O Holocausto, o Fascismo e A Memória

The Palgrave Macmillan
The Holocaust, Fascism and

Memory
Essays in the History of Ideas
Dan Stone
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
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: History and Its Discontents 1
Part I Interpreting the Holocaust

1 Beyond the ‘Auschwitz Syndrome’: Holocaust Historiography
after the Cold War 15
2 Raphael Lemkin as Historian of the Holocaust 25
3 Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Historiography 37
4 The Holocaust and ‘The Human’ 49
Part II Fascism and Anti-Fascism

5 Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a
Contribution to Defeating It 67
6 The Mein Kampf Ramp: Emily Overend Lorimer and the
Publication of Mein Kampf in Britain 81
7 Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi? 96
8 Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right in France and Britain
between the Wars 110
9 The Uses and Abuses of ‘Secular Religion’: Jules Monnerot’s
Path from Communism to Fascism 123
Part III Politics and Cultures of Memory

10 Genocide and Memory 143
11 Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: The Future of Memory
after the Age of Commemoration 157
12 Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’ 172
Notes 184
Index 241
vii
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 Histo-
riography’, 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 grate-

ful to the publishers. Additionally, Chapter 8 has appeared in French as
‘Ruralisme et droite radicale en France et en Grande-Bretagne dans l’entre-
deux-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 fol-
lowing: 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 Pro-
fessor 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.
Introduction: History and Its
Discontents
This book deals with some of the key problems of modern and contempo-
rary 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 negotiat-
ing 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 cen-
tury 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 previ-
ous 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, identity-
construction 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, his-
tory 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
2 The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory
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 sev-
eral 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 phi-
losophy 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 specula-
tive philosophy of history, where the events of the past – and therefore of
the present and future – are believed to be inherently directional, that is, his-
tory 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 testi-
mony’ 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
to find meaningful ways into twentieth-century history through the his-

tory 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, intel-
lectual, 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 twenti-
eth/early twenty-first century phenomenon, with its emphasis on the need
for historians to be ‘self-reflexive’, on the significance of ‘memory’ for grap-
pling 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 theo-
retically 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 dis-
cussions 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
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 understand-
ing 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 insep-
arable. 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 con-
sider 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 his-
torians. 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 explana-
tory 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 Holo-
caust 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 unprecedented-
ness has become an increasingly conservative position.7 Whatever the case,
two discrete bodies of scholarly literature now exist: that on fascism tend-
ing 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,
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 ressen-
timent 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 cor-
rect, 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 iso-
lation from fascism means that they ‘often overlooked the actual ideological
connections between the global intellectual history of fascism and the his-
torical 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 eradi-
cation 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 popula-
tion 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 exist-
ing regimes, especially in the newly created ‘successor states’ of central and
eastern Europe, to respond imaginatively to the economic crisis of 1929
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 minor-
ity 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 right-
wing 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 clean-
liness, 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 con-
firms 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, includ-
ing 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 liter-
ature 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, discon-
tent with certain trends in historiography, in particular the isolation of the
scholarship on fascism and the Holocaust from each other, which is a con-
cern 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 understand-
ing 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 get-
ting 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 – histori-
cal 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 under-
researched.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 other-
wise 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 logi-
cally and morally dubious ideas. In this instance, Martin Broszat’s insistence
that the traumatic (and, as he hinted, vengeful) memory of the Jewish vic-
tims 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
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 ‘cri-
sis’ diagnosed by Diner concerned the internal methods of history itself in
the face of Nazi genocide. That question of historical representation is per-
haps less pressing today as a matter internal to the discipline; as opposed to
thinking innovatively about methodology, few historians reject the histori-
cal 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 repre-
sentation’ 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 mem-
ory. 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 aesthet-
ics 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 dis-
course’ 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 cre-
ated, contested and eliminated ‘collective memory’) and instead making
‘memory’ synonymous with ‘history’ or even making ‘memory’ the mas-
ter 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
By the same token, it is easy to find discontent with the ‘optimistic’ ver-
sion of memory studies, according to which memory studies deals with
reconciliation, overcoming the past and psychic closure. Rather than pro-
moting 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 eas-
ily 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 dispassion-
ate, 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 transi-
tion, 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 par-
ticular, 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 cen-
tury 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 under-
standing the appeal of movements and ways of thinking that would prove
catastrophic not just for their enemies but also for their advocates. Fascist
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 per-
ceived 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 unwit-
ting collaboration. The anti-fascists’ discontent grew out of a sense that all
that the liberal democracies held dear was being betrayed by those who sub-
scribed 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 occur-
rences, 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 diag-
nose 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, colo-
nial 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
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 under-
stand 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 actu-
ally 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 grat-
ifying 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. Mem-
ory 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 obvi-
ously 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 satisfac-
tory 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
tries to show that those who fall in the former category of those who dis-
like 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 perpe-
trators 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 drag-
ging 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, with-
out 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 mur-
dered 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 Holo-
caust 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’, espe-
cially 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 ‘mod-
ified 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 sim-
ply 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 Auschwitz-
Birkenau, 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 labour-
based 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 para-

dox 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 Oper-
ation 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 Bełżec, 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, serv-
ing no other purpose than murder, and the process was unpleasant beyond
belief. For too long we have talked about the ‘modernity’ of the killing pro-
cess, 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 ‘car-
nivalesque’ 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 cheer-
ing 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
Jews were killed there, and thus the largest victim groups – religiously ortho-
dox 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 con-
trolled big business, not the other way round, and that the leading Nazis
believed in their ideology, especially in what Saul Friedländer calls ‘redemp-
tive 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 possi-
bility 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 oper-
ations 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 neigh-
bours 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
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 satis-
fied 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 cen-
turies. 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, nonethe-
less, 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 radi-
calised 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 distin-
guish 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
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 sto-
ries 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 some-
thing 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 con-
cerned, 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 under-
taken 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 Holo-
caust in Romania, now there are numerous studies which show in great
detail something that Nicolai Ceauşescu’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
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, pro-
tecting 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 ‘func-
tionalist’ 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 con-
cerning 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, his-
torians 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
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 def-
inition of genocide as state-led mass murder. If genocide occurred in the
European overseas colonies, such as in North America or Australia, it usu-
ally 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 over-
seas 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 minor-
ity 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 lead-
ership and educated strata, denying cultural expression and restricting food
supply – the way in which the Nazis dealt with the Jews was altogether dif-
ferent and much more radically straightforward. Jews simply had no place
in the Nazi universe.40 Although we now know that surprisingly large num-
bers 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 Holo-
caust 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 understand-
ing, 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
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 ‘net-
works’, ‘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 mean-
ing 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 possi-
ble, 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 succes-
sors 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 mas-
sively bowdlerised. For example, in museums from Budapest to Tallinn, the
murder of the Jews is often presented as little more than a sideshow com-
pared with the ‘second Holocaust’ of the Hungarian/Estonian people. Here,
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 pan-
theon 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 com-
munism – 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 narra-
tives 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 hap-
pened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of
victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiq-
uity, 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 dan-
gerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even
against all military and other utilitarian considerations. The killing pro-
gram 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 cam-
paigned 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
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, eventu-
ally, 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 inter-
national 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 anal-
ysis 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 sophistica-
tion 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 disrupt-
ing 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 occu-
pant 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 27
spiritual but also national leadership); in the field of morality (by attempts
to create an atmosphere of moral debasement through promoting porno-
graphic 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 popu-
lation 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 differ-
ent actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the
life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups them-
selves. . . . 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 sev-
eral 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
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 writ-
ing 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 administra-
tion. 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 cen-
tral 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 histo-
rians 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 institu-
tions and decision-making procedures in Nazi Germany. Nor, as courtroom
documents, were they arranged in order to facilitate the work of histori-

ans. 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 for-
mula 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 devo-
tion 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 pro-
vide 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
and Hans Mommsen, although the notion of ‘factory-line murder’ was also
commonplace in the early studies of the Holocaust. Léon Poliakov, for exam-
ple, 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 direc-
tives 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 ‘Aryani-
sation’. 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
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 under-
wrote 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 ‘pop-
ulation 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 under-
stood 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 peo-
ple 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 peo-
ple’ (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, sug-
gested to Lemkin by contrast not only that mass killing is not the only way
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 vari-
ous 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 distin-
guish 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 exam-
ple, 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 con-
ditions 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 ofi-
cial 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 pol-
icy 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,
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. Neverthe-
less, 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 histori-
ans 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 Con-
vention’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
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 main-
stream 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 occur-
ring 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 pro-
vides 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 mas-
ters 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
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 con-
solation 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 historiog-
raphy, 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 identi-
fied 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 Holo-
caust 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 crimi-
nal regime for committing crimes against humanity, there is no difference
between the death of a Jew and a Catholic Pole. Whether or not the treat-
ment of the occupied territories of Eastern Europe constitutes genocide or
not is debatable; there seems little evidence that the Nazis intended to seek
the destruction of the Poles or Ukrainians as such, as opposed to reduc-

ing 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 vari-
ant 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 Extermina-
tion 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, mul-
tivocality and the incorporation of memory and testimony are concerned
Friedländer’s two-volume history does indeed follow quite closely his theo-
retical 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 pre-
cisely 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 him-
self and Broszat by furthering a process of historicisation (Broszat’s aim) but
maintaining the Holocaust as the central point of importance in the con-
sideration 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 ear-
lier 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 Holo-
caust, 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
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 warn-
ings 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 representa-
tion 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 descrip-
tive and purely empirical research’.7 The implications of these objections
were felt much more widely in the historical profession and were not con-
fined to Germany, although the continued stress on a more or less positivist
methodology in the history-writing of the Holocaust – especially in per-
petrator 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 under-
standing 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 “mem-
ory” 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 con-
sciously or unconsciously). Both ‘memory’ and ‘history’, for Friedländer,
Saul Friedländer and Holocaust Historiography 39
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 self-
evident’.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 through-
out 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 com-
pendium 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 modi-
fied his opposition to what he took to be a crucial methodological tool of
historicization – Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life) – and his sus-
picion that it essentially served “normalizing” tendencies’.17 In fact – and
perhaps contrary to the expectations of some historians18 – the process of
writing the history of everyday life under Nazism as it transpired in the

post-unification context of the 1990s did not promote apologetic tenden-
cies. 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 self-
image 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, ques-
tions 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 prac-
tice 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 trau-
matic 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 commen-
tary’, Friedländer continued, in a much-cited passage, ‘should disrupt the
facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpre-
tations, 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
of the so-called “mythic memory” of the victims within the overall rep-
resentation 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 cease-
lessly 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 sus-
pect 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 actu-
ally 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 pro-
vides 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
over oft-heard mystical demands to maintain the Holocaust as an event ‘out-

side 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 pro-
cess 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 central-
ity 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. Interest-
ingly, in an age of testimony and autobiographical fiction where we have
become accustomed to hearing the author’s voice and to chronological acro-
batics, 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 ideol-
ogy’ 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 han-
dles 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’ per-
sonal accounts into the narrative, the integration of the victims’ diaries
and accounts lacks almost any synthetic, analytic or conceptual frame-

work. They are simply there, somehow piercing or punctuating the nar-
rative. 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 Holo-
caust 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 instinc-
tive 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
frightening prospect and would go beyond merely historicising the Holo-

caust. 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 bar-
riers of ‘civilisation’ constitutes the main blockage of our comprehension,
then perhaps we can expect to go no further than his remarkable poly-
vocal 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 irre-
spective 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 nar-
rative 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
Jew as a concept is a Jew as a real material body’. They were reduced (dehu-
manised, 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 them-
selves ‘total identification with symbols that represent[ed] them’; that is to
say, those that made up the ‘true believers’ reduced themselves in a not dis-
similar 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 them-
selves 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 encom-
passes 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 understand-
ing 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 per-
son 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 Renais-
sance 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
community (Volksgemeinschaft). In his work on Kameradschaft (comrade-

ship) 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 cre-
ate 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 identi-
fied 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 sol-
diers 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 embod-
iment 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 for-
mer ‘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 repre-
sented 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 [verge-

meinschaftete die Gewalt], permitting “Volksgenossen” to participate in it.’53
Here we can profitably bring in Eelco Runia’s provocative claim that ‘Peo-
ple 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 expli-
cated by Kühne and Wildt, show this process in action: even as they ended
up destroying themselves, these institutions acquired more and more pres-
tige and devotion to them grew ever more frenzied. Part of the problem in
commemorating the destruction they wrought – apart from guilt and resent-
ment – 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 abil-
ity 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 ref-
erence 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 lead-
ing historians of the Holocaust. We have, in The Years of Persecution and
The Years of Extermination, the culmination of the great narrative analy-
ses 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 all-
inclusive 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
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 Lim-
its 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 ‘cer-
tain 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 polit-
ical 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 his-
toricisation 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 nar-
rative 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 his-
torian’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 sen-
timentality 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 consid-
erable 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 sur-
prised to find critics such as Aimé Césaire talking of ‘pseudo-humanism’
in the wake of colonialism and the Holocaust. Césaire says of human-
ism 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
At the heart of Nazism lay a radical philosophical anthropological chal-

lenge: 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 selec-
tively 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, partic-
ularly 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 trou-
blesome 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 “pro-
tectors”, resembled some new and animal species.’8 More disturbingly, this
ethnocentrism left Arendt apparently less moved by the treatment of colo-
nial subjects during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonialism’s
victims fell, in her terminology, into the category animal laborans, ‘nat-
ural’ 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 nei-
ther 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’ 51
make this claim in the light of other such attacks, in particular the 1994
Rwandan genocide, in order not to follow Arendt’s ethnocentric presump-
tions. 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: ‘Per-
haps 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 dis-
cussion 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 ques-
tion 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 reac-
tions 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
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 ideolo-
gies 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 exper-
iment 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 concen-
tration 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 tri-
umph 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 revolu-
tionizing 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
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 ‘mun-
danities’ 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 dec-
laration 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 com-
mand 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 ide-
ology 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 understand-
ing 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 peo-
ple . . . 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
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 feel-
ing 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 neces-
sary 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 anthro-
pology. This discussion will, of necessity, be no more than a pointer to
future work, work which will need to consider the anthropological impli-
cations 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
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 vio-
lence need not be instrumental and that in an environment where the
usual, ‘civilised’ checks on behaviour are withdrawn, whether through per-
sonal 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 ). Never-
theless, 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 fas-
cinated 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 impor-
tantly, 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.
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
of the two known survivors of the Bełżec death camp, noted of the ‘work-
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 dread-
ful 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 acquain-
tances, 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 Łódź, 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 sen-
sation 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 shel-
ter, 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
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 (counter-
humans) 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 ani-
mals. 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 Holo-
caust, 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
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’ geno-
cides – interethnic competition flaring up in the context of longstanding
political and economic rivalry – there are, on the other hand, many similari-
ties 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 Inter-
national 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 occur-
rence 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 dis-
tinction between victims and perpetrators is surely as clear and as simple
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 envis-
age extending its operations into Burundi in order to target Tutsis there
(although the RPF did subsequently become embroiled in a regional con-
flict 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 Fur-
thermore, 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
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 con-
sequences 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 problema-
tise 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 ani-
mated 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 ‘anti-
humanist’ one? Or does seeing Nazism as a humanism only compound the
problem?64
The second problem concerns how the crime of the Holocaust is under-
stood 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 feel-
ing 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?
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 uni-
versalism 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? Further-
more, 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 individ-
ual, 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
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 ref-
erence to Eichmann) and denying that Nazism is linked to the Western
tradition is really to suppress rather than to answer the question. Neverthe-
less, if one cannot say that Arendt satisfactorily deals with Dastur’s concern
that focusing on a ‘metaphysical’ explanation of Nazism leads one to over-
look 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.
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 defini-
tion 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 sim-
ply 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 extraordinari-
ness 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 ideol-
ogy 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 over-
looking 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 writ-
ings 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 real-
isation 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 propo-
nents 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
68 Fascism and Anti-Fascism
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 intellec-
tual 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 num-
ber 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 politi-
cians and well-known authors, as well as reports on the experiences of
persecuted persons influenced international political opinion on National-
Socialist 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 young-
sters – 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
Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain 69
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 superan-
nuated democracies. In a sense their writings gave intellectual credence to
the response of active British anti-Fascists, for whom, as Copsey notes, ‘eval-
uations 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, play-
wright Ernst Toller, journalist and former SPD member of the Reichstag
Gerhart Seger, who spent a short time in the United Kingdom, sociolo-
gist 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 mani-
festation 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 cen-
tral Europeans writing about Nazism rather than about Italian Fascism to
produce a really insightful anti-fascist theory that challenged the British ten-
dency 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 pre-
sented 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
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 commenta-
tors, 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 War-
rior 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 commu-
nism from within but then rejected it – he was actually arrested by the
communists whilst in Spain – is the key to understanding his fierce anti-
fascism 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 émi-
grés 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 com-
munists 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 con-
cerned 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 discus-
sion 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.
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 atmo-
sphere of compromise prevailing in democratic countries, and instinctively
expect the revolutionaries beyond the Rhine to come over, given only suf-
ficient time and a willingness to grant concessions, to their own approach
to politics’.17 Now he extended this critique, noting that, after the occu-
pation 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 inde-
terminate 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 adven-
tures 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 point-
less since the regime was consumed by ‘quasi-mystical fanaticism’ (21) and
the idea of it settling down to some sort of ‘normalcy’ was ‘quite meaning-
less’ (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 conven-
tional 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.
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 com-
munism (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 pub-
lished’ 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 vari-
ety of Christian Socialism, nevertheless Kolnai’s understanding of Nazism
went way beyond that ordinarily associated with the LBC, and his person-
alist 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 mean-
ing 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 Revo-
lution 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
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 athe-
ism and its rejection of reason. Nazism, he argued even before it came to
power in Germany, represented no mere counter-revolution but an ‘over-
turning 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 shock-
ing 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 vulgar-
ity, are at their highest endowed with spiritual grandeur and relevancy’ (18).
Outside of the descriptions of the Nuremberg rallies offered by fellow trav-
ellers 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 democ-
racy 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
Thus, like Borkenau, Kolnai’s basic message was that attempting to under-
stand 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 barren-
ness, 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 fas-
cism. ‘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 con-
crete 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 uncom-
promising 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 decep-

tion of the capitalist West, with its pacifist sentimentalism and its
anti-proletarian instincts, than to allay the astute rulers of Russia, untram-
melled by inhibitions prevailing in the West, into a common action
against the Liberal world – whose downfall would immediately throw
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 fas-
cism, 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 vir-
tually 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 lead-
ers, the Nazis, the loyal population, the disloyal population, the opposition
and the émigrés. The final chapter, ‘Possibilities’, contains some extraordi-
narily 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
characterised them. The way Haffner divides the book up may seem simplis-
tic, 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 esti-
mation 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 un-
English – 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 ‘bound-
less 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 con-
tents for a world-conception! . . . In fact, this world-conception is rubbish
if not an impudent fraud. Moreover, none of the Nazi leaders take it seri-
ously. The National Socialists are a reality, but their world-conception is
not. (33–34)
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 his-
torians 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 los-
ing 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 shib-
boleth, 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 bind-
ing 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 émi-
grés (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.
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, aris-
tocratic 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 neigh-
bourliness. 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 his-
tory 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 dis-
tinguished his position from that of Rauschning and gave his liberal views
weight in official circles’.37 It remains an analysis of Nazism that merits seri-
ous 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
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 con-
cerned, 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 twen-

tieth 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 anti-
fascists – 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 height-
ened 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
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 com-
munists 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 anti-
fascism 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, follow-

ing 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 ver-
bosity, Mein Kampf was never taken seriously outside Germany’.2 Indeed,
even many Germans held the ideas expressed in Mein Kampf to be irrele-
vant; 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 dominatio-
nis, 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
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 com-
mentators, 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 interna-
tionally. 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 inten-
tionalism 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 predis-
posed 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 mar-
riage to David Lockhart Robertson Lorimer who served in the Indian Army
and Indian Political Service in many places, including Bahrain, Persian
The Mein Kampf Ramp 83
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 expatri-
ate community, Gertrude Bell describing David Lorimer as ‘an exceptionally
able man’ and recording in a letter to her mother ‘the immense debt of grat-
itude’ 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, trans-
lating 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 Octo-
ber 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 post-
card 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 think-
ing. 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, spec-
trally 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 meet-
ing, ‘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
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 inter-
vening matter paragraph by paragraph, compressing where necessary, but
never excising or rejecting anything vital to the argument or to its pre-
sentation. 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, crit-
ical 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, sig-
nificantly, 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 writ-
ings on Nazism of the 1930s were highly critical warning signals, which took
on the daunting task of displacing mainstream – and, importantly, govern-
mental – attitudes to Nazism, which lay on a spectrum running from lack
of interest to scoffing at its significance to appreciation of its aims in fight-
ing 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 any-
thing 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,
a subsidiary of Hutchinson Publishing Group, was heavily abridged, con-

taining 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 nation-
alism 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 par-
ticular 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 jour-
nalist, 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 fur-
ther 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 acces-
sion 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 Octo-
ber 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
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 “autho-
rised” English edition would seem to have been drastically edited for British
consumption, with many of the more vital teachings of the Führer omit-
ted.’ 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 pro-
found 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
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 any-
body 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 avail-
able. 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 delib-
erate 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 impres-
sive 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
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 grudg-
ingly 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 per-
formed 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 move-
ment, 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 super-
fluous’. 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
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 under-
stand) 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 phi-
losophy and ‘ideals’, and that being so, how can one assort their conduct
with rational behaviour? [ . . . ] Even if one draws the rather dramatic con-
clusion 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 oth-
ers – 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 com-
plicit 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
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 lit-
eral 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 vio-
lence’ 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 vocabu-
lary. 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 evi-
dence 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 states-
man . . . 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:
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 there-
fore 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, prob-
ably 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 nation-
state – 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 illu-
sion 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
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 pro-
German, 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
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 chang-
ing 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 signifi-
cant 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 giv-
ing 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 mis-
placed; 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.
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 cor-
respondence 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 over-
trustfulness.48
For a woman who had stressed the importance of Nazi ideology, this con-
fusion 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 princi-
ple 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
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 infan-
ticide, 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 maintain-
ing 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 infatua-
tion, 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 assess-
ments 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 Oth-
ers 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 ‘pro-
Nazism’ 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 thor-
ough 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
Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi? 97
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 hence-
forth 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 man-
hood 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 natu-
ral 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 civilisa-
tion 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
Cambridge, he became dissatisfied with the mechanistic and materialist out-

look 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 break-
away 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
of the Boberhaus in Loewenberg, Silesia (today Lwówek Ślanski ˛ 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 con-
tributions 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 move-
ment 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 state-
ments 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 ideologi-
cally 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
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 expe-
rience, 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 return-
ing 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 reveal-
ing: ‘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
flourishing, ‘It is something totally foreign and un-English, and its Jewish-
American 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 con-
vincingly 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). Con-
demning 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’ opin-
ions 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 vig-
orous 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
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 recon-
structing 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 dif-
fers 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 Sur-
vey 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 move-
ment 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 for-
gotten, 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 vig-
orous German peasantry through which a new and potent aristocracy might
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 appar-
ently 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 pro-
paganda 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 dig-
nity.’ Gardiner goes on to explain that the liberal establishment in Britain
is placing many slanderous obstacles in the way of people’s understand-
ing 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 inter-
national 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.
For we believe that the new German state will help us and will be our protec-
tor [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 Anglo-
German 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 recon-
necting 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 his-
toricising 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 mate-
rialistic 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
endeavoured to continue those active exchanges which hitherto had proved

so fruitful, and many German groups participated in work camps and sum-
mer 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 can-
not 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.
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 foot-
ball 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 pre-
cisely 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 peas-
ant 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 fas-
cism in order to establish that he was not a fascist and that Nazism was
not a form of fascism. Still, even if this is considered somewhat disingen-

uous, 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’ aristoc-
racy, 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 nec-
essary 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 terri-
torial 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 gen-
eral 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, deca-
dence, 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 noth-
ing other than a product of modernity – the cry of ‘back to the land’ makes
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 move-
ment was driven as much by the idea of racial regeneration through contact
with the national soil as by environmental concerns; indeed, the two ele-
ments 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 medi-
cal 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 white-
wash 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, con-
necting 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 publi-
cation 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 through-
out 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 cul-
ture. Thus, in one piece written around the time that Gardiner conceived the
idea for the Kinship in Husbandry, he exhorted English youth to ‘Remem-
ber 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
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 inter-
est 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 destruc-
tion in the German Farmlands were wrong, but that they might be
misinterpreted (a casual mention or half-quotation might give an over-
patriotic 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
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 censor-
ship; 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 signifi-
cantly, 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 Hus-
bandry 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 Hus-
bandry, 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 horri-
fied 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, stan-
dardising, materialist – became stronger than it had been before it. Thus,
before approximately 1940 (perhaps earlier, but the evidence of England Her-
self 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 pro-
gramme. 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 deca-
dent, ‘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 back-
bone 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
Rural Revivalism and the Radical Right 111
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 degener-
ate 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 exclu-
sivity. 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 left-
wing quiver as a right-wing one. The attack on unhealthy cities with their
foul atmosphere, and the metaphorical attack on cities as morally and intel-
lectually 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 rad-
ical 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 pro-
posed 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 (encom-
passing ecologism in the strict sense or advocacy of organic farming) that
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 popula-
tion 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 similar-
ities 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 them-
selves, 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 technologi-
sation 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 secu-
rity’ 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
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 eas-
ily 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 tri-
omphe 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 radi-
cal movements that emerged in the countryside. The failure of these French
movements can to a large extent be explained by two facts: first, the agri-
cultural movements were unable to expand their appeal beyond their rural
constituencies and, second, because urban elites were ultimately only inter-
ested 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 asser-
tion 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 anti-
semitism 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 agri-
cultural depression.’ Wilson notes that politicians from all parties sang the
praises of ‘our dear French peasant’, but that ‘the theme enjoyed particu-
lar 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
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 par-
asitic 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 writ-
ers 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 tes-
tifies to the equation of rural defence with a rejection of modernity, and
which constitutes a condemnation of the aristocracy’s betrayal of its histor-
ical 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 fas-
cists 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 main-
stream 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. The-
ories of racial identity were transferred to the inanimate landscape, a kind
of reification in which the people still living and working in the countryside
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 rad-
ical right makes the British case especially striking. Among the founders of
the Soil Association in 1946 – the body that today gives commercial certifica-
tion 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 deracina-
tion 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 suc-
ceeded 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
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 right-
ist thought into the capitulation of 1940 and pays insufficient attention to
the ways in which events influenced ideas. Attending to the social and polit-
ical 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 neu-
tral (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 com-
parison 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 ‘suspi-
cious 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 mem-
ber 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 unin-
terested 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
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 – com-
munism 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 ‘national-
ism’ – 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 expla-
nations 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 Arc-
tic, 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 brother-
hood 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 rec-
ommended 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 aris-
tocracy might spring’.38 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’.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 perpet-
uate 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 particu-
larly Gardiner, held themselves aloof from mass politics, at least once they
realised that fascism was no ‘spiritual’ movement, though neither aban-
doned 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 philo-
sophical 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
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 Kin-
ship 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 remem-
ber that most of the members were not fantasists dreaming of a ‘picturesque
countryside’ in the Baldwinite tradition but men with considerable experi-
ence 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 suf-
fice’ 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 eugenicist-
organicism: ‘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 con-
trol 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 writ-
ings, the emphasis was on the ideal technocratic future: the garden city
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 agri-
cultural 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 Agri-
cultural 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 impor-
tance 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 func-
tioned in counterpoint to a negative portrayal of the town and of urban life,
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 quag-
mire 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 tra-

ditionalist elites the peasantry therefore embodies the vital generational link,
and through it the history of the country: “perpetuating ancestral tradi-
tions, 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 wors-
ening 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,
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-to-
the-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 ini-
tially 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 authori-
tarian 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 radi-
cal 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 differ-
ent 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 pro-
gramme; on its own, rural fascism had too small a constituency to threaten
the established order, and it even alienated the very urbanites whose fan-
tasies 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 adminis-
tered 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 elec-
tions 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
be confused with someone who agrees to sit in the same group as a rep-
resentative 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 ‘hyper-
homogenization’ 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 dis-
tinguish between the ‘classic fascism’ of the interwar period and the radical
right populist movements of the post-war period, arguing that the differ-
ent 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 explic-
itly) 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 move-
ments 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 remark-
ably consistent with their more successful interwar forebears. Thus, whether
one talks about parties of ‘radical return’ or ‘radical continuity’, the con-
temporary 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
The Uses and Abuses of ‘Secular Religion’ 125
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 par-
ties 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, educa-
tion, 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 parliamen-
tary 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 com-
munism 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 ‘sec-
ular 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 com-
munism were widely shared by anti-communists during the Cold War –
most of whom did not become fascists – and thus his slide from right-
wing 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 reli-
gion’, 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
‘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 sub-
sumed 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 exis-
tence 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 ‘primi-
tive’ 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 origi-
nal 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 schol-
ars 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
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 com-
munist 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 impor-
tant 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 reli-
gion, 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 schol-
ars 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 reli-
gion 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 non-
observable’.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
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 mem-
ber 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 par-
ticipate 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 Commu-
nism. It is thus hardly surprising that one significant scholar of the College
of Sociology claims that the ‘power and brilliance’ of Monnerot’s three post-
war 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
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 merg-
ing 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 civiliza-
tions, 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 reli-
gious 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, unremark-
able 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 sharp-
ens 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 secu-
lar 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 ini-
tiative and independence’.40 It is the standard notion of ‘authentic’ religion
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, orga-
nizes 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 dis-
solution 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’ insti-
gate ‘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 ‘secu-
lar 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 syndical-
ism, 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
‘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 Commu-

nism 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 com-
mon enough biographical experience in the mid-twentieth century49 – to
fascism? After Sociology of Communism, Monnerot wrote almost nothing sub-
stantial 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 pres-
ence 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, ‘con-
temporary 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
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 com-
munity, which is ‘no less irreducible to homogeneity than rebels are, but
no less differing from the latter than saints’, becomes an agent of destruc-
tion: ‘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 commu-
nism, 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 contem-
porary 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 ear-
lier 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 found-
ing principles of the College, seeing their potential to legitimise fascism,
but Monnerot was not, but remained, as Richardson notes, the sole mem-
ber 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, overlook-
ing 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 anti-
immigration, 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 ‘collec-
tive 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
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 his-
torians 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 encom-
passed 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 hap-
pened 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 log-
ical 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 presi-
dential 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 Repub-
lic 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
be rearmed. Although communism was intellectually influential in France,

politically it had been emasculated, and there was no threat of a commu-
nist 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 unifi-
cation – 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 restor-
ing 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 magi-
cally 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
movements. Monnerot wrote that fascism should be understood as a move-

ment 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 ‘mysti-
cal’ 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 consis-
tent 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 ‘fas-
cist’. 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 irra-
tional, such as inspired the journal Acéphale. Indeed, his antifascist activities
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 demo-
cratic 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 homo-
geneous. 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 con-
trast, 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 myth-
historical 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 con-
demned Marxism: for its untenable, bastard mix of ‘science’ (political econ-
omy) and its opposite, the Hegelian dialectic inherited from Heraclitus.84
And, with the content of his argument in contest with its form of articu-
lation, 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 situ-
ating 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
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, decoloni-
sation 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 immigra-
tion 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 total-
itarianism 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 phenom-

ena 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
Arendt had failed to define either ‘religion’ or ‘ideology’. He stressed that ide-
ology 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 under-
stood 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 carica-
turing 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 ‘polit-
ical 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 com-
munity 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 warn-
ings and calls for careful analysis have been ignored, and Monnerot’s desig-
nation 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 equiva-
lence 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 commu-
nist regimes, saw Islam as the greatest threat to French cultural homogeneity
and to the west as such.91 He condemned the ‘politically correct’ main-
stream 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
confirming Monnerot’s claim that his contemporaries were ‘the most con-
ditioned 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 homogenisa-
tion 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 ‘collec-
tive 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 asso-
ciated 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 auto-

biographies, 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 soci-
ety, 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 indi-
vidual 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 ‘col-
lective 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 sup-
posed 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
144 Politics and Cultures of Memory
in the work of French sociologists Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs,

and perhaps reaches its zenith in Ricoeur’s last major work, Memory, His-
tory, 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 ‘col-
lective 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 memo-
rials, 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 liv-
ing 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 com-
munism, 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 rela-
tions. 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 collec-
tive 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 under-
stood as the result of the interaction of three ‘types of historical factors:
Genocide and Memory 145
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 Histori-
ans 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 mem-
ory of various national or (more often) ethnoracial groups’.7 Memory is,
in fine, one of the more dangerous tools of identity politics. Thus, schol-
ars 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 unat-
tended, 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 mem-
ory means, then, examining the ways in which collective memories of past
humiliations or victories are mobilised in the present, showing how indi-
viduals 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
the murder of the Jews lay a deeper desire to overthrow the moral law –
represented by the Ten Commandments, the basis of Judeo-Christian civili-
sation – 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 ‘super-
seding’ 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 curi-
ous, 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 per-
petrators 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 under-
pinned 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 ances-
tors 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 mas-
sive 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 cer-
tainly 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
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 espe-
cially 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 per-
manent 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 affin-
ity 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 col-
lective 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 interna-
tional 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 bat-
tle (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 vic-
tory, 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
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 allega-
tions 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 bat-
tle 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 moder-
ates 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 responsi-
ble for the murder of tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Romanies. No seri-
ous 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 his-
torians 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 strat-
egy 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
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 sug-
gests 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 mobilis-
ing perpetrators, it also underpins attempts to commemorate genocide in its
immediate aftermath and to advocate on behalf of survivors in their quest
for justice.
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 commis-
sions 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 com-
mon 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 mem-
ory of Nuremberg informs the currently developing international law on
genocide and human rights.34 Issues of compensatory and/or corrective jus-
tice, 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.
When memory is the subject, the focus of attention is usually on com-

memorative 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 pro-
vides 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 thou-
sand 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 delib-
erately 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 pub-
lic display of body parts has been permitted, contrary to usual custom,
although one should bear in mind that ‘the maintenance of a site to commu-
nicate 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 fes-
tivals 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
Remembering genocide, however, is only one side of the coin of respond-

ing 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 vic-
tims 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 con-
tinue ‘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 fun-
damentally 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 unex-
pectedly 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 ‘trau-
matic memory’ is a widely applicable concept. The idea that whole societies
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 rep-
resentations 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 situa-
tion 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 administra-
tion by making a public apology to the country’s Indigenous people for
the suffering endured by the ‘stolen children’ and their families. This pol-
icy, 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 Aborig-
ines 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 Abo-
riginal 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.
The perpetration of genocide requires the mobilisation of memory, as

does its punishment, though in the latter case there is a prima facie argu-
ment 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 chal-
lenges 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 his-
tory’, debates over Australian history overshadowed contemporary political
debates concerning how best to deal with troubled Aboriginal communi-
ties. 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 recon-
ciliation 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 funda-
mental 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’ dis-
courses 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 contin-
ues 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 mem-
ory 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
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 colo-
nial 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 dif-
ficult 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 contin-
ues to poison relations with the Palestinians with devastating consequences,
at least in Australia these memory conflicts are being articulated in the pub-
lic 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, per-
haps, 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 mutu-
ally agreeable arbitration between competing versions of the past. As Peter
Fritzsche notes, the reason that national memories ‘remain so resonant’
is ‘not because they are more true, but because the narratives of collec-
tive guilt and collective victimisation that they generate have the effect of
recognising and commemorating individual suffering in socially meaning-
ful, 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, grap-
pling 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 mnemotech-
nia or the Romans as ars memoriae, he retires, wishing to ‘forget about
remembering’. This aspiration, as he immediately acknowledges, is ‘an Alice-
in-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 disman-
tled 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
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, tech-
nocratic, 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 simultane-
ously 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 mem-
ory’. 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 commemo-
ration or with the heritage industry and its ‘history spin’, nevertheless I will
here run them together to some extent in the interest of provoking discus-
sion. 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 – mem-
ory 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
Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute 159
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, respec-
tively, 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 per-
haps 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 mem-
ory’ (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 com-
memorations 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 thor-
oughly 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 oth-
ers we could easily add. We see here the truth of Paul Connerton’s point that
social memory is constructed through performative commemorative cere-
monies, 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 repeat-
edly of what Confucius called “love for the ancients” in the name of
scientific rationality and cultural enlightenment’, and she claimed, in a way
that would be unthinkable just a few years later, that ‘we moderns face the
world with a much impoverished vocabulary for remembering – so dimin-
ished, 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 mount-
ing. 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, “mem-
ory” 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 spo-
ken 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 can-
not 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 iden-
tity politics and a postmodern sensibility that distrusts the determinism of
totalising historical narratives – memory as ‘re-enchantment’, as ‘project-
ing 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, nega-
tive theology; as clinical, therapeutic.18 The danger, according to Klein, is
that the approach that he calls ‘structural memory’ – examining the cre-
ation 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
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 con-
sumers 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 pol-
itics, 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 con-
temptible 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 attribu-
tion 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 fascina-
tion’ (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 min-
gle 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
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 major-
ity 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 per-
haps 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 soci-
eties 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 trauma-
tisms, 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 ‘mem-
ory 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
Ceauşescu, Manea offers some provocative thoughts: ‘Public commemora-
tions 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:
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 enter-
prise 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 talk-
ing 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 postmod-
ernists’. 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 wither-
ing 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
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 ‘mem-
ory 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 posi-
tively, 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 disconti-
nuity, 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 some-
thing possessed by individuals, and psychologists still find it difficult to
jump from the individual to the collective.33 But as Ricoeur notes, psychol-
ogists, as scholars of individuals, did not at the time (and often still don’t)
grasp the Durkheimian manoeuvre (‘methodological holism’) of taking indi-
vidual 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 per-
sonal 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 neu-
rological sense, or that ‘memories’ are mysteriously passed on by osmosis,
nor to subscribe to the view (implied in the pejorative undertones that

accompany the term ‘methodological holism’) that individuals and indi-
vidualism are unimportant. But it is saying something stronger than that
collective memory is just a fashionable term for mythic narratives or ideo-
logically 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 sim-
ply 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, ideolog-
ically 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 memo-
ries ‘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 author-
ity, 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 (nec-
essarily cursory) examples would be useful at this point in order to illustrate
why ‘collective memory’ is not simply synonymous with ‘myth’ or with crit-
ical 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 repre-
sentations and make a strong case for moving ‘memory studies’ towards
investigating social relations, institutions and the state. The book that
they have edited on German memory illustrates the possibility of orient-
ing ‘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 pro-
vide 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 con-
structed, 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 collec-
tive 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 grass-
roots 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 insuf-
ficient space to the atrocities that characterised Belgian colonial rule.43 All
of these approaches reveal a varied and fruitful research landscape, not all
of which can be subsumed under the rhetoric of ‘re-enchantment’ or ‘cul-
tural homogenisation’. And quite apart from these examples, which are
mostly drawn from historians, the work of literary theorists and philoso-
phers 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 ‘mem-

ory 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 pro-
ceed? 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 nei-
ther 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 criti-
cal 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
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 rela-
tively 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 there-
fore 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 stud-
ies’ 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 Holo-
caust 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 considera-
tion, 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 threat-
ening 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,
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 some-
thing 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, ‘con-
stitutes 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 some-
one 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, Forget-
ting, 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 mem-
ory’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 trans-
formative force. In Susan Handelman’s terms, it ‘is an act of compression
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 abol-
ish 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 argu-
ment 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 rela-
tionship 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, ‘sociom-
nemonic 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
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 mem-
orably 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 sur-
prising desire for cultural homogeneity, consistency, and predictability’,70 or,
as Klein puts it, ‘Memory appeals to us partly because it projects an imme-
diacy 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 contesta-
tions 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 commemo-
ration, history will still be unthinkable without memory. Mnemosyne was,
we recall, the mother of the nine muses, including Clio, the muse of his-
tory. 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 (Żydokomuna), 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 exam-
ple 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’ com-
munism in 1989, then that defeat was only possible because communism
172
Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’ 173
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 per-
nicious 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 struc-
tures of thought on post-communist Russian nationalism are right, for ‘a
decade of post-Communist history in Eastern Europe suggests that Commu-
nist 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 ‘mem-
ory 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 con-
troversies 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 ‘time-
less present’. She writes that it is ‘the function of memory to “present”
(make present) the past and deprive the past of its definitely bygone char-
acter. 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
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 libera-
tion, 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 long-
standing 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 wel-
fare 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’ (brat-
stvo 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 facil-
itated the Soviets’ carrying out massive social restructuring through land
‘redistribution’. In the west, the suffering caused by the liberation pro-
cess – 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
resistance movements were topics too uncomfortable to mention in liber-

ated countries. Instead, mythic narratives of resistance, Allied solidarity and
democratic renewal quickly took hold, in the interests of relatively friction-
less 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, ‘resem-
bling 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 reconstruc-
tion were dismantled even faster than was already the case; for example,
the notion of widespread involvement in and support for the French resis-
tance 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 tra-
dition 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 inces-
santly invoked in public debates, narratives of self-pity and self-glorification
prevail over lucid scrutiny of the past’.21
With the exception of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, when World War II mem-
ory 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 tradi-
tions – 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 ‘long-
maintained 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 consen-
sus that dominated post-war politics after 1945, whether Social or Christian
Democrats were in power, started to crack, as confusion over the mean-
ing 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 ter-
ror’. 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 deter-
minism 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 particu-
lar, 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 unprece-
dented 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 consen-
sus – 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
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 decid-
edly undemocratic political elements (Fascists and Communists) to hide
behind the mask of Italy’s so-called antifascist republic’.30 Although histo-
rians 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 ‘sec-
ond 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 per-
petuates, 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 vic-
tims made up about half of all Dutch wartime deaths,35 their experiences
were subsumed into a narrative of national heroism that animated the post-
war 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
A particularly interesting case is Spain, where Franco’s regime survived

the war by playing up its alleged neutrality, talking the language of anti-
communism 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 dis-
tortion of memory’ (removing monuments of Franco, for example), has
engendered a substantial public movement towards recovering ‘lost’ mem-
ories 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 vio-
lence came in 2007, with the passing of the Law of Historical Memory. ‘The
revision of official memory to include the individual memories of those pre-
viously 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 exam-
ple, 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. Con-
demning 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 compe-
tition 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
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 hor-
ror 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’ memo-
rial to Estonia’s Soviet ‘liberators’ can be seen as ‘the belated completion
of an unfinished project of the war generation’ – once again, the reappear-
ance 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 com-
munism, 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 con-
tinued 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 pro-
cess – 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 mas-
ter 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, con-
structed 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 legit-
imacy 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
the break-up of the USSR argued that Stalin had supported Nazi Germany
from the outset because he believed that Hitler would unleash a destruc-
tive 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 nev-
ertheless correct to state that ‘Contemporary Russia has not yet arrived at
a consensus about its past, and thus is forced to contend with conflict-
ing 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 com-
pensation 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 impar-
tial 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 resur-
gence 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 dis-
cover 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 suffer-
ing 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 situat-

ing these European memory wars into a broader context, since they occur
worldwide, especially in societies scarred by civil war, genocide and author-
itarianism, such as post-apartheid South Africa, Rwanda, Guatemala and
Argentina. Besides, many of the European memory wars have a far wider
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 How-
ever, 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 How-
ever, 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 chil-
dren’ 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 rela-
tively 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 Declara-
tion of Human Rights and 1951 Refugees Convention), but especially since
1989. The development of a human rights culture has gone hand in hand
with the globalisation of Holocaust memory, although the precise rela-

tionship 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’ commit-
ment to individual rights.69 The emphasis in twentieth-century diplomacy
on ‘state sovereignty rooted in national homogeneity’ meant that humani-
tarian 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 reinvig-
orated 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 humani-
tarian 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 exis-
tence 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 charac-
terised 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 schol-
arly 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
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 hin-
der 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 con-
cerns 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 schol-
ars, 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 Post-
war 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 philos-
ophy 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, Testi-
mony’, 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 partic-
ular contextualisations; for example, Judt and Snyder suggest that the emergence
of Holocaust consciousness in the West has buried an awareness of the sophistica-
tion 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 com-
ments 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
Notes 185
13. Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Vio-
lence 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 Build-
ing 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 ‘divi-
sionism’, 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 expecta-
tions 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 Ševčenko and Ereshnee Naidu, ‘Utopian Dreams or Prac-
tical 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 Fas-
cism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 35, 2 (2000), 185–211. One might also mention the role of
186 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).
Notes 187
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 nationalsozial-
istischen 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 His-
tory, 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 Solu-
tion’, 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 Will-
ing 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 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.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Waltham: Brandeis Univer-
sity Press, 2001); Ahlrich Meyer, Täter im Verhör: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ in
Frankreich 1940–1944 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005).
29. Geoffrey P. Megargee (ed.), The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclo-
pedia 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).
30. Sara Bender, The Jews of Białystok during World War II and the Holocaust (Waltham:
Brandeis University Press, 2009), 293.
31. Dan Michman, The Emergence of Jewish Ghettos during the Holocaust (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
32. Christopher R. Browning, ‘Before the “Final Solution”: Nazi Ghettoization Pol-
icy 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.
33. 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).
34. Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1994).
35. Donald Bloxham, ‘Europe, the Final Solution and the Dynamics of Intent’, Pat-
terns 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.
36. 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 189
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).
37. See Ulrich Herbert (ed.), National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary
German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).
38. 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).
39. 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.
40. John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice’, Central
European History, 32, 1 (1999), 1–33.
41. Wolf Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims,
1938–1944 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
42. 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).
43. Feldman and Seibel (eds.), Networks of Nazi Persecution.
44. 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:
45. 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).
46. Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe A. Veltri (eds.), Italy Today: The Sick Man of
Europe (London: Routledge, 2010).
47. 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.
48. 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.
49. Maria Mälksoo, ‘The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European
Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe’, European Journal of International
190 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 Raphael Lemkin as Historian of the Holocaust

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, ‘Inter-
national 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 Con-
stitutional 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 extermi-
nate 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 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 Holo-
caust 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. Lemkin, ‘Genocide—A Modern Crime’, 3.
16. See Dan Stone, ‘Genocide as Transgression’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7, 1
(2004), 45–65.
17. Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London: Elek Books, 1956 [orig. French 1953]),
182.
18. 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 ‘perpetra-
tor 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.
19. For a discussion, see Frank Bajohr, ‘Expropriation and Expulsion’, in Stone (ed.),
The Historiography of the Holocaust, 52–64.
20. See, for example, Avi Beker (ed.), The Plunder of Jewish Property During the Holocaust:
Confronting European History (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Con-
fiscation of Jewish Property in Europe, 1933–1945: New Sources and Perspectives:
Symposium Proceedings (Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, 2003).
21. See TNG, 153–76.
22. Lemkin, Axis Rule, xi.
23. Lemkin, Axis Rule, 21–22.
24. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1942). Neumann argued (107) that ‘racism and Anti-
Semitism 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’.
192 Notes
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 Mem-
ory: Saul Friedländer’s Historiography of the Shoah’, in Martin L. Davies and
Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds.), How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Per-
spectives (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, Mis-
interpretation, 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.
Notes 193
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.), Rework-
ing 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 implica-
tions 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 Historiogra-
phy 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.
194 Notes
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 Histo-
riography 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
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 195
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, Genera-
tion 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 Annihi-
lation’, 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 sicherheit-
spolizeilichen 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 Ermächti-
gungsregime’, in Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt (eds.), Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezu-
stand 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.
196 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 Rep-
resentation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992), 19–20.
63. Friedländer, Memory, History, 5–6.
4 The Holocaust and ‘The Human’

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 Anti-
Semitism’, 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 Mean-
ing 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 thought-
ful 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, Risk-
ing 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 197
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 Deso-
lation 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.
10. 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.
11. Arendt to Jaspers, 17 December 1946, in Arendt/Jaspers Correspondence, 69.
12. 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.
13. Hannah Arendt, ‘Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)’,
in Jerome Kohn (ed.), Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Uncollected and Unpub-
lished Works by Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994),
316.
14. Arendt, ‘Mankind and Terror’, 304.
15. Arendt, ‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism’, in Essays in Understanding, 340.
16. Ibid., 341.
17. Arendt, ‘Mankind and Terror’, 305.
18. 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 criti-
cism 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 controver-
sial than Voegelin’s statement on “nature” (identifying a “thing as a thing”
and therefore incapable of change by definition) implies’, but also in her asser-
tion 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 Notes
Review of Politics, 15, 1 (1953), 76–84 and is reprinted in Essays in Understanding,

401–08.
19. 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).
20. Christian Gerlach, ‘The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews, and
Hitler’s Decision in Principle to Exterminate all European Jews’, Journal of Mod-
ern 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 “Opera-
tion 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).
21. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with
Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (London: Picador, 1999), 17.
22. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland (London: HarperCollins, 1992).
23. 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: Sol-
diers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
for more examples.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. Finkielkraut, L’Humanité perdue, 110–11.
27. Jankiel Wiernik, ‘One Year in Treblinka’, in Lawrence L. Langer (ed.), Art from the
Ashes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 30–31.
28. See my ‘Modernity and Violence: Theoretical Reflections on the Einsatzgruppen’,
in History, Memory and Mass Atrocity, 1–14. For useful studies on the social psy-
chology 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 Organiza-
tion 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.
29. 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.
30. 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 199
way in which the Nazis regarded them, can make this conceptual difference
meaningful.
31. See the drawings in Thomas Geve, Guns and Barbed Wire: A Child Survives the
Holocaust (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1987).
32. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987), 48.
33. Rudolf Reder, ‘Bełżec’, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 13 (2000), 282.
34. 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).
35. Alan Adelson (ed.), The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak (London: Bloomsbury, 1996),
170.
36. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the
Film (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 174.
37. Jan Karski, Story of a Secret State (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), 330.
38. Naomi Samson, Hide: A Child’s View of the Holocaust (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000), 74–75.
39. Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital
and the Jewish Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 45.
40. 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.
41. 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.
42. 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 Auto-
biographical and Historical Writing during and after the Holocaust’, Yad Vashem
Studies, 33 (2005), 381–429.
43. 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.
44. 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 epi-
graph, 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.
45. 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
200 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.
46. Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York:
Human Rights Watch, 1999), 73 (‘cockroaches’), 258 (‘work’).
47. 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).
48. 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 Perpe-
trators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate’, Journal of Genocide
Research, 6, 1 (2004), 85–98.
49. 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.
50. Faustin Kagame, ‘The Artificial Racialization at the Root of the Genocide’, in Berry
and Berry (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda, 73.
51. See Mark Levene, ‘Rwanda: The Aftermath’, Patterns of Prejudice, 35, 2 (2001),
87–94.
52. Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and
Jews (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 55. For further discus-
sion see Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (eds.), Gray Zones: Ambiguity and
Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005).
53. 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.
54. 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.
55. Ignace Rukiramacumu in Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda
Speak (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 47.
56. Pio Mutungirehe in ibid.
57. Léopord Twagirayezu in ibid., 144.
58. Cited in Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 347–8.
59. 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).
60. Pancrace Hakizamungili in Hatzfeld, Machete Season, 21–22.
61. Or, as Seyla Benhabib notes, in her work, ‘Arendt does not examine the philo-
sophical 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 201
the moral and political equality of human beings in a community of recipro-

cal recognition remains philosophically unthematized’. Seyla Benhabib, ‘Arendt’s
Eichmann in Jerusalem’, in Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah
Arendt, 82.
62. 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 power-
less 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’.
63. Arendt, ‘A Reply to Eric Voegelin’, in Essays in Understanding, 408.
64. 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.
65. 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).
66. 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.
67. 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.
68. 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.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 34–5.
72. 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 crim-
inal 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” ele-
ment 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’.
73. Hannah Arendt, ‘Fernsehgespräch mit Thilo Koch’, in Ursula Ludz (ed.), Ich will
verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk (Munich: Piper, 1996), 40.
74. Dastur, ‘Three Questions’, 35.
75. I have discussed this in my ‘Ontology or Bureaucracy?’
76. Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate (London: Elek Books, 1956 [orig. French ed.
1953]), 286.
202 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 Anti-
Fascism 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 émi-
grés’ 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 Anti-
Fascism’, 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 sozialistis-
cher 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 Post-
War 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 deutsch-
jüdischer 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 nationalsozial-
istischen Diktatur’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 3 (1985), 43–58;
Jan Foitzik, ‘Revolution und Demokratie: Zu den sofort- und Übergangsplanun-
gen 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 rele-
vant 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: Vic-
tor 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 Notes
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 32–35; Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holo-
caust (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.
12. 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.
13. Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), 156,
119. Luigi Sturzo, ‘Fascism and Nazism’, Quarterly Review, 261 (1933), 162–76.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. Orwell, ‘Review of The Totalitarian Enemy’, 42.
17. Franz Borkenau, Austria and After (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 15.
18. Franz Borkenau, The New German Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 11.
Further references in the text.
19. Franz Borkenau, ‘The German Problem’, Dublin Review, 209 (October 1941), 196.
20. Victor Gollancz, ‘The Most Important Book the Club Has Issued’, Left News, 25
(May 1938), 790–91.
21. Orwell, ‘Review of The Totalitarian Enemy’, 40.
22. 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.
23. Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 518.
Further references in the text.
24. Reviews cited by Kolnai in Twentieth-Century Memoirs (1952–55), VII, 84. Kings
College London, Archives, MV29/8.
25. Francis Dunlop, The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002),
137.
26. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Die Credo der neuen Barbaren’, Oesterreichische Volkswirt, 24
(3 September 1932), 1174.
27. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Pacifism Means Suicide’, The Nation (21 January 1939), 88.
28. Aurel Kolnai, The Pivotal Principles of NS Ideology (handwritten ms, 1939), 3.
University of St. Andrews, Archives.
29. Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, 46.
30. Kolnai, Twentieth-Century Memoirs, VII, 10. Kings College London, Archives,
MV29/8.
31. 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.
32. For other appraisals of Germany Jekyll and Hyde, see Jörg Thunecke,
‘ “Characterology”, Not “Ideology”: Sebastian Haffner’s Refutation of Daniel
Notes 205
Goldhagen in Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (1940)’, in Ian Wallace (ed.), German-
Speaking 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.
33. 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.]
34. Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 39, 2 (2004), 242.
35. 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.
36. Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: The
Harvill Press, 1996).
37. Lothar Kettenacker, ‘The Influence of German Refugees on British War Aims’, in
Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain, 106.
38. Neal Ascherson, ‘Introduction’, in Germany Jekyll and Hyde, xviii; Kettenacker,
‘The Influence of German Refugees’, 108–09.
39. Kettler, ‘Antifascism as Ideology’, 5.
40. 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.
41. 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.
42. 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.
43. Aurel Kolnai, Twentieth-Century Memoirs, Kings College London Archives,
MV29/8, 72–73, 77.
44. 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 Contempo-

rary 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 Interpreta-
tion (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 attribut-
ing 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 Spe-
cial 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 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).
12. ‘Publishers’ Preface’ to Banse, Germany, Prepare for War!, xiv.
13. Adolf Hitler, My Struggle (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1933).
14. 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.
15. E.C. Bentley, ‘Hitler on the Hitler Spirit’ (review of English translation of Mein
Kampf ), Daily Telegraph (13 October 1933).
16. E.O. Lorimer, ‘Hitler’s Germany’, John O’London’s Weekly (11 November 1933).
17. 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 pol-
icy 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 for-
eigners. Notwithstanding this whitewash, Hitler’s main ideas and policies remain
intact, including foreign expansion in the future; the rebuilding of German ide-
alism 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 out-
side 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).
18. 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 Notes
2–8. Barnes and Barnes do not mention Lorimer in their otherwise quite thorough
survey.
19. Letter from Arnold Hyde in Manchester Guardian (19 October 1938).
20. Time and Tide (4 February 1939). All press reviews are in F177/53 and 54.
21. Bolton Evening News (15 April 1939); Western Telegraph (21 April 1939).
22. Daily Worker (8 February 1939).
23. Beneš to Lorimer, 3 January 1939, F177/50.
24. Daly to Lorimer, 6 January 1939, F177/51.
25. Whitehouse to Lorimer, 3 February 1939, F177/51.
26. Strakosch to Lorimer, 22 May 1939, F177/52.
27. Barsley to Lorimer, 30 August 1939, F177/46.
28. Times (21 January 1939).
29. 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.
30. Letter in New English Weekly (22 April 1939), F177/85.
31. Lorimer to Hyde, 24 April 1939, F177/85. On the publication of the compet-
ing American editions see Barnes and Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and
America, ch. 5.
32. 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.
33. E.O. Lorimer, ‘Men and Books’, Time and Tide (1 April 1939), 422.
34. Ibid., 423.
35. Ibid. See Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, unexpurgated edition, trans. James Murphy
(London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939).
36. 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. Never-
theless, 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 suspi-
cion. Unlike one of his predecessors in Berlin, Cola Ernest Carroll, who founded
Notes 209
the Anglo-German Review in 1936, he was not interned under Regulation 18B
(ibid., 169).
37. Vansittart to Lorimer, 25 August 1941, F177/85.
38. ‘Must We Always Be Fools?’, typescript for Never Again Association, 8 June 1941,
F177/75.
39. 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).
40. 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’.
41. 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.
42. 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.
43. E.O. Lorimer, ‘The Mein Kampf Ramp’, typed memorandum, F177/85.
44. 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.
45. Lorimer, ‘The Mein Kampf Ramp’.
46. Ibid.
47. 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 ‘state-
less 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 fur-
ther 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.
48. Lorimer to ‘Dix’, 13 May 1942, F177/46.
49. ‘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.
210 Notes
50. Letter of 22 August 1940, F177/46.

51. J.L. Garvin, ‘The Truth’, Observer (19 March 1939), 6.
7 Rolf Gardiner: An Honorary Nazi?

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’, Agri-
cultural 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 last-
mentioned article. It should be noted that in a more recent, jointly-authored
article, he writes: ‘That Wallop and Gardiner were personally close and sympa-
thetic 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 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.
15. 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).
16. Peter D. Stachura, The German Youth Movement 1900–1945: An Interpretative and
Documentary History (London: Methuen 1981), 63, 67.
17. 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.
18. Leslie Paul, The Annihilation of Man: A Study of the Crisis in the West (London: Faber
and Faber, 1944).
19. 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.
20. 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’.
21. Rolf Gardiner, ‘The Outlook of Young Germany’ (1929), 3, Cambridge Univer-
sity 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.
22. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Stroemungen des englischen kulturellen und politischen Lebens’
(no date, c.1933), 1, 5, RGP A2/6.
23. Ibid., 15.
24. Ibid., 21.
25. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Die Wende des englischen Volkes’ (no date, c.1933), 1, 18, RGP
A2/6.
26. Ibid., 33–34.
27. Rolf Gardiner, letter to the Times, no date (c.1933), RGP A2/6.
28. 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 gese-
hen: 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 Notes
and Ron H. Feldman (eds.), The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken Books,
2007), 49.
29. Rolf Gardiner, England Herself: Ventures in Rural Restoration (London: Faber & Faber,
1943), 7.
30. 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.
31. Ibid., 27, 37, 44.
32. Ibid., 43. See also in the same file, ‘An English Centre of German Propaganda’.
33. Gardiner to Goebbels, 25 April 1933. RGP A2/6. See Frank Trentmann, ‘Gardiner,
(Henry) Rolf (1902–71)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
34. 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.
35. Gardiner, England Herself, 73.
36. 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.
37. 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.’
38. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Stroemungen des englischen Kulturellen und politischen Lebens’,
12 (‘Die Union Jack plus Fussballmasse plus Windhundwettrenindustrie, – das ist
ungefähr the “Blackshirt Movement”’).
39. Rolf Gardiner, ‘Youth and Europe’ (1923), WSG, 19–21.
40. Moore-Colyer, ‘A Northern Federation?’, 319.
41. 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.
42. 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 Bio-
logical 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.
43. 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: Cul-
tural 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 Anti-
Urbanism 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 Soci-
ety”?’ 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 urban-
ized 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 Notes
56. Lymington (as Gerard Wallop) to Gardiner, 11 August 1943, RGP F2/2.
57. On this matter see Moore-Colyer and Conford, ‘A “Secret Society”?’, 196–99.
58. Blunden to Gardiner, 6 August 1943, RGP F2/2.
59. 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, Real-
ities (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 Conserva-
tion 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 Theo-
ries 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 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).
9. Brian Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages: The County War Agricultural Com-
mittees 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 Agri-
cultural 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.
10. A.G. Street, Feather-Bedding (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), cited in Short, ‘War
in the Fields and Villages’, 237.
11. 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).
12. 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 Twentieth-
Century 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 Univer-
sity 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).
13. 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 Geogra-
phy, 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.
14. 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 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 His-
tory/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 Polit-
ical Cultures in France and Italy’, Contemporary European History, 17, 2 (2008),
213–36.
15. Bertram M. Gordon, ‘The Countryside and the City: Some Notes on the Collab-
oration Model during the Vichy Period’, in Fishman et al. (eds.), France at War,
145–60.
16. Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, 162.
17. 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.
18. David Bensoussan, Combats pour une Bretagne catholique et rurale: Les droites
bretonnes dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 223.
19. Jenkins, ‘The Right-Wing Leagues’, 1363.
20. Ibid., 1367.
21. See George L. Mosse, ‘The French Right and the Working Classes: Les Jaunes’,
Journal of Contemporary History, 7, 3–4 (1972), 185–208.
22. 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.
23. 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 Construc-
tion of “Englishness”’, in Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (eds.), History,
Nationhood and the Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
375–85.
24. 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’).
25. 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).
26. Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, 197.
27. Ibid., 198. In these quotations, Winock is rehearsing the arguments put forward
by Sternhell.
28. Kevin Passmore, ‘The Construction of Crisis in Interwar France’, in Jenkins (ed.),
France in the Era of Fascism, 162.
29. Jenkins, ‘Conclusion: Beyond the “Fascism Debate”?’ in Jenkins (ed.) France in the
Era of Fascism, 203.
30. 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 217
‘Agrarian Movements and Their Contexts’, Sociologia Ruralis, 17, 1 (1977), 167–90,
esp. 183 on the radical right.
31. 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.
32. Byers, “‘I am not a force of nature”’, 11.
33. Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, ‘Pour sauver le peau des français’, Le flambeau (27 June
1936), cited in Kalman, ‘Faisceau Visions’, 352.
34. 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.
35. Le Nouveau Siècle, 25 January 1926, cited in Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism,
255.
36. Mosse, ‘Fascism and the Intellectuals’, in The Fascist Revolution, 116.
37. 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).
38. 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.
39. Ibid., 43.
40. See, for example, Rolf Gardiner, World without End: British Politics and the Younger
Generation (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1932), 33–34.
41. Moore-Colyer, ‘Towards “Mother Earth”’, 355.
42. 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 introduc-
tion 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.
43. 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.
44. 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 Coun-
tryside: A Study of the Work of H. J. Massingham’, Social and Cultural Geography,
3 (2002), 25–38.
45. My thanks to Philip Conford for this point.
46. Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages’, 219.
47. George Stapledon, The Way of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), 92, 94.
48. Earl of Portsmouth, Alternative to Death: The Relationship between Soil, Family and
Community (London: The Right Book Club, 1945 [1943]), 30.
49. 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.
218 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 Exter-
nal 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 pre-
vented 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 move-
ment, 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 Pol-
itics: 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 radi-
cales en France et en Grande-Bretagne au XXe siècle (Lille: Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, 2012), 87–105.
68. Paxton, French Peasant Fascism, 14.
Notes 219
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 commu-
nisme (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 Lobonţ, 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 Par-
liament 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 enti-
tled ‘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.
220 Notes
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 continu-
ity). 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 can-
not 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, Revi-
sion, 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, antisub-
version (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. Origi-
nally published in Nouvelle revue française, July 1938.
Notes 221
20. Sociology of Communism receives a passing mention, for example, in Emilio Gen-
tile, ‘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 com-
munism, 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 Inter-
vention 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 Con-
temporary 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 move-
ments 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 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’.
28. See, for example, Henry W. Ehrmann, ‘French Views on Communism’, World Pol-
itics, 3, 1 (1950), 141–51; Mercer Cook, ‘Race Relations as Seen by Recent French
Visitors’, Phylon, 15, 2 (1954), 121–38.
29. 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.
30. 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 Falasca-
Zamponi, ‘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.
32. Richardson, ‘Sociology on a Razor’s Edge’, 41.
33. Monnerot, Sociologie du communisme, 543, cited in Heimonet, ‘Le Collège et son
double’, 233; ‘in the making’ in English in the original.
34. Monnerot, Sociology of Communism, 19–20.
35. 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 Rev-
olution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
36. 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.
38. Ibid., 143.
39. Ibid., 146.
40. Ibid., 16.
41. 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.
43. 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.
45. Ibid., 162, 210.
Notes 223
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.
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 some-
one 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.
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.
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.
224 Notes
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.
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; Falasca-
Zamponi, ‘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 anti-
intellectualisme 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.
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: Imperial-
ism, 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.
Notes 225
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.
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 Fas-
cist 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.
226 Notes
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: Out-
line 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-us-
bombardment-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 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).
22. Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’,
Slavic Review, 54, 4 (1995), 927.
23. Anthony Oberschall, ‘The Manipulation of Ethnicity: From Ethnic Coopera-
tion to Violence and War in Yugoslavia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23, 6 (2000),
982–1001.
24. Bogdan Denitch, Ethnic Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), 81, cited in Oberschall, ‘The Manipulation’, 990.
25. 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 Previ-
ous 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).
26. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History’,
in Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide, 34–40.
27. Dirk Moses, ‘Moving the Genocide Debate Beyond the History Wars’, Australian
Journal of Politics and History, 54, 2 (2008), 264.
28. 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.
29. 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.
30. Levene, The Meaning of Genocide, 197.
31. Henri Raczymow, ‘Memory Shot Through with Holes’, Yale French Studies, 85
(1994), 98–105.
32. Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holo-
caust 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).
33. Dan Diner, ‘Restitution and Memory: The Holocaust in European Political Cul-
tures’, New German Critique, 90 (2003), 39–40. See also Dan Diner and Gotthard
Wunberg (eds.), Restitution and Memory: Material Restoration in Europe (New York:
34. Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holo-
caust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mark Mazower,
228 Notes
‘An International Civilization? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the

Mid-Twentieth Century’, International Affairs, 82, 3 (2006), 553–66.
35. 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.
36. 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).
37. Dan Stone, ‘Memory, Memorials and Museums’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The
Historiography of the Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
508–32.
38. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 6–7.
39. See David S. MacDonald, Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and
Historical Representation (London: Routledge, 2008).
40. William F.S. Miles, ‘Third World Views of the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide
Research, 6, 3 (2004), 388.
41. 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
42. 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 Twenti-
eth 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.
43. 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 Tri-
bunal and the Cambodian “Genocide” 1975–79’, Journal of Genocide Research, 9, 2
(2007), 215–33.
44. 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.
45. Guyer, ‘Rwanda’s Bones’.
46. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy
for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, Africa, 76, 2 (2006), 131.
47. 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.
48. Sorabji, ‘Managing Memories’, 2.
49. 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 Mis-
take: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rethinking
History, 8, 2 (2004), 193–221.
Notes 229
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: Fron-
tier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004), 229, 237; Pat O’Malley, ‘Gentle Genocide: The Gov-
ernment 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 Holo-
caust 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’, Representa-
tions, 26 (1989), 7–25.
230 Notes
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 Com-
mitment 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
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 His-
tory 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’, Repre-
sentations, 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.
Notes 231
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 col-
lective 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 oth-
ers. 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, ‘Col-
lective Memory – What Is It?’; Timothy Snyder, ‘Memories of Sovereignty and
Sovereignty over Memory: Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, 1939–1999’, in Jan-
Werner 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 His-
tory 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 His-
tory 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’.
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 Citi-
zenship 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 His-
torical 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 remember-
ing and individual memory that uses ‘non-discursive forms of memory’ as its
232 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 Sła-
womir 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.
34. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95. ‘This text’, Ricoeur notes of Halbwachs’
On Collective Memory, ‘basically says: to remember, we need others’ (120).
35. 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.
36. 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.
37. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 3.
38. 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.
39. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, ‘Introduction: Noises of the Past’, in Confino
and Fritzsche (eds.), The Work of Memory, 5.
40. Richard H. Minear, ‘Atomic Holocaust, Nazi Holocaust: Some Reflections’, Diplo-
matic 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).
41. 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.
42. 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.
43. 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 Dark-
ness’, 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.
44. 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 233
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 Mem-
ory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Marc Augé, Oblivion, trans.
Marjolijn de Jager (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
45. Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning’, 184.
46. LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, 19; Patrick H. Hutton, History as an
Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993).
47. Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95–96.
48. Benjamin Forest, Juliet Johnson and Karen Till, ‘Post-totalitarian National Iden-
tity: 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 Cul-
tural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany’, Grey Room, 16 (2004),
37–59.
49. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing
History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 209.
50. Rothberg, ‘The Work of Testimony’, 1243.
51. 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).
52. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, xv.
53. Ibid., 89.
54. Ibid., 147.
55. Ibid., 498.
56. Ibid., 21.
57. Ibid., 68, 87.
58. Ibid., 147.
59. 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.
60. 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.
61. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 459. For an exemplary discussion of the prob-
lems 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.
62. 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.
63. Handelman, Fragments, 164.
64. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 95–96.
234 Notes
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 – pro-
vided 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.
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 Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

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 (origi-
nal 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 Under-
standing, 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.
Notes 235
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 Con-
fiscation 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 Democ-
racy, 18, 4 (2007), 63; Vladimir Tismaneanu, ‘Leninist Legacies, Pluralist Dilem-
mas’, 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 Post-
Communist 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;
236 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.
26. 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.
27. For example: Jan-Werner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Stud-
ies 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).
28. 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 Univer-
sity 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 Rever-
ence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962
(New York: New York University Press, 2009).
29. 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.
30. Robert A. Ventresca, ‘Mussolini’s Ghost: Italy’s Duce in History and Memory’,
History & Memory, 18, 1 (2006), 96–97.
31. 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, ‘Fas-
cism 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.
32. Pamela Ballinger, ‘Who Defines and Remembers Genocide after the Cold War?
Contested Memories of Partisan Massacre in Venezia Giulia in 1943–1945’, Jour-
nal of Genocide Research, 2, 1 (2000), 11–30; Gaia Baracetti, ‘Foibe: Nationalism,
Revenge and Ideology in Venezia Giulia and Istria, 1943–45’, Journal of Contempo-
rary 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
Notes 237
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 Nar-
rating 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, ‘Col-
lective 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 Commu-
nism 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 Fas-
cism: 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 Total-
itarianism: Moral Equivalence and Degrees of Evil in Modern Political Vio-
lence’, 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 Totalitarian-
ism: 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 Interna-
tional Relations, 15, 4 (2009), 653–80. See also Claus Leggewie, ‘A Tour of the
238 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.
47. 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.
48. Nurit Schleifman, ‘Moscow’s Victory Park: A Monumental Change’, History &
Memory, 13, 2 (2001), 5–34.
49. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, ‘Commemorations of the Siege of Leningrad: A Catastro-
phe in Memory and Myth’, in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds.), The Memory
of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 111.
50. 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.
51. Benjamin Forest, Juliet Johnson and Karen Till, ‘Post-totalitarian National Iden-
tity: Public Memory in Germany and Russia’, Social and Cultural Geography, 5, 3
(2004), 368.
52. 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.
53. 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.
54. Judt, Postwar, 803. Jens Kroh, ‘Erinnerungskultureller Akteur und geschicht-
spolitisches 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 interna-
tionaler 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.
55. 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 Con-
flict 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).
Notes 239
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 Com-
munist 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 “Exorbi-
tant” Jewish Memory’, History & Memory, 18, 1 (2006), 43–85.
59. Adam Hochschild, ‘In the Heart of Darkness’, New York Review of Books (6 Octo-
ber 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 Con-
flict 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 Repa-
rations’, 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 “Holo-
caust” from War Crime to Trauma Drama’, European Journal of Social Theory, 5,
1 (2002), 5–85; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, ‘Memories of Europe: Cos-
mopolitanism 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’,
240 Notes
International Review of Sociology, 15, 3 (2005), 405–21. See also the important arti-
cle by Marco Duranti, which decouples Holocaust consciousness from the history
of human rights: ‘The Holocaust, the Legacy of 1789 and the Birth of Interna-
tional Human Rights Law: Revisiting the Foundation Myth’, Journal of Genocide
Research, 14, 2 (2012), 159–86.
69. Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, The Histori-
cal Journal, 47, 2 (2004), 379–98.
70. 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.
71. 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 his-
tory of human rights, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).
72. Rosenfeld, ‘A Looming Crash’.
73. Ido de Haan, ‘The Construction of a National Trauma: The Memory of the Perse-
cution of the Jews in the Netherlands’, Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences, 34, 2
(1998), 196–217.
74. 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.
75. Tony Judt, ‘The “Problem of Evil” in Postwar Europe’, New York Review of Books
(14 February 2008).
76. Michael Rothberg, ‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chron-
icle of a Summer, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor’,
PMLA, 119, 5 (2004), 1243.
77. Richard Ned Lebow, ‘The Future of Memory’, Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science, 617 (2008), 25–41.
78. Prizel, ‘Nationalism in Postcommunist Russia’, 334.
79. 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 Rec-
onciliation in History’, ed. Elazar Barkan, American Historical Review, 114, 4
(2009).
Index
Abbasid Empire, 129 Austria, 124, 150

Aborigines, 50, 153–54, 166 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin), 21,
‘Stolen generations’, 153, 181 26–27, 28, 32
Acéphale, 135
Action (BUF), 120 Bajohr, Frank, 31, 77
Action Française, 125, 130, 131, 133 Baker, Bruce, 169
Adamovich, Ales, 179 Baldwin, Stanley, 92, 119
Adenauer, Konrad, 78 Balfour, Arthur, 85
African-Americans, 166 Baltic States, 15, 21
Agamben, Giorgio, 47, 57, 59, 63 Banse, Ewald, 84, 95
Algerian War, 129, 177, 181 Barrès, Maurice, 114, 115, 116, 120
Alltagsgeschichte, 39–40, 41, 44 Barsley, Michael, 88
Alsace-Lorraine, 31, 115 Barta, Tony, 155
Alternative to Death (Earl of Portsmouth), Bartelson, Jens, 182
119 Barthes, Roland, 41
Aly, Götz, 32, 62 Bartov, Omer, 18
Ambrosino, Georges, 126 Basrah Times, 83
American Indians, 166 Bataille, Georges, 126, 128, 131, 132,
Amnesty Law (Spain, 1977), 178 135–36, 137, 139
Anderson, David, 166 Baum, Steven K., 44
Antelme, Robert, 60 Bazin, René, 114
antifascism, 5, 6, 10, 23, 67–80, 135–36, Behemoth (Neumann), 81
176, 177 Belarus, 20, 21
antisemitism, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, Belgian Congo, 166, 181
40, 42, 54–55, 57, 59, 77, 99, 124, see also Democratic Republic of Congo
125, 175 Belgium, 20, 166
Antonescu, Ion, 20–21, 175 Bell, David, 125
Apartheid, 181 Bell, Gertrude, 83
Arendt, Hannah, 25, 28, 49–62, 76, Belloc, Hilaire, 72, 82
137–38, 173 Bellow, Saul, 157
Argentina, 155, 180, 181 Bełżec, 17, 56
Armenian genocide, 26, 33, Bender, Sara, 20
50, 146 Beneš, Edvard, 87
Aron, Raymond, 127, 128 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 177
Arrow Cross, 133, 178 Benjamin, Walter, 126, 169–70
Arusha Accords, 147 Bensoussan, David, 121, 122
Aschheim, Steven, 37, 39 Berg, Nicolas, 38
Assmann, Jan, 159 Bergen-Belsen, 28
Augé, Marc, 143, 167 Berlin, 144, 159
Auschwitz, 16, 17, 49, 50, 55, 57, Berlin Wall, 175
137, 159 Berlusconi, Silvio, 23, 177
in collective memory, 144 Berth, Edouard, 115
Sonderkommando in, 56 Best, Andrew, 96
Australia, 22, 88, 153–54, 155, 181 Bidault, Georges, 129
241
242 Index
Black Book of Communism, The, 177 Cioran, Emil, 11

Bloxham, Donald, 22 Civil Rights, 169
Blum, Léon, 129 Club de L’Horloge, 133
Blunden, Edmund, 107, 108, 109, 119 Cold War, 16, 22, 23, 29, 30, 31, 79, 125,
Boberhaus (Loewenberg), 98, 102 137, 144, 150, 155, 159, 173, 174,
Borges, Jorge Luis, 11 175, 177, 181, 182, 183
Borkenau, Franz, 68, 69–71, 74, 75, College of Sociology, 123–24, 125, 126,
78, 79 127, 128, 131
Bosnia, 152, 153 Collingwood, R. G., 73
Boulangism, 114 colonialism, 10, 16, 22, 33, 49, 50, 147,
Boutang, Pierre, 125 149
Boyarin, Jonathan, 159 Comité de Vincennes, 129
Boyd, Carolyn, 178 commemorations, 143, 145, 149,
Bozman, E. F., 108 150–51, 153, 163–64, 168, 170, 182
Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 81 Commission for Historical Clarification
Bramwell, Anna, 110, 113, 116, 120, 122 (Guatemala), 166, 181
Brasillach, Robert, 114 communism, 5, 10, 23, 29, 70, 74, 79,
Brauchitsch, Walther von, 30 88, 105, 116, 125, 127, 129, 130,
Bringing Them Home Report (Australia), 131, 134, 135, 172, 177, 180
153 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT),
British Empire, 78, 89, 97 121
British Union of Fascists (BUF), 80, 100, Confino, Alon, 41, 43, 44, 155, 165–66,
105, 119–20, 122, 133 168, 173
Brittany, 120–21 Confluence, 137
Broszat, Martin, 29, 37–39, 41, 48 Conford, Philip, 106, 114, 120
Browning, Christopher, 54 Confucius, 159
Brucan, Silviu, 174 Congress of Vienna, 183
Bryant, Arthur, 91, 92–93, 108, 119 Connerton, Paul, 159
Buckley-Zistel, Susanne, 152 Consonni, Manuela, 44
Budapest, 23, 72, 178 Copsey, Nigel, 67, 69, 70, 74
Bulgaria, 20 Critique, 128
Bünde, 98 Croatia, 21, 148
Burundi, 58, 147 Croix de Feu, 114, 120
Bush, George W., 158 Czechoslovakia, 34, 68, 134
Byers, Susie, 116
Dachau, 28
Caillois, Roger, 124, 126, 128, 131, 132 Daily Telegraph (London), 85
Cambodia, 146, 150, 151 Daily Worker (London), 87
Canada, 88 Daly, Sidney, 87
Carroll, Lewis, 88 Darfur, 182
Caruth, Cathy, 162 Darré, Richard Walther, 101, 110, 117
Ceauşescu, Nicolai, 20, 162 Dastur, Françoise, 60, 61, 62
Césaire, Aimé, 49 Dean, Martin, 31
Chamberlain, Neville, 73, 90, 92 de Benoist, Alain, 133, 138–39
Champetier de Ribes, Auguste, 145 Debray, Régis, 172
Chase, Malcolm, 98, 109, 119 decolonisation, 168, 183
Chełmno, 17 de Felice, Renzo, 177
Chetniks, 148, 174 Defying Hitler (Haffner), 75, 78–79
Choeung Ek, 151 de Gaulle, Charles, 128, 129, 133, 134
Churchill, Winston, 72, 79, 172 De Haan, Ido, 162, 177
Index 243
Dell, Robert, 89 Faisceau, 112, 120

Democratic Republic of Congo, Faits sociaux ne sont pas des choses, Les
59, 153 (Monnerot), 128, 132, 136
Denitch, Bogdan, 148 Falange (Spain), 133
Denmark, 75 Farrell Krell, David, 158
Déroulède, Paul, 114 fascism, 4, 6, 7, 9–10, 11, 29, 68–69, 73,
Derrida, Jacques, 60, 61, 158, 159 96–97, 105, 106, 116–18, 124–25,
Deutsche Arbeitsfront, 117 126, 130, 131, 135, 137, 139, 173,
Deutsche Bank, 23 175
Deutsche Freischar, 98 and Nazism, 5, 96–97, 101, 104,
Dickson, Lovat, 84 105–6, 117–18, 132
Diner, Dan, 7, 8, 38, 150 and ‘neo-fascism’, 124–25
Distributism, 72 appeal of, 6, 105, 116, 131, 136, 137
Dmitrov, Georgi, 70 as tool of big business, 68
Dorgères, Henri, 111, 112, 120, British, 6, 80, 119–20, 122
121, 122 ecology and 110, 113, 120
Doriot, Jacques, 117 French, 111, 116, 120, 122, 124–25,
Dreyfus Affair, 114, 133 126, 133
Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 116–17, 118, intellectual origins of, 111, 115–16
120 Italian, 4, 5, 116, 122, 133, 144
Drumont, Edouard, 114 Romanian, 5, 11
Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), 151 Fascisme, Le (Valois), 116
Dugdale, E. T. S., 85 Felman, Shoshana, 170
Dulić, Tomislav, 148 Ferdinand, Franz, 147
Durkheim, Emile, 126, 128, 144, 164 Finchelstein, Federico, 5, 6
Dwork, Debórah, 32 Fini, Gianfranco, 177
Finkelstein, Norman, 160, 163, 166
East Timor, 58 Finkielkraut, Alain, 54
Eichmann, Adolf, 43, 62, 150 Finland, 20
Einsatzgruppen, 30, 54 foibe, 177
Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), forced labour, 17, 20, 22
18, 30–31 For Fatherland and Freedom Party
Eire, 88 (Latvia), 172
Eley, Geoff, 174 Foucault, Michel, 11, 47
Eliade, Mircea, 11 Fowler, David, 96
Elkins, Caroline, 166 Foyle, Christina, 92
England Herself (Gardiner), 103–4, 108, Fraenkel, Heinrich, 69
109 France, 20, 68, 75, 150, 155, 177, 178
English Array, 106, 118 and decolonisation, 129
English Mistery, 106, 118 Fifth Republic, 125, 132, 137
Ensor, R. C. K., 85 Popular Front, 112
Estonia, 20, 179 Resistance, 128, 132
eugenics, 94, 95 Revolution, 88, 159
European Coal and Steel Community rural exodus, 112
(ECSC), 134 Third Republic, 113, 133
European Conservatives and Reformists Vichy, 32, 113, 122, 125, 133, 134, 177
Group (ECR), 172 Francisme, 120
European Union (EU), 8, 24, 134, 176, Franco, Francisco, 178
180, 181, 183 Francoism, 6, 178
Evans, Martin, 179 Frank, Hans, 28, 33, 36
244 Index
Friedländer, Saul, 1, 2, 7, 18, 37–48, 182 Hamburg, 18, 108

Friedman, Philip, 35 Handelman, Susan, 169
Fritzsche, Peter, 155, 165–66, 168, 171 Hargrave, John, 98
Front National, 123, 124–25, 127, 129, Hartman, Geoffrey, 159, 166, 167, 170
133, 136, 139 Harvest of Hate (Poliakov), 62
Hauner, Milan, 81
gacaca, 58, 181 Hayden, Robert M., 148
Galicia, 20 Heidegger, Martin, 60, 61, 103
Gardiner, Rolf, 96–109, 115, 116, Heiden, Konrad, 75
117–18, 119, 120, 122 Heimonet, Jean-Michel, 124, 125
Garvin, J. L., 95 Herero and Nama genocide, 22
General Government, 28 Hess, Jonathan M., 164
Generalplan Ost, 33 Heydrich, Reinhard, 17
genocide, 4, 7, 21–22, 25–36, 40, 44, 50, Hilberg, Raul, 44
143–56, 168 Himmler, Heinrich, 21, 36, 110
aftermath of, 149–53 Hiroshima, 166
cultural, 27, 31 Hirsch, Marianne, 167
‘double’, 8, 23–24, 178–79 Historikerstreit, 4, 154
Gentile, Emilio, 130 historiography, 3, 7, 11–12, 38, 48, 169
German Southwest Africa, 22, 146 history
Germany Jekyll and Hyde (Haffner), 75–78 as concept, 2, 7, 9, 10
Germany’s Third Empire (Moeller van den laws of, 51–52, 138
Bruck), 82, 83–84 methodology, 3, 4, 8, 28, 37, 38–39,
Geve, Thomas, 55 40–41, 48, 144–45, 155, 159, 161,
Geyer, Michael, 46, 149 165, 167
ghettos, 20 of ideas, 3, 4, 9, 10–11, 76
Gilroy, Paul, 49 philosophy of, 2
Globocnik, Odilo, 17 popular, 3, 8
Goebbels, Josef, 45, 57, 91, 92, 102–3, History & Memory, 168
149 History in Transit (LaCapra), 162
Goetsch, Georg, 102, 103 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 20, 21, 26, 33, 36, 49, 67,
Goldberg, Amos, 42–43, 44–45 70, 75, 76, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,
Gollancz, Victor, 72, 74, 92 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 110, 130, 135,
Gourevitch, Philip, 53 137, 149, 172, 174, 179, 180
Gradowski, Zalman, 56 Hitler Case, The (Lemkin), 27, 28, 33
Great Patriotic War, 23, 179 Hitler Youth, 101, 117
Green, E. H. H., 92 Hochschild, Adam, 166
Greenshirt Movement, 111, 112, 120, Hollier, Denis, 123, 136
121, 122 Holocaust, 4, 5, 42, 153, 168, 169, 177,
Grey, Peter, 159, 161 180, 183
Griffiths, Richard, 96, 114, 125 and fascism, 5, 7
Gringauz, Samuel, 35 and Nazi crimes, 31–32, 35, 36
Gross, Babette, 69 as ‘colonial genocide’, 21–22, 33
Guatemala, 150, 180 as ‘industrial genocide’, 15
Guedalla, Philip, 85 as ‘mysterious’, 43–44, 48, 60
Guerre en question, La (Monnerot), 131 as state-led crime, 22
Gulag, 51 as ‘subaltern genocide’, 149
bureaucracy of, 16
Haffner, Sebastian, 68, 75–79 commemoration of, 8
Halbwachs, Maurice, 144, 164 ‘consciousness’, 144, 150, 178
Index 245
denial of, 127, 148, 178 Jacoby, Gerhard, 34

economics and, 18–19, 23, 53 Jacquier, Charles, 113
hiding in, 56 Jasenovac, 148
historiography of, 6, 7–8, 15–24, 25, Jaspers, Karl, 62
26, 28, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, Jenkins, Brian, 114, 116
42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52 Jenks, Jorian, 115, 120
in Eastern Europe, 16, 18, 20–21 Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, 111
in Western Europe, 16, 20 Jeunesse Patriotes, 114
looting in, 18, 30, 180 Jewish history, 19, 38, 157
memorial day, 23, 150, 159 John, Evan, 81, 82
micro-histories of, 16 Judt, Tony, 3, 4–5, 160, 180, 182
museums and, 23
negotiations with Allies in, 21 Kaminski, Michał, 172
perpetrators of, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 41, Kangura, 147
42, 44, 45, 53–54 Kansteiner, Wulf, 144, 153, 160, 161,
photographs of, 17, 55 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170,
representation of, 2, 8 171
survival in, 20 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 83
victims of, 41, 42–43, 44, 54 Kaplan, Chaim, 57
Hölscher, Lucian, 170 Karski, Jan, 56
Hooligan’s Return, The (Manea), 162 Katz, Steven, 58
Hoover, Calvin, 83 Kaunas, 15
Howard, John, 153, 154 Kenya, 166, 181
Howkins, Alun, 116, 120 Kershaw, Ian, 44, 76
humanism, 49, 60–61 Kettenacker, Lothar, 78
Hungary, 20, 124 Kettler, David, 67, 79
Hunt, Lynn, 44 Khmer Rouge, 146, 151
Hutchinson, Walter, 91, 92, 93 Kibbo Kift Kindred, 98
Hutton, Patrick, 167 Kiernan, Ben, 146
Hutu Power, 58, 59, 147 King, Richard H., 137, 181
Huxley, Aldous, 35 Kinship in Husbandry, 107–9, 118, 119,
Huyssen, Andreas, 158, 159 120
Hyde, Arnold, 85–86, 89 Kissinger, Henry, 137
Klein, Kerwin Lee, 160, 161, 163, 164,
India, 88, 149 165, 167, 170, 171
Indochina, 129, 181 Klossowski, Pierre, 123, 126
Institute of Jewish Affairs (New York), 34 Kojève, Alexandre, 126
Institute of National Memory (Poland), Kolnai, Aurel, 10, 67, 68, 72–75, 77, 78,
166 79
International Criminal Court, 150 Koselleck, Reinhart, 170
International Criminal Tribunal for Kosovo, 148
Rwanda, 58 Kosovo Polje, Battle of (1389), 147
Iron Guard, 133 Krzeminski, Adam, 172
Islam, 129, 138 Kugelmass, Jack, 159
Israel, 150, 155 Kühne, Thomas, 45–46, 47
Italy, 20, 23, 68, 124, 176–77 Kulaks, 146
Jabès, Edmond, 45 La Cagoule, 120

Jäckel, Eberhard, 58 LaCapra, Dominick, 38, 160, 162, 164
Jacobs, Steven, 27 Lang, Berel, 38
246 Index
Langer, Lawrence, 38, 170 Manea, Norman, 162–63

Lanzmann, Claude, 56 Mann, Michael, 44
Lapland, 110 Margalit, Avishai, 159, 167
Laqueur, Walter, 98 Mariupol, 15
Laski, Harold, 72 Marx, Karl, 101, 138
Lassiera, Raymond, 111 Marxism, 11, 18, 68, 70, 77, 130, 136
Latvia, 23 Massingham, H. J., 109, 119
Laub, Dori, 170 Mau Mau Emergency, 181
Law and Justice Party (Poland), 172 Maurras, Charles, 114, 125
Law of Historical Memory (Spain, Mazzini, Giuseppe, 11
2007), 178 Meaning of Hitler, The (Haffner), 75
Lawrence, D. H., 98 Mégret, Bruno, 136
League of Nations, 182 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 26, 81–95
Lebow, Richard Ned, 175 memory, 2, 3, 8–9, 23–24, 38, 40, 41,
Le Corbusier, 110 143–56, 157–71, 172
Lefort, Claude, 128 as process, 168
Left Book Club, 69, 72, 73, 74, collective, 143–44, 149, 152, 154–55,
75, 92 156, 160, 163, 164–65, 166–67,
Leftwich, Joseph, 94 173
Lehmann-Russbüldt, Otto, 69 ‘multidirectional’, 168, 183
Leiris, Michel, 126 national, 155–56
Lemkin, Raphael, 21, 25–36 ‘wars’, 155, 172–83
Leningrad, Siege of, 179 Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur), 144,
Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 123, 136, 138 169
Levene, Mark, 149 Memory of Catastrophe, The (Gray and
Levi, Primo, 56, 58 Oliver), 161
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 126 Milošević, Slobodan, 147, 148
Libra, Pierre, 126 Minear, Richard, 166
Lieux de mémoire, Les (Nora), 158 Moeller van den Bruck, Artur, 82, 83
Ligue Anti-Sémitique, 113 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), 180
Ligue des Patriotes, 114 Mommsen, Hans, 30
Linenthal, Edward, 159 Monnerot, Jules, 123–39
Linnaeus, Carolus, 63 Monnet, Jean, 134
Lithuania, 20, 21 Moore-Colyer, Richard, 96, 105, 106,
Łódź Ghetto, 56 114, 118
Lorimer, David, 82, 83 Morès, Marquis de, 113
Lorimer, Emily, 10, 81–95 Morgenthau, Henry, 50
Lublin, 17 Moscow, 179
Ludovici, Anthony Mario, 95, 106, 114, Moses, A. Dirk, 22, 148–49
118 Mosley, Oswald, 100, 105, 106, 120
Lymington, Viscount, see Portsmouth, Mosse, George L., 117
Earl of Mother Earth, 120
Lyotard, Jean-François, 48 Munich Agreement (1938), 6
Münzenberg, Willi, 69
Macmurray, John, 105 Murambi, 151
Maier, Charles S., 40, 158 Murphy, James, 90–91, 92, 93
Majdanek, 17 Muselmann, 57
Mammone, Andrea, 125 Musikheim (Frankfurt an der Oder), 98,
Man and the Sacred (Caillois), 131, 132 102
Manchester Guardian, 72, 85 Mussolini, Benito, 69
Index 247
My Lai massacre, 144, 165 Observer (London), 95

Myth of the Twentieth Century Of Spirit (Derrida), 60, 61
(Rosenberg), 86 O’Hagan, Andrew, 163
Oliver, Kendrick, 159, 161, 165
National Book Association, 92 Open, The (Agamben), 63
National Farmers Union (NFU), Operation Reinhard, 17
120, 122 Ophüls, Marcel, 175
NATO, 133 Order Police, 17, 45
Nazism, 2, 4, 5, 7, 38, 39, 40, 43, Origins of Totalitarianism, The (Arendt),
46, 49, 60–61, 71, 72, 73, 74, 51, 52, 137
80, 84, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, Orwell, George, 69, 72
103, 109, 115, 116, 122,
127, 130, 133, 159, 172, Palestinians, 155
173, 177 Paris, 144
and big business, 18, 68 Parti Populaire Français (PPF), 116, 120
and colonialism, 16, 149 Paul, Leslie, 99
and countryside, 122 Pavelić, Ante, 148
and ecology, 110 Paxton, Robert, 111, 122
and German youth movements, Perec, Georges, 77
98–104 Petropoulos, Jonathan, 18, 77
and war, 74, 77 Pionniers Rouges, 111
as ‘gangsterism’, 18, 77 Plumyène, Jean, 111
as Prussian militarism, 70, 78, 91 Poland, 17, 21, 22, 32, 150
as variety of fascism, 5, 6, 101, 104, Poliakov, Léon, 35, 62
105–6, 132 Pollitt, Harry, 70
collaboration with, 174 Pol Pot, 146
ideology, 16, 33, 35, 44–45, 50, 51–52, Portsmouth, Earl of (Gerald Wallop,
55, 57, 62–63, 73, 76, 77, 81, Viscount Lymington), 92, 99, 103,
83–84, 94, 103, 149 106, 108, 115, 118, 119, 120, 122
rejection of reason, 73 Portugal, 23
resistance to, 175 postmodernism, 38, 41, 126, 160, 163
Netherlands, 18, 20, 122, 177 Potts, Alex, 114
‘Hunger Winter’, 177 Poujadism, 121
Neumann, Franz, 33, 69, 81 POWs, 17, 32
New English Weekly (London), 88 Prague, 71, 95
New German Empire, The (Borkenau), Princip, Gavrilo, 147
70–71 Prizel, Ilya, 180
New Party, 105 Probing the Limits of Representation
New Pioneer, 106, 118 (Friedländer), 48
New Zealand, 88 Prowe, Diethelm, 124, 125, 134
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 143, 153, 160 Puckett, Richard, 169
Nora, Pierre, 144, 158, 159, 164, 167 Putin, Vladimir, 23, 179
North America, 22
Northern Transylvania, 20 Queensland, 50
Norway, 31, 75
Nouvelle Droite, 125, 138 race, 4, 18, 40, 45, 61, 103, 112, 147, 149
NSDAP, 38 Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines
Nuremberg rallies, 73 (RTLMC), 147
Nuremberg Trials, 28, 30, 150 Ramsey, Archibald, 106
Nussbaum, Martha, 49 Rassinier, Paul, 127
248 Index
Rauschning, Hermann, 49, 72, 75, 78 Snyder, Timothy, 17, 18

Reflections of Nazism (Friedländer), 47, 48 Sobibór, 17
Reichenau, Walter von, 30 Social Credit, 98
Reitlinger, Gerald, 35 Social Darwinism, 2, 116, 146
Renan, Ernest, 143 Sociologie de la revolution (Monnerot),
Renton, Dave, 67 124, 131, 135, 137
Rév, István, 178 Sociology of Communism (Monnerot),
Rexism, 122 124, 128–30, 131, 136, 137
Richardson, Michael, 132 Soil Association, 106, 115, 120
Ricoeur, Paul, 143, 144, 145, 157, 158, Solidarité Française, 120
159, 162, 164, 167, 168–71 Sorabji, Cornelia, 152
Riga, 178 Soral, Alain, 127
Right Book Club, 92 Sorel, Georges, 130
Risiera di San Sabba, 177 Sorrow and the Pity, The (Ophüls), 175
Röder, Werner, 68 Soucy, Robert, 134
Romania, 11, 15, 20–21, 32, 155, 162, South Africa, 88, 155, 180
180 Soviet Union, see USSR
Romanies, 16, 31–32, 35, 148, 166 Spain, 68, 151, 166, 178, 183
Rosenberg, Alfred, 33, 86, 88, 95 Spanish Civil War, 70, 153, 166
Rothberg, Michael, 167, 168, 183 Spanish Cockpit, The (Borkenau), 70
Rougement, Denis de, 126 Speer, Albert, 111
RSHA, 17, 45 SS, 17, 20, 32, 60, 124
Rubenstein, Joshua, 15 Stachura, Peter, 98
Rudd, Kevin, 153, 155 Stalin, Joseph, 44, 82, 146, 159, 172, 180
Runia, Eelco, 47 Stapledon, George, 99, 119
Russia, 23, 32, 173, 179, 183 Steed, Henry Wickham, 89
Rwanda genocide, 44, 51, 57–60, Steinlauf, Michael, 159
146–47, 152, 182 Sternhell, Zeev, 111, 115, 116, 121
memory of, 145, 151 Stier, Oren Baruch, 159
Rwandan Patriotic Front, 58, 147 Stockholm Forum (2000), 23, 150, 180
Story of a Secret State (Karski), 56
Salvemini, Gaetano, 69 Stowe, Leland, 89
Samson, Naomi, 56–57 Stowers, Stanley, 127
Schirach, Baldur von, 98 Strachey, John, 70
Schwarcz, Vera, 159, 160 Strackosch, Henry, 88
Seger, Gerhart, 69 Straus, Scott, 22
Seibel, Wolfgang, 19 Street, A. G., 112
Seldes, George, 69 Strong, Roy, 161
Serbia, 20, 147–48 Sturzo, Luigi, 69
Serge, Victor, 92 Sunday Times, 72
Shakespeare, William, 49, 50 Suvorov, Viktor, 179
Shields, James, 125 Syndicalism, 10
Shoah (Lanzmann), 56 Szálasi, Ferenc, 175
Shub, Boris, 34 Szwajger, Adina Blady, 57
Sierakowiak, Dawid, 56
Sihanouk, Norodom, 146 Tallinn, 23, 178, 179
Simard, Marc, 111 Talmon, Jacob, 49
slavery, 168, 183 Tasmania, 33
Slovakia, 21 Tenenbaum Joseph, 35
Smith, William Robertson, 131 testimony, 40, 182
Index 249
Thoughts on Nazi Genocide (Lemkin), 28, VE Day, 159

29, 30, 31, 32 Vetlesen, Arne Johan, 45
Time and Tide (London), 87, 89, 90, 93 Vienna, 72, 85
Times (London), 67, 88, 100 Vietnam War, 165
Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 72 Vilnius, 178
Tismaneanu, Vladimir, 175 Voegelin, Eric, 127, 130, 137
Tiso, Jozef, 21, 175 Volhynia, 15, 18
Todorov, Tzvetan, 158, 159 Volksdeutsche, 15
Todos los nombres (Spain), 151 Volksgemeinschaft, 40, 46
Toller, Ernst, 69 Volkswagen, 23
Totalitarian Enemy, The (Borkenau), 69, Volontés, 135
70
Trafalgar, Battle of, 159 Waller, James, 44
Transnistria, 20, 162 Wandervogel, 99
Traverso, Enzo, 67, 79 Wannsee Conference, 28, 53
Treblinka, 54–55 War Against the West, The (Kolnai), 72, 74
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 85 Warsaw Ghetto, 56, 57
Trieste, 177 Warthegau, 17
Tudjman, Franjo, 148 Washington, DC, 144
Tuol Sleng, 151 Weber, Max, 1, 97
Tyldesley, Mike, 96, 98 Wehrmacht, 21, 30, 31, 45–46, 47, 77
Wehrmacht Exhibition, 30
Ukraine, 15, 17, 21, 22, 32, 110 Weinreich, Max, 34
Greek Catholic Church in, 19 Welzer, Harald, 44
UNESCO, 61 What Hitler Wants (Lorimer), 82, 83, 86,
Unfinished Victory (Bryant), 92–93 87, 88, 91, 94
Union Movement, 120 What the German Needs (Lorimer), 82, 91
United Kingdom, 6 White, Arnold, 114
United Nations, 59, 182 White, Hayden, 41
United Nations Convention on the Whitehouse, Muriel, 87–88
Prevention and Punishment of Wiernik, Jankiel, 54–55
Genocide (1948), 25, 26, 33, 145, Wiesel, Elie, 57
150, 153, 181 Wildt, Michael, 45, 46, 47
United States Holocaust Memorial Williamson, Henry, 120
Museum, 20 Wilson, Ronald, 153
United States of America, 6, 53, 56, 68, Wilson, Stephen, 113
75, 88, 93, 97, 133, 155, 160, 162, Windschuttle, Keith, 154
166 Winock, Michel, 115, 116
Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘Winter Help’, 18
(1948), 181 Wolfreys, Jim, 124
Unknown Black Book, 15 Wolin, Richard, 135
Upper Silesia, 16 Wood, Nancy, 159
USSR, 20, 21, 22, 23, 51, 57, 68, 74, 75, Woodcraft Folk, 99
130, 146, 180 Work of Memory, The (Confino and
Ustashe, 148, 174 Fritzsche), 168
World War I, 5, 10, 34, 95, 97, 112, 135
Valley of the Fallen, 178 World War II, 6, 23, 35, 40, 43, 75, 81,
Valois, Georges, 112, 115–16, 120, 122 95, 96, 97, 104, 114, 132, 139, 148,
Van Pelt, Robert Jan, 32 166, 172, 173, 174, 179, 181, 183
Vansittart, Robert, 91 World Without End (Gardiner), 100
250 Index
Wright, Patrick, 96 Yizker-Bikher, 34, 151

Wulf, Joseph, 34 Young, James E., 151, 159
WVHA, 17 Yugoslavia, 148, 174, 176, 182
World War II in, 148, 176
Yaskiel, David, 69
Years of Persecution (Friedländer), 37, 39, Zaire, see Democratic Republic of Congo
41, 47 Zelizer, Barbie, 159, 165, 166, 168
Years of Extermination (Friedländer), 37, Zerubavel, Eviatar, 159, 164
40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 182 Zimmerer, Jürgen, 22
Yeats-Brown, Francis, 92 Zyklon B, 17

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The Palgrave Macmillan

The Holocaust, Fascism and

Introduction: History and Its Discontents 1

Part I Interpreting the Holocaust

Part II Fascism and Anti-Fascism

Part III Politics and Cultures of Memory

Chapter 1: ‘Beyond the “Auschwitz Syndrome” ’, Patterns of Prejudice, 44, 5

For permission to reprint these previously published articles, I am very grate-

the text a melancholy air, allowing it to be perceived as a major work of

to ﬁnd meaningful ways into twentieth-century history through the his-

apparently credible.24 In certain circumstances, notably the Romania of the

‘Auschwitz syndrome’, which has kept us fascinated by the apparent para-

Utilitarian motivation of institutional actors was, presumably, the main

Investigations into motivation do not seek to exculpate but to provide

murdered in Eastern Europe, we know far more about the Holocaust in

on the one hand, memory of the Holocaust is placed at the service of an

Although in some ways, their ideas were remarkably similar, Arendt’s

based on substantial historical scholarship, since only with reference to mass

Genocide is effected through a synchronized attack on different aspects of

Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a

Indeed, although in the 1930s Lemkin used the term ‘extermination’

Each contributes to our understanding of Lemkin’s position and reveals the

documents, were they arranged in order to facilitate the work of histori-

as encapsulated in the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East). Where Lemkin

the destruction of the Poles or Ukrainians as such, as opposed to reduc-

In revisiting the famous ‘controversy’ with Broszat on the question of

inhered in the process of writing history, and historicisation that aspired

at a loss to produce an overall history of the extermination of the Jews

writing the history of everyday life under Nazism as it transpired in the

over oft-heard mystical demands to maintain the Holocaust as an event ‘out-

and accounts lacks almost any synthetic, analytic or conceptual frame-

Goldberg’s argument is that in the ‘era of the witness’ in which we now

He is quite right, of course, to note that some aspect of the Holocaust

frightening prospect and would go beyond merely historicising the Holo-

community (Volksgemeinschaft). In his work on Kameradschaft (comrade-

Or, as he writes elsewhere, ‘The Nazi regime communalised violence [verge-

According to the unreliable Hermann Rauschning, Hitler once proclaimed

It may or may not be the case, as an eminent literary critic wants us to

At the heart of Nazism lay a radical philosophical anthropological chal-

Both [totalitarian systems] mean to make human beings in their inﬁnite

Totalitarian lawfulness, executing the laws of Nature or History, does not

The second may be summarised as follows:

and diaries written by the participants testify. Peer pressure to participate

In such a system, the concentration camps are perhaps not economically

It is necessary to back up these claims. I will do so in two ways: ﬁrst, by

Wiernik’s description is of the variety that often gets dismissed in Holocaust

as it is possible to be in the realm of human affairs’.52 Furthermore, whilst

Still, I do remember the ﬁrst person who looked at me at the moment of

It is inherent in man’s nature to recognise himself in others and to

The democracies . . . lead their people not to defeat but to collapse

much attention other than to be praised occasionally for having supposedly

George Orwell, reviewing Franz Borkenau’s The Totalitarian Enemy (1940),

conspicuously failed to do – basically, of course, because they dared not.’15

We . . . are hugging the complacent belief that the essence of democracy is

Or, as he put it in his talk to the LBC summer school in 1939:

Berlin has incomparably more hope of engineering an ideological decep-

the Soviet Union upon the mercy of triumphant Central European

Kolnai’s writings – which are inseparable from anti-fascism activity, as his