HISTORIANS' DISPUTE—A Balance Sheet after Ten Years
foreword to European Civil War 1917-1945, by Ernst Nolte
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In Place of a Foreword to the 5th Edition
This Book and the “Historians’ Dispute”
A Balance Sheet after Ten Years
"Dispute", confrontation, is something quite ordinary and endless in science and journalism; where there is no dispute, there is no "spiritual life" and, at best, there is only the inner harmony of a sect. From time to time the term is used with special emphasis, when the major tendencies clash and wrestle with one another for a long time. In German historiography there was the "method controversy" over the sociological or "collectivist" approach of Karl Lamprecht, and later in sociology, the "positivism controversy." Another significant and momentous dispute among historians was the so-called Fischer controversy of the 1960s, which raised the question of the character and extent of Germany's guilt in World War I, but which took its name from the initiator or author. The term “Historians’ Dispute” is today almost exclusively associated with the argument that began in 1986 and continued with great and increasingly one-sided bitterness at least until autumn of 1988, when a statement by the then Federal President the Bamberg Historians' Day seemed to mark the end. A 1991 publication listed nearly 1,200 articles and nearly three dozen books that had been published by the end of 1988; only the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany caused interest to wane. However, it was precisely these revolutionary historical events that raised the question of whether there was an internal connection with the "Historians' Dispute," and whether one could even say that "History" had made a decision that could not be brought about by theses and arguments.
One of the starting points of the dispute was the intention of the Federal Government to build a German Historical Museum in Berlin, and this plan was almost unanimously criticized by the "left-wing intellectuals" in the strongest possible terms, because it seemed to stem from the desire to "dispose” of the German past and to recover a "normal" view of history; but this diverted the view from the singular crimes of National Socialism and pushed the desire for a radical new beginning into the background, which, admittedly, had been neglected in the history of the Federal Republic from its beginning in comparison with the urge for a revival. This museum was actually established in Berlin in 1991 in the armory on Unter den Linden, where the GDR Historical Museum was located. The other side, which people liked to call "right-wing", had not made the corresponding demand either; if it had done so, the waves of indignation would have been far higher.
In 1986, Jürgen Habermas spoke with a high negativity of the "German-national tinted NATO-philosophy" attributable to the opposing party, and had fought in opposition against a view that instrumentalized the "expulsion of the kulaks" in Stalin’s Soviet Union in order to relativize the singularity of the Nazi regime, and to label the Soviet Union as a hostile power that was "still on our doorstep". In 1991, there was general satisfaction that the reunified Germany remained "anchored" in NATO, and no one seriously doubted that the power that was now withdrawing its troops from Germany had really an enemy, an enemy of the whole "West."
In 1986, Hans Mommsen was extremely negative about anti-Bolshevism, about those "anti-communist resentments" which the opponents see as decisive and which find their expression in the "theory of totalitarianism", a theory which considers "merely external similarities to be constitutive" and does not want to admit it that the communist systems of rule, in stark contrast to the fascist ones, are not subject to any process of self-destruction. In 1991, "dissidents" took over the governments everywhere in Eastern Europe and made no secret of their anti-communism, or at least anti-Sovietism; The term “totalitarianism” was used by almost all intellectuals as a matter of course, and by no means only with reference to a "Stalinist" phase; that the events had been preceded by a "self-destruction of communism" had become an obvious insight. The view that the 20th century actually only began in 1917 with the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 also seemed to be gaining ground.
But with all this, the questions that had proven to be the core of the historians' dispute by 1988 were, in fact, not answered: whether between Soviet communism and the militant anti-communism of the fascist movements and regimes, especially the radical fascist National Socialism that came to power in Germany that there was a relationship of action and re-action, of challenge and response, of the original and the copy, and whether a "causal nexus", if it did exist, could also be established between the extermination measures of the two regimes. It was precisely these problems that were articulated in my article "The Past That Will Not Pass" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 6, 1986, with the question "Was not the Gulag Archipelago more Original than Auschwitz?" with the statement a causal nexus between the two was probable.
Questions like these could not be decided by historical events alone. They could, however, be explained more comprehensively and justified more clearly. This is exactly what happened from my side in the present book which appeared in 1987, and it was the prerequisite in the matter as the result of that article, which nevertheless may be regarded as its expansion and source-based elaboration. Certainly, even the book alone cannot dispel the counter-arguments, the main point being that National Socialism must be explained from the premises of German history and that this also applies to "Auschwitz," i.e. to the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" as an absolutely singular, indeed incomparable, event, that lacks the rational connection that existed in the Gulag between real enemies of the regime and their destruction. Furthermore, the physical destruction was not intended in the Gulag, but only formed an incidental, even if terrible and extensive, consequence. Another objection is that the struggle between two ideologies and mass movements, communism and National Socialism, was merely a mask for the power struggle between two great states, so that the term "European civil war" is unjustified. The two declarations do not cancel each other out because they contradict each other, because at least the National Socialist regime must be ascribed state character of a very special kind, if one does not want to arrive at the absurd opinion that there was no “Auschwitz” in the First World War was only by chance. The weight of a third objection cannot be denied either: that the extermination measures against real or alleged enemies, i.e. "the Gulag" and "Auschwitz," were consistent actions of two "cleansing ideologies", but were merely parallel phenomena, between which there were no "causal nexus.”
A completely different kind of argument than this one were the allegations and insinuations concerning the motives of the main participants or their effects: the goal to suppress "German crimes," what "we have done," in an apology for the leaders of the Wehrmacht, in the “whitewashing of German industries,” in the macabre offsetting of mass crimes against one another; the guiding principle was the desire to make Bolshevism or even Marxism the real culprit for all the crimes of the 20th century, and consequently the intention to promote the great oblivion that has long been around in Germany through "relativization" and "historicization." As far as I know, in all of these polemics the consideration of whether it might not be a matter of more comprehensive and fairer remembrance has not even rudimentarily been raised.
One might have expected, however, that after ten years and after the surprising developments of this decade, some representatives of the "other side" in the historians' dispute would have asked themselves what balance should now be drawn: whether one should not renounce some of the old arguments and agree with the opponents in one respect or another. If I am not mistaken, this happened on the part of only one of the participants, namely Heinrich August Winkler, who wrote an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau of October 29, 1996, titled “Inspection of the Obverse. Ten Years Later: A Retrospective of the German Historians' Dispute.” Winkler reproaches himself here for having displayed an unjustified self-assurance ten years ago in another article in the same newspaper and for demanding that the Germans no longer strive for a sovereign nation-state and should therefore recognize the two state system, which was after all a consequence of the fateful role Germany played in both world wars. But his view was based on a "secularized theology of history," which was also decisive for many of the other "left-wing" contributions to the discussion. The conviction that the National Socialist crimes could be atoned for by the division of Germany had become the "great life-lie of the West German left," and today it was time to "question the morality to many moral-sounding and morally cautious arguments from the time of the historians' dispute.” In this way, Winkler brings up a considerable amount of self-criticism, but with regard to the adversary who had put forward those objectionable theses about the “causal nexus,” he held to his earlier opinion: Ernst Note had an “apologetic intention,” that he had argued nationalistically and revisionistically. In the "long version" of his article, in the European Civil War 1917-1945, he had “taken up” the “theme of the century” of the interrelationships between communism, fascism and democracy, but because of its intent of apology, the ordeal had ended “in an analytical debacle.”
In a less direct way, however, other participants have also commented on the topic of the historians' dispute after the course of almost ten years and thus potentially contributed to a balancing that Winkler postulated, but hardly already carried out. The cause was the publication of Daniel Goldhagen's book about “Hitler's Willing Executioners.” Goldhagen, the young Jewish-American political scientist, took the “orthodox” view to the extreme, even to the point of caricature: in his presentation essentially only the Germans and the Jews appear, and the relationship between them is reduced entirely to anti-Semitism on the one hand and victim status on the other. Already in the 19th century, and basically since Luther, the Germans, with a few exceptions, were filled with an “eliminatory” anti-Semitism, which under Hitler unfolded with all too great consequences into an “exterminatory” will. This had not been so much realized in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka (whose “efficiency was greatly exaggerated”), but in the hundreds of thousands of murderous acts carried out with “zeal” and “lust” by the SS, the police battalions, and the Wehrmacht. The Bolsheviks and the Gulag are not mentioned, nor is the international situation of 1939-1941, and nor is the hostility towards Jews that was widespread in the Baltic States and Ukraine. Only the confrontation between German murderers and murdered Jews is of importance. From this perspective, the thesis of the causal nexus between Gulag and Auschwitz does indeed appear to be utterly absurd. Goldhagen occasionally calls the murderers “Weltanschauung-warriors,” but in connection between anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism appears at most for fleeting moments and is further assigned to the “delusions.” Goldhagen emphatically underlines the principle of “understanding” and even emphasizes that the perpetrators considered “the mass extermination of the Jews to be justified,” but his understanding and the perpetrators' self-understanding only coincide with the concept of “delusions.” This means that a very clear verdict of guilt can be reached, and Goldhagen seems to be completely lacking in the awareness that with this collectivist attribution of guilt he is doing nothing other than what the National Socialists had done by blaming “the Jews” for the Red Terror, for the atrocities of the Cheka, and for the “great extermination” in the Gulag.
None of the "left-wing" German participants in the historians' dispute identified with such an extremist, and, for long stretches, a simply ignorant position, not even Jürgen Habermas, who of course praised Goldhagen at the 1997 “Democracy Prize.” Goldhagen had written history from the deeds of the many individuals and not from the constraints of bureaucratic apparatus or from the decisions of a charismatic leader. Hans Mommsen in particular dealt with Goldhagen's views in numerous statements and interviews, and suddenly his long-known and often "revisionist" interpretation, which took the blame away from the “weak dictator” Hitler and assigned it to the “leading classes” of Germany, took on the character of an apology, namely an apology for the German masses, who in Goldhagen appear to be the actual culprits, however much he expresses himself in rather “intentionalist” terms in some places.
Hans-Ulrich Wehler was in favor of welcoming Goldhagen's astonishing public impact as a welcome effect and of respecting his “perceptible moral indignation.” But he noted serious weaknesses that radically discredit Goldhagen’s explanation of the properly presented facts, e.g. the diabolization of the Germans and thus the “ethnicization” of the debates, his “terrifying self-righteousness” and also the omission of the “terrible, decades-long murder of millions under Lenin and Stalin's dictatorship” - however, Wehler does not have so much the omissions as such, but rather the possible and quite mistaken derivation of these crimes from a tradition of “Russian barbarism.”
Eberhard Jäckel, on the other hand, who had seen a "miserable practice of undercutters” at work on the other side in the historians' dispute, and had put forward a highly questionable thesis about alleged public announcements of the murder of Jewish women and children by Hitler, characterized Goldhagen's book as one “thoroughly flawed, unsuccessful dissertation,” which falls back to the state of research of the fifties and completely neglects the main task of research, namely “to explain the connections.”
But was not the overwhelming success of Goldhagen's book, and was not the author’s triumphant tour of Germany’s broadcasting studios and auditoriums, the most impressive proof that the Habermas-Wehler assertion was at least in some sense correct, that the attack of national apologetic revisionism had been beaten back and a great victory had been won for the Germans, through "coming to terms with the past"?
It could be, however, that this “fight against forgetting” only served a greater forgetting, that the German self-glorification of the National Socialist era was simply turned into a German self-condemnation, and that that alleged debacle was precisely the way to a deeper self-reflection and to a more adequate understanding of the context of the history of the 20th century. In any case, some publications of the 1990s by world-renowned historians suggested that such a presumption was well-founded.
When Alan Bullock's “Hitler and Stalin” was published in German translation in 1991, the memory of the historians' dispute was still fresh enough that astonishment was often expressed at how little excitement was caused by a topic that bore so much resemblance to the question of “Gulag” and “Auschwitz.” In fact, Bullock’s preliminary remarks clearly set himself apart from the germanocentric view that had so largely dominated the discussion in Germany. In his search of a frame of reference in which the larger contexts of Europe’s recent history could be better understood, he turned to the “German-Russia axis” neglected in Western historiography. This, he said, made possible to compare “between the two revolutionary power systems at home” possible, the Stalinist and the National Socialist. “Both seemed at the same time to stand in irreconcilable opposition and to have many things in common. Both had, each in their own way, challenged the existing order in Europe ideologically and politically. Their simultaneous appearance on the stage of history, embodying their mutual relationships and interactions, it seems to me, embodies the most remarkable and novel phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century, a phenomenon whose aftermath extends far into the second half.” This postulates the comparative account of two revolutionary regimes that were fundamentally related and interactive. The first question would have to be whether “revolutionary” meant the same thing in both cases and whether one revolution was also, or initially, in a one-sided relationship to the other, in such way that one would have been the precondition for the existence of the other and thus the relationship of action and re-action would have existed. Such a relationship was, after all, taken for granted by the two regimes as a matter of course: one, the Bolshevik, always saw itself as the embodiment of the “revolution” which was opposed by the “counter-revolution” in the form of the fascist regimes, and Hitler repeatedly declared that his party was protecting Germany and Europe from the global danger of Bolshevik cultural destruction. Bullock, however, does not take this path of inquiry; instead, as the subtitle suggests, he portrays “parallel lives,” namely the lives of two men who were the almost unlimited rulers of their states for twelve and almost thirty years, respectively, but who had a different relationship to their own “revolution” or “counter-revolution”: Stalin was the successor of the party founder, behind whom he always took a back seat, at least in his official statements; Hitler, on the other hand, was the founder, and to that extent should be seen as the opposite figure or the parallel to Lenin. When Bullock deals in the first three chapters with the “Origin,” the “Early Experiences,” as well with the October Revolution and the November putsch, and contrasts Stalin and Hitler, the of course he also speaks of Lenin, but the early history of the Bolshevik party, up to the coming to power in November 1917 comes only a little into view, while Hitler is almost identical with the early history of his party and the Munich putsch attempt of November 1923 must in no way be put into the parallel with the “October Revolution.” Only in the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933 does the parallel appear, and it takes place in Bullock’s book upon reaching page 409.
Bullock’s book thus consists of several chapters that depict the lives of Stalin and Hitler with strong references to the history of the Russian or German parties and the Russian or German states. The Russian Revolution, the central figures of which were Lenin and Trotsky, is therefore not described in detail, and the reader does not get the impression that Hitler's early days were significantly influenced by the relationship to this revolution. Only with the 14th chapter, which is devoted to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, does a relevant interaction begin, and it is not told much differently than it would be told in any history of Europe in the 20th century. On the whole, then, the parallelism is certainly there, the reciprocal effect comes into view late, and the originally one-sided relationship, that of “revolution” and “counter-revolution,” as Stalin and Hitler themselves saw the relationship, with opposing values, does not play a role significant role. In this respect, Bullock continues the line of structural-analytical totalitarianism theory, which also understood its double object, the Bolshevik and the National Socialist regimes, primarily as parallels. What was inspiring and attractive for countless people about the two movements and regimes is at most only partially emphasized here and there; what was terrible, on the other hand, is very much emphasized. According to Bullock, Stalin brought his people “suffering and death to an extent for which there is no parallel in history,” and the “slave empire under the rule of the SS” that Hitler brought into existence in Eastern Europe was “in no way inferior in extent or in the horrors it spread,” to terror regime “that Stalin and the NKVD established in the Soviet Union.” In this respect, Bullock, as Hannah Arendt and Carl J. Friedrich had done, places “kulaks” and “Jews” next to one another. Occasionally, however, there is talk of an intrinsic interrelation of ideologies, which is hardly a mere parallel, as when it is said: “If one replaces ‘race’ with ‘class,’ the ‘racial elite’ with the Communist Party, the subordination of the individual to the ‘Volk’ by subordination to the ‘State’…, one would get the outlines of a worldview that Stalin would have had little fault with.” But Bullock does make an essential distinction: since Hitler's main enemy, “the Jew,” is only the diabolical “invention of a pathological philosophy,” the Holocaust ultimately has a completely different character from the extermination of kulaks, party enemies, and Polish officers. “Here mass murder was not a means to an end, but an end in itself.”
So the “parallel lives” of Stalin and Hitler end not only in the radical opposition of triumph on the one hand and total defeat on the other, but also in that of purpose and rationality or irrationality of the two regimes. But at the very end, Bullock comes to speak of the events of 1989 and 1990, which in his eyes mean a far-reaching reversal of the situation of 1945, because the Soviet people are facing an economic catastrophe and must ask for help from Western states and especially from Germany, which in its western part has reached “a remarkable level of prosperity and stability.” This, the era of Hitler and Stalin is over, but it took 70 years as a result of the survival of Stalinism—until the end of the 1980s. As many questions as Bullock merely hints at and leaves unanswered as a consequence of his approach to the “parallel lives” of two men, it is nevertheless certain that, from his perspective, all attempts to separate “Hitler” from “Stalin” and to make them self-sufficient subjects are, as interpretations of the 20th century, wrong a priori.
Another English historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who for a long time was primarily known as a Marxist and authoritative social historian, after his books on the 19th century, also presented in 1994 a “World History of the 20th Century,” to which he gave the title “The Age of Extremes.” He is far more involved in the whole wealth of events than Bullock, and there is hardly a state or an important political movement that is not mentioned in at least one sentence. But the common thread is never lost. The title seems to imply that the main topic would be the various totalitarianisms and that Hobsbawm, like Bullock, would proceed on the line of structural-analytical theory of totalitarianism. But right from the start it becomes clear that he assigns a place of paramount importance to the Russian Revolution, because according to him in the years 1989/1991 a world, “which was shaped by the effects of the Russian Revolution of 1917” broke up. True, he has “the short 20th century” begin in 1914 with the outbreak of the Great War, and one must speak of a “thirty-one year world war,” since the Treaty of Versailles had so many injustices and weaknesses that “a new war was practically certain.” Nevertheless, Hobsbawm does not conceive the history of the first half of the century primarily as a history of the declared and undeclared wars between the great states. A new quality emerges from the fact that the opposition to the war, and the will to a completely new structure of life prevailed in one of the states: the October Revolution “was just as central an event for this century as the French Revolution of 1789 was for the 19th century.” The fact that their main intention was “the complete destruction of the Russian and European bourgeoisie” is apparently not seen by Hobsbawm as something negative, but it is not quite clear whether Hobsbawm, despite some self-criticism, is not convinced that Marx will be right in the longer run. In any case, according to his account, Wilson's “Fourteen Points” were already a reaction to the Russian Revolution, because they played the nationalist card against its universal appeal. Likewise, the very moderate stance of the socialist parties was "”essentially just a reaction to Bolshevism.” A “causal nexus” is thus self-evident for Hobsbawm, and the same is obviously true of Hitler's National Socialism, which was counter-revolutionary and “a kind of right-wing extremist equivalent to international communism, with Berlin as its Moscow.” However, an extraordinary complication arises from the fact that for Stalin the revolution was more and more “just rhetoric” and that the fascists showed themselves able to mobilize the masses from below; hence these are to be called “the revolutionaries of the counter-revolution.” Despite such reversals, the fascist movements and regimes remained essentially different from the communist ones, for they were a response to the real danger of a powerful social revolution and a strong working class, and Nazism plagiarized the Soviet regime to a considerable extent. The epoch can consequently be best understood as an “international ideological civil war,” and in the end Hobsbawm even defines the entire “short 20th century” as an “age of wars of religion,” and among the secular religions he includes socialism as well as nationalism . But in the second half of the century these religious wars obviously took place outside of Europe and America, for example, around the “deeply murderous dictatorships” of Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung and, admittedly, Ceausescu. The main characteristic of European-American development were precisely the “golden years” of capitalism between 1950 and 1973, whose reality evidently represents a phenomenon difficult to explain for Hobsbawm, since he is by no means inclined to agree with the “theologians of the free market” like Hayek and Friedman. But since 1973, a new age of crisis has been approaching, and it seems that for Hobsbawm “the extreme” does not lose its significance even after 1989 and the end of the “short 20th century.” The extreme horrors of the “age of modern religious wars” therefore have a place only in Asia and Africa in the second half of the century, while in the first half, the epoch of the actual ideological civil war, both in Stalin's Bolshevik Russia and in Hitler’s National Socialist Germany. Hobsbawm while mentioning the “Holocaust” right at the beginning, conflates it with the starvation deaths of several hundred thousand residents of Leningrad and the 3.5 million victims among Russian prisoners of war. “Auschwitz,” which does not even appear as a name, apparently does not occupy a completely singular place in the abundance of events, and as much as Hobsbawm sees himself as an “anti-fascist,” his judgment is in many places distant and unemotional, for example, as when he attributes to “Nazi Germany” the merit of being the only western state to have overcome unemployment between 1933 and 1938, and when he makes a very critical judgment of Zionism.
François Furet, who was a member of the French Communist Party for some time in the 1950s, in his 1995 book “Le Passé d'une illusion,” which intends to be an “essay on the communist idea in the 20th century” and yet in no way absorbed by it, emphasizes the central importance of the Russian Revolution, the “charme universel d’Octobre,” even more strongly than Hobsbawn does, and makes this fascination much vivid because he exemplifies with some important men such as the left-wing Catholic Pierre Pascal, the Russian-Jewish petty bourgeois Boris Souvarine, and Georg Lukács the son of the Jewish upper middle class in Hungary. For these three men, as for numerous others, the Russian Revolution was the “lighthouse” in the darkness of the period marked by the First World War; it appealed to passions even more than to ideas; it making sense of the apparently senseless took hold of the whole human being and not just the intellect. For Pierre Pascal, Bolshevism is by no means anti-Christian, but “the revenge of the humiliated”; Boris Souvarine is filled with deep sympathy for the little people in Russia who have not yet been touched by Western individualism; for Georg Lukács a double self-hatred plays an important role: “the self-hatred of the Jew and that of the bourgeois.” Pascal and Souvarine moved away from the Soviet system after a few years, albeit hardly from the idea of communism which here and elsewhere underlies the criticism of empirical aberrations, and even Lukács became a dissident in 1956, although he remained convinced that Stalin was the Incarnated Reason of world-history. For French intellectuals, one of the main attractions of communism was the fact that the Russian Revolution was traced back to the French Revolution in the influential works by eminent historians such as Aulard and Mathiez, and thus was a further stage in the triumphant advance of equality, emancipation, freedom and fraternity. Only Solzhenitsyn's
“Gulag Archipelago” finally broke this fascination, a fascination which had been as conspicuous in England and even in America between the wars, as it had been in France.
But Furet is not satisfied with describing this gradual disappearance of the communist faith. In its heyday it have rise to another ideology, the fascist ideology, which Furet, like so many authors before him, characterizes as a “reaction” and which he regards as “the other great myth of the century”: “Fascism arises as a reaction of the particular against the universal, of the people against the class, of the national against the international. It is in its beginnings inseparable from communism, whose aims it combats by imitating its methods.” In all its forms, however, it is not a mere reaction, no mere counter-revolution, it has its own “magic of the future,” it is as fascinating for quite a few intellectuals as communism is for many others; it can give meaning to the lives of individuals. Thus fascism appears as an almost equal counterpart to communism in the “European tragedy,” and as little as Furet denies his own past and the anti-fascist past, the principle of “understanding” comes to the fore, which keeps away from hasty moral judgments. The goal is to “understand the 20th century,” and this results in much more of “mourning” than partisan accusation. Sometimes it even looks as if Furet regards it as a misguided and deplorable development that the idea of fascism has become after the war the object of a “forbidden radical” and that a demonization ensures it an afterlife, but only an afterlife that serves to guarantee the victors the perpetuation of their triumph and which compels Germany to pay for all the crimes of the century. But this judgment is not an absolute one, it only refers to the apparent triumph of the communist view, which prevented the decisive insight that communism, like fascism, constituted “one of the great anti-liberal and anti-democratic reactions in European history of the 20th century.” Communism and fascism are therefore both similar and dissimilar to one another, and the movements as well as the regimes waged a struggle against each other which can with good reason be described as an European Civil War. But through such a distant understanding, those crimes, which in a certain way represent the climax and at the same time the self-refutation of the two ideologies, do not get out of sight: the great crime against the Russian and Ukrainian peasants, which was absolutely singular because never before History a state had set the goal of “killing, deporting, or enslaving its farmers,” and a decade later the National Socialist crime against the Jews, which was no less singular, although or because for Furet it was not caused by any “causal nexus” to the Gulag and Collectivization. As the final result of the history of the 20th century, Furet notes the victory of the “third” side, the “capitalist” side, which was sometimes barely visible in the struggle of the two great “ideo-cratic regimes,” the victory of private property, the market, and human rights. But as much more understanding of fascism as he is than Hobsbawm, so much less does he seem to be convinced that this victory could only be a temporary one.
Neither Bullock nor Hobsbawm nor Furet accept the reason given by Stalin and many Western European intellectuals for the war of extermination against the kulaks: it was indispensable for the modernization and industrialization of the country. One of the three takes even less seriously the justification put forward by Hitler and not a few National Socialists for the (initially only aimed at separation) for the war of extermination against the Jews: the Jews are “all communists” and therefore responsible for the Cheka terror and the Gulag, and, on top of that, for Western capitalism. For Furet, however, the narrative itself shows that in fact an unusually high percentage of Jews did indeed occupy leading positions in Marxists or communist movements in France and elsewhere. But Furet would also undoubtedly agree with the following thesis: even if all the accusations made against the kulaks by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been correct, and even if all the allegations made by the NSDAP about the Jews had been true, it would to be morally condemnable to kill defenseless men and women without legal trials, even children, or even to simply deport them into the unknown would be morally condemnable. Only from a historical point of view would distinctions possibly have to be made, for there is an unmistakable difference between kulaks, who refuse a reasonable delivery of grain, and German or French Jews, who do not differ in any way from their German or French compatriots.
In order to make such differences and at the same time the fate of the “collectivist attribution of guilt” clearer, I take a look at the diaries that the novelist Victor Klemperer wrote during the years 1933-1941, and which were published in 1995 under the title "I Will Bear Witness.”
If anyone was allowed to feel completely German, it was Victor Klemperer—personally a Protestant, holder of a chair in Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden, exemplary intellectual and cultural man, frontline fighter in the World War, married to an “Aryan woman” —even if he was the son of a rabbi. But immediately after January 30, 1933, the anti-Jewish campaign of the NSDAP, the legal exclusion of Jewish civil servants, and the boycott of Jewish businesses hit him with terrible force, although he was initially spared like the other frontline fighters. The hatred he felt for the National Socialists from the beginning is the hatred of the educated citizen and intellectual for the demagoguery and irrationalism of a mass movement, among whose components he counts “Americanism, technicism, automatism and deification (of the Führer).” He feels a similar aversion to communism and even to Zionism, which, with its racial doctrine, is a “source of the Nazis” and which discriminated against the Aryans in Jerusalem in the same way as it does against the Jews in Germany. In 1935 he was compulsorily retired and his previous colleagues avoided him “like a plague corpse.” Yet, for him, there is absolutely no “Jewish question” in Germany at all, because in his opinion the friction between Jews and “Aryans” was not half as great as, say, between Protestants and Catholics or between employers and employees or between East Prussia and southern Bavaria. There was only one solution to the German or Western European Jewish question, he writes, namely “the mating of its inventors.” However, he obviously considers an “Eastern Jewish question” to be real, and even when the “yellow Jewish band” was introduced in 1941, when he was forced to live in a “Jewish house,” he sees the reason not merely as arbitrariness and torture, but rather the fear of “Jewish criticism.” In all of this, nothing would be more natural than for him to condemn the entire German people who so unflinchingly follow Hitler. Indeed, some of the phrases actually sound as if they were an endorsement of Goldhagen, for example: The situation is bleak, Hitler really corresponds to the German people’s will, as a reason for this people’s will he mentions not anti-Semitism, but the fear of communism and communist Russia. All of Germany prefers Hitler to the communists, he remarks, although both movements are materialistic and lead to slavery; even some Jews protect the Nazis to a certain extent, because they fear communism, that Hitler is be the savior, from Russia, is certainly the opinion of 79.5 million Germans. Even in the “Jewish house” there is a man who, as a former officer, “is in the monomania of German soldiering and acts more nationalist than any Nazi.” On the other hand, Klemperer notices next to nothing of anti-Semitism when he has to bear the name ‘Victor Israel” and wear the Star of David: “I often wonder where the wild anti-Semitism is. For my part, I encounter a lot of sympathy, they help me out, but of course fearfully…The officials in the tax office are exemplary polite…The passers-by sympathized with the star-bearers…The people undoubtedly feel the persecution of the Jews as a sin.” An apartment neighbor thinks that every Jew has an Aryan angel, and, as is well known, Heinrich Himmler said exactly the same thing in one of his speeches, albeit in a tone of criticism and accusation. The consequence of this exclusion and collectivist attribution of guilt, which affects people who, according to Klemperer, “would be Nazis if they were not affected as Jews” is, in the eyes of this German Jew, extremely paradoxical and at the same time fatal: Hitler is the most important supporter of Zionism, he literally created the “people of the Jews,” “world Jewry,” THE Jews. But this strange fact is only a result of National Socialism; its elementary prerequisite, however, according to Klemperer, is nothing else than the relationship to communism, which, unlike the Jews, was threatening and frightening for the great majority of the German people.
It should now have become clear what the "European Civil War 1917-1945" and also the article about the “The Past That Will Not Pass” was about, even to some extent the “Fascism in its Epoch” was about: not about exculpation or incriminations, burden or exoneration, accusation or apology; but to one of the possible conceptions or paradigms or interpretative guidelines of European history and world history in the 20th century. The main question to be addressed to it is whether it grasps the context or fails to do so, whether it is illuminates or obscures, expands or narrows it. A possible restriction of political or propagandistic guilty verdicts, a different distribution of light and shadow will only result from this; but it must not be the prerequisite, however certain the individual historian will have his preferences and dislikes. The only scientifically legitimate dislike, however, is that which applies to the will to achieve political goals, which ruthlessly ignores unsuitable facts. However, each paradigm inherently has its own limitations. Precisely for this reason, there must be no strict closure from one another. The number of possible paradigms is small, however, and numerous examples from historiography can be cited for them.
The national paradigm may claim practical priority. For centuries, states, whether monarchical-aristocratic states or nation-states, have been the supreme and most capable political units; nothing was more natural than that historiography made them its main theme as soon as overarching concepts and realities such as "Christianity" ceased to be prominent. The story of the “Great Rebellion” of Lord Clarendon has as its subject an important period in English history; Voltaire's story of the age of Louis XIV, despite all its tendencies towards cultural and moral history, is nevertheless largely devoted to the development of the French state system. The English and French states, however, were older than the historiography on which they became the subject; in Germany and Italy, however, historiography preceded the formation of states, and the historians of the small-German-school such as Sybel, Treitschke and Droysen did not hide their desire to promote the emergence of a Prussian-German nation state through their work. The same applies to Italians like Carlo Botta and Cesare Balbo.
The fact that Bismarck's Germany was structured differently than that of Gladstone's England and even the France of the Third Republic, namely constitutional instead of parliamentary, was considered a positive fact and was not infrequently viewed as a special path that took Germany away from the weaknesses and deterioration of “Western” liberalism and parliamentarism. The strong monarchy was seen as the root of Germany’s rise, and the concept of the positive German special path [Sonderweg] reached its culmination the in the so-called Ideas of 1914. The defeat in World War I brought about no significant change, and for the few National Socialists among the German historians, “Germany” is hardly more in the center than for the German Nationalists. Nothing was more obvious than that after the second defeat in 1945 the positive accent should be replaced by a negative one and the German special path understood as the origin of National Socialism: the difference between industrial modernity and the premodern political system, which differed from the conditions in the “West,” had first prevented the political rule of the bourgeoisie and then the development towards a democratic revolution; thus the feudal authoritarian state plunged into the world war in 1914, and after 1918 only the aristocratic warrior ethos was democratized and vulgarized, so that the National Socialist state, contrary to the spirit of the times, had been able to launch its war of conquest and exploitation against the other states of Europe. The present task was to end the special path and to join the Western or democratic system without reservation.
There is no doubt that this national-German paradigm, both in its negative and in its positive form, has or had considerable explanatory value. Since 1870, all major decisions had been made in the capital Berlin, and they had all wished to serve the good of the people or the nation. Two world wars, for which Germany was responsible, seemed to prove irrefutably that these decisions and developments had in truth not been for the good, but for the disaster of the nation. After 1945, therefore, positive nationalism could at best still be used in a historicizing way to correct the excesses of the negative special path thesis, and the National Socialist interpretation was to be completely discredited: to continue to allow Hitler the peaceful intentions that he had often proclaimed was simply no longer an option, and it was obviously wrong to make him a victim of treachery of diplomats and generals by emphasizing the lack of adequate war preparations. The only possibility of a “neo-National Socialist” historiography was probably that which an English historian, namely David Irving, had more hinted than explicitly outlined: the cooperation between the “leading classes” and Hitler, which was so strongly attacked by the advocates of the negatively formulated special path thesis, was not condemnable, but had even been the only future possibility, provided that it had developed into a compromise between Germany and England in 1940, which, however, had been prevented by Churchill and his kind. If it had come about, the Holocaust would not have taken place and England would not have lost its Empire. But even if this interpretation were given a truth value, it could only have a nostalgic character today, and Hitler himself had far exceeded the national-German paradigm by considering himself the leader of “all Teutons” or even “all Aryans.” In the context of the national-German conception after 1945, only the negatively accentuated Sonderweg thesis was of practical importance, and this gained inner strength because it was connected with the tendency towards “social historiography,” which went back to Karl Lamprecht and had produced great achievements in in the form of the “Annales” school in France.
But there was a more original social historiography or conception of social history, which strove with much more decisiveness to transcend national borders and made the concept of class far more exclusively its center. This was the Marxist paradigm, which was based on a universalist philosophy of history and which had already produced historiographical works such as the "18th Brumaire by Louis Bonaparte" by Marx himself. Here, the starting point is not a particular state, but the overarching process of the industrial revolution, from which a powerful international movement emerges, namely the workers’ movement. Its destiny is to fulfill the unrealized postulates of the bourgeois-liberal revolution, namely freedom, equality and fraternity, and to lead the hitherto capitalist modernity to the insurmountable summit of global society without classes and states. In this perspective, the German special path became irrelevant because it did not differ in essence from the path of the “Western nations,” and the task was much more ambitious than the modernization or even the democratization of existing class structures could ever be. Although the suspicion soon arose that the Marxist vision of the future was not “modern” at all, but archaic in its orientation towards the conception of the human family and the individuals existing in complete reciprocity without alienation and objectification, the harmony with the universalizing tendencies of the modernity was nevertheless so palpable that pre-1914 Marxism could with good reason consider itself the “party of progress” and the “wave of the future.” The historiographical work of Franz Mehring was also borne by this enthusiastic confidence, and in his old age he welcomed the Bolshevik revolution as the decisive step towards the reality of a socialist world.
But the historians of the Soviet Union soon faced a serious dilemma. With M. N. Pokrowski at the helm, they followed the tendency to condemn the Russian “special path,” which the Slavophiles had praised so much, as backwardness and barbarism much more strongly than anyone had ever condemned the German special path, but necessities of state-politics, strongly emphasized by Stalin, soon resulted in a glorification of large parts of the tsarist and “feudal” past, which in the eyes of not a few Western Marxists was all too similar to the positive nationalist view of history in other states. In this respect, the historians of the German Democratic Republic were in a better position after 1945, as they were able to draw far clearer lines from the Bismarck’s anti-working-class oppressive state via the reactionary regime of the Weimar Republic and the barbaric, because anti-communist, Third Reich to the GDR, in which the entire positive heritage of the progressive part of the German past was inextricably linked with the future world of the socialist bloc led by the USSR. To their great surprise, during the years of the so-called student revolution from 1968 onwards, all historians of the Federal Republic, including the representatives of the special path thesis, experienced firsthand what attraction this historical image of the simple lines of a black and white painting was able to exert.
What seemed to have been finally marginalized or even made to disappear in these years was the “theory of totalitarianism,” which was now more and more attacked as the ideology of the Western world in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellites—not least probably because it shared the overarching character with Marxism. Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the historians who followed in their footsteps brought together what for all communists, insofar as they did not belong to heterodox currents, the absolute opposites, namely the Communist Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany. And it was difficult to deny the common traits they worked out: the single ruling party with its almost all-powerful top, the terrorist secret police, the ideology that pervades all areas of life, the economy that is almost completely subjected to planning and and withdrawn from the laws of the market. Both regimes were apparently separated from the system of the “Western constitutional state” by an abyss, and both expressed this hostility undisguised. Moreover, it was indeed extremely striking that there was a great deal of polemics against National Socialism on the Soviet side, but no detailed presentation and analysis—presumably because the similarities that the theory of totalitarianism emphasized so much could hardly have remained hidden. The strongest counter-argument of Soviet Marxism could only be the reference to—even during the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact—the indissoluble enmity between two regimes and ideologies, which despite certain similarities had opposite goals and therefore opposed each other like light and darkness, like humanity and barbarism. Very few authors in the West followed this view, but the argument gained more and more weight, since the totalitarianism of the Stalinist epoch was transforming itself into an authoritarianism and thus taking a development that a possibly victorious National Socialist regime would not have been capable of.
Before the question can be asked whether another version of the theory of totalitarianism and the historiography that arises from it should not be given a rank of its own, for which the enmity between the two movements and regimes would not be superficial, but which would not attribute to either of them had the quality of the “victor of History” or the “wave of the future,” one must speak of the “Jewish paradigm.” This paradigm, which at first glance could be called “national” or “national-religious” or “Zionist,” is to be given a prominent position because it is based on a very extraordinary experience, namely the extermination of millions of Jews, obviously intended by the spite of the National Socialist state, in which basically every single Jew within the huge sphere of power of National Socialist Germany should be included, so that an escape was only possible through fortunate and fortuitous circumstances. This monstrous event could by no means be deduced from the most unfortunate “German special path,” because during the First World War the German Reich had pursued an decidedly pro-Jewish policy with its Turkish ally and in the occupied eastern territories, and the anti-Semitic parties, which had no major influence than the corresponding groupings and tendencies in France, Russia, and Romania, had all but disappeared in the years before 1914. Something very special must have happened that such a radical hostility towards Jews as that of Hitler and Rosenberg could arise. It was obvious for both Jewish and German interpreters to simply blame a phenomenon that has been known for thousands of years, namely anti-Semitism, and to sharpen the special path thesis that the entire German people was at one with Hitler on this anti-Semitism. But this interpretation can at best make the “Zionist” aspect of National Socialism understandable, namely the demand for the “removal” of the Jews after coexistence had allegedly proven impossible. However, it cannot take account of facts such as the fact that even Heinrich Himmler rejected the extermination of a people as “Bolshevik” and “un-Germanic” as late as 1940 and that even Joseph Goebbels was very surprised when he first learned in March 1942 what methods in were used in the East against the Jewish population. There can only be one sufficient explanation, namely the following: that in the mind of the only person who was able to set in motion such an extraordinary process, which none of the subordinate participants even thought possible as late as 1940, the conviction, expressed early on, of that the Jews were the authors of Bolshevism and, beyond that, of all the evils of modern times, was no longer only “guiding knowledge,” but also became “guiding action” with the beginning of the planning for the war of aggression against Bolshevik Russia. The only open question can be whether Hitler actually saw the Jews as merely “scapegoats” onto whom he projected his (albeit initially only minor) failures, or whether he perceived and hated in them “something” whose protagonists had long been not all Jews, but nevertheless, many of them were: the idea of international socialism or humanitarianism or, as Victor Klemperer puts it at one point, “the eternal mission, the championhood of the Jewish spirit.” The first view easily leads to the claim that the Jews were brought “like sheep to the slaughter”; from the second, on the other hand, the thesis can be derived that they died "not as the unfortunate victim of a repugnant crime, but as deputies in the most desperate attack ever carried out against human nature and the transcendence within him.” Which of the two interpretations gives greater honor to the dead Jews should be out of the question.
The phrase quoted can be found in my 1963 book “Fascism in Its Epoch.” By emphasizing the singularity of “Auschwitz,” it took a very distant position vis-à-vis communism from the start, because all Soviet communist accounts were guided by the view that the real struggle of the National Socialists was directed against the communists and that the emphasis was on the Jewish victims mean a nationalist narrowing, even if they come from non-Jews. It was just as important that Marxism was not understood as “absolute truth” but as a fallible, albeit outstanding, ideology among other ideologies. National Socialism, however, was proven wrong to an even greater extent by being defined as “anti-Marxism,” “which seeks to destroy the opponent by developing a radically opposing and yet neighboring ideology and using almost identical and yet characteristically re-shaped methods…”
These judgments were based on the concept of the “liberal system,” which sees its essence, the essence of this conflict society, in the peaceful settlement of such conflicts and thus in the prevention of bloody processes of annihilation. The Marxist concept of “class struggle” is ambiguous and therefore potentially integrable into this system; but as soon as the aspect of civil war emerges and is even made independent by a seizure of power, a process of annihilation is set in motion that cannot take place in a liberal system (which may also exist as a “pluralist party state”). Such an upheaval can only be based on historical processes of paramount importance: the convincing electoral victory of the “proletarian party,” which, according to certain indications by Marx and Engels, entails the use of the earlier entrepreneurs for the purposes of the planned economy, and to that extent a purely social and even bloodless annihilation means, or else the violent seizure of power by a minority party of professional revolutionaries, which is able to ride the wave of widespread mass emotions for a moment. In this second case, the result is most likely an open civil war with the largely physical annihilation of the “class enemies” and, one day, a violent struggle aimed at annihilation against the leading group of the country's self-sustaining farmer majority. In this respect, Bolshevism marks the beginning of the ideologically justified measures of extermination by totalitarian regimes that shaped the face of the century so much. But it is inappropriate to use the term “guilt” here, although a party and even a class can after all be ascribed “guilt” with more justification than a people or cultural group.
By attributing to Bolshevism more original intention and action of extermination than to National Socialism and by conceiving its intention and action of extermination as a response or re-action, the struggle between the two regimes is taken much more seriously than on the part of the structural-analytical theory of totalitarianism, and the “Western constitutional state” is not glorified, but was seen as the contrast of the totalitarian regimes, but also as their top native. The historical-genetic version of the theory of totalitarianism is thus in its own paradigm, and it cannot be denied that it is closer to both communism and national socialism than the structural-analytic version, since it takes over what is common to both movements and regimes, namely their self-understanding as an “action” or as a “re-action.” Nothing follows from it more compellingly than the thesis that the “Gulag” was more original than “Auschwitz.” Anyone who needs simple historical images may claim that the Bolsheviks or even the Marxists are made the “first culprits” in the calamities of the 20th century, while the National Socialists as the “second culprits” are downright exculpated or trivialized. But the “guilt” that consists in the attribution of guilt to an entire people is historically more serious than the guilt that results from the struggle against a class. That is why I avoided the term “crime” or “mass crime” in relation to "Auschwitz" and spoke of an “atrocity.” The restriction of absolute-sounding statements also applies to the above sentence about the Jews as "deputies". If it only meant that the Jews, as champions of world unity, humanity and socialism, had been fought and largely killed by Hitler, it would be a mere reversal of the “collectivist attribution of guilt” to a “collectivist attribution of merit.” But Grigory Zinoviev was indeed guilty also in a narrow and individually attributable sense when he demanded the extermination of ten million people—however, he did not speak to Jews as a Jew, but to as a communist to communists.
And for some time now, “modernity” has not been understood as an all-round positive term, even by many representatives of the progressivist tradition. Things are inherently more complicated, and they are subject to far more reversals than the political and ideological struggle would have us believe. In this respect, the historian, who wants to think through contexts and not just describe processes, is in a lost position in public from the start, since certain aspects of his topic, which are articulated in isolatable sentences, can always lead to political consequences, which politicians and political writers defend themselves with counter-claims and often with allegations as well as defamation. But he must also not hide his own weaknesses and the vicissitudes of life. I was probably the first in scientific literature to describe the war of aggression against the Soviet Union as “the most monstrous war of conquest, enslavement and annihilation” “known to modern history”; I do not deny, however, that I am far from inner approval 35 years later when it is converted into an exhibition in a propagandistically elaborate and one-sided manner.
However, whatever the individual preferences and inclinations may be: the historical-genetic version of the totalitarianism theory is essentially independent of it in its basic features, and in the future it will play a role again and again, explicitly or not explicitly, in historical representations of the 20th century and in the corresponding attempts at thinking in one form or another; it can actually only be astonishing that it took so long before it came to existence as a historiography beyond merely suggestive or essayistic ideas of “world civil war.” The cause is likely to be that indisputable closeness to a basic conception of National Socialism, which at the same time and to an even greater extent means a closeness to the basic conception of Soviet communism. Both were questionable and offensive in the Cold War era; in a time when capitalist globalization and philo-socialist anti-fascism tend to merge into a new kind of unity, only one thing is apparently still offensive, even damnable. But this conception is by no means the invention or speculation of an aloof “maverick”; as has been shown, the books by Bullock, Hobsbawm, and Furet point in the same direction, although considerable differences between the authors are undoubtedly evident.
The book, which in the preliminary form of an article caused so much excitement and indignation and which then, as it were, fell into its shadow, is now, after ten years, presented anew in its fifth edition unchanged except for a new “Concluding Observation” and expanded only by this “Balance Sheet After Ten Years.” Perhaps this time it will succeed primarily in provoking reflection rather than mere contradiction. The correspondence between François Furet and myself, which was published in German in 1998 and one letter of which is printed in the “Appendix,” could also contribute to this. For my part, I am aware of the fact that the present framework should be inserted into an even larger framework, which, with the question of “Historical Existence,” will be the last—in the meantime largely completed—work of my life.
In June 1997
Ernst Nolte