all in the east or in more or less fringe venues in the west. The end of the Cold War permitted the articulation of sentiments that had been hitherto suppressed. Something, Richard Ned Lebow writes, ‘resembling a tacit conspiracy to tiptoe quietly around the past developed between major forces on the right and left’ in the post-war years.17 It is true that ‘revisions of World War II collective memory in Eastern Europe started in the mid-1980s, well before the fall of the Berlin Wall’, but such revisions could only be freely voiced on a large scale after 1989.18 On the one hand, post-war myths that contributed to smoothing the path of social reconstruction were dismantled even faster than was already the case; for example, the notion of widespread involvement in and support for the French resistance was something that scholars and filmmakers had been taking apart since the late 1960s, the most famous example being The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophüls’ dissection of Clermont-Ferrand during the war. On the other hand, the loosening grip of such myths also enabled the return of arguments that characterised the ‘other side’ of the consensus. Fascist, ultra-nationalist, antisemitic and xenophobic positions that had been impossible (in the east) or difficult (in the west) to articulate openly gained strength and confidence as the demise of communism signalled, for some, the death of all liberal– leftist ideologies stemming from Enlightenment thought. Particularly in the eastern half of the continent, what Vladimir Tismaneanu names ‘fantasies of salvation’ appeared rapidly on the scene – often directly reprising local interwar and wartime fascist movements – as the collapse of communism encouraged the search for a national heritage untainted by association with communism.19 Unfortunately, in a region in which few countries had a tradition of liberalism, anti-communism before and during World War II often meant ultra-nationalism or fascism, and not a few war criminals, such as Ion Antonescu, Jozef Tiso or Ferenc Szálasi, were rehabilitated as national heroes in the immediate post-Cold War years. Romania’s Memorial of the Victims of Communism and Anticommunist Resistance in Sighet exemplifies the phenomenon.20 As Tismaneanu writes, although ‘historical memory is incessantly invoked in public debates, narratives of self-pity and self-glorification prevail over lucid scrutiny of the past’.21

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With the exception of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, when World War II memory was mobilised to fuel ethno-nationalist war on a scale not seen on the continent since 1945,22 the direst predictions of a return to local traditions of fascism, nationalism or peasantism have not materialised, thanks partly to the incorporation of east-central Europe into the European Union (EU) and partly to the widespread acceptance of liberal democracy, whether espoused by centre-right or revamped communist parties. But such political traditions – which are also by no means unknown in the EU’s longer-standing members – remain potent as possible sources of alternative ideologies, and populist politicians are now in or close to government.23 Indeed, although stability is the most noteworthy fact about the post-communist years, some commentators argue that the region is backsliding, with populism now ‘the new condition of the political in Europe’, especially in countries where ‘longmaintained forms of amnesia’ concerning fascist and communist crimes are ‘bound to fuel discontent, outrage, and frustration and to encourage the rise of demagogues’.24 In Western Europe, the demise of the anti-fascist consensus that dominated post-war politics after 1945, whether Social or Christian Democrats were in power, started to crack, as confusion over the meaning of ‘left’ and ‘right’ took hold. The ensuing vacuum in political theory was exacerbated by such phenomena as globalisation and the rise of the unregulated global market and, after 11 September 2001, the ‘war on terror’. In contemporary Europe, far-right politicians clearly share a heritage with ‘classic fascism’, but advance their populist agenda on the basis of more topical fears: of Muslims, financial crisis, immigration and the threat posed to local, ‘indigenous’ populations by these ideological, economic and population movements.25 While racism in the sense of biological determinism still exists, it has been largely replaced by an older form of race understood through culture, in which somatic characteristics are understood as markers of cultural and religious difference rather than of ‘a biological heredity’.26 Historians have provided richly detailed accounts of the construction of memory regimes in Western and Eastern Europe after 1945.27 In particular, they have rigorously scrutinised the gradual development of ‘Holocaust consciousness’.28 In what follows, I will focus on how the memory boom since the end of the Cold War and, especially, in the new millennium reflects and brings about new challenges to European identity and politics. The common theme is the demise of the post-war consensus and the revival of previously marginalised ways of thinking, which means that an unprecedented assault on the values of the post-war period has taken place on the one hand and that an exaggerated version of them has survived on the other. Nothing illustrates the first effect – the collapse of the post-war consensus – better than the creation of the so-called ‘second republic’ in Italy after 1994.29 After 1944, post-war Italy, following the general trend in Western Europe, was stabilised with the aid of the founding myth of the country as


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a nation of anti-fascists. The result, according to Renzo De Felice, was ‘to obscure the actual history of fascism and the war, and to allow many decidedly undemocratic political elements (Fascists and Communists) to hide behind the mask of Italy’s so-called antifascist republic’.30 Although historians had debated the role played by fascism and anti-fascism before the end of the Cold War, the collapse of communism and the birth of the ‘second republic’ sundered Italy’s post-war mythic narrative and opened up an uneasy space for multiple, competing versions of the past. Within a very short space of time, ‘neo-fascists’, led by Gianfranco Fini, found their way into Berlusconi’s government. Although the party changed its name from the fascist-connoted Movimento Sociale Italiano to the Alleanza Nazionale, its message was the revisionist one that all sides had been victims in the war, that Italy had overcome the divisions of the past and that the Italian people were all ‘post-fascists’ now.31 In one of the most striking examples, the Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste – Italy’s most notorious concentration camp during World War II – has become the focus of a vigorous struggle over wartime memory, which has seen the foibe (the murder by Yugoslav partisans of Italian soldiers and civilians in 1943 and 1945) set alongside the Holocaust, thus driving revisionist claims by instrumentalising Holocaust victims’ experiences.32 In fact, this drive to moral equivalence actually perpetuates, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, ‘black holes’ in memory, with very little discussion taking place about Italian atrocities in the Balkans or colonial territories, in Italian concentration camps, or about Jewish forced labour in Italian cities and countryside.33 The same phenomenon is observable in states which were victims of Nazi aggression but in which collaboration played a significant role. In the Netherlands, the 1940s and 1950s saw a kind of ‘truce’ – Ido de Haan calls it ‘a shifting political compromise between silence and speaking out’ – over the question of who had suffered more: those deported to Germany as forced labourers, Jews deported to concentration and death camps and those who had endured the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944–45.34 Although Jewish victims made up about half of all Dutch wartime deaths,35 their experiences were subsumed into a narrative of national heroism that animated the postwar reconstruction. That narrative began to break down long before 1989, but since the end of the Cold War, greater openness about Dutch–German collaboration and the role of the Dutch police and state bureaucracy in deporting Jews to the death camps has been accompanied by a revival of right-wing populism, most often manifest as a ‘defence’ of Dutch liberty from ‘radical Islam’. In France, the combination of the memory of Vichy and the recent reawakening of interest in the Algerian War (1954–62) has been a potent brew for memory wars, which have seen laws passed and retracted on the teaching of colonialism’s ‘positive’ side, and unseemly debates, sparked by the publication of The Black Book of Communism (1997) about whether communism was ‘worse’ than Nazism.36

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A particularly interesting case is Spain, where Franco’s regime survived the war by playing up its alleged neutrality, talking the language of anticommunism and providing a useful base for the US air force. The literal exhumation of the past in the form of mass graves of victims of Francoist repression, combined with an assault on the dictatorship’s ‘repressive distortion of memory’ (removing monuments of Franco, for example), has engendered a substantial public movement towards recovering ‘lost’ memories and investigating the extent of what really happened after the civil war.37 The transition to democracy after 1975 was negotiated by reformist Francoists and the democratic opposition on the basis of a consensus that the civil war was a ‘tragedy’ over which a veil of silence should be drawn, a strategy aided by the 1977 Amnesty Law.38 This consensus broke down in the 1990s ‘history wars’, when groups representing victims of Franco began to demand not just accurate historical facts but official condemnation of the dictatorship, because, they argued, the ‘model transition’ had allowed perpetrators to evade justice and had created a democratic deficit. A strong government-backed expression of support for the victims of Francoist violence came in 2007, with the passing of the Law of Historical Memory. ‘The revision of official memory to include the individual memories of those previously silenced’, Carolyn Boyd writes, ‘was understood to be a necessary first step toward reconciliation and democratic consolidation’.39 Whether it was appropriate to use legislation to mandate the control of memory (for example, banning Francoist political gatherings at the Valley of the Fallen) is hotly contested, but Spain’s example is perhaps no different from laws banning Nazi symbols in Germany or Holocaust denial in France. Indeed, it is striking that the 2007 law was passed at the same time as ‘Holocaust consciousness’ was developing rapidly in Spain – with Holocaust-related plays, monuments and novels all appearing at a rapid rate since 2000 – and whilst Holocaust commemoration was becoming a defining aspect of European identity. Condemning the Franco dictatorship, even if Spaniards still do not know how to exhibit its legacy,40 can thus be seen as an integral part of a pan-European memory phenomenon. This breaking down of the post-war consensus can also be seen at work in the rhetoric of the ‘double genocide’ that informs a wave of new museums in post-communist eastern Europe. In Budapest’s Terror House, in Tallinn’s and Riga’s Occupation Museums and in Vilnius’s Museum of the Victims of Genocide, the memories of Nazism and communism are placed in competition with each other, and anti-fascism is only employed insofar as it does not impinge on the anti-communist narrative. In Budapest, the museum sets great store by the fact that the communist regime lasted decades as opposed to the mere months of the Nazi occupation, forgetting, as István Rév notes, that ‘there was a sort of connection between the coming in of the Soviets and the end of the Arrow-Cross rule’. Indeed, Rév goes so far as to argue that the Terror House, with its overwhelming focus on the communist period, is


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not meant as a space of memory at all but is ‘a total propaganda space, where death and victims are used as rhetorical devices’.41 In Tallinn, images of local support for the Nazi invasion are willingly shown, since they imply the horror of the first Soviet occupation (June 1940–June 1941) and thus ‘confirm the anti-communist script’.42 Similarly, the erection of a ‘Victory Cross’ in Tallinn’s Freedom Square and the removal of the ‘Bronze Soldier’ memorial to Estonia’s Soviet ‘liberators’ can be seen as ‘the belated completion of an unfinished project of the war generation’ – once again, the reappearance of the past in the present.43 The exaggerated nature of this ‘equality of suffering’ argument, with its suggestion that the Nazi invasion constituted a ‘national liberation’ from Soviet terror, and with its antisemitic subtext which ‘justifies’ Jewish persecution in terms of Jews’ alleged support for communism, is explicable as an over-compensation for or a counter-memory to the rejection of communism after 1989 (1991 in the case of the Baltic States), in an attempt to remind Western Europeans of Eastern Europe’s continued suffering after the end of World War II.44 It reveals too how what is aptly called ‘geopolitical vertigo’45 informs the ambivalent relationship of Eastern European states with Western European narratives of the ‘good war’: the memory of World War II is employed both to challenge ‘smug’ Western European accounts and to assure ‘core Europe’ of Eastern European commitment to a shared definition of ‘Europe’.46 Apart from the breakdown of the anti-fascist consensus, the second process – the caricatured afterlife of post-war values – is best shown by analysing the role played by the Great Patriotic War in Russia. Since the Russian master narrative of the war has been subjected to tendentious revisionism in the Baltic States and other former parts of the Soviet Union, it should come as no surprise that in Russia itself under Putin and his successors the cult of the Great Patriotic War has been revived. Indeed, as Martin Evans writes, ‘the more Russia’s loss of superpower status became apparent, the more the defeat of fascism has been held up as a source of national pride that transcends the end of the USSR’.47 It is noteworthy that the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow’s Victory Park was not opened until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1995, even though the decision to build a museum on the site had been taken as early as 194248 and that a museum to commemorate the siege of Leningrad was built in 1989 on the same site as the original museum, constructed during the siege itself (and which closed in 1953).49 Post-communist Russian governments want to bask in the glow that the memory of the war emits, for it is one of the few sources of continuity and popular legitimacy in a country that had always been synonymous with its empire and is therefore still grappling with its national identity. Thus, dissenters such as the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich believe that the overburdened term ‘Great Patriotic War’ should be dropped in favour of ‘the war with Hitler’, and Viktor Suvorov scurrilously though understandably in the context of

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the break-up of the USSR argued that Stalin had supported Nazi Germany from the outset because he believed that Hitler would unleash a destructive war that would act as the ‘icebreaker’ for revolution in Europe.50 If it is something of an exaggeration to argue, as some do, that debates about the past contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union,51 Ilya Prizel is nevertheless correct to state that ‘Contemporary Russia has not yet arrived at a consensus about its past, and thus is forced to contend with conflicting and contradictory visions of its future.’52 Prizel’s point is apparent, for example, in continued denials of the existence of the secret clauses in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.53 These specific examples could easily be multiplied. What is striking is that the Holocaust, which, in Judt’s felicitous phrase, has been made the ‘entry ticket’ to contemporary Europe, has been the subject of historical commissions across Europe and, since the Stockholm Forum of 2000, has been enshrined in official European collective memory.54 Questions of compensation for slave labour and the restitution of stolen property and land – topics which were impossible to discuss under communism – have become burning issues.55 At the same time, most Eastern European countries have conducted commissions into the experience of communism. These two sets of commissions have been conducted with remarkable scholarly dispassion and expertise, and even in the most difficult cases, such as Romania, with its history of ethnonationalism and a communist regime akin to a form of ‘totalitarianism-cum-Sultanism’,56 they have provided judicious and impartial models for examining difficult pasts.57 Yet, these ‘EU-friendly’ measures are simultaneously being challenged (in all parts of the continent) both at the official level, by government-sponsored revisionist museums or populist state-controlled media, for example, and at the grassroots, by the resurgence of populism, which breeds on resentment towards Eurocrats and anger at ‘exorbitant’ Holocaust memory, itself a recapitulation of resentment towards minority treaties.58 The commissions’ balanced approach needs to be brought into mainstream discussions, where many have yet to discover that a recovery of Holocaust memory need not come at the expense of the memory of communism: between transnational commemoration of the Holocaust and recognition of specific national and regional suffering under communism there can be co-existence. Memory need not be a zero-sum game.

The international context Although the focus of this chapter is Europe, it is worth briefly situating these European memory wars into a broader context, since they occur worldwide, especially in societies scarred by civil war, genocide and authoritarianism, such as post-apartheid South Africa, Rwanda, Guatemala and Argentina. Besides, many of the European memory wars have a far wider


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resonance than their national or intra-European contexts might suggest; after all, many of the debates over memory concern colonial legacies, and therefore debates over Belgium’s role in the Congo, or France’s in Algeria or Indochina, for example, are obviously not merely European issues.59 However, the impact of these memories varies considerably depending on local context. The recent revelations of British atrocities in Kenya during the Mau Mau Emergency revealed that there is more appetite for revising histories of colonialism in some countries than others: in the United Kingdom, there is no need to pass laws teaching the benefits of imperial rule, not because Britain’s imperial past constitutes an unblemished record, but because for most people it has vanished without trace.60 Memories of Britain ‘standing alone’ in 1940 have facilitated ‘a 50 year inflation of the national ego’ and still inform British attitudes towards the EU, with a popular suspicion that it constitutes ‘simply a peaceful form of German domination’.61 Perhaps the different emphases that colonial histories have had in French and Belgian memory debates in comparison with Britain have something to do with the former countries’ experience of World War II, and the rise of English as a world language – certainly as the language of European diplomacy – and is not solely a reflection of the violence that characterised their decolonisation processes .62 Once again, it is obvious that World War II is central to these debates. Since it really was a world war (in a way that even World War I was not), its effects are being debated more than ever across the world, now that the Cold War lenses have been removed.63 Issues of race, for example, or American awareness of the Soviet war effort, have recently come to the fore.64 However, memory wars taking place outside of the European public sphere have tended to focus less on World War II than on post-war phenomena, such as Apartheid, the putting down of anti-colonial resistance movements and national traumas such as the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina or the ‘stolen children’ in Australia. ‘Truth and reconciliation committees’ have been a notable characteristic of the post-Cold War years, as have related phenomena, such as states apologising for former crimes or the search for forms of justice other than retribution.65 Richard King notes that, like memory, restitution and compensation processes need not be zero-sum games: compensating one formerly abused group can be in the best interests of society as a whole.66 The reality, however, is that such bodies as Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification or Rwanda’s gacaca system of local trials for relatively minor génocidaires create new divisions even as they help to heal old wounds.67 Just as important as these phenomena has been the rise to prominence of a human rights agenda, since 1945 (and inspired by it – most obviously in the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 1951 Refugees Convention), but especially since 1989. The development of a human rights culture has gone hand in hand

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with the globalisation of Holocaust memory, although the precise relationship between the two is unclear.68 After World War II, the League of Nations’ dedication to group rights, which had failed miserably, was partially replaced with the weaker but politically expedient United Nations’ commitment to individual rights.69 The emphasis in twentieth-century diplomacy on ‘state sovereignty rooted in national homogeneity’ meant that humanitarian intentions went hand in hand with forced deportations and territorial partition along ethnic lines.70 Although the history of human rights predates World War II, its advocates employ the memory of the war to justify the concept and to provide a linear, progressive history of its unfolding towards global prominence. This history is both complicated/disrupted and reinvigorated by recent catastrophes, such as the wars in the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda or Darfur. Competing versions of the origins of and necessity to protect human rights are bound up with debates over humanitarian intervention, pre-emptive wars and the rights and wrongs of ‘regime change’ and are thus prime examples of how memory informs contemporary international relations and political action. Indeed, following Jens Bartelson, we might argue that human rights discourse has been remembered into existence in a way that does not always conform to the historical record as a constituent part of an argument that justifies action on behalf of human rights.71

Conclusion It has been suggested recently that the ‘memory boom’ of the last decades cannot be sustained. The relatively stable and apparently ‘post-ideological’ years of the 1990s have given way to a new ‘war’ on a global scale in the new millennium; demands for national unity and the rejection of ‘postmodern relativism’ are turning the tide against the focus on the past that characterised the first post-Cold War decade.72 Irrespective of the fact that the condemnation of ‘relativism’ seems terribly misplaced in an age in which the most dangerous threats come from those with firm beliefs (including the attack on science and reason which characterises the new age of superstition which appears to be upon us), it is no doubt the case, if only because of the cycles of fashion, that the ‘memory boom’ has reached its zenith. The scholarly assault on ‘trauma studies’ means that more care needs to be taken when deploying this medical term in the context of social experience of atrocity,73 and the remarkably popular phenomenon of confessional literature and celebrity culture seems to be waning somewhat, indicating that the appetite for testimony as a genre will become less fashionable and that testimony will turn into just another tool in the scholarly kit – as Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination suggests.74 Furthermore, as Tony Judt suggests, when it comes to Holocaust commemoration, the greatest challenge to meaningful (that is, critically engaged) memory may not be ignorance or hostility but


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the ‘banality of overuse’, that is, ‘the flattening, desensitising effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing’.75 Yet memory, as Michael Rothberg stresses, is ‘multidirectional’. That is to say, sometimes a process takes place ‘in which transfers occur between events that have come to seem separate from each other’.76 He gives the examples of the Holocaust and decolonisation, but there are others, such as slavery, the use of the atom bomb and genocides of indigenous peoples. One cannot easily predict how the contested memories of one event will help or hinder the ‘discovery’ of memories of other events, which may then become equally contentious. Besides, as recent arguments about World War II show, one can hardly suggest that memory animates public and academic concerns less now than it did 20 years ago. Germany may present an exemplary face of a nation that has confronted its dark past (if one brackets off for the moment the critical voices which regard this self-satisfaction as a kind of Sündenstolz or pride in one’s own sins); but Russia has yet to do so and most of the countries of the former eastern bloc have barely begun the process (not to mention other areas of the world in Latin America or Africa where such processes are also relevant). Spain is another major European example where memory politics are fundamental to contemporary life. One cannot look to Germany and argue that because the job has been done there, the trajectory to be followed by other states is mapped out and thus, for scholars, predictable and boring. Indeed, the reverse seems to be the case: the more that the myth of the Holocaust as an act committed by an impersonal evil force called Nazism that has nothing to do with ‘us’ is challenged, the more resistance in European countries to official commemoration seems to grow. In other words, the more uncertain the present and the future look, the more memory – precisely because it is future-oriented – will continue to be an arena of contestation, giving rise in some cases to conflict, in others to reconciliation.77 In case of the former, it might turn out that the ‘negation of nationalism as the central force in politics was a short interlude that lasted less than an intellectual generation’.78 In case of the latter, we might argue that with the extension of the EU, the upsurge of populism will be contained within democratic structures and, thus, that Europe ‘has not had such a good opportunity to establish lasting peace since the Congress of Vienna’.79 Postwar Europe, especially post-Cold War Europe, has been a period of intense memory scrutiny, primarily of World War II. Now that post-war Europe is itself fast on the road to becoming history; its very pastness means that it too is ripe for inclusion in ongoing struggles to control memory and thus to shape the ‘new Europe’.

Notes

Introduction: History and Its Discontents 1. Compare Bain Attwood’s comments in ‘In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance”, and Public History’, Public Culture, 20, 1 (2008), 94–95. My thanks go to Becky Jinks for reading – and greatly improving – an earlier version of this Introduction. 2. See, for example, Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999). 3. On the distinction between historicism in the sense of the speculative philosophy of history and historicism in the sense of setting events meaningfully in their historical context in the tradition of Ranke, see Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012). 4. See my discussions of these issues in Chapter 12 and in ‘History, Memory, Testimony’, in Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (eds.), The Future of Testimony (London: Routledge, 2013). 5. Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: William Heinemann, 2012). That does not mean I agree wholeheartedly with their particular contextualisations; for example, Judt and Snyder suggest that the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in the West has buried an awareness of the sophistication of Central and Eastern European history and thought, which is now regarded as interesting only insofar as it illuminates the background to and possibility of the Holocaust. Other, positive traditions have been forgotten (237). I would suggest that things are a little more complicated than that, both with respect to Holocaust consciousness – which has hardly been a uniform process in ‘the West’ – and to Western knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe. 6. For a fuller discussion of these ideas, see my introduction to Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). 7. See, for example, Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and the review forum on that book in the Journal of Genocide Research, 13, 1&2 (2011), 107–52. 8. Judt and Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 104. 9. Judt and Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, 177–78. One should note the remarkable conditions in which Judt’s and Snyder’s book was produced. My comments should not be read as lacking sympathy for a dying man who was speaking without the aid of reference materials. 10. Federico Finchelstein, ‘Fascism and the Holocaust’, in Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, 265. Also Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 27. 11. Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism. See also Andrea Mammone (ed.), Borderless Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 12. Finchelstein, ‘Fascism and the Holocaust’, 260. 184

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13. Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1918–1939 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt (eds.), Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009). 14. For greater detail, see my Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 15. For a fuller discussion, see my Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 16. See Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 17. Dan Diner, ‘Historical Experience and Cognition: Juxtaposing Perspectives on National Socialism’, in Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 163. 18. See the essays in Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology. 19. The reference is to Gil Anidjar, ‘Against History’, afterword to Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 125–59. See my discussion in ‘The Harmony of Barbarism: Locating the “Scrolls of Auschwitz” in Holocaust Historiography’, in Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams (eds.), Inside Auschwitz: New Perspectives on Holocaust Testimony (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). 20. Apart from Chapters 10 and 11, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and the Terror of History’, Parallax, 17, 4 (2011), 90–108; Jens Meierhenrich, ‘Topographies of Remembering and Forgetting: The Transformation of Lieux de Mémoire in Rwanda’, in Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (eds.), Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 283–96. 21. See, for example, Waldorf, ‘Instrumentalizing Genocide: The RPF’s Campaign against “Genocide Ideology”’, in Straus and Waldorf (eds.), Remaking Rwanda, 48–66, on the Rwandan government’s attacks on ‘genocide ideology’ and ‘divisionism’, which, as Waldorf shows, have done more to strengthen old animosities and divisions than overcome or replace them. See also Janine Natalya Clark, ‘The “Crime of Crimes”: Genocide, Criminal Trials and Reconciliation’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14, 1 (2012), 55–77, which argues for limiting our expectations of the extent to which criminal trials can aid social reconciliation; and Jens Meierhenrich, Lawfare: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Jurisdictions in Rwanda, 1994–2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), which questions the success of Rwanda’s gacaca process. 22. See Paul Connerton’s interesting suggestions in ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, Memory Studies, 1, 1 (2008), 59–71. 23. Brandon Hamber, Liz Ševˇcenko and Ereshnee Naidu, ‘Utopian Dreams or Practical Possibilities? The Challenges of Evaluating the Impact of Memorialization in Societies in Transition’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 4 (2010), 397–420. 24. On France, Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); on Italy, David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Roberts, ‘How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 2 (2000), 185–211. One might also mention the role of

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Notes

the anti-Irish Home Rulers in the House of Lords, whose pre-1914 position surely has a good claim to be counted as one of the originating loci of fascism. 25. Roberts, ‘How Not to Think about Fascism’, 208.

1 Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography after the Cold War 1. Lev Rozhetsky, ‘My Life in a Fascist Prison’, in Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (eds.), The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 128. 2. Sara Gleykh, ‘The Destruction of the Jews of Mariupol’, in Rubenstein and Altman (eds.), Unknown Black Book, 216. 3. Joshua Rubenstein, ‘The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front’, in Rubenstein and Altman (eds.), Unknown Black Book, 13. 4. Dalia Ofer, ‘Holocaust Historiography: The Return of Antisemitism and Ethnic Stereotypes as Major Themes’, Patterns of Prejudice, 33, 4 (1999), 87–106. 5. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). 6. As noted by Alon Confino, ‘A World without Jews: Interpreting the Holocaust’, German History, 27, 4 (2009), 540–41. And see the essays in Mark Roseman, Devin Pendas and Richard Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 7. Robert Gellately, ‘The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide’, in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds.), The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 241–63; Christopher R. Browning, ‘The Nazi Empire’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 407–25. 8. Peter Hayes, ‘Auschwitz: Capital of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 17, 2 (2003), 330–50. 9. Jan Erik Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung: Das Wirtschaftsimperium der SS. Oswald Pohl und das SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001); Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Jan Erik Schulte, ‘Zwangsarbeit für die SS: Juden in der Ostindustrie GmbH’, and Bernd C. Wagner, ‘Gerüchte, Wissen, Verdrängung: Die IG Auschwitz und das Vernichtungslager Birkenau’, both in Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher and Bernd C. Wagner (eds.), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2000), 43–74 and 231–48. 10. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower, ‘Introduction’, in R. Brandon and W. Lower (eds.), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 6. 11. Patrick Montague, Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012); Shmuel Krakowsi, Das Todeslager Chełmno/Kulmhof: Der Beginn der Endlösung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007); Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987); Bogdan Musial (ed.), ‘Aktion Reinhardt’: Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2004).

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12. See for example, the descriptions in Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Witold Chrostowski, Extermination Camp Treblinka (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004); Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk, ‘Treblinka—ein Todeslager der “Aktion Reinhard”’, in B. Musial (ed.), ‘Aktion Reinhardt’; Michael Wildt, ‘Die Lager im Osten: kommentierende Bemerkungen’, in Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth and Christoph Dieckmann (eds.), Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt/M: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), vol. 1, 508–20. 13. Dieter Pohl, ‘The Holocaust and the Concentration Camps’, in Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (London: Routledge, 2010), 149. 14. Omer Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe as the Site of Mass Murder’, Journal of Modern History, 80, 3 (2008), 576; Frank Bajohr, ‘The “Folk Community” and the Persecution of the Jews: German Society under National Socialist Dictatorship’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 20, 2 (2006), 195; Konrad Kwiet, ‘Perpetrators and the Final Solution’, in Stephanie McMahon-Kaye (ed.), The Memory of the Holocaust in the 21st Century: The Challenge for Education (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001), 79. 15. On which the historiography is sparse. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown, 1996), chapters 13 and 14 and, especially, the work of Daniel Blatman, ‘The Death Marches and the Final Phase of Nazi Genocide’, in Caplan and Wachsmann (eds.), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, 167–85, and The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 16. Timothy Snyder, ‘Holocaust: The Ignored Reality’, New York Review of Books (16 July 2009). 17. Timothy Snyder, ‘The Life and Death of Western Volhynian Jewry, 1921–1945’, in Brandon and Lower (eds.), The Shoah in Ukraine, 102. See also Bartov, ‘Eastern Europe’; Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Yehuda Bauer, The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 18. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–39 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), ch. 3. For discussion, see Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (eds.), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Historiography (London: Continuum, 2010). 19. Jonathan Petropoulos, ‘The Nazi Kleptocracy: Reflections on Avarice and the Holocaust’, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. 7: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 34. 20. Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 21. Frank Bajohr, Aryanization in Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of Their Property in Nazi Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). 22. See the survey in Gerhard Paul, ‘Von Psychopathen, Technokraten und “ganz gewöhnlichen” Deutschen: Die Täter der Shoah im Spiegel der Forschung’, in Gerhard Paul (ed.), Die Täter der Shoah: Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 13–90. 23. Frank Bajohr, ‘The Holocaust and Corruption’, in Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel (eds.), Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 118–38. 24. On the ‘antisemitic consensus’, see Mark Roseman, ‘Ideas, Contexts, and the Pursuit of Genocide’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, London, 25, 1

188

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

Notes (2003), 83; Michael Wildt, ‘Gewalt als Partizipation: Der Nationalsozialismus als Ermächtigungsregime’, in Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt (eds.), Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes. Historische Perspektiven (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 236–38; Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Massenmord und schlechtes Gewissen: Die deutsche Bevölkerung, die NS-Führung und der Holocaust (Frankfurt/M: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), 10. Wolfgang Seibel, ‘A Market for Mass Crime? Inter-institutional Competition and the Initiation of the Holocaust in France, 1940–1942’, International Journal of Organization Theory and Behavior, 5, 3&4 (2002), 236. As is explained by, for example, Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 450; Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 169. Davide Rodogno, ‘Italiani brava gente? Fascist Italy’s Policy towards the Jews in the Balkans, April 1941–July 1943’, European History Quarterly, 35, 2 (2005), 213–40; Guri Schwarz, ‘On Myth Making and Nation Building: The Genesis of the “Myth of the Good Italian”’, Yad Vashem Studies, 36, 1 (2008), 111–43; MacGregor Knox, ‘Die faschistische Italien und die “Endlösung”’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 55, 1 (2007), 53–92. Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2001); Ahlrich Meyer, Täter im Verhör: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ in Frankreich 1940–1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005). Geoffrey P. Megargee (ed.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: USHMM, 2009); Guy Miron (ed.), The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos during the Holocaust, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009). Sara Bender, The Jews of Białystok during World War II and the Holocaust (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2009), 293. Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Christopher R. Browning, ‘Before the “Final Solution”: Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland (1940–1941)’, in Ghettos 1939–1945: New Research and Perspectives on Definition, Daily Life and Survival, Symposium Presentations (Washington, DC: USHMM, 2005), 1–13. Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); Jean Ancel, ‘The German-Romanian Relationship and the Final Solution’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 19, 2 (2005), 252–75; Dennis Deletant, Hitler’s Forgotten Ally: Ion Antonescu and His Regime, Romania 1940–1944 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Mihail E. Ionescu and Liviu Rotman (eds.), The Holocaust and Romania: History and Contemporary Significance (Bucharest: Institute for Studies of Defense and Military History, 2003). Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Donald Bloxham, ‘Europe, the Final Solution and the Dynamics of Intent’, Patterns of Prejudice, 44, 4 (2010), 317–35, and Donald Bloxham, ‘The Holocaust and European History’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 233–54. Wendy Lower, ‘ “Anticipatory Obedience” and the Nazi Implementation of the Holocaust in the Ukraine: A Case Study of Central and Peripheral Forces in the

Notes

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

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Generalbezirk Zhytomyr, 1941–1944’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 16, 1 (2002), 1–22; Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Controlled Escalation: Himmler’s Men in the Summer of 1941 and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Territories’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 21, 2 (2007), 218–42; Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944); Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer (eds.), The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence (London: Routledge, 2009). On ‘genocide studies’ as a discipline, see Bloxham and Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies; Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (eds.), Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2007); Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Kolonialer Genozid? Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer historischen Kategorie für eine Globalgeschichte’, in Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis zwischen Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: LIT, 2010), 131–50. John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice’, Central European History, 32, 1 (1999), 1–33. Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz?; A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). Feldman and Seibel (eds.), Networks of Nazi Persecution. Christopher Kobrak and Andrea H. Schneider, ‘Big Business and the Holocaust: An Appraisal of the Historical Arguments’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 141–72; Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener (eds.), Business and Industry in Nazi Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Martin Dean, Constantin Goeschler and Philipp Ther (eds.), Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). Adam Krzeminski, ‘As Many Wars as Nations: The Myths and Truths of World War II’, Sign and Sight (6 April 2005), online at: www.signandsight.com/features/ 96.html (original in Polityka, 23 March 2005). Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe A. Veltri (eds.), Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe (London: Routledge, 2010). Gregory Carleton, ‘Victory in Death: Annihilation Narratives in Russia Today’, History & Memory, 22, 1 (2010), 135–68; Thomas C. Wolfe, ‘Past as Present, Myth, or History? Discourses of Time and the Great Fatherland War’, in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 249–83. James Mark, ‘Containing Fascism: History in Post-communist Baltic Occupation and Genocide Museums’, in Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor (eds.), Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 335–69. Maria Mälksoo, ‘The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe’, European Journal of International

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Notes Relations, 15, 4 (2009), 653–80. See also Claus Leggewie, ‘A Tour of the Battleground: The Seven Circles of Pan-European Memory’, Social Research, 75, 1 (2008), 217–34; Robert Bideleux, ‘Rethinking the Eastward Extension of the EU Civil Order and the Nature of Europe’s New East-West Divide’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 10, 1 (2009), 118–36.

2


1. Hannah Arendt, ‘Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship’ (1964), in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 42. 2. For further discussion, see Dan Stone, ‘Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies’, New Formations, 71 (2011), 46–57; Seyla Benhabib, ‘International Law and Human Plurality in the Shadow of Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin’, Constellations, 16, 2 (2009), 331–50. 3. For the most up-to-date work on Lemkin, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19–41; A. Dirk Moses, ‘The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 272–89. 4. See Steven L. Jacobs, ‘Raphael Lemkin and the Armenian Genocide’, in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2003), 125–35. 5. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), xi–xii. 6. Lemkin, Axis Rule, 79. 7. Henry R. Huttenbach, ‘From the Editor: Towards a Conceptual Definition of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 4, 2 (2002), 172–73. 8. Raphael Lemkin, ‘Genocide—A Modern Crime’, Free World, 4 (1945), online at: www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/freeworld1945.htm 9. For example, in the case of the Bosnian Serb Nikolai Jorgić, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany (Bundesverfassungsgericht) said that ‘the statutory definition of genocide defends a supra-individual object of legal protection, i.e. the social existence of the group [. . .] the intent to destroy the group [. . .] extends beyond physical and biological extermination [. . .] The text of the law does not therefore compel the interpretation that the culprit’s intent must be to exterminate physically at least a substantial number of the members of the group’. Cited in William A. Schabas, ‘National Courts Finally Begin to Prosecute Genocide, the “Crime of Crimes” ’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, 1, 1 (2003), 58. 10. Raphael Lemkin, ‘Acts Constituting a General (Transnational) Danger Considered as Offences Against the Law of Nations’ (1933), online at: www.preventgenocide. org/lemkin/madrid1933-english.htm (originally written in French and presented in absentia at the International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law, Madrid, October 1933); Lemkin, ‘Genocide as a Crime Under International Law’, The American Journal of International Law, 41, 1 (1946), 145–51. 11. As Lemkin wrote in his unpublished autobiography, Totally Unofficial Man (1958), ‘I defended it [i.e., cultural genocide] successfully through two drafts. It meant the destruction of the cultural pattern of a group, such as the language, the traditions, the monuments, archives, libraries, churches. In brief: the shrines of the soul of

Notes

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

191

a nation. But there was not enough support for this idea in the Committee. . . . So with a heavy heart I decided not to press for it’. Cited in John Docker, Raphael Lemkin’s History of Genocide and Colonialism (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 3. See also Schabas, ‘National Courts’, 58–59; Matthew Lippman, ‘A Road Map to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 4, 2 (2002), 183, 189. Steven L. Jacobs (ed.), Raphael Lemkin’s Thoughts on Nazi Genocide: Not Guilty? (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), henceforth referred to in the text as TNG. Raphael Lemkin, The Hitler Case (unpublished ms), henceforth referred to in the text as HC. I am very grateful to Steven Jacobs for providing me with a copy of The Hitler Case. See Martyn Housden, Hans Frank, Lebensraum and the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For a good discussion of law in the Nazi racial state see Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), chapter 7. As, for example, in the writings of Lucie Varga, Eric Voegelin, Bronislaw Malinowski, Norbert Elias and Eric Wolf. For a discussion, see Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 37–42; Dan Stone, ‘Nazism as Modern Magic: Bronislaw Malinowski’s Political Anthropology’, History and Anthropology, 14, 3 (2003), 203–18. Lemkin, ‘Genocide—A Modern Crime’, 3. See Dan Stone, ‘Genocide as Transgression’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7, 1 (2004), 45–65. Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London: Elek Books, 1956 [orig. French 1953]), 182. That centres on Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown, 1996). For a discussion of the sub-discipline of ‘perpetrator studies’ that this debate has engendered, see Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Historiography and the Perpetrators of the Holocaust’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 197–215; Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95–111. For a discussion, see Frank Bajohr, ‘Expropriation and Expulsion’, in Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust, 52–64. See, for example, Avi Beker (ed.), The Plunder of Jewish Property During the Holocaust: Confronting European History (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Confiscation of Jewish Property in Europe, 1933–1945: New Sources and Perspectives: Symposium Proceedings (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003). See TNG, 153–76. Lemkin, Axis Rule, xi. Lemkin, Axis Rule, 21–22. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942). Neumann argued (107) that ‘racism and AntiSemitism are substitutes for the class struggle. . . . The internal political value of Anti-Semitism will, therefore, never allow a complete extermination of the Jews. The foe cannot and must not disappear; he must always be held in readiness as a scapegoat for all the evils originating in the socio-political system’.

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25. Gerhard Jacoby, Racial State: The German Nationalities Policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress, 1943), 220. 26. Ibid., 244, 269. 27. Boris Shub (ed.), Hitler’s Ten Year War on the Jews (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress, World Jewish Congress, 1943), 301, 302. 28. Lemkin, Axis Rule, 78, 81. 29. Aldous Huxley, ‘Emperor-Worship Up to Date’ (1935), in David Bradshaw (ed.), The Hidden Huxley (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 193.

3

Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Historiography

1. Steven E. Aschheim, ‘On Saul Friedländer’, History & Memory 9, 1&2 (1997), 38. My thanks to Paul Betts, Amos Goldberg, Wulf Kansteiner, Dirk Moses and Christian Wiese for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. On memory in Friedländer’s work, see Karolin Machtans, ‘History and Memory: Saul Friedländer’s Historiography of the Shoah’, in Martin L. Davies and Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds.), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 199–207; Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 6; Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939– 1945 (London: HarperCollins, 2007), xiii–xxvi; Friedländer, ‘Eine integrierte Geschichte des Holocaust’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 14–15 (2 April 2007), 7–14. On the relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in Friedländer’s work, see also Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Modernist Holocaust Historiography: A Dialogue between Saul Friedländer and Hayden White’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 203–29. 3. Saul Friedländer, ‘Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism’, in Peter Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990), 94, 99. 4. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Berel Lang, The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Berel Lang, Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005); Berel Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988); Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Dan Diner Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse: Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007); Moshe Postone and Eric Santner (eds.), Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen and Bernd Stiegler (eds.), Shoah: Formen der Erinnerung. Geschichte, Philosophie, Literatur, Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996). 5. Aschheim, ‘On Saul Friedländer’, 17.

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6. Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). See also Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 31. 7. Nicholas Berg, ‘The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Research and Memory’, in Moshe Zimmermann (ed.), On Germans and Jews under the Nazi Regime: Essays by Three Generations of Historians (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006), 87. 8. Which is one of the aims of Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology. 9. Berg, ‘The Holocaust and the West German Historians’, 102. 10. More detail can be found in Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, chapter 6; Peter Baldwin, ‘The Historikerstreit in Context’, in Peter Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past, 3–37; Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Jörn Rüsen, ‘The Logic of Historicization: Metahistorical Reflections on the Debate between Friedländer and Broszat’, History & Memory, 9, 1&2 (1997), 113–44. 11. Berg, ‘The Holocaust and the West German Historians’, 103. 12. Ibid. 13. Friedländer, ‘Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Socialism’, 89. 14. Martin Broszat/Saul Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism’, New German Critique, 44 (1988), 106–07. 15. Saul Friedländer, ‘Introduction’, in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xxxii–xxxiii. 16. Saul Friedländer, ‘Trauma, Memory and Transference’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 259. 17. Aschheim, ‘On Saul Friedländer’, 44–59. Cf. Gulie Ne’eman Arad, “‘Nazi Germany and the Jews”: Reflections on a Beginning, a Middle, and an Open End’, History & Memory 9, 1&2 (1997), 420, where she speaks of Friedländer’s decision ‘to return to this history qua history. . .’ 18. See especially Karl-Heinz Roth, ‘Revisionist Tendencies in Historical Research into German Fascism’, International Review of Social History, 39 (1994), 429–55; Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 205ff. 19. Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 93. Or, as Kershaw notes (in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 289), ‘the implications of historicization might be less serious both in theory and in practice than Friedländer fears’. 20. Gerhard L. Weinberg, ‘Two Separate Issues? Historiography of World War II and the Holocaust’, in David Bankier and Dan Michman (eds.), Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 379–401. 21. ‘Idyllic law of narrative’ comes from Sarah Kofman, Paroles suffoquées (Paris: Galilée, 1987), 43. 22. Friedländer, ‘Trauma, Memory, and Transference’, 261. 23. Ibid., 262. 24. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, xix, cited in Alon Confino, ‘Narrative Form and Historical Sensation: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination’, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 199–219. 25. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, xvii.

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26. See, for example, Friedländer, ‘On the Possibility of the Holocaust: An Approach to a Historical Synthesis’, in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich (eds.), The Holocaust as Historical Experience: Essays and a Discussion (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), 1–21; ‘From Anti-Semitism to Extermination: A Historiographical Study of Nazi Policies toward the Jews and an Essay in Interpretation’, in François Furet (ed.), Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 3–31; ‘The Extermination of the European Jews in Historiography: Fifty Years Later’, in Alvin H. Rosenfeld (ed.), Thinking about the Holocaust after Fifty Years (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 3–17. 27. See my ‘The Holocaust and Its Historiography’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 373–99. In general on perpetrators, see Mark Roseman, ‘Beyond Conviction? Perpetrators, Ideas and Action in the Holocaust in Historiographical Perspective’, in Frank Biess, Mark Roseman and Hanna Schissler (eds.), Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 83–103; and references in Chapters 1 and 2. 28. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, 4–5; see also 64. 29. Amos Goldberg, ‘The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History’, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 222. 30. Shoshana Felman, ‘Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust’, Critical Inquiry, 27, 2 (2001), 201–38. 31. Goldberg, ‘The Victim’s Voice’. 32. Ibid. See also Amos Goldberg, Holocaust Diaries as Life Stories (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004). 33. Confino, ‘Narrative Form and Historical Sensation’. 34. Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 49. 35. Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, 295. 36. Raul Hilberg, ‘I Was Not There’, in Berel Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 25. 37. Friedländer, Memory, History, 132. 38. Lynn Hunt, ‘Introduction: History, Culture, and Text’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), p. 12; Alon Confino, ‘A World without Jews: Interpreting the Holocaust’, German History, 27, 4 (2009), 531–59. 39. Amos Goldberg, ‘Trauma, Narrative, and Two Forms of Death’, Literature and Medicine, 25, 1 (2006), 122–41, here at 132 and 124. 40. Joseph Goebbels, ‘Die Juden sind Schuld!’, Das Reich (16 November 1941), cited in Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 210. 41. Arne Johan Vetlesen, Evil and Human Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72. 42. Edmond Jabès, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 12. 43. For some of Friedländer’s thoughts on this issue, see his ‘Mosse’s Influence on the Historiography of the Holocaust’, in Stanley G. Payne, David J. Sorkin and John S. Tortorice (eds.), What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 134–47.

Notes

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44. Most notably Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Also Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Lutz Hachmeister, Der Gegnerforscher: Die Karriere des SS-Führers Franz Alfred Six (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1998). 45. Karin Orth, Die Konzentrationslager-SS: Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004); Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002); Isabel Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptampt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). 46. For example, George C. Browder, ‘Perpetrator Character and Motivation: An Emerging Consensus?’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 17, 3 (2003), 480–97; Edward B. Westermann, ‘Shaping the Police Soldier as an Instrument for Annihilation’, in Alan E. Steinweis and Daniel E. Rogers (eds.), The Impact of Nazism: New Perspectives on the Third Reich and Its Legacy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 129–50; Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Controlled Escalation: Himmler’s Men in the Summer of 1941 and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Territories’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 21, 2 (2007), 218–42. 47. See, for example, Jürgen Matthäus, ‘Georg Heuser—Routinier des sicherheitspolizeilichen Osteinsatzes’, in Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Gerhard Paul (eds.), Karrieren der Gewalt: Nationalsozialistische Täterbiographien (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004), 115–25. 48. Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 49. Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 14–15. Michael Geyer, ‘Des zur Organisation erhobene Burgfrieden. Heeresrüstung und das Problem des Militarismus in der Weimarer Republik’, in K.J. Müller and E. Opitz (eds.), Militär und Militarismus in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 27. On ‘Erfahrungsgeschichte’ see Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘Die drei Sinnbildungsebenen der Geschichtsschreibung’, in Klaus E. Müller and Jörn Rüsen (eds.), Historische Sinnbildung: Problemstellung, Zeitkonzepte, Wahrnehmungshorizonte, Darstellungsstrategien (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997), 98–117, and the other works by Ankersmit listed on 116–17 n2 in that article. 50. Kühne, Kameradschaft, 19. 51. Ibid., 97. 52. Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbstermächtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2007), 68. 53. Michael Wildt, ‘Gewalt als Partizipation: Der Nationalsozialismus als Ermächtigungsregime’, in Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt (eds.), Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes. Historische Perspektiven (Götiingen: Wallstein, 2008), 239. 54. Eelco Runia, ‘Burying the Dead, Creating the Past’, History and Theory, 46, 3 (2007), 319. 55. Runia, ‘Burying the Dead’, 318. 56. Ibid. 57. Anita Kasabova, ‘Memory, Memorials, and Commemoration’, History and Theory, 47, 3 (2008), 331–50 is a critique of Runia’s work.

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Notes

58. On sense and non-sense, see Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte’, in Müller and Rüsen (eds.), Historische Sinnbildung, 79–97. 59. For more detail, see my ‘Holocaust Historiography and Cultural History’, Dapim: Studies on the Shoah, 23 (2009), 52–68, and responses to the article in the same issue by Carolyn J. Dean, Federico Finchelstein, Dominick LaCapra, Wendy Lower and Dan Michman. 60. See Chapter 4. 61. Saul Friedländer, ‘On the Representation of the Shoah in Present-Day Western Culture’, in Yehuda Bauer (ed.), Remembering for the Future (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989), vol. 3, 3097. 62. Saul Friedländer, ‘Introduction’, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 19–20. 63. Friedländer, Memory, History, 5–6.

4


1. Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939), 238. 2. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999). 3. J.L. Talmon, ‘Mission and Testimony: The Universal Significance of Modern AntiSemitism’, in J.L. Talmon, The Unique and the Universal: Some Historical Reflections (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965), 163. 4. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 15; Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice: in Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism’, Political Theory, 20, 2 (1992), 202–46. 5. Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), 327–56. See also Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996); Kenan Malik, ‘Making a Difference: Culture, Race and Social Policy’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39, 4 (2005), 361–78; Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For a thoughtful discussion of the ‘postessentialist’ problem, that is, ‘how to get away from the negative consequences of identity politics without simply returning to notions of universalism, Reason, and the unified subject’, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), epilogue (here 237). 6. See my ‘Ontology or Bureaucracy? Hannah Arendt’s Early Interpretation of the Holocaust’, in History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), 53–69. 7. Cited in Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House, 2000), 44. 8. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (1919), cited in Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (London: John Murray, 2002), 39. 9. Shiraz Dossa, ‘Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 13, 2 (1980), 309–23. For the term animal laborans, as well as the other human types described by Arendt, Homo faber, and animal rationale, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). See also Mary G. Dietz, ‘Arendt and the Holocaust’, in Dana

Notes

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–109 for a convincing discussion of the importance of the terms developed in The Human Condition as a response to the Holocaust; Richard Shorten, ‘Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism: Moral Equivalence and Degrees of Evil in Modern Political Violence’, in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 173–90 for a demonstration of the fact that Arendt’s categories developed with reference to Stalinism and Nazism can be used to think about nineteenth-century imperialism. It is also worth noting, as Ira Katznelson points out, that Arendt’s Eurocentrism was ‘not celebratory’, but was meant to act as an impetus for Europe to set its house in order. See his Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 70. See also Alfons Söllner, ‘Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in its Original Context’, European Journal of Political Theory, 3, 2 (2004), 219–38, and Pascal Grosse, ‘From Colonialism to National Socialism to Postcolonialism: Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism’, Postcolonial Studies, 9, 1 (2006), 35–52. Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 4 March 1951, in Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (eds.), Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992), 166. For discussions see Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 88–100; Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 11–38. Arendt to Jaspers, 17 December 1946, in Arendt/Jaspers Correspondence, 69. See Tony Barta, ‘On Pain of Extinction: Laws of Nature and History in Darwin, Marx, and Arendt’, in King and Stone (eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, 87–105. Hannah Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)’, in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Uncollected and Unpublished Works by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 316. Arendt, ‘Mankind and Terror’, 304. Arendt, ‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism’, in Essays in Understanding, 340. Ibid., 341. Arendt, ‘Mankind and Terror’, 305. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979), 458. It is important here to note Eric Voegelin’s criticism of Arendt in his important review of Origins: ‘A “nature” cannot be changed or transformed; a “change of nature” is a contradiction of terms; tampering with the “nature” of a thing means destroying the thing.’ For Voegelin this suggested that Arendt had adopted the same ‘immanentist ideology’ as the ‘totalitarians’. See ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, The Review of Politics, 15, 1 (1953), 74–75. However, Arendt’s response seems to me entirely justified, not just when she argued that the ‘problem of the relationship between essence and existence in Occidental thought seems to me to be a bit more complicated and controversial than Voegelin’s statement on “nature” (identifying a “thing as a thing” and therefore incapable of change by definition) implies’, but also in her assertion that she was not advocating such a change but only recognising that the attempt to change human nature (irrespective of whether this is possible) was the aspiration of totalitarian regimes. Arendt’s ‘A Reply to Voegelin’ is in The

198

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

Notes Review of Politics, 15, 1 (1953), 76–84 and is reprinted in Essays in Understanding, 401–08. Ulrich Herbert (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen (Frankfurt/M: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998); Christian Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998); Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1999). Christian Gerlach, ‘The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and Hitler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate all European Jews’, Journal of Modern History, 70, 4 (1998), 759–812. See also Gerlach’s response to critics in Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, 155–66, and, for a different approach, Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26–57. See also Bogdan Musial, ‘The Origins of “Operation Reinhard”: The Decision-Making Process for the Mass Murder of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement’, Yad Vashem Studies, 28 (2000), 113–53; Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2002). Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (London: Picador, 1999), 17. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (London: HarperCollins, 1992). Statement of Kurt Werner in Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess (eds.), ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by the Perpetrators and Bystanders (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993), 67. See also Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), for more examples. Alain Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue: essai sur le XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 69. See also Alon Confino, ‘Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust’, History & Memory, 17, 1&2 (2005), 296–322. Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern’, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds.), Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106. Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue, 110–11. Jankiel Wiernik, ‘One Year in Treblinka’, in Lawrence L. Langer (ed.), Art from the Ashes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 30–31. See my ‘Modernity and Violence: Theoretical Reflections on the Einsatzgruppen’, in History, Memory and Mass Atrocity, 1–14. For useful studies on the social psychology of genocide see Steven K. Baum, ‘A Bell Curve of Hate?’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 4 (2004), 567–77; Herbert C. Kelman, ‘Violence without Moral Restraint: Reflections on the Dehumanization of Victims and Victimizers’, Journal of Social Issues, 29, 4 (1973), 25–61; John M. Darley, ‘Social Organization for the Production of Evil’, Psychological Inquiry, 3, 2 (1992), 199–218; Albert Bandura, ‘Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 3 (1999), 193–209. See my essays ‘Georges Bataille and the Interpretation of the Holocaust’ and ‘Genocide as Transgression’, in History, Memory and Mass Atrocity, 70–92 and 196–216. Jews were, of course, not the only victims of the Nazis. Among the many other victim groups, Europe’s Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) were also victims of genocide. But the peculiar drive to destroy Jews, a result of the ‘metaphysical’

Notes

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

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way in which the Nazis regarded them, can make this conceptual difference meaningful. See the drawings in Thomas Geve, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the Holocaust (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1987). Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987), 48. ˙ Rudolf Reder, ‘Bełzec’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 13 (2000), 282. Zalman Gradowski, ‘Writings’, in Ber Mark (ed.), The Scrolls of Auschwitz (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985), 175. On the ‘Scrolls’, see the essays in Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams (eds.), Inside Auschwitz: New Perspectives on Holocaust Testimony (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Alan Adelson (ed.), The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 170. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 174. Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), 330. Naomi Samson, Hide: A Child’s View of the Holocaust (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 74–75. Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 45. Pelagia Lewinska, Twenty Months at Auschwitz (1968), cited in Emil Fackenheim, ‘The Spectrum of Resistance during the Holocaust: An Essay in Description and Definition’, Modern Judaism, 2, 2 (1982), 123. Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), 1; Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham I. Katsh (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), 225, entry for 17 November 1940. Hannah Arendt, ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps’, in Essays in Understanding, 236. See also the discussion in Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 317–38; and Amos Goldberg, ‘If This Is a Man: The Image of Man in Autobiographical and Historical Writing during and after the Holocaust’, Yad Vashem Studies, 33 (2005), 381–429. On the Muselmann see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). Whilst Agamben inappropriately makes the Muselmann the figure for the Holocaust survivor on the basis of far too small a selection of texts, this is nevertheless one of the few works that have attempted a theoretical analysis of the meaning of the Muselmann. For a critique of Agamben see Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 144–94. Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente (Munich: Saur, 1987), vol. 3, 628 (entry for 2 November 1940). One should note here the tension that often occurs in Nazi rhetoric between describing Jews as ‘animals’, as Goebbels does here, and describing them, as Hitler does in my epigraph, as ‘counter-humans’, that is, something other than animals. Similarly, Himmler referred to Slavs but not to Jews as ‘human animals’. See his speech of 4 October 1943, in J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1988), vol. 3, 920. On the Holocaust as ‘salvation’, see Michael Ley, Genozid als Heilserwartung: Zum nationalsozialistischen Mord am europäischen Judentum, 2nd edn (Vienna: Picus Verlag, 1995); Michael Ley, Holokaust als Menschenopfer: Vom Christentum

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46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

Notes zur politischen Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002); Klaus Vondung, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion: Potentials and Limitations of an Analytical Concept’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6, 1 (2005), 87–95. Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 73 (‘cockroaches’), 258 (‘work’). Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (London: John Murray, 2005); and the controversial Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer, 2005). See Darryl Li, ‘Echoes of Violence’, in Nicolaus Mills and Kira Brunner (eds.), The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 117–28. For the numbers involved, see Scott Straus, ‘How Many Perpetrators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 1 (2004), 85–98. John A. Berry and Carol Pott Berry, ‘Introduction: Collecting Memory’, in John A. Berry and Carol Pott Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1999), 5. Faustin Kagame, ‘The Artificial Racialization at the Root of the Genocide’, in Berry and Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda, 73. See Mark Levene, ‘Rwanda: The Aftermath’, Patterns of Prejudice, 35, 2 (2001), 87–94. Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 55. For further discussion see Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (eds.), Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). The Cambodian genocide too provides many examples of this attack on ‘the human’, not just on individual human beings. A satisfactory analysis of Cambodian survivor testimonies requires a separate study, but for a starting point see Jean-Louis Margolin, ‘L’amémoire du génocide cambodgien, ou comment s’en débarrasser’, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, 181 (2004), 317–37. See the discussion in Christopher C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 174–75, and Berry and Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda, 113–15. Ignace Rukiramacumu in Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 47. Pio Mutungirehe in ibid. Léopord Twagirayezu in ibid., 144. Cited in Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 347–8. Thomas Kamilindi, journalist, ‘Witness Testimony’, in Berry and Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda, 16. On the international community, see Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2000); Romeo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004). Pancrace Hakizamungili in Hatzfeld, Machete Season, 21–22. Or, as Seyla Benhabib notes, in her work, ‘Arendt does not examine the philosophical step which would lead from a description of the equality of the human condition to the equality which comes from moral and political recognition. . . . The path leading from the anthropological plurality of the human condition to

Notes

62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

201

the moral and political equality of human beings in a community of reciprocal recognition remains philosophically unthematized’. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem’, in Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, 82. Robert Antelme, The Human Race (Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1992). Antelme writes (219–20): ‘there are not several human races, there is only one human race. It’s because we’re men like them that the SS will finally prove powerless before us. It’s because they shall have sought to call the unity of this human race into question that they’ll finally be crushed. . . . And we have to say that everything in the world that masks this unity, everything that places beings in situations of exploitation and subjugation and thereby implies the existence of various species of mankind, is false and mad’. Arendt, ‘A Reply to Eric Voegelin’, in Essays in Understanding, 408. Here the discussion would need to consider the writings of Georges Bataille on the one hand and Emmanuel Levinas on the other hand. There is no space here for such a discussion but, for a start, see Samuel Moyn, ‘Judaism Against Paganism: Emmanuel Levinas’s Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 1930s’, History & Memory, 10, 1 (1998), 25–58. For the text of 1950 and 1952 UNESCO statements on race, see Ashley Montagu, Race, Science and Humanity (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1963), 172–83. Also Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History: The Race Question in Modern Science (Paris: UNESCO, 1958). Arendt to Jaspers 17 August 1946, in Arendt/Jaspers Correspondence, 54. Later Arendt noted that ‘men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable’. See The Human Condition, 241. I am indebted here to Richard H. King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940– 1970 (Washington, DC/Baltimore, MD: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 313–16. See also Gilroy, Between Camps, and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), for the idea of evil as one facet of human freedom. Françoise Dastur, ‘Three Questions to Jacques Derrida’, in Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott (eds.), Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), 34. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 34–5. Jaspers to Arendt, 19 October 1946, in Arendt/Jaspers Correspondence, 62: ‘I’m not altogether comfortable with your view, because a guilt that goes beyond all criminal guilt inevitably takes on a streak of “greatness” – of satanic greatness – which is, for me, as inappropriate for the Nazis as all the talk about the “demonic” element in Hitler and so forth. It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterises them’. Hannah Arendt, ‘Fernsehgespräch mit Thilo Koch’, in Ursula Ludz (ed.), Ich will verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk (Munich: Piper, 1996), 40. Dastur, ‘Three Questions’, 35. I have discussed this in my ‘Ontology or Bureaucracy?’ Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London: Elek Books, 1956 [orig. French ed. 1953]), 286.

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Notes

77. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 25–26. 78. Agamben, The Open, 27. Cf. 37, where Agamben writes: ‘it is enough to move our field of research ahead a few decades [from Haeckel writing in the 1890s], and instead of this innocuous pale-ontological find [i.e. Homo alalus, the “ape-man”] we will have the Jew, that is, the non-man produced within the man, or the néomort and the overcomatose person, that is, the animal separated within the human body itself’. On the inappropriateness of talking about ‘beasts’ to describe human evil, see Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), 35–42. 79. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 459. Or, as the German émigré scholar Sebastian Haffner wrote about the second generation of Nazis: ‘the question arises in all seriousness as to whether these beings are still to be called men. Physically, to all appearance, they are still men; spiritually, no more.’ Germany Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany (London: Libris, 2005 [orig. 1940]), 63. For examples of Nazi theorising about the exclusion of the Jews from the definition of ‘human’ see Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich: Selected Essays (London: Routledge, 2004), 70–71.

5 Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution to Defeating It 1. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Must Democracy Use Force? Part I: Pacifism Means Suicide’, The Nation, 148, 4 (21 January 1939), 87. 2. Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 2. See also Nigel Copsey and David Renton (eds.), British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 3. David Kettler, ‘Antifascism as Ideology: Review and Introduction’, 16, online at: www.bard.edu/contestedlegacies/lib/kettler_articles.php?action= getfile&id= 362394 (accessed 14 March 2008); Dave Renton, ‘A Provisional History of AntiFascism in Britain: The Forties’, paper given to Northern Marxist Historians Group, 18 September 1996, online at: http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/old/old2.html (accessed 2 October 2012). See also, for a case study, Neil Barrett, ‘The Anti-Fascist Movement in South-East Lancashire, 1933–1940: The Divergent Experiences of Manchester and Nelson’, in Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott (eds.), Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 48–62. My claims here are not meant to suggest that British writers had no insights into the nature of fascism, only that the émigrés’ analyses were, overall, more penetrating and urgent. Compare Andrzej Olechnowicz’s comments on my views in ‘Labour Theorises Fascism: A.D. Lindsay and Harold Laski’, in Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds.), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 202–23. 4. Enzo Traverso, ‘Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism: For a Critical Historization’, New Politics, 9, 4 (2004), online at: www.wpunj.edu/∼newpol/issue36/Traverso36.htm (accessed 14 March 2008). See also Anson Rabinbach, ‘Paris, Capital of AntiFascism’, in Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn and Elliot Neaman (eds.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 182–209.

Notes

203

5. See, for example, Francis L. Carsten, ‘German Refugees in Great Britain 1933–1945: A Survey’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain: Refugees from Hitler’s Germany (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1984), 11; Ludwig Eiber, ‘Verschwiegene Bündnispartner: Die Union deutscher sozialistischer Organisationen in Großbritannien und die britische Nachrichtendienste’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 15 (1997), 68. The best evidence of the relative unimportance of Britain as a destination for the exiles is the four pages devoted to Britain out of the nearly 900 that make up Jean-Michel Palmier’s, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso, 2006), 149–53. 6. For example, Herbert Loebl, ‘Das Refugee Industries Committee: Eine wenig bekannte britische Hilfsorganisation’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 8 (1990), 220–41; Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain; Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Emigrés: The Cultural Impact of Refugees from Nazism (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002); Marion Berghahn, Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, rev edn (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). 7. Werner Röder, ‘The Political Exiles: Their Policies and Their Contribution to PostWar Reconstruction’, in Herbert Strauss and Werner Röder (eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945, Volume II Part 1: A-K. The Arts, Sciences, and Literature (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1983), xxvii–xl; Andreas Klugescheid, ‘ “His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”: Der Kampf deutschjüdischer Emigranten in den britischen Streitkräften 1939–1945’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 19 (2001), 106–27; Helga Grebing, ‘Was wird aus Deutschland nach dem Krieg? Perspektiven linkssozialistischer Emigration für den Neuaufbau Deutschlands nach dem Zusammenbruch der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 3 (1985), 43–58; Jan Foitzik, ‘Revolution und Demokratie: Zu den sofort- und Übergangsplanungen des sozialdemokratischen Exils für Deutschland 1943–1945’, Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 24, 3 (1988), 308–42; Isabelle Tombs, ‘Socialists Debate Their History from the First World War to the Third Reich: German Exiles and the British Labour Party’, in Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert and Peter Schuman (eds.), Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750– 2000 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 361–81; Marjorie Lamberti, ‘German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on “What Should Be Done with Germany after Hitler,” 1941–1945’, Central European History, 40 (2007), 279–305. 8. Röder, ‘The Political Exiles’, xxxv. 9. John P. Fox, ‘Nazi Germany and German Emigration to Great Britain’, in Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain, 38f. 10. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, 6. 11. Fox, ‘Nazi Germany and German Emigration’, 61–70. Among their most relevant publications, see Ernst Toller, I Was a German (London: John Lane, 1934); Otto Lehmann Russbüldt, Germany’s Air Force (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1935); Gerhart Seger, A Nation Terrorised (Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co., 1935); Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1943). See also Charmian Brinson, ‘The Gestapo and the German Political Exiles in Britain during the 1930s: The Case of Hans Wesemann – and Others’, German Life and Letters, 51, 1 (1998), 43–64; James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, Nazi Refugee Turned Spy: The Life of Hans Wesemann, 1895–1971

204

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

Notes (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 32–35; Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust (London: Continuum, 2000), on Seger’s internment in Oranienburg; Anson Rabinbach, ‘Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror’, New German Critique, 103 (2008), 97–126. Michael Seyfert, ‘ “His Majesty’s Most Loyal Internees”. The Internment and Deportation of German and Austrian Refugees as “Enemy Aliens”: Historical, Cultural and Literary Aspects’, in Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain, 185. Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), 156, 119. Luigi Sturzo, ‘Fascism and Nazism’, Quarterly Review, 261 (1933), 162–76. George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arthur Baker, 1936). Seldes was an American radical journalist. See also R.J.B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), Chapter 2. George Orwell, ‘Review of The Totalitarian Enemy’, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 40. Carsten too described Borkenau as ‘the eminent anti-Nazi publicist and writer’; ‘German Refugees in Britain’, 22. Orwell, ‘Review of The Totalitarian Enemy’, 42. Franz Borkenau, Austria and After (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 15. Franz Borkenau, The New German Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 11. Further references in the text. Franz Borkenau, ‘The German Problem’, Dublin Review, 209 (October 1941), 196. Victor Gollancz, ‘The Most Important Book the Club Has Issued’, Left News, 25 (May 1938), 790–91. Orwell, ‘Review of The Totalitarian Enemy’, 40. On Personalism see John Hellman, ‘From the Söhlbergkreis to Vichy’s Elite Schools: The Rise of the Personalists’, in Zeev Sternhell (ed.), The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy 1870–1945 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996), 252–65. Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 518. Further references in the text. Reviews cited by Kolnai in Twentieth-Century Memoirs (1952–55), VII, 84. Kings College London, Archives, MV29/8. Francis Dunlop, The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 137. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Die Credo der neuen Barbaren’, Oesterreichische Volkswirt, 24 (3 September 1932), 1174. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Pacifism Means Suicide’, The Nation (21 January 1939), 88. Aurel Kolnai, The Pivotal Principles of NS Ideology (handwritten ms, 1939), 3. University of St. Andrews, Archives. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, 46. Kolnai, Twentieth-Century Memoirs, VII, 10. Kings College London, Archives, MV29/8. On Haffner in the context of the German exiles in Britain see Werner Röder, Die deutschen sozialistischen Exilgruppen in Großbritannien 1940–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Widerstandes gegen den Nationalsozialismus, rev. edn (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1973), 132–34. For other appraisals of Germany Jekyll and Hyde, see Jörg Thunecke, ‘ “Characterology”, Not “Ideology”: Sebastian Haffner’s Refutation of Daniel

Notes

33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

205

Goldhagen in Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (1940)’, in Ian Wallace (ed.), GermanSpeaking Exiles in Great Britain [=Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, 1 (1999)], 75–93; Nick Hubble, ‘Franz Borkenau, Sebastian Haffner and George Orwell: Depoliticisation and Cultural Exchange’, in Edward Timms and Jon Hughes (eds.), Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation: Refugees from National Socialism in the English-Speaking World (Vienna: Springer, 2003), 109–27. Sebastian Haffner, Germany Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany (London: Libris, 2005), 5. Further references in the text. [Orig. London: Secker and Warburg, 1940.] Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39, 2 (2004), 242. Jonathan Petropoulos, ‘The Nazi Kleptocracy: Reflections on Avarice and the Holocaust’, and Frank Bajohr, ‘Cliques, Corruption, and Organised Self-Pity: The Nazi Movement and the Property of the Jews’, both in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, vol. VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 29–38 and 39–49. On the Frankfurt School, especially Friedrich Pollock’s view of Nazism as a ‘racket’, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996 [1973]), 156–57. Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: The Harvill Press, 1996). Lothar Kettenacker, ‘The Influence of German Refugees on British War Aims’, in Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain, 106. Neal Ascherson, ‘Introduction’, in Germany Jekyll and Hyde, xviii; Kettenacker, ‘The Influence of German Refugees’, 108–09. Kettler, ‘Antifascism as Ideology’, 5. Traverso, ‘Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism’, 6. See Andrzej Olechnowicz, ‘Liberal Anti-Fascism in the 1930s: The Case of Sir Ernest Barker’, Albion, 36, 4 (2004), 636–60, for an example from Britain, and Peter Monteath, ‘A Day to Remember: East Germany’s Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism’, German History, 26, 2 (2008), 195–218, for the ways in which the GDR’s official ceremony has been taken over and developed by grassroots movements since the demise of the regime. See also George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 100–12, for an interesting consideration of this point. See Jeffrey C. Isaac, ‘Critics of Totalitarianism’, in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192, for broader context. Aurel Kolnai, Twentieth-Century Memoirs, Kings College London Archives, MV29/8, 72–73, 77. Anthony Glees, ‘The German Political Exile in London 1939–1945: The SPD and the British Labour Party’, in Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain, 98.

6 The Mein Kampf Ramp: Emily Overend Lorimer and the Publication of Mein Kampf in Britain 1. Evan John, Answer to Hitler: Reflections on Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and on Some Recent Events Upon the Continent of Europe (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1939), 6.

206

Notes

2. Milan Hauner, ‘Did Hitler Want a World Dominion?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13, 1 (1978), 16. On the reception of Mein Kampf in Germany see Werner Maser, Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf: Geschichte, Auszüge, Kommentare (Esslingen: Bechtle, 1974); G. Schreiber, Hitler-Interpretationen 1923–1983: Ergebnisse, Methoden und Probleme der Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988); Barbara Zehnpfennig, Hitlers Mein Kampf: Eine Interpretation (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002); Othmar Plöckinger, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf’ 1922–1945 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2006). Maser, Schreiber and Plöckinger also deal with the reception of Mein Kampf in other countries, as does Detlev Clemens, Herr Hitler in Germany: Wahrnehmung und Deutungen des Nationalsozialismus in Großbritannien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 330–43, though none mentions Lorimer. 3. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942), 381. Neumann’s position was a reflection of his orthodox Marxism; as he wrote to T.W. Adorno in 1940, ‘I can imagine, and I have done this in my book, that one can represent National Socialism without attributing to the Jewish problem a central role.’ Cited in Anson Rabinbach, ‘ “Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?” The Place of Antisemitism in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment’, in Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (eds.), Adorno: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 136–37. For an attempt to take Hitler seriously as a thinker, see Lawrence Birken, Hitler as Philosophe: Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). 4. John, Answer to Hitler, 12. To be fair to John, he did go on to note that Hitler’s writing in Mein Kampf on the Jews were extreme. But for John, this represented an aberration in Hitler’s thought rather than its centrepiece. 5. Bell to father, 18 March 1911 and to mother 21 March 1911, in Gertrude Bell Papers, University of Newcastle, online at: www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk (accessed 4 October 2005). 6. British Library, Oriental and India Office, MSS Eur.F177/38, Lorimer Papers, Lorimer to Mrs Overend, 24 October 1932 and 31 October 1932. 7. E.O. Lorimer, What Hitler Wants (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939 [Penguin Special no. 13]), 36, citing her notes from 31 October 1932. Henceforth referred to in the text as WHW. 8. See Calvin B. Hoover, Germany Enters the Third Reich (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), 95. 9. For a good contemporary discussion of Moeller van den Bruck, see Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938). 10. ‘Translator’s Note’, Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire, trans. E.O. Lorimer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), n.p. 11. See, for example, Ewald Banse, Germany, Prepare for War!, trans. Alan Harris (London: Lovat Dickson, 1935); Edgar Mowrer, Germany Puts the Clock Back (London: John Lane, 1933); Hoover, Germany Enters the Third Reich; Robert Dell, Germany Unmasked (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934); Leland Stowe, Nazi Germany Means War (London: Faber & Faber, 1933); Dorothy Woodman, Hitler Rearms: An Exposure of Germany’s War Aims (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1934); Vernon Bartlett, Nazi Germany Explained (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933); Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism (London: Methuen & Co., 1934); Wickham Steed, The Meaning of Hitlerism (London: Nisbet & Co., 1934); The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933); The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany (London: Victor

Notes

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

207

Gollancz, 1936). For a discussion of these and other contemporaries see Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). ‘Publishers’ Preface’ to Banse, Germany, Prepare for War!, xiv. Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1933). Philip Guedalla, The Jewish Past: Presidential Address Delivered Before the Jewish Historical Society of England in the Botanical Theatre, University College London, 21 November, 1938 (London, 1939), 7. E.C. Bentley, ‘Hitler on the Hitler Spirit’ (review of English translation of Mein Kampf ), Daily Telegraph (13 October 1933). E.O. Lorimer, ‘Hitler’s Germany’, John O’London’s Weekly (11 November 1933). Germany’s Foreign Policy as Stated in Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (London: Friends of Europe, 1936), FoE pamphlet 38, with a preface by the Duchess of Atholl. Lorimer cites Atholl’s foreword in WHW, 10: ‘The English edition . . . is only about one-third of Mein Kampf. . . . It unblushingly mistranslates passages of which an accurate rendering would have been disconcerting to English readers. No one therefore who reads My Struggle can have any idea of the foreign policy set forth in the original.’ R.C.K. Ensor, Hitler’s Self-Disclosure in Mein Kampf, Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939); idem., ‘Review of Mein Kampf, unexpurgated edition’, Spectator (24 March 1939). This was not entirely fair. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes note in Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History 1930–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 13–14, that in Dugdale’s translation, ‘Above all, he [Hitler] is presented so as not to appear ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners. Notwithstanding this whitewash, Hitler’s main ideas and policies remain intact, including foreign expansion in the future; the rebuilding of German idealism and self-confidence; Germany’s need for strong leadership; the need to manipulate the mass electorate through propaganda; the eternal struggle against Bolshevism and the Jews; the ultimate repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles; and the role which the Nazis hoped to play in the rebirth of the German state.’ For other relevant contemporary discussions of Mein Kampf, mostly from outside Britain, see: C. Appuhn, Hitler par lui-même d’après son livre ‘Mein Kampf’ (Paris: Haumont, 1933); Irene Hamand, His Struggle: An Answer to Hitler (Chicago: Artcraft Press, 1937); Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Our Battle: Being One Man’s Answer to My Battle (Mein Kampf) by Adolf Hitler (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938); Herbert N. Casson, L’Europe après Hitler. La réponse à Mein Kampf (Brussels: np, c.1938); A.P. Mayville, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Present War: A Critical Survey of the Nazi Bible of Hate and Its Effect on Pre-War Events in Germany from Which Emanated the Impending Cataclysm of the World (New York: American Goodwill Association, 1939); John, Answer to Hitler; Karl Billinger, Hitler Is No Fool: The Menace of the Man and His Program (New York: Modern Age Books, 1939); Francis Hackett, What ‘Mein Kampf’ Means to America (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941). Mein Kampf also inspired other rejoinders such as Richard Acland, Unser Kampf: Our Struggle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940 [Penguin Special no. 54]), the curious Richard Ferrar Patterson, Mein Rant: A Summary in Light Verse of ‘Mein Kampf’ (London: Blackie & Son, 1940), and the hilarious Unexpurgated, Unpurged, Unspeakable Edition of Mein Rampf (Little Goering, Gobbles: Fumpf & Itmar, A.G., 1939). E.T.S. Dugdale, ‘National Socialism in Germany’, English Review, 53 (1931), 566–67. And for more on Dugdale see Barnes and Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf,

208

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

Notes 2–8. Barnes and Barnes do not mention Lorimer in their otherwise quite thorough survey. Letter from Arnold Hyde in Manchester Guardian (19 October 1938). Time and Tide (4 February 1939). All press reviews are in F177/53 and 54. Bolton Evening News (15 April 1939); Western Telegraph (21 April 1939). Daily Worker (8 February 1939). Beneš to Lorimer, 3 January 1939, F177/50. Daly to Lorimer, 6 January 1939, F177/51. Whitehouse to Lorimer, 3 February 1939, F177/51. Strakosch to Lorimer, 22 May 1939, F177/52. Barsley to Lorimer, 30 August 1939, F177/46. Times (21 January 1939). New English Weekly (20 April 1939). On NEW see Philip Conford, ‘A Forum for Organic Husbandry: The New English Weekly and Agricultural Policy, 1939–1949’, Agricultural History Review, 46, 2 (1998), 197–210. Letter in New English Weekly (22 April 1939), F177/85. Lorimer to Hyde, 24 April 1939, F177/85. On the publication of the competing American editions see Barnes and Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America, ch. 5. Hyde to Lorimer, 30 April 1939, F177/51. For examples of authors for whom such conclusions were neither ‘inconceivable’ nor ‘rather dramatic’ see James Strachey, The Menace of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933); W.A. Rudlin, The Growth of Fascism in Great Britain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935); G.T. Garratt, The Shadow of the Swastika (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938). See also Christina Bussfeld, ‘Democracy versus Dictatorship’: Die Herausforderung des Faschismus und Kommunismus in Großbritannien 1932–1937 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002), 167–94. E.O. Lorimer, ‘Men and Books’, Time and Tide (1 April 1939), 422. Ibid., 423. Ibid. See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, unexpurgated edition, trans. James Murphy (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939). See, among his many publications: Adolf Hitler: The Drama of His Career (London: Chapman & Hall, 1934); idem., ‘The Spirit of the New German Army’, English Review, 62, 4 (1936), 435–43. On Murphy see Barnes and Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America, especially 51–72, and idem., James Vincent Murphy: Translator and Interpreter of Fascist Europe (New York: University Press of America, 1987). Barnes’ and Barnes’ detailed investigations into Murphy’s life and career reveal that he was actually not a Nazi, as Lorimer believed. Nevertheless, their biography does tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. For example, they describe him (Murphy, 179) as ‘a minor cog in the complicated machine, but from this position he was able to witness the Nazi administration from the inside.’ They do acknowledge that he was ambivalent towards Nazism, and was to a degree antisemitic; yet, even though with his Irish passport Murphy may have been right to believe that ‘he could always leave if things didn’t work to his satisfaction’ (ibid., 190) it is hard to see how someone could take a job at Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda in a purely disinterested manner. Nevertheless, on his return to Britain he was keen to stress his anti-Nazi credentials, and his expertise in analysing Germany and Italy which long predated the rise of Nazism, and there is no sense that the authorities regarded him with suspicion. Unlike one of his predecessors in Berlin, Cola Ernest Carroll, who founded

Notes

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

209

the Anglo-German Review in 1936, he was not interned under Regulation 18B (ibid., 169). Vansittart to Lorimer, 25 August 1941, F177/85. ‘Must We Always Be Fools?’, typescript for Never Again Association, 8 June 1941, F177/75. E.O. Lorimer, What the German Needs (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942); For Lorimer’s 1943 articles for ‘Miniform’ – ‘We – the Germans’; ‘The Soul of the German’; ‘Two Protectorates’; ‘The Religion of the Germans Is the Religion of Satan’; ‘Two World Wars’ – see F177/76. For Vansittart’s views see his Black Record: Germans, Past and Present (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941). The best discussion is in E.H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 5: ‘The Battle of the Books’. King’s College, London, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Bryant Papers C41 and C49. See Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939, 144–45, for a fuller discussion. On Ashridge and its role in interwar Conservatism, see Clarisse Berthezène, ‘Creating Conservative Fabians: The Conservative Party, Political Education and the Founding of Ashridge College’, Past and Present, 182 (2004), 211–40. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism, 147–48. See also Andrew Roberts, ‘Patriotism: The Last Refuge of Sir Arthur Bryant’ in his Eminent Churchillians (London: Phoenix, 1995), 287–322. E.O. Lorimer, ‘The Mein Kampf Ramp’, typed memorandum, F177/85. Arthur Bryant, Unfinished Victory (London: Macmillan, 1940); Time and Tide, 10 February 1940. For a discussion of the reception of Unfinished Victory and of Bryant’s relationship with Macmillan see Richard Griffiths, ‘The Reception of Bryant’s Unfinished Victory: Insights into British Public Opinion in Early 1940’, Patterns of Prejudice, 38, 1 (2004), 18–36. Lorimer, ‘The Mein Kampf Ramp’. Ibid. In the United States the debate centred on whether Houghton Mifflin & Co. and Hitler were the American copyright owners of Mein Kampf, or whether, as rival publishers Stackpole Sons, Inc. argued, Hitler had declared himself to be a ‘stateless man’ and therefore not a citizen of any country with which the US had a copyright agreement. The rival 1939 ‘unexpurgated’ editions brought out by Reynal & Hitchcock under licence from Houghton Mifflin and Stackpole Sons competed for the market until, on appeal, the courts upheld Houghton Mifflin’s argument that they were the legitimate copyright holders, thus preventing further sales of the Stackpole edition. Stackpole Sons made great play of the fact that they were donating all royalties to refugees funds, but Houghton Mifflin also promised that, after the deduction of royalties from their net receipts (as with Hutchinson) they would donate the profits to refugees from Nazi Germany. See the Times, 1 March 1939 and 14 June 1939 for discussions. And, for a fuller discussion, Barnes and Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America, 73–134. Lorimer to ‘Dix’, 13 May 1942, F177/46. ‘Review of Anthony M. Ludovici, The Future of Women and Ray Strachey, ed., Our Freedom and Its Results’, Listener (6 January 1937). On Ludovici see Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), ch. 2.

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Notes

50. Letter of 22 August 1940, F177/46. 51. J.L. Garvin, ‘The Truth’, Observer (19 March 1939), 6.

7


1. Rolf Gardiner, ‘A Birthday Speech’ (1962), in Andrew Best (ed.), Water Springing from the Ground: An Anthology of the Writings of Rolf Gardiner (Fontmell Magna: Springhead, 1972), 249. Henceforth WSG. 2. Patrick Wright, The Village That Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 156. My reproduction of this quotation should not obscure the fact that Wright presents a full and balanced portrayal of Gardiner, though to my mind it is overly sympathetic. 3. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Mike Tyldesley, ‘The German Youth Movement and National Socialism: Some Views from Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41, 1 (2006), 21–34. 4. See David Fowler, Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c.1920–c.1970: From Ivory Tower to Global Movement. A New History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 5. Richard Moore-Colyer, ‘Back to Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H. J. Massingham and “A Kinship in Husbandry”’, Rural History, 12, 1 (2001), 85–108; idem., ‘Rolf Gardiner, English Patriot and the Council for the Church and Countryside’, Agricultural History Review, 49, 2 (2001), 187–209; idem., ‘A Northern Federation? Henry Rolf Gardiner and British and European Youth’, Paedagogica Historica, 39, 3 (2003), 305–24. I am grateful to Professor Moore-Colyer for a copy of the lastmentioned article. It should be noted that in a more recent, jointly-authored article, he writes: ‘That Wallop and Gardiner were personally close and sympathetic to aspects of fascism there can be no doubt.’ Richard Moore-Colyer and Philip Conford, ‘A “Secret Society”? The Internal and External Relations of the Kinship in Husbandry, 1941–52’, Rural History, 15, 2 (2004), 201. Gerard Wallop was Viscount Lymington, later Earl of Portsmouth. 6. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Meditations on the Future of Northern Europe’, in Rolf Gardiner and Heinz Rocholl (eds.), Britain and Germany: A Frank Discussion Instigated by Members of the Younger Generation (London: Williams and Norgate, 1928), 123. 7. Ibid., 126–27. 8. Ibid., 127–28. See also Rolf Gardiner, ‘Englische Tradition und die Zukunft’, in Wilhelm Freiherr von Richtofen (ed.), Brito-Germania: Ein Weg zu Paneuropa? Warum wieder Weltkrieg? (Berlin: Verlag für aktuelle Politik, 1930), 20–38 for similar comments. 9. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1918), in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1991) 128. 10. Gardiner, ‘The Future of Wessex’ (1946), WSG, 183. 11. Gardiner, ‘Universities and Relevance’, WSG, 22. 12. See W.J. Keith, ‘Spirit of Place and Genius Loci: D. H. Lawrence and Rolf Gardiner’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 7, 2 (1974), 127–38; David Bradshaw, ‘Red Trousers: Lady Chatterley’s Lover and John Hargrave’, Essays in Criticism, 55, 4 (2005), 352–73. 13. Rolf Gardiner, ‘The Musikheim, Frankfurt an der Oder’, North Sea and Baltic (1930), 10. 14. Walter Z. Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 243. It is a measure of Gardiner’s

Notes

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

211

significance that a book entitled Young Germany devotes several pages to him. Gardiner also receives a brief mention in Howard Becker, German Youth: Bond or Free? (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1946), 70 n11. See also George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970) and Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a ‘Third Force’ in Pre-Nazi Germany (London: Orbach & Chambers, 1971) for relevant contextual information. See, for example, E.Y. Hartshorne, German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941) and, for the same claim made from a pro-Nazi position, Paul Gierlichs, German Youth: The Making of Nazis (London: np, 1939). Peter D. Stachura, The German Youth Movement 1900–1945: An Interpretative and Documentary History (London: Methuen 1981), 63, 67. Malcolm Chase, “‘North Sea and Baltic”: Historical Conceptions in the Youth Movement and the Transfer of Ideas from Germany to England in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann (eds.), Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750–2000 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 309–30, here 327. Leslie Paul, The Annihilation of Man: A Study of the Crisis in the West (London: Faber and Faber, 1944). Rolf Gardiner, ‘Correspondence’, The Adelphi, 8, 1 (1934), 64. This was a response to Paul’s article ‘The Decline of the Youth Movement’, The Adelphi, 7, 5 (1934), 317–27. See Paul, ‘The Decline of the Youth Movement’; Gardiner, ‘Correspondence’; Paul, The Annihilation of Man; idem., Angry Young Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 205–06. For a discussion see Tyldesley, ‘The German Youth Movement and National Socialism’. Rolf Gardiner, ‘The Outlook of Young Germany’ (1929), 3, Cambridge University Library, Rolf Gardiner Papers (henceforth RGP), A3/1/1. I am grateful to Mrs Rosalind Richards for permission to cite from her father’s papers, and to Cambridge University Library’s Special Collections Department for their help with accessing them. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Stroemungen des englischen kulturellen und politischen Lebens’ (no date, c.1933), 1, 5, RGP A2/6. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 21. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Die Wende des englischen Volkes’ (no date, c.1933), 1, 18, RGP A2/6. Ibid., 33–34. Rolf Gardiner, letter to the Times, no date (c.1933), RGP A2/6. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Karl Marx and Young Germany’ (no date, c.1932), RGP A3/1/2(b); idem., ‘Die deutsche Revolution von England gesehen’, in Rolf Gardiner, Arvid Brodersen and Karl Wyser (eds.), Nationalsozialismus vom Ausland gesehen: an die Gebildeten unter seinen Gegnern (Berlin: Verlag die Runde, 1933), 15. Gardiner was here rather ill-informed about European history – Jews have been present in the lands now called ‘France’ and ‘Germany’ long before the states that bore those names came into being. But of course, this sort of fact-correcting is hardly the right way to combat antisemitism, as Hannah Arendt noted in the 1930s. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Antisemitism’, in Jerome Kohn

212

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

Notes and Ron H. Feldman (eds.), The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 49. Rolf Gardiner, England Herself: Ventures in Rural Restoration (London: Faber & Faber, 1943), 7. Rolf Gardiner, ‘A Survey of Constructive Aspects of the New Germany. With Some Notes and Suggestions as to the Methods of Projection’ (June 1934), 15, 16. RGP M3/7. Ibid., 27, 37, 44. Ibid., 43. See also in the same file, ‘An English Centre of German Propaganda’. Gardiner to Goebbels, 25 April 1933. RGP A2/6. See Frank Trentmann, ‘Gardiner, (Henry) Rolf (1902–71)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See Goetsch’s letter to Gardiner, 13 August 1939, RGP E2/4, where he explains his commitment to the Nazi regime, noting that ‘There is young [sic] generation in Germany which is obviously willing to carry out on a large scale and bring into national reality, what my friends and myself searched for all our lives and tried out in preliminary activities in smaller groups.’ The letter was written from Farleigh Wallop, Lymington’s estate in Hampshire. Gardiner, England Herself, 73. Laqueur, Young Germany, 243. On this issue, see my Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ch. 4. Gardiner to Alan (surname unknown), 17 November 1930. RGP A2/6. See also Gardiner, ‘Wisdom and Action in Northern Europe’ (n.d., c.1926-27), RGP A3/1/10(b), where he writes that ‘Between the Adriatic and the Arctic, the Vistula and the Atlantic, there is a hidden kingdom to which we all, Scandinavians, Germans and English belong in our blood and our souls. This is a positive, organic kinship, slumbering within us, not an abstract brotherhood imposed by the ideal will.’ Rolf Gardiner, ‘Stroemungen des englischen Kulturellen und politischen Lebens’, 12 (‘Die Union Jack plus Fussballmasse plus Windhundwettrenindustrie, – das ist ungefähr the “Blackshirt Movement”’). Rolf Gardiner, ‘Youth and Europe’ (1923), WSG, 19–21. Moore-Colyer, ‘A Northern Federation?’, 319. Rolf Gardiner, World Without End: British Politics and the Younger Generation (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1932), 33–34. Gardiner used the same formulation elsewhere: ‘Every country needs a form of Fascism today in order to redeem the vital impulses of society from the muddle and formlessness into which scientific liberalism and homogeneous democracy have betrayed the human soul.’ ‘The Example of Kibbo Kift’, RGP A2/6. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Germany: A Personal Confession’, Tomorrow [Dartington School magazine]’ (July 1933), 22. RGP A3/1/12. The phrase was of course Lenin’s before it was Macmurray’s. On Macmurray See Philip Conford, ‘ “Saturated with Biological Metaphors”: Professor John Macmurray (1891–1976) and The Politics of the Organic Movement’, Contemporary British History, 22, 3 (2008), 317–34. See also Richard Griffiths, ‘The Dangers of Definition: Post-Facto Opinions on Rolf Gardiner’s Attitudes towards Nazi Germany’, in Matthew Jefferies and Mike Tyldesley (eds.), Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 137–49. I use the word popularised by Roger Griffin in order to suggest that Gardiner was not so distant from fascism as he claimed. See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991) and his many publications since.

Notes

213

44. On Ludovici, see my Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), ch. 2, and on the English Array and its relationship to the BUF, see my Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939, ch. 6. 45. Moore-Colyer and Conford, ‘A “Secret Society”?’, 199. 46. Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (eds.), How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005); Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller (eds.), Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London: W. W. Norton, 2006); Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Useful surveys are provided by Frank Uekötter, ‘Green Nazis?’, German Studies Review, 30, 2 (2007), 267–87, and David Motadel, ‘The German Nature Conservation Movement in the Twentieth Century’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 1 (2008), 137–53. 47. See, for example, Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism and Conservation, 1900–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Cf. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41, 4 (2006), 595–610; Bernhard Dietz, ‘Countryside-versus-City in European Thought: German and British AntiUrbanism between the Wars’, The European Legacy, 13, 7 (2008), 801–14. 48. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Correspondence’, The Adelphi, 8, 1 (1934), 65. 49. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Farming and Forestry in an Overcrowded World’ (1966), WSG, 268. 50. Clare and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ‘The Kinship in Husbandry’, Salisbury Review, 15, 3 (1997), 36. 51. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Can Farming Save European Civilisation?’ (1950), WSG, 196. 52. For more details on the Kinship in Husbandry – names of members, its relations with other bodies, and so on – see Moore-Colyer and Conford, ‘A “Secret Society”?’ and my Responses to Nazism in Britain, 153ff. For an earlier discussion see Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 112–22. 53. Rolf Gardiner, ‘A Sermon to English Youth’, New English Weekly (4 July 1940), copy in RGP A3/6/2. 54. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Forestry and Husbandry’, in H.J. Massingham (ed.), The Natural Order: Essays in the Return to Husbandry (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1945), 130–31. See also Rolf Gardiner, ‘Rural Reconstruction’, in H.J. Massingham (ed.), England and the Farmer: A Symposium (London: B. T. Batsford, 1941), 91–107. Here he wrote of the need to focus on the local and argued (107) that ‘National-Socialist Germany set out to restore the experience of blood and soil to a rapidly urbanized nation. But the experience remained a doctrine and the blood and soil were sacrificed to the Baal of war.’ 55. Peter J. Atkins, ‘The Pasteurisation of England: The Science, Culture and Health Implications of Milk Processing, 1900–1950’, in David F. Smith and Jim Phillips (eds.), Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth Century: International and Comparative Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2000), 37–51, esp. 45–46.

214 56. 57. 58. 59.

Notes Lymington (as Gerard Wallop) to Gardiner, 11 August 1943, RGP F2/2. On this matter see Moore-Colyer and Conford, ‘A “Secret Society”?’, 196–99. Blunden to Gardiner, 6 August 1943, RGP F2/2. Chase, ‘North Sea and Baltic’, 329.

8 Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain between the Wars 1. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 162. My thanks to David Bensoussan, Susie Byers, Philip Conford and Philippe Vervaecke for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. Raymond H. Dominick III, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); Axel Goodbody (ed.), The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (eds.), How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005); Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller (eds.), Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London: W. W. Norton, 2006); Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also the forum on ‘The Nature of German Environmental History’, German History, 27, 1 (2009), 113–30. 3. Mark Antliff, ‘La cité française: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier, and Fascist Theories of Urbanism’, in Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (eds.), Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 134–70; cf. Richard A. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 4. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). But note Mark Antliff’s comments in ‘Fascism, Modernism and Modernity’, The Art Bulletin (March 2002), n13, online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0422/is_1_ 84/ai_84721212/print?tag= artBody;col1 (accessed 10 September 2008). See also Michael Thad Allen, ‘How Technology Caused the Holocaust: Martin Heidegger, West German Industrialists, and the Death of Being’, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 285–302. 5. Jean Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, Les fascismes français, 1923–1963 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1963), 108–09. 6. Marc Simard, ‘Intellectuels, fascisme et antimodernité dans la France des années trente’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, 18 (1988), 73. 7. Samuel Kalman, ‘Faisceau Visions of Physical and Moral Transformation and the Cult of Youth in Inter-War France’, European History Quarterly, 33, 3 (2003), 347. 8. Annie Moulin, Peasantry and Society in France since 1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 4; Michel Gervais, Marcel Jollivet and Yves Tavernier,

Notes

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

215

La fin de la France paysanne de 1914 à nos jours, vol. 4 of Georges Duby and Armand Wallon (eds.), Histoire de la France rurale (Paris: Seuil, 1976). Brian Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages: The County War Agricultural Committees in England, 1939–45’, Rural History, 18, 2 (2007), 217–44; Brian Short, Charles Watkins and John Martin, ‘ “The Front Line of Freedom”: State-Led Agricultural Revolution in Britain, 1939–1945’, in Brian Short, Charles Watkins and John Martin (eds.), The Front Line of Freedom: British Farming in the Second World War (Exeter: British Agricultural History Society, 2006), 1–15. A.G. Street, Feather-Bedding (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), cited in Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages’, 237. Edouard Lynch, ‘La parti socialiste et la paysannerie dans l’Entre-deux-guerres: pour une histoire des doctrines agraires et de l’action politique au village’, Ruralia, 3 (1998), online at: http://ruralia.revues.org/document54.html (accessed 10 September 2008); Edouard Lynch, Moissons rouges: les socialistes français et la société paysanne durant l’Entre-deux-guerres, 1918–1940 (Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2002); Jean Vigreux, ‘Le Parti communiste français à la campagne, 1920–1964’, Ruralia, 3 (1998), online at: http://ruralia.revues.org/document55. html (accessed 10 September 2008). Susan Carol Rogers, ‘Good to Think: The “Peasant” in Contemporary France’, Anthropological Quarterly, 60 (1987), 56, cited in Shanny Peer, ‘Peasants in France: Representations of Rural France in the 1937 International Exposition’, in Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (eds.), Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in TwentiethCentury France (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 19. See also Armand Frémont, ‘The Land’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 2: Traditions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3–35; Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 40–45; Christopher Parsons and Neil McWilliam, “‘Le Paysan de Paris”: Alfred Sensier and the Myth of Rural France’, Oxford Art Journal, 6, 2 (1983), 38–58. And, for a more recent example, Jean-Luc Mayaud, Gens de la terre: La France rurale 1880–1940 (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 2002). Gervais, Jollivet and Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne, 442; Moulin, Peasantry and Society, 151–58; Peer, ‘Peasants in France’, 43. See also Michael Heffernan, ‘Geography, Empire and National Revolution in Vichy France’, Political Geography, 24, 6 (2005), 731–58. The reality was of course somewhat different, with behaviour in certain areas, such as the Cévennes, being ‘diametrically opposed to the attitudes and behaviour that Vichy expected of its rural populations.’ See H.R. Kedward, ‘Rural France and Resistance’, in Sarah Fishman, Laura Lee Downs, Ioannis Sinanoglou, Leonard V. Smith and Robert Zaretsky (eds.), France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 126. As Kedward notes (129 and 136–37), by the time Vichy was espousing its ‘return to the land’ ideas, they were ‘already a cliché’, but so too were the almost identical images of the peasantry as the ‘fundamental embodiments of France’ being promoted by the London-based La France Libre. On the ‘immunity thesis’—the claim that France was ‘allergique au fascisme’— see Brian Jenkins, ‘The Right-Wing Leagues and Electoral Politics in Interwar France’, History Compass, 5, 4 (2007), 1359–81; Brian Jenkins (ed.), France in the Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); also Robert J. Soucy, ‘The Debate over French Fascism’, in Richard J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism’s Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since

216

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes 1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 130–51; Kevin Passmore, ‘The Croix de Feu and Fascism: A Foreign Thesis Obstinately Maintained’, in Edward J. Arnold (ed.), The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 100–18; John Bingham, ‘Defining French Fascism, Finding Fascists in France’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 29, 3 (1994), 525–43. For a modern example of the French Right’s looking to neo-fascists in Italy, and vice-versa, see Andrea Mammone, ‘The Transnational Reaction to 1968: Neo-fascist Fronts and Political Cultures in France and Italy’, Contemporary European History, 17, 2 (2008), 213–36. Bertram M. Gordon, ‘The Countryside and the City: Some Notes on the Collaboration Model during the Vichy Period’, in Fishman et al. (eds.), France at War, 145–60. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, 162. Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (London: Associated University Presses/Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1982), 277–78. David Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale: Les droites bretonnes dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 223. Jenkins, ‘The Right-Wing Leagues’, 1363. Ibid., 1367. See George L. Mosse, ‘The French Right and the Working Classes: Les Jaunes’, Journal of Contemporary History, 7, 3–4 (1972), 185–208. Richard Moore-Colyer, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”: Jorian Jenks, Organicism, the Right and the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39, 3 (2004), 353. Alex Potts, ‘ “Constable Country” between the Wars’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 2: National Fictions (London: Routledge, 1989), 166. See also Christine Berberich, “‘I Was Meditating about England”: The Importance of Rural England for the Construction of “Englishness”’, in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds.), History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 375–85. Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 196 (‘poet’); Kalman, ‘Faisceau Visions’, 345–46 (‘redemptive concepts’). Maurice Barrès, ‘Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme’, in J.S. McClelland (ed.), The French Right from de Maistre to Maurras (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 192–93 (orig. Paris: Plon, 1925). Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, 197. Ibid., 198. In these quotations, Winock is rehearsing the arguments put forward by Sternhell. Kevin Passmore, ‘The Construction of Crisis in Interwar France’, in Jenkins (ed.), France in the Era of Fascism, 162. Jenkins, ‘Conclusion: Beyond the “Fascism Debate”?’ in Jenkins (ed.) France in the Era of Fascism, 203. Alun Howkins, ‘Fascism and the Rural World in Inter-war Europe’, unpublished paper delivered at the ‘Rethinking the Rural: Land and the Nation in the 1920s and 1930s’ conference, Royal Holloway, University of London, 4–6 January 2007. My thanks to Alun Howkins for a copy of this paper. See also Theodor Bergmann,

Notes

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

217

‘Agrarian Movements and Their Contexts’, Sociologia Ruralis, 17, 1 (1977), 167–90, esp. 183 on the radical right. Susie Byers, ‘ “I am not a force of nature”: Ecology and Humanity in the Fascism of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’, unpublished MA essay (University of Western Australia, 2008), 8. My thanks to Susie Byers for a copy of this essay. Byers, “‘I am not a force of nature”’, 11. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, ‘Pour sauver le peau des français’, Le flambeau (27 June 1936), cited in Kalman, ‘Faisceau Visions’, 352. George L. Mosse, ‘On Homosexuality and French Fascism’, in his The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), 179–80. Le Nouveau Siècle, 25 January 1926, cited in Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, 255. Mosse, ‘Fascism and the Intellectuals’, in The Fascist Revolution, 116. Gardiner to Alan (surname unknown), 17 November 1930. Rolf Gardiner Papers (RGP), University of Cambridge, A2/6; Gardiner, ‘Wisdom and Action in Northern Europe’ (n.d., c.1926–27), RGP, A3/1/10(b). Rolf Gardiner, ‘A Survey of Constructive Aspects of the New Germany. With Some Notes and Suggestions as to the Methods of Projection’ (June 1934), 27, 37, 44; RGP, M3/7. Ibid., 43. See, for example, Rolf Gardiner, World without End: British Politics and the Younger Generation (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1932), 33–34. Moore-Colyer, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”’, 355. I use the word popularised by Roger Griffin in order to suggest that the English Mistery was not as distant from fascism as it claimed. This is not meant to be an unequivocal endorsement of Griffin’s claim that there now exists a ‘consensus’ in the study of fascism; for discussion see, for example, R.J.B. Bosworth’s introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–7, and David D. Roberts, ‘Fascism, Modernism and the Quest for an Alternative Modernity’, Patterns of Prejudice, 43, 1 (2009), 91–102. On the English Mistery/English Array and its relationship to the BUF, see my ‘The English Mistery, the BUF, and the Dilemmas of British Fascism’, Journal of Modern History, 75, 2 (2003), 336–58. On Massingham, see, R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘A Voice Clamouring in the Wilderness: H. J. Massingham (1888–1952) and Rural England’, Rural History, 13, 2 (2002), 199–224; Clare Palmer, ‘Christianity, Englishness and the Southern English Countryside: A Study of the Work of H. J. Massingham’, Social and Cultural Geography, 3 (2002), 25–38. My thanks to Philip Conford for this point. Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages’, 219. George Stapledon, The Way of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), 92, 94. Earl of Portsmouth, Alternative to Death: The Relationship between Soil, Family and Community (London: The Right Book Club, 1945 [1943]), 30. Malcolm Chase, ‘ “North Sea and Baltic”: Historical Conceptions in the Youth Movement and the Transfer of Ideas from Germany to England in the 1920s and 1930s’, in Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert and Peter Schumann (eds.), Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750–2000 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 329.

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Notes

50. For more on Kinship in Husbandry see my Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), ch. 5; R.J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Back to Basics: Rolf Gardiner, H. J. Massingham and “A Kinship in Husbandry”’, Rural History, 12, 1 (2001), 85–108; Richard Moore-Colyer and Philip Conford, ‘A “Secret Society”? The Internal and External Relations of the Kinship in Husbandry, 1941–52’, Rural History, 15, 2 (2004), 189–206. 51. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, 164–65. 52. Ibid., 167. 53. Peer, ‘Peasants in France’. 54. Jenks, ‘Kommissars for Agriculture’, Action, LI (6 February 1937), 11, cited in David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 120. 55. Philip Conford, The Origins of the Organic Movement (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2001), 146. 56. Howkins, ‘Fascism and the Rural World’, 11. See also Philip Conford, ‘The Organic Challenge’, in Short, Watkins and Martin (eds.), The Front Line of Freedom, 67–76. 57. One should note Sternhell’s strong criticism of Paxton’s findings in the new preface to the 3rd edition of Ni droite ni gauche (2000) and his straightforward assertion that ‘what Dorgères led was a mass fascist movement.’ For Sternhell, ‘the only important element which separated Dorgères from the ideal type of fascism was his defence of the countryside against the town. This political divide prevented him from transcending class interests and appealing to the whole nation.’ Zeev Sternhell, ‘Morphology of Fascism in France’, in Jenkins (ed.), France in the Era of Fascism, 52, 53. Indeed, as Gordon notes, (‘The Countryside and the City’, 152), ‘There was no collaborationist follow-up after 1940 to the Green Shirt movement, most of whose supporters looked to Marshal Pétain and official Vichy after 1940.’ 58. Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale, 223–24. 59. ‘Le but d’un groupe rural d’ACJF [Association catholique de la jeunesse francaise]’, Semaine religieuse du diocèse de Nantes, 17 June 1922, cited in Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale, 224. 60. Roger Grand, extrait du discours prononcé lors des journées rurales de Nantes, le 12 mars 1927. Reproduit dans le bulletin mensuel de l’ACCF [Association catholique des chefs de famille] du diocèse de Nantes, avril 1927, cited in Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale, 224. 61. Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale, 224. 62. Ibid., 455. 63. Ibid., 457. 64. Ibid., 458. 65. Gervais, Jollivet and Tavernier, La fin de la France paysanne, 437. 66. Howkins, ‘Fascism and the Rural World’, 9; Suzanne Berger, Peasants Against Politics: Rural Organization in Brittany, 1911–67 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 73. 67. Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale, 458. See also Moulin, Peasantry and Society, 149; David Bensoussan, ‘Mystique paysanne, agrarisme et corporatisme: les droites radicales dans le monde rural en France au milieu des années trente’, in Philippe Vervaecke (ed.), Á droite de la droite: Droites radicales en France et en Grande-Bretagne au XXe siècle (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2012), 87–105. 68. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism, 14.

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69. See, for example, Michael Winter, ‘Corporatism and Agriculture in the U.K.: The Case of the Milk Marketing Board’, Sociologia Ruralis, 24, 2 (1984), 106–19. 70. Howkins, ‘Fascism and the Rural World’, 19.

9 The Uses and Abuses of ‘Secular Religion’: Jules Monnerot’s Path from Communism to Fascism 1. Jules Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, trans. J. Degras and R. Rees (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), 141. Originally published as Sociologie du communisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), and published in the US as Sociology and Psychology of Communism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1953). My thanks to Ned Curthoys, Richard Griffiths, Joel Isaac, Florin Lobon¸t, Andrea Mammone, Samuel Moyn, Michèle Richman, Philippe Secondy and Philippe Vervaecke for their advice on this chapter, and to Philippe Vervaecke for his help with translation. 2. Denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 92–93. On the 1935 Congress, see Roger Shattuck, ‘Having Congress: The Shame of the Thirties’, in Shattuck, The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 3–31; and, for texts of the speeches, see Wolfgang Klein (ed.), Paris 1935: Erster internationaler Schriftstellerkongreß zur Verteidigung der Kultur. Reden und Dokumente. Mit Materialien der Londoner Schriftstellerkongreß 1936 (Berlin [East]: Akademie Verlag, 1982). Monnerot would not allow his speech to be reprinted in this volume as he refused to have anything to do with the East German regime; but according to the editor, Monnerot, speaking as the delegate of the French Antilles, referred to himself ‘as the grandson of black slaves and perhaps also of white adventurers, whose physical appearance was already a pure challenge to the myth of race’, advocating subordinating all other aims to the struggle against fascism (492). Monnerot’s father was a founder of the Communist Party in Martinique. 3. Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Michel Besnier, Jean-Pierre Faye, Jean-Michel Heimonet, Jean-Pierre Le Bouler and Dominique Lecoq, letter to La Quinzaine littéraire, 23 May 1989, 8, cited in Jean-Michel Heimonet, Jules Monnerot ou la démission critique, 1932–1990. Trajet d’un intellectuel vers le fascisme (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1993), 7–8, n2. The reference to the German representative in the European Parliament is to Franz Schönhuber, leader of the Republikaner, the most successful far-right party in West Germany at the time. Monnerot had earlier staked his claim to have been the founder of the College of Sociology in an appendix entitled ‘Le Collège de Sociologie ou le problème interrompu’, in the 1979 edition of his most famous book: Sociologie du communisme, 3rd edn (Paris: Hallier, 1979). 4. Heimonet, Jules Monnerot ou la démission critique, 74. 5. Jean-Michel Heimonet, ‘Le Collège et son double: Jules Monnerot et le Collège de Sociologie interrompu’, The French Review, 60, 2 (1986), 231–40, here 238. The same wording is in Jean-Michel Heimonet, Politique de l’écriture: Bataille/Derrida. Le sens du sacré dans la pensée française du surréalisme à nos jours (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 106. 6. Heimonet, Politique de l’écriture, 108–09. 7. Most persuasively Diethelm Prowe, ‘ “Classic” Fascism and the New Radical Right in Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts’, Contemporary European History, 3, 3 (1994), 289–313.

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8. This is the distinction used by Michael Shafir in the immediate post-communist period to differentiate extreme-right wing Romanian parties such as the Party of National Right (radical return) from the Greater Romania Party (radical continuity). See, for example, among Shafir’s many publications, ‘Anti-Semitism in the Postcommunist Era’, in Randolph L. Braham (ed.), The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry (New York: Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, 1994), 333–86. 9. Jim Wolfreys, ‘Neither Right nor Left? Towards an Integrated Analysis of the Front National’, in Nicholas Atkin and Frank Tallett (eds.), The Right in France 1789– 1997 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 267–68, cited in Richard Griffiths, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Fascism (London: Duckworth, 2000), 151. 10. James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (London: Routledge, 2007), 307, cited in Andrea Mammone, ‘The Eternal Return? Faux Populism and Contemporization of Neo-Fascism across Britain, France and Italy’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 17, 2 (2009), 175. 11. David S. Bell, Parties and Democracy in France: Parties under Presidentialism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 127, cited in Paul Hainsworth, The Extreme Right in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 2008), 14. 12. Mammone, ‘The Eternal Return?’ 171–92. 13. The debate about the appropriateness of using the term ‘fascism’ in France cannot be dealt with here. See, for helpful discussions: Robert J. Soucy, ‘The Debate over French Fascism’, in Richard J. Golsan (ed.), Fascism’s Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 130–51; Kevin Passmore, ‘The Croix de Feu and Fascism: A Foreign Thesis Obstinately Maintained’, in Edward J. Arnold (ed.), The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000), 100–18; John Bingham, ‘Defining French Fascism, Finding Fascists in France’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 29, 3 (1994), 525–43; and the essays in Brian Jenkins (ed.), France in the Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). See Chapter 7 for a more direct approach to this question. 14. For example, see Richard Wolin, ‘Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology’, Constellations, 2, 3 (1996), 397–428; Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil’, in Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 126–45. On Monnerot, see also Romain Ducoulombier, ‘Penser et combattre. Jules Monnerot face à la subversion des “sociétés ouvertes”’, in François Cochet and Olivier Dard (eds.), Subversion, contre-subversion, antisubversion (Paris: Riveneuve, 2009), 45–61. 15. Heimonet, ‘Le Collège et son double’. See also Michael Richardson, ‘Sociology on a Razor’s Edge: Configurations of the Sacred at the College of Sociology’, Theory, Culture & Society, 9, 3 (1992), 27–44, esp. 31, 33. 16. Heimonet, Jules Monnerot ou la démission critique, 69. 17. Libra has also been described by one commentator as a Maurrasian through and through (pur et dur); Frédéric Saumade, Drieu La Rochelle: L’homme en désordre (Paris: Berg International, 2003), 117, n2. 18. ‘Note on the Foundation of a College of Sociology’, in Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology 1937–1939 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5. 19. Roger Caillois, ‘Introduction’, in Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, 10. Originally published in Nouvelle revue française, July 1938.

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20. Sociology of Communism receives a passing mention, for example, in Emilio Gentile, ‘Political Religion: A Concept and Its Critics—A Critical Survey’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6, 1 (2005), 19–32. 21. Raymond Aron, ‘The Future of Secular Religions’ (1944), in Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, ed. Yair Reiner (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 177–201. On French intellectuals and communism, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May’68 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). A relevant case study is Richard Shorten, ‘François Furet and Totalitarianism: A Recent Intervention in the Misuse of a Notion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 3, 1 (2002), 1–34. 22. On Rassinier, see Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Les assassins de la mémoire: ‘Un Eichmann de papier’ et autres essais sur le révisionnisme (Paris: La Découverte, 1987), 49–57. For an interesting case study, see Jeffrey M. Bale, ‘ “National Revolutionary” Groupuscules and the Resurgence of “Left-Wing” Fascism: The Case of France’s Nouvelle Résistance’, Patterns of Prejudice, 36, 3 (2002), 24–49. Of course, in the interwar years, this was by no means an unusual trajectory, as the careers of Benito Mussolini, Georges Sorel, Henri de Man, Jacques Doriot, Marcel Déat, Georges Valois and Gustave Hervé indicate. See, for example, Gilbert D. Allardyce, ‘The Political Transition of Jacques Doriot’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1 (1966), 56–74; Philippe Burrin, La dérive fasciste: Doriot, Déat, Bergery 1933– 1945 (Paris: Seuil, 1986); Michael B. Loughlin, ‘Gustave Hervé’s Transition from Socialism to National Socialism: Continuity and Ambivalence’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38, 4 (2003), 515–38; Richard Griffiths, ‘Fascism and the Planned Economy: “Neo-Socialism” and “Planisme” in France and Belgium in the 1930s’, Science & Society, 69, 4 (2005), 580–93. My thanks to Philippe Vervaecke for alerting me to Soral. See www.alainsoral.com (accessed 5 February 2010). 23. Stanley Stowers, ‘The Concepts of “Religion,” “Political Religion” and the Study of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42, 1 (2007), 9–24, here 22. 24. Stowers, ‘The Concepts’, 11, 13. 25. Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996 [1938]). Before Monnerot, the fascist movements had also been likened to religious movements by Talcott Parsons, who thought that this similarity could ‘serve as a guide to the sociological analysis of their origins and character’. Talcott Parsons, ‘Some Sociological Aspects of the Fascist Movement’ (1942), in Uta Gerhardt (ed.), Talcott Parsons on National Socialism (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993), 204. See also Richard Shorten, ‘The Enlightenment, Communism and Political Religion: Reflections on a Misleading Trajectory’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 8, 1 (2003), 13–37; Alexander Tristan Riley, ‘Durkheim contra Bergson? The Hidden Roots of Postmodern Theory and the Postmodern “Return” of the Sacred’, Sociological Perspectives, 45, 3 (2002), 243–65. 26. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 268. 27. Claude Lefort, ‘Sociologie du communisme’, Les temps modernes, 50 (1949), 1098–108. N.S. Timasheff, reviewing the book in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 267 (1950), 211, wrote that ‘no clear-cut and convincing conception of Communism as a social phenomenon is arrived at’, and Ossip K. Flechtheim, writing in the American Political Science Review, 48, 1 (1954), 223, argued that Monnerot’s book offered the reader no information

222

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

Notes about the social structure of the communist parties or institutions, but instead ‘rather commonplace socio-philosophical observations about communism as a totalitarian dictatorship and as a secular religion’. See, for example, Henry W. Ehrmann, ‘French Views on Communism’, World Politics, 3, 1 (1950), 141–51; Mercer Cook, ‘Race Relations as Seen by Recent French Visitors’, Phylon, 15, 2 (1954), 121–38. Richard J. Golsan, ‘From French Anti-Americanism and Americanization to “American Enemy?”’ in Alexander Stephan (ed.), The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 44–68. Jules Monnerot, Les faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). On Durkheim and the College of Sociology, see the excellent study by Michèle H. Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); also Simonetta FalascaZamponi, ‘A Left Sacred or a Sacred Left? The Collège de Sociologie, Fascism, and Political Culture in Interwar France’, South Central Review, 23, 1 (2006), 40–54. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 194. Richardson, ‘Sociology on a Razor’s Edge’, 41. Monnerot, Sociologie du communisme, 543, cited in Heimonet, ‘Le Collège et son double’, 233; ‘in the making’ in English in the original. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 19–20. Jules Monnerot, ‘La guerre subversive en Algérie’, Les Cahiers du Comité de Vincennes, 3 (1960), online at: http://julesmonnerot.com/GUERRE_SUBVERSIVE_ ALGERIE.html (accessed 9 February 2010). See also Jules Monnerot, Désintox: Au secours de la France décérébrée (Paris: Albatros, 1987), 42, online at: http: //julesmonnerot.com/DESINTOX.html (accessed 9 February 2010) for a similar statement. And, for the broader context, which shows how the FLN operated in the interstices of Cold War rivalries, see Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). See, for example, Claire Eldridge, ‘Blurring the Boundaries between Perpetrators and Victims: Pied-noir Memories and the Harki Community’, Memory Studies, 3, 2 (2010), 123–36. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 220–21. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 16. Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), probably the leading work in the field, makes essentially the same point as Monnerot. For a similar analysis contemporaneous with Monnerot’s, but without the analogy of communism with Islam, see Waldemar Gurian, ‘Introduction’, to Gurian (ed.), Soviet Imperialism: Its Origins and Tactics. A Symposium (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1953), 1–16. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 18–19. Ibid., 22. Cf. Isaac Deutscher, ‘Marxism and Primitive Magic’, in Tariq Ali (ed.), The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on 20th-Century World Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 106–17. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 127. Ibid., 162, 210.

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46. Ibid., 160. 47. Ibid., 217. One wonders about the significance of Mein Kampf, although Monnerot is right – its study as opposed to its display was not required in the way that Marx’s or Lenin’s texts were. 48. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 128. 49. Most famously in Arthur Koestler et al., The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950). As the title indicates, Richard Crossman’s powerful introduction (7–16) discusses communism as a faith. See also Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist (London: The Reprint Society, 1952). 50. Jules Monnerot, La guerre en question (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 33. 51. Heimonet, Politique de l’écriture, 107. 52. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 209–10; cf. 233. Here ‘heterogeneity’ is meant in Bataille’s sense (which was also originally Monnerot’s), of something or someone irreducible to profit and the exchange economy. See Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure,’ and ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, in Allan Stoekl (ed.), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–29 and 137–60. 53. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 145–46. 54. Jules Monnerot, Sociologie de la révolution: mythologies politiques du XXe siècle marxistes-léninistes et fascistes. La nouvelle stratégie révolutionnaire (Paris: Fayard, 1969), 541. Again, this is hardly original; cf. on the fascist leader, Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ (1951), in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 124–28. 55. Monnerot, Sociologie de la révolution, 518. 56. Georges Bataille, ‘The Moral Meaning of Sociology’, in Michael Richardson (ed.), The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism (London: Verso, 1994), 108. First published in Critique 1 (1946). 57. Bataille, ‘War and the Philosophy of the Sacred’, in The Absence of Myth, 120, 122. Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), orig. L’Homme et le sacré, 2nd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1950 [1939]). 58. Jean-Michel Heimonet, ‘Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism’, Diacritics, 26, 2 (1996), 59–73, here 59. 59. Richardson, ‘Sociology on a Razor’s Edge’, 41. 60. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 184. 61. Ibid., 268. 62. Although we should bear in mind that being a member of the Resistance – as a patriotic anti-German – was no bar to being a French fascist, as the case of Georges Loustaunau-Lacau indicates. My thanks to Richard Griffiths for this point. 63. Club de L’Horloge (ed.), Socialisme et religion: sont-ils compatibles? (Paris: Albatros, 1986), for example, owed a great deal to Monnerot. 64. Federico Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’, Constellations, 15, 3 (2008), 326. 65. Jules Monnerot, ‘Misunderstandings’, in James Burnham (ed.), What Europe Thinks of America (New York: The John Day Company, 1953), 1–35, here 16. 66. Monnerot, ‘Misunderstandings’, 17. 67. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 250ff. 68. Ibid., 325–29. 69. Monnet cited in Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009), 24.

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70. Jules Monnerot, ‘Politique en connaissance de cause’, in Groupe de la ‘Nation Française’ (ed.), Tribunes Libre 29: Écrits pour une renaissance (Paris: Plon, 1958), 3–73, here 8–9. 71. Monnerot, ‘Politique en connaissance de cause’, 11, 27–28, 38, 72–73. 72. Jules Monnerot, ‘La constitution du mythe “fascisme” en France et l’institution politique de ce mythe’, in Club de L’Horloge (ed.), Socialisme et fascisme: une même famille? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984), 61–72, here 63. Monnerot developed these thoughts on ‘the myth of fascism in France’ in his short book, Désintox, which was dedicated to the members of the Club de L’Horloge. 73. Monnerot, Sociologie de la révolution, 499–500, 592; cf. Sociology of Communism, 159. 74. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 235. 75. Monnerot, Sociologie de la révolution, 592; cf. 545–47. 76. Ibid., 633. This claim was quite correct; for a recent assessment of big business’s relationship with Nazism, see Christopher Kobrak and Andrea H. Schneider, ‘Big Business and the Third Reich: An Appraisal of the Historical Arguments’, in Dan Stone (ed.),The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 141–72. 77. Denis Hollier, ‘A Farewell to the Pen’, in Zeev Sternhell (ed.), The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy 1870–1945 (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996), 223–24. As Hollier notes, ‘calls for authority’ such as Monnerot’s, including those made by Caillois, Bataille and Jean Paulhan, were ‘conceived and perceived as being in keeping with the values of the extreme left’ (224). On Volontés and Monnerot’s survey, see Vincent Giroud, ‘Transition to Vichy: The Case of Georges Pelorson’, Modernism/Modernity, 7, 2 (2000), 221–48, esp. 227–31. 78. Monnerot, Sociologie de la révolution, 584. 79. Hollier, ‘A Farewell to the Pen’, 225. 80. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 163–64. 81. Dan Stone, ‘Georges Bataille and the Interpretation of the Holocaust’, in Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), ch. 5; Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Bataille in the Street: The Search for Virility in the 1930s’, Critical Inquiry, 21 (1994), 61–79; FalascaZamponi, ‘A Left Sacred or a Sacred Left?’, 52; Stefanos Geroulanos, ‘The Anthropology of Exit: Bataille on Heidegger and Fascism’, October, 117 (2006), 3–24. 82. Heimonet, Politique de l’écriture, 127. Cf. Julia David, ‘Sens du sacré et antiintellectualisme dans les idéologies d’avant-garde durant l’entre-deux-guerres en France, une apocalypse sans révélation’, Quaderni, 58 (2005), 15–32. 83. Heimonet, Politique de l’écriture, 127–28. 84. Monnerot, ‘La fièvre de G. Bataille’, cited in Heimonet, La politique de l’écriture, 163. See also Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 154–55. 85. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 288–89. 86. Heimonet, Politique de l’écriture, 174. Monnerot, Sociologie de la révolution, 528. 87. Richard H. King, ‘Conclusion: Arendt between Past and Future’, in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 253, citing Arendt, ‘A Reply to Eric Voegelin’, in Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 405.

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88. Jules Monnerot, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Confluence: An International Forum, 2, 4 (1953), 131–34, here 133. Arendt, ‘Religion and Politics’, and ‘Reply to Jules Monnerot’ can be more easily found in Essays in Understanding, 368–90, originally published in Confluence, 2, 3 (1953) and 3, 1 (1954). 89. Arendt, ‘Reply to Jules Monnerot’, 385, 386. On Arendt and Monnerot, see Peter Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 93–123. Baehr argues that in the light of today’s religious radicalism, Monnerot’s ideas deserve a closer look than Arendt was willing to grant them. 90. Baehr, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences, 120. 91. Monnerot, ‘Racisme et identité nationale’, Itinéraires (1990), online at: http:// julesmonnerot.com/RACISME_IDENTITE.html (accessed 9 February 2010). 92. Jules Monnerot, ‘La culpabilisation du sentiment national’, in Club de L’Horloge (ed.), L’Identité de la France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1985), 196, 197. In the same volume, see also Monnerot’s essay, ‘La préférence occidentale’, 259–64. 93. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 155. 94. Alain de Benoist, ‘Jules Monnerot’, Le Spectacle du monde (2006), online at: www. alaindebenoist.com/pdf/jules_monnerot.pdf (accessed 31 January 2010). On de Benoist in the context of the post-war French right, see Roger Griffin, ‘Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia: The Nouvelle Droite’s Strategy for Conserving the Fascist Vision in the “Interregnum”’, Modern and Contemporary France, 8, 1 (2000), 35–53. And to understand the continuity between the FN (as well as Italy’s MSI/AN and Britain’s BNP) and ‘classic fascism’, see Mammone, ‘The Eternal Return?’ 95. Gerd Bergfleth, Theorie der Verschwendung: Einführung in Georges Batailles Antiökonomie (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1985), 144.

10

Genocide and Memory

1. J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000). 2. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41 (2002), 188. 3. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (eds.), The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning’. 4. Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning’, 180. 5. Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69 (2000), 127–50. 6. Charles S. Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial’, History & Memory, 5, 2 (1993), 136–52. 7. Klein, ‘On the Emergence’. 8. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [orig. French 2000]). See also Chapter 11. 9. Alexander K.A. Greenawalt, ‘Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-Based Interpretation’, Columbia Law Review, 99, 8 (1999), 2294. 10. Gunnar Heinsohn, ‘What Makes the Holocaust a Uniquely Unique Genocide?’ Journal of Genocide Research, 2, 3 (2000), 411–30.

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11. Dominik J. Schaller, ‘From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 311. 12. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 13. See Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. Vol. 1: The Meaning of Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 196–202. 14. Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History, 70, 4 (1998), 813–61; Nicolas Werth, ‘The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 400–19; Nicholas Werth, ‘Mass Deportations, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocidal Politics in the Later Russian Empire and the USSR’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 386–406. 15. Ben Kiernan, ‘Myth, Nationalism and Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, 3, 2 (2001), 190. See also Ben Kiernan, ‘Serial Colonialism and Genocide in Nineteenth-Century Cambodia’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, 205–28; Ben Kiernan, ‘Roots of Genocide: New Evidence on the US Bombardment of Cambodia’, Cultural Survival Quarterly, 14, 3 (1990), online at: http://www. culturalsurvival.org/ourpublications/csq/article/roots-genocide-new-evidence-usbombardment-cambodia (accessed 5 October 2012); David P. Chandler, ‘Seeing Red: Perceptions of Cambodian History in Democratic Kampuchea’, in David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan (eds.), Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1983), 34–56; Karl D. Jackson, ‘Intellectual Origins of the Khmer Rouge’, in Karl D. Jackson (ed.), Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 241–50. 16. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 17. For example, Nigel Eltringham, ‘ “Invaders Who Have Stolen the Country”: The Hamitic Hypothesis, Race and the Rwandan Genocide’, Social Identities, 12, 4 (2006), 425–46; René Lemarchand, ‘Exclusion, Marginalization and Political Mobilization: The Road to Hell in the Great Lakes’, University of Copenhagen Centre of African Studies Occasional Paper (March 2000). 18. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Edith R. Sanders, ‘The Hamitic Hypothesis’, Journal of African History, 10, 4 (1969), 512–32. 19. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 20. Johan Pottier, Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 130. See also Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein (eds.), My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 21. Florian Bieber, ‘Nationalist Mobilization and Stories of Serb Suffering: The Kosovo Myth from 600th Anniversary to the Present’, Rethinking History, 6, 1 (2002), 95–110; G.G. Raymond and S. Bajic-Raymond, ‘Memory and History: The

Notes

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

227

Discourse of Nation-Building in the Former Yugoslavia’, Patterns of Prejudice, 31, 1 (1997), 21–30; Jasna Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (London: C. Hurst, 2002). Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, 54, 4 (1995), 927. Anthony Oberschall, ‘The Manipulation of Ethnicity: From Ethnic Cooperation to Violence and War in Yugoslavia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23, 6 (2000), 982–1001. Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 81, cited in Oberschall, ‘The Manipulation’, 990. Robert M. Hayden, ‘Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia, 1941–45 and 1992–95’, in Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, 487–516; Robert M. Hayden, ‘Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia’, in Ruby S. Watson (ed.), Memory, Opposition and History under State Socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), 167–84; Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killings in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005); Paul B. Miller, ‘Contested Memories: The Bosnian Genocide in Serb and Muslim Minds’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8, 3 (2006), 311–24. On the figures from the 1990s, see Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, ‘War-Related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results’, European Journal of Population, 21 (2005), 187–215; Research and Documentation Center, Sarajevo, Human Losses in Bosnia and Herzegovina 91-95 (CD-Rom, 2006). Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History’, in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, 34–40. Dirk Moses, ‘Moving the Genocide Debate Beyond the History Wars’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 54, 2 (2008), 264. See Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). Goebbels cited 209. See also Doris L. Bergen, ‘Instrumentalization of Volksdeutschen in German Propaganda in 1939: Replacing/Erasing Poles, Jews, and Other Victims’, German Studies Review, 31, 3 (2008), 447–70, for an example of the manipulation of fears of German victimization at the hands of Poles. Michael Geyer, ‘Endkampf 1918 and 1945: German Nationalism, Annihilation, and Self-Destruction’, in Alf Lüdtke and Bernd Weisbrod (eds.), No Man’s Land of Violence: Extreme Wars in the Twentieth Century (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 47. Levene, The Meaning of Genocide, 197. Henri Raczymow, ‘Memory Shot Through with Holes’, Yale French Studies, 85 (1994), 98–105. Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler and Philipp Ther (eds.), Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). Dan Diner, ‘Restitution and Memory: The Holocaust in European Political Cultures’, New German Critique, 90 (2003), 39–40. See also Dan Diner and Gotthard Wunberg (eds.), Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mark Mazower,

228

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

Notes ‘An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the Mid-Twentieth Century’, International Affairs, 82, 3 (2006), 553–66. Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 17 August 1946, in Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (eds.), Arendt/Jaspers Correspondence 1926–1969 (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 54. For example, Caroline Fournet, The Crime of Destruction and the Law of Genocide: Their Impact on Collective Memory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Gerry Simpson, Law, War and Crime: War Crimes Trials and the Reinvention of International Law (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Dan Stone, ‘Memory, Memorials and Museums’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 508–32. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 6–7. See David S. MacDonald, Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation (London: Routledge, 2008). William F.S. Miles, ‘Third World Views of the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 3 (2004), 388. Sara Guyer, ‘Rwanda’s Bones’, boundary 2, 36, 2 (2009), 155–75. For examples of these memorials and many more in Rwanda, see http://genocidememorials.cga. harvard.edu/home.html Judy Ledgerwood, ‘The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative’, in David E. Lorey and William H. Beezley (eds.), Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 103–22. See also Burcu Münyas, ‘Genocide in the Minds of Cambodian Youth: Transmitting (Hi)stories of Genocide to Second and Third Generations in Cambodia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 10, 3 (2008), 413–39; David P. Chandler, ‘Cambodia Deals with Its Past: Collective Memory, Demonisation and Induced Amnesia’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9, 2/3 (2008), 355–69. Paul Williams, ‘Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remembrance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 18, 4 (2004), 242. On trials, see Jörg Menzel, ‘Justice Delayed or Too Late for Justice? The Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the Cambodian “Genocide” 1975–79’, Journal of Genocide Research, 9, 2 (2007), 215–33. Rachel Hughes, ‘Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials’, in Susan E. Cook (ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2006), 257–80. Guyer, ‘Rwanda’s Bones’. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, Africa, 76, 2 (2006), 131. Cornelia Sorabji, ‘Managing Memories in Post-War Sarajevo: Individuals, Bad Memories, and New Wars’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 12 (2006), 1–18. Sorabji, ‘Managing Memories’, 2. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Testing the Limits of Trauma: The Long-Term Psychological Effects of the Holocaust on Individuals and Collectives’, History of the Human Sciences, 17, 2/3 (2004), 97; Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking History, 8, 2 (2004), 193–221.

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50. Helen Graham, ‘The Memory of Murder: Mass Killing, Incarceration and the Making of Francoism’, in Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Roberta Quance and Anne L. Walsh (eds.), Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea/War and Memory in Contemporary Spain (Madrid: Verbum, 2008). 51. Quoted in Robert Manne, ‘Aboriginal Child Removal and the Question of Genocide, 1900–1940’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 229, 237; Pat O’Malley, ‘Gentle Genocide: The Government of Aboriginal Peoples in Central Australia’, Social Justice, 21, 4 (1994), 46–65. 52. Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Sydney, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002). 53. Damien Short, ‘Reconciliation, Assimilation, and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia’, International Political Science Review, 24, 4 (2003), 506. 54. Moses, ‘Moving the Genocide Debate’, 254–5. See also Patrick Brantlinger, ‘ “Black Armband” versus “White Blindfold” History in Australia’, Victorian Studies, 46, 4 (2004), 655–74; Neil Levi, ‘ “No Sensible Comparison”? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia’s History Wars’, History & Memory, 19, 1 (2007), 124–56; Andrew G. Bonnell and Martin Crotty, ‘Australia’s History under Howard, 1996–2007’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 617 (2008), 149–65. 55. Dirk Moses, ‘An Antipodean Genocide? The Origins of the Genocidal Moment in the Colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2, 1 (2000), 89–106. 56. Jens Bartelson, ‘We Could Remember It for You Wholesale: Myths, Monuments and the Constitution of National Memories’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 51. 57. Young, The Texture of Memory, 2. 58. Barta, ‘Decent Disposal: Australian Historians and the Recovery of Genocide’, in Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, 296–322; Alfred A. Cave, ‘Genocide in the Americas’ in ibid., 273–95; Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise from Its Ashes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 59. Alon Confino, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, American Historical Review, 102, 5 (1997), 1403. 60. Peter Fritzsche, ‘The Case of Modern Memory’, Journal of Modern History, 73, 1 (2001), 117. 61. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 42.

11 Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: The Future of Memory after the Age of Commemoration 1. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 498. 2. Saul Bellow, ‘The Bellarosa Connection’, in Saul Bellow, Collected Stories, ed. Janis Bellow (New York: Penguin, 2002), 35–89. Page references in the text. My thanks to Bruce Baker and Barbara Rosenbaum for incisive comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 3. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 504. 4. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7–25.

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5. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in an Age of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). 6. David Farrell Krell, ‘The Perfect Future: A Note on Heidegger and Derrida’, in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 114–21. 7. Charles S. Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial’, History & Memory, 5, 2 (1993), 150–51. 8. Charles S. Maier, ‘Hot Memory . . . Cold Memory: On the Political Half-Life of Fascist and Communist Memory’, Transit: Europäische Revue, 22 (2002), online at: www.iwm.at/t-22txt5.htm (accessed 5 July 2005). 9. See my ‘Memory, Memorials and Museums’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 508–32. 10. BBC1, 10 o’clock news, 28 June 2005. 11. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5 and passim. 12. Vera Schwarcz, ‘Mnemosyne Abroad: Reflections on the Chinese and Jewish Commitment to Remembrance’, in David E. Lorey and William H. Beezley (eds.), Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 139–66, here 143 (orig. 1991). 13. Thomas Butler, ‘Memory: A Mixed Blessing’, in Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 25. See also Jay Winter, ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the “Memory Boom” in Contemporary Historical Studies’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 27 (2000), online at: http://www.ghi-dc.org/publications/ghipubs/bu/027/b27winterframe. html (accessed 5 October 2012). 14. Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000), 5. 15. Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, ‘Collective Memory – What Is It?’, History & Memory, 8, 1 (1996), 30–50. For an earlier discussion see M.I. Finley, ‘Myth, Memory and History’, History and Theory, 4, 3 (1965), 281–302, here 297: ‘ “group memory” is never subconsciously motivated in the sense of being, or seeming to be, automatic and uncontrolled, unsought for as personal memory so often appears. Group memory, after all, is no more than the transmittal to many people of the memory of one man or a few men, repeated many times over; and the act of transmittal, of communication and therefore of preservation of the memory, is not spontaneous and unconscious but deliberate, intended to serve a purpose known to the man who performs it’. Memory, Finley notes, is thus ‘controlled by relevance’. 16. Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 8. 17. Tony Judt, ‘From the House of the Dead: On Modern European Memory’, New York Review of Books (6 October 2005), 16. See also Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), 803–31; Richard S. Esbenshade, ‘Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe’, Representations, 49 (1995), 72–96. 18. Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations, 69 (2000), 127–50. 19. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41 (2002), 179–97, here 180. 20. Ibid., 184, 193.

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21. Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver, ‘Introduction’, in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds.), The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 1–18, here 5. 22. Duncan S.A. Bell, ‘Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity’, British Journal of Sociology, 54, 1 (2003), 63–81, here 65. 23. Bell’s distinction between those who hold neurological memories in their brains – for whom the word ‘memory’ is appropriate and everyone else – for whom collective memory should be replaced by ‘myth’ – is too simplistic and is a version of the argument that has also been put forward by Gedi and Elam, among others. Timothy Snyder’s distinction between ‘mass personal memory’ and ‘national memory’ – though it uses the specific term (‘national memory’) that Bell wants to decouple – seems to me to be more alive to the complexities and nuances of what is meant by ‘collective memory’ than Bell’s literalism. See Gedi and Elam, ‘Collective Memory – What Is It?’; Timothy Snyder, ‘Memories of Sovereignty and Sovereignty over Memory: Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, 1939–1999’, in JanWerner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 39–58. 24. Roy Strong, ‘Introduction’, to Patrick Cormack, Heritage in Danger, 2nd edn (London: Quartet, 1978), 10, cited in Robert Hewison, ‘The Climate of Decline’, in David Boswell and Jessica Evans (eds.), Representing the Nation: A Reader. Histories, Heritage and Museums (London: Routledge, 1999), 160. 25. Ido de Haan, ‘Paths of Normalization after the Persecution of the Jews: The Netherlands, France, and West Germany in the 1950s’, in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds.), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 65–92, here 68–69. 26. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking History, 8, 2 (2004), 193–221, and ‘Testing the Limits of Trauma: The Long-Term Psychological Effects of the Holocaust on Individuals and Collectives’, History of the Human Sciences, 17, 2–3 (2004), 97–123. See also Eelco Runia, ‘Presence’, History and Theory, 46, 1 (2006), 4, for a brief but tough criticism of ‘trauma’. 27. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 78. 28. Norman Manea, The Hooligan’s Return: A Memoir, trans. Angela Jianu (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 224. 29. Ibid., 244. 30. Andrew O’Hagan, ‘Still Reeling from My Loss’, London Review of Books (2 January 2003), which memorably opens: ‘If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.’ 31. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 8. 32. Jonathan M. Hess, ‘Memory, History, and the Jewish Question: Universal Citizenship and the Colonization of Jewish Memory’, in Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (eds.), The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 40–41. 33. As exemplified by David B. Pillemer, ‘Can the Psychology of Memory Enrich Historical Analyses of Trauma?’ History & Memory, 16, 2 (2004), 140–54. Pillemer argues (150) that ‘ “collective knowledge” is a more apt descriptor than “collective memory”’. For an attempt to mediate between notions of societal remembering and individual memory that uses ‘non-discursive forms of memory’ as its

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34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

Notes guiding insight, see Michael Stewart, ‘Remembering Without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories among European Roma’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 10 (2004), 561–82. See also Sławomir Kapralski, ‘Ritual Memory in Constructing the Modern Identity of Eastern European Romanies’, in Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt (eds.), The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of ‘Gypsies’/Romanies in European Cultures (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), 208–25. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95. ‘This text’, Ricoeur notes of Halbwachs’ On Collective Memory, ‘basically says: to remember, we need others’ (120). Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3, 6. See also Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Remembering (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994) for an earlier statement along similar lines. Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning’, 188. Cf. my ‘The Domestication of Violence: Forging a Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Britain, 1945–46’, Patterns of Prejudice, 33, 2 (1999), 13–29, esp. 14. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3. Kendrick Oliver, ‘ “Not Much of a Place Anymore”: The Reception and Memory of the Massacre at My Lai’, in Gray and Oliver (eds.), The Memory of Catastrophe, 171–89. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, ‘Introduction: Noises of the Past’, in Confino and Fritzsche (eds.), The Work of Memory, 5. Richard H. Minear, ‘Atomic Holocaust, Nazi Holocaust: Some Reflections’, Diplomatic History, 19, 2 (1995), 347–65; David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004); Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). Zelizer, Remembering to Forget; cf. Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), and Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005) for West Germany. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘Public Memory and Its Discontents’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 99–115, here 105. Natalia Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust – Between Silence and Public Debate’, German History, 22, 3 (2004), 406–32; Victoria Sanford, Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Helen Graham, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 7; Adam Hochschild, ‘In the Heart of Darkness’, New York Review of Books (6 October 2005), 39–42. For another example, see Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), or, for a particularly stinging attack on Israeli memory politics, Yosefa Loshitzky, ‘Pathologising Memory: From the Holocaust to the Intifada’, Third Text, 20, 3–4 (2006), 327–35. Hartman, ‘Public Memory and Its Discontents’; Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, in Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust (London: Athlone Press, 2001), 215–46; idem., Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Michael Rothberg, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois in Warsaw:

Notes

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

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Holocaust Memory and the Color Line, 1949–1952’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 1 (2001), 169–89; idem, ‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor’, PMLA, 119, 5 (2004), 1231–46; Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Marc Augé, Oblivion, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning’, 184. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 19; Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993). Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95–96. Benjamin Forest, Juliet Johnson and Karen Till, ‘Post-totalitarian National Identity: Public Memory in Germany and Russia’, Social and Cultural Geography, 5, 3 (2004), 357–80, here 374. See also Alexander Etkind, ‘Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany’, Grey Room, 16 (2004), 37–59. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 209. Rothberg, ‘The Work of Testimony’, 1243. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 13. See also, on the question of the ‘failure of memory’, Paul Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003). Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, xv. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 498. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 68, 87. Ibid., 147. Bruce E. Baker, ‘Under the Rope: Lynching and Memory in Laurens County, South Carolina’, in W. Fitzhugh Brundage (ed.), Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 319–45. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Memory-Forgetfulness-History’, ZiF Mitteilungen, 2 (1995), 12. See my discussion in ‘Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White and Holocaust Historiography’, in History, Memory and Mass Atrocity, 107–31. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 459. For an exemplary discussion of the problems associated with the interaction, indeed indistinction, between Ricoeur’s categories of ‘personal memory’, ‘social memory’ and ‘historical memory’, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘History, Heroism, and Narrative Desire: The “Aubrac Affair” and National Memory of the French Resistance’, South Central Review, 21, 1 (2004), 54–81. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 98 (citing Lukács). See also Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 150; and Rebecca Comay, ‘Redeeming Revenge: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, and the Poetics of Memory’, in Clayton Koelb (ed.), Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), 21–38. Handelman, Fragments, 164. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95–96.

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65. Ibid., 169. See also Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 94. As Marc Bloch wrote, ‘nothing can really ever take the place of seeing things with one’s own eyes – provided one is blest with good sight’, quite a claim for a modern historian. Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 24. 66. Lucian Hölscher, ‘Geschichte und Vergessen’, Historische Zeitschrift, 249 (1989), 1–17. 67. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 499. 68. Ibid., 408. 69. Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 18, cited in Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 54. 70. Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory’, 193. 71. Klein, ‘On the Emergence’, 129. 72. Bellow, ‘The Bellarosa Connection’, 35.

12


1. Régis Debray, Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation (London: Verso, 1994), 92. My thanks go to Luiza Bialasiewicz, Robert Bideleux, Cathie Carmichael, Martin Evans, Helen Graham, Becky Jinks, Roger Markwick, Dirk Moses and Gavin Schaffer for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2. Adam Krzeminski, ‘As Many Wars as Nations: The Myths and Truths of World War II’, Sign and Sight, 6 April 2005, www.signandsight.com/features/96.html (original in Polityka, 23 March 2005). Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 3. For example, Douglas C. Peifer, ‘New Books on Memory, History and the Second World War’, Contemporary European History, 18, 2 (2009), 235–44; Christof Dejung, ‘A Past That Refuses to Pass: The Commemoration of the Second World War and the Holocaust’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43, 4 (2008), 701–10. 4. Martin Evans, ‘Memories, Monuments, Histories: The Re-Thinking of the Second World War since 1989’, National Identities, 8, 4 (2006), 335. 5. Richard Ned Lebow, ‘The Memory of Politics in Postwar Europe’, in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 14. 6. Alon Confino, ‘Remembering the Second World War, 1945–1965: Narratives of Victimhood and Genocide’, Cultural Analysis, 4 (2005), 48. 7. Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 8. As R.J.B. Bosworth argues in Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945–1990 (London: Routledge, 1993), 3. 9. Hannah Arendt, ‘No Longer and Not Yet’, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 158–62; Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, eds. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 48. See also Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, ‘Hannah Arendt Twenty Years Later: A German Jewess in the Age of Totalitarianism’, New German Critique, 86 (2002), 30.

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10. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, ‘A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory “Industry”’, Journal of Modern History, 81, 1 (2009), 127, 135. 11. Silviu Brucan, The Wasted Generation: Memoirs of the Romanian Journey from Capitalism to Socialism and Back (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), x. 12. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), 749. 13. Geoff Eley, ‘Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name’, History Workshop Journal, 63, 1 (2007), 154–88. Cf. Carl Tighe, ‘Pax Germanica’, in his Pax Variations (Manchester: IMPress, 2000), 89–141. 14. Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005); Dubravka Ugrešić, ‘The Confiscation of Memory’, in her The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (London: Phoenix, 1998), 217–35. 15. William I. Hitchcock, Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 369; Pieter Lagrou, ‘Victims of Genocide and National Memory: Belgium, France and the Netherlands 1945–1965’, Past and Present, 154 (1997), 181–222. 16. Hitchcock, Liberation, 370–71; Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 17. Lebow, ‘The Memory of Politics in Postwar Europe’, 19. 18. Claudio Fogu and Wulf Kansteiner, ‘The Politics of Memory and the Poetics of History’, in Lebow, Kansteiner and Fogu (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, 295. 19. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 20. Gabriela Cristea and Simina Radu-Bucurenci, ‘Raising the Cross: Exorcising Romania’s Communist Past in Museums, Memorials and Monuments’, in Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor (eds.), Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 275–305, esp. 297–303. 21. Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘Civil Society, Pluralism, and the Future of East and Central Europe’, Social Research, 68, 4 (2001), 989. 22. Robert M. Hayden, ‘Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia, 1941–45 and 1992–95’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 487–516. 23. Marc Morjé Howard, ‘The Leninist Legacy Revisited’, in Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc Morjé Howard and Rudra Sil (eds.), World Disorder after Leninism: Essays in Honor of Ken Jowitt (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), 34–46; Jeffrey Kopstein, ‘1989 as a Lens for the Communist Past and Post-Communist Future’, Contemporary European History, 18, 3 (2009), 289–302. 24. Ivan Krastev, ‘The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus’, Journal of Democracy, 18, 4 (2007), 63; Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘Leninist Legacies, Pluralist Dilemmas’, Journal of Democracy, 18, 4 (2007), 38. Cf. Charles S. Maier, ‘What Have We Learned since 1989?’ Contemporary European History, 18, 3 (2009), 253–69; Michael Shafir, ‘From Historical to “Dialectical” Populism: The Case of PostCommunist Romania’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 50, 3–4 (2008), 425–70. 25. Dieter Prowe, ‘ “Classic” Fascism and the New Radical Right in Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts’, Contemporary European History, 3, 3 (1994), 289–314;

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26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

Notes Richard Golsan (ed.), Fascism’s Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Tamir Bar-On, ‘Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 16, 3 (2008), 327–45. Etienne Balibar, ‘Is There a “Neo-Racism”?’ in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 17–28; Lisa Lampert, ‘Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages’, Modern Language Quarterly, 65, 3 (2004), 391–421. For example: Jan-Werner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (eds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). For example: Harold Marcuse, ‘The Revival of Holocaust Awareness in West Germany, Israel, and the United States’, in Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert and Detlef Junker (eds.), 1968: A Year Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 421–38; Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Andy Pearce, ‘The Development of Holocaust Consciousness in Contemporary Britain, 1979–2001’, Holocaust Studies, 14, 2 (2008), 71–94; Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Claudio Fogu, ‘Italiani brava gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory’, in Lebow, Kansteiner and Fogu (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, 161–65. Robert A. Ventresca, ‘Mussolini’s Ghost: Italy’s Duce in History and Memory’, History & Memory, 18, 1 (2006), 96–97. Ventresca, ‘Mussolini’s Ghost’, 102–04. See also Ventresca, ‘Debating the Meaning of Fascism in Contemporary Italy’, Modern Italy, 11, 2 (2006), 189–209; Andrea Mammone, ‘A Daily Revision of the Past: Fascism, Anti-Fascism, and Memory in Contemporary Italy’, Modern Italy, 11, 2 (2006), 211–26; Joshua Arthurs, ‘Fascism as “Heritage” in Contemporary Italy’, in Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe A. Veltri (eds.), Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe (London: Routledge, 2010), 114–27. Pamela Ballinger, ‘Who Defines and Remembers Genocide after the Cold War? Contested Memories of Partisan Massacre in Venezia Giulia in 1943–1945’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2, 1 (2000), 11–30; Gaia Baracetti, ‘Foibe: Nationalism, Revenge and Ideology in Venezia Giulia and Istria, 1943–45’, Journal of Contemporary History, 44, 4 (2009), 657–74; Martin Purvis and David Atkinson, ‘Performing Wartime Memories: Ceremony as Contest at the Risiera di San Sabba Death Camp, Trieste’, Social and Cultural Geography, 10, 3 (2009), 337–56. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation’, in Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (eds.), The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (London: Routledge, 2004), 147. Cf. James Walston, ‘History and Memory of the Italian Concentration Camps’, The Historical Journal, 40, 1 (1997), 169–83; Robert S.C. Gordon, ‘The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria, 27 January 2001’, Modern Italy, 11, 2 (2006), 167–88. Ido de Haan, ‘Paths of Normalization after the Persecution of the Jews: The Netherlands, France, and West Germany’, in Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds.), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 69.

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35. Ido de Haan, ‘Routines and Traditions: The Reactions of Non-Jews and Jews in the Netherlands to War and Persecution’, in David Bankier and Israel Gutman (eds.), Nazi Europe and the Final Solution (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2003), 437. 36. William B. Cohen, ‘The Algerian War and French Memory’, Contemporary European History, 9, 3 (2000), 489–500; Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘Communism and the Human Condition: Reflections on The Black Book of Communism’, Human Rights Review, 2, 2 (2001), 125–34. 37. Michael Richards, ‘Between Memory and History: Social Relationships and Ways of Remembering the Spanish Civil War’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, 19, 1 (2006), 86; Francisco Ferrándiz, ‘Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9, 2 (2008), 177–92. 38. I am grateful to Helen Graham for the wording of this sentence. 39. Carolyn P. Boyd, ‘The Politics of History and Memory in Democratic Spain’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 617 (2008), 142–43. See also Carsten Jacob Humlebæk, ‘Political Uses of the Recent Past in the Spanish Post-Authoritarian Democracy’, in Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney (eds.), Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 75–88; Paloma Aguilar and Carsten Humlebæk, ‘Collective Memory and National Identity in the Spanish Democracy’, History & Memory, 14, 1/2 (2002), 121–64. For a moving example, see Ramón Sender Barayón, A Death in Zamora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). 40. Antonio Monegal, ‘Exhibiting Objects of Memory’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9, 2 (2008), 239–51. 41. István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 282, 296. See also Mark Pittaway, ‘The “House of Terror” and Hungary’s Politics of Memory’, Austrian Studies Newsletter, 15, 1 (2003), 16–17; Judt, Postwar, 827–28; Péter Apor, ‘Eurocommunism: Commemorating Communism in Contemporary Eastern Europe’, in Małgorzata Pakier and Bo Stråth (eds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 233–46. 42. Evans, ‘Memorials, Monuments, Histories’, 319–21; James Mark, ‘Containing Fascism: History in Post-Communist Baltic Occupation and Genocide Museums’, in Sarkisova and Apor (eds.), Past for the Eyes, 352. 43. Meike Wulf, ‘Changing Memory Regimes in a New Europe’, East European Memory Studies, 7 (2011), 17–18. 44. William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 184–86. See also Richard Shorten, ‘Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism: Moral Equivalence and Degrees of Evil in Modern Political Violence’, in Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 173–90; Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 45. Stuart Elden and Luiza Bialasiewicz, ‘The New Geopolitics of Division and the Problem of a Kantian Europe’, Review of International Studies, 32, 4 (2006), 627. 46. Maria Mälksoo, ‘The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe’, European Journal of International Relations, 15, 4 (2009), 653–80. See also Claus Leggewie, ‘A Tour of the

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47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

Notes Battleground: The Seven Circles of Pan-European Memory’, Social Research, 75, 1 (2008), 217–34; Robert Bideleux, ‘Rethinking the Eastward Extension of the EU Civil Order and the Nature of Europe’s New East-West Divide’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 10, 1 (2009), 118–36. Evans, ‘Memorials, Monuments, Histories’, 333. See also Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds.), Post-Communist Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010); Gregory Carleton, ‘Victory in Death: Annihilation Narratives in Russia Today’, History & Memory, 22, 1 (2010), 135–68; Roger Markwick, ‘The Great Patriotic War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Collective Memory’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 692–713. Nurit Schleifman, ‘Moscow’s Victory Park: A Monumental Change’, History & Memory, 13, 2 (2001), 5–34. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, ‘Commemorations of the Siege of Leningrad: A Catastrophe in Memory and Myth’, in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds.), The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 111. Adamovich and Suvorov cited in Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 207, 211–12. Benjamin Forest, Juliet Johnson and Karen Till, ‘Post-totalitarian National Identity: Public Memory in Germany and Russia’, Social and Cultural Geography, 5, 3 (2004), 368. Ilya Prizel, ‘Nationalism in Postcommunist Russia: From Resignation to Anger’, in Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (eds.), Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), 337. See also Alexander Etkind, ‘Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany’, Grey Room, 16 (2004), 36–59; Thomas C. Wolfe, ‘Past as Present, Myth, or History? Discourses of Time and the Great Fatherland War’, in Lebow, Kansteiner and Fogu (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, 249–83; David Reynolds, ‘World War II and Modern Meanings’, Diplomatic History, 25, 3 (2001), 457–72, esp. 464–66. James V. Wertsch, ‘Blank Spots in History and Deep Memory: Revising the Official Narrative of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact’, in Ene Kõresaar, Epp Lauk and Kristin Kuutma (eds.), The Burden of Remembering: Recollections and Representations of the 20th Century (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2009), 37–56. Judt, Postwar, 803. Jens Kroh, ‘Erinnerungskultureller Akteur und geschichtspolitisches Netzwerk: Die “Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research”’, and Harald Schmid, ‘Europäisierung des Auschwitzgedenkens? Zum Aufstieg des 27. Januar 1945 als “Holocaustgedenktag” in Europa’, both in Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel (eds.), Universalisierung des Holocaust? Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik in internationaler Perspektive (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), 156–73 and 174–202; Lothar Probst, ‘Founding Myths in Europe and the Role of the Holocaust’, New German Critique, 90 (2003), 45–58. Avi Beker (ed.), The Plunder of Jewish Property during the Holocaust: Confronting European History (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler and Philipp Ther (eds.), Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2007); Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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56. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 344–65. 57. Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘Democracy and Memory: Romania Confronts Its Communist Past’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 617 (2008), 166–80; Ruxandra Cesereanu, ‘The Final Report on the Holocaust and the Final Report on the Communist Dictatorship in Romania’, East European Politics and Societies, 22, 2 (2008), 270–81. 58. Carolyn J. Dean, ‘Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and “Exorbitant” Jewish Memory’, History & Memory, 18, 1 (2006), 43–85. 59. Adam Hochschild, ‘In the Heart of Darkness’, New York Review of Books (6 October 2005), 39–42; Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (London: Verso, 2002); Martin Ewans, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and its Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2002). 60. Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). 61. Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘The Second World War and British Culture’, in Brian Brivati and Harriet Jones (eds.), From Reconstruction to Integration: Britain and Europe since 1945 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), 45 (national ego); Reynolds, ‘World War II and Modern Meanings’, 470 (German domination); Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London: Routledge, 2000), esp. ch. 7; cf. Wendy Webster, ‘ “Europe against the Germans”: The British Resistance Narrative, 1940–1950’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 958–82. 62. Caroline Elkins, ‘Race, Citizenship, and Governance: Settler Tyranny and the End of Empire’, in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (eds.), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005), 203–22. 63. Matthew Connelly, ‘Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict During the Algerian War for Independence’, American Historical Review, 105, 3 (2000), 739–69. 64. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1996); Phillips P. O’Brien, ‘East versus West in the Defeat of Nazi Germany’, Strategic Studies, 23, 2 (2000), 89–113; Mark A. Stoler, ‘The Second World War in US History and Memory’, Diplomatic History, 25, 3 (2001), 383–92. 65. John Torpey, ‘ “Making Whole What Has Been Smashed”: Reflections on Reparations’, Journal of Modern History, 73, 2 (2001), 333–58; Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 66. Richard H. King, ‘ “What Kind of People Are We?” The United States and the Truth and Reconciliation Idea’, in Wilfred M. McClay (ed.), Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 496. 67. Christopher J. Le Mon, ‘Rwanda’s Troubled Gacaca Courts’, Human Rights Brief, 14, 2 (2007), 16–20. 68. Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The “Holocaust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5, 1 (2002), 5–85; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘Memories of Europe: Cosmopolitanism and Its Others’, in Chris Rumford (ed.), Cosmopolitanism and Europe (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 158–77; Gerard Delanty, ‘The Idea of a Cosmopolitan Europe: On the Cultural Significance of Europeanization’,

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69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

Notes International Review of Sociology, 15, 3 (2005), 405–21. See also the important article by Marco Duranti, which decouples Holocaust consciousness from the history of human rights: ‘The Holocaust, the Legacy of 1789 and the Birth of International Human Rights Law: Revisiting the Foundation Myth’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14, 2 (2012), 159–86. Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, The Historical Journal, 47, 2 (2004), 379–98. Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions’, American Historical Review, 113, 5 (2008), 1313–43. Jens Bartelson, ‘We Could Remember It for You Wholesale: Myths, Monuments and the Constitution of National Memories’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 51. In general, for the best critical history of human rights, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Rosenfeld, ‘A Looming Crash’. Ido de Haan, ‘The Construction of a National Trauma: The Memory of the Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands’, Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences, 34, 2 (1998), 196–217. Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking History, 8, 2 (2004), 193–221; Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Testing the Limits of Trauma: The Long-Term Psychological Effects of the Holocaust on Individuals and Collectives’, History of the Human Sciences, 17, 2–3 (2004), 97–123. On Friedländer’s use of testimony, see Amos Goldberg, ‘The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History’, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 220–37. Tony Judt, ‘The “Problem of Evil” in Postwar Europe’, New York Review of Books (14 February 2008). Michael Rothberg, ‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor’, PMLA, 119, 5 (2004), 1243. Richard Ned Lebow, ‘The Future of Memory’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 617 (2008), 25–41. Prizel, ‘Nationalism in Postcommunist Russia’, 334. Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘Was There a European Order in the Twentieth Century? From the Concert of Europe to the End of the Cold War’, Contemporary European History, 9, 3 (2000), 330. See, for examples: Jeffrey S. Kopstein, ‘The Politics of National Reconciliation: Memory and Institutions in German-Czech Relations since 1989’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 3, 2 (1997), 57–78; Jan C. Behrends, ‘Jan Józef Lipskis europäischer Traum: Zur Geschichtskultur in Polen, Russland und Deutschland nach 1989’, Themenportal Europäische Geschichte (2007), online at: www.europa.clio-online.de/2007/Article= 246; and the forum ‘Truth and Reconciliation in History’, ed. Elazar Barkan, American Historical Review, 114, 4 (2009).

Index Abbasid Empire, 129 Aborigines, 50, 153–54, 166 ‘Stolen generations’, 153, 181 Acéphale, 135 Action (BUF), 120 Action Française, 125, 130, 131, 133 Adamovich, Ales, 179 Adenauer, Konrad, 78 African-Americans, 166 Agamben, Giorgio, 47, 57, 59, 63 Algerian War, 129, 177, 181 Alltagsgeschichte, 39–40, 41, 44 Alsace-Lorraine, 31, 115 Alternative to Death (Earl of Portsmouth), 119 Aly, Götz, 32, 62 Ambrosino, Georges, 126 American Indians, 166 Amnesty Law (Spain, 1977), 178 Anderson, David, 166 Antelme, Robert, 60 antifascism, 5, 6, 10, 23, 67–80, 135–36, 176, 177 antisemitism, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 40, 42, 54–55, 57, 59, 77, 99, 124, 125, 175 Antonescu, Ion, 20–21, 175 Apartheid, 181 Arendt, Hannah, 25, 28, 49–62, 76, 137–38, 173 Argentina, 155, 180, 181 Armenian genocide, 26, 33, 50, 146 Aron, Raymond, 127, 128 Arrow Cross, 133, 178 Arusha Accords, 147 Aschheim, Steven, 37, 39 Assmann, Jan, 159 Augé, Marc, 143, 167 Auschwitz, 16, 17, 49, 50, 55, 57, 137, 159 in collective memory, 144 Sonderkommando in, 56 Australia, 22, 88, 153–54, 155, 181

Austria, 124, 150 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin), 21, 26–27, 28, 32 Bajohr, Frank, 31, 77 Baker, Bruce, 169 Baldwin, Stanley, 92, 119 Balfour, Arthur, 85 Baltic States, 15, 21 Banse, Ewald, 84, 95 Barrès, Maurice, 114, 115, 116, 120 Barsley, Michael, 88 Barta, Tony, 155 Bartelson, Jens, 182 Barthes, Roland, 41 Bartov, Omer, 18 Basrah Times, 83 Bataille, Georges, 126, 128, 131, 132, 135–36, 137, 139 Baum, Steven K., 44 Bazin, René, 114 Behemoth (Neumann), 81 Belarus, 20, 21 Belgian Congo, 166, 181 see also Democratic Republic of Congo Belgium, 20, 166 Bell, David, 125 Bell, Gertrude, 83 Belloc, Hilaire, 72, 82 Bellow, Saul, 157 ˙ Bełzec, 17, 56 Bender, Sara, 20 Beneš, Edvard, 87 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 177 Benjamin, Walter, 126, 169–70 Bensoussan, David, 121, 122 Berg, Nicolas, 38 Bergen-Belsen, 28 Berlin, 144, 159 Berlin Wall, 175 Berlusconi, Silvio, 23, 177 Berth, Edouard, 115 Best, Andrew, 96 Bidault, Georges, 129 241

242

Index

Black Book of Communism, The, 177 Bloxham, Donald, 22 Blum, Léon, 129 Blunden, Edmund, 107, 108, 109, 119 Boberhaus (Loewenberg), 98, 102 Borges, Jorge Luis, 11 Borkenau, Franz, 68, 69–71, 74, 75, 78, 79 Bosnia, 152, 153 Boulangism, 114 Boutang, Pierre, 125 Boyarin, Jonathan, 159 Boyd, Carolyn, 178 Bozman, E. F., 108 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 81 Bramwell, Anna, 110, 113, 116, 120, 122 Brasillach, Robert, 114 Brauchitsch, Walther von, 30 Bringing Them Home Report (Australia), 153 British Empire, 78, 89, 97 British Union of Fascists (BUF), 80, 100, 105, 119–20, 122, 133 Brittany, 120–21 Broszat, Martin, 29, 37–39, 41, 48 Browning, Christopher, 54 Brucan, Silviu, 174 Bryant, Arthur, 91, 92–93, 108, 119 Buckley-Zistel, Susanne, 152 Budapest, 23, 72, 178 Bulgaria, 20 Bünde, 98 Burundi, 58, 147 Bush, George W., 158 Byers, Susie, 116 Caillois, Roger, 124, 126, 128, 131, 132 Cambodia, 146, 150, 151 Canada, 88 Carroll, Lewis, 88 Caruth, Cathy, 162 Ceau¸sescu, Nicolai, 20, 162 Césaire, Aimé, 49 Chamberlain, Neville, 73, 90, 92 Champetier de Ribes, Auguste, 145 Chase, Malcolm, 98, 109, 119 Chełmno, 17 Chetniks, 148, 174 Choeung Ek, 151 Churchill, Winston, 72, 79, 172

Cioran, Emil, 11 Civil Rights, 169 Club de L’Horloge, 133 Cold War, 16, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31, 79, 125, 137, 144, 150, 155, 159, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 182, 183 College of Sociology, 123–24, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131 Collingwood, R. G., 73 colonialism, 10, 16, 22, 33, 49, 50, 147, 149 Comité de Vincennes, 129 commemorations, 143, 145, 149, 150–51, 153, 163–64, 168, 170, 182 Commission for Historical Clarification (Guatemala), 166, 181 communism, 5, 10, 23, 29, 70, 74, 79, 88, 105, 116, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 172, 177, 180 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), 121 Confino, Alon, 41, 43, 44, 155, 165–66, 168, 173 Confluence, 137 Conford, Philip, 106, 114, 120 Confucius, 159 Congress of Vienna, 183 Connerton, Paul, 159 Consonni, Manuela, 44 Copsey, Nigel, 67, 69, 70, 74 Critique, 128 Croatia, 21, 148 Croix de Feu, 114, 120 Czechoslovakia, 34, 68, 134 Dachau, 28 Daily Telegraph (London), 85 Daily Worker (London), 87 Daly, Sidney, 87 Darfur, 182 Darré, Richard Walther, 101, 110, 117 Dastur, Françoise, 60, 61, 62 Dean, Martin, 31 de Benoist, Alain, 133, 138–39 Debray, Régis, 172 decolonisation, 168, 183 de Felice, Renzo, 177 Defying Hitler (Haffner), 75, 78–79 de Gaulle, Charles, 128, 129, 133, 134 De Haan, Ido, 162, 177

Index Dell, Robert, 89 Democratic Republic of Congo, 59, 153 Denitch, Bogdan, 148 Denmark, 75 Déroulède, Paul, 114 Derrida, Jacques, 60, 61, 158, 159 Deutsche Arbeitsfront, 117 Deutsche Bank, 23 Deutsche Freischar, 98 Dickson, Lovat, 84 Diner, Dan, 7, 8, 38, 150 Distributism, 72 Dmitrov, Georgi, 70 Dorgères, Henri, 111, 112, 120, 121, 122 Doriot, Jacques, 117 Dreyfus Affair, 114, 133 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 116–17, 118, 120 Drumont, Edouard, 114 Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), 151 Dugdale, E. T. S., 85 Dulić, Tomislav, 148 Durkheim, Emile, 126, 128, 144, 164 Dwork, Debórah, 32 East Timor, 58 Eichmann, Adolf, 43, 62, 150 Einsatzgruppen, 30, 54 Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), 18, 30–31 Eire, 88 Eley, Geoff, 174 Eliade, Mircea, 11 Elkins, Caroline, 166 England Herself (Gardiner), 103–4, 108, 109 English Array, 106, 118 English Mistery, 106, 118 Ensor, R. C. K., 85 Estonia, 20, 179 eugenics, 94, 95 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 134 European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR), 172 European Union (EU), 8, 24, 134, 176, 180, 181, 183 Evans, Martin, 179

243

Faisceau, 112, 120 Faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses, Les (Monnerot), 128, 132, 136 Falange (Spain), 133 Farrell Krell, David, 158 fascism, 4, 6, 7, 9–10, 11, 29, 68–69, 73, 96–97, 105, 106, 116–18, 124–25, 126, 130, 131, 135, 137, 139, 173, 175 and Nazism, 5, 96–97, 101, 104, 105–6, 117–18, 132 and ‘neo-fascism’, 124–25 appeal of, 6, 105, 116, 131, 136, 137 as tool of big business, 68 British, 6, 80, 119–20, 122 ecology and 110, 113, 120 French, 111, 116, 120, 122, 124–25, 126, 133 intellectual origins of, 111, 115–16 Italian, 4, 5, 116, 122, 133, 144 Romanian, 5, 11 Fascisme, Le (Valois), 116 Felman, Shoshana, 170 Ferdinand, Franz, 147 Finchelstein, Federico, 5, 6 Fini, Gianfranco, 177 Finkelstein, Norman, 160, 163, 166 Finkielkraut, Alain, 54 Finland, 20 foibe, 177 forced labour, 17, 20, 22 For Fatherland and Freedom Party (Latvia), 172 Foucault, Michel, 11, 47 Fowler, David, 96 Foyle, Christina, 92 Fraenkel, Heinrich, 69 France, 20, 68, 75, 150, 155, 177, 178 and decolonisation, 129 Fifth Republic, 125, 132, 137 Popular Front, 112 Resistance, 128, 132 Revolution, 88, 159 rural exodus, 112 Third Republic, 113, 133 Vichy, 32, 113, 122, 125, 133, 134, 177 Francisme, 120 Franco, Francisco, 178 Francoism, 6, 178 Frank, Hans, 28, 33, 36

244

Index

Friedländer, Saul, 1, 2, 7, 18, 37–48, 182 Friedman, Philip, 35 Fritzsche, Peter, 155, 165–66, 168, 171 Front National, 123, 124–25, 127, 129, 133, 136, 139 gacaca, 58, 181 Galicia, 20 Gardiner, Rolf, 96–109, 115, 116, 117–18, 119, 120, 122 Garvin, J. L., 95 General Government, 28 Generalplan Ost, 33 genocide, 4, 7, 21–22, 25–36, 40, 44, 50, 143–56, 168 aftermath of, 149–53 cultural, 27, 31 ‘double’, 8, 23–24, 178–79 Gentile, Emilio, 130 German Southwest Africa, 22, 146 Germany Jekyll and Hyde (Haffner), 75–78 Germany’s Third Empire (Moeller van den Bruck), 82, 83–84 Geve, Thomas, 55 Geyer, Michael, 46, 149 ghettos, 20 Gilroy, Paul, 49 Globocnik, Odilo, 17 Goebbels, Josef, 45, 57, 91, 92, 102–3, 149 Goetsch, Georg, 102, 103 Goldberg, Amos, 42–43, 44–45 Gollancz, Victor, 72, 74, 92 Gourevitch, Philip, 53 Gradowski, Zalman, 56 Great Patriotic War, 23, 179 Green, E. H. H., 92 Greenshirt Movement, 111, 112, 120, 121, 122 Grey, Peter, 159, 161 Griffiths, Richard, 96, 114, 125 Gringauz, Samuel, 35 Gross, Babette, 69 Guatemala, 150, 180 Guedalla, Philip, 85 Guerre en question, La (Monnerot), 131 Gulag, 51 Haffner, Sebastian, 68, 75–79 Halbwachs, Maurice, 144, 164

Hamburg, 18, 108 Handelman, Susan, 169 Hargrave, John, 98 Hartman, Geoffrey, 159, 166, 167, 170 Harvest of Hate (Poliakov), 62 Hauner, Milan, 81 Hayden, Robert M., 148 Heidegger, Martin, 60, 61, 103 Heiden, Konrad, 75 Heimonet, Jean-Michel, 124, 125 Herero and Nama genocide, 22 Hess, Jonathan M., 164 Heydrich, Reinhard, 17 Hilberg, Raul, 44 Himmler, Heinrich, 21, 36, 110 Hiroshima, 166 Hirsch, Marianne, 167 Historikerstreit, 4, 154 historiography, 3, 7, 11–12, 38, 48, 169 history as concept, 2, 7, 9, 10 laws of, 51–52, 138 methodology, 3, 4, 8, 28, 37, 38–39, 40–41, 48, 144–45, 155, 159, 161, 165, 167 of ideas, 3, 4, 9, 10–11, 76 philosophy of, 2 popular, 3, 8 History & Memory, 168 History in Transit (LaCapra), 162 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 20, 21, 26, 33, 36, 49, 67, 70, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 110, 130, 135, 137, 149, 172, 174, 179, 180 Hitler Case, The (Lemkin), 27, 28, 33 Hitler Youth, 101, 117 Hochschild, Adam, 166 Hollier, Denis, 123, 136 Holocaust, 4, 5, 42, 153, 168, 169, 177, 180, 183 and fascism, 5, 7 and Nazi crimes, 31–32, 35, 36 as ‘colonial genocide’, 21–22, 33 as ‘industrial genocide’, 15 as ‘mysterious’, 43–44, 48, 60 as state-led crime, 22 as ‘subaltern genocide’, 149 bureaucracy of, 16 commemoration of, 8 ‘consciousness’, 144, 150, 178

Index denial of, 127, 148, 178 economics and, 18–19, 23, 53 hiding in, 56 historiography of, 6, 7–8, 15–24, 25, 26, 28, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52 in Eastern Europe, 16, 18, 20–21 in Western Europe, 16, 20 looting in, 18, 30, 180 memorial day, 23, 150, 159 micro-histories of, 16 museums and, 23 negotiations with Allies in, 21 perpetrators of, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 41, 42, 44, 45, 53–54 photographs of, 17, 55 representation of, 2, 8 survival in, 20 victims of, 41, 42–43, 44, 54 Hölscher, Lucian, 170 Hooligan’s Return, The (Manea), 162 Hoover, Calvin, 83 Howard, John, 153, 154 Howkins, Alun, 116, 120 humanism, 49, 60–61 Hungary, 20, 124 Hunt, Lynn, 44 Hutchinson, Walter, 91, 92, 93 Hutton, Patrick, 167 Hutu Power, 58, 59, 147 Huxley, Aldous, 35 Huyssen, Andreas, 158, 159 Hyde, Arnold, 85–86, 89

245

Jacoby, Gerhard, 34 Jacquier, Charles, 113 Jasenovac, 148 Jaspers, Karl, 62 Jenkins, Brian, 114, 116 Jenks, Jorian, 115, 120 Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, 111 Jeunesse Patriotes, 114 Jewish history, 19, 38, 157 John, Evan, 81, 82 Judt, Tony, 3, 4–5, 160, 180, 182

India, 88, 149 Indochina, 129, 181 Institute of Jewish Affairs (New York), 34 Institute of National Memory (Poland), 166 International Criminal Court, 150 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, 58 Iron Guard, 133 Islam, 129, 138 Israel, 150, 155 Italy, 20, 23, 68, 124, 176–77

Kaminski, Michał, 172 Kangura, 147 Kansteiner, Wulf, 144, 153, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 83 Kaplan, Chaim, 57 Karski, Jan, 56 Katz, Steven, 58 Kaunas, 15 Kenya, 166, 181 Kershaw, Ian, 44, 76 Kettenacker, Lothar, 78 Kettler, David, 67, 79 Khmer Rouge, 146, 151 Kibbo Kift Kindred, 98 Kiernan, Ben, 146 King, Richard H., 137, 181 Kinship in Husbandry, 107–9, 118, 119, 120 Kissinger, Henry, 137 Klein, Kerwin Lee, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 167, 170, 171 Klossowski, Pierre, 123, 126 Kojève, Alexandre, 126 Kolnai, Aurel, 10, 67, 68, 72–75, 77, 78, 79 Koselleck, Reinhart, 170 Kosovo, 148 Kosovo Polje, Battle of (1389), 147 Krzeminski, Adam, 172 Kugelmass, Jack, 159 Kühne, Thomas, 45–46, 47 Kulaks, 146

Jabès, Edmond, 45 Jäckel, Eberhard, 58 Jacobs, Steven, 27

La Cagoule, 120 LaCapra, Dominick, 38, 160, 162, 164 Lang, Berel, 38

246

Index

Langer, Lawrence, 38, 170 Lanzmann, Claude, 56 Lapland, 110 Laqueur, Walter, 98 Laski, Harold, 72 Lassiera, Raymond, 111 Latvia, 23 Laub, Dori, 170 Law and Justice Party (Poland), 172 Law of Historical Memory (Spain, 2007), 178 Lawrence, D. H., 98 League of Nations, 182 Lebow, Richard Ned, 175 Le Corbusier, 110 Lefort, Claude, 128 Left Book Club, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 92 Leftwich, Joseph, 94 Lehmann-Russbüldt, Otto, 69 Leiris, Michel, 126 Lemkin, Raphael, 21, 25–36 Leningrad, Siege of, 179 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 123, 136, 138 Levene, Mark, 149 Levi, Primo, 56, 58 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 126 Libra, Pierre, 126 Lieux de mémoire, Les (Nora), 158 Ligue Anti-Sémitique, 113 Ligue des Patriotes, 114 Linenthal, Edward, 159 Linnaeus, Carolus, 63 Lithuania, 20, 21 Łód´z Ghetto, 56 Lorimer, David, 82, 83 Lorimer, Emily, 10, 81–95 Lublin, 17 Ludovici, Anthony Mario, 95, 106, 114, 118 Lymington, Viscount, see Portsmouth, Earl of Lyotard, Jean-François, 48 Macmurray, John, 105 Maier, Charles S., 40, 158 Majdanek, 17 Mammone, Andrea, 125 Man and the Sacred (Caillois), 131, 132 Manchester Guardian, 72, 85

Manea, Norman, 162–63 Mann, Michael, 44 Margalit, Avishai, 159, 167 Mariupol, 15 Marx, Karl, 101, 138 Marxism, 11, 18, 68, 70, 77, 130, 136 Massingham, H. J., 109, 119 Mau Mau Emergency, 181 Maurras, Charles, 114, 125 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 11 Meaning of Hitler, The (Haffner), 75 Mégret, Bruno, 136 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 26, 81–95 memory, 2, 3, 8–9, 23–24, 38, 40, 41, 143–56, 157–71, 172 as process, 168 collective, 143–44, 149, 152, 154–55, 156, 160, 163, 164–65, 166–67, 173 ‘multidirectional’, 168, 183 national, 155–56 ‘wars’, 155, 172–83 Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur), 144, 169 Memory of Catastrophe, The (Gray and Oliver), 161 Milošević, Slobodan, 147, 148 Minear, Richard, 166 Moeller van den Bruck, Artur, 82, 83 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), 180 Mommsen, Hans, 30 Monnerot, Jules, 123–39 Monnet, Jean, 134 Moore-Colyer, Richard, 96, 105, 106, 114, 118 Morès, Marquis de, 113 Morgenthau, Henry, 50 Moscow, 179 Moses, A. Dirk, 22, 148–49 Mosley, Oswald, 100, 105, 106, 120 Mosse, George L., 117 Mother Earth, 120 Munich Agreement (1938), 6 Münzenberg, Willi, 69 Murambi, 151 Murphy, James, 90–91, 92, 93 Muselmann, 57 Musikheim (Frankfurt an der Oder), 98, 102 Mussolini, Benito, 69

Index My Lai massacre, 144, 165 Myth of the Twentieth Century (Rosenberg), 86 National Book Association, 92 National Farmers Union (NFU), 120, 122 NATO, 133 Nazism, 2, 4, 5, 7, 38, 39, 40, 43, 46, 49, 60–61, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 84, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 109, 115, 116, 122, 127, 130, 133, 159, 172, 173, 177 and big business, 18, 68 and colonialism, 16, 149 and countryside, 122 and ecology, 110 and German youth movements, 98–104 and war, 74, 77 as ‘gangsterism’, 18, 77 as Prussian militarism, 70, 78, 91 as variety of fascism, 5, 6, 101, 104, 105–6, 132 collaboration with, 174 ideology, 16, 33, 35, 44–45, 50, 51–52, 55, 57, 62–63, 73, 76, 77, 81, 83–84, 94, 103, 149 rejection of reason, 73 resistance to, 175 Netherlands, 18, 20, 122, 177 ‘Hunger Winter’, 177 Neumann, Franz, 33, 69, 81 New English Weekly (London), 88 New German Empire, The (Borkenau), 70–71 New Party, 105 New Pioneer, 106, 118 New Zealand, 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 143, 153, 160 Nora, Pierre, 144, 158, 159, 164, 167 North America, 22 Northern Transylvania, 20 Norway, 31, 75 Nouvelle Droite, 125, 138 NSDAP, 38 Nuremberg rallies, 73 Nuremberg Trials, 28, 30, 150 Nussbaum, Martha, 49

247

Observer (London), 95 Of Spirit (Derrida), 60, 61 O’Hagan, Andrew, 163 Oliver, Kendrick, 159, 161, 165 Open, The (Agamben), 63 Operation Reinhard, 17 Ophüls, Marcel, 175 Order Police, 17, 45 Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt), 51, 52, 137 Orwell, George, 69, 72 Palestinians, 155 Paris, 144 Parti Populaire Français (PPF), 116, 120 Paul, Leslie, 99 Pavelić, Ante, 148 Paxton, Robert, 111, 122 Perec, Georges, 77 Petropoulos, Jonathan, 18, 77 Pionniers Rouges, 111 Plumyène, Jean, 111 Poland, 17, 21, 22, 32, 150 Poliakov, Léon, 35, 62 Pollitt, Harry, 70 Pol Pot, 146 Portsmouth, Earl of (Gerald Wallop, Viscount Lymington), 92, 99, 103, 106, 108, 115, 118, 119, 120, 122 Portugal, 23 postmodernism, 38, 41, 126, 160, 163 Potts, Alex, 114 Poujadism, 121 POWs, 17, 32 Prague, 71, 95 Princip, Gavrilo, 147 Prizel, Ilya, 180 Probing the Limits of Representation (Friedländer), 48 Prowe, Diethelm, 124, 125, 134 Puckett, Richard, 169 Putin, Vladimir, 23, 179 Queensland, 50 race, 4, 18, 40, 45, 61, 103, 112, 147, 149 Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLMC), 147 Ramsey, Archibald, 106 Rassinier, Paul, 127

248

Index

Rauschning, Hermann, 49, 72, 75, 78 Reflections of Nazism (Friedländer), 47, 48 Reichenau, Walter von, 30 Reitlinger, Gerald, 35 Renan, Ernest, 143 Renton, Dave, 67 Rév, István, 178 Rexism, 122 Richardson, Michael, 132 Ricoeur, Paul, 143, 144, 145, 157, 158, 159, 162, 164, 167, 168–71 Riga, 178 Right Book Club, 92 Risiera di San Sabba, 177 Röder, Werner, 68 Romania, 11, 15, 20–21, 32, 155, 162, 180 Romanies, 16, 31–32, 35, 148, 166 Rosenberg, Alfred, 33, 86, 88, 95 Rothberg, Michael, 167, 168, 183 Rougement, Denis de, 126 RSHA, 17, 45 Rubenstein, Joshua, 15 Rudd, Kevin, 153, 155 Runia, Eelco, 47 Russia, 23, 32, 173, 179, 183 Rwanda genocide, 44, 51, 57–60, 146–47, 152, 182 memory of, 145, 151 Rwandan Patriotic Front, 58, 147 Salvemini, Gaetano, 69 Samson, Naomi, 56–57 Schirach, Baldur von, 98 Schwarcz, Vera, 159, 160 Seger, Gerhart, 69 Seibel, Wolfgang, 19 Seldes, George, 69 Serbia, 20, 147–48 Serge, Victor, 92 Shakespeare, William, 49, 50 Shields, James, 125 Shoah (Lanzmann), 56 Shub, Boris, 34 Sierakowiak, Dawid, 56 Sihanouk, Norodom, 146 Simard, Marc, 111 slavery, 168, 183 Slovakia, 21 Smith, William Robertson, 131

Snyder, Timothy, 17, 18 Sobibór, 17 Social Credit, 98 Social Darwinism, 2, 116, 146 Sociologie de la revolution (Monnerot), 124, 131, 135, 137 Sociology of Communism (Monnerot), 124, 128–30, 131, 136, 137 Soil Association, 106, 115, 120 Solidarité Française, 120 Sorabji, Cornelia, 152 Soral, Alain, 127 Sorel, Georges, 130 Sorrow and the Pity, The (Ophüls), 175 Soucy, Robert, 134 South Africa, 88, 155, 180 Soviet Union, see USSR Spain, 68, 151, 166, 178, 183 Spanish Civil War, 70, 153, 166 Spanish Cockpit, The (Borkenau), 70 Speer, Albert, 111 SS, 17, 20, 32, 60, 124 Stachura, Peter, 98 Stalin, Joseph, 44, 82, 146, 159, 172, 180 Stapledon, George, 99, 119 Steed, Henry Wickham, 89 Steinlauf, Michael, 159 Sternhell, Zeev, 111, 115, 116, 121 Stier, Oren Baruch, 159 Stockholm Forum (2000), 23, 150, 180 Story of a Secret State (Karski), 56 Stowe, Leland, 89 Stowers, Stanley, 127 Strachey, John, 70 Strackosch, Henry, 88 Straus, Scott, 22 Street, A. G., 112 Strong, Roy, 161 Sturzo, Luigi, 69 Sunday Times, 72 Suvorov, Viktor, 179 Syndicalism, 10 Szálasi, Ferenc, 175 Szwajger, Adina Blady, 57 Tallinn, 23, 178, 179 Talmon, Jacob, 49 Tasmania, 33 Tenenbaum Joseph, 35 testimony, 40, 182

Index Thoughts on Nazi Genocide (Lemkin), 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 Time and Tide (London), 87, 89, 90, 93 Times (London), 67, 88, 100 Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 72 Tismaneanu, Vladimir, 175 Tiso, Jozef, 21, 175 Todorov, Tzvetan, 158, 159 Todos los nombres (Spain), 151 Toller, Ernst, 69 Totalitarian Enemy, The (Borkenau), 69, 70 Trafalgar, Battle of, 159 Transnistria, 20, 162 Traverso, Enzo, 67, 79 Treblinka, 54–55 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 85 Trieste, 177 Tudjman, Franjo, 148 Tuol Sleng, 151 Tyldesley, Mike, 96, 98 Ukraine, 15, 17, 21, 22, 32, 110 Greek Catholic Church in, 19 UNESCO, 61 Unfinished Victory (Bryant), 92–93 Union Movement, 120 United Kingdom, 6 United Nations, 59, 182 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948), 25, 26, 33, 145, 150, 153, 181 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 20 United States of America, 6, 53, 56, 68, 75, 88, 93, 97, 133, 155, 160, 162, 166 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 181 Unknown Black Book, 15 Upper Silesia, 16 USSR, 20, 21, 22, 23, 51, 57, 68, 74, 75, 130, 146, 180 Ustashe, 148, 174 Valley of the Fallen, 178 Valois, Georges, 112, 115–16, 120, 122 Van Pelt, Robert Jan, 32 Vansittart, Robert, 91

249

VE Day, 159 Vetlesen, Arne Johan, 45 Vienna, 72, 85 Vietnam War, 165 Vilnius, 178 Voegelin, Eric, 127, 130, 137 Volhynia, 15, 18 Volksdeutsche, 15 Volksgemeinschaft, 40, 46 Volkswagen, 23 Volontés, 135 Waller, James, 44 Wandervogel, 99 Wannsee Conference, 28, 53 War Against the West, The (Kolnai), 72, 74 Warsaw Ghetto, 56, 57 Warthegau, 17 Washington, DC, 144 Weber, Max, 1, 97 Wehrmacht, 21, 30, 31, 45–46, 47, 77 Wehrmacht Exhibition, 30 Weinreich, Max, 34 Welzer, Harald, 44 What Hitler Wants (Lorimer), 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 91, 94 What the German Needs (Lorimer), 82, 91 White, Arnold, 114 White, Hayden, 41 Whitehouse, Muriel, 87–88 Wiernik, Jankiel, 54–55 Wiesel, Elie, 57 Wildt, Michael, 45, 46, 47 Williamson, Henry, 120 Wilson, Ronald, 153 Wilson, Stephen, 113 Windschuttle, Keith, 154 Winock, Michel, 115, 116 ‘Winter Help’, 18 Wolfreys, Jim, 124 Wolin, Richard, 135 Wood, Nancy, 159 Woodcraft Folk, 99 Work of Memory, The (Confino and Fritzsche), 168 World War I, 5, 10, 34, 95, 97, 112, 135 World War II, 6, 23, 35, 40, 43, 75, 81, 95, 96, 97, 104, 114, 132, 139, 148, 166, 172, 173, 174, 179, 181, 183 World Without End (Gardiner), 100

250

Index

Wright, Patrick, 96 Wulf, Joseph, 34 WVHA, 17 Yaskiel, David, 69 Years of Persecution (Friedländer), 37, 39, 41, 47 Years of Extermination (Friedländer), 37, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 182 Yeats-Brown, Francis, 92

Yizker-Bikher, 34, 151 Young, James E., 151, 159 Yugoslavia, 148, 174, 176, 182 World War II in, 148, 176 Zaire, see Democratic Republic of Congo Zelizer, Barbie, 159, 165, 166, 168 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 159, 164 Zimmerer, Jürgen, 22 Zyklon B, 17