Totalitarianism and Political Religions Volume III
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Totalitarianism and Political Religions Volume III

Hans Maier, Jodi Bruhn, Hans Maier

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eBook - ePub

Totalitarianism and Political Religions Volume III

Hans Maier, Jodi Bruhn, Hans Maier

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Available for the first time in English language translation, the third volume of Totalitarianism and Political Religions completes the set. It provides a comprehensive overview of key theories and theorists of totalitarianism and of political religions, from Hannah Arendt and Raymond Aron to Leo Strauss and Simone Weill. Edited by the eminent Professor Hans Maier, it represents a major study, examining how new models for understanding political history arose from the experience of modern despotic regimes.

Where volumes one and two were concerned with questioning the common elements between twentieth century despotic regimes - Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Maoism – this volume draws a general balance. It brings together the findings of research undertaken during the decade 1992-2002 with the cooperation of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists for the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Munich.

Following the demise of Italian Fascism (1943-45), German National Socialism (1945) and Soviet Communism (1989-91), a comparative approach to the three regimes is possible. A broad field of interpretation of the entire phenomenon of totalitarian and political religions opens up. This comprehensive study examines a vast topic which affects the political and historical landscape over the whole of the last century. Moreover, dictatorships and their motivations are still present in current affairs, today in the twenty-first century. The three volumes of Totalitarianism and Political Religions are a vital resource for scholars of fascism, Nazism, communism, totalitarianism, comparative politics and political theory.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2008
ISBN
9781134063178

Part I
Introduction

1 On the interpretation of totalitarian rule 1919–89

Hans Maier


From the beginning, the emergence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century has left behind a broad trail of interpretations and analyses by contemporaries of those regimes. This begins with the perception of Communism, Fascism and National Socialism recorded in reports of travellers, journalists, writers and politicians following 1917, 1922 and 1933. It continues in the efforts to discover appropriate descriptions for the new phenomena. And it leads, finally, to larger interpretive patterns. Of these, the concepts of totalitarianism and political religions have become the best known ones.1
At present, there is no consensus in the research concerning these interpretive patterns. Much is still disputed and the discussion is still in progress.2 Contemporary investigations of the despotisms of the twentieth century, however, bear features that differ markedly from the investigations that occurred at the beginning. Fascist Italy, in the meantime, has probably departed from the focus of totalitarianism research definitively. Today, the research concentrates increasingly — indeed, almost exclusively — on the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany. With regard to Germany and Russia, research on the Holocaust and the Gulag has trained our gaze on the phenomenon of mass destruction: on processes, therefore, that (not coincidentally) mark the extreme culmination of totalitarian politics. Such processes can hardly be adequately explained in terms of the course of pragmatic events! For its part, the search for motives for the crimes of the Holocaust and Gulag has revived questions as to the ideological impetuses, the historical-philosophical justifications, the pseudo-religious legitimation and absolution of those who committed the deeds. In sum: following a period of intensive (and meritorious!) reconstruction of the facts accompanied by a palpable restraint concerning comprehensive interpretations, a conspicuous interest in gaining an encompassing view stirs again today. We seek to comprehend something we have long since known — something that threatens to remain incomprehensible, even unbelievable, without interpretive help. This renewed interest provides new opportunities for the old interpretive models. It is no coincidence that, after 1989/90, both the theory of totalitarianism and the idea of ‘political religions’ have returned to the arena.
The following reflections on the interpretive history of the totalitarian regimes arise from three international symposia on this topic that were held in the years 1994, 1996 and 1999.3 The focus is on three questions. First: what new thing attracted the attention of observers during the beginnings of Communism, Fascism and National Socialism (first section)? Second: how did the corresponding perceptions and terminologies develop (second section)? And third: what has been the yield of the concepts of totalitarianism and political religions in particular (third section)?

Communism, Fascism, National Socialism: the new element

Communism and Fascism were children of war. They developed in a political scene that was dominated by war, civil war, constant battles and paramilitary actions. The context is the most tangible with Russian Communism, which would hardly be conceivable without the military collapse in the West, the conclusion of the peace, the gathering of a ‘Red Army’ and the victory in the civil war.4 Mussolini’s seizure of power also occurred in an atmosphere charged with a civil-war like situation, however, and was consciously stylised as a ‘March on Rome’ in the military sense. Nor did Hitler, appearing a little later, lack his squadri5 — the ‘brown battalions’ whose terrorist energies unfurled in the streets and squares.6
The power that World War I7 unleashed gained a prolonged, dark permanence with the modern despotic regimes. These often seemed to be demonstrations of a continually expanding ‘total mobilisation’.8 The military infiltrated the civil structures and transformed them. A militaristic friend-enemy mentality now presided in the state interior too. With every conflict driven to the point of an existential ‘either-or’, power no longer rested on the foundation of law, but on the end of the bayonet. And because all things involving war entail a hint of the arbitrary, an element of the toss of the dice comes into politics: everything might be won or lost with a coup; one might fall into oblivion or be carried up to the heights of power and greatness. The magnification, intensification and vitalisation of political power distinguish the modern despotisms from the nineteenth-century constitutional state, with its distribution of powers. To an equal extent, the uniformed dictator and his military retinue are distinct from the civil statesman and civil service of a democracy. The warlike all-or-nothing transports politics from an activity of advising, consideration and decision into one of war — victory and defeat are involved. In the extreme case, there are only the dead and the survivors in the end.
The exaltation of politics, its elevation above the state of normality, becomes clear in the statements of contemporaries of this phenomenon. For Nikolai Nikolayevitch Suchanov, for example, the Petersburg Soviet is ‘like the Roman senate, which the ancient Carthagians once held to be a council of the gods. Such a mass 
 could in fact tempt one to attempt to illuminate old Europe with the light of the Socialist Revolution’.9 Although Fedor
Stepun had portrayed the ‘insane-like’ quality of the Russian situation like hardly any other, he still calls the October Revolution an ‘exceedingly significant Russian topic’, estimating that ‘some primordial, typical hour begins to strike for Russia, so that perhaps it steps into the meaning of its madness’.10 The popular poet, Demyan Bedny, sees the Soviet person looming up in the streets of the large city like a giant Leviathan composed of many individuals:
Feet of millions: one body. The plaster cracks.
Masses of millions: one heart, one will, one step!
In time, in time!
They are marching forward. They are marching forward.
March march 
 11
Little wonder that the Bolshevists were regarded beyond the Russian borders — and above all, in Germany — as ascetic soldiers of the Revolution, Dostoyevskian heroes, ‘pointers of new paths’, ‘reformers of universal humanity’. In his diary, Harry Graf Kessler reports of a visit to Walter Rathenau in February of 1919:
for Bolshevism, he let a strong affection shine through. It is a magnificent system, he says, and one to which the future will likely belong. In one hundred years, the world will be Bolshevistic. Contemporary Bolshevism resembles a wonderful play at the theatre 
 By night he is a Bolshevist, he says; but by day, when he sees our workers and administrators, he is not — or not yet (he repeated the ‘not yet’ several times).12
Similar statements can be found in the work of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, of KĂ€the Kollwitz and Alfred Kerr. This is to say nothing of such emphatic ‘fellow travellers’ as Herbert G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Lion Feuchtwanger, AndrĂ© Gide and others, whose long procession towards Moscow had already set itself in motion in 1920, in the midst of the civil war.13
The receptions of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ and Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’ are more sober. Although messianic undertones are entirely present in both Italy and Germany, they are lacking among foreign observers. Nevertheless: the features of ‘mobilisation’, of the marching and parading force that has broken loose from its administrative and parliamentary enclosures, were clearly perceived. Predominantly Anglo-Saxon observers noted the emergence of a naked power that is no longer domesticated by a constitutional and party state. Because it is omnipresent, flooding everything with images, symbols, banners, speeches and fanfares, it is a power that can no longer be evaded. On 6 January 1932 in Rome, Harold Nicolson entered the following into his diary:
spent the day for the most part reading Fascist pamphlets. They have, in any case, transformed the entire country into an army. One is pressed into the Fascist mould from the cradle to the grave; no one can escape it. On paper, this all seems very virtuous and impressive. But I ask myself how the life of the individual looks. This I will not be able to say before I have lived in Italy for a certain period of time. To the extent that it destroys individuality, in any case, a socialist experiment is involved. It also destroys freedom. If someone first prescribes for you how you should think, then he immediately also prescribes how you should conduct yourself. With such a system, I confess, a measure of energy and effectiveness can be attained such as we, on our island, do not attain. And yet, and yet 
 The whole thing is a pyramid set on its head.14
The second testimony arises from William L. Shirer’s Nightmare Years 1930–1940 and describes the Nuremberg Party Convention of September 1934.
[F]ifty thousand young men in dark green uniforms, the first rows with naked torsos, stood before their FĂŒhrer with flashing spades that mirrored the morning sun. Standing at attention on the Zeppelinwiese, they listened as he praised their service to the Fatherland. When they then began to march forward — in a perfect goose step; presumably, even the old Prussian field sergeants could not have done it better — the huge multitude went wild with enthusiasm. I found the goose step laughable, but it appeared to please the spectators so much that they sprang up spontaneously and cheered. In marching past, the young men paid homage to their FĂŒhrer in a powerfully reverberating speaking chorus, one that concluded with another thundering ‘Heil Hitler!’ I soon learned that Hitler — besides the Work Service — had built up an even more comprehensive youth organisation, the Hitler Youth. Here, children were to be sworn to the FĂŒhrer beginning in the seventh year of life.15
The new movements sought to form the entire human life. This was to influence the conduct of each individual. Not that such reactions were new: ‘Vulgar obedience toward those who have somehow come into power soon occurs’, as Jacob Burckhardt says.16 Here, though, obedience is born not only from habit or a need for peace. Nor is it born solely of fear: whoever marches with the rest has the liberating feeling of standing in harmony with the era and realising a historical new beginning. Thus does mobilisation of the masses arise in response to the commanding presence of the leadership: the will to political power is transposed upon the many. These, in turn, march ‘with the new era’.17

Levels of understanding

The political personnel in the countries that had been gripped by revolution seemed at first like a troupe of lost fighters. Many actions appeared to have been improvised actions of war, a state of emergency directed inwards rather than against external enemies. Even if this was true, the new regimes — in Russia, as in Italy and Germany — nonetheless proved themselves to be unexpectedly lasting ones. One had to label them, then. The struggle to find appropriate labels accompanied the history of Russian Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism from the beginning.
The attempt to conceptualise the Bolshevik rule in Russia first triggered a dispute among European socialists. The concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ — one going back to Marx and Engels18 and taken up again by Lenin19 — divided them into two camps. In 1918, Karl Kautsky already entered the battlefield by speaking out against Lenin’s dictatorship.20 Characterising it as ‘Asian’ or ‘Tartaric’ in 1920, he applied the epithet that Marx and Engels had coined to describe th...

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