FIRE AND BLOOD

FIRE AND BLOOD

The European Civil War 1914–1945

Enzo Traverso

Translated by David Fernbach

This English-language edition first published by Verso 2016

Translation © David Fernbach 2016

Originally published as A feu et à sang: De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945

© Editions Stock 2007

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-133-0 (HB)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-134-7 (US)

eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-135-4 (UK)

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Typeset in Garamond Pro by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

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To my mother, who was twenty at the time of Liberation

Acknowledgements

My thanks first of all to François Guedj and Valeria Galimi, editors of the collective work on Le XXe Siècle des guerres (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2004), which contained my first discussion on the idea of European civil war and gave rise to a study day at the University of Toulouse in March 2005. Several sections of this book were presented and discussed over the next three years at lectures, colloquia, seminars, and sometimes courses that I gave as guest professor at universities in the United States and Latin America, as well as in Europe. I would like to thank the colleagues and friends who offered me these opportunities for debate, as well as the researchers and students who took part in them, starting with those from the masters programme in political science at my own university, Amiens. Though unable to mention everyone, I would particularly like to remember Angelo Ventrone and Luca Baldissara from the universities of Macerata and Pisa in Italy; Nicolás Sánchez Durá and Ismael Saz from the University of Valencia, as well as Francisco Cobo Remero of the UNIA of Baeza, in Spain; Gilbert Achcar, when he was attached to the Centre Marc-Bloch, and Elfi Müller, organizer of the Jour Fixe lectures, in Berlin; Federico Finchelstein, Tim Campbell and Dominick LaCapra of Cornell University at Ithaca, NY; Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University; Patricia Flier and José Sazbon of the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, in Argentina; and Esther Cohen of UNAM, in Mexico City. I assure them all of my gratitude and friendship. Besides seminars and conferences, this book owes much to the reflections on comparative violence in the contemporary world that I have been conducting for several years now together with Marina Cattaruzza, Dan Diner, Marcello Flores and Simon Levis Sullam. Finally, I would like to thank Nicole Lapierre, attentive reader and critic of my manuscript, for having accepted it for her fine series with Éditions Stock.

Paris, October 2006

The English edition of this book is released almost nine years after the original French, and follows the German, Greek, Italian and Spanish translations. It only includes a few marginal corrections and additions, mostly bibliographical updates. I would like to thank David Fernbach for his excellent translation and Sebastian Budgen for enabling this book to join the Verso catalogue.

Paris/Ithaca, NY, January 2015

Introduction

Certain images of the twentieth century are inscribed in our memory as visual references, icons of the past that sum up its meaning and retain its taste. Everyone knows Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles, the figure of astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon, and the artificial happiness of Marilyn Monroe’s smiles. When we think of the decades stretching from the First World War to the Second, however, everything darkens. We see the trenches, the rail tracks leading into the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau under the snow of the Polish winter, the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. The age of extremes has produced its imaginary of horror, with a whole world of suffering behind it, but also social experiences, shared cultures, ideas and struggles that the present book aims to explore by way of the concept of a ‘European civil war’. This term has been used by several commentators and interpreters, from the interwar years on, even if the only writer to have developed it systematically – and in a highly debatable manner – is Ernst Nolte. If I adopt it here, it is to try and grasp the meaning of an age of wars and revolutions in which the symbiosis between culture, politics and violence has deeply fashioned the mentalities, ideas, representations and practices of its actors. Methodologically, this work draws on various disciplines – political theory, social history and cultural history – borrowing from them both interrogations and analytical tools. From political theory, it adopts the arguments for answering a crucial question: What is a civil war? It recalls the horrors of this experience, but also tries to sketch its features and grasp its logic, to see whether or not this concept can help us understand the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. From social history, it endorses some categories that allow the interpretation of total war as violence against civilians, and civil war as a fury that unchains emotions and passions in a context of anomie. In the perspective of cultural history, it articulates the analysis of ideologies with the investigation of collective imagination engendered by such an eruption of violence. However, this interdisciplinary approach has clear limits. Interpreting the relationship between violence, politics and culture in interwar Europe does not mean writing a general history of the old continent. This book does not tackle several fundamental dimensions of the historical process, which necessarily remain implicit, as the outlines of a wide landscape. It is obvious that the global crisis of capitalism played a crucial role in provoking the European collapse in the 1930s, setting many countries on the road to fascism, radicalizing social and political conflicts as well as reshaping worries, expectations and collective identities. But in spite of its importance, this dimension is beyond the scope of the present work.

This book responds to the need to revisit or go beyond certain historical controversies of recent decades around the interpretation of fascism, Communism and the Resistance in order to situate them in a broader perspective, beyond the division into different contexts. It aims also to re-establish a historical perspective against the anachronism so widespread today that projects onto the Europe of the interwar years the categories of our liberal democracy as if these were timeless norms and values. This tendency blithely reduces an age of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions to the horrors of totalitarianism. The temptation is all the greater, as civil war is precisely a moment in which these norms turn out to be invalid. It has its own logic and its own ‘laws’, which fatally imposed themselves on all the combatants, including those who took up arms in order to struggle against fascism, to defend or restore democracy. In other words, it is a false perspective to try to analyse with the spectacles of Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls an age that produced Ernst Jünger and Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt and Leon Trotsky. If we see democracy not simply as a set of norms but also as a historical product, we can grasp the genetic link that connects it to an age of civil war.

The historian Annette Wieviorka defined our time as the ‘age of the witness’,¹ emphasizing the attention paid today to the accounts of past actors, and especially those of one particular category: the victims, who in today’s vocabulary have become synonymous with witnesses. This shift in gaze, directed previously at heroes and now at victims, has gone together with a new historical consciousness according to which the twentieth century was the age of violence. In terms of historiography, this turn coincided with a salutary questioning of former positivist paradigms for which written archives were privileged if not exclusive sources, and the emergence of new approaches attentive to oral sources, to the lives of the ‘subaltern’ and their subjectivity. Today it is the previously ignored victims who attract the interest of researchers. This change has been fruitful, expanding the horizon of investigation, but the interaction between history and memory raises broad questions for historians of the contemporary world. These do not bear only on the status and subjectivity of witnesses. If, as Raul Hilberg has shown, mass violence is the result of a triangle – of executioners, victims and ‘bystanders’,² with a grey zone in the middle whose attitude is often decisive for the outcome of a conflict – the exclusive focus on the memory of victims risks mutilating the reconstruction and reading of an event. Two distinct dangers need to be avoided: on the one hand, ‘empathy’ with the executioners, difficult but necessary in order to penetrate their motivations and mental universe, may end up as apologia (the German Historikerstreit of the 1980s is well worth reflecting upon from this point of view);³ on the other hand, one-sided empathy with the victims may abolish the critical distance necessary to the historian, transforming him or her into an advocate of memory who puts compassion in place of the task of analysing and understanding.

The present book does not ignore victims: one chapter is devoted to the suffering of civilians during the world wars. But it focuses above all on the authors of violence, those who inflict it and those who, when they experience it, accept it as the foreseeable consequence of their choices. The object, in other words, is to rebalance the historical perspective by restoring visibility to the actors in wars and revolutions, the vanquished as well as the victors. Obscured by a public memory of the twentieth century that frames it as an age of totalitarianism and genocides, a memory whose paradigm in many respects is the ‘civil religion’ of the Holocaust,⁴ they have experienced an eclipse that has also removed certain keys to the intelligibility of the previous century. This assertion links up with an important methodological remark made by Reinhart Koselleck, who wrote that ‘historical gains in knowledge stem in the long run from the vanquished’.⁵ The vanquished in the European civil war are on all sides: their names are Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Manuel Azaña, Leon Trotsky, Walter Benjamin – but also Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt. That is why their ideas occupy a major place in this book, as the object of critical reflection and analysis beyond the sympathies or antipathies that attract me to some and estrange me from others.

In 1948, Cesare Pavese concluded The House on the Hill, his novel on the Italian Resistance, with the following words: ‘“And what about those who have fallen? What do we do about them? Why are they dead?” I would not know what reply to make. Not at present anyway. Nor does it seem to me that anyone else knows either. Perhaps only the dead know and only for them is the war over for good.’⁶ This bitter conclusion could be read as reflecting Pavese’s deep unease during the war years, that of a convinced antifascist who never managed to overcome his moral reticence towards taking up weapons, and preferred to isolate himself in the Piedmont countryside while the struggle against the German occupation and the Salò regime was raging around him. For certain critics, who have spoken of the ‘house-on-the-hill syndrome’, these words are emblematic of a more general tendency. Pavese gave voice in his novel to the ‘grey zone’, the indistinct, broad group of all those who, out of fear, refusal of violence, or opportunism, either could not or would not choose their camp in the civil war⁷ – those who withdrew or hid, not to protect themselves from persecution, but to escape a conflict that tore society apart and divided their community. Some people did not know which side to join; others, despite recognizing the rightness of the antifascists’ action, dared not follow them, still less engage in armed struggle. They felt rather cowardly and guilty for their passivity, but this sentiment was overshadowed by the horrible spectacle of violence and mass death, in the face of which no value or ideology seemed to find justification.

Literature is often premonitory. Pavese’s novel formulates conceptions and conveys a view of the war, the Resistance and antifascism that reflects more the sensitivity and opinions of the early twenty-first century than those that dominated European culture at the end of the Second World War. The only memory of the age of fire and blood that was the first half of the twentieth century that it seems necessary today to preserve is the memory of the victims, innocent victims of an explosion of insensate violence. In the face of this memory, that of the combatants has lost any exemplary dimension, unless that of a negative model. Fascists and antifascists are rejected equally as representatives of a bygone age, when Europe had sunk into totalitarianism (whether Communist or Nazi). The only great cause that deserved commitment, so post-totalitarian wisdom suggests, was not political but humanitarian. So Oskar Schindler has dethroned Missak Manouchian.⁸ The example kept in mind today is that of the businessman (a Nazi party member) who rescued his Jewish employees, rather than that of the immigrants in France (Jews and Armenians, Italians and Spaniards) who fought against Nazism in a movement linked to the Communist Party. If the combatants are mentioned, it is to emphasize that they took the wrong path, that their cause no longer has any significance for our contemporaries, and that they should now reconcile themselves with their former enemies. In Italy, accordingly, the antifascists and the ‘Salò boys’ are nowadays commemorated together – each patriots in their own fashion.⁹ And in Spain former republican fighters have to parade together with volunteers in the Blue Division, which set off in 1941 to join the Wehrmacht in combating atheistic Communism.¹⁰

This a posteriori revalorization of the ‘grey zone’ has attracted several champions.¹¹ They celebrate it as a receptacle of moral virtue protected from the fantasies of utopia and its ideologies, recalling the degree to which the imperatives of commitment could lead historical agents astray by making them forget their individual responsibilities towards their fellow citizens. Taking up Max Weber’s classic distinction between the ‘ethic of conviction’ and the ‘ethic of responsibility’,¹² they oppose the latter to the former, which alone is capable of taking into account the consequences of each action, with a view to ruling out those that lead to evil despite the intentions of their authors. According to this view, the résistants stood for a morality of sacrifice that made them either heroes ready to immolate themselves for a cause, or fanatics capable of killing with the alibi of doing good, though sacrificing scapegoats in the name of an ideology. Rather than this execrable morality that produces heroes and murderers, often at the whim of circumstances, they prefer an apolitical morality that does not aim at building an ideal community – the totalitarian utopia of the New Man – but is concerned for real human beings. Its representatives act not from a desire to liberate the human race, but simply with the object of avoiding the creation of innocent victims, or of aiding them. The former pave the way for totalitarianisms; the latter embody the virtues of humanitarianism, more humble but incomparably more noble.

In the reality of a civil war, however, the wide spectrum of behaviour of the actors involved seems often hard to pin down to one or other of Weber’s two ideal types. The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are never completely separated, being instead connected and mingled in various ways. Resistance fighters put much effort into questioning the consequences of their actions – as their discussions attest – while humanitarians, for their part, are far from always lacking political convictions. Can we blame those who carried out the attack on Heydrich in Prague, in May 1942, for the massacre at Lidice that followed? Should the Via Rasella attack of March 1944 in Rome, in which the Resistance killed thirty-two German soldiers, have been avoided? That is the view of those who blame this for the Nazi reprisals, in which 335 civilians were massacred in the Fosse Ardeatine. Such questions were posed throughout Europe. Should one passively submit to the German occupation without resisting? What legitimacy could the institutions born with the Liberation have drawn from this? These dilemmas worried the actors of the time. In April 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising was preceded by an intense debate within the Jewish Resistance, in which the ethic of conviction prevailed over the ethic of responsibility. On the basis of a simple estimate of the balance of forces, the Jewish fighters had no chance of success and their choice could appear purely suicidal. It is not hard to recognize, in retrospect, that the morality of sacrifice displayed by these insurgents was more worthy than the sense of responsibility of the leaders of the Jewish councils, whose collaboration was not always simply a matter of opportunism or conformism (obedience to orders as a habitus, an internalized norm), but often, following a miscalculation of the consequences of their choices, a concern to save human lives. The suicide in 1943 of Adam Czerniakow, president of the Warsaw Jewish Council, is a dramatic illustration of this.¹³ The ideology of the Dutch trade unions and left parties, which organized a general strike against the deportation of Jews from Amsterdam in December 1941, was more worthy than the ethic of responsibility of Arthur Harris, who organized the destruction of German cities by thousands of tons of bombs, or of Harry Truman, who, as a responsible statesman, justified the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by stressing the high number of American casualties that a land invasion of Japan would generate.

If the first half of the twentieth century is now sufficiently remote to enable a distanced view, particularly on the part of those who did not experience it, the following pages refuse its reduction to a human catastrophe or a terrifying example of the evil power of ideologies. Their starting-point is the idea that, if all civil wars are tragedies, some deserve commitment;¹⁴ that we, citizens of a democratic Europe, contracted a debt towards those who fought to build it; that an amnesiac democracy is necessarily a fragile one, especially in a continent that has experienced fascism of various kinds; and that an attitude of apolitical rejection of commitment, condemnation of violence and stigmatizing of ideologies should not be seen as a form of timeless wisdom. The point is not to contest the civic virtues of humanitarianism, but simply to refuse the assertion that our post-totalitarian sensibility should lead us to transform an ethical and political category into a historical one, in the belief that the moral condemnation of violence can replace its analysis and interpretation. The conservative spirit of our time presents humanitarianism as the indispensable corollary of liberalism, immunized against ideologies and arising from the ashes of a century of horrors. Against this tendency, the American historian Arno J. Mayer wrote a great book, The Furies, which deserves to be more widely read and meditated upon. He recalls here, in the wake of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Marx, that violence is a ‘midwife’ of history, sketching its course and timing its movement.¹⁵ This is neither a philosophical or anthropological assertion,¹⁶ nor a pro-Jacobin or pro-Bolshevik argument, but the necessary starting-point of any serious effort to place the twentieth century in history.

It goes without saying that an approach of this kind has very little in common with the historiography of violence that is dominant today. For Patrice Gueniffey, a historian of the French Revolution, terror is ‘a fatality … of every revolution, seen as a modality of change’.¹⁷ Consequently, he concludes, the importance of Jacobinism lies in its archetypical character, as Auguste Cochin had understood when, in his analysis of the Terror of year II, he unconsciously contributed to the ‘autopsy of Bolshevism’.¹⁸ According to Gueniffey, revolutions are characterized by two common features: a ‘limitless terror’ and the ‘serial assassination of victims’, in a scenario ‘that has constantly repeated itself over two centuries’.¹⁹ In conclusion, the Jacobins provided the Bolsheviks with a model for their policy of extermination. Nolte had already explained how the ‘class genocide’ of the Bolsheviks constituted the ‘logical and factual prius’ from which Nazi violence was born in a kind of imitative reaction.²⁰ The circle is closed: the condemnation of totalitarianism expressed in the verdict on revolutionary violence. Yet, after almost twenty years of historiographical regression during which we have had anti-Communist variants of the CPSU’s famous ‘Short Course’, in which socialism has been transformed into a totalitarian nightmare yet ideology has remained solidly in command, it is timely to rediscover the limpid prose of Isaac Deutscher, who, still borne by the wind of history with its torments and contradictions, saw the Russian Revolution both as an emancipatory act of universal import and as the origin of a regime that was despotic and soon became totalitarian.²¹

A rereading of twentieth-century history after the end of the Cold War could not spare the antifascist tradition. The opposition between fascism and antifascism dominated the political culture of the 1930s and ’40s, taking the form of a dramatic choice with which Europe was faced. After the war, antifascism was transformed into a kind of ‘civil religion’ for many democratic regimes that had experienced the Resistance. This now seems a bygone age. In the last decade or so, antifascism has been brought down from its pedestal and subjected to a critical revision. In Italy, the media present it as responsible for the catastrophic trends of the ‘First Republic’. The leading biographer of Mussolini, Renzo De Felice, waged a battle to overcome the ‘antifascist paradigm’ that he saw as the major failure in postwar historiography, and many historians have followed him on this course.²² In Germany, following reunification, antifascism is no longer welcome. It was abandoned along with the arsenal of dogma of the former GDR, but this disappearance carried with it that of a certain public memory – one of exile and struggle against the Hitler regime – which went well beyond a state ideology. For certain observers, antifascism was basically no more than a ‘myth’, expressed in a series of symbols and ritual practices that concealed a totalitarian ideology based on the principles of a single party, a state-controlled economy and a hierarchical social order.²³

In France, the campaign against antifascism was launched some years ago with an article by Annie Kriegel in the journal Commentaire.²⁴ It saw its most mediocre moment with the appearance of a pamphlet depicting Jean Moulin as a Soviet agent,²⁵ and its apogee, on a higher cultural level, with François Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion – a book in which antifascism is presented as a propaganda exercise that enabled Soviet totalitarianism to extend its influence over Western culture. By way of antifascism, Furet wrote, ‘the Communists had recovered the trophy of democracy without renouncing any of their basic convictions. During the Great Terror, Bolshevism reinvented itself as a freedom by default.’²⁶ In other words, the prevalence of antifascism was simply a democratic disguise for a Communism that sought, on the one hand, to expand its political influence and, on the other, to conceal its totalitarian nature. Though this verdict does contain an element of truth, it is one-sided and reductive, taking into account neither the plurality of the antifascist phenomenon, in which various ideological sensibilities and orientations found common ground, nor its scope and embeddedness, both intellectual and social. The complexity of the relationship between antifascism and Stalinism is avoided a priori by an approach that sees the former as simply a creature and byproduct of the latter. One might argue that shedding antifascism entails the risk of obliterating the only decent face that Italy was able to present to the world for the period between 1922 and 1945, Germany from 1933 to 1945, France from 1940 to 1944, and both Spain and Portugal for close to forty years. Yet, pertinent as this response may be, it is not by itself sufficient. In order to understand antifascism in both its complexity and its contradictions, a critical history of it is needed. This is where the difficulties begin, since present historical debate shows all too clearly that the time is not ripe for a dispassionate and distanced historicization. The historical conception of antifascism remains a task indissociable from the public use of history and the political stakes involved in it. A critical historical take on it, however, should still go beyond the opposing stereotypes of ideological stigmatization and blind apology, each of which is one-sided and false. In this book, antifascism will be analysed above all as a site of the radicalization and politicization of intellectuals. It is in the mirror of their commitment, in the interwar years and then in the Resistance, that it shows both its tremendous power of attraction and its internal contradictions.

If this book is not devoted to the memory of the violence of war in its various forms, it inevitably includes, like any work of history, a share of personal memory that has steered my questioning and reflection. This is not the memory of a ‘witness’, based on remembrances of an experienced past, since the age in question was before my own time, but rather what Marianne Hirsch calls a ‘post-memory’²⁷ – in other words, a collective memory which I received snippets of from my early childhood, and which took shape over the years, sometimes with evident contradictions or elements frozen into legend. Transmitted within an antifascist family, it was by and large in tune with the dominant public discourse, but not always with that of my school friends.

I was born in Gavi, a small Piedmont town of some 3,000 inhabitants. Wedged between a river and a castle, and surrounded by hills, it is not without charm, like other settlements on the borders of Piedmont and Liguria. Known for its white wine, its typical pastries and its ravioli, it has led a fairly prosperous and very peaceful life, at least while I have known it. But that was not the case during the Second World War, when the region felt the full force of the German occupation and the armed resistance to it. The castle – the old medieval building had been transformed during the First World War into a military fortress – became a prison for British and American officers, often better fed than their guards. After the fall of fascism, on 8 September 1943, the Germans seized the building and used it to hold Italian prisoners of war. For two terrible years, from late 1943 to spring 1945, the valley around Gavi became a microcosm of the civil war that was ravaging the peninsular, and Europe more generally. In April 1944 it was plunged into mourning by a massacre – one of the many acts of carnage perpetrated in Italy in that crucial year. Bands of partisans began to organize in the mountains, attracting a growing number of young men who refused to enrol in the army of Mussolini’s ‘Italian Social Republic’. Fearing an Allied landing in Liguria, the German forces decided on a major ‘clean-up’ operation (bonifica) in this strategic region, as the arrival of Anglo-American forces in the Po valley would have quickly opened the route to Germany. It was necessary therefore to control the mountains that divided the sea from the plain. On 6 April, with a massive deployment of heavy weapons, the Germans began to bomb the mountain held by the partisans, then to burn it with flame-throwers. The ninety-seven partisans captured at their base – a former monastery named Benedicta – were executed on the spot the next day. But the manhunt continued for days to come; not only were captured fighters killed, but also several peasants suspected of having afforded them help or protection. These operations were conducted by a Wehrmacht unit of 2,000 soldiers, but the executions were entrusted to a squad of Italian Bersaglieri. In six days, 147 partisans were killed in this way, not counting those who died in the fighting. A few days later, 400 young people were deported to Mauthausen, over half of whom never returned.²⁸ Even today, opinions remain deeply divided as to the partisans’ lack of military preparation (it was only in the months that followed that the Resistance would gather strength), the presence of traitors in their ranks, and the role played by a local priest who called for surrender – some say in order to save those youngsters who were still in hiding, others say in order to facilitate their arrest. These are stories I have heard several times. The official account of the event – an account still given today on the memorial erected on the site of the massacre – describes a martyrdom in which young heroes sacrificed themselves in combat against the foreign invader. (On such commemorative plaques, the word ‘Nazi’ hardly ever appears, reference being almost always to ‘Germans’.) But the unspoken, the allusions and suspicions relayed by local rumour, soon reveal that the story of this German massacre was also a story of civil war between Italians. A year later, on 25 April 1945, partisan bands entered Gavi, just after the departure of the German forces. Rather than a festival of liberation, their arrival brought a settling of accounts. The fascist officials had taken flight, but the few who remained, such as the podestà – the unelected mayor appointed by the Mussolini regime – were executed, along with a certain Herr Zimmermann, a German dentist with a practice in the town, whom the occupiers had often used as interpreter. My father, who was the town’s Communist mayor after the war, said that the podestà was a ‘good bloke’, certainly a fascist but not a torturer, who did not deserve to end up like that. As for Herr Zimmermann, my mother said that his execution was engraved in her memory as a scene of horror. Almost everyone thought that he was killed simply for being a German. My mother also spoke of the chain of solidarities that had enabled partisans to be hidden in the town: when a raid was imminent, news travelled fast enough for them to escape before the soldiers arrived. I often had the impression, listening to these stories, that support for the Resistance was part and parcel of a mutual aid and community solidarity far stronger in wartime than ordinarily – a structure of support that did not always have its source in ideology, and could often be combined with reservation or even disapproval of certain forms of violence. As an adolescent, I often heard epic tales of the acts of the partisans: ambushes at bends in the road, shootings, songs, the pseudonyms of the fighters. But the description that many witnesses give of the partisans’ arrival in the town on the day of liberation does not hold together with the myth. They seem to have had the air of hunted animals rather than that of a victorious army.

Several Jews hid out in the surrounding countryside. Some had been fascists until 1938; the racial laws discriminated against them, but persecution began only in 1943. Others were involved in the Resistance. Some were arrested by the Italian police and then deported. During my childhood and adolescence, however, I never heard the deportation of the Jews mentioned. Ignorance, repression, or indifference? Perhaps a mixture of all three; it is hard to say. In Gavi there were no Jews. But even elsewhere this was something people did not speak of. I do have in my library, however, a photocopy of a booklet entitled Lo sterminio degli ebrei (‘The Extermination of the Jews’), published in Italian in London, in late 1942, by the Inter-Allied Information Committee, which reports the deportations in various European countries. Though this publication does not mention Auschwitz, it describes life in the ghettos, refers to Chełmno and Bełżec as ‘places of torment’ in which the mass execution of Jews was carried out by ‘electric shock and poison gas’, and calls Poland ‘a slaughterhouse in which Jews are concentrated and massacred, not only Polish but from all over Europe’.²⁹ This booklet belonged to a former partisan, now dead, who had been active in the Gavi valley. I never had the occasion to ask how it had reached him, nor what the resistenti thought of the Jewish deportations. This booklet, however, proves that information was passed around.

My paternal grandfather, in his capacity as barber (a trade he learned during his captivity in an Austrian camp during the First World War), possessed a permit allowing him to go out in the evening despite the curfew, so as to cut the hair of the town’s leading citizens. That was not his own choice, but a kind of obligation, a customary practice bound up with what was seen at that time as one of the humblest of trades. These notables all maintained excellent relations with the fascist authorities and the occupying forces, but in 1944 they began to pay the levies demanded by the Resistance. Without exception, they were not disturbed by the Liberation. A few of them took the precaution of vanishing for a while. I often heard tales, not without a certain incredulity, of peasant carts strafed by Allied planes. ‘They fired on everything that moved on the roads,’ people said. In Villalvernia, where the railway offices were, just a few kilometres from Gavi, Allied bombing had far more tragic consequences. On 1 December 1944, the village was razed by American bombers, killing 114 civilians and injuring 234. The population was only 800, plus some 350 refugees. The town hall, school and church were destroyed. Since it was neither a military base nor an industrial centre, no one had foreseen such a hail of bombs; the warning had not even been given. I have always been struck by certain constant features in these stories. The Benedicta massacre was certainly attributed to the Germans, with the Italian execution squad being scarcely ever mentioned; at most it was forced out like a confession. The Allied bombing, on the other hand, was never presented as an ‘American atrocity’, but always as a kind of fatality of the war, in a tradition that went back to the start of the conflict. The commemorative plaque records a ‘terrible firestorm that the anger of the war released on the peaceful inhabitants of Villalvernia’.

All the ingredients of total war and civil war were thus concentrated in the space of a small valley: German massacres and Italian accomplices; the complex web of collaboration; civilians divided between enforced adaptation and revolt; the Resistance with its martyrs, heroes and atrocities; not forgetting the blind bombing of the Allies. This place, so peaceful today, was a miniature theatre of the drama played out in the Old World.

In the 1970s, certain partisan figures still retained a mythic aura, all the more intolerable as it was systematically invoked when needed to silence the ‘left extremists’ who criticized the Italian Communist Party. I remember an encounter with Andrea Scano, a former partisan and a friend of my father, who lived in Novi, the town where I went to secondary school. In the course of a political meeting at which I spoke in the name of a school association – stigmatizing the attitude of the Communist Party – I managed to annoy him intensely. Andrea Scano, however, was a kind of living memory of the European civil war. He had fought with the International Brigades in Spain, had known the fascist prisons, and then taken part in the Resistance. His refusal to lay down arms in 1945 had led to his prosecution, and when the Cold War broke out and the Communists were no longer in government, this forced him to leave the country once more. He took refuge in Yugoslavia where, as an orthodox Stalinist, he organized an opposition to Tito in 1948, and was once again arrested and interned in a labour camp. After returning to Italy in the mid 1950s, he lived in discreet retirement in a small provincial town.³⁰ In a Communist Party now oriented towards ‘historic compromise’, Scano was something of an embarrassment, but the moral authority he enjoyed among militants was evidence of the very strong bond that tied them to the Resistance and the years of civil war.

In Novi, the heroes of antifascist struggle were for the most part members of the Communist Party, and the radical left had only weak connections with the Resistance. Its legacy had in a sense been confiscated by the Italian Communist Party, and our ‘postmemory’ was in reality a rupture of memory. For us, this had been only the umpteenth ‘revolution betrayed’, and almost no one in our ranks had been a part of it. This undoubtedly explains the insistence with which we sought to link up with the October Revolution, or looked for our models elsewhere, particularly in Latin America. Alongside this ‘invention of tradition’, however, the years of the Second World War still floated as a kind of subliminal story. They reminded us of our missing history. The radical left of those years embodied rupture, not continuity; that was both its strength and its weakness.

I was sixteen years old when I joined a ‘revolutionary’ political organization, in 1973, and thus one of the final representatives of the ‘last generation of October’,³¹ a generation that experienced the 1970s under the sign of political militancy. As a very young militant, I inherited a series of political categories and a vocabulary – party, masses, tactics, strategy, insurrection, balance of forces, and so on – that went back to the time of the European civil war. For want of a militia, we demonstrated in helmets, marshalled by a security service with military appearance. Our songs had warlike choruses, launching calls to arms and sometimes proclaiming ‘civil war’, as did the anthem of Potere Operaio. I do not believe that the meaning of our commitment can be reduced to this taste for violent confrontation, let alone this military dimension; but it did exist, and it would be wrong to deny this. For some people, particularly in Italy and Germany, it took on the aspect of terrorism, and had tragic consequences. In this book I have tried in essence to understand the origins of a language and mental habitus that were also my own, despite being sometimes experienced in the form of parody. I do not intend to reduce the social and political conflicts of the 1970s to a farcical repetition, ignoring the very real dimensions of theoretical, practical and even aesthetic innovation that the experience had. My object is simply to understand the share of inheritance that it conveyed, the accumulated sediment of an earlier age that was not so distant, and still present in the minds of contemporaries.

If the late 1960s were dominated by the spirit of revolt that touched a whole generation, within the most politicized fringe of the following decade, which liked to view itself as a ‘vanguard’, a revolutionary project was developed that at times took the form of methodical preparation for civil war. The turn that the world took in 1989 finally relegated these strategic debates to the ideological arsenal of a bygone century. If changing the world remains a necessity (even before being a project), the ways to achieve it have to be radically reconsidered. And this experience needs to be contemplated without either nostalgia or resentment.

Writing history books means offering the raw material needed for a public use of the past. This does not make the historian into the guardian of a national heritage (an ambition we can leave to others), as his task consists in interpreting the past, not in promoting processes of identity-construction or national reconciliation. An intellectual (and so also a historian) ‘organically’ tied to a class, a minority, a group or a party, risks forgetting the critical autonomy essential to his profession. On the other hand, I do not believe either in the definition of the historian, above all the historian of the present age, as an observer above the fray. In order to exercise his craft, he must be capable of assuming a certain critical distance; but he must also be aware of what ties him to the object of his research,³² which always includes a measure of ‘transfer’ – a measure of subjectivity that refracts the events of the past like a prism and orients his gaze.

In our present time, it can be useful to spell out certain points. If I mention the atrocities of the Spanish Republicans, it is not to put them on the same footing as the Francoists. If I mention the hideous spectacle of the lynching of Mussolini and the public hanging of his corpse, or the mass rapes of German women by Red Army soldiers as they advanced towards Berlin in May 1945, this is not to cast collaborationists and resisters as equal avatars of an interchangeable violence, nor to equate Soviet war-making with that of the Nazis. It is simply that these dreadful acts, which nothing in the world could justify, demand an explanation. I do not know if there is one, let alone do I claim to have found it. But at least I have not abandoned the need to look for it.

______________

1Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du temoin (Paris: Plon, 1998).

2Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

3See Rudolf Augstein and Karl Dietrich Bracher, ed., Historikerstreit. Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse über die Enzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987).

4See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 199.

5Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change: A Historical–Anthropological Essay’, in The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 76.

6Cesare Pavese, The House on the Hill (London: Peter Owen, 1956), p. 192.

7See Raffaele Liucci, La tentazione della ‘casa in collina’. Il disimpegno degli intellettuali nella guerra civile italiana (1943–1945) (Milan: Unicopli, 1999).

8Missak Manouchian, of Armenian origin, was a leading figure in the Communist-oriented Main-d’oeuvre immigrée (MOI), a Resistance network of immigrant workers. He was killed by the Nazis in February 1944.

9Luciano Violante, ‘Sui ragazzi di Salò’ (1996), in Filippo Focardi, ed., La guerra della memoria. La Resistenza nel dibattio politico italiano dal 1945 a oggi (Rome/Bari: Laterza, 2005), pp. 285–6. The reference is to an investiture speech of the president of the Italian parliament.

10See Josep Ramoneda, ‘Poco más que un defile’, El País, 14 October 2004.

11See for example Tzvetan Todorov, Une tragédie française. Été 1944: scènes de guerre civile (Paris: Seuil, 1994).

12See J. Dreijmanis, ed., Max Weber’s Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocation (New York: Algora, 2008), pp. 155–98.

13See R. Hilberg, ed., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999).

14See on this point the illuminating remarks of Sergio Luzzato, La crisi dell’antifascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2004).

15Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

16Unlike those that Wolfgang Sofsky suggests, with a complacency both ambiguous and refined, in his Traktat über die Gewalt (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005).

17Patrice Gueniffey, La Politique de la Terreur. Essai sur la violence révolutionnaire 1789–1794 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 226.

18Ibid., p. 234.

19Ibid., pp. 338–9.

20Ernst Nolte, ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will. Eine Rede, die geschrieben, aber nicht gehalten werden konnte’, Historikerstreit, p. 45.

21See in particular Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). Among the most useful new developments in historiography, see the collective work edited by Michel Dreyfus, Bruno Groppo and others, Le Siècle des communismes (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2000).

22See Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995).

23See for example Antonia Grunenberg, Antifaschismus. Ein deutscher Mythos (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993), p. 12. See also on this subject Enzo Traverso, Le Passé: modes d’emploi. Histoire, mémoire, politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005), Chapter 5 (‘The Dilemmas of German Historians’).

24Annie Kriegel, ‘Sur l’antifascisme’, Commentaire 50 (1990). See also Maurice Agulhon, ‘Faut-il réviser l’histoire de l’antifascime?’, Le Monde diplomatique, June 1994, p. 17.

25Thierry Wolton, Le Grand Recrutement (Paris: Grasset, 1993) – a work that at least served to provoke a reply from Pierre Vidal-Naquet: Le Trait empoisonné. Réflexions sur l’affaire Jean Moulin (Paris: La Découverte, 1993).

26François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 224.

27Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

28See the collective work Benedicta. L’evento, la memoria (Genoa: Le Mani, 2004). For a more general perspective, see Lutz Klinkhammer, L’occupazione tedesca in Italia (1943–1945) (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993), and, by the same author, Le stragi naziste in Italia (Rome: Donizelli, 2006), which discusses the Benedicta massacre.

29Lo sterminio degli ebrei. Relazioni del comitato d’informazione interalleato in Londra (London: Presso la stamperia reale, n. d.), p. 36. (The preface, written by the interim president of the committee, Georges Schommer, bears the date 18 December 1942.)

30A rather romanticized portrait of Andrea Scano can be found in Gianpaolo Pansa, Prigionieri del silenzio (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2004).

31See Benjamin Stora, La Dernière Génération d’Octobre (Paris: Stock, 2003).

32A question to which Saul Friedländer has devoted a masterly reflection. ‘History, Memory, and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities’, New German Critique 80 (2000), pp. 3–15.

PART I

PATHS TO ACTION

Civil war, the culminating form of class struggle, violently abolishes all moral ties between enemy classes.

Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (1938)

Civil war is bellum with a justa causa on both sides, but also with in-justus hostis on both sides.

Carl Schmitt, Glossarium (1947)

ONE

Commencement

Interpretations

During the first half of the twentieth century, Europe experienced an extraordinary entanglement of conflicts: ‘classic’ wars between states; civil wars; wars of national liberation; genocides; violent confrontations arising from cleavages of class, nation, religion, politics and ideology. Many contemporary observers and, in their wake, several historians, have sought to sum up the meaning of this turbulent age by placing it under the sign of a ‘European civil war’. The comprehensive character and evocative power of this formula have assured it a certain success, but its status remains vague and uncertain. The term is quite frequently used, but it has rarely been subjected to any rigorous conceptualization or overall study.¹ Its originator seems to have been the German painter Franz Marc, in a letter he wrote from the front shortly before his death at Verdun. As opposed to what propaganda claimed, he noted, the world war was neither a war against an eternal enemy nor a conflict of races, but ‘a European civil war, a war against the inner invisible enemy of the European spirit’.²

Similar formulae can be found in many postwar writers. In the opening pages of his essay on ‘total mobilization’ (1930), Ernst Jünger stressed the link between ‘the world war and the world revolution’, two phenomena between which there was ‘a deep imbrication’. Both things, he wrote, were simply ‘two sides of the same event of planetary scope, correlated in respect of both their origin and the manner in which they appeared’.³ Basically, the war of 1914–18 had simply been an apocalypse showing ‘Europe struggling against Europe’ in a climate of ‘civil war’.⁴ In November 1942, while Jünger was posted to the Wehrmacht headquarters in Paris, he similarly described this latest conflict in his journal as ‘a civil war on the world scale’ (Weltbürgerkrieg).⁵ This new war went far beyond the context of a traditional confrontation between powers, being now transformed into a global conflagration that was horrendously destructive. A few months later, having returned from a mission to the Caucasus at the moment of the German defeat at Stalingrad, Jünger reasserted this idea in still darker terms: ‘The war in the East is absolute, to a degree that Clausewitz could not have conceived, even after the experiences of 1812 – it is a war between states, between peoples, between citizens and between religions, with the object of zoological extinction.’⁶

Karl Löwith, exiled in Japan, examined in 1940 the dissolution of European unity, the true background of the war under way. The core of this broken unity was not material, but lay in a ‘shared spiritual disposition’.⁷ It was precisely because the issue at stake was the unity of the continent that the First World War, according to Löwith, had been ‘a civil war’.⁸ Its result was not unity but the advent of nihilism, a nihilism he interpreted as ‘the negation of existing civilization’,⁹ in other words the destruction of all values handed down by the European tradition.

There is a tendency today to associate the idea of ‘European civil war’ with the German historian Ernst Nolte, who used it for the title of one of his best-known books. For him, it defines the period that began with the October Revolution and ended with the defeat of Nazism. His interpretation is implicit in his book’s subtitle: ‘National Socialism and Bolshevism’, alluding to a conflict generated by the totalitarian germ of Communism, whose crimes the Nazis did no more than simply copy.¹⁰ On close examination, this thesis was already present in outline in his first book, Three Faces of Fascism, where he defined Nazism as a movement ‘radically opposed yet related’ to Marxism, which it combated by ‘the use of almost identical, and yet typically transformed methods’.¹¹ In an isolated passage that is generally unnoticed, he even put forward the idea that would later form the focus of the Historikerstreit, attributing to Hitler a view of Bolshevism as ‘the most radical form of Jewish genocide ever known’.¹² By way of conclusion to this first book of his, Nolte located the underlying core of fascism in resistance to the ‘transcendence’ of the modern world, a ‘transcendence’ embodied in its radical form by Marxism (on the philosophical level) and Bolshevism (on the political level). Fascism, accordingly, was an organized reaction against the advent of modernity, equally radical as its enemy in an age of wars and revolutions. As a rejection of this ‘practical transcendence’, fascism was naturally situated in a conservative or even reactionary tradition. But it also took the form of a ‘struggle against theoretical transcendence’, which denied the modern world while challenging it from within, ‘on the ground specific to it’.¹³ In order to combat modernity, when this took the form of revolution, a counter-revolution was needed – in other words a ‘conservative revolution’. Charles Maurras had been the first to understand that ‘radical reaction means revolution against the revolution’,¹⁴ indicating the direction that the fascist movements would take after the Great War. Maurras’s counter-revolution might still have aimed at a restoration of the Bourbons, but he opened the path subsequently taken by Mussolini and Hitler with other objectives. There was a clear continuity between counter-revolution and fascism. Which is why, against the prevailing trend in historiography (though Sternhell would later echo him), Nolte saw Action Française as a fascist movement.

In short, Nolte interpreted the twentieth century as an age dominated by a radical conflict between transcendence and resistance to transcendence, i.e. between revolution and counter-revolution, Communism and fascism.¹⁵ According to Nolte, the gigantic confrontation which tore the world apart after 1917 had been prefigured at the philosophical level by Marx and Nietzsche. In the nineteenth century, the author of The Birth of Tragedy had been the first representative of a radical revolt against the modern world. His view of modernity as a world with neither gods nor prophets inspired his critique of ‘theoretical transcendence’, while his rejection of democracy, mass society and socialism announced the coming battle against ‘practical transcendence’. Marx, who gave a philosophical and political form to the great ‘slave uprising’ of the modern age, was the antithesis of Nietzsche, the two respectively embodying revolution and counter-revolution. Nolte found in Nietzsche a ‘prediction of the great civil war’ that would break out in the twentieth century, as well as the ‘concept of unavoidable extermination’ that would accompany it.¹⁶ With Bolshevism, the ‘universal threat’ that Nietzsche had a presentiment of had taken a ‘concrete form’.¹⁷

Nolte never changed the broad lines of this interpretation. In a chapter of his Streitpunkte devoted to the Nazi view of Bolshevism as a ‘doctrine of humanity in Asiatic and barbarian guise’, he recalled Zinoviev’s 1920 speech in Baku to the Congress of Peoples of the East. This first attempt to organize the colonized peoples in an international movement had a strong impact on the fascist imagination. At Nazi meetings, Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were in the habit of describing the Russian Revolution as a ‘revolution of Untermenschen’,¹⁸ a gigantic uprising aimed against Western civilization.

The historian Horst Möller, in the laudatio he delivered at the awarding of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s prize to Ernst Nolte in 2000, detected a Spenglerian accent throughout the work of his colleague.¹⁹ Nolte presented himself as a resigned and contemplative critic of modernity, almost Weberian, but there is an echo in his work of a warlike chaos bearing the traces of the ‘conservative revolution’. Nolte also received his demons from that tradition – from an anti-Semitic view of the ‘Jew’ as secret motor of the modern world: the heart of ‘transcendence’. His books, while helping us penetrate the mental dispositive and thought system of Nazism, at the same time reproduce certain essential features of this. In Streitpunkte, Nolte does indeed define the Jewish genocide as ‘the most terrible mass murder in world history’,²⁰ but he interprets it as a derivative crime, a mere ‘imitation’ of the Bolshevik ‘genocide’. It is in Bolshevism that the real source of evil lies, and it found its natural representatives among the Jews: the people, Nolte writes citing Nietzsche, who ‘began the revolt of the slaves in morality’.²¹

The polemics that Nolte’s argument aroused are very well known. We should note, however, that it is far from exhausting the richness and plurality of meanings of the concept of European civil war found in the work of several authors. Many historians, rejecting Nolte’s apologetic approach, have dated the start of this civil war to 1914 rather than 1917.²² They agree in emphasizing that, far beyond the collapse of a system of alliances and a balance between the Great Powers, the First World War marked the end of a certain idea of Europe and the starting-point of a new epoch of crises, including social, political and military conflicts. This is an old idea, its premises found already in a book from the early 1950s: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Here the Great War is described as the ‘explosion’ of the Old World, its shattered pieces tearing and knocking against each other in a disorder that no longer corresponded either to the previous system of empires nor to a coherent grouping of national states. And the ‘twenty years of uneasy peace’ that followed the first world conflict are seen here as a chain reaction of ‘civil wars … bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors’, finally leading only to a second general explosion still greater and more devastating than the first.²³

More recently, the European crisis of the years 1914–45 has been called a ‘civil war’ by historians such as the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm and the liberal François Furet, who each emphasize from their different perspectives its essentially ‘ideological’ nature. The former contrasts the world that issued from the trenches of 1914 with that which preceded it, a ‘golden age’ of stability and security dominated by the idea of peace and progress. This was a world in which, in Europe at least, figures in millions were used to refer to the tons of coal and steel produced by the continent’s industries – not, as subsequently, to the number of victims of wars and genocides. In The Age of Extremes, Hobsbawm uses the concept of ‘ideological international civil war’²⁴ to describe, well beyond the conflict between Communism and fascism, the rent in a continent ravaged by the moral confrontation between ‘two different ideological families’: on the one hand, the Enlightenment, a tradition that also includes, quite naturally, the Russian Revolution; and on the other hand, the anti-Enlightenment, i.e. fascism.²⁵ The Great War was a watershed: its outbreak marked the end of the ‘long’ nineteenth century and the opening of an age of civil war. This latter thus coincides with the first part of a ‘short’ century, which Hobsbawm calls the ‘age of catastrophe’. ‘Ideological civil war’ and ‘age of catastrophe’: these two formulae are to some extent interchangeable.

For François Furet, too, the Second World War was a conflict that followed an ‘ideological logic’,²⁶ situated in the context created by the turning-point of 1914. After the conflagration sparked by the Sarajevo assassination, the face of Europe was never again the same. The hiatus dividing these two epochs was so deep that the First World War appears to Furet as ‘one of the most enigmatic events of modern history’. Despite causing ‘an enormous break with what preceded it’, it ‘seems almost absurd: a civil war, but waged between sovereign states in the name of nationalistic passions’.²⁷ This European crisis provides the matrix of two anti-liberal reactions, Communism and fascism, antinomic but in some ways parallel and twin, which Furet interprets as the actors in the totalitarian parenthesis that upset the ineluctable path of Western civilization towards democratic liberalism. For Hobsbawm, this civil war was worth waging; sides had to be chosen, and it was this very struggle that saved Europe. Furet views it from afar, blasé and distant, as if liberal virtue could exist above the melee of ideological conflict. These are two sensibilities and two memories, despite starting from the same assertion: the history of Europe between 1914 and 1945 is that of a continent torn apart by civil war.

Antecedents

The European civil war of the twentieth century has two ancestors: the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48 and the French Revolution a century and a half later, in the sense of the long process of rupture and transformation that began with the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and ended with the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Both were devastating, and changed the face of the continent. Comparison with the twentieth century forces itself almost naturally. The first to have sketched a parallel between the European crisis of the seventeenth century and a future world war was undoubtedly Frederick Engels, in a famous article of 1888 whose prophetic character has often been pointed out. In such a war, he pointed out, ‘eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts’. ‘The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War’, he continued, would be ‘compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent’. A new war would produce famine and disease, a ‘universal lapse into barbarism’, as well as an ‘irretrievable dislocation’ of the economy ‘ending in universal bankruptcy’. We would witness ‘the collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one will be around to pick them up’.²⁸ The Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke echoed this in a resounding speech in the Reichstag in May 1890, asserting that, in view of the power achieved by national armies, no state in the case of a new conflict would be able to prevail rapidly over the others, and the result would be a new and terribly devastating Thirty Years’ War.²⁹ The parallel was taken up in 1919 by the German historian Hans Kohn, in a pioneering book that sought to comprehend the modern nationalisms born out of the Great War.³⁰

During the Second World War, there was further occasion for comparison with the Thirty Years’ War. There was no doubt in diplomatic minds, in 1939, that the new war was a continuation of its predecessor, given that Hitler had constantly proclaimed his intention to wipe out the shame of Versailles. In 1942, the German political scientist Sigmund Neumann, now an émigré in the United States, suggested: ‘the last three decades must be conceived of as a unit, perhaps as a second Thirty Years’ War’.³¹ And in his autobiographical work Kaputt, Curzio Malaparte, at that time a war correspondent on the Eastern front, recalled the bitter irony of Wehrmacht soldiers who referred to the present fighting as a ‘thirty years’ blitzkrieg’ (ein dreissigjähriger Blitzkrieg).³² This parallel was a regular theme of Alfred Rosenberg, first of all in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party’s official daily paper – particularly an editorial of 1 September 1942, and subsequently in a pamphlet devoted to the combat against Bolshevism, the European ‘sickness’ generated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In this struggle, he wrote, ‘attitudes to life, conceptions of the state and views of the world (Lebenshaltungen, Staatsauffassungen, Weltanschauungen)’ confronted each other to the point of becoming, in Darwinian terms, a ‘struggle for life itself’.³³ The comparison also appeared in a radio speech by De Gaulle in September 1941, and from the pen of Winston Churchill, who presented his history of the Second World War in 1948 as ‘an account of another Thirty Years’ War’.³⁴ Raymond Aron likewise defined this ‘second Thirty Years’ War’ as a ‘hyperbolic war’: born in 1914 from a ‘diplomatic failure’, it was ended only in 1945, after a series of multiple crises and civil wars.³⁵

There are indeed quite striking analogies between the European wars of the seventeenth century and those of the twentieth. In both cases, these were total wars. They were terribly deadly, not only for the soldiers taking part in them but also for the civilian populations that suffered them, killed in their millions by hunger and epidemics in the earlier case, and in the latter by the bombings, massacres and genocides that accompanied the fighting. The first Thirty Years’ War was marked, on the religious level, by the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, and on the political level by the confrontation between feudalism and absolutism. The second arose in 1914 from a classical conflict between great powers for continental hegemony, and continued after 1917 with a confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution, finally culminating, in 1941, in an irreducible war between hostile visions of the world. It took a complex political form, in which several different conflicts were intertwined: capitalism against collectivism, liberty against equality, democracy against dictatorship, universalism against racism. In other words, it was initially a confrontation between liberalism and Communism, revolution and counter-revolution, then between democracy and fascism, fascism and Communism, until the final conflict of the coalesced fascisms against the alliance of the liberal democracies with Communism. Both of these Thirty Years’ Wars combined wars between states with civil wars, modifications of frontiers with political changes in the structure of states, conflicts of a religious order with ideological confrontations. Both were waged with a spirit of crusade, and marked by massacres and even genocides. Both had at their centre Germany, and were concluded, in 1945 as in 1648, by its division.³⁶

The difference lay in the results. With the peace of Westphalia, the first Thirty Years’ War gave birth to a stable system of international relations based on an equilibrium between states. It laid the foundations of what would be called the jus publicum europaeum: the legal regulation of relations between the European powers and the management of their wars as secularized conflicts between sovereign states. This balance was shaken by the French Revolution, then re-established at Vienna in 1815. The first Thirty Years’ War had laid the foundations of the modern state in the form of absolutism, a legal and political apparatus possessing sovereignty, exercising a monopoly of legitimate violence within its frontiers, and capable of defending these against outside threats by means of a standing army (a process that Norbert Elias defined as the ‘courtization of the warriors’).³⁷ The Wars of Religion allowed Bodin to conceptualize sovereignty, and the English Revolution inspired Hobbes’s vision of the state as Leviathan opposed to the Behemoth of civil war, i.e. an absolute authority capable of establishing a political order, peace, and security upon a state of nature that was conflictive because prepolitical. Under absolutism, war became a means of avoiding civil war: submission to the sovereign was the price to pay for allaying the fear of dying a violent death. The second Thirty Years’ War, for its part, ended neither with a compromise between the belligerents nor with a new balance of forces, but with the crushing of one of the antagonists – no other outcome would be possible after 1941 – and the renewal of conflict between liberalism and Communism, the two enemy children of the Enlightenment who had united to combat Nazism. In the twentieth century, the strengthening of states did not reduce the risk of their citizens’ dying a violent death; instead it created the conditions for modern massacres and genocides. The first Thirty Years’ War has been understood historically as a decisive step in the process of civilization, the second as the paroxysm of its crisis.

The second European civil war was opened by the French Revolution, and reached its epilogue at Waterloo. The historian Roman Schnur has used the rubric ‘world civil war’ to place the conflicts that set Europe in flames between 1792 and 1814.³⁸ Once again, as in the seventeenth century, this was a gigantic social and political upheaval and a war of ideologies. On the military level, it began as a confrontation between a coalition of monarchies and a revolutionary nation that, in the name of natural right, had declared a war sans frontières on the ancien régime. Jacobin groupings had arisen in many parts of Europe, welcoming the French invasion as an act of liberation, and so transforming a war between states into an internal uprising against aristocratic power, a civil war. In a speech to the Convention in April 1793, Robespierre had proclaimed the principle of fraternity of peoples, which should lead them to cooperate as ‘citizens of the same state’, and made the oppressor of one nation ‘the enemy of all’. The battle against the enemies of the human race then took on the characteristics of a civil war, since, according to Robespierre, it could not be reduced to the rules of international law. ‘Kings, aristocrats, tyrants,’ he asserted, ‘should be pursued by all, not as ordinary enemies but as murderers and rebellious brigands.’³⁹ Quite analogously, the anti-Jacobin coalition – inspired by the French aristocratic emigration – did not react against a nation but against the Revolution, as Burke understood perfectly well when he called for a ‘war of religion’ against an ‘armed doctrine’ in which ‘the mode of civilized war will not be practised’.⁴⁰

According to Jean-Clément Martin, the French Revolution had asserted a new view of the world, organized around the cleavage ‘friends/enemies of liberty’ – a view which, by abolishing secret diplomacy, put an end to conflicts between monarchs and ‘introduced the premises of a global civil war’ on ideological foundations.⁴¹ This was also how the Bolsheviks waged war against the Whites between 1918 and 1921, and again how the Allied forces waged their battle against Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945: wars against illegitimate enemies whom one does not seek to make peace with but rather to destroy.

As in the first Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars demolished the old social order. They involved all European states, mobilized the peoples of the continent, triggered the advent of modern nationalisms, and had an impact that extended to the New World. The peace of Westphalia had given birth to absolutism; the Congress of Vienna sealed its demise. The Restoration did not challenge the social transformations brought about by the Napoleonic conquests, and the ‘persistence’ of the ancien régime after 1815 certainly did not prevent the rise of industrial capitalism, even if the political order remained that of an aristocratic Europe. The shocks generated by the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, therefore, were unable to destroy the jus publicum europaeum. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna established a ‘hundred years’ peace’, disturbed only by conflicts of far more limited scope and duration, such as the Crimean war (1853–54), the Franco-Austrian war at the origin of the Italian Risorgimento (1859), the Austro-Prussian war (1866–67) and the Franco-Prussian war (1870–71), which enabled Bismarck to complete German unity. The Balkan wars of 1912–13, for their part, appear more as an expression of the crisis of the Ottoman Empire than a threat to European stability, despite the fact that the crisis that would shatter the order of the continent arose from this direction.

According to Karl Polanyi, this ‘hundred years’ peace’ born in 1815 rested on four pillars: the ‘balance of power system’; the gold standard; the liberal economy promoted by the industrial revolution and founded on the principle of the self-regulating market; and finally the liberal state, with the recognition of certain constitutional freedoms. Outside of tsarist Russia, where the fourth pillar was sadly wanting, all the European countries accepted this system.⁴² At the origin of this ‘hundred years’ peace’ lay the sentiment, deeply rooted in all countries of the continent, of belonging to one and the same civilization and sharing the same values. This civilization was defined in opposition to the rest of the planet, a world of radical otherness that confirmed Europe’s own image of superiority and domination, as well as its historical ‘mission’ as a vector of progress. In the extra-European space, conceived as a space open to colonization, violence could be deployed without either limit or rules. Within the Old World, however, the nineteenth century had forged a social system, institutions, a culture and behaviours that seemed unshakable. Torture had almost disappeared everywhere; peace was recognized as a shared value; wars had only a limited scope and duration. The system of alliances between the great powers was the mirror of this civilization. Diplomacy was a kind of aristocratic caste, possessing its language – French – and continent-wide ties echoing those of the royal families, accustomed to marriages of convenience between the crowns of different countries. For these cosmopolitan gentlemen, it was hard to separate national interests from the fate of imperial Europe. But this caste was now deeply out of phase with the rise of nationalisms.⁴³

In 1914, a high official of the British Foreign Office emphasized the emergence of a single type of diplomat. All of them, he maintained, ‘speaking metaphorically, speak the same language; they have the same habits of thought, and more or less the same points of view’.⁴⁴ The fate of the world being entrusted to an elite of men corresponding to this ‘single type’ meant that the possibility of a war of annihilation in Europe itself, after the model of those waged by the Europeans in Africa, outside the ‘civilized world’, was unimaginable. In April 1914, only a few months before the outbreak of the catastrophe, a Times editorial reaffirmed its faith in the virtues of the European concert:

The division of the Great Powers into two well-balanced groups with intimate relations between the members of each, which do not forbid any such member from being on the friendliest terms with one or more members of the other, is a twofold check upon inordinate ambitions or sudden outbreaks of race hatred. All Sovereigns and statesmen – aye, and all nations – know that a war of group against group would be a measureless calamity. That knowledge brings with it a sense of responsibility which chastens and restrains the boldest and most reckless. But they know, too, that to secure the support of the other members of their own group and to induce them to share the responsibility and risks of such conflict, any Power or Powers which may mediate recourse to arms must first satisfy those other members that the quarrel is necessary and just. They are no longer unfettered judges in their own cause, answerable to none but themselves.⁴⁵

This underlying optimism was broadly shared by all political forces. Over the years leading up to 1914, the European Socialists had launched a great peace offensive that reached a climax at the international conference in Basle in November 1912. The workers’ movement, they said, would be able to prevent world war or, in case this did break out, transform it into a socialist revolution. But these solemn declarations displayed a naive optimism that ruled out the possibility of conflict. And the positions of principle never led to any practical decision. Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of German and international Social Democracy, recognized in very lucid terms, at the end of the war, the blindness of all the members of the International Socialist Bureau who met on 29–30 July 1914: ‘It is amazing that none of us who were there had the idea of raising the question: What to do if war breaks out? What attitude should the Socialist parties take in this war?’⁴⁶

The system based on the reciprocal neutralization of the great empires was fated to collapse in August 1914. The postwar peace treaties, from the treaty of Versailles onwards, did not re-establish the balance of forces. As distinct from the Congress of Vienna, which had re-integrated France among the great powers on a footing of equality, the Versailles conference decided to punish Germany, condemning it to disarmament, heavy economic reparations and painful territorial mutilations, which left outside its borders several million former citizens of the Reich. Soviet Russia was isolated by a cordon sanitaire, while the attempt was made to crush it militarily. It would only be recognized after the defeat of the White counter-revolution. The civil wars that followed the collapse of tsarism and the Central Powers undermined the liberal political system; the emergence of the Soviet regime on the one side and the fascist regimes on the other only deepened the crisis. As for economic liberalism, it was challenged first of all by the war economy, then harshly affected by the crisis of 1929 that did so much to tip the balance into fascism across a large part of Europe. No one, starting from the liberal economist John Maynard Keynes, could believe in the self-regulating virtues of the market.

The ‘European concert’ established at Vienna in 1815 rested on the existence of the great aristocratic empires. According to Georges-Henri Soutou, it implied both a mechanical equilibrium, founded on the balance of forces between the great powers, and an organic equilibrium, founded on a series of liberal values that these same states embodied.⁴⁷ The mechanical equilibrium, however, had disappeared with the dissolution of empires and the atomization of the continent into a multitude of fragile and, for the most part, heterogeneous nation-states. As for the organic equilibrium, this had been swallowed up by the civil wars of 1918–23, the deep crisis of liberalism, the emergence of Bolshevism in Russia, and the advance of fascism in the rest of the continent – first in Italy, then followed by Germany, Austria, Spain and various countries of Central Europe. After 1930, the economic crisis exploded the very fragile architecture of Versailles, revealing the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations. This had been based on the principle of nationalities propounded by Woodrow Wilson, reflecting the democratization of European societies and the birth of new post-aristocratic elites, intellectual and political as well as economic. The former dynastic ‘concert’ belonged to a bygone age, but it had not found a successor. The family spirit with which the old dynasties had always settled the continent’s affairs was cruelly lacking among the new national political elites. This was already noted by Jacques Bainville in 1919, in Les Conséquences politiques de la paix.⁴⁸

Germany had indeed been weakened, but not paralysed. Fear of Bolshevism lay behind a policy of reconciliation symbolized by the Locarno Treaty of 1925, then by Germany’s entry into the League of Nations. Keynes, who had already termed the 1914 conflict a ‘European civil war’,⁴⁹ devoted his study on The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920) to a warning against the dangers of a deliberate effort to punish Germany, which risked playing into the hands of Communism. (It would actually pave the way for Nazism.) In his eyes, such a policy would not only impoverish Central Europe, condemning many millions to die of hunger; it would lay the foundations for a new conflict of still wider scope. ‘Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation.’⁵⁰

But fear of Bolshevism was also at the root of Franco-British passivity in the face of German rearmament and the militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, as well as the reintegration of the Saar and the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland – all carried out in the name of the right to self-determination proclaimed at Versailles. After the bloodletting of the First World War, and lacking an army to match the level of its diplomacy, France no longer had the power to react. Great Britain not only feared an excessive weakening of Germany in the face of the Bolshevik threat, but wanted also to avoid a French hegemony over the continent. Both understood only too late that Hitler wanted war, and that his expansionism was qualitatively different from that of Prussian pan-Germanism: Hitler’s plan was not just to establish German hegemony in Europe, but to conquer the continent; not to make Poland a vassal, but to annihilate it; not to contain the Soviet Union, but to seize the Russian territories as Lebensraum; not to expel the Jews from the Reich, but to exterminate them on a continental scale. In short, they did not understand that the Nazi war marked a rupture even within the second Thirty Years’ War.⁵¹ Peace would return after 1945, no longer based on the European ‘concert’ but rather on a balance of terror, in a world of which Europe had ceased to be the centre. It was only after its self-destruction that Europe would rediscover its unity.

If the crisis of 1914–45 has been interpreted as a European civil war in the same sense as the upheavals produced by the French Revolution, they remain irreducibly opposed in our representations of history because the impact of each was completely different in the minds of their contemporaries. It is because the actors of the twentieth century had integrated into their historical consciousness the view of 1789 as a step in the civilization process that Verdun and Auschwitz struck them right away as expressing a ‘collapse’ of the civilized world into barbarism – a formula that was current in the 1930s and ’40s. The French revolutionaries saw themselves as following in the path of the Enlightenment, whose principles they codified and whose inheritance they claimed. Condorcet found the Revolution the historical confirmation of his idea of progress, while the Convention transferred the remains of Rousseau to the Panthéon. Despite their critique of the Terror, both Kant and Hegel greeted the French Revolution as a moment of emancipation.⁵² At the opposite extreme to this view, the European civil war of the twentieth century remains engraved in our memory as an immense catastrophe, which threatened the eclipse of civilization. Its beginnings were described by Karl Kraus as the ‘last days of humanity’;⁵³ its conclusion seemed to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno the expression of a ‘self-destruction of rationalism’.⁵⁴

Cycle

In his classic essay on historical times, Fernand Braudel distinguishes three temporal categories. Firstly, the event, ‘the most capricious and most deceptive of durations’, able to blind observers by its flashes and flames, but ephemeral and almost insignificant from the standpoint of the social sciences. Then the longue durée, which he sees as the only one that merits attention, bringing to light structures, major demographic, economic and cultural tendencies that underlie the long-term movements of societies. And between the two, an intermediate category of the ‘conjuncture’ or ‘cycle’, whose length Braudel fixes at ‘a decade, a quarter of a century, or, in the extreme case, the half-century of the classic Kondratieff cycle’.⁵⁵ Braudel does not dwell on this third category, but his suggestion is a fruitful one. The cycle, covering a number of decades, defines a timeframe in which events are more than mere surface agitations – contrary to Braudel’s opinion, they sometimes mark major historical turning-points – but can be placed in perspective and analysed in the light of secular tendencies. In other words, the cycle is a period that reveals the connection between events and structures, bordering on both the short and long run, where temporalities comes together.

The concept of European civil war does not denote either an event or a secular tendency, but precisely a cycle in which a chain of catastrophic events – crises, conflicts, wars, revolutions – condenses a historical mutation whose premises were built up, over the longue durée, in the course of the preceding century. The advent of mass society, the transition from liberal capitalism to monopoly capitalism, the democratization of politics, the nationalization of the masses, and the military revolution all preceded the rupture of 1914. The transition from an imperial order to a conflictual system of so-called ‘national’ states (often very heterogeneous) was prepared by the erosion of the aristocratic regimes that had ‘persisted’ since the French Revolution and the uprisings of 1848. The Communist wave that followed October 1917 presupposed the rise of an industrial proletariat, just as the appearance of fascism implied the convergence of the anti-Enlightenment with a ‘revolutionary right’ that was no longer aristocratic but nationalist. Total war would have been inconceivable without mass armies and modern means of destruction, as would the propaganda that accompanied it without the implantation in the popular strata of a national ideal forged in the course of the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Finally, the shift in the world’s axis from one side of the Atlantic to the other, with the emergence of the United States as a great international power, only made visible a mutation in the balance of forces that had been under way since the Civil War. All these structural changes were built up over the longue durée, but condensed and precipitated in a series of events that stretched over some thirty years, and whose starting-point – a genuine watershed for contemporaries – was the crisis of 1914. It is this cycle of crises, wars and revolutions that can be summed up in the idea of the European civil war. And it is certainly no accident that it was in the aftermath of the Great War that books appeared theorizing the end-point of the trajectory of European civilization, analysing the synchrony between a ‘long wave’ of the capitalist economy and the war, and announcing a new cycle of revolutions on the continental scale. A priori, one would see no affinities between Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, the economic writings of Kondratiev, and Trotsky’s reflections on the dynamics of the European revolution at the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist International. And yet the German conservative philosopher, the Russian economist and his revolutionary compatriot all shared the need to understand a conjuncture in which the long timeframes of history were telescoped together with economic, military and political cycles.⁵⁶

The concept of a European civil war might in certain respects seem inappropriate for grasping the temporal sequence of a crisis that had an international dimension right from the start. It was bounded by two total wars, the first already marked by the intervention of the United States, and the second taking place in a number of different theatres, from Africa to the Pacific. Between these two wars were a number of particular crises, including the international economic recession triggered by the stock exchange crash of October 1929, which had such deep repercussions on the Old World. It would clearly be hard to deny the importance of this event and its consequences for understanding the crisis of Europe between 1914 and 1945. And from the standpoint of world history, the European civil war was simply one aspect of an international conflict that continued after 1945 with the Cold War, to end forty-five years later with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The interwar period nonetheless remains crucial for defining the future of Europe, since its material destruction and spiritual laceration revealed in tragic forms the continent’s common heritage, as well as showing the necessity of its unification.

Despite its features of civil war, the First World War, in which armies of several million soldiers confronted one another, remained a conflict between states – states that no longer respected the norms of the jus publicum europaeum, but remained nonetheless sovereign. The features of civil war stand out far more prominently, however, in the conflicts of the years that followed. Framed by two total wars, the European civil war was also made up of a number of local civil wars. These can be grouped into three major moments. First of all, the period that opened with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and came to an end in the early 1920s (symbolically, with the abortive Hamburg insurrection of October 1923), during which a war between states gave rise to revolutions and civil wars in several countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Then the Spanish Civil War, which condensed conflicts of continental and global significance on the scale of a single country. And finally the Second World War, which in its turn generated a multitude of local civil wars. These three phases are closely linked together. It was this intimate mixture of total wars and civil wars that shaped the continuity of the period from 1914 to 1945.

Sequence

Born as a classic conflict between states, the Great War ended with the collapse of the continent’s empires in a context of civil wars. Initially, a union sacrée prevailed in all the countries involved. The European Socialists opposed to the war, who met at Zimmerwald in the Swiss Alps in 1915, represented only tiny minorities. By the end of the conflict, on the other hand, European societies were deeply torn apart. In Russia, the tsarist regime was overthrown in February 1917 by a revolution that was increasingly radicalized until the Bolsheviks came to power in October. In March 1918, the Soviet government signed a separate peace with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, and faced at home a bloody civil war that would take three years to defeat. In Germany, a climate of civil war prevailed in the wake of the collapse of the Hohenzollern regime. On 9 November 1918, the Social Democrat Philip Scheidemann solemnly proclaimed the republic, speaking from the windows of the Reichstag at two o’clock in the afternoon. Two hours later, Karl Liebknecht addressed Berlin workers on the Charlottenburgplatz, announcing the advent of a socialist republic.⁵⁷ This situation of dual power – war had generated revolution, and revolution a civil war – could not endure. The crisis was expressed in armed confrontation in January 1919, following the dismissal of the Berlin prefect of police Emil Eichhorn, an Independent Socialist close to the Spartacists, whom the revolutionary movement had imposed on the government in the November days. The presence in the capital of a police chief who wanted not to restore order but overthrow it, who disavowed the government and placed himself at the service of the assembly of workers’ councils, embodied the rupture of the state monopoly of violence in postwar Germany. His refusal to resign triggered the Spartacist insurrection, improvised and isolated, and mercilessly crushed; its charismatic leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by the Freikorps, and Luxemburg’s body thrown into the Landwehrkanal.⁵⁸ In Berlin, the witch-hunt against authors of disturbance continued until March, claiming thousands of victims. Then it was the turn of Bavaria, where a republic of councils was established in spring 1919, after the assassination of the first republican president, Kurt Eisner. The leaders of this ephemeral regime were again executed, including the writer and literary critic Gustav Landauer, or condemned to long prison sentences, like the playwright Ernst Toller. Disturbances continued the following year, with an attempted putsch by the far right organized by Generals Lüttwitz and Ludendorff and fronted by a Prussian civil servant named Kapp. An insurrection was prepared in the course of 1923, when the Communists formed coalition governments with the left Social Democrats in Saxony and Thuringia, proceeding to arm the workers, but in the end this only erupted in Hamburg. Once again isolated, it was severely repressed.⁵⁹ At the same time, Hitler made his appearance on the public stage with his pitiful beer-hall putsch in Munich. All these events occurred against a background of disturbance and galloping inflation.

In November 1918 the Habsburg Empire also collapsed, its various national components separating to form independent states. This crisis led to a general strike in Vienna and the birth of a soviet republic in Hungary under the leadership of the Communist Béla Kun. This lasted for only four months. It was overthrown in spring 1919 by the intervention of a Romanian army (supported by France), which installed the dictatorship of Marshal Miklós Horthy. In Budapest as in Munich, anti-Communist repression provoked a bloodbath with a strongly anti-Semitic tinge. Horthy stayed in power until the end of the Second World War, during which his regime allied itself and collaborated with Nazi Germany. (Horthy even sent troops on his own initiative to take part in the war against the USSR.)⁶⁰

In Finland, whose proximity to the Soviet Union and embroilment in the Russian civil war exacerbated local conflicts, the White terror conducted a ferocious repression from 1918 onwards, with 20,000 ‘Reds’ executed in a country of only 3.1 million inhabitants.⁶¹ In the Baltic states, particularly Estonia, the civil war took on particularly deadly characteristics owing to the superimposition of political, social and national conflicts. The presence of different national groups (Estonians, Lithuanians, Russians, Polish, Germans and Jews) inflamed the struggles by creating an osmosis between class and race that prefigured the Nazi war against the USSR in 1941. The Germans had invaded the Baltic states in 1915 to colonize Latvia and Estonia, promising the volunteers in their expeditionary corps a rapid seizure of lands. In 1918 their war was transformed into an anti-Bolshevik struggle. General Goltz did not hide his project of ‘exterminating the intellectuals’ of the cities, identified with the Bolsheviks, and his troops were happy to call themselves Landsknechte, after the German mercenaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁶² Forced to retreat to Germany when the Baltic states gained independence, they strengthened the ranks of the Freikorps and took part in the Kapp putsch. According to the historian Dan Diner, it was in this context that a new and specifically racist variant of anti-Bolshevism was constituted.⁶³ Several Nazi leaders, including the ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, future minister of the Third Reich for the territories of the East, cut their teeth in Riga during the battles against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ of 1918–20.⁶⁴

The ‘symbiotic’ relationship between revolution and counterrevolution is a typical feature of the civil wars that broke out at the end of the Great War. Just as the French Revolution was forced in 1793 to defend itself on two fronts – internationally against the royalist coalition and internally against the Vendée reaction – so the Russian Revolution simultaneously waged a civil war against the Whites (Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel) and a defence against the British, French and Japanese military interventions. If war is a conflict against a foreign enemy and civil war a conflict within a state, the confrontation of revolution and counter-revolution combines the two. Robespierre had posed the question clearly back in December 1791: ‘What is the war that we can foresee? Is it a war of one nation against other nations, or of one king against other kings? No, it is the war of the enemies of the French Revolution against the French Revolution.’⁶⁵ The Bolsheviks similarly saw world revolution as the best defence of the Russian Revolution, creating the Communist International for this purpose in 1919. That is why one of the fundamental concerns of European diplomacy, at the negotiations that preceded the Versailles conference, was precisely to create a cordon sanitaire around the focus of revolution in Russia. The fundamental difference between the Congress of Vienna of 1815 and the Versailles conference a century later is that the former coincided with the restoration of the ancien régime, whereas the latter took place when the flames of revolution seemed to be spreading across Central Europe. If Talleyrand had been able to take part in the Congress of Vienna in the name of France, the powers that gathered in Paris in 1919 were unanimous in viewing Bolshevik Russia as a country that had fallen into the hands of a band of criminals and savages. Winston Churchill referred to the Bolsheviks as ‘enemies of the human race’; under their rule, civilization had almost completely disappeared ‘over gigantic areas’, while they were ‘hop[ping] and caper[ing] like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and corpses of their victims’.⁶⁶ The Russian revolutionaries, for their part, rejected the principle of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other nations as a legacy of bourgeois Europe, and their publication of secret treaties sowed terror among the forces of the Entente. According to Karl Radek, the world revolution required ‘the most energetic intervention in the affairs of the whole world’.⁶⁷ On their arrival at Brest-Litovsk, where they were to negotiate a separate peace with Germany, the leaders of the Soviet delegation, Trotsky and Joffe, began distributing leaflets to the German soldiers calling on them to disobey, under the stupefied gaze of the German delegation who came to meet them. The presence among the Soviet diplomats of Karl Radek, a Polish Jew and citizen of the Habsburg Empire, scandalized the German officers. His participation in the Soviet delegation had the object of showing that, before representing a nation, this represented the revolution, which knew no national enemies but only a class enemy.⁶⁸

In Russia, the civil war immediately took the form of a confrontation of European scope between revolution and counter-revolution, since the Bolsheviks counted on the spread of revolutionary uprising beyond Russian borders, while the White Guards enjoyed the military support of the Western powers.⁶⁹ The conflict acquired an international dimension right away. The Whites were financed, armed, equipped and often directly supported by Western military units – French and British in particular, but also Austrian, Czech, Romanian and Japanese. The Reds, for their part, were able to mobilize several hundred thousand ‘internationalists’, foreigners who fought on the side of the revolution: Chinese, Koreans, Hungarians, and even many Germans who found themselves in Russia as prisoners of war. In this context, different conflicts were telescoped together: a revolutionary war of the Soviet state against an international coalition, a class war between the urban proletariat and the industrial and aristocratic elite, a national war between Russians and non-Russian peoples, and finally a social war between town and country. These conflicts were particularly deadly. In the Ukraine, Wrangel’s army used anti-Semitism as a weapon against Bolshevik power; a wave of pogroms in 1919 claimed between 75,000 and 150,000 Jewish victims.⁷⁰ Kolchak, the leader of the Whites in western Siberia, proclaimed that his ‘first and fundamental goal is to wipe Bolshevism off the face of Russia, to exterminate and annihilate it’.⁷¹ The most sinister figure of the counter-revolution was undoubtedly Krasnov, the general who organized the revolt of the Don basin Cossacks after having been rather naively released by the Bolsheviks. His trajectory culminated in the Second World War, when he headed a Cossack unit incorporated into the Wehrmacht. He was executed by the Soviets in 1947.⁷² Makhno, the peasant leader often idealized by the anarchists, defended rural culture and tradition, but he also sought to ‘kill off the commissars and Yids’.⁷³ The Bolsheviks replied with terror, decreed on 6 September 1918 after the attacks that killed the Petrograd police chief, Moisei Uritsky, and wounded Lenin. The Soviet regime established its own organ of terror, the Cheka, which claimed more than 10,000 victims in 1918 alone.⁷⁴ In the Don region, the struggle against the ‘Cossack Vendée’ led to the death or deportation of more than 300,000 people, out of a population that was no more than 3 million.⁷⁵ Famine and the epidemics provoked by the war alone killed several million peasants. Social, political and national conflicts were often superimposed. The Cossacks established in the Ukraine the first White army that opposed the Bolsheviks and allied with the Germans, because their own preservation as a community was identified with the interests of a class of landowners. This complexity of the Russian civil war lies at the root of the divisions that cut across the counter-revolutionary front and contributed to its defeat. The abolition by Kolchak and Denikin of the Soviet decree that distributed land to the peasants cut off the Whites from their social base, and enabled the Bolsheviks to break their isolation in the countryside. In fact, this civil war was not fought only between the Red Army and the White Guards. A third actor played an essential role in it: the ‘Greens’, whose most famous armed force was that of the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno. These were peasant ‘armies’ opposed both to the Bolsheviks and to the counterrevolutionaries, swinging between the two and allying with one side or the other according to circumstances. The Bolsheviks prevailed because they were able to ‘neutralize’ the Greens and isolate the Whites, after having built, starting from chaos and disorder, a disciplined and ideologically resolute army, prepared to fight to the end in order to defend the Revolution. The Whites represented a failed regime, swept away in the cities in 1917 and isolated in the countryside, where the atavistic contempt of the aristocracy towards the peasants prevented them from winning the support of populations that were often suspicious of the Bolsheviks. The Greens, for their part, were condemned in advance, as they lacked a social project or national perspective. Between the Whites, who sought to restore a regime condemned by history, to murder the Bolsheviks and pillage the countryside, and the Greens, who hated the cities, it was the Reds who carried the day. These conflicts reached a provisional solution only in the early 1920s, thanks to the defeat of the counterrevolution. On the military level, the Red Army therefore won a victory over the Whites. On the socioeconomic level, the New Economic Policy appeased the peasants by reintroducing the market. On the national level, conflicts were defused partly by granting independence to the national minorities of the former empire (the Russian retreat from Poland, the independence of Finland and the Baltic states) and partly by military repression (the ‘Sovietization’ of the Caucasus). The Russian civil war reached its epilogue with the repression of Kronstadt, the naval fortress on the Baltic at the gates of Petrograd, which demanded ‘free soviets’ but which, in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, risked being transformed into a rallying point of the forces opposed to the Revolution. Its repression was sealed by the condemnation and execution of several thousand insurgents.⁷⁶

The Bolsheviks conceived civil war as a class confrontation, on both the domestic and international levels.⁷⁷ The price of this approach, which ignored the weight of the national question, would be very high. In 1920, the attempt to export revolution by military means led to a crushing defeat, when the Red Army’s advance was blocked at the gates of Warsaw by a Polish resistance that rose up against this new invasion by the old Russian oppressor.⁷⁸ The Bolsheviks’ internationalism was often perceived as a mask for Russian nationalism. The civil war, the Bolsheviks’ real ‘baptism of fire’,⁷⁹ led to a military view of the Revolution that left its mark on the whole history of Communism. Nolte was not mistaken in interpreting the foundation of the Communist International, in Moscow in March 1919, as the act of birth of a ‘party of world civil war’.⁸⁰ This was simply to register a fact that neither Lenin nor Trotsky would have challenged, and that the acts of the First Congress of the Comintern readily confirmed. Lenin had oriented himself in this direction in 1917, when he called for ‘transforming the imperialist war into a civil war’.⁸¹ These militarist features, however, were more the reflection of a catastrophic context – that of a civil war arising from the First World War – than the application of an ideological imperative. Ideology played its role, but it was refashioned in the context that made the international Communist movement a defending army for the threatened Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik experiment a model for revolution in Europe, and armed insurrection a normative paradigm.⁸²

In short, the confrontations that cut across Europe between 1918 and 1923 were no longer the expression of a conflict between nations, but a dialectic opposing revolution and counter-revolution, in which nationalisms were absorbed and redefined. The methods and practices of trench warfare were transferred into civil society, brutalizing its language and forms of struggle. In the postwar period, the ‘nationalization of the masses’ took on the features of a chauvinist, populist, radical, aggressive and anti-democratic movement, both modern and reactionary at the same time. In Berlin and Munich, as we saw, the Freikorps were the spearhead of the counterrevolution. In Italy, the advent of fascism was the result of a struggle between nationalists, who did not accept the ‘mutilated victory’, and the Arditi del Popolo, the free corps that had chosen to oppose Mussolini. Total war was not only the matrix of revolution but also that of fascism. Everywhere, political movements were militarized. In Weimar Germany, each party had its own militia, from the Nazi Assault Division (SA) to the Communist Red Front. The same was the case in the Austrian republic, where the end of democracy was marked, in February 1934, by a week of battles between the army and the Socialist militia (Schutzbund). Everywhere, including Paris and London, the nationalist right paraded in uniform. In many countries, the state monopoly of violence seemed to be widely challenged.

The confrontation that broke out in Spain in July 1936, with General Franco’s pronunciamiento against the republic, was inscribed in this context of tensions on the continental scale. It is true that its roots lay deep in the country’s history, but right from the start the national issues at stake were deeply imbricated with an international crisis of which Spain, which had until then remained on the margin, became the focus. In the words of one of its leading historians, Paul Preston, this was ‘the latest and fiercest battle in a European civil war which had been raging intermittently for the previous twenty years’.⁸³ This fact was not clear right away to all its protagonists, but they rapidly became aware of it. For Franco, it was the culmination of a long historical process in which ‘fatherland and anti-fatherland’ faced each other in a mortal combat whose only outcome could be the ‘triumph of pure and eternal principles against the bastards and anti-Spaniards’.⁸⁴ The ideologists of Francoism proclaimed a religious reading of the conflict that stigmatized the Republicans as the embodiment of evil. In Pamplona, the coup d’état was welcomed by a popular festival in which the Carlists flocked into the streets shouting ‘Viva Cristo Rey!’⁸⁵ For the poet J. M. Pemán, it was a battle between God and the Devil, St George and the dragon, St Michael and Satan, the flesh and the spirit.⁸⁶ It was a war between modernity and conservatism, in which the upholders of traditional Spain, Catholic and agrarian, confronted those of the modern Spain embodied by the Republic. It was a national war in which the imperial Castilian tradition was opposed by regional autonomies, particularly in Catalonia and the Basque country. It was also a class war of the urban proletariat and the peasantry against capital and landed property, accompanied by a political war between fascism and democracy. And there was a civil war within the civil war, since revolution and Stalinist order opposed one another within the Republican camp, crossing the threshold of armed confrontation in Barcelona in May 1937. Finally, it was a European war between democracy and fascism, or again between fascism and Communism, in which the Francoist camp was supported by Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, while the Soviet Union armed the Republican forces. The European dimension of the Spanish Civil War is very clearly illustrated by the presence of foreign troops on the battlefields. The Italian and German military intervention proved decisive. Fascist Italy sent 78,000 soldiers, Nazi Germany 19,000, and Salazar’s Portugal 10,000, on top of the 70,000 Moroccans who were part of the Francoist army. Italian and German support also assured the Francoists a crushing aerial superiority throughout the conflict. Isolated by Franco-British non-intervention, the Republican forces striving to reconstruct their army received the support of some 34,000 antifascists who came from across the world to fight in the International Brigades. The Soviet Union, whose shipments of arms and civilian goods came at the price of political control over the Republican government, exerted a direct influence thanks to the presence of its Comintern agents and 2,000 military advisers.⁸⁷ The international impact of this war was finally evidenced by the half a million exiles who were forced to leave their country in 1939.⁸⁸

The Spanish conflict gave birth to a new concept that found its way into everyday language: the ‘fifth column’. In November 1936, when Madrid was under siege by the fascist army, the nationalist General Mola was questioned by the press on his military formation, made up of four columns. He replied that his strategy banked above all on a ‘fifth column’, that of his supporters inside the besieged city. The ‘fifth column’ thus became synonymous with the ‘enemy within’.⁸⁹ By adopting a measure reminiscent of the French ‘law of suspects’ of 1793, the Republican government decided on the deportation of all those whose social position cast them as potential Franco supporters. Over 2,000 of these were executed in the outskirts of Madrid. To get an idea of the prevailing atmosphere in Spain during the conflict, we need only recall the words with which Captain Gonzalo de Aguilera, Franco’s press attaché, defined the objectives of his army to the American journalist John Whitaker: ‘Kill, kill and kill’ (matar, matar y matar) all the ‘Reds’, in order to liberate Spain from the ‘virus of Bolshevism’.⁹⁰ The number of victims testifies to the ferocity of this war. Historians give the following tally: 100,000 dead in combat, 10,000 dead from bombings, and 50,000 dead from disease and malnutrition caused by the conflict. The political repression, for its part, claimed 200,000 victims, at least three-quarters of these being objects of Francoist violence.⁹¹ The notion of ‘legal civil war’ could well be applied to the first decade of the Franco regime, which deployed violent repression against the defeated Republicans: 270,000 of these were interned in concentration camps.⁹²

If the Second World War in Central and Eastern Europe was essentially a war of self-defence and national liberation against German domination, in the Balkans and Italy the Resistance also took on characteristics of a civil war, as it did in France and Belgium to a lesser degree, given the speed of their liberation after the Allied landings. In Poland, where there was no collaborationist regime, this phenomenon was more limited. Here, there was an internal conflict within the Resistance, divided between nationalists, with their government-in-exile based in London, and Communists, a small minority but supported by the USSR, both groups having their own military organization. The linkage between this conflict and the ‘Jewish question’ – the place of anti-Semitism in the history of Polish nationalism, and the key role of Poland in the Nazi machine of extermination of the Jews – wove a tangled web that gives twentieth-century Polish history its particular character.⁹³

Italy remains an emblematic case for studying the civil wars during the Second World War. It is also the country where, in the last fifteen years, historical research has made the concept of civil war a central concern. From 8 September 1943, when Marshal Badoglio, appointed head of government by King Victor Emmanuel after the arrest of Mussolini, proclaimed an armistice with the Allied forces that had invaded the south of the peninsula, the Italian state collapsed. The army dissolved, after a few tragic attempts to resist the German forces that took control of the rest of the country. The continuity of the state was symbolically preserved by the monarchy, while Mussolini, freed by a German commando unit, proclaimed the creation of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), known as the republic of Salò after the name of its capital – committed to collaboration with the German occupiers. The conflict that broke out the same autumn between the Resistance and the forces of the RSI, accompanying the war between the Germans and the Allies, took the form of a civil war. Representatives of the RSI and the Resistance treated each other as traitors to the homeland. The Resistance did not represent a state, while neither the monarchy nor the Salò regime, lacking any legitimacy of their own, could exist without the Allied and German occupations, respectively. In these circumstances, the Resistance developed as a war of national liberation against the German occupiers, as a struggle for democracy against a totalitarian dictatorship, and – for its Communist and Socialist participants, who were the great majority – as a class war against the traditional elites who were identified with fascism.⁹⁴

As in Vichy France after 1940, the choice of collaboration – beyond the ideological motivations of its leading figures – was perceived by many people as the price to be paid for preserving a national state. However, cleavages were very rapidly defined in the conditions of occupation. For the fascists, this meant fidelity to the Mussolini regime and the rejection of democracy, above all Communism; for the resistenti, the antifascist struggle marked the beginning of a redefinition of national identity and a reconstruction of the country on new foundations. Many saw this as a new Risorgimento. The French case exhibits many similar features: a confrontation between the Vichy regime and the armed Resistance, in the context of a war between the German occupation forces and the Allied troops who had landed in June and August 1944. Two elements prevented this confrontation from taking the form of a full-scale civil war: on one hand, the rapidity of the Allied advance, which liberated the country in a matter of months; on the other hand, the presence within the Anglo-American forces of a French military contingent that enabled General de Gaulle to proclaim the return of the republic upon his arrival in Paris. In strictly military terms, both résistants and collaborators accordingly remained small minorities: the underground forces amounted to some 50,000 fighters in January 1944, the fascist milice to 4,000 in the northern zone and some 30,000 in the south, of whom no more than half were truly operational. This created, according to Olivier Wieviorka, ‘a climate of civil war’, but not enough to ‘place France in a configuration of civil war’.⁹⁵ The Vichy regime, proclaimed four years before by Marshal Pétain, who had been entrusted with full powers by what remained of the Third Republic, was declared null and void. There then began a long phase of psychological repression which, seen from several decades later, turned out to be only one stage in a persistent syndrome. Quarrels in France over the Vichy period, ‘a past that doesn’t pass away’,⁹⁶ appear from this perspective as expressions of the memory of a civil war that was unable to develop but for which all the prerequisites existed.

In the Balkans as well, the Resistance took the form of a war of national liberation, a class war and a civil war. The first of these was waged against a particularly ferocious and deadly Italian and German occupation: Yugoslavia mourned 1.7 million victims at the end of hostilities. The second opposed a movement with a worker and peasant base, led by the Communists, to the urban elites and large landowners. The third was between the Resistance and the collaborationists – including the Croatian Ustashe of Ante Pavelić – as well as within the Resistance itself, between nationalists loyal to the monarchy (the Serbian Chetniks) and the Communists (the multi-ethnic movement led by Tito, as well as the Albanian resistance movement). The latter managed to build up a genuine army, the most powerful military force of the Resistance in Europe, and the only one that managed to take power without the intervention of the Red Army or the Anglo-American forces.⁹⁷ Smothered during the Titoist period, the memory of these internal Yugoslav conflicts arose again in 1989, giving rise to a new civil war. This was the brutal and bloody legacy of a drama that seemed to have reached its epilogue in 1945, but which had in fact only been suspended.

An emblematic case of interaction between total war and civil war is that of Greece, where several conflicts were also linked together.⁹⁸ This was initially a national liberation struggle against the German and Italian occupation forces, coupled with a civil war between the Resistance and the Greek fascists who chose the path of collaboration (1940–44), basing themselves on the state apparatus inherited from the regime of General Metaxas. But it was also a civil war between the two components of the Resistance: the Communists who led the Popular Army of National Liberation (ELAS), and the nationalists loyal to the exiled monarchy and supported by the British forces who invaded the country in October 1944, seeking to promote the return of King George II. This conflict, which was latent during the first phase of the Italian and German occupation, broke out in the open in the summer of 1944. The Communists, a large majority within the Resistance, renounced taking power, both because of the Allied military presence and because of their international isolation, Greece falling outside the Soviet sphere of influence under the agreement made between Stalin and Churchill. This civil war had a tragic resurgence between 1946 and 1949, in the context of the Cold War, and ended with the final defeat of the Communists.

The Spanish Civil War thus appears in many respects as prefiguring the far wider conflict that broke out in Europe just a few months after Franco’s victory proclamation. The Second World War was a total war in which several parallel wars again interacted: first of all, a war between the great powers competing for the control of geopolitical territories; then a war of self-defence by the USSR, threatened with destruction by National Socialism; and finally a war of national liberation waged in the countries occupied by the Axis powers, and within this context, a civil war of the Resistance against the collaborationist regimes.⁹⁹ It was also a total war between competing visions of the world and models of civilization. Franco’s anti-Communist campaign now assumed the gigantic dimensions of a war of annihilation against the USSR, which Hitler viewed as a ‘crusade’ (Glaubenskrieg) and a ‘racial war’ (Rassenkrieg), in which ‘Aryans’ fought to impose their order against Slavs and Jews. Nazism sought to reorganize Europe on a racial basis. The genocide of the Jews, perpetrated between the start of its military offensive against the USSR in June 1941 and the end of the war, lay at the heart of a double project of Nazi policy: on the one hand, conquest of Lebensraum by the German colonization of Slav territories; on the other, the destruction of Communism. In the Nazi vision of the world, Slavs and Communism were identified with a state controlled by a Jewish elite. The colonization of Lebensraum, destruction of Communism and extermination of the Jews were thus combined in a single war of conquest and extermination. It is true that anti-Semitism formed the ideological and cultural background of this genocide, its indispensable foundation, but it was only in the context of a total war aimed at reshaping the map of Europe that it was able to mutate into a policy of extermination.

Of course, the various steps of this intricate sequence were neither always foreseeable nor systematically planned. Agency played a crucial role in the history of the European civil war. In many cases, its shifts were the result of miscalculations by their actors. Operation Barbarossa was probably the biggest mistake of both Stalin and Hitler. The Russian dictator had not ignored the aggressive ambitions of his German partner; but neither had he paid attention to the rumours of an imminent offensive, which seemed to him nothing but British propaganda, and his initial passivity led the USSR to the edge of defeat. Hitler fell into the trap of his own ideology – his vision of the Slavic peoples as an ‘inferior race’ – and made a fatal mistake in thinking that he could destroy his enemy in a few months: the failure of his offensive would be decisive for the evolution of the conflict. When he launched his blitzkrieg on the Eastern front, the Nazi dictator pursued four main objectives: a quick collapse of the USSR; a planned famine designed to affect 30 million people from the winter of 1941 onwards; a huge plan for the German colonization of the western territories of the USSR (Ostplan); and the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question, entailing the massive displacement of the European Jews towards the most remote regions of the conquered territories, where they would be steadily eliminated. The failure of Hitler’s blitzkrieg, however, compelled him to change his plan, modifying its hierarchy of goals. The ‘final solution’, whose completion was foreseen at the end of the conflict, suddenly became a priority, as the only objective that could be immediately accomplished. Since they could not be deported to the eastern Soviet territories, the Jews were exterminated, while the Slavic peoples were submitted to a form of slavery. Auschwitz, a crucial centre of the Polish railways network, was to have been the starting-point for the colonization of the German Lebensraum; it became the terminus for the deported Jews and one of the main sites of their annihilation. Five out of six victims of the Holocaust, however, were killed in territories to the east of Auschwitz. The extermination camps were inseparable from the war against the partisans, from the famine inflicted on the Slavic peoples, and from the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war (2.4 million dead out of 3 million captured by December 1941).¹⁰⁰

The specific characteristics of the Holocaust – a genocide perpetrated at the heart of the Second World War, but which did not simply follow from its internal logic – need to be emphasized. If the war in the East, radicalized by all the tensions it condensed, made it possible to unleash the wave of extermination against the Jews, the Shoah became steadily more autonomous, to the point of constituting an intrinsic aim of Nazi policy. The conquest of Lebensraum and the annihilation of Bolshevism do not explain the deportation to Auschwitz of Jews from Salonika or Corfu; nor does the context of military operations, especially after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943. But this does not make the war between 1941 and 1945 a ‘parenthesis’ in the twentieth century. In the context of the war, the Holocaust certainly revealed a specific dynamic bound up with the Nazi project of racial domination, but its premises were inscribed in the longue durée of European and German history.¹⁰¹ Despite its specific features, the Nazi war against the Jews belonged to this European and global civil war. While it would be wrong to try and deny its singularity, diluting it in the totality of violence of the war, it would be equally absurd to isolate it from this global context, which was its soil and its detonator. So it is not a question of confusing a genocide with a civil war – in the case of the Holocaust, the victims were not belligerents and the executioners possessed the monopoly of violence – nor of seeing the two as linked by a relationship of cause and effect, but of situating it in its historical context. The European civil war created a series of conditions without which the Holocaust could have been neither conceived nor perpetrated.

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1This is the verdict of Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Henry Rousso, Anne Dumézil and Christian Ingrao in their bibliographical essay, ‘Les sociétés, la guerre et la paix (Europe, Russie/URSS, États-Unis, Japon) 1911–1946’, Historiens & Géographes 383 (2003), p. 155. For a reconstitution of the concept’s genealogy, see Claudio Pavone, ‘La Deuxième Guerre mondiale: Europe et guerre civile européenne’, in Pietro Causarano, Valeria Galimi and Frédéric Fredji, eds, Le XXe siècle des guerres (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2004), pp. 472–85, and Gian Enrico Rusconi, ‘La “guerra civile europea” e le sue conseguenze per l’idea di nazione e di Europa’, in Se cessiamo di essere una nazione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), pp. 101–23.

2Cited in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Bantam, 1989), p. 94. Emphasis in original.

3Ernst Jünger, ‘Die totale Mobilmachung’, Politische Publizistik 1919–1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001 [1931]), p. 559.

4Ibid., p. 572.

5Ernst Jünger, The Paris Diaries (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1992).

6Ibid.

7Karl Löwith, ‘Der europäische Nihilismus. Betrachtung zur geistigen Vorgeschichte des europäischen Krieges’, Sämtliche Schriften (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 473–540. On this text of Löwith, see Enrico Donaggio, Una sobria inquietudine. Karl Löwith e la filosofia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004), pp. 90–7.

8Löwith, ‘Der europäische Nihilismus’, p. 479.

9Ibid., p. 498.

10Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Munich: Herbig Verlag, 1997).

11Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: New American Library, 1963), pp. 20–1.

12Ibid., p. 406.

13Ibid., p. 540. Nolte took his concept of ‘transcendence’ from Heidegger, whose student he had been. See Volker Kronenberg, Ernst Nolte und das totalitäre Zeitalter. Versuch einer Verständigung (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1999), pp. 85–103; Hans-Christoph Kraus, ‘L’historiographie philosophique d’Ernst Nolte’, La Pensée politique, 1994, p. 64; Martin Kitchen, ‘Ernst Nolte and the Phenomenology of Fascism’, Science and Society 38: 2 (1974), p. 139. On Heidegger’s concept of ‘transcendence’, see Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reason (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1969).

14Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism.

15See Kraus, ‘L’historiographie philosophique d’Ernst Nolte’, p. 64.

16Ernst Nolte, Nietzsche und der Nietzscheanismus (Berlin: Propyläen, 1990), pp. 192ff.

17Ibid., p. 276.

18Nolte, Streitpunkte, p. 357.

19See Richard Herzinger, ‘Totalitäre Dynamik’, Die Zeit 24 (2000), p. 42.

20Nolte, Streitpunkte, pp. 93, 290.

21Nolte, Nietzsche, p. 122. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009), p. 20.

22Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999), pp. 21–5; Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 10ff; Giorgio Galasso, Storia d’Europa. III Età contemporanea (Bari/Rome: Laterza, 1996), pp. 131ff.

23Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 267.

24Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 144. The concept of ‘European civil war’ had already been used by Isaac Deutscher in Unfinished Revolution, p. 73.

25A similar approach, though lacking in context and restricted to interpreting this conflict in the field of the history of ideas, is that of Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

26Furet, Passing of an Illusion, p. 35.

27Ibid., p. 20.

28Frederick Engels, ‘Introduction to Borkheim’s pamphlet In Memory of the German Blood-and-Thunder Patriots, 1806–1807’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, vol. 26 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), p. 446ff. See on this subject Gilbert Achcar, ‘Engels, penseur de la guerre, penseur de la révolution’, in Georges Labica and Mireille Delbraccio, eds, Friedrich Engels, savant et révolutionnaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 139–60.

29See Michael Howard, ‘A Thirty Years’ War? The Two World Wars in Historical Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society III (1993), p. 171. On the Thirty Years’ War as a ‘total war’, see Roger Chickering, ‘Total War: The Use and Abuses of a Concept’, in Manfred F. Boemecke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds, Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences 1871–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 13–28.

30See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2005 [1919]).

31Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution: Totalitarianism in the Age of International Civil War (London: Pall Mall, 1965 [1942]), p. 260.

32Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), p. 202.

33Alfred Rosenberg, Völkischer Beobachter, 1 September 1942, and Der Weltkampf und die Weltrevolutionen unserer Zeit (Munich: F. Eher, 1944), cited by Michael Geyer, ‘Urkatastrophe, europäische Bürgerkrieg, Menschenschlachthaus. Wie Historiker den Epochenbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges Sinn geben’, in Rainer Rother, ed., Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918. Ereignis und Erinnerung (Berlin: Minerva, 2004), p. 29.

34De Gaulle’s speech is cited in Antoine Prost and Jay Winter, Penser la Grande Guerre. Un essai d’historiographie (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 33. Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (New York: Rosetta, 2012 [1948]), p. xiii.

35See Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection, (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 1997), pp. 203–4.

36For a comparison between the two ‘thirty years’ wars’, that of the seventeenth century and that of the twentieth, see in particular Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History (New York: Pantheon, 1990), pp. 31ff, which draws on the classic work edited by Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge, 1984).

37Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell 1994), pp. 387ff.

38Roman Schnur, ‘Weltfriedensidee und Weltbürgerkrieg 1791–1792’, in Revolution und Weltbürgerkrieg. Studien zur Ouverture nach 1789 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1983).

39Maximilien Robespierre, ‘Draft Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,’ in Virtue and Terror (London: Verso, 2007), p. 68. The importance of this speech in the genesis of the concept of a ‘European civil war’ is underlined in Wilhelm Janssen, ‘Krieg’, in Reinhart Koselleck, ed., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), vol. 3, p. 588.

40Cited in Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘Introduction: The Manifesto of a Counter-Revolution’, in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 61–2.

41Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et Révolution. Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 119.

42Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]), p. 3.

43Henry Stuart Hughes, Contemporary Europe: A History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1961), p. 6.

44James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (revised by Gordon Martel) (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), p. 51.

45Ibid., p. 54.

46Cited in Georges Haupt, ‘Guerre ou révolution? L’Internationale et l’Union sacrée en août 1914’, in L’Historien et le movement social (Paris: Maspero, 1980), pp. 203–4.

47Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘1914: vers la guerre de Trente Ans? La disparition d’un ordre européen’, in Pierre Chaunu, ed., Les Enjeux de la paix. Nous et les autres, xviiie-xxie siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), p. 80.

48Jacques Bainville, ‘Les conséquences politiques de la paix’ (1919), in John Maynard Keynes and Jacques Bainville, Les Conséquences économiques de la paix, suivi de: Les consequences politiques de la paix (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). See Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘Le concert européen, de Vienne à Locarno’, in Georges-Henri Soutou and Jean Bérender, eds, L’Ordre européen du xvie au xxe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), pp. 117–36.

49John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Penguin, 1995 [1920]), p. 7.

50Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 105.

51See Howard, ‘A Thirty Years’ War?’, pp. 183–4.

52See in particular Noberto Bobbio, ‘Kant e la Rivoluzione francese’, in L’età dei diritti (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), pp. 143–55.

53Karl Kraus, The Last Days of Mankind (New York: F. Ungar, 1974).

54Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. xvi.

55Fernand Braudel, ‘La longue durée’ (1958), in Écrits sur l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), p. 48.

56See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Nikolai D. Kondratiev, The Long Waves in Economic Life (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010); Leon Trotsky, The First Five Years of the Communist International (London: New Park, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 133–8. On Kondratiev and Trotsky, see Joshua S. Goldstein, ‘Kondratieff Waves as War Cycles’, International Studies Quarterly 29: 4 (1985), pp. 411–44, and Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 108ff.

57Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre des klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 13–15.

58Pierre Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 256.

59Ibid., pp. 809ff.

60On the repression of the council republic in Bavaria, see the collection of contemporary testimonies in Tankred Dorst, ed., Die Münchner Räterepublik. Zeugnisse und Kommentar (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), and especially the autobiography of Ernst Toller, Ein Jugend in Deutschland (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963). On the counter-revolution in Hungary, see István Deák, ‘Budapest and the Hungarian Revolution’, Slavonic and East European Review XLVI: 106 (1968), pp. 130ff; on Horthy’s career, see István Deák, ‘A Fatal Compromise? The Debate over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary’, in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, eds, The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 39–73. For a more general approach, see F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972).

61See Anthony F. Upton, The Finnish Revolution 1917–1918 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). See also Julián Casanova, ‘Guerras civiles, revoluciones y contrarevoluciones en Finlandia, España y Grecia (1918–1949): un análisis comparado’, in Julián Casanova, ed., Guerras civiles en el siglo XX (Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias, 2001), pp. 1–28.

62Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes 1917–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), p. 172.

63Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen, p. 53.

64See on this subject Ernst von Salomon’s memoir The Outlaws (Germantown, NY: Periodicals Service Company, 1985).

65Cited in Julien Freund, L’essence du politique (Paris: Dalloz, 2004), p. 578.

66Letter to Lloyd George of 15 February 1999, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, 1916–1922 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 246.

67Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 20.

68See Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (London: Verso, 2003), Chapter 11.

69On the Russian civil war, the work of reference remains Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1891–1924 (London: Penguin, 1998), especially Chapters 12 and 13.

70See Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 160–3.

71Cited in Jean-Jacque Marie, La Guerre civile russe, 1917–1922 (Paris: Autrement, 2005), p. 99.

72Ibid., pp. 19, 234.

73Ibid., p. 126.

74See Nicolas Werth, ‘Un État contre son people. Violences, repressions, terreur en Union soviétique’, in Stéphane Courtois, ed., Le Livre noir du communisme (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997), p. 91.

75Ibid., p. 117.

76Ibid., pp. 127–9. See also Paul Avrich, La Tragédie de Cronstadt (Paris: Seuil, 1975), and especially Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

77Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 70.

78Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army (London: New Park Publications, 1978), pp. 121ff; Deutscher, Prophet Armed, Chapter 13.

79Fitzpatrick, Russian Revolution, p. 72.

80Ernst Nolte, Die europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolshewismus (Berlin: Propyläen, 1985).

81See Georges Haupt, ‘Guerre et revolution chez Lénine’, L’Historien et le mouvement social (Paris: Maspero, 1980), pp. 237–66. See also Étienne Balibar, ‘Le moment philosophique determiné par la guerre dans la politique: Lénine 1914–1916’, in Philippe Soulez, ed., Les Philosophes et la guerre de 14 (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1988), pp. 105–20.

82See Marco Revelli, Oltre il Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), p. 16.

83Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (London: Harper, 2007), p. 136. Eric Hobsbawm, for his part, defines the Spanish Civil War as a ‘miniature version of a European war’ (Age of Extremes, p. 161).

84Cited in Alberto Reig Tapia, ‘Les inspirateurs du mal: communistes, juifs et individus de la meme engeance’, in Jean-Clément Martin, ed., La Guerre civile entre histoire et mémoire (Nantes: Université de Nantes-Ouest Éditions, 1994), p. 104.

85Paul Preston, Franco (London: Fontana, 1995), Chapter 6.

86Cited in Enrique Moradiellos, ‘Ni gesta heroica, ni locura tragica: nuevas perspectivas históricas sobre la guerra civil’, Ayer. Revista de historia contemporanea 50 (2003), p. 14.

87See ibid., pp. 199–232.

88Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (London: Fontana, 1996), Chapter 9.

89See Gabriele Ranzato, ‘Le Guerra civile spagnola nella storia contemporanea della violenza’, in Gabriele Ranzato, ed., Guerre fratricide. Le guerre civili in età contemporanea (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994), pp. 280–1.

90Cited in Julián Casanova, ‘Una dictadura de cuarenta años’, in Julián Casanova, ed., Morir, matar, sobrevivir. La violencia en la dictadura de Franco (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002), p. 11.

91See Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 526–40; see also, taking into account the most recent research, Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (London: HarperCollins, 2012).

92See Casanova, ‘Una dictadura de cuarenta años’, p. 20.

93Jan T. Gross, ‘A Tangled Web: Confronting Stereotypes Concerning Relations Between Poles, Germans, Jews and Communists’, in Deák et al., Politics of Retribution in Europe, pp. 74–130.

94See Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance (London: Verso, 2014), Chapter 6.

95See Olivier Wieviorka, ‘Guerre civile à la française? Le cas des années sombres (1940–1945)’, Vingtième Siècle 85 (2005), p. 10. See also Philippe Burin, La France à l’heure allemande 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 453.

96See Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passé qui ne passé pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994).

97On the history of the Yugoslav Resistance, see the memoirs of Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

98See Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941–44 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

99On the Second World War as a fusion of several wars, see Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War (London: Verso, 1986), p. 45, and Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2009).

100See Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 215.

101See Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York: New Press, 2003).

TWO

The Anatomy of Civil War

Anomie

From Machiavelli to Clausewitz, all theorists of war have seen armed conflict as closely linked to politics. War challenges the forms, limits and principle of sovereignty, thus directly affecting the very nature of the state as its material embodiment. The notion of bellum justum, with its distinction between aggressive and defensive war, dates from Antiquity, but the first formulations of a modern law of war only appear at the time of the Wars of Religion. According to Grotius and Pufendorf, who analysed it in secular terms, no longer as a theological conflict but a struggle ‘in defence of oneself and one’s possessions’, in which the issues at stake are power and material interests, war is simply a conflict between states. Nevertheless, by making it part of a theory of natural law, they conceived it as a means for realizing justice: its goal was not the destruction of the enemy but the establishment of an equitable peace.¹ From the Middle Ages, war has had its rules, concerning both the right to declare it (jus ad bellum) and the right way to conduct it (jus in bello). On the one hand, war can be declared only by a legitimate authority, it must be based on a ‘just cause’ (for instance, defence against aggression or the righting of a wrong), it must not hide intentions opposed to natural law and, finally, it must be necessary. (In other words, it is justified only after exhausting all peaceful means for resolving a conflict.) On the other hand, war needs a set of rules shared by all belligerents. They must respect the rights of prisoners (above all their right to life) and spare civilians, not making them into military targets (as established by Geneva Convention in 1864, and confirmed by the various Hague treaties from 1907 onwards). Above all, the force used must be proportionate to the injustice suffered, otherwise a just war is denatured by illegitimate motives of vengeance or oppression.

The law of war was just one aspect of the jus publicum europaeum, marking the advent of a codified system of relations between states possessing the monopoly of legitimate violence within their respective territories.² The notion of bellum justum allowed for that of sovereignty, which presupposed the inviolability of the power of the state within its frontiers. For a theorist of absolutism such as Emer de Vattel, war is always legitimate – in his terms, ‘regular’ or ‘regulated’ – providing it is declared.³ In other words, a war is now ‘just’ not because of its aims but because of its conduct. Its legitimacy no longer lies in its theological, ethical or political motivations, but simply in the nature of the belligerents; no matter what their motives, these must be recognized states, the only possessors of the jus ad bellum.⁴ What becomes illegitimate now is civil war, so kings and princes may use their right to wage war in order to avert the risks of internal sedition. In his anthropomorphic metaphor of the state – as an artificial, terrestrial, and consequently mortal god – Hobbes compares civil war to a sickness that strikes the human body and weakens it to the point of killing it.⁵ The subjects, for their part, recognize the sovereign’s right to wage war against a foreign enemy in exchange for peace and security. This is the underlying assumption of the absolutist state. The sovereign claims the privilege of declaring war on his neighbours, but at the same time takes responsibility for protecting his subjects. One of the first theorists of modern sovereignty, Jean Bodin, did not hesitate to praise the virtues of war as a safety-valve for internal conflicts and the last resort for avoiding a civil war. ‘The best way of preserving a state, and guaranteeing it against sedition, rebellion, and civil war’, he wrote in his Six Books of the Commonwealth, is ‘to find an enemy against whom [the people] can make common cause.’⁶

Once it is banned within the state, war can be directed against an external enemy, while respecting its specific rules. This conception is implicit in the famous formula with which Clausewitz opens his treatise: ‘War is nothing but a duel (Zweikampf) on a larger scale.’⁷ On close examination, in fact, the social practice of duelling, which was widespread among aristocratic strata up until 1914, reveals a growing adaptation to law and the internalization of certain shared norms in the use of violence. Duelling was essentially reserved to social elites, excluding subaltern classes, women and, in Germany, a stigmatized minority such as Jews. It was conceived as a ritualized and codified confrontation aiming at repairing an injury or offence, according to the principle of ‘ability to give satisfaction’ (Satisfaktionsfähigkeit). Its aim was not the death of the adversary, even if this was not excluded, but rather respect for a code of honour, the distinctive mark of belonging to a social elite. In duelling with the sword, it was the custom throughout the nineteenth century to stop the combat ‘at the first drop of blood’.⁸ In duelling with pistols, an attempt was made to make bullets less dangerous. According to Alfred d’Almbert, author of a Physiologie du duel, published in Paris in 1853, the custom was to load pistols in such a way that the bullet ‘could injure, but superficially, without penetrating beyond the skin and provoking the horrible wounds that render the use of firearms so dreadful’. The practice of duels was thus able to benefit from the inventions of gunsmiths, who began to produce ‘pistols that wound a little but never kill’.⁹ Of course, duellists were ready to die, wrote their wills before fighting, and prepared for flight in case of a fatal result of the confrontation. But in most cases, according to historian Ute Frevert, ‘duelling had the features of a society game that took place in front of a crowd’.¹⁰ Using swords or pistols chosen in advance under the control of witnesses, duellers were gentlemen who recognized one another as legitimate adversaries, able to fight each other following a tradition of chivalry, with shared norms. Witnesses played the role of lawyers in the negotiations that preceded the duel, became judges during the confrontation, and afterwards wrote a report that might be presented in court if need arose. According to the historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney, this growing ‘legalization’ of duelling converted it into a social practice de facto recognized by the law.¹¹ In Germany, within the army it was more than tolerated. Prussian law legitimated it by considering it as a kind of ‘customary law’, useful for preserving the sense of honour within the military caste.¹² Rather than representing a feudal survival, as Gabriel Tarde interpreted it, or a symbol of Germany’s ‘special path’ (Sonderweg), as it was for Norbert Elias,¹³ duelling was a constitutive element in the civilizing process – the self-control and normative regulation of conflicts – embodied by the ‘persisting’ ancien régime throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁴ In other words, its highly formalized code reproduced within civil society the norms of war fixed by the jus publicum europaeum.

A similar evolution can be seen in sport, as shown by the creation of the modern Olympic games. On the eve of the First World War, their founder, Pierre de Coubertin, proposed that the great powers should replace military conflicts with sporting competitions in which the victory of the strongest would arouse the admiration and respect of the losers. On the basis of shared rules, these could have their revenge in the next games.¹⁵ In 1914, however, the Olympics were suspended and duelling went into decline. The code of honour that inspired it did not survive the advent of total war.

In the summer of 1914, the principles of the jus publicum europaeum seemed still self-evident when the Sarajevo assassination generated a frenetic diplomatic ballet in which all the continent’s chancelleries were involved.¹⁶ Initially, the Austro-Hungarian Empire simply wished to teach Serbia a lesson, with the approval of its German ally; it had no intention of provoking a world war. Russian intervention on the side of Serbia indirectly awakened the tensions between Germany and France, because of their military alliances. England, for its part, was the ally of France and could not stay passive in the face of a potential shift in the continental balance of power, with the risk of the emergence of German hegemony. One year later, putting an end to its neutrality, Italy tried to exploit the new situation by conquering territories with an Italian majority that belonged to its Austrian former ally. Finally, the United States entered the conflict, concerned for the economic viability of its indebted European allies and aware of its new role as international arbiter. The assassination by a Serbian nationalist was thus the spark that set light to a conflict that burned a whole continent. Leaving aside its deeper causes, about which historical debate still continues, the Great War was neither foreseen nor wished for by its actors. It was provoked by the running out of control of a diplomatic machine that had been built up over the years as the expression of a European dynastic and ‘civilized’ order, but no longer corresponded to the real situation. Of course, the Great War had its causes, about which historical debate still rumbles – scholars prefer to speak of premises or conditions rather than deterministic ‘causes’ – but it was neither foreseen nor intended by its actors. According to Christopher Clark, the most reputed historian of the origins of the Great War, those responsible for the conflict ‘were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world’.¹⁷

Nobody among those responsible for the conflict had foreseen armies of millions of men bogged down for years in the trenches; nobody had imagined chemical weapons, heavy artillery bombardments, destroyed towns and serial killings by machine-gun fire. Their mental equipment and cultural references remained tied to the European experience of the nineteenth century, with its ‘civilized’ wars between ancien régime states that paid each other mutual respect. During the Great War, on the contrary, the perception of the adversary as a legitimate enemy was quickly replaced by the crusade to destroy him. At Christmas 1914, fighting was suspended for a one-day truce. Several photos show German officers and soldiers fraternizing with their British and French homologues in the no-man’s-land between the enemy lines. This ephemeral brotherhood indicates that they respected each other as legitimate enemies.¹⁸ In the following years, such events were not repeated. The war was transformed into a conflict between peoples, nations and civilizations, taking every possible meaning except that of a confrontation between combatants who respected one another. Jus in bello was rapidly buried, first by the German violation of Belgian and Luxembourg neutrality, then by violation of the neutrality of the sea, the blockade against the Central Powers, the bombing of towns and internment of civilians. At Ypres, in April 1915, with the first gas attack by German troops, the law of war became a memory of a bygone age.

A movie like La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece realized in 1937, pointed out this shift from ‘civilized’ to ‘civil’ war. It romantically depicted the friendship between the French Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and the German officer von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), whose reciprocal loyalty and admiration was the mirror of a dynastic and aristocratic conception of war that would not survive the trauma of 1914–18. It is in accomplishing their respective military duties that Boeldieu tries to escape from his imprisonment and Rauffenstein kills him; but at the moment of his enemy’s death he asks to be pardoned: he did not wish to kill Boeldieu, simply to wound him, but it was dark and he failed. The movie shows that these enemies shared many common values – above all the sense of honour – that were certainly higher and deeper than the reasons behind their war. By 1918, this noble and humanist vision of war was over.

From Machiavelli to Rousseau, many philosophers criticized the theory of the ‘just war’ from various points of view, revealing its ambiguities and hidden ideological purposes. Since the implicit corollary of the jus publicum europaeum was the view of the non-Western world as a space open to colonization, wars of conquest and even colonial massacres ipso facto became just wars in the name of natural law. (In other words, in the name of trade, circulation and property – the appropriation of lands and goods that were supposedly waiting, as Tocqueville wrote, for their ‘legitimate owners’.) Conceived as enterprises of conquest (and often also of extermination) in which European armies were confronted not with other regular armies but with tribes and combatants without a well-defined status from the point of view of the conquerors, colonial wars did not distinguish between soldiers and civilians. In this respect, the massacres that accompanied the history of colonialism provided a model for the total wars of the twentieth century. Of course, colonial wars were not civil wars, since the opposing forces were quite remote from one another both politically and culturally. They were certainly not conflicts within a single community, yet they presented many features typical of a civil war. Civil war is not a conflict between states, but a breakdown of order within a state no longer able to impose its monopoly of violence. The enemy parties are not two regular armies but two factions within one and the same state, only one of which possesses a legal status, so that the distinction between civilian and combatant becomes highly problematic. The laws of war no longer apply if the enemies are not states but belong to the same community, whose law they no longer recognize. As a consequence, the figure of the ‘legitimate enemy’ (justis hostis) disappears. The internal rebel of civil war, like the criminal or the indigenous rebel of colonial wars, is an outlaw with whom no compromise is possible.¹⁹

The oldest description of this type of conflict is that given by Thucydides. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, he describes the civil war that broke out in 427 BCE on the island of Corcyra (Corfu), when the Athenians arrived and drove the Peloponnesians to take flight. It was an eruption of hate, writes Thucydides, in which ‘general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity’ were abolished and replaced by violence and depravity.²⁰ During this crisis, ‘the Corcyraeans were engaged in butchering those of their fellow citizens whom they regarded as their enemies’. ‘Death’, Thucydides adds, ‘raged in every shape; and, as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants dragged from the altar or slain upon it; while some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.’²¹ Thucydides does not stop with a phenomenological description. He also underlines the psychological changes it induces in the actors of a civil war, who kill under the impulse of a hatred unknown in normal times, turning the order of things and mentalities upside down: ‘Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.’²²

Such descriptions, with the same feelings and states of mind, could perfectly be applied to twentieth-century civil wars. One of the most acute and fascinating observers here, being both a writer and a militant, was doubtless Victor Serge. In his diary notes, written in Petrograd in spring 1919 and collected under the title ‘The city in danger’, he captured the deep essence of civil war as a conflict between two factions of a lacerated society: a conflict driven only by violence, where no compromise is possible. ‘It is impossible to understand anything of the history of the civil war’, he writes, ‘without picturing these two opposing forces, mingled together, sharing the same life, rubbing shoulders in the thoroughfares of the cities with the constant, clear recognition that one side would have to kill the other.’²³ Fear, insecurity, hatred, and the will to eliminate the enemy, drive the actors of civil war, fuelling them with the energy needed for fighting. In this war, every principle of humanity is banished from both sides. ‘If Red Commissars, militants or commandants are taken by surprise they are invariably shot. For our part we don’t spare former officers, or non-commissioned officers of any sort. War to death with no humanitarian hypocrisy; there is no Red Cross and stretcher-bearers are not allowed. Primitive warfare, war of extermination, civil war.’²⁴ Such a context, Serge concludes, can only lead to terror, in which, rather than in government policy, he sees a state of mind of the belligerents: ‘The law is: kill or to be killed … The air is permeated with a vague smell of blood, creating among us a state of mind in which terror cannot fail to grow. We can sense the approach of terror just as before thunderstorms you can feel the air charged with electricity.’²⁵

In short, a civil war is always made up of atrocities and horrors. Serge perceives one of its features in the emotional overinvestment of its protagonists. The sense of accomplishing a duty could inspire the volunteers of 1914, but it is not enough for committing oneself to a civil war, which always occasions a mixture of juridical anomie and emotional plenitude, both pushed to the extreme, as if the vacuum created by the demise of norms were filled by a new existential content. Combat is no longer legitimized, let alone regulated, by law, but by higher moral and political convictions that have to be defended to the end in the most intransigent way, at the price of the life of the enemy – an enemy who is close at hand and known – and, if necessary, at the price of sacrificing oneself. The values filling this space of anomie can be the most noble or the most abject, sometimes a mixture of both: liberation, justice, equality, human dignity, freedom from oppression, but also vengeance, racism, exacerbated nationalism, religious fanaticism.

Carl Schmitt’s definition of civil war in his highly controversial text Ex captivitate salus (1949) remains a classic. It deserves consideration despite its place in a highly debatable apologia, in which he tries to explain his involvement with the Nazi regime. ‘Civil war is particularly cruel’, Schmitt writes, being ‘carried on inside a political community including the enemy, and within the same juridical Order.’ Each party considers the enemy as an outlaw: ‘They suppress the right of the adversary, but they do that in the name of law.’ In this way, he adds, civil war establishes a particular relationship, ‘specifically dialectical’, with law:

It cannot but be just, and it becomes in this way the archetype of the just war, which proclaims itself as just. More dangerously than in any other kind of war, every party is obliged to suppose in a pitiless way both his own right and the fault of the adversary. The one claims his legal right, the other his natural right.

In such a context, the opposition between legality and legitimacy becomes radical. On the one hand, the instruments of justice lose their impartiality as they convert themselves into tools of a merciless combat; on the other hand, revolutionary justice knows only one rule: the annihilation of the enemy. Its popular tribunals must not ‘attenuate the horror but accentuate it’. They designate ‘an enemy of the state, of the people or of humanity’ in order ‘to deprive him of any right in the name of law’. And Schmitt concludes: ‘The hostility becomes so absolute that the old, sacred distinction between the enemy and the criminal is dissolved into the paroxysm of self-justification. To doubt one’s own righteous cause is perceived as a betrayal; to hear the arguments of the adversary becomes slyness; and any attempt to discuss becomes a form of complicity with the enemy.’²⁶ If we ignore the motivations and the context of these words, they sketch the anatomy of civil war as a cruel conflict without shared rules that is a fairly exact description of the confrontations that ravaged Europe between 1914 and 1945.

In the first volume of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky suggests a similar analysis of the civil war in Marxist terms, indicating its climax in the formation of a ‘dual power’. He describes this as a transitional situation of ‘anarchy’ that leads, sooner or later, to the victory of one of the two parties in struggle. This step is characteristic of all the great revolutions in history, from the English Revolution, with its conflict between the monarchy and Cromwell’s ‘new model army’, to the French Revolution, with the opposition first between the king and the Constituent Assembly and then, after 1792, between the Commune and the Convention. In 1871, the dualism of power took the form of a territorial separation: the revolution in Paris and the counter-revolution at Versailles. In 1917, it opposed the provisional government led by Kerensky to the congress of Soviets, in which the Bolsheviks acquired a majority in October. And it was in order to give ‘all power to the soviets’ that they decided to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. Such fragmentation of power into two irreducibly antagonistic entities cannot continue. ‘The demand for a dictatorship’, Trotsky writes, ‘results from the intolerable contradictions of the double sovereignty. The transition from one of its forms to the other is accomplished through civil war.’²⁷

Civil war does not aim at a just peace with a legitimate adversary but rather the destruction of the enemy. At the Casablanca conference, in January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt declared in a joint statement that the Allied forces would not accept any compromise with Germany and Japan, but only their ‘unconditional surrender’.²⁸ It is interesting to observe that in this declaration, which already foreshadowed the tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo, the US president and British prime minister did not use the conventional formulation of the military lexicon: capitulation. They chose to speak of unconditional surrender, adopting the term that the Union forces had imposed on the Confederacy at the end of the American Civil War and that General Lee signed at Appomattox in 1865. Such a formulation did not belong to international law; it was borrowed from commercial law, where it indicates a cession and a transfer of property. By adopting this concept, the victors wished to show that the Confederacy had not only been defeated, but had definitively disappeared – that it did not exist anymore.²⁹ In a capitulation, soldiers lay down their arms at a public ceremony symbolizing their defeat, but they still belong to the army of a state whose legal existence is recognized by international law (including by the victor). In an unconditional surrender, on the other hand, the defeated army becomes in a way the property of the victor who imposes his domination. General Wilhelm Keitel, who had signed the unconditional surrender of Germany at Berlin-Karlhorst, on 8 May 1945, was judged at Nuremberg the following year and executed as a war criminal. A similar fate befell Hideki Tojo, the Japanese head of government. In 1945, Germany and Japan were occupied by Allied forces who had initially decided to deprive them of any form of national sovereignty for several decades. At Casablanca, it was Roosevelt who suggested the demand of unconditional surrender for Germany. According to Churchill, who immediately approved it, it was not a question of reducing the Germans to slavery, but of refusing any negotiations, and above all of ruling out any international juridical norm that could have ‘bar[red] territorial transfers or adjustments in enemy countries’.³⁰

Partisans

The partisan is a striking figure in the history of the Second World War. Partisans are irregular combatants who appear in all conflict theatres, and sometimes play a decisive role. They were unknown during the First World War, which began as a classic inter-state war following the norms of European law, emerging only with the revolutionary crisis that broke out at the end of the conflict, notably in Russia and Central Europe. The militarization of political life at the end of the Great War led to the formation of partisan militias and armed groups participating in street combat, and sometimes actual insurrections. The phenomenon was not limited to the former Russian Empire. Images of the Spartacist rebellion in Berlin, in January 1919, show columns of armed workers seizing the building of the Mosse press group or firing at the Freikorps controlled by minister Noske. These armed formations – from the Communist Rote Front to the Nazi SA – were a typical feature of the Weimar Republic and, more generally, of interwar European societies. In Italy, the period 1920–24 was characterized by violent confrontations between the Arditi del Popolo and Mussolini’s squadristi. Between 1919 and 1924, armed insurrections and violent counter-revolutions took place in Bavaria, the Baltic states, Hungary, Hamburg, and finally Bulgaria. In Austria, the fascist putsch of February 1934 provoked a week of bloody clashes in the streets of Vienna between the army and the Schutzbund, a Socialist militia, whose defeat cost 1,200 dead and many thousands of wounded. The same phenomenon appeared in the first stage of the Spanish Civil War. Republican forces, embodying the legal authority, needed to reconstruct a regular army with units that had remained loyal to the government, and popular militias spontaneously arose to combat the military putsch.

The apogee of partisan struggle, however, was the Second World War. There were hundreds of thousands of them across Europe, waging a parallel war alongside the regular armies mobilizing millions of soldiers. The partisans were irreplaceable actors in a war where military operations were intertwined with movements of national liberation, the struggle against collaborationist regimes, and antifascist combat. In the first months following the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin called for the creation of partisan groups behind enemy lines, in Soviet territories occupied by the German armies. From 1943 onwards, the Resistance also acquired a mass dimension in the Balkans and on the Western front, in Yugoslavia and Greece, Belgium and Holland, France and Italy. Its impact was amplified by fascist and Nazi propaganda that justified its repression and violence, including the deportation and massacre of civilians, with the pretext of the anti-partisan struggle. Posters threatening with death all kinds of Resistance combatants, called ‘bandits’ and ‘terrorists’, covered the countries occupied by German troops. The strong presence of Communists and foreigners, especially Jews, was systematically emphasized, as with the famous Affiche rouge of February 1944 in Paris, announcing the execution of twenty-three partisans of the Manouchian group. In Italy, the fascists called partisans bastardi, indicating their non-belonging to the national community. On the other hand, the Resistance considered them as patriots and fighters for liberty. Everywhere, it afforded them the status of regular combatants, emphasizing their military and hierarchical structure, and sought to have this status recognized by the Allied forces at the time of Liberation. The Italian partisans who occupied the town of Macerata on 3 June 1944 wore colonial uniforms they had found in a warehouse; their helmets were rather exotic, but had the advantage of giving them the appearance of regular soldiers.³¹ The heroes of the Resistance were sometimes retrospectively militarized, like ‘Colonel Fabien’, the French Communist militant who carried out the first assassination of a German official in Paris, in 1941.³² At Liberation, the partisans enjoyed full legitimacy. They became the symbol of an insurgent civil society with which everyone was keen to identify, out of empathy, or to be identified, for convenience. After many years of underground existence, they found themselves at the heart of a liberatory festival that turned the social order upside down. The former bandits metamorphosed into heroes of popular mythology, exchanging the tragic dimension of struggle for the joyful aspect of the charivari. In his description of insurgent Paris, Claude Roy sketched this portrait of the last-minute franc-tireur: ‘He has a machine gun, two grenades under his belt, his trousers are tucked into woollen socks; his shoes are large and he wears a check shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He comes from an American movie. He is the hero of Viva Villa himself.’³³ The boldest partisan actions were sometimes recreated in front of a camera with the object of immortalizing them. Pantomime of this kind (which often was not a falsification of history, as it deliberately set out to be an a posteriori reconstruction) followed the real Resistance with its cortège of blood and death. It is precisely because it was a serious event that it had to be immortalized; because everyone was aware of its historic character, it was necessary to show its heroic dimension, sometimes making it into a kind of icon. Certain postures are rather incongruous, designed only to meet the photographer’s demands. They show, for example, the various stages of agony of a fighter being tortured to death, then his comrades dying as heroes with raised fists before the execution squad, or a nurse caring for a man on a mountaintop while a comrade protects them with his sub-machine gun. In front of the camera, the protagonists of the Resistance transformed themselves, literally, into actors in the ‘theatre’ of history.³⁴

The importance of the partisans’ role during the Second World War, under their various designations, reveals the anomic character of this conflict, its transgression of traditional rules of war, and therefore its civil-war nature. Once again, it was Carl Schmitt who defined the ‘ideal type’ of the partisan. Above all, he is an irregular combatant, distinct in this respect from the soldier wearing a uniform. The deep motivation of the partisans’ struggle lies in their ‘intensive political engagement’, as indicated by the etymology of the name, which refers to party membership. Their action is also characterized by ‘flexibility, speed, and the ability to switch from attack to retreat’, almost always coordinated with that of a regular army they support. Finally, partisans have, according to Schmitt, ‘a telluric character’: in most cases, they are deeply rooted in a territory they wish to liberate, and their action takes advantage of their organic links with the local population.³⁵ Peasants help them in the mountains, orienting and nourishing them where they fight as an armed group, and civilians hide and protect them in the towns, where the partisan is a ‘technician of the invisible struggle’ and a ‘saboteur’.³⁶ The partisan is thus a central figure in a war claiming a justa causa but not recognizing a justus hostis. The Second World War exalted both the liberating guerrillero and the political combatant: their characteristics fused into the partisan, sometimes conferring on him an almost mythical aura. In the countries where an army created by irregular combatants succeeded in defeating the occupying forces and taking power, its charismatic leader became quite naturally the head of a new state, like Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia or Mao Zedong in China.

In 1907, the Hague Convention had assimilated the irregular combatants in a civil war, and particularly populations that ‘spontaneously take arms’, to regular forces involved in a war, on condition that they had a leader, wore distinguishing marks, did not hide their arms and respected ‘the rules and customs of war’.³⁷ The usefulness of this recognition of the partisans’ belligerent status would be clear during the Spanish Civil War, when it was the legal Republican authority that was defended by popular militias, while the rebel forces belonged to a regular army. According to Swiss jurist Hans Wehberg, who argued in 1938 for the incorporation of civil war into the law of war, legally recognized that rebels should be treated not as ‘pirate vessels’ but as subjects of international law – a recognition that would humanize civil war by introducing rules.³⁸ The problem lies in the fact that, in most cases, such recognition comes from international institutions or countries external to the conflict, rather than being a mutual recognition by the conflicting parties. The partisan forces and groups of the Second World War – from the Polish Armia Krajowa to the Yugoslav Titoists, from the French Francs-Tireurs Partisans to the Italian Garibaldi Brigades – incontestably belonged to the category established by the Hague Convention (‘militias and volunteer corps’), but the Germans always considered them mere terrorists and bandits. Their actions were followed by retaliations that, in the best of cases, killed ten ‘bandits’ for each dead German, or were directed against civilians. A similar attitude was adopted by the Soviet troops who shot members of the German Volkssturm set up to defend the Reich in the last phase of the war. For the Nazis, the anti-partisan campaign (Partisanenbekämpfung) belonged to the tradition of counterrevolutionary combat, and many of its leaders had cut their teeth back in 1919. The historian Christian Ingrao has illustrated the continuity of this Nazi culture of violence in his biographical sketch of Oskar Dirlewanger, a leader of this campaign on the Eastern front and responsible for the massacre of thousands of civilians in Poland and Russia after 1941. After fighting on the Russian front during the First World War, he was active in the Freikorps after 1918, and in 1938 was sent to Spain with the Condor Legion to support Franco’s army during the Spanish Civil War. Captured in southern Germany in 1945, he was killed by former deportees who had recognized him in the camp where he was interned.³⁹ In a war where risks were limitless,⁴⁰ it was inevitable that partisans, who had suffered the most savage repression, should be in the front line of the épuration that settled accounts at the end of the war.

The partisan does not wear a uniform, but he has moral principles and norms of conduct. We should not interpret a civil war, taking Hobbes’s definition literally, as regression to a pre-political state of nature, leading to disorder and a bellum omnium contra omnes. The confrontation between two belligerents who do not have shared rules does not prevent each of them having their own particular rules. The faction identifying itself with a legal authority – the state whose legitimacy the other faction no longer recognizes – treats its adversaries as bandits and outlaws. The rebels seeking to embody a new legitimacy organize themselves and set their own rules. Analysing this phenomenon in the Italian Resistance, the historian Claudio Pavone observed the tendency, within partisan groups, towards a ‘re-emergent desire to establish normative standards’.⁴¹ Roberto Battaglia, a historian of the Resistance who was himself political commissar in a Garibaldi brigade in Tuscany in 1944–45, describes the paradoxical character of such a situation. Partisans who had taken up arms to fight fascism, or, more simply, tried to escape enrolment into the fascist army, were outlaws. But their decision to place themselves outside the law lay in their deep desire to destroy an order they perceived as unjust – morally and politically unacceptable – and to lay the foundations of a new order. Placing oneself outside the law meant constituting an alternative system of values and norms. It was in a very serious manner that Battaglia, summoning the directors of local banks to impose on them a levy for the Resistance, introduced himself with the peremptory declaration: ‘I am the law [io sono la legge].’⁴² This was not a joke. It was important to show that the partisans were not brigands, as their enemies claimed, and that they would not accept any transgression of their rules. Traitors were executed, and partisans who took advantage of their arms to loot or rob were severely punished. It was only possible to impose their political legitimacy by practising an inflexible justice.⁴³ Prompt and summary execution, exemplary punishments and the excesses of violence typical of every civil war always coexist, paradoxically, with an extremely sharp sense of justice and a firm morality of combat. Simone Weil, who vigorously denounced Republican atrocities during the Spanish Civil War, recalled that ‘theft and rape were capital crimes in the anarchist militias’.⁴⁴

A civil war is always fought by active minorities. Between the conflicting parties – Reds and Whites in Russia, Republicans and Francoists in Spain, Resistance partisans and collaborators – lies a wide ‘grey zone’⁴⁵ made by the inchoate mass of bystanders, hesitant, paralysed or simply unable to choose their camp, whose attitudes change with the course of the conflict. During the Russian civil war, the peasantry were taken hostage in turn by the Red Army and White Guards, sometimes balancing between them or passing from one camp to the other according to circumstances, as did Makhno’s army in Ukraine. In 1944, the French Resistance enjoyed the backing of a great majority in a society which had massively supported the Vichy regime four years before. In autumn 1943, the great majority of Italians hesitated to choose between the republic of Salò and a monarchy that had chosen to join the Anglo-American camp after the implosion of its state machine and its army. The young people who chose to take up arms against fascism were a small minority. It was not until 1944 that the Resistance expanded, enjoying majority support at the moment of Liberation, in April 1945. In a civil war it is not the ‘grey zone’ that is decisive, but active minorities. The partisans were faced with difficult choices.

Their ‘ethic of conviction’ spurred them to action: fighting Nazism was a moral and political imperative. But, at the same time, their ‘ethic of responsibility’ obliged them to take into account the consequences of their acts, to foresee the inevitable response of the enemy, with potential reprisals against civilians, sometimes even massacres. In church, the ecclesiastical authorities denounced the ‘irregular acts’ of the partisan bands. Giorgio Amendola, a leading figure in the Communist resistance in Italy, recalls their choice: ‘The problem of reprisals was raised and settled once and for all at the start of the armed struggle, in Italy as it had already been in France and other countries occupied by the Nazis. Accepting the blackmail of reprisals meant renouncing the struggle right away.’⁴⁶ Civilians oscillated between solidarity and fear. Sometimes they supported partisan groups, sometimes they accused them of bringing down Nazi repression because of their ‘irresponsible’ acts. On the one hand, their spontaneous distrust of sabotage actions and attacks carried out by irregular fighters derived from a mental habitus which, for centuries, had granted state authorities the monopoly of violence.⁴⁷ On the other hand, their hostility, if not open opposition, to an authority perceived as illegitimate converted them into sympathizers and supporters of the rebels. Such contrasting feelings accompanied the civil war until its conclusion.⁴⁸ Later, in a pacified society, the passive mass that had refused commitment, swinging between forced adaptation and collaboration,⁴⁹ hesitant or simply consumed by the difficulties of everyday life, would decide, by voting, the new political equilibrium. But during the confrontation these people were left behind, suffering the shocks and adapting to a situation that was beyond their control. When they again became actors in political life, the partisan had left the stage, becoming either a mythical figure in the collective memory or simply forgotten.

Hot Violence

In a situation of civil war, violence takes the form of transgression. As Roger Caillois brilliantly observed, civil war presents a striking homology with the festival. Both are essential moments of socialization in which individuals are consumed by a ‘collective effervescence’ that transforms the solution of their problems into a community act, challenging social distance and individual autonomy. Routine is broken; what was traditionally forbidden is now permitted or prescribed. Just as carnival permits incest, so war incites killing. It loses all immediate utility and acquires a religious, sacred dimension; it becomes a sacrifice of the combatant and an immolation of the enemy. In civil war as in festivals, ‘the share of liturgy diminishes in proportion to the growth of the share of license and orgy’.⁵⁰

Hatred loses its abstract character; rather than a mental disposition or a sentiment that fuels political choice, it becomes an impulse expressed in action. The suspension of law and the breakdown of the state’s monopoly of violence create the context allowing the outbreak of violence. From this point of view, it is incontestable that civil war implies a regression in the civilizing process.⁵¹ The social and cultural constraints that mould our norms of behaviour explode. Control over our drives, which Norbert Elias, in the wake of Freud, considers the source of the ‘psychic economy’ of civilized individuals, impeding them from ‘abandoning themselves to the pleasure of aggression’, evaporates. The breakout of civil war marks an anthropological turn that separates it, as a watershed, from the previous and following times of peace. In this intermediate phase, violence takes an extreme dimension, spreading without limits. It is no longer simply a means of struggle, but also the expression of the passions, feelings, fears and hatreds of its agents. It takes forms that resurrect in the modern world the archaic image of the massacring mob, under the sign of transgression, the subversion of order, and revenge. It revives the practices of societies that Elias considers pre-civilized, i.e. anterior to the establishment of state coercion. In a society of warriors, he writes in The Civilizing Process, the life of individuals ‘is threatened continually and directly by acts of physical violence’. If the existence of members of such a society is compared with that in more pacified zones, it permits the warrior extraordinary freedom in living out his feelings and passions; it allows savage joys, the uninhibited satisfaction of pleasure from women, or of hatred in destroying and tormenting anything hostile or belonging to an enemy. But at the same time it threatens the warrior, if he is defeated, with an extraordinary degree of exposure to the violence and the passions of others, and with such radical subjugation, such extreme forms of physical torment as are later – when physical torture, imprisonment and the radical humiliation of individuals have become the monopoly of a central authority – hardly to be found in normal life.⁵²

In a civil war, violence is never purely instrumental. It takes on a strong symbolic dimension, feeds on itself and acquires its own dynamic, eventually becoming an end in itself. In other words, extreme violence converts into cruelty.⁵³ In the days that followed the Franco putsch of July 1936, Spanish soldiers killed nearly a thousand Republicans in the region of Valladolid. They organized public executions in the city centre, which fascist dignitaries attended while eating churros and drinking anisette.⁵⁴ It is often hard to distinguish between true and false in accounts of this kind of violence. The presence of foreign troops in Russia during the civil war of 1918–21 gave rise to many legends, the most famous of which is doubtless the tortures practised by a mythical Chinese cheka that fed the animals in the Petrograd zoo with the corpses of their victims,⁵⁵ or killed their enemies by putting their heads in a ‘rat cage’ (Rattenkäfig).⁵⁶ Even more horrible, however, are the stories of the violence of the White Guards, which the historian Jean-Jacques Marie relates as established facts. For instance, he describes the ‘Communist soup’ invented by the Cossacks, which consisted in throwing Jewish Communists, still alive, into a gigantic tank of boiling water, in the middle of a village, then forcing other prisoners to eat the boiled corpses of their comrades. According to this legend, many of them were driven mad.⁵⁷

Civil war exhumes and revives old feelings and impulses that articulate with contemporary hopes and frustrations. The enemy must not only be killed; he must be publicly humiliated and exhibited as a war trophy. Nazis and fascists accordingly hung up executed partisans for display, especially in Eastern Europe. Sometimes, their victims were hung by their feet like animals in a butcher’s shop. This violence inevitably generated a counter-violence that sometimes reproduced the same features, despite being perpetrated by forces whose legitimacy derived from the moral rejection of such acts. Thus, Mussolini’s corpse was trampled by the crowd in the Piazzale Loreto, in Milan, on 29 April 1945, then hung by its feet from a pole. As historian Sergio Luzzatto pertinently remarks, civil war ‘is also a bodily tragedy’.⁵⁸ It always brings with it a share of excessive, spectacular, terrifying violence. This anthropological dimension of civil war does not prove, pace Wolfgang Sofsky, that ‘violence is the destiny of humanity’.⁵⁹ It does not reveal the deep nature of human beings, but indicates with blinding evidence what they are capable of in extreme situations. Civil wars (like genocide) represent an interesting laboratory for the deep testing of the solidarity, generosity and spirit of sacrifice that are also inherent in human beings. But they also reveal the abysses of cruelty and evil that, in the last analysis, are simply the dialectical reverse of those values. They challenge both the anthropological optimism of philosophies of progress and the anthropological pessimism of conservative ideologies. Good and evil coexist in a civil war as opposing poles of the same magnetic field, showing that, in the face of an extreme situation, human nature is always composed of a mixture of both.⁶⁰

Revenge was an aspect of the popular festivals that followed the end of the Second World War, a revenge that was both symbolic and material. For a short period, before legal justice was restored, improvised popular tribunals meted out justice themselves, often ordering summary executions. Between 1944 and 1945, the defeat of the German armies opened up the space for a ‘crazy festival’.⁶¹ This was an upsurge of joy and enthusiasm expressed in barricades, flags and church bells, as well as in the sensuality of the encounter with the liberating army and the Resistance forces. Such an interruption in chronological time, and the irruption of a qualitative time, full of meaning and hope, spontaneously resurrected images and rites rooted in collective memory. In Paris, barricades were both combat sites and places of memory, evoking the 1848 revolution and the Commune of 1871. But the outburst of passions was not always experienced as deliverance. It also demanded its portion of humiliated bodies, when popular festival was transformed into ‘hideous carnival’ by a grimacing mob delighting in the spectacle of shaven-headed women, the ‘collaboratrices horizontales’.⁶² The cleavage between those two crowds, the first jubilant and the other vengeful, was never clear. The two merged together, inspired by a plurality of feelings that swung between joy and hate, generosity and cruelty, driven to paroxysm.

This drunkenness of excess, when tremendous generosity is combined with horrific cruelty, a sentiment of fraternity with a sentiment of revenge, the joy of popular festival with the sadistic impulses of massacre, closely resembles the ‘spontaneous violence of the early revolutionary times’ analysed by Michel Vovelle.⁶³ It was an anarchistic violence that he opposes to the Terror as an institutional, organized and planned practice of coercion, a violence that did not confine itself to destroying the symbols of the ancien régime (and those who embodied them) but sought to create a new order, attacking the enemies it met along the way. This was the violence that erupted in France between 1789 and 1792, when, in a metaphor that Paolo Viola borrowed from Mounier, ‘the throne is empty’.⁶⁴ The ancien régime was demolished, but popular sovereignty remained an abstract concept, not yet having acquired the forms of a new power. During this transitional moment, that of emptiness at the summit, when the king was a hostage of the revolutionary forces, there were no laws and the people governed absolutus legibus. The people, whom the absolute monarchy had both oppressed and protected, who had endured an overwhelming power that they might rebel against but never dared replace, finally found themselves alone. They had to create new organs of power. It was at that point that massacres erupted, with crowds executing aristocrats and carrying their heads in procession, stuck on the end of a pike. The Terror put an end to this popular and spontaneous violence, bringing it back into a legal framework. According to Robespierre and Danton, it was a question of replacing popular revenge, blind and dangerously prone to excess, with ‘the sword of the law’.⁶⁵

Similar features appeared in the Russian civil war. Contrary to a widespread interpretation in contemporary historiography, which tries to explain it as exclusively a product of Bolshevik ideology, the Red Terror was the response of the new Soviet power to a violence coming from below that became endemic in 1917. As in the French Revolution, ideology intervened a posteriori to legitimize methods that were invented on the spot. According to Marc Ferro, the Communist dictatorship ‘legitimized a spontaneous violence and exploited it for consolidating its power’.⁶⁶ As distinct from peasant violence, literally explosive and uncontrolled, the excesses of the Cheka were not spontaneous. They fitted into the pitiless logic of a civil war opposing revolution and counter-revolution, Reds and Whites, peasants and landowners, urban popular classes and tsarist aristocracy, Russian Communism and Western anti-Communism.

The logic of the ‘empty throne’ was also at work in the first months of the Spanish Civil War, when Franco’s pronunciamiento triggered a real social revolution in the Republican zones. José Luis Ledesma has convincingly shown, analysing the case of Republican repression in Aragon, that the great majority of its victims were killed in summer 1936. The eruption of popular violence at that time was the result of the breakdown of the state and the consequent power vacuum.⁶⁷ In these weeks, according to Gabriele Ranzato, Spain experienced an ‘overflow of bloody and iconoclastic radicalism’ that killed 6,800 religious – a massacre that government authority was unable to stop.⁶⁸ Priests and landowners were hunted down in a repression arising from class impulses, especially in the countryside: it spared people whose hands showed the marks of manual work and condemned the others. Such anarchistic (and often anarchist) violence came to an end in the autumn, when the Republican state was reconstituted and imposed its law. Popular tribunals continued to pronounce death sentences, but the wave of violence declined: the revolution began to create its own institutions. There was a fundamental difference in the anti-Republican violence that intensified as Franco’s army consolidated its power, with executions continuing for more than ten years after the end of the civil war and the establishment of the caudillo’s regime.

The atrocities of the Second World War, particularly those perpetrated on the Eastern front, were documented by thousands of photographs taken by the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. These often unbearable images, showing violence and death in the most naked and horrible factual way, are not easy to interpret, beyond their immediate dimension as ‘documents’ or ‘moments of truth’ captured by the lens.⁶⁹ In many cases, the photographers were involved in the murderous actions, and their pictures testify to a complicit gaze accompanying the pleasure of killing. The captions several soldiers wrote beneath the pictures, as a kind of commentary in their souvenir albums, reveal this dimension of the visual document: the war trophy.⁷⁰ More frequently, pictures of this kind fulfilled another aim. Not taken in response to an order or to be widely distributed, but rather on the initiative of soldiers themselves, and deposited in their private archives, they reveal another dimension of the war and a different gaze on violence. The camera ‘neutralizes’ the feelings and emotions of the soldiers, amateur photographers who, while taking part in the killings, might well view them with a ‘cold eye’.⁷¹ The camera allowed them to establish a distance with respect to the regarded object – the act of killing and its victim – through a separation and neutralization that conferred on them the status of bystanders instead of actors. Today, these pictures detach themselves from their original destination, the secret imagination of the soldiers, and settle themselves in our collective memory as ‘secular icons’ of death in the twentieth century.

Cold Violence

In order to understand civil wars, it is necessary to compare their violence with the far more large-scale violence of the total wars of which they are often components or appendices. The difference is glaring. The bloody conflicts that tore Germany apart at the moment of its defeat and the birth of the Weimar Republic, between January and May 1919, claimed a number of victims incomparably lower than the battles of the Somme or Verdun. The particular character of the European civil war lies in the fact that it was a mixture of total wars, revolutions, civil wars and genocides. It created a context in which a savage and ancestral violence merged with the modern violence of total war, the technology of aerial bombing and the industrial extermination of gas chambers. In this war, one might say, borrowing the words of Alain Corbin, the ‘Dionysiac drives’ of avenging crowds coexisted with the ‘pasteurized massacres’ of state violence.⁷² In other words, the violence born from the regression in the civilizing process combined, in an astonishing dialectic of non-contemporaneity, with a modern and much more murderous violence based on the technology of industrial society. Violence of this kind implied, both socially and anthropologically, the achievements of the civilizing process: the state monopoly of weapons, managerial and productive rationality, the fragmentation of tasks and the division of labour, self-control of instincts, the freeing of social agents from moral responsibility, spatial separation between victims and executors. While Einsatzgruppen soldiers and policemen killed Jews in Polish villages, piling them in common graves, SS lieutenant-colonel Adolf Eichmann remained in his office, where he organized the deportation of other Jews to the death camps. An army of civil servants performed tasks essential to the extermination process – whether censuses, expropriation decrees, or the train timetables that made possible the convoys to the death camps – but which, considered in isolation, had nothing murderous about them. They became murderous only through being integrated into a global chain culminating in the gas chambers, a chain whose final outcome was not necessarily known to its individual participants, one of its very premises being ‘the social production of moral indifference’ so typical of modern societies.⁷³ The image of Oradour-sur-Glane, the small French village where, on 10 June 1944, the SS burned the whole population alive in the village church, belongs as much to the memory of the Second World War as do the chimneys of Auschwitz. These different forms of violence, ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, coexisted in the same war. Despite Norbert Elias’s theory helping us to study the expressions of an avenging crowd in a civil war, his attempt to explain the Holocaust as ‘a throwback to the barbarism and savagery of earlier ages’⁷⁴ turns out to be deceptive and false. It would be far more appropriate to interpret it, in the wake of Adorno and the Frankfurt school, as the expression of a barbarism ‘inscribed within the principle of civilization’.⁷⁵ Civilization and barbarism are not absolutely antagonistic terms, but two indissociable aspects of the same historical process carrying both emancipatory and destructive tendencies. Emancipation and domination go together as two potentialities of a single dialectical movement.

In an interesting reflection on the implications of distance as a source of moral indifference – a reflection whose genealogy he reconstructs from Aristotle to Chateaubriand – Carlo Ginzburg reminds us of the metaphor of Diderot’s ‘Letter on the Blind’. If there was no fear of punishment, many men would prefer to kill another person a long way off than to use their own hands to kill a cow. Distance keeps the horror of blood at bay, rendering the criminal indifferent, like a blind man who cannot see and consequently neutralizes his moral reactions. According to Ginzburg, the air war of the twentieth century, transforming the enemy into a microscopic target and removing blood from the bombers’ vision, proves Diderot’s assertion. ‘When pushed to extremes’, Ginzburg concludes, ‘distance may lead to an absolute lack of pity for other human beings.’⁷⁶ These observations grasp an aspect of war and mass violence in the modern world. In the European civil war, however, cold violence and ‘distance’ are combined with the heat and passion of a crusade against a known enemy, aiming to kill him and to exhibit his corpse as a trophy. Distance and the moral indifference that makes it possible to bomb towns and murder en masse are mixed with the physical closeness and emotional involvement of the combat seeking to kill Bolsheviks, torture partisans and eliminate Untermenschen in a struggle experienced as ‘redemptive’.⁷⁷ The images of executions of partisans and Jews that the Wehrmacht soldiers sent back to their wives from the Eastern front, like the films showing soldiers grinning as they cut the beard of an old Jew or humiliate naked women in the Polish winter, are the mirror of this brutalization of mental dispositions and practices of the violence of war.⁷⁸

Dictatorship

The European civil war transformed the meaning and usage of the term ‘dictatorship’. Following the advent of the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin, it became synonymous with an authoritarian or even totalitarian regime of oppression and terror, eclipsing the meaning it had always had previously.⁷⁹ Charlie Chaplin’s parody of Hitler in The Great Dictator, made in Hollywood in 1940, brought this new meaning of the word into mass culture. From Antiquity to the twentieth century, dictatorship had been seen as a corollary of democracy. In its classic meaning, it denoted the form of republican government in a time of crisis, when the exercise of power was monopolized by a single individual called a ‘dictator’. The Roman dictatorship, however, was a magistracy with limited prerogative powers, field of action and duration. It was not a despotic, arbitrary or illegal power, and its basis remained republican. The dictator was appointed by a consul, at the request of the Senate, and his mandate lasted for six months. As an ‘extraordinary magistrate’, he was appointed to deal with a major peril, whether internal (sedition) or external (war). If the dictator embodied authority, from a strictly institutional point of view this dictatorship was not the actual state power, but simply an extraordinary organ of it, its character being conjunctural rather than structural.⁸⁰ In the popular imaginary, the figure of a dictator was embodied by Cincinnatus, the legendary commander who was called upon to save the endangered Roman republic and who, after defeating the enemy in two weeks, went home to plough his fields.

Dictatorship implies a state of exception, i.e. the suspension of law and limitation of individual liberty. But this is a matter of temporary measures authorized by legitimate bodies of the state. In Giorgio Agamben’s definition, inspired here by Carl Schmitt, the state of exception separates the norm from its application, in order to preserve it and make it effective: ‘The state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law.’⁸¹ The dictator, accordingly, cannot be equated with a usurper or tyrant who seizes power in a coup d’état, since the power that he exercises is not simply de facto but de jure. He can provisionally suspend the application of the law, but he can neither change the law nor suppress the constitution, nor again promulgate new laws. This conception of dictatorship runs through the entire history of political thought.

Taking inspiration from Bodin, Carl Schmitt defined two types of dictatorship. In 1920, he distinguished between classical dictatorship, which he defined as the dictatorship of a commissioner, and sovereign dictatorship: the former being the emanation of a constituted state power, while the latter was the organ of a constituent power.⁸² The model for the latter Schmitt saw in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century: after dissolving the Long Parliament, Cromwell had established a military dictatorship that was not answerable to any higher body, and transformed itself into a genuine sovereign power, no longer delegated or provisional, but permanent and absolute. Schmitt also included the French Revolution in this category, the Constituent Assembly having played a similar role when it established its own organ of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety, in 1793. The final example he gave was that of the regime established by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, prefigured by the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In this case, too, the dictatorship was not the extraordinary organ of a legal power, but a constituent power that created a new order. In this case, it happened to be a revolutionary power that could not claim national legitimacy (it had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, in which it was a minority), but based itself on a class legitimacy – the soviets; though this representation was immediately confiscated by the party that had organized the insurrection. In the course of the civil war, the constituent power came inevitably to be identified with the dictatorship of a militarized revolutionary party.⁸³

It was immediately after the First World War, a period marked in Central Europe by the bloody confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution, with the rise of more or less lasting military dictatorships, that Max Weber reformulated his theory of ‘charismatic authority’, now integrating into it the various forms of Caesarism whose typology he had presented in Economy and Society.⁸⁴ Charismatic authority is that of a man of providence with a vocation for swaying crowds, the leader with supposedly exceptional qualities who appears as a ‘saviour’ in a period of crisis. He seems touched by ‘grace’ and capable of performing miracles, in the manner of the thaumaturgical kings of the Middle Ages. A ‘charismatic community’ of disciples forms around him, united by a quasi-religious feeling of belief in his extraordinary properties, who voluntarily submit themselves to his will. In a similar way to the early Christian communities (ecclesiae) who had no formal structure but a charismatic foundation linked to the personality of Christ, so the dictatorships that arose after the First World War often claimed an extra-legal legitimacy, appealing not to human law but to the higher laws of Nature or History. They were distinct both from traditional power, whose legitimacy rested on the force of customary law, and from modern forms of domination based on the rational constraint of the law. The feature shared by their leaders, Weber emphasizes, lies in the fact that they are obeyed not by virtue of any custom or law, but because they are viewed as possessing exceptional powers.⁸⁵ Charismatic power is by its very nature fragile and transitory, like the disturbed and chaotic times that engender it, and ineluctably condemned, according to Weber, to a ‘routinization’ (Veralltäglichung) that erodes it and undermines its characteristics. In its rise, however, it annuls or neutralizes the law, and replaces it with the decision of a leader. This is then a personal power that claims to be original and free of legal constraints. A personal power embodied by a single, sacred, irreplaceable body, neither dynastic nor institutional, but precisely charismatic; a body identified with gestures, expressions, a voice; the mystical object around which the crowd can assemble and commune. This is the body of the Führer as presented by Leni Riefenstahl in her film on the Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will; or the body of the Duce, whose power of fascination over his disciples is stressed by the writer Vitaliano Brancati: ‘If he finds himself in the midst of a crowd, the crowd begins to surge and boil around him; the people surround him, forming a pyramid and placing him spontaneously at the summit.’⁸⁶ It is inevitable that the end of this charismatic power should involve the destruction of its embodiment: trampled, humiliated and hanged by the feet, like the body of Mussolini in April 1945; ‘self-immolated’ like that of Hitler a few days later, when the Third Reich collapsed, to escape an equally horrible death. The body of the dictator does not survive the European civil war, its end often culminating in his immolation. Like the execution of Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas II, this symbolic moment marks the emergence of a new legitimacy.

In 1920, Trotsky’s pamphlet against Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, seems to anticipate Schmitt’s essay on dictatorship. In this work, the head of the Red Army analyses and legitimizes the revolutionary terror as an indispensable tool for creating a new state power. After recalling that ‘no one ever considered war a school of humanity – still less civil war’, Trotsky justifies Bolshevik policy in the name of the laws of history, seeking to prove that it does no more than follow the example of Cromwell, the Jacobins, and the Paris Commune. On each occasion, the revolutionaries were accused of terrorism. Each time, the defence of the revolution demanded the taking and execution of hostages, the imposition of censorship, the neutralization or elimination of enemies (from expediency, he spells out, not from principle). The violence of Bolshevik power, Trotsky concludes, rests on class foundations that follow the direction of history. His strictly historicist argument leads to the following conclusion:

The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie … This hastening – a pure question of acceleration – is at certain periods of decisive importance. Without the Red Terror, the Russian bourgeoisie, together with the world bourgeoisie, would throttle us long before the coming of the revolution in Europe. One must be blind not to see this, or a swindler to deny it.⁸⁷

A few months earlier, Victor Serge had proclaimed the same principle, in a formulation that was equally frightening, even if inspired more by revolutionary enthusiasm than by raison d’état: ‘We – the Reds – despite hunger, mistakes, and even crimes – we are on the way to the city of the future.’⁸⁸

These passages illustrate very well the paradoxical position of the Bolsheviks in 1920. On the one hand, they practised terror as a weapon of survival, in a desperate struggle against an enemy that threatened to crush them; on the other hand, they justified this in the name of the laws of history, and theorized it as the forceps needed to give birth to a new society. Respecting the codes of revolutionary scholastics, the practices of the Cheka could even find a theoretical legitimation in Marx’s thesis of violence as the ‘midwife’ of history.

This apology for terror was basically only one aspect of the new perception of violence in European societies as these emerged from the trauma of the Great War. On the nationalist side, fascists and ‘conservative revolutionaries’ idealized war as the laboratory of a form of civilization organized by the total state and embodied by the new humanity that had emerged from the trenches. The Great War had forged the values, mentality and political vision of the fascist leaders. Mussolini and Hitler were veterans who believed that they had discovered the meaning of life in the experience of war. The war had created a ‘combat community’ (Kampfgemeinschaft) that became, after 1918, a model of society, transformed into a monolithic and totalitarian ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft).⁸⁹ Idealized by futurism as an aesthetic experience, and exalted by nationalism as the mission of the ‘new man’, war remained at the heart of the fascist view of the world. As distinct from Russia, where the Bolshevik dictatorship was born out of a social and political revolution that had broken the state apparatus inherited from tsarism and destroyed the former ruling elites, in Italy and Germany fascism seized power by legal means. In both countries, the construction of a totalitarian regime involved a ‘legal revolution’,⁹⁰ which, without immediately affecting the institutional façade of the state, suspended its laws for the duration. In Italy, the demolition of the liberal state was completed around the end of 1925, with the promulgation of the leggi fascistissme – laws that followed Anteo Zamboni’s attempted assassination of Mussolini. In the space of three years, the parliamentary system was practically destroyed, all powers were concentrated in the executive, and basic liberties suppressed (including freedom of association and the right to strike). Press pluralism was abolished by the imposition of censorship, the death penalty reintroduced, local administration entrusted to podestà who were appointed by the central authority, and finally, in 1928, the Fascist Grand Council became the regime’s supreme constitutional organ. In Germany, it was the emergency decree ‘for the protection of people and state’ issued by Hitler on 28 February 1933, following the Reichstag fire, that suspended sine die all freedoms enshrined in the Weimar constitution. This is why Roman Schnur defined the Nazi regime as a ‘legal civil war’.⁹¹ The Hitler dictatorship ‘legalized’ civil war because it could not consolidate itself without making permanent the state of exception characteristic of civil war. The political scientist Ernst Fraenkel termed it a ‘dual’ state – a state in which two opposing legal structures could coexist: on the one hand, rational modern law concerning the economy and the private sphere, and on the other hand, the law of exception that allowed the political power to free itself from any legal and rational procedure.⁹² The fascist dictatorship suspended law in order to make the state of exception a permanent norm. The context of crisis, during the interwar period, provided the soil from which Schmitt drew the elements of his political theology, which brought back on to the agenda, in a secular form, the postulates of absolutism. The prerogative of the holders of absolute power thereby became the nomos of modern politics: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’⁹³

______________

1See Richard Tuck, The Right of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

2On the notion of jus publicum europaeum, see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), and Reinhard Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1988), pp. 41ff.

3Michel Senellart, ‘La qualification de l’ennemi chez Emer de Vattel’, Astérion 2 (2004), pp. 31–52.

4See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), p. 147.

5Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1968), pp. 369–70.

6Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Six Books of the Commonwealth (Seven Treasures, 2009), p. 206.

7Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Bonn: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlag, 1991), p. 191; On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 75.

8See Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Le duel. Une passion française 1789–1914 (Paris: Seuil, 2004), p. 26.

9Ibid., p. 27.

10Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 170.

11Jeanneney, Le duel, p. 80.

12V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 273.

13Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of the Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 52. See also Jonathan Fletcher’s comments in Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 123–34.

14See Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 110–1.

15See Michel Caillat, L’Idéologie du sport en France depuis 1880 (Paris: Éditions de la Passion, 1993), pp. 31–2; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 174.

16See Gian-Enrico Rusconi, Rischio 1914. Come si decide una guerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987).

17Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914 (London: HarperCollins, 2013), p. 562.

18See some pictures in Rainer Rother, ed., Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918. Ereignis und Erinnerung (Wolfratshausen: Edition Minerva Hermann Farnung, 2004), p. 105.

19On the relationship between civil war and colonial war, see Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth.

20Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Penguin, 2000), Book III, Chapter X, p. 113.

21Ibid., p. 111.

22Ibid., p. 112.

23Victor Serge, ‘The Endangered City’, in Revolution in Danger (New Chicago: Haymarket, 2011), p. 22.

24Ibid., p. 24.

25Ibid., p. 27.

26Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus. Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945–1947 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002). For a definition of civil war from the point of view of political theory, see Norberto Bobbio, ‘Guerra civile?’, Teoria politica VIII: 2 (1992), pp. 297–307.

27Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008 [1932]), p. 152.

28Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999), p. 22; Lothar Kettenacker, ‘“Unconditional Surrender” als Grundlage der angelsächsischen Nachkriegsplanung’, in Wolfgang Mischalka, ed., Der Zweite Weltkrieg (Munich: Piper, 1989), pp. 174–88; and Alfred Vagts, ‘Unconditional Surrender: vor und nach 1945’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7 (1959), pp. 280–309.

29Schivelbusch, Culture of Defeat, pp. 27–9.

30Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Mariner, 1986), p. 618. This passage is quoted by John L. Chase, ‘Unconditional Surrender Reconsidered’, Political Science Quarterly 70: 2 (1955), p. 265. See also Hans Kelsen, ‘The Legal Status of Germany According to the Declaration of Berlin’, American Journal of International Law 39: 3 (1945), pp. 518–26.

31See Adolfo Mignemi, La seconda guerra mondiale 1940–1945 (Rome: Editiori Riuniti, 2000), p. 176.

32Pieter Lagrou, ‘La “guerra irregolare” e le norme della violenza legittima nell’Europa del Novecento’, in Luca Bladissare, ed., Crimini e memorie di guerra (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2004), p. 97.

33Quoted in Alain Brossat, Libération, fête folle (Paris: Autrement, 1994), p. 121.

34See Adolfo Mignemi, Storia fotografica della Resistenza (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995), pp. 257–87.

35Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (New York: Telos, 2007), p. 35.

36Ibid., pp. 14–22.

37See James Brown Scott, ed., Texts of the Peace Conferences of The Hague, 1899 and 1907 (Rochester, NY: Scholar’s Choice, 2015 [1908]), p. 209; Hans Wehberg, La guerre civile et le droit international (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1938), p. 88.

38Wehberg, La guerre civile et le droit international, p. 9.

39Christian Ingrao, Les Chasseurs noirs. La brigade Dirlewanger (Paris: Perrin, 2006).

40According to Schmitt, partisan war does not know the notion of risk, which, in the legal sphere, refers always to insurance legislation, where it denotes limited damage, calculated and hence susceptible of indemnization (Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, p. 29).

41Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance (London: Verso, 2014), p. 149.

42Roberto Battaglia, Un uomo. Un partigiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), pp. 209–10.

43Pavone, A Civil War, pp. 502–10.

44Simone Weil, ‘Letter to Georges Bernanos’, in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977), p. 77.

45On the concept of the ‘grey zone’, see Pavone, A Civil War, pp. 299–300; Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero (Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1995), pp. 55–65.

46See Giorgio Amendola, Lettere a Milano. Ricordi e documenti 1939–1945 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1973), p. 293. On the debate in the Italian Resistance over the question of reprisals, see Pavone, A Civil War, pp. 568–88.

47Pavone, A Civil War, p. 503.

48See on this subject Tzvetan Todorov, Une tragédie française. Été 44, scènes de guerre civile (Paris: Seuil, 1994).

49For a typology of civilian behaviours under an occupation regime, see Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: New Press, 1998), pp. 468–71.

50Roger Caillois, L’Homme et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 227.

51See Gabriele Ranzato, ‘La guerra civile spagnola nella storia contemporanea della violenza’, in Gabriele Ranzato, ed., Guerre fratricide. Le guerre civili in età contemporanea (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994), p. 272.

52Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 370–1.

53Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, ‘Au coeur de la guerre: la violence du champ de bataille pendant les deux conflits mondiaux’, in S. Audoin-Rouzeau, A. Becker, C. Ingrao and H. Rousso, eds, La violence de guerre, 1914–1945 (Brussels: Complexe, 2002), p. 91.

54Javier Rodrigo, Vencido. Violenza e repression politica nella Spagna di Franco (1936–1948) (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2006), p. 46.

55Jean-Jacques Marie, La guerre civile russe, 1917–1921 (Paris: Autrement, 2005), p. 41.

56This legend is related in Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt: Herbig, 1987), p. 115. The origin of the legend would seem to be an anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic pamphlet by a Russian émigré: see R. Nilostonski, Der Blutrausch des Bolschevismus. Berichte eines Augenzeugen (Berlin: Karl Rohm, 1925), p. 48. See also Hans Ulrich Wehler, Entsorgung der deutschen Vergangenheit? Ein polemischer Essay zum ‘Historikerstreit’ (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), pp. 147–53. The first version of the ‘rat cage’ story is from Octave Mirabeau, Le Jardin des supplices (Paris: UGE, 1986), pp. 216–18, as noted by Alain Brossat, who has unravelled its literary genealogy: see Alain Brossat, L’épreuve du désastre. Le XXe siècle et les camps (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), pp. 357–72.

57Marie, La guerre civile russe, p. 124.

58See Sergio Luzzatto, Il corpo del Duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 60.

59Wolfgang Sofsky, Violence: Terrorism, Genocide, War (London: Granta, 2004), p. 61.

60See Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after Auschwitz (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 88–90.

61Alain Brossat, Libération fête folle: mythes et rites ou le grand théâtre des passions populaires (Paris: Autrement, 1994).

62Alain Brossat, Les Tondues. Un carnaval moche (Paris: Manya, 1993) – a book inspired by Bakhtin’s interpretation of the carnival.

63Michel Vovelle, La mentalité révolutionnaire. Société et mentalité sous la Révolution française (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1985), p. 85.

64See Paolo Viola, Il trono vuoto. La transizione della sovranitê nella rivoluzione francese (Turin: Einaudi, 1989).

65Cited in Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 196.

66Marc Ferro, ‘Nazisme et communisme: les limites d’une comparaison’, in Marc Ferro, ed., Nazisme et Communisme. Deux regimes dans le siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1999), p. 17.

67José-Luis Ledesma, Los dias de llama de la revolución. Violencia y politica en la retaguardia republicana de Zaragoza durante la guerra civil (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2003).

68Gabriele Ranzato, L’eclissi della democrazia. La guerra civile spagnola e le sue origini 1931–1936 (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2004), pp. 408–10.

69Georges Didi-Hubermann, Images malgré tout (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2003), p. 47.

70See Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel, ‘Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos’, Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), pp. 265–93.

71See Dieter Reifahrth and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Die Kamera der Täter’, in Hannes Heer und Klaus Naumann, eds, Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), p. 497.

72Alain Corbin, Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

73Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 18.

74Elias, The Germans, p. 302.

75Theodor Adorno, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 191.

76Carlo Ginzburg, ‘To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’, in Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (London: Verso, 2002), p. 167.

77See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1, The Years of Persecution 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 73ff.

78These images are published in Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Vintage, 1997). On this subject, see in particular Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Der entleere Blick hinter der Kamera’, in Heer and Naumann, Vernichtungskrieg, pp. 504–27.

79Giovanni Sartori, ‘Dittatura’, in Enciclopedia del Diritto, vol. 13 (Milan: Giuffré, 1964), p. 357.

80Alfred Cobban, Dictatorship: Its History and Theory (New York: Haskell House, 1971 [1939]); Franz Neumann, ‘Notizen zur Theorie der Diktatur’ (1954), in Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat (Frankfurt: Fisch, 1986), pp. 224–47; Sartori ‘Dittatura’, pp. 359–60.

81Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 39.

82Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

83On the revolution as ‘constituent power’, see Antonio Negri, Le Pouvoir constituant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), pp. 352–85.

84Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 241ff. On this shift, see Peter Baehr, ‘Max Weber and the Avatars of Caesarism’, in Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, eds, Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 167.

85Max Weber, Complete Writings on Academic and Political Vocations (New York: Algora, 2008), p. 159.

86Quoted in Luzzatto, Il corpo del Duce, p. 19.

87Leon Trotsky, ‘Terrorism and Communism’, at marxists.org.

88Serge, ‘Endangered City’, p. 81.

89Omer Barton, ‘Fields of Glory’, in Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 9–44.

90Emilio Gentile, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? Histoire et interprétation (Paris: Folio- Gallimard, 2004), p. 45.

91Roman Schnur, ‘“Zwischenbilanz”: zur Theorie des Bürgerkrieges. Bemerkungen über einem vernachlässigten Gegenstand’, in Revolution und Weltbürgerkrieg. Studien zur Ouverture nach 1789 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1983), p. 134.

92Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).

93Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 5.

THREE

War against Civilians

Annihilation

The first global conflict, the act of birth of the European civil war, began as a classic confrontation between states, which is why its actors were stunned by the unprecedented and unexpected forms that the conflict very rapidly took. Their reaction reveals the culture and mentalities that were typical of nineteenth-century Europe: aristocratic and imperial, confident of its power, shocked to see a ‘barbarism’ that had previously been relegated to the ‘uncivilized’ world resurface in its midst, and to discover that war was no longer a gentlemen’s business but an eruption of devastating violence.¹ The German military who occupied Belgium were fearful of ‘snipers’, in an echo of the war of 1870. This led to a wave of violence against civilians in the frontier villages, which were immediately ravaged and set on fire. The historians John Horne and Alan Kramer have counted 6,427 civilian victims during the first weeks of hostilities in France and Belgium.² These events fuelled a Franco-British campaign against ‘German atrocities’, embellished by rumour and myth, but based on a kernel of unchallengeable fact. The violence of the Prussian army crossed a threshold previously unknown in the conduct of warfare, which now became right away a war against civilians. It was not a question of reactive measures that could be ascribed to an unforeseen situation, but of preventive actions decided on by the German general staff.³ Censorship, the restriction of individual freedom, intimidation, requisitions, the taking of hostages and forced labour became the everyday lot of the population of the occupied countries. By November 1914, 2 million Belgians, out of a population of 7.5 million, had sought refuge in France, the Netherlands or Great Britain; 600,000 of them returned home only after the end of the conflict.⁴ Similar practices were repeated the following year on the Eastern front, this time undertaken by the Russian army, which decided, in the course of its retreat, to deport to the Russian heartland 300,000 Lithuanians, 250,000 Latvians, 350,000 Jews and 743,000 Poles.⁵

In 1915, a French commission of inquiry published its report on German war crimes, classified as ‘acts committed by the enemy in violation of the law of nations’. The accusations went far beyond the violation of Belgian neutrality. They concerned the use of chemical weapons, the bombing of cities, looting, rape, murder and arson. The Germans had adopted ‘treacherous methods of warfare’ and inflicted ‘cruel’ treatment on civilian populations. In short, they had transgressed the code of jus publicum europaeum, thus proving their barbaric nature. This gave comfort to the instigators of French propaganda, whose denunciation of the brutality of the ‘Huns’ was fundamental to their campaign. The Germans responded with a similar report on ‘the world war and the collapse of the law of nations’ (Der Weltkrieg und der Zusammenbruch des Völkerrechts). Besides recalling that certain ‘inhuman methods of war’ that they were accused of, such as aerial bombardment and the use of chemical weapons, were also widely employed by their enemies, they also stigmatized the Entente for imposing a blockade on the Central Powers (and, in the case of tsarist Russia, for pogroms against the Jews). As proof of the fact that the British and French trampled over the traditional norms of war, they invoked ‘the failure to respect customary usage towards German diplomats’ and, above all, ‘the use of uncivilized peoples in a war between Europeans’.⁶

These reciprocal accusations, which bear the mark of their culture and time, both indicate facts and convey myths; they also attest to the shock produced by the systematic violation of the laws of war, and herald the shift under way towards a total war that in many respects resembled a civil war. This was expressed very lucidly in October 1915 by Sir Henry Erle Richards, opening the academic year at All Souls College in Oxford:

If the indiscriminate murder of the civilian population and the general destruction of civilian property is to continue, then in future wars we shall have every belligerent equipped with a fleet of air-ships, and the inhabited portions of every enemy country will be ravaged by bombs dropped from the clouds. The aim of the laws of war has been to alleviate as much as possible the calamities of war and to confine the military separation of belligerents to the weakening of the military forces of the enemy: to spare non-combatants in the interest of humanity. But this kind of warfare is a complete reversal of that policy.⁷

From this point of view, the First World War was only a beginning. The war crimes mentioned by Richards in 1915 were quite minor in comparison with those that would mark the second global conflict. The real turning-point here was neither the invasion of Poland in 1939 nor the rapid success of the blitzkrieg on the Western front the following year, which destroyed French defences in a few weeks. It was the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. From this point on, the conflict underwent a change of nature, and began to be waged on the Eastern front as a civil war: a war in which the only rule accepted was that of terror, hatred and limitless violence.

On 22 June 1940, representatives of France and the Third Reich signed an armistice, in the same railway carriage in which the capitulation of the German army had been signed on 11 November 1918. This highly symbolic act had a number of meanings. It indicated not simply Hitler’s desire to take revenge on one of the parties responsible for the German humiliation of Versailles, but also the survival of a last vestige of the jus publicum europaeum. Defeated France remained a civilized European nation, capable therefore of integration into a Europe dominated by Nazism. Even as a vassal, it could preserve a simulacrum of sovereignty on part of its territory. Its culture would be muzzled but not destroyed, and its elites encouraged to embark on the path of collaboration, from which they might hope to benefit. Publishing houses, cinemas and theatres were not closed, but simply brought under control, and the receptions given in Paris by Otto Abetz attracted high society. The war in the East, on the other hand, had a completely different configuration. Hitler conceived it as a war of conquest and extermination: conquest of German Lebensraum, colonization of the Slavic world, destruction of Bolshevism and extermination of the Jews. Right from the start, it differed from all wars that had preceded it on the continent. It was initiated as a colonial war with no distinction between combatants and civilians, in which whole peoples were to be made into slaves, while others were exterminated by the use of special arrangements, first of all the ghettos and Einsatzgruppen, subsequently gas chambers in camps specially conceived as human slaughterhouses. In the Nazi view of the world, the symbiosis between Jews and Bolsheviks was so close that their destruction constituted one and the same objective. During the first year of this war, several hundred thousand political commissars of the Red Army were shot on the spot by the Einsatzgruppen that followed the advance of the Wehrmacht. The orders were clear from the start: the Russian soldiers did not merit respect; they were not ‘comrades’.⁸ Out of 3,350,000 Soviet prisoners of war captured by the Wehrmacht during Operation Barbarossa in 1941, more than 2 million were either executed or failed to survive the end of the war, on account of the atrocious conditions in which they were detained.⁹ Simply comparing military and civilian victims, the differences between the Western and Eastern fronts leap to the eye. The total number of deaths, including soldiers who fell in battle, civilians killed by bombing, and victims of conflicts between the Resistance and the occupying forces, as well as Jews and political deportees, shows an impressive gulf between the two theatres of war.¹⁰ France mourned nearly 600,000 dead (two-thirds of these in metropolitan France), and Italy a similar number (including soldiers fighting alongside the Third Reich, as well as partisans and civilians who died under the German occupation after 1943). Great Britain also counted over 400,000 victims (including 60,000 civilians), and the Netherlands some 300,000 (over half of whom were Jews). Compared with the ravages of the war in the East, these figures do not seem very high. In the East, the numbers were counted in millions: 23 million Soviets (10 per cent of the total population, including at least 8 million civilians), and 6 million Poles (20 per cent of the total population, including 3.5 million Jews). Similar proportions were seen in the Balkans, with 2 million dead (10.6 per cent of the population in Yugoslavia, 6.8 per cent in Greece). The gap is equally marked if the respective rates of mortality for the British and Soviet armies are compared: around 5 per cent for the British and 25 per cent for the Soviets.¹¹ During the final phase of the war, Hitler even complained of the ‘stupid’ Geneva conventions, which considerably limited the ferocity of German soldiers on the Western front.¹² Where surrender did not pose a threat to the soldiers’ survival, they showed themselves less bellicose. Distinctions should also be made among the German losses, according to the different theatres. Out of 3.5 million soldiers of the Third Reich who fell in the course of the war, the deaths on the Western front between spring 1940 and the end of 1944 were ‘only’ 128,000, or 3.2 per cent of total German losses. Recalling the extraordinarily ferocious character of the war in the East, Pieter Lagrou stresses that the total number of civilian victims of the bombing of German cities – some 600,000 – was still less than those of either Leningrad or Warsaw alone.¹³

The German soldiers themselves noted the ferocity of the war in the letters they wrote from the front: ‘Here war is pursued in its “pure form”, any sign of humanity seems to have disappeared from deeds, hearts, and minds. The scenes which one observes border on insane hallucinations and nightmares.’¹⁴ In short, the Second World War was essentially fought on the Eastern front, where its various dimensions – ideological (the struggle against Bolshevism), colonial (the conquest of Lebensraum) and racial (the subjection of the Slavs, the genocide of Jews and gypsies) – were fully developed. In this respect, it differed from the First World War, in which, since it was an inter-state conflict in the sense of international law, the number of victims was proportionally comparable on all sides.¹⁵ Once this character of classic warfare was lost, it was that much more deadly wherever its character as an ideological, colonial and exterminatory war was more openly displayed.

The unbreakable link between these different dimensions of the conflict was hammered home by the propaganda designed for the German armies on the Eastern front. The historian Omer Bartov has drawn up an inventory of the privileged themes of this ideological war (the notion of Weltanschauungskrieg constantly crops up in the Nazi language of the time), pointing out that these were developed in bulletins, documents and orders emanating from officers, which in the great majority of cases were not subject to the control of Goebbels’s ministry. The dehumanization of the enemy, defined according to the categories of the Nazi lexicon, was the distinctive element here:

Everyone who has looked at the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like … We would be insulting animals if we were to describe these men, who are mostly Jewish, as beasts. They are the embodiment of the Satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity. The shape of these commissars reveals to us the rebellion of the Untermenschen against noble blood.¹⁶

The extirpation of Bolshevism was a legitimate demand of Germany, according to the orders of the commander of the 37th Panzer Corps:

It is now our task to destroy the Red Army and thereby eradicate for ever Bolshevism, the deadly enemy of National Socialism. We have never forgotten that it was Bolshevism which had stabbed our army in the back during the [First] World War and which bears the guilt for all the misfortunes which our people have suffered after the war. We should always remember that!¹⁷

The aims and methods of this war were summed up in an order from the commanders of the 16th Army, Walther von Reichenau, Erich von Manstein and Hermann Hoth, transmitted to the troops in November 1941, at the time of the great German advance towards Leningrad and Moscow. The essential aim of the war lay in the destruction of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, and the ‘eradication of the Asian influence on the European cultural sphere’. Consequently,

the soldier in the East is not only a fighter by the rules of war, but also the carrier of an inexorable racial concept [völkische Idee] and the avenger of all bestialities inflicted upon the Germans. For this reason the soldier must have complete understanding for the necessity of harsh, but just measures against [Sühne an] Jewish sub-humanity … Only in this manner will we do justice to our historical task, to liberate the German people for once and for all from the Asiatic-Jewish danger.¹⁸

According to Bartov, this propaganda contributed to the creation of a new conception of heroism, in the conditions of a savage war¹⁹ – a heroism, we may add, whose ultimate source was no longer the mystique of patriotism but the advent of nihilism. If liberating Europe from Bolshevism and the Jews was a redemptive mission, then the soldiers entrusted with it were transformed into heroic warriors. In the actual conditions of the Eastern front, this ideological crusade took the form of a combat of extreme cruelty. The soldier no longer perceived war, after the model of 1914, as a confrontation between military apparatuses; he grew accustomed to living everyday life as a brutal, fanatical and amoral affair, in the context of an army that stood for an ‘ethic of annihilation’ (Vernichtungsmoral).²⁰ Conceived in Darwinian terms, this war acquired the features of a struggle for existence. We can indeed speak, in this case, of a regression from the norms of the civilization process.

As rejection of the traditional rules of war was consubstantial with the Nazi war – seen as ideological and racial, and waged as a colonial war – changes were introduced into the conduct of the conflict that affected all the actors in it. The air raids of the British and Americans, as we shall see later on, aimed at destroying German cities and terrorizing the civilian populations. The savagery of the conflict brutalized the language on all sides. After the German raids on London of spring 1941, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons to proclaim his support for the desire of revenge that was rising among his fellow citizens: ‘Give it them back.’²¹ In an interview, he further radicalized his statement: ‘There are less than seventy million malignant Huns – some of whom are curable and others killable.’²² On the battlefield, words were still more clear. At the time of the landings in Sicily, in July 1943, General George S. Patton addressed the officers of the 45th infantry division in the following terms: ‘When we meet the enemy, we will kill him. We will show him no mercy. He has killed thousands of your comrades, and he must die.’ No matter, Patton spelled out, if he tried to surrender: ‘Oh no! That bastard will die! You must kill him.’²³ If the American war in Europe was not characterized by the racist language and practices that marked the war against the Japanese in the Pacific,²⁴ the laws of war were certainly forgotten for the duration.

On the Eastern front, the brutalization of the war inevitably had a deep effect on Soviet troops. Defence was organized; Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad could not be allowed to fall. In the territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, Stalin decided to respond to Nazi aggression with a partisan war. Soviet soldiers were not allowed to surrender: prisoners of war were regarded as deserters. Two famous orders issued by the Red Army high command in August 1941 (no. 270) and July 1942 (no. 227), signed by General Zhukov and Stalin himself, described as deserters liable to execution all officers and political commissars of the Soviet army who were captured by the enemy.²⁵ In his radio broadcast of 3 July 1941, Stalin had launched his call for a ‘great patriotic war’, whose aim was not only to defend the threatened USSR but also to contribute to the liberation of ‘all the European peoples groaning under the yoke of German fascism’.²⁶ As the months of an ever more barbaric war passed, the language grew more radical. In a booklet designed for Soviet soldiers, Ilya Ehrenburg refused to consider the Germans as human beings, and called for them to be killed: ‘Do not count days; do not count versts. Count only the number of Germans killed by you … Kill the German – this is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German – that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German – that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through. Kill.’²⁷

In 1944, when Soviet troops entered East Prussia, the walls were covered with posters calling for vengeance: ‘Red Army Soldier: You are now on German soil; the hour of revenge has struck!’²⁸ In this vein, a leaflet incited the killing of soldiers and rape of women: ‘Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn. Follow the words of Comrade Stalin and crush forever the fascist beast in its den. Break the racial pride of the German woman. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, valorous soldier of the Red Army.’²⁹ We know that the arrival of the Russians in Berlin was accompanied by an apogee of violence, with summary executions and plunder in the destroyed city. According to certain estimates, 90,000 women were raped.³⁰ There can certainly be no question of establishing a parallel between the Nazi war of aggression and the Soviet war of liberation, as certain historians (either apologists or blinded by their anti-Communism) have sometimes been tempted to do.³¹ Stalin had begun a war of defence, which changed into a war of occupation, imposing his domination over a part of Europe; but the submission of the Germans to a state of slavery was not among his objectives, let alone their physical extermination. The violence and excesses perpetrated by the Red Army, which in many cases deserve categorizing as war crimes, along with the Allied air war and the US bombing of Japan, attest to the cruelty of the Second World War. They were the expression of a conflict waged by modern armies equipped with extremely powerful means of destruction, but also fought with the methods, sentiments and passions of a civil war.

This conflict proceeded under the sign of hatred. Fascism had prepared the ground for this by proclaiming the end of humanism, idealizing war as ‘global hygiene’ and making force and violence into a cult. The Nazis prided themselves on this, Josef Goebbels placing it at the centre of his radio speeches. Europe, he proclaimed in June 1944, had never known such great and profound hatred: ‘During these last months, the peoples of Europe have experienced this hatred and nourished themselves with the will to put an end to this terror, yes, to have this terror paid for!’³²

Bombing

The air war proceeded as an escalation of actions and reactions leading to a blindly destructive wave, literally apocalyptic for the populations that experienced it. The systematic bombing of cities and civilian populations, begun in 1940 and ending in August 1945 with the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrates the introduction of a new paradigm of war, which Peter Sloterdijk has described as ‘atmo-terrorist’.³³ Its principle, whose first expression this author saw in the gas attack conducted by the German army against French and Canadian forces at Ypres, on 22 April 1915, lay no longer in the intentio directa that aimed at the body of the enemy, as had always been the case since the wars of Antiquity, but in the destruction of his ecological conditions of existence. The air war killed civilians – Hiroshima would be a macroscopic example – by eliminating their natural habitat, in the biological sense of the term. In his book On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald gave a striking insight into the ‘atmo-terrorist’ war by describing the destruction of Hamburg on the night of 28 July 1943, in the RAF operation known as ‘Gomorrah’.³⁴ Within minutes of the first raid, fires were ignited throughout the city, rapidly growing into a gigantic firestorm. Flames rose from the eviscerated buildings, drawing in oxygen so powerfully that the air blew with the force of a hurricane. Those who had sheltered in the refuges were buried under the ruins, and those who had tried to flee were trapped by the flames, which burned them as living torches, or submerged in boiling asphalt. The next morning, the city was covered with a thick shroud of smoke which no light pierced through. The heat that this hell gave out was felt by the pilots in their cockpits.

Aerial bombings had first been tried out during the First World War, but were initially confined to zones close to the front lines. Between January 1915 and December 1916, German Zeppelins bombed English cities, including the capital, but caused only a small number of casualties (no more than 1,400 dead and a few tens of thousands wounded). In the wake of the conflict, the League of Nations established a commission of lawyers charged with drawing up a code of aerial warfare. Meeting at The Hague between December 1922 and February 1923, this commission laid down a set of rules that prohibited attacks on towns. Its conclusions were clear: ‘Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants is prohibited.’³⁵ Despite these norms being violated quite flagrantly by Italy in its war against Ethiopia in 1935, the majority of political leaders continued solemnly to reaffirm them. In June 1938, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain gave instructions to the RAF’s Bomber Command to the effect that the bombing of cities and civilian populations was ‘absolutely contrary to international law’.³⁶ These rules, however, were quickly forgotten at the start of the Second World War. Despite the good intentions of heads of state, their violation was inherent to the very nature of modern weapons, just as total war was inherent to the conditions created by the industrial revolution. Ernst Jünger had very clearly drawn this conclusion as early as 1930, indicating that ‘the motorized army that moves on the ground and in the air will not accept for very long that war should be restricted to battle, and the big cities will exert a growing attraction on the new armies as centres and neuralgic points of the technical world’.³⁷

The first air raids took place in September 1939, striking Polish cities and preparing the German conquest of Warsaw. In May 1940, with the start of hostilities on the Western front, it was the turn of Amsterdam. After the fall of France, the United Kingdom was isolated and, possessing no other means of combat, launched an air offensive against German industrial installations in the Rhineland, adopting the strategy of ‘area bombing’ – dropping incendiary bombs in urban zones. The German response would be the intensive bombing of English cities. Between autumn 1940 and spring 1941, German raids killed more than 40,000 civilians. The industrial town of Coventry was razed. The escalation that ensued did not stop until 1945, with the more or less complete destruction of German cities.

At the Casablanca conference of January 1943, the Allies decided on a military strategy whose explicit aim was to strike German civil society as a whole, by the massive bombing of cities.³⁸ This is one of the factors that explain the incomprehension and indifference with which the world observed in August 1945 the atomic annihilation of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In total, during the war, the British Bomber Command, headed by Sir Arthur Harris, launched 390,000 attacks against Germany, costing the lives of 56,000 pilots. On the German side, the estimate is more than 500,000 civilians killed, at least 100,000 seriously injured, and 3 million homes destroyed.³⁹ Hamburg was bombed between summer and autumn 1943, Dresden in February 1945. Millions of refugees were forced to flee from the burning cities. If the damage caused by German bombing was very much less than that of the Allied air war, this was essentially owing to the steady decline in the resources available to the Nazi regime. The V1s and V2s with which Hitler hoped to reverse the course of the war were imprecise, and never claimed more than a few thousand killed or wounded.

The Second World War radically refuted the predictions of the Italian officer Giulio Douhet, who became famous in 1921 when he published his book on military strategy, Il dominio dell’aria. Though he correctly foresaw the destructive and deadly character of aerial bombing in a future war, he was seriously mistaken in thinking that this would provoke riots by civilians to impose a halt to hostilities, and that, at the end of the day, the cost of such a war would be more than states could bear.⁴⁰ Civilian populations stoically accepted their new role as ‘rearguard combatants’ and enemy targets. The survivors cleared up debris, while the rulers called for revenge. The massive bombings of German cities even shored up the stability of the Nazi regime until its final fall, arousing in civilians, despite the collapse of the Hitler myth,⁴¹ a feeling of fear and hatred towards the enemy. They furnished arguments for Goebbels’s propaganda, as he himself made clear in his diary. The hundreds of thousands in Hamburg bombed in autumn 1943 thus became the ‘vanguard of revenge’ (Avantgarde der Rache).⁴² The British popular press, for its part, ironically declared that ‘Hamburg has been Hamburgerized’.⁴³

A paradoxical situation was thus created in which the Allied war to liberate the countries occupied by the Axis powers took the form of a war against civilian populations, who accepted the loss and destruction with resignation, as an inevitable consequence of the conflict. Collective memory retains the epic and ferocious battles of the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944, which led in a few weeks to the liberation of Paris and began the final phase of the war in the West. And yet the number of civilian victims of the air raids that preceded and accompanied the landings was greater than that of the soldiers who fell on the Normandy beaches. (The village of Portel, in Pas-de-Calais, had already been destroyed in September 1943 by a raid that sought to test German defences, and killed 500 civilians.)⁴⁴ This paradox, however, was inherent to the logic of total war – a war that no longer distinguished between combatants and civilians.

The excesses of these air raids reveal the perverse effects of a conflict without rules, in which hatred of the enemy develops into the desire for total destruction. It was the very idea of Europe as past, inheritance and cultural tradition that was buried under the ruins of the destroyed cities. This unprecedented aspect of total war was well summed up in the English expression ‘cultural bombing’. On 29 March 1942, the RAF bombed the medieval town of Lübeck on the Hanseatic coast, destroying its historical monuments from the Marienkirche to the Renaissance palaces of the city centre, including the town hall. Hitler then decided to strike English historic towns, launching the ‘Baedeker raids’, named after the tourist guide used to select targets. The medieval cities of Exeter, Bath and York were targeted. German radio triumphantly announced: ‘Exeter was a jewel; we have destroyed it.’ The British air raids touched the symbols of Kultur, the architectural and artistic heritage of a past to which German nationalism, well beyond Nazism, devoted a genuine cult. They struck at the heart of the principle of ‘protection of the homeland’ (Heimatschutz) that had been made sacred by those in charge of German cultural policy since the First World War (Max Dvořák had theorized this in 1916, in his Katechism der Denkmalpflege).⁴⁵ The response thus had to match the offence suffered.

The Allied ‘cultural bombing’ continued and intensified throughout the conflict, sparing scarcely any town – from Wuppertal, a major Rhineland industrial centre, to Würzburg, a small historic town bombed in March 1945 even though its destruction did not offer any strategic benefit. On the night of 10 March 1943, the Munich national library lost half a million books (23 per cent of its stock) in the fire caused by the air raid. Six months later, the university library of Hamburg lost 625,000 volumes in the flames. Out of a total of 40 million books in German public libraries, 30 million had been stored underground to escape this destructive fury. Out of the 10 million volumes that remained on the shelves, 8 million were consumed by fire.⁴⁶ The bombs were supposed to bury German civil society under a mountain of ruins, and make a clean slate of its culture. This nihilism, which had made its first spectacular appearance with the book-burnings organized by Goebbels in May 1933, thus found its epilogue at the apogee of the European civil war. The destruction of cities, with their cathedrals, monuments, libraries and works of art, struck many observers as a kind of ineluctable nemesis. In his talks to the German people broadcast by the BBC, Thomas Mann could not help lamenting the destruction of Lübeck, his native town; but he remembered Coventry, and concluded that ‘everything has to be paid for’.⁴⁷

In Great Britain, only a few voices opposed this policy of destruction of German civil society. These were above all representatives of the churches, including the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the bishop of Chichester, a number of Labour MPs, and certain intellectuals such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the philologist Gilbert Murray and the writer Vera Brittain, who described the bombings as ‘a carnival of death’.⁴⁸ When Sir Arthur Harris, in response to questions in both Houses of Parliament, delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Ethics of Bombing’, the Rev. John Collins, chaplain of Bomber Command, simply remarked that ‘The Bombing of Ethics’ would have been a more appropriate title.⁴⁹ But these remained isolated voices. At Nuremberg, in order to deprive a possible German defence of any argument, the US prosecutor Telford Taylor presented the aerial bombing of cities as ‘a recognized part of modern war’, thus integrating it into customary law.⁵⁰ In other words, the massacre of civilians was implicitly accepted as an inevitability of total war. If Allied silence about these crimes, seen as the price to pay in a just war, is not hard to explain, German silence has more complicated reasons. We may see it as a symptom of what Karl Jaspers called, as early as 1945, the ‘question of German guilt’ (deutsche Schuldfrage).⁵¹ It cannot be ruled out, as W. G. Sebald suggested, that ‘quite a number of those affected by the air raids, despite their grim but impotent fury in the face of such obvious madness, regarded the great firestorms as a just punishment, even an act of retribution on the part of a higher power with which there could be no dispute’.⁵² In other words, it may be that the flames devouring German cathedrals recalled those that had risen from synagogues on the Kristallnacht of 8 November 1938; and that the lines of impoverished homeless evoked those – equally disciplined and marshalled, though with no solidarity from the spectators lining their route – of Jews being led to the stations from where they were deported to the death camps.

Expulsion

The two world conflicts assumed features of civil wars, first of all, because they were waged as total wars. This term, which first appeared in 1915, rapidly spread in all Western languages long before it was consecrated by the booklet of that title by the German General Ludendorff, twenty years later. Total war, by definition, goes beyond the limits of a classic war, invading the space of a civil society traditionally excluded from military operations. Fighting takes place not only on the front lines but also in the rear. Submarines take the battle into the seas, and air raids strike cities. The whole continent becomes the theatre of military operations: civilians are involved in battles, not only producing for the army but also becoming the target of enemy bombs. War is thus transformed, writes Ludendorff, into a ‘struggle for existence’, which in his eyes constituted its real ‘ethical justification’.⁵³ During the First World War, economies were transformed into war economies, challenging the liberal postulates of ‘laissez-faire’. Workers became a ‘labour militia’ active in the rear, while women massively entered production in the name of patriotic duty, replacing the men who had been enlisted. Culture was transformed into propaganda, the media subjected to censorship, the illustrated press and cinema placed under government control in order to defend the union sacrée. Governments established propaganda bureaus staffed by intellectuals ‘in uniform’, such as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee in England, or Gioacchino Volpe in Italy. From 1792 onwards, the logic of war has been that of national mobilization. The union sacrée, John Horne notes, is simply ‘an attempt to secularize the idea of crusade’.⁵⁴ But the 1914–18 war crossed a threshold in this ‘nationalization’ of warfare, as the business of peoples and no longer of dynasties, as well as in the contamination of the civilian sphere by the military. In this sense, total war imposed itself on the whole of the continent as a civil war. Not because the opposing enemy forces belonged to the same political community, but because it deeply affected the civil societies of all countries involved. That is why Alexandre Koyré saw modern war, given the social, economic, political and demographic upheavals it provoked, as a ‘kind of revolution’.⁵⁵

It is in the very nature of modern means of destruction that they break the previously normative distinction between combatants and civilians. In 1914, the Central Powers were struck by an economic blockade that, by the end of the conflict, had cost the lives of a number of German civilians variously estimated at between 424,000 and 800,000.⁵⁶ Cities close to the front quickly became military targets, subjected to intensive bombing and sometimes destroyed, as Ernst Friedrich showed in great detail in his pacifist pamphlet of 1924, War Against War!⁵⁷ The populations of the occupied territories were often compelled to do compulsory labour, while citizens of enemy countries were perceived as a potential ‘fifth column’ and interned as undesirable foreigners. This led to the first forms of forced population transfer by the occupying armies in France, Belgium and Austro-Hungarian Galicia. The war against civilians was ‘a real war whose objectives were no different from those of the war waged on the battlefield’.⁵⁸ By the end of the conflict, no one could be unaware of the degree to which European societies had been shaken by this tremendous trauma: a generation had been mown down in the trenches, nations had been pauperized, states indebted, aristocratic elites deposed, diplomatic and commercial relations destroyed, political systems profoundly shattered and, in many countries, the existing regimes challenged by movements of insurrection.

It was in this climate of war that the Turkish regime of the declining Ottoman Empire undertook the genocide of a million Armenians suspected of acting as a ‘fifth column’. A long history of persecution found its tragic epilogue in the context of a total war that radicalized Turkish nationalism and transformed its hostility towards non-Turkish minorities into a project of extermination. The Armenians, as Christians, were accused of being allies of the Russian enemy, and of supporting their fellow nationals enrolled in the tsarist army. The forms and methods of this first genocide of the twentieth century were archaic, but its execution proceeded from the context of crisis, generalized violence and habituation to mass death created by the total war.⁵⁹ By virtue of their social, economic and cultural role in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians represented a major obstacle to the process of national homogenization launched by the Young Turk movement. This was the first genocide perpetrated in the name of modern nationalism, the act of birth of a nation-state of the Western type in place of an old multinational empire.

A similar logic was at work in the vast operations of ethnic cleansing that took place in Central Europe and the Balkans at the end of the war. As Hannah Arendt showed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, this gave rise to a new category of people deprived of citizenship and rights: refugees and the stateless. The legitimacy that the European order could claim before 1914 was not national but, in most cases, dynastic and imperial. The legitimacy of the states that arose from its collapse was far from corresponding to the religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural mixture of their populations. There were many minorities that found no place in the new political system based on the model of the nation-state. The breakup of the old system of international relations amplified the postwar crises, provoking an explosive mixture of civil wars and revolutions. As distinct from their forerunners in the age of the wars of religion – the Huguenots who found refuge in Protestant Europe – the stateless of the twentieth century were well and truly alone.⁶⁰ One of the consequences of the peace treaties that, from 1919 onwards, confirmed the dissolution of the defeated empires, was the forced displacement of nearly 10 million people.⁶¹ Around a million Germans were expelled from the territories detached from the former Reich (Poznan, Pomerania, Upper Silesia) or fled from the civil war in the Baltic states. Some 2 million Poles were displaced from their native lands and repatriated within the frontiers of the newly created Polish state. The civil war in the former tsarist empire led to the exodus of more than 2 million Poles and Ukrainians. Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, followed soon by Hungary, received several hundred thousand of its nationals from the countries born out of the dissolution of the Habsburg empire, while others left Budapest because of the civil war – a first wave fleeing the Communists of Béla Kun, and a second seeking to escape the repression of Admiral Horthy. The cross-currents of population movement and forced exodus were equally substantial in the former Ottoman Empire. The Lausanne treaty of 1923 decreed the expulsion of over a million Orthodox Greeks living in Turkey and 400,000 Turks living in Greece. Greece was overwhelmed by refugees, now forming a quarter of all its inhabitants and doubling the populations of Athens and Salonika. Under the terms of the Neuilly treaty, also of 1923, 52,000 people left Bulgaria for Greece, and 30,000 moved in the opposite direction. Over 300,000 Armenians who had survived the genocide left Turkey during the postwar years. Since many refugees had their nationality revoked by their state of origin – a practice begun by Germany, then followed by Soviet Russia in relation to the White émigrés – the League of Nations established in 1921 a High Commission for Refugees, presided over by the Norwegian Fridtjhof Nansen, to grant papers to the ‘stateless’, which especially benefited those of Russian and Armenian origin. This mass of homeless was increased, after 1933, by Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, soon followed by those from Austria and Czechoslovakia, the total number of whom reached 450,000 by the start of the Second World War.⁶² In 1939, a similar number of Spanish Republican refugees crossed the French frontier.⁶³ This tremendous upheaval was the product of a European crisis in which the redrawing of frontiers confirmed the result of political confrontations and civil wars.

For Hannah Arendt, the appearance of the stateless – these individuals deprived of legal recognition and protection – revealed a paradox of modernity. They embodied the abstract humanity postulated by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and at the same time were ‘outlaws’, not because they had transgressed the law, but simply because there was no law capable of recognizing them as citizens. ‘The transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation’, wrote Arendt, had created an unprecedented situation in which the stateless had not only lost their homeland, but were in no position to find a new one: ‘The first great damage done to the nation-states as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of stateless was that the right of asylum, the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man, was abolished.’⁶⁴ This circumstance, by an irony of history, seemed to vindicate the conservatism of Edmund Burke. In 1790, Burke had criticized the empty abstraction of the universal notion of humanity elaborated by the Enlightenment, with its ‘natural rights’, opposing to this the ‘rights of the English’ – the very specific privileges of the British aristocracy, handed down as a legacy from one generation to the next.⁶⁵ In their capacity as outlaws, expelled from humanity and thus deprived of political rights, the stateless were often interned in camps. And this internment of a human group whose only fault was to exist without belonging to a political community – more precisely, to a state entity – Arendt saw as the first step, in 1930s Europe, in a process that led these ‘superfluous’ individuals to the Nazi extermination camps: ‘[B]efore they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged.’⁶⁶

This reflection of Arendt’s on the fate of the stateless identifies the preconditions for the genocide of the Jews in the context created by the Great War and the dislocation of Europe. But the sudden appearance of this mass of stateless people on the historical stage was also a symptom of the European civil war. As outlaws excluded from the political community, the stateless shared some features with the enemy in the civil war – with the difference that, not being belligerents, their status of unprotected outlaw condemned them a priori to the role of victim. That is why they became an emblematic figure of the European crisis that began in 1914.

It was clearly the Second World War that exposed to broad daylight its character of a war against civilians, who formed around half of its victims (25 million out of 48 million). On top of this, between 1939 and 1948 at least 40 million people were displaced as a result of deportation, terror and border changes. The first forced transfers of population followed the division of Poland and the Baltic states between the USSR and the Third Reich in 1939. Two years later, the German offensive against the Soviet state was seen by Hitler as a campaign of Germanic colonization of Eastern Europe – the conquest of Lebensraum – implying the deportation of several million Slavs and the elimination by famine of millions more. Poland was not just conquered; it had to disappear as a national entity, with the annihilation of its political, military and intellectual elite. In this war, civilian victims did not count as ‘collateral damage’, but as targets whose destruction was planned. The reorganization of the conquered territories implied gigantic operations of ethnic cleansing, with forced transfers of Slav populations and the installation in their place of ‘ethnic Germans’ (Volksdeutsche). The extermination of the Jews, with its own specific features, fitted into this vast project, which also aimed to reduce the Slav population by way of starvation. In autumn 1941, when the German offensive against the USSR was in full swing, Goering predicted that famine would destroy between 20 and 30 million Soviet citizens in the coming winter, in the territories conquered by the Wehrmacht.⁶⁷ Soviet prisoners of war, for their part, were interned in camps that functioned as centres of slow extermination, when they were not executed right away (in Kaputt, Malaparte describes one of these operations, in which victims were selected by a reading test: only the semi-illiterate were kept alive).⁶⁸

If the peace treaties of 1919–23 had reshaped the political map of Europe, in 1945 the victorious Allies proceeded to a far more drastic redrawing of frontiers, in an attempt to homogenize vast territories on an ethnic basis. Versailles had registered the collapse of the multinational empires and given birth to a series of states that forcefully claimed their national character, but often possessed only a very weak national and linguistic homogeneity. At Potsdam, the victors sought to make ethnic and political boundaries coincide, by means of forced population transfers. The war fundamentally redrew not only the political map of the continent but also its ethnographic map, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. This great campaign of ethnic cleansing was expressed in the expulsion of 15 million Germans between 1945 and 1948: 7 million from Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia; 3 million Sudeten Germans; 2 million from Poland and the USSR; 2.7 million from Yugoslavia, Romania and Hungary. This made possible the formation of a nationally homogeneous Poland, with East Prussia divided between Poland and the USSR. The exodus had begun in 1944, when the Red Army crossed into the territories of the German Reich. According to the US diplomat George Kennan, who visited East Prussia in 1945, ‘the sight was that of a totally ruined and deserted country: scarcely a sign of life from one end of it to the other’.⁶⁹ Poland, whose population in 1939 had been one-third non-Polish, became 97 per cent Polish by 1948. In Romania, which had become a multinational state after the First World War, Hungarians were after the Second World War the sole surviving minority. Czechoslovakia, which had numbered 23 per cent Germans in 1939, had scarcely any remaining in 1948.

The end of Mitteleuropa was one of the consequences of the European civil war.⁷⁰ This concept had always carried multiple meanings in the course of its history. First of all, it signified the geopolitical idea of a Grossdeutschland as the dominant power at the heart of the continent, in the vision developed by Friedrich Naumann during the First World War.⁷¹ It later denoted the idea of the cultural unity of the Germanic world, beyond political frontiers, based on language and the presence of German-speaking minorities in a vast space stretching from Königsberg to Trieste. Besides this form of cultural pan-Germanism, which Karl Jaspers defended in his correspondence with Hannah Arendt,⁷² there was a further variant, inevitably charged with a strong nostalgic connotation after 1918, that identified Mitteleuropa with the legacy of the Habsburg Empire, multinational and cosmopolitan, as opposed to a monolithic Germany based on the Teutonic Volk. This is the Habsburg myth, which found its literary interpreters in Joseph Roth and Elias Canetti, and its historians in François Fejtő and Claudio Magris.⁷³ From this perspective, Central Europe was seen as a space of plural identities, shared by the mosaic of peoples living between Russia and Germany. In other words, it was a crossroads not only of German and Slav cultures, but also of Latin ones (Romania, Trieste), as well as various religions (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and, on its margins, Muslim). None of these different conceptions of Mitteleuropa, however, survived the ravages of the European civil war. The peace treaties signed at the end of the Great War made ‘nations’ out of countries whose very identity came from their diversity. After 1945, the idea of Mitteleuropa was buried with the disappearance of its foundations: the division of East Prussia between Poland and the USSR, the expulsion of German minorities, the end of the multinational ‘small nations’ of the Danube basin and, above all, the extermination of the Jews, who had been its real cultural cement.

______________

1This is the same stupefaction that Sigmund Freud showed in 1915, when he noted in ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ that ‘the great world-dominating nations of white race upon whom the leadership of the human species has fallen’ had proved incapable of developing this along peaceful paths. The war, he concluded, ‘strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us’. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957), pp. 276, 299.

2John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 74.

3Ibid., p. 43.

4See Sophie Schaepdrijver, ‘Occupation, Propaganda, and the Idea of Belgium’, in Ariel Rohswald and Richard Stites, eds, European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda 1914–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 270.

5Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, pp. 74–84.

6See Marc Ferro, La Grande Guerre 1914–1918 (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1990), p. 219.

7Henry Erle Richards, International Law: Some Problems of the War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1915), p. 35.

8See Omer Bartov, ‘Savage War: German Warfare and Moral Choice in World War II’, in Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 8. On this subject, see in particular Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgsfangenen 1941–1945 (Bonn: Dietz, 1997).

9See Pavel Polian, ‘La violence contre les prisonniers de guerre soviétiques dans le Troisième Reich et en URSS’, in Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Annette Becker, Christian Ingrao and Henry Rousso, eds, La Violence de guerre 1914–1945 (Brussels: Complexe, 2002), p. 121.

10The following figures are taken from Philippe Masson, ed., Dictionnaire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, vol. 1 (Paris: Larousse, 1979), pp. 875–6.

11See R. A. C. Parker, The Second World War: A Short History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 281ff.

12See Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 779.

13Pieter Lagrou, ‘Les guerres, les morts, le deuil: bilan chiffré de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale’, in Audoin-Rouzeau et al., La Violence de guerre, p. 323.

14Cited in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 26.

15Lagrou, ‘Les guerres, les morts, le deuil’, p. 323.

16Cited in Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 83.

17Ibid., p. 84.

18Ibid., pp. 84–5.

19Bartov, Hitler’s Army, p. 26. On the same subject, see also pp. 113ff.

20Hannes Heer, ‘Die Logik des Vernichtungskrieges. Wehrmacht und Partisanenkampf’, in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds, Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), p. 115.

21Cited in Stephen Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities (New York: St Martin, 1993), p. 12.

22Ibid., p. 91.

23Cited in Johanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London: Basic Books, 1999), p. 183.

24See John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

25See Pavel Polian, ‘La violence contre les prisonniers de guerre soviétiques dans le Troisième Reich’, in Audoin-Rouzeau et al., La Violence de guerre, pp. 124–5.

26Josef Stalin, radio broadcast of 3 July 1941, at marxists.org. See Isaac Deutscher, Stalin (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), Chapter 12.

27Cited in Anthony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin: 1945 (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 177.

28Cited in Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 66.

29Ibid., p. 65.

30See Tony Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’, in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, eds, The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 294. See also Anthony Beevor, who offers a higher figure of between 95,000 and 130,000 (Fall of Berlin, p. 434).

31See Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reich und das Ende des europäische Judentums (Berlin: Siedler, 1986). The contentions of this book were one of the sources of the German Historikerstreit.

32Cited in Ralf George Reuth, Goebbels (Munich: Piper, 1995), p. 543.

33See Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Semiotex(e), 2009).

34W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), p. 26ff.

35See Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II, p. 26.

36Ibid., p. 29.

37Ernst Jünger, ‘Das grosse Bild des Krieges (Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges)’, Politische Publizistik, 1919 bis 1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001 [1930]), p. 606.

38Richard Overy, ‘Die Allierte Bombenstrategie als Ausdruck des “Totalen Krieges”’, in Lothar Kettenacker, ed., Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003), p. 40. See also Danièle Voldman, ‘Les populations civiles, enjeux du bombardement des villes (1914–1945)’, in Audoin-Rouzeau et al., La Violence de guerre, pp. 151–74. Based on these facts, but also in contradiction with their brilliant analysis of the differences between total war and genocide, two scholars claim to have revealed a ‘genocidal’ character in the Allied bombing of the Second World War: Eric Markusen and David Kopf, The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 255.

39Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (Berlin: Ullstein, 2002), p. 63; Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II, p. 21.

40Giulio Douhet, Il dominio dell’aria (CreateSpace, 2012 [1921]). See Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2003), § 104.

41Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 200ff.

42Cited in Friedrich, Der Brand, p. 481.

43Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II, p. 103.

44See Christophe Beaudufe, L’Été 1944. Le sacrifice des Normands (Paris: Perrin, 1994); Gabriele Ranzato, ‘Guerra totale e nemico total’, in Marcello Flores, ed., Storia, verità, giustizia. I crimini del XXe secolo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001), p. 75.

45See Miles Glendinning, ‘The Conservation Movement: A Cult of the Modern Age’, Royal Historical Society Transactions 6: 13 (2003), pp. 359–76.

46Friedrich, Der Brand, p. 539.

47Ibid.

48See Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in World War II, p. 124.

49Ibid., p. 97.

50Cited in Lindqvist, History of Bombing, § 239.

51Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial, 1947).

52Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, p. 14.

53Erich Ludendorff, The Total War (Brussels: Friends of Europe, 1936). See also Hans Ulrich Wehler, ‘“Absoluter” und “totaler” Krieg. Vom Clausewitz zu Ludendorff’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift X (1969), pp. 220–48.

54John Horne, ‘Civilian Populations and Wartime Violence: Towards an Historical Analysis’, International Social Science Journal 54: 174 (2002), pp. 483–90.

55Alexandre Koyré, La Cinquième Colonne (Paris: Allia, 1997), p. 33.

56See Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), p. 65.

57Ernst Friedrich, War Against War! (Seattle: Real Comet, 1987) – originally published in a quadrilingual edition.

58Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18. Retrouver la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 72.

59See Jay Winter, ‘Under Cover of War: The Armenian Genocide in the Context of Total War’, in Robert Gelatelly and Ben Kiernan, eds, Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 189–214.

60Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: André Deutsch, 1986), p. 267.

61These figures are taken from Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

62See Herbert Strauss, ed., Jewish Immigrants of the Nazi Period in the USA, 6 vols (Munich: Saur, 1987).

63See Paul Preston, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (London: Fontana, 1996), p. 107.

64Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 275, 280.

65Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 104.

66Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 296.

67See Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1999), p. 186.

68Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), pp. 208–9.

69Cited in Marrus, The Unwanted, p. 301; see also de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 60.

70See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 212ff.

71On the history of the Mitteleuropa concept, see Jacques Le Rider, La Mitteleuropa (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), and especially Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Esprits d’Europe. Autour de Czeslaw Milosz, Jan Patocka, Istvan Bibo (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2005).

72Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969 (Boston: Mariner, 1993), p. 58.

73François Fejtő, Requiem pour un empire défunt. Histoire de la destruction de l’Autriche-Hongrie (Paris: Seuil, 1988); Claudio Magris, Danube (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). See also the fundamental reflections of István Bibó, Misère des petits États de l’Europe de l’Est (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), and Milan Kundera, ‘L’Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe central’, Le Débat 27 (1983), pp. 3–22.

FOUR

Judging the Enemy

Debellatio

By the end of the Second World War, Europe was a heap of ruins.¹ The dead were counted in tens of millions, more than half of them being civilians. In certain countries, the population losses were devastating: 14 per cent in the USSR, 18 per cent in Poland, over 10 per cent in Yugoslavia. The Nazis had killed 6 million Jews and half a million Gypsies. Prisoners of war also counted in millions, including 2.27 million Soviet soldiers and more than 1.5 million Germans. The number of ‘displaced persons’ produced by air raids, destruction or deportation was close to 20 million. In Central Europe, massive population transfers would profoundly change the structure and identity of several countries, including Germany and Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The continent was divided into spheres of influence, and the social structures of some nations were deeply affected. On top of its minorities, Poland had lost a quarter of its urban population, 55 per cent of its lawyers, 40 per cent of its doctors and a third of its university professors. The material damage was also enormous. Urban centres had been ravaged by bombing, especially in Germany. The road network was seriously damaged, even in countries that had suffered far fewer human losses than the USSR and Poland. Photographs, literature and films of the time recorded the continent’s state of distress, where eating one’s fill and finding adequate shelter were the fundamental concerns of the majority of the population. Even in the absence of epidemics, these basic figures give substance to the ritual comparison with the Thirty Years’ War.

In 1945, Germany was not subjected to a state of ‘belligerent occupation’, as defined in the Hague convention of 1907. In other words, it was not a defeated nation that was temporarily occupied by forces that recognized it as a belligerent state. After its ‘unconditional surrender’ and the dissolution of the last Reich government under Admiral Dönitz, it lost its sovereignty, which was transferred de facto to the four occupying powers. There simply no longer was a German state. The USSR, the United States, the United Kingdom and France did not want to sign a treaty with their defeated enemy, but rather to decide on its future. ‘After its unconditional surrender’, Hans Kelsen explained in 1945, ‘Germany has ceased to exist as a state from the standpoint of international law.’² Its status, he added, rather corresponded to that of debellatio.³ Since the occupying forces did not want to annex the country, they established a kind of condominium, comparable to that which Prussia and Austria had imposed on Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, the United Kingdom and Egypt on the Sudan in 1898, or Austria and Hungary on Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908.⁴ In the first phase, the Allies did not rule out depriving Germany of its sovereignty for at least a generation. Henry Morgenthau, one of Roosevelt’s closest collaborators, wanted to transform the Germans into ‘an agricultural population of smallholders’.⁵ The fact that Germany regained its independence in 1949, after the outbreak of the Cold War, was the result not of a peace treaty but rather of the desire of the occupying powers to give birth to two distinct states.

Emergence from a civil war involves the establishment by the victors of a new order, and the application (one might almost say ‘performance’) of their justice. The defeated party does not survive as an institutional or political entity, but simply has to accept the victor’s conditions; it is charged, judged, condemned and punished by the victor. The fact that the trial of the enemy assuages a need for justice and appears morally well-founded, even necessary, in the eyes of international opinion, in no way detracts from the eminently political character of such a process. Far from standing above the disputing parties, the law acts in these circumstances as an instrument in the hands of the victors, whose victory is also measured in terms of the symbolic impact of their political justice.⁶ Trying the enemy serves to consolidate their victory, to legitimize and sacralize it in moral terms, as well as to repress the desire for revenge, preventing a wave of uncontrolled and extreme violence impelled by passion or, if such a wave is already forming, containing and reversing it. Political justice appeases sentiments and defuses the explosive potential, made up of emotions and hatreds, that the civil war had built up. In short, political justice is both a necessity and a convenience.

Political Justice

In the specific course they took, the Nuremberg trials were rather improvised. So as to respect a certain balance, it was necessary to judge also those high officials captured by the Soviet forces, though these were fewer and far less important. The underlying logic of the Nuremberg trials, however, had been sketched out more than two years before. Stalin’s preferred option, when he proposed the summary execution of some tens of thousands of Third Reich officials in March 1943, was opposed by Churchill, who suggested instead drawing up a list of a hundred names. (A few months earlier, however, he had himself envisaged a solution similar to Stalin’s.)⁷ In fact, the Soviets themselves soon realized the importance of a trial, and one that would have a more substantial character than the Moscow farces of 1936–38. In Kharkov, on the Ukrainian front, they had judged and executed in December 1943, before a crowd of 40,000, three German soldiers and a Russian collaborator captured after the battle of Stalingrad and accused of having killed Soviet citizens with ‘mobile gas chambers’.⁸ Pravda had given a high profile to this event, which sounded like a warning addressed to the Nazis and an announcement of the merciless nature of the justice that would await them in the wake of their defeat. Already during the war, this episode inspired a film made for propaganda purposes.

It was this logic – the punishment of the defeated enemy by the verdict of an exemplary trial – that led to the creation of the International Military Tribunal (IMT). The idea of entrusting the organization of the trial to the justice of a neutral country had never been considered, since having remained neutral in this war scarcely seemed like a virtue. The IMT was therefore established by the victors, on the basis of rules that they had laid down during the war. In order for the project to succeed, the mistakes of the past had to be avoided. In 1919, the Versailles treaty had provided for the bringing of several hundred German high officials accused of war crimes before an international criminal court, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, the chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, Field-Marshal Hindenburg, future president of the Weimar Republic, and General Ludendorff. But this trial was never held, owing not only to the German refusal to submit to such humiliation, but also to the refusal of the Netherlands to extradite the deposed Kaiser. A simulacrum of such a trial was finally held in Leipzig in 1921, featuring a few dozen war criminals, which ended in several acquittals and a few symbolic condemnations, followed by early release.⁹ A solution of this kind was no longer imaginable in 1945, when the logic of civil war had fully imposed itself.

As the product of long negotiations in London between representatives of the four victorious powers in the summer of 1945, the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg court that was to try some twenty high officials of the Nazi regime, including the German army and economy, covered three basic areas.¹⁰ The first included ‘crimes against peace’: violations of international law, and ‘conspiracy’ for a war of conquest (‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression’). Second came ‘war crimes’: ‘violations of the laws or customs of war’ by the inhuman treatment of prisoners of war or civilians, ‘plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity’. Third and last were ‘crimes against humanity’: ‘extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts’, or ‘persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds’.

The twelve death sentences pronounced at Nuremberg, along with the long terms of imprisonment, immediately aroused a wide legal and political debate. The notions of ‘crime against peace’ and ‘crime against humanity’ had not existed before the war, and the defence lawyers protested vigorously against the application of such laws ex post facto, which contradicted the fundamental legal principle of non-retroactivity (nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege). As early as the investigation stage, French and Soviet lawyers expressed their perplexity at the notion of ‘crimes against peace’ including ‘war of aggression’.¹¹ For the French, the adoption of this legal principle risked reducing all German crimes to the ‘plotting’ of a small group of Nazi hierarchs, and relegating to second rank the ‘substantial’ crimes perpetrated during this war of aggression. Soviet opposition was based on different concerns. If this principle were adopted, the USSR could be condemned along with Germany for its aggression against Poland and the Baltic states in 1939. Almost simultaneously, France and the United Kingdom had declared a ‘war of aggression’ against Germany, a country that had never threatened them, despite this war being justified because of the German violation of international law in invading Poland. Since no treaty placing war outside the law had existed in 1939, it was highly contradictory to accuse the defeated states of ‘crimes against peace’. It was true that the notion of ‘war of aggression’ had already appeared in 1919, at the Versailles conference, but it had never been made into law. Germany had been deemed guilty of initiating the war, but punished with heavy economic sanctions rather than criminal ones. It was also true that the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 had sought to ban war from international relations, but this was no more than a moral commitment on the part of its signatories (it was finally ratified by fifty-seven states) and not an act of law, since no concrete measure was indicated to be adopted in case of a ‘war of aggression’. From this point of view, it fitted into the logic of Versailles, which envisaged economic sanctions against aggressor states. At the Nuremberg trial, however, the IMT pronounced sentences on these charges on the basis of the individual responsibility of the accused. Telford Taylor – one of the Nuremberg prosecutors, and certainly the major memoirist of the trials – openly acknowledged that the principles of the IMT laid down ‘ex post facto punishment’. They could not have been adopted, he adds, without the ‘political and emotional’ element that sustained the prosecution: the desire to condemn Nazism as expressed by international political opinion.¹² According to Hans Kelsen, the notion of a ‘crime against peace’ was not needed in order to judge and condemn war crimes perpetrated by states in the course of a conflict, whose initiation might be the object of political condemnation, but not of penal sanctions against individuals on a legal basis.¹³ Paradoxically, this legal innovation ran the risk of lessening the crime condemned, inasmuch as war of aggression was attributed to a ‘conspiracy’, which could only (in the view of the French judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres) be the maleficent work of a small clique, and failed to challenge the whole chain of German responsibilities.¹⁴

The notion of ‘crime against humanity’, another innovation of the IMT, did not raise objections, but remained marginal in a trial conceived above all for punishing those responsible for a ‘conspiracy’ against peace. The majority of Nazi crimes against civilian populations were judged under the heading of war crimes. For the Americans, ‘crimes against humanity’ had only a ‘subsidiary’ character.¹⁵ The ‘crime of crimes’, according to the prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, remained ‘conspiracy’ against peace, since it was from this that all other Nazi offences followed.¹⁶ This secondary position of ‘crimes against humanity’ contributed to the general acceptance of this charge. Even a rigorous normativist such as Hans Kelsen approved the exception represented by this criminal sanction introduced a posteriori. It punished crimes that undoubtedly constituted a violation of existing law when they were perpetrated, despite not being brought under a specific charge. The introduction of the criterion of individual responsibility for these crimes did not contradict previous legislation. Those responsible for them could not have been unaware of the criminal nature of their acts, and it was natural therefore that they should be punished, even if it was necessary for this to resort to an ex post facto law.¹⁷ In other words, the principle of justice prevailed in this case over formal respect for the norm, the definition of ‘crime against humanity’ apparently appealing to natural law as a kind of prior moral norm underlying positive law as historically established.

Curiously, Kelsen’s perspective on the notion of ‘crime against humanity’ was shared, at least briefly, by Carl Schmitt, who was one of the first legal scholars to elaborate a critical analysis of the charter of the IMT, which had been published on 8 August 1945. Three weeks later, in the ruins of Berlin and in the uncertainty of provisional liberty between two arrests, first by the Soviets and then by the Americans, the former ‘crown jurist’ of the Reich made a study of the history of the idea of war of aggression (Angriffskrieg). With considerations very similar to those of Kelsen, he raised doubts as to the pertinence of a concept that could have the paradoxical result of lessening that of ‘war crime’, which was already inscribed in law and had taken the cruellest forms in the conflict that had just ended. In this context, he took into consideration ‘crimes against humanity’, acts mala in se that he defined under the Latin appellation of scelus infandum,¹⁸ for which justice required sanctions beyond any consideration of the question of non-retroactivity. In Schmitt’s words,

The inhumanity of these acts is so great and so clear that it is enough to demonstrate the facts and their perpetrators to justify their punishment without regard in each instance to the criminal law as specified in positive legislation. Here, all the arguments of natural perception, human sentiment, reason and justice converge in so elementary a fashion that they justify a guilty verdict without any positive norm in the formal sense seeming necessary. Here again, it is not necessary to raise the question of knowing how far the perpetrators had a deadly intention, a criminal premeditation, as this does not need to be explained.¹⁹

A few years later – after two arrests, interrogation, confiscation of his library and a ban on teaching – Schmitt would change his mind on the definition of ‘crimes against humanity’. In 1949, for example, he waxed ironic on the notion of ‘genocide’ and presented himself as a victim on the grounds of having suffered ‘the eradication [Ausrottung] of Prusso-German functionaries’.²⁰ But it was precisely because of his status as a former Nazi that his writings of 1945 are particularly significant. They attest to the perception of Nazi crimes by German opinion at the time, and support Telford Taylor’s remark on the importance of the emotional context in which the Nuremberg judgements were delivered.

Despite the consensus on it, the new notion of ‘crime against humanity’ was handled clumsily and imprecisely by the prosecution. The lack of exact information, combined with mental habits, psychological attitudes and political calculations, contributed to leaving the Nazi genocides in shadow, at a time when the concept of genocide struck several jurists as a ‘crime against the English language’.²¹ The Soviet prosecutors particularly emphasized political deportation, while the British and Americans never made the distinction between Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, despite documentary proof of the latter’s existence being provided at the tribunal’s sessions in the form of film.²² Jews were never considered as such, only in the context of the various nations to which they belonged, despite proof of their systematic extermination being presented to the court. The camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were scarcely mentioned. Since the distinction between political deportation and racial extermination had not yet been made, Nuremberg appears today to reflect the world’s silence and incomprehension in the face of the Shoah. It is true that the figure of 6 million Jewish victims was brought up in the trial, but according to the historian Donald Bloxham, this was ‘in an atmosphere where statistics were hurled around with abandon and where false equivalences were regularly drawn – both unconsciously and wilfully – between victim groups. The press coverage of the trials served only to magnify the distortions of the courtroom.’²³ In his comments written during the trial, the French judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres noted that ‘the category of crimes against humanity which the Charter had let enter by a very small door evaporated by virtue of the Tribunal’s judgment’.²⁴

The US prosecuting counsel, Robert H. Jackson, wanted a verdict ‘for the future’ that could become a model of universal scope. The symbolic impact of the trial was immense, but the political justice of the victors could not have such an exemplary character. Its limitations were lucidly indicated by Hans Kelsen, who recalled that, despite its claim to pronounce in the name of the still embryonic United Nations, the preamble of the IMT charter drew its legitimacy from ‘the exercise of the sovereign legislative power by the countries to which the German Reich unconditionally surrendered’.²⁵ According to this Austrian jurist, the judgement delivered by the Nuremberg court could not claim the status of a binding principle of universal value, for the simple reason that ‘the principle of individual criminal responsibility for the violation of rules of international law prohibiting war [had] not been established as a general principle of law, but as a rule applicable only to vanquished States by the victors’.²⁶ He saw this as a privilegium odiosum that was bound to tarnish the image of the trial for posterity.

The partition of Poland in 1939 was viewed as a ‘crime against peace’ only on the part of the German Reich, and not of the USSR, whose occupation of Finland and the Baltic states similarly went unmentioned. Certain Soviet war crimes, such as the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, were attributed to the Germans, despite the truth of this tragic episode being known to everyone involved in the trial.²⁷ The Allies would have preferred to overlook this altogether, but the Soviet prosecutors – some of whom had been involved in the Moscow trials of 1936–38 – insisted on the lie being put down in the trial records. The IMT was not established to judge Allied war crimes, and neither the naval war nor the massive bombings of German cities were mentioned at Nuremberg, other than to recognize that these destructive acts conformed to the ‘rules’ of customary law.

As far as ‘crimes against humanity’ were concerned, the contrast was striking between the very little attention directed at the genocide of Jews and Gypsies, and the prosecution’s insistence on pursuing acts that seem of lesser importance not only with regard to the totality of Nazi crimes, but also in relation to the similar practices of the Allies during the conflict. The IMT treated as crimes against humanity the deportation of a million Poles from the Warthegau (the part of Poznań annexed to the Reich) and that of 100,000 Alsatians to Vichy France. It did not mention the fact that, when this judgement was being delivered, more than 10 million Germans from Central Europe, and several million Soviet citizens belonging to nationalities accused of collaboration (the Crimean Tartars, the Volga Germans, the Chechens and Ingush) were being forcibly expelled from their lands.²⁸

The charter of the IMT, including the notion of ‘crime against humanity’, was made public on 8 August 1945, in perfect synchrony with the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The German-Jewish exile Günther Anders wrote that the condemnation of Nazi crimes pronounced by the Nuremberg court ‘took place, from the very start, in the context of other crimes against humanity’.²⁹ In his August 1945 editorial for the review Politics, Dwight MacDonald described the nuclear attacks on Japan as an ‘atrocious action’ that put those responsible for it ‘on the same moral level as the butchers of Maidanek’.³⁰ And writing about the ‘tribunals of victors’ organized at Nuremberg, Hannah Arendt even proposed the hypothesis that, if they had chosen to judge only a very limited number of Nazi criminals, the basic reason was a prudential concern ‘about convicting the German defendants on charges that were open to the tu-quoque argument’.³¹

Nuremberg, accordingly, was a political trial in which a highly dramatic presentation – what Arendt called a ‘sensational spectacle’³² – served equally to satisfy a general demand for justice and to legitimize, even sacralize, the status of the victors as the new masters of the continent. After the model of all political trials in history, its verdict was known in advance, and its proceedings acquired the features of a liturgy addressed to international opinion, rather than mere respect for formal procedures. The victors spoke in the name of goodness, morality and humanity: the plaintiff, Robert H. Jackson proclaimed, was ‘Civilization’. While the prosecution were able to consult a substantial volume of documents, which would subsequently provide the foundation for the first wave of historical research on Nazi violence, these archives remained practically inaccessible to the defence, as Admiral Dönitz’s counsel, Otto Kranzbühler, complained.³³ In many respects, Nuremberg belongs to the category of political trials that Max Weber described as ‘Kadijustice’ (Kadijustiz). In such trials, he wrote in Economy and Society, ‘the parties acted on the judges by way of pathos, tears, and the insults of the opponent’, following a score written in advance, in which ‘a magistrate appointed a judex to whom he gave binding indications on the conditions for the condemnation of the accused’.³⁴

Besides the sacralizing of the victors, Nuremberg had a fundamental consequence in redefining the postwar political order. Its verdict established and punished individual responsibility. This eliminated the notion of ‘collective guilt’ that still weighed on Germany – a necessary condition for ending the condominium born from the defeat of Hitler’s Reich and re-establishing a German state (or, in the event, two). When the Nuremberg judgement was delivered, the alliance between the victors was beginning to crack, and the first disputes that heralded the Cold War were already being heard. The trial made it possible to integrate the greater part of Germany into the Atlantic political and military alliance, and for its eastern part, by way of reaction, to be annexed to the Soviet bloc, so that each was rehabilitated, one in the name of anti-Communism and the other in the name of anti-fascism. In a certain sense, the Nuremberg judgement drew a line under and made obsolete all the questions raised by Karl Jaspers in his essay on the ‘question of German guilt’, published in Heidelberg in April 1946.³⁵ As this philosopher defined it, the ‘metaphysical culpability’ that derived from a community of existence and weighed on the whole German nation well beyond the criminal responsibilities of its leaders, had lost its rationale. Nuremberg had cleansed Germany of its fault, and it could cease to appear (and see itself) as a ‘pariah nation’.³⁶ Jaspers’s essay remains a major text in moral philosophy, but it did not arouse any debate in the Germany of ‘year zero’. During the twenty years that followed the fall of Nazism, Germany lived rather in the sentiment of a ‘collective innocence’ (kollektive Unschuld).³⁷

Purging

At the close of the conflict, Europe was not just caught up in dressing its wounds. It was also faced in dramatic fashion both with the rifts between the continent’s great powers and with those produced within each country. Millions were accused of collaboration with the occupying forces of the Nazis and their allies; according to the historian István Deák, these amounted to between 2 and 3 per cent of the total population.³⁸ If they were not executed by the Resistance, like Mussolini in April 1945, leaders such as Marshal Pétain, the Hungarian Szálasi, the Norwegian Quisling, the Slovak Tiso and the Romanian Antonescu were often condemned to death for high treason.

The purges that followed the defeat of Nazism and its allies took a varied character, depending on the country in question and its geopolitical situation. In the USSR, which was not a Rechtstaat, it led to the deportation of whole peoples accused of collaboration.³⁹ Under decrees that treated all soldiers captured by the enemy as deserters (designed to force them to fight to the bitter end), the majority of the 2.27 million prisoners of war returned to the USSR were deported to labour camps. In the countries now included in the Soviet bloc, the antifascist purge coincided with the establishment of people’s democracies and ended up eliminating all the former elites, economic as well as political. Popular support for these profound transformations varied considerably, depending on the influence of the Communist parties and the relationship that the resistance movements had had with the USSR, but they were always achieved through measures decided from above and imposed by force.

Where the German occupation had been particularly ferocious, and the war of national liberation had taken on the aspect of a civil war against collaborating regimes, the purging was often ‘wild’, with the establishment of popular tribunals and a large number of extra-judicial executions. Yugoslavia saw a real massacre of this kind, with the killing of some 60,000 individuals charged with involvement in the crimes of the Croatian Ustashe.⁴⁰ But the purges also reached a considerable scale in Western Europe. In France, between 8,000 and 10,000 collaborators and officials of the Vichy regime were executed extra-judicially in 1944.⁴¹ In Italy, during 1945, the Resistance executed between 10,000 and 15,000 representatives of the republic of Salò.⁴² The violence of these brutal and spontaneous purges was a function of the suffering and resentment built up during a year and a half of occupation. It was due to the power vacuum already mentioned, resulting from the mistakes and weaknesses of the new authorities seeking legitimacy, or the inertia and corporate loyalties of administrations that continued under the new political regime. A sadly famous episode of extra-judicial purging was the lynching of the Rome director of prisons, Donato Carretta, in September 1944, during the trial of the former chief of police of the Italian capital. The city had only recently been liberated, and minds were still strongly marked by the massacre of the Fossi Ardeatine, in which 335 civilians had been executed in March by the Germans in reprisal for an attack by the Resistance. The crowd outside, who had been unable to attend the trial, mistook Carretta for Pietro Caruso, the real accused, and threw themselves on him to prevent his escape. A number of attempts to prevent his murder failed in the face of the angry mob.⁴³ In March 1945, Albert Camus presented as ‘the last and most long-lived victory of Hitlerism … the shameful scars made on the hearts of those who fought Hitlerism most vigorously’. Pleading for a justice of reason against blind revenge, he criticized the wild purges while explaining them as an inheritance of Nazi occupation and collaboration:

We were left with hatred. We were left with the impulse that the other day in Dijon made a fourteen-year-old child fall on a collaborator who had been lynched and disfigure his face. We were left with the rage that consumes our souls at the memory of certain images and certain faces. The executioners’ hatred engendered the victims’ hatred. And once the executioners had gone, the French were left with their hatred only partially spent. They still look at one another with a residue of anger. Well, this is what we must overcome first of all. Our poisoned hearts must be cured. And the most difficult battle to be won against the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice.⁴⁴

In several countries, legal purging was the result of a tension between the demand for political sanction raised by public opinion and the reticence of the judiciary to apply a retroactive justice. But this became inevitable in the context of a political transition that imposed on justice an exceptional role, beyond mere respect for legal norms that were themselves in the process of undergoing a profound change. Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark, which had abolished capital punishment in the nineteenth century, decided to re-establish it – in the first two countries by decision of their governments-in-exile, in the third by a decree issued on 1 June 1945.⁴⁵ In Belgium, where there had not been an actual civil war, owing to the rapid liberation of the country by Allied forces in September 1944, the public prosecution service opened 400,000 files on charges of collaboration, and brought 57,000 individuals to court, 2,940 of whom were condemned to death and 242 actually executed.⁴⁶ In France, 311,000 cases were opened and 124,000 verdicts delivered, including 44,000 guilty ones. Between 1,500 and 1,600 death sentences were carried out; 50,000 individuals were sentenced to ‘national degradation’, and at least 22,000 civil servants punished.⁴⁷ In Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway, the judicial system could not cope with the large number of cases, and decided to proceed by way of ‘negotiated settlements’. (In the Netherlands, 100,000 out of the 250,000 awaiting trial were in prison.)⁴⁸

In Italy there was a striking contrast between the scope of the spontaneous, ‘wild’ purging carried out at the time of Liberation, and the virtual absence of legal purging by the judicial institutions. The high commission charged with purging, which had been established in May 1944 by the Bonomi government, was dissolved in March 1946, following nearly two years of paralysis in which it had confined itself to sanctioning a posteriori the repression carried out by the Resistance in the centre and north of the country. The origin of this anomaly, including the collapse of any project of an ‘Italian Nuremberg’,⁴⁹ clearly lay in the unique position of the kingdom of Italy, which had been an aggressor during the first phase of the world war, then an occupied country from autumn 1943. On the one hand, Italy should have had to pay for the war crimes committed by its army as a member of the Axis; on the other hand, it had obtained from the British and Americans the status of co-belligerent, which enabled it to demand justice for the crimes of the German occupation and the republic of Salò. In the name of the continuity of the state – and with the complicity of the Allied forces, which increasingly viewed the Resistance as a source of social and political subversion – the Italian government forbade any investigation of the big companies that had supported fascism, and refused to hand over the major war criminals guilty of crimes perpetrated by the fascist army in Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania. Those members of the ruling elite of the fascist regime and the Salò republic who had escaped the ‘wild’ purging were able to benefit from an amnesty as early as 1946. The majority of them returned to their professional activity, or in many cases a senior position in the civil service. The change of regime took place in the context of a substantial continuity in the judiciary, state administration and bureaucratic personnel. Only a few leaders of the Salò collaborationist regime, such as its interior and defence ministers, Guido Buffarini Guidi and Augusto Graziani, as well as a few infamous torturers, were condemned for high treason, while the War Crimes Commission for Italy set up by the British condemned those with highest responsibility in the German occupation, General Albert Kesselring and the police chief Herbert Kappler. Out of 20,000 cases examined by the extraordinary courts set up in April 1945, less than a third led to a conviction, and only ninety-one death sentences were carried out.⁵⁰

Amnesty

In an article published anonymously in 1949, Carl Schmitt, who had himself been purged by the Americans, formulated a demand for amnesty. He saw this claim, which was widely shared in Germany at this time, as ‘the only means to put an end to civil war in a human way’.⁵¹ He returned to this question in a note in his diary, writing that ‘a civil war cannot be ended by the verdicts of a political justice, it can only be ended by an amnesty’.⁵² It would be more appropriate to say that it generally finishes with both things: first of all, the exemplary and symbolic punishments of political justice; then, once popular resentment is appeased and solid foundations laid for the transition to a new power, when the vanquished have accepted their defeat and are no longer in a position to cause damage, an amnesty that aims at reconciliation. In France, the legal purge was followed by several waves of amnesty, between 1947 and 1953, which reduced the number of people imprisoned for acts of collaboration from 70,000 to a few hundred.⁵³ The most emblematic case of an amnesty following on the heels of an extensive ‘unofficial’ purge, and in some sense acting as a substitute for the absence of a political justice, remains that of Italy. In June 1946, Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist minister of justice, promulgated an amnesty that granted liberty to 219,481 accused, followed by a measure of sentence reduction [condono] for 3,000 fascists guilty of serious crimes.⁵⁴ The amnesty covered all crimes perpetrated for political reasons, with the exception of those individuals with greatest responsibility for the policy of collaboration, the authors of massacres and ‘particularly atrocious exactions’, although many torturers also benefited from this – often arousing popular anger. As the minister of justice saw it, these limitations of the amnesty decree were aimed at satisfying ‘a demand that is not only legal and political, but also moral, a demand for justice’, since leaving those responsible for ‘national betrayal’ unpunished would not have helped reconciliation but exacerbated resentment.⁵⁵ Fiercely contested for its wide scope and extremely precocious character, scarcely a year after the country’s liberation, this legal act followed the referendum that had brought the republic into being a few days earlier, and coincided with the elections for a new constituent assembly. Italy had turned the page, and the new state aimed to reconcile its citizens by way of this act of clemency.

In fact, however, the amnesty was total. Almost all those responsible for collaboration were released: from the leaders of the state, army and Fascist Party to the petty torturers of the provincial squadristi, not forgetting the instigators of anti-Semitic persecution. Born as an act of clemency and reconciliation, the amnesty became, even before the eruption of the Cold War, the first step in a process of restoration. What had been proclaimed as expressing the virtues of a renascent democracy very soon became a sign of its weakness, and a revenge of defeated fascism. In 1947, the historian, jurist and resistant Carlo Galante Garrone bitterly noted that ‘the judiciary of the new Italy [has] wiped out everything, or almost everything, and covered everything over with an indulgent veil of pardon and forgetting. Everything, including the gravest crimes and greatest responsibilities.’⁵⁶ In the early 1950s, when the Fascist criminals had all regained their liberty, a new wave of trials commenced, seeking to prosecute acts of violence perpetrated by the Resistance.

All the countries of Western Europe, if in a less abrupt and decisive fashion, set free, with or without a formal amnesty, almost every prisoner accused of fascism and collaborationism, often reintegrating them into the state administration. In Italy, in 1960, sixty-two of the sixty-four prefects had been senior civil servants under the Fascist regime.⁵⁷ In France, many high officials of the Vichy regime went on to brilliant careers under the Fourth and Fifth Republics. In West Germany, where the constitution envisaged the reintegration of former civil servants of the Hitler Reich, one of the authors of the Nuremberg laws of 1935, Hans Globke, could even fill a ministerial post in Adenauer’s government.⁵⁸ The secondary place that the Shoah occupied at this time in Europe’s historical consciousness attests to the wish to turn the page by putting an end to the purges and reintegrating the enemies of yesterday. It was not until the 1960s that the notion of indefeasibility gradually entered the jurisprudence of various European countries, making possible the belated prosecution of crimes that had remained unpunished.

These actions that put a legal closure to the civil war fitted into a long historical tradition. Amnesties that were more or less summary, more or less hasty, depending on the particular case, always marked the end of civil conflicts and wars. In 1598, the edict of Nantes proclaimed ‘that the recollection of everything done by one party or the other … remain obliterated and forgotten, as if no such things had ever happened’.⁵⁹ In England, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II decreed ‘a free and general pardon, indemnity and oblivion’, which covered the whole epoch of the Cromwellian revolution, apart from those directly implicated in the regicide of his father. Louis XVIII did the same, in the form of an oblivion ‘commanded to the courts and citizens’, by which he magnanimously agreed to ‘pardon Frenchmen who went astray’.⁶⁰ And in 1865, US president Andrew Johnson ended the war of secession by a Proclamation of Pardon and Amnesty which aimed to reintegrate into the Union the former Confederate states that had so violently challenged it.

The paradigm of these amnesties, conceived and applied as policies of national reconciliation, remains the ancient Athenian democracy. In 403 BCE, when the democratic order was restored after the bloody oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants, the new authorities led by Thrasybulus decide to decree an amnesty in order to pacify the divided city. Every citizen was summoned to swear an oath: ‘I shall never recall the misfortunes.’⁶¹ As Nicole Loraux points out in La Cité divisée, ‘this oath, by containing the hostility that was cancelled by its expression, could and should by the same token renounce memory, since the memory of misfortunes was the memory of hatred.’⁶² This political prohibition of remembrance, transgression of which was punished, was indissociable from the commitment to defend democracy, and for this reason the Thirty Tyrants were excluded from this denial of memory. They remained solely responsible for the stasis that had torn the city apart, and their condemnation enabled the community to find a new unity after a fratricidal war. The political prohibition of remembrance thus acquired a fundamental character. It was a pact that sealed reconciliation and prevented revenge. In other words, politics was born from forgetting, from the deliberate effort to overcome the past with its conflicts and divisions.

In the first phase of the Third Republic, only a few years after a belated amnesty put an end to the persecution of the Communards, Ernest Renan repeated from his own perspective this view of forgetting as a foundational pact for the nation. In his eyes, it was an essential ingredient of the ‘daily plebiscite’ that enabled a nation, despite its past, to live in the present as a community of fate. In the course of a reflection whose implicit focus was the Paris Commune, i.e. civil war, Renan added to his praise of forgetting an important corollary: distrust of history.

Forgetting, and I might even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and this is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to the principle of nationality. Historical investigation, in fact, brings to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origin of all political formations, even those whose consequences have been most fortunate.⁶³

In other words, nations are born out of violence and massacre, wars of religion and civil wars, but in order to build themselves, they must learn to forget. As Renan concludes, ‘It is good for everyone to be able to forget.’⁶⁴

This dialectic of amnesty and forgetting often characterizes the aftermath of wars. It may well have belated manifestations, as in Spain after 1975, with the death of Franco and the transition to democracy. Here again, the political forces in play sealed a pact of forgetting. This was not an official pact, like that of Athens in 403 BCE, but rather a tacit and surreptitious pact, symbolic but just as binding. There can clearly be no official prohibition of remembrance, and it was at this same time that a new historiography of the Civil War began to take shape in Spain, superseding the stereotypes of Francoist propaganda and breaking the isolation of the antifascist historiography in exile. But the fear of falling back into civil war, and the desire for reconciliation, underpinned the demand for an amnesty (benefiting both antifascist exiles and those responsible for Francoist crimes) that could only lead to a collective amnesia. According to the historian Ismael Saz Campos, this pacto de olvido, which arose from a social demand, was legitimate since it was conceived as a means to bury Francoism and permit the transition to democracy. It would be another quarter of a century before Spanish society voiced a demand for memory, often under the impulse of a new generation.⁶⁵ This is expressed today not just in a deepening of historical research, but in a campaign for the recognition of the victims of Francoism, the creation of sites of republican memory in the public space, and the challenging or at least redefinition of the symbolic dimension of the monuments and vestiges of the caudillo’s regime.

What neither Renan nor Nicole Loraux take into consideration in their analyses of the dialectic linking amnesty and forgetting is the partial erosion of historical awareness that it inevitably brings with it, sometimes leading to a denial of the memory of the victims, who find themselves abandoned to a perpetuated sense of injustice, and deprived forever of public recognition. Although the two things are often seen as synonymous, amnesty is not the same thing as pardon. The latter presupposes the remembrance of crime and injustice, which it inscribes in a pacified memory, redeemed from the temptation to violence. Amnesty, on the other hand, prescribes a forgetting that consists in wiping out the traces of the crime, since it demands acting as if nothing had occurred.⁶⁶ If we seek to make more rigorous distinctions, we should add that amnesty, because it cancels the criminal character of the contested facts, should not be confused either with mercy, which does not cancel the verdict but limits itself to dispensing with the application of the penalty, or with negative prescription, which suspends the penalty at the end of a defined period.⁶⁷ Amnesty can prove very effective in the short term as a policy of reconciliation, but it anaesthetizes memory only by creating conditions for its subsequent resurgence, with the expression of a long-stifled suffering and an unaccomplished justice.

In short, if the dialectic of amnesty and forgetting is established before justice is delivered, this memory will resurge later, often charged with resentment. A resentment born from a wounded memory may translate into hatred or engender a new explosion of violence, as shown by the war in Yugoslavia. The virtues of a non-amnesic amnesty, a reconciliation concerned for an effort towards truth and an administration of justice, were experienced in South Africa in the 1990s. We may well believe that it was by reflecting on the bad uses of memory current in Europe in the course of the twentieth century that the heirs of apartheid discovered the political virtues of a reparatory justice that avoided both forgetting and revenge.

______________

1This section draws largely on Stéphane Courtois and Annette Wieviorka, eds, L’État du monde en 1945 (Paris: La Découverte, 1994).

2Hans Kelsen, ‘The Legal Status of Germany According to the Declaration of Berlin’, American Journal of International Law, 39: 3 (1945), p. 519.

3Ibid., p. 520.

4Ibid., p. 524.

5See Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials 1945–1946: A Documentary History (Boston/New York, Bedford-St Martins, 1997), p. 24.

6See on this notion Otto Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedure for Political Ends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). On the context of the political trials that followed the end of the Second World War, see Marcello Flores, L’età del sospetto. I processi politici della guerra fredda (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), Chapter 1.

7See Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (New York: Random House, 2012), Chapter 2.

8See Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 66–72; Alfred de Zayas, ‘Der Nürnberger Prozess’, in Alexander Demandt, ed., Macht und Recht. Grosse Prozesse in der Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), p. 250.

9See Jean-Jacques Becker, ‘Le procès de Leipzig’, in Annette Wieviorka ed., Les Procès de Nuremberg et de Tokyo (Brussels: Complex, 1996), pp. 51–62.

10See the charter of the IMT reproduced as an appendix to Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials.

11Ibid., Chapter 12.

12Ibid., p. 644.

13See Hans Kelsen, ‘Will the Judgment in the Nuremberg Trial Constitute a Precedent in International Law?’, International Law Quarterly 1: 2 (1947), pp. 157–8.

14See Marrus, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, p. 236.

15Ibid., p. 187.

16Ibid., p. 123.

17Ibid., p. 165.

18Carl Schmitt, Das internationalrechtliche Verbrechen des Angriffskriegs und das Grundsatz ‘nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege’ (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994), p. 81.

19Ibid., p. 23.

20Carl Schmitt, Glossarium. Aufzeichungen der Jahre 1947–1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 265.

21See Wieviorka, Procès de Nuremberg, p. 127.

22See Christian Delage, La Vérité par l’image. De Nuremberg au procès Milosevic (Paris: Denoël, 2006).

23Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 124.

24Cited in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 257. This was the argument put forward during the trial by the French judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, in ‘Le procès de Nuremberg’, Revue de droit pénal et de criminology 27 (1946), pp. 480–90.

25Kelsen, ‘Will the Judgment in the Nuremberg Trial Constitute a Precedent in International Law?’, p. 169.

26Ibid., p. 70.

27See Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, pp. 312, 639.

28Ibid., p. 163–4.

29Günther Anders, Die atomare Drohung. Radikale Überlegunen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981), pp. 168–9.

30Dwight MacDonald, ‘The Bomb’, in The Responsibility of Peoples and Other Essays in Political Criticism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957), p. 103. On Anders and MacDonald, see Enzo Traverso, L’Histoire déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997, chapters 4 and 8.

31Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 256. Arendt’s opinion is supported by Marrus, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, p. 131–2.

32Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 4.

33Cited in Marrus, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, p. 248.

34See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 978.

35See Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Dial, 1947).

36See Anson Rabinbach, ‘The German as Pariah: Karl Jaspers’s The Question of German Guilt’, in In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 129–65.

37Ralph Giordano. Die zweite Schuld oder von der Last Deutscher zu sein (Munich: Knaur, 1990), p. 266.

38See István Deák, ‘Introduction’, in István Deák, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, eds, The Politics of Retribution in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 4.

39See Jean-Jacques Marie, Les Peuples déportés d’Union soviétique (Brussels: Complexe, 1995).

40See Klaus-Dietmar Henke and Hans Woller, eds, Politische Säuberungen in Europa. Die Abrechnung mit Faschismus und Kollaboration (Munich: DTV, 1991).

41See Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), pp. 202–7.

42See Hans Woller, I conti con il fascismo. L’epurazione in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), and Guido Crainz, ‘La giustizia sommaria in Italia dopo la seconda guerra mondiale’, in Marcello Flores, ed., Storia, verità, giustizia. I crimini del XXe secolo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001), pp. 162–70.

43See Gabriele Ranzato, Il linciaggio di Carretta (Roma 1944). Violenza politica e violenza ordinaria (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997).

44Albert Camus, ‘Defense of Intelligence’, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 58.

45See Novick, Resistance versus Vichy, p. 186.

46See Martin Conway, ‘Justice in Postwar Belgium: Popular Passions and Political Realities’, in Deák, Gross and Judt, Politics of Retribution in Europe, p. 135.

47See Henry Rousso, ‘L’épuration en France’, in Vichy, l’événement, la mémoire, l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 543–4.

48See Novick, Resistance versus Vichy, p. 213.

49See Michele Battini, Peccati di memoria. La mancata Norimberga italiana (Bari/Rome: Laterza, 2003).

50See Valeria Galimi, ‘Collaborationnisme et épuration judiciaire en Italie et en France’, in François Guedji and Valeria Galimi, eds, Le XXe Siècle des guerres (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2004), p. 378.

51Carl Schmitt, ‘Amnestie. Urform des Rechts’, in Staat, Grossraum, Nomos (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995).

52Schmitt, Glossarium, p. 257.

53See Rousso, ‘L’épuration en France’, p. 245.

54See Mariuccia Salvati, ‘Amnistia e amnesia nell’Italia del 1946’, in Flores, Storia, verità, giusitizia, pp. 141–61.

55See Togliatti’s speech of 22 June 1946 in Mimmo Franzinelli, L’amnistia Togliatti. 22 giugno 1946. Colpo di spugna sui crimini fascisti (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), pp. 309–12.

56Ibid., p. 136.

57See Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 92.

58Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 140–3.

59See Stéphane Gacon, L’Amnistie. De la Commune à la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 25.

60See Helmut Quaristsch, ‘Über Bürgerkriegs und Feind-Amnestien’, Der Staat 32: 3 (1992), pp. 414–15; Gacon, L’Amnistie, p. 31.

61Nicole Loraux, La Cité divisée. L’oubli dans la mémoire d’Athènes (Paris: Payot/Rivages, 2005), p. 145.

62Ibid., pp. 145–6.

63Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’, in Shlomo Sand, On the Nation and the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 45–6.

64Ibid., p. 56.

65See Ismael Saz Campos, ‘El pasado que aún no puede pasar’, in Fascismo y franquismo (Valencia: University of Valencia, 2004), pp. 277–91. On the memory of Francoism, see especially Paloma Aguilar, Memoria y olvido de la Guerra civil española (Madrid: Alianza, 1996).

66Peter Krapp, ‘Amnesty: Between an Ethics of Forgiveness and the Politics of Forgetting’, German Law Journal 6: 1 (2005), pp. 191–2.

67For a rigorous distinction between amnesty, mercy and pardon, see Louis Joinet, ‘L’amnistie. Le droit à la mémoire entre pardon et oubli’, Communications 49 (1989), p. 214.

PART II

CULTURES OF WAR

In July 1936 I was in Paris. I don’t like war; but what has always horrified me most in war is the situation of those in the rear. When I understood that, despite my efforts, I could not prevent myself from participating morally in this war, that is, wishing every day and every hour for the victory of one side and the defeat of the other, I told myself that Paris for me was the rear, and I took the train for Barcelona with the intention of joining up. That was in early August 1936.

Simone Weil, ‘Letter to Georges Bernanos’ (1938)

We were on the Titanic, and everyone knew it was hitting the iceberg. The only uncertainty was about what would happen when it did. Who would provide a new ship? It was impossible to remain outside politics.

Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (2002)

FIVE

Eruption

Prefigurings

Few events in the history of the modern world have had so deep an impact on European culture as the Great War; and rarely have there been major historic turning-points that were so unforeseen, destructive and traumatic. Some observers, as we saw, had envisaged the possibility of a new war. A few clearheaded minds had even put forward the hypothesis of a continental conflagration, evoking the memory of that triggered a century earlier by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which changed the face of Europe. Predictions were not wanting, but no one could imagine that this would be a total war, nor how it would transform the Old World, changing not only its social and political structures but also its mentalities, cultures, ways of life and perceptions.

The cultural pessimism that spread across Europe in the late nineteenth century, when the idea of progress was challenged in favour of a view of modernity as decadence, did not arouse the fear of a new war. The catastrophes of the modern world, as the enemy of both man and nature, were attributed to many other factors: the advent of mass society; the ‘age of the crowd’ and democracy; the physical and intellectual degeneration of nations bound up with urbanization and the revolt of the ‘dangerous classes’; racial degeneracy produced by cross-breeding; the Malthusian growth of world population, and so on. Of the various catastrophist scenarios that were presented as imminent, scarcely anyone foresaw the millions of dead in a total war. Or else the prognosis was so abstract as to neutralize horror, as in the case of the Social Darwinists and eugenicists, who welcomed the invention of chemical weapons and saw a new war as the occasion to eliminate the world’s demographic surplus by selecting the most fit. Such was the point of view of two British scientists, Reginald Clare Hart and Karl Pearson. In an essay of 1911, the former of these wished for a ‘relentless war of extermination of inferior individuals and nations’, while the latter offered a biological justification of war as a means of strengthening national virility.¹ But despite appearing legitimate in the scientific debate of the time, and certainly revealing an intellectual predisposition to the worst nationalist and racist deliriums of the following decades, these theories were never translated into a concrete project of extermination. The optimism of Comte and Spencer, who had seen industrial society as a vector of peace and progress, still prevailed. The European imaginary, with its many fruitful aspects, proved incapable of foreseeing the Great War. Intellectuals give us an image of this blindness.

Prefigurings of catastrophe came not from the social sciences but from literature and the arts, as privileged sites of utopian imagination. At the end of the nineteenth century, the science-fiction novels of H. G. Wells showed considerable premonition, particularly The War of the Worlds (1898), which heralds a dark future of decadence. Wells describes the invasion of England by an army of Martians who test on it their mechanical weapons of mass destruction: mobile cannon that anticipate tanks, and chemical weapons that prefigure not only the gas attacks of Ypres but also the atomic weapons of the Second World War. Meanwhile, the earthly epidemics that finally destroy the Martians proclaim the fear of a bacteriological war.

The connection between technology and modern warfare is present also in Émile Zola, who in the same decade published La Bête humaine (1890), a novel in which he offers a metaphor of progress as a catastrophe by describing the blind and mad course of a train pulled by a driverless engine. In his preparatory notes, Zola considered filling this train with ‘merry soldiers, unaware of danger and singing patriotic songs’, adding that this train would then be ‘the image of France’.²

Zola was far from alone in detesting technology. In a realist style that aimed to describe not the future but a tendency of the present, Giovanni Papini, an avant-garde writer and critic who would later join the fascist movement, devoted a prophetic essay to modern war. There is certainly no harm here in recalling that this appeared in 1913, the same year that the first mass-produced automobiles emerged from the Ford factories in Detroit. The new century, Papini noted, would not be happy, but rather a century of industrial extermination in which human life would definitively lose its value. His essay is a rather strange mixture of pre-fascist existentialism and Weberian resignation in the face of a modernity perceived as inhuman and oppressive mechanical rationality:

The entire life of our age is an organization of necessary massacres, visible and invisible. Those who rebel in the name of life will be crushed by life itself. After the model of warfare, industrial civilization will feed on carrion. Cannon flesh and machine flesh. Blood on the battlefield and blood in the street: blood under the tent and blood in the factory. Life only raises itself up by leaving part of itself behind it as ballast.³

The eclectic and paradoxical fusion between a romantic revolt against the disenchantment of modernity and a vitalist exaltation of technology was the premise of the ‘conservative revolution’, or, as the historian Jeffrey Herf calls it, ‘reactionary modernism’,⁴ which spread across Europe in the inter-war years. But this tendency had already appeared before 1914, prefigured by avant-garde tendencies such as futurism. In his famous manifesto of 1909, Marinetti invoked war as the ‘hygiene of the world’, wishing for it as a confrontation of technological forces. His aesthetic cult of the machine and speed did not yet have the existentialist accents of Ernst Jünger’s essays of the 1920s, but appealed to a bellicose irrationalism that established a continuity between pre-1914 nationalism and fascism, which the futurists adhered to almost spontaneously. Basically, futurism anticipated the ‘aestheticization of politics’ that characterized fascism and a good part of European culture between the wars. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Italian futurists were interventionists in 1914, and that when the country did join the war, a year later, they established a motorized battalion that drove to the front shouting ‘Zang-Timb-Tuuum’.⁵

But it was the whole avant-garde, no matter what its political divisions at the start of the conflict, that had expressed during the previous decade the symptoms of a deep historic fracture in the perception and representation of the world. The cubism of Braque and Picasso decomposed forms in painting, just as Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern broke down classical harmonies and laid the foundations of atonal and twelve-tone music. For the historian Modris Eksteins, the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913, marked the beginning of a new age.⁶ This piece, which critics denounced as a ‘massacre of spring’, radically challenged the traditional view of the world. By its ferocious and savage primitivism, it rejected the forms of civilization; by its vitalism, it broke away from rationalism (or maybe conquered and transformed it); and by its rejection of musical conventions and social norms, it expressed a revolt of subjectivity. The scandal that Stravinsky aroused simply heralded the collapse of the old order a year before it happened. Nor was it by accident that the painter Fernand Léger saw the ruins of Verdun as the expression a decomposed reality, fragmented into a thousand pieces. War appeared in his eyes as a kind of convergence of reality with the representations that cubist painting had already made of it in recent years. Fascinated by this landscape of destruction, which ‘authorizes every pictorial fantasy’, Léger abandoned abstract art and turned to the re-creation of mechanical figures.⁷

Chauvinist Fever

In August 1914, the declarations of war aroused an amazing wave of collective enthusiasm in all European capitals. The nationalistic fever suddenly took hold of culture and won over all minds, with few exceptions.⁸ In Paris, the union sacrée extended well beyond the supporters of Action Française.⁹ The French president, Raymond Poincaré, launched an appeal to the members of the Académie Française to contribute to the patriotic effort ‘with their pens’. The voices of Barrès and Maurras now mingled with those of the Dreyfusards. From Gide to Proust, Anatole France to Claudel, Durkheim to Bergson and Péguy, all greeted the war as a deliverance. The ‘Jacobin’ historian Albert Mathiez saw it as a continuation of the levée en masse of 1792. In Belgium, the medievalist Henri Pirenne broke off his friendship with his German colleague Karl Lamprecht. Across the Rhine, the Berliner Tagblatt published a celebrated manifesto in October 1914, in which ninety-three scholars of world renown, including several Nobel prize-winners, defended the German cause as that of Kultur. It was signed by such prominent individuals as the biologist Ernst Haeckel, the physicist Max Planck, the historian Karl Lamprecht, the political scientist Friedrich Naumann and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. The philosopher of history Ernst Troeltsch wanted to ‘transform words into bayonets’,¹⁰ while the phenomenologist Max Scheler attributed to Germany the mission of ‘regenerating civilization’.¹¹ The economist Werner Sombart contrasted the heroic spirit of the Germans with the commercial spirit of the British (Helden versus Händler).¹² As for Thomas Mann, he idealized the Hohenzollern empire as a receptacle of the values of German Kultur against the corrupting tendencies of modern Zivilisation, mechanical and soulless. The ‘ideas of 1914’ confronted the principles of 1789, the starting-point of an age of ‘progress’ that had exhausted minds and distanced men from the most authentic values of existence: courage, virility, sacrifice, combat, glory. In his famous Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Mann proclaimed his ‘disgust’ for the principles of the Enlightenment, borrowing this expression from Nietzsche. He saw war as the continuation by force of arms of a struggle that had begun long before in the field of culture.¹³ In Austria, all the great scholars, from Wittgenstein to Freud, were caught up in the wave of chauvinism. In Russia, such enemies of tsarism as the libertarian Kropotkin and the socialist Plekhanov joined the crusade against ‘German barbarism’, as did poets such as Blok, Yesenin and Mayakovsky. Italian nationalists, from the socialist Mussolini to the imperialist Enrico Corradini, the futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the ‘decadentist’ Gabriele D’Annunzio, called for an end to their country’s neutrality and its entry into the war against the Habsburg empire in order to liberate the irredente lands of Trentino and Trieste.¹⁴ As Noberto Bobbio has written, ‘No Italian man of letters with the authority of Romain Rolland had the courage to place himself “above the melee”’.¹⁵ England rediscovered a political passion that had not been seen since Cromwell’s Puritan revolution, and was now unleashed against Germany. H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and the popular writer G. K. Chesterton all served as propagandists for the anti-German crusade.¹⁶ Only a few figures of the intellectual world managed to escape the chauvinist wave: Karl Kraus in Vienna, Bertrand Russell in London, Henri Barbusse and Romain Rolland in Paris, and Gramsci, still very little known at that time, in Turin.

But the patriotic intoxication evaporated as the war went on, soon showing a very different face from the mythology that had invaded the streets of European capitals in August 1914, and that the leaders of the Great Powers, all victims of the illusion of a short war, had entertained. In the face of this reality, a large number of intellectuals abandoned nationalism to join the cause of humanist pacifism. The trajectory of Siegfried Kracauer, later one the leading figures of Weimar culture, was quite exemplary in this respect. After enlisting as a volunteer at the start of the conflict, he published in the Preussische Jahrbücher in 1915 an article entitled ‘War as Lived Experience’, which perfectly summed up the intellectual climate of the time. In an exalted tone, Kracauer welcomed the war as an end to the routine and boredom of the Wilhelmine age, describing patriotism in Nietzschean terms as a kind of vital force that would enable Germany to free itself from the materialist values of a soulless world, with neither god nor prophets. He praised war as a ‘redeeming’ experience, in which the spirit is strengthened by the ‘joy of combat’.¹⁷ For the young Kracauer, war needed no social or political justification, satisfying as it did an existential demand and offering a mystical and almost religious experience. In 1917, however, Kracauer had already abandoned this patriotic rhetoric, writing an article for Das Neue Deutschland in which he acknowledged his deception. The war had shown its true nature, that of a horrific butchery in which ‘the ever deeper decomposition of European humanity’ was displayed.¹⁸ This change in perspective was no more than a condensed version of a path followed by many other European intellectuals.

The Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, who witnessed the joyous demonstrations of the fateful summer of 1914, left the most striking description of the nationalization of the masses that reached an apogee with the Great War. Although sceptical about a ‘fratricidal war’, he could not remain unmoved by the burgeoning of this mystical communion. In his memoirs, he emphasizes the striking difference between this atmosphere and that in which the outbreak of the Second World War was received, twenty-five years later:

A rapid excursion into the romantic, a wild, manly adventure – that is how the war of 1914 was painted in the imagination of the simple man, and the young people were honestly afraid that they might miss this most wonderful and exciting experience of their lives; that is why they hurried and thronged to the colours, and that is why they shouted and sang in the trains that carried them to the slaughter; wildly and feverishly the red wave of blood coursed through the veins of the entire nation. But the generation of 1939 knew war. It no longer deceived itself. It knew that it was not romantic but barbaric.¹⁹

The illusion, then, was short-lived. As early as 1916, in his anti-patriotic pamphlet Above the Battle, Romain Rolland denounced the conflict as a carnage from which ‘only a mutilated Europe can emerge’.²⁰ The strongest writings against the massacre came from the pen of one of the rare individuals within the international socialist movement who opposed the voting of war credits. Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish revolutionary transplanted to Berlin, in no way experienced the demonstrations of August 1914 as an explosion of contagious joy; to her they appeared as a wave of collective hysteria, in which could be detected ‘the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air’.²¹ The war had revealed the true face of bourgeois society, ‘shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth’. Once the façade of civility and morality, peace and law, had fallen away, it showed its true nature, that of ‘a roaring beast’ dancing ‘an orgy of anarchy’ and exuding ‘a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity’.²² Despite not expressing the same indignation, Franz Kafka remained equally immune to the nationalist virus. On 6 August 1914 he noted in his diary: ‘Patriotic parade. Speech by the mayor … I stand there, with my malignant look. These parades are one of the most disgusting accompaniments of the war.’²³

From Field of Honour to Slaughterhouse

Between 1914 and 1918, sentiments swung from blind idealization and boundless enthusiasm to terror and horror. On the one hand, the war marked the triumph of a conception of honour and heroism expressed in the phrase ‘dying for one’s country’, and culminating in August 1914. It was with the memory of these intoxicated days in his mind that Ernst Kantorowicz, many years later, would retrace its genealogy in medieval Europe. On the other hand, the First World War destroyed the myth of death on the field of honour by revealing the horrors of technological massacre and anonymous mass death. The legend of heroic war was symbolized, in the first months of combat, by the Flanders village of Langemarck, which German soldiers had conquered in November 1914 at the cost of enormous losses, singing the national anthem.²⁴ The Langemarck soldier was the perfect embodiment of the hero: good-looking, idealistic, virile, generous, courageous and ready for sacrifice. Such a hero cannot fear death; on the contrary, it glorifies him. According to the code of honour inaugurated by the Homeric warriors, death is the price to pay in order to attain glory (kleos). But this glory obtained at the price of the supreme sacrifice is a value that transcends life itself, being eternal and conferring the status of immortality on the martyr.²⁵ The fatherland recognizes this and cannot forget him; it erects monuments to him and evokes his memory in ceremonies.

Max Weber, whose sociology did not prevent him from being carried away by the chauvinist wave, was certainly one of the last European scholars to adhere to the myth of death on the field of honour. He sought to conceptualize it in 1915, at the very moment when it was in the process of collapsing. In his essay on ‘Religious Rejections of the World’, he noted first of all the ‘pathos’ and ‘sentiment of commitment’ that war created among combatants, pressing them to make the ‘gift of themselves’ and realize ‘an unconditionally devoted and sacrificial community’. Grasping the nature of war as a secular crusade, he emphasized the irresistible force of such sentiment. The essential element that welds this warrior community together lies in the sacralizing of death, by which the soldier can give his existence a unique and profound meaning. Irreducible to ordinary, natural death, which belongs to the continuity of societies and permits the transmission of the experiences of one generation to another, death on the field of battle possesses a particular and sublime sense, entering into harmony with the ‘vocation’ (Beruf) of the soldier. According to Weber, ‘religions can show comparable achievements only in heroic communities professing an ethic of brotherliness’.²⁶

These words were written a few months before the battle of the Somme, which claimed a million victims. Inaugurated with the myth of heroic death, the Great War finished with commemorations of the ‘unknown soldier’. This image represents the countless victims of a conflict in which the act of killing is transformed into a mechanical operation, and where death acquires the character of a collective experience, anonymous and lacking any specific quality – in short, that of a ‘mechanically reproducible’ death, whose ‘aura’ was forever stripped away in the mud of the trenches. Drawn by lot among so many disfigured and unrecognizable corpses, the ‘unknown soldier’, according to Roger Caillois, embodied ‘the end of heroic war’.²⁷ Monuments dedicated to him proliferated in Europe in the postwar years. They mark a break with the romantic view of death cultivated by nineteenth-century nationalism, abandoning the notion of heroic individual sacrifice for that of collective holocaust. The Great War, therefore, marks a watershed between two antinomic images: the figure of the hero is replaced by that of the ‘unknown soldier’, death on the field of honour by death in the slaughterhouse. The delirious episode at the start of the battle of the Somme – in which British soldiers fell by the thousand, mown down by German machine guns as they advanced in compact ranks with no protection to the sound of bugles and kicking a football – indicates the unbridgeable gulf that had emerged between the traditional view of war and the reality of total war. This was a gulf between the modernization of society and the persistence of old mentalities that were particularly tenacious among military hierarchies, formed by aristocratic elites and placed at the head of mass armies. As Dan Diner writes, war was not only a conflict between armies, but had become ‘a war between man and machine’.²⁸ From the field of honour to the slaughterhouse, that was the real anthropological mutation that took place within Europe.²⁹ Kantorowicz draws this conclusion very clearly at the end of his genealogical essay on the idea of ‘dying for one’s country’ (pro patria mori). This seems to have triumphed in 1914, when the Christian view of self-immolation of the warrior for God, king and country found its secularized form in the sacrifice of the soldier on the altar of the corpus mysticum of the nation. With the advent of total war, however, the state imposed death on the soldier without offering him either an emotional substitute or a glorious posterity for the gift of his life. The Second World War, with its impersonal mechanisms of technological extermination, completed the disenchantment of death. As Kantorowicz concludes, ‘deprived of any idea of encompassing humanitas, be it God or king or patria, [war] will be deprived also of the ennobling idea of self-sacrifice’.³⁰

This metamorphosis can be illustrated with the help of two singularly antinomic passages written during and after the war, by the historian Marc Bloch and the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The first is a patriotic plea inspired by a tragic and solemn sense of honour; the second a rejection of war that leads to a sarcastic apology for cowardice. On 1 June 1915, just before returning to the front after a period of convalescence in Paris, Bloch wrote a letter to his family anticipating his death:

I died voluntarily for a cause that I loved; in leaving, I made the sacrifice of myself; it’s the finest of endings. I would lie if I said that I don’t regret life; I would be unfair to you who have been so sweet to me; but you have taught me to place certain things above life itself … For my part, I die certain of victory, happy – yes, truly happy, I say so with all the sincerity of my soul – to spill my blood.³¹

After the war, this kind of rhetoric aroused mockery on the part of Céline, who made Ferdinand Bardamu, the hero of his Journey to the End of the Night, the perfect antithesis of the soldier ready to die for his country. Interned in a psychiatric hospital, Bardamu delivers himself to an outrageous praise of cowardice:

‘Oh, Ferdinand! Then you’re an absolute coward! You’re as loathsome as a rat…’

‘Yes, an absolute coward, Lola, I reject the war and everything in it […] Because I’m the one who knows what I want: I don’t want to die.’

‘But it’s not possible to reject the war, Ferdinand! Only crazy people and cowards reject the war when their country is in danger…’

‘If that’s the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? … Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? … No! … You see? You never tried … As far as you’re concerned they’re as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement …³²

The view of war as a slaughterhouse was also sketched by Churchill in the early 1920s, in a lecture that is striking for its clarity and force. Here he describes the First World War as a horrible wound inflicted on European civilization, in a passage that is all the more significant in coming from a conservative politician who had a military career behind him, a representative of imperialism who reflected on the state of the world that he had helped to bring about:

The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them … No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.³³

The apocalyptic landscape that emerges from this description is no longer that of a classical war, a war between states. It is that of a total war that engulfs nations, in which armies destroy civilian populations, and where there are quite simply no longer any rules but that of the complete destruction of the enemy. In short, it genuinely was a civil war on a continental scale.

______________

1See Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 79–81.

2Ibid., p. 106.

3Giovanni Papini, ‘La vita non è sacra’, Lacerba 20 (1913), p. 208, quoted in Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della Grande Guerra de Marinetti a Malaparte’ (Bari/Rome: Laterza, 1970), p. 94.

4See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

5See Renzo De Felice, ed., Futurismo, cultura e politica (Turin: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988).

6See Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Bantam, 1989), pp. 10–16.

7See Philippe Dagen, Le Silence des peintres. Les artistes face à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1996), pp. 173–83.

8See Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Krise Europas’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich and Irina Renz, eds, Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch… Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkrieges (Essen: Klartext, 1993), pp. 30–52.

9On France, see Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie. Les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale (1910–1919) (Paris: La Découverte, 1996), and Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of the Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Some indications of this are also given in Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), Chapter 15.

10Quoted in Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence, KS: Regent Press of Kansas, 1982), p. 137.

11Max Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der Deutsche Krieg (Leipzig: Weissn Bücher, 1915), p. 65. On the nationalist mobilization of the German intelligentsia, see Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung. Die deutsche Intellektuellen und der Erste Weltkrieg (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 2000).

12Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden (Munich/Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1915). On Sombart during the Great War, see Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987), pp. 254–64.

13Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985). On Mann and the Great War, see Eckart Koester, ‘“Kultur” versus “Zivilisation”. Thomas Manns Kriegspublizistik als weltanschaulich-ästhetischer Standortsuche’, in Wolfgang Mommsen, ed., Kultur und Krieg. Die Rolle der Intellektuellen, Künstler und Schriftseller im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996), pp. 249–58.

14See Isnenghi, Il mito della Grande Guerra.

15Norberto Bobbio, Profilo ideologico del Novecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1990), p. 129.

16See Stromberg, Redemption by War.

17Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Vom Erleben des Krieges’, in Schriften 5.1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 21.

18Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Max Scheler. Krieg und Aufbau’, in ibid., p. 27. On Kracauer’s evolution, so symptomatic of a whole current in Germany, see Enzo Traverso, Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectual nomade (Paris: La Découverte, 1994), pp. 18ff.

19Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 230.

20Romain Rolland, Above the Battle (CreateSpace, 2012), p. 20.

21Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Crisis in German Social Democracy’, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), p. 312. Kishinev had been the site of an infamous pogrom in 1903.

22Ibid., p. 313.

23The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken, 1988), p. 302.

24See Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Schlachtenmythen und die Konstruktion des “Neuen Menschen”’, in Hirschfeld, Krumlech and Renz, Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch, pp. 43-84; and George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 70–3.

25See Antonio Scurati, Guerra. Nazioni e culture nella tradizione occidentale (Rome: Donzelli, 2003), p. 52.

26Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 335–6.

27Roger Caillois, ‘Le vertige de la guerre’, Quatre essais de sociologie (Paris: Perrin, 1951), p. 107.

28Dan Diner, Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999), p. 40.

29Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 160.

30Ernst Kantorowicz, ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’, American Historical Review 56: 3 (April 1951), p. 492.

31Marc Bloch, ‘Lettre d’adieu’, in L’Histoire, la Guerre, le Résistance (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2006), p. 188.

32Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (New York: New Directions, 2006), pp. 53–4.

33This passage, from Winston Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 19–20, has attracted the attention of several historians: see George Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 105–6; and Hagen Schulz, État et nation dans l’histoire de l’Europe (Paris: Seuil, 1996), p. 300.

SIX

Imaginaries of Violence

Fear

‘Agiant with a frightened face, the sister of death, fear is our queen and nobody can escape her power. Those in the rear have said so many foolish things about fear that we must remind them that the intrepid squaddie is a myth.’¹ In 1929, the historian Jean Norton Cru quoted this testimony by the soldier Jean Marot in his extraordinary investigation of the memory of the Great War, as proof that heroic death did not exist. Despite responding to an impersonal and mechanical threat rather than to an enemy in flesh and blood, fear of violent death was always present, and no one could elude it.

Then he opens his eyes. He must have been able to hear me and he looks at me with an expression of absolute terror. His body does not move, but in his eyes there is such an incredible desire to get away that I can imagine for a moment that they might summon up enough strength to drag his body with them, carrying him hundreds of miles away, at a single leap. The body is still, completely quiet, there is not a single sound, and even the gurgling has stopped, but the eyes are screaming, roaring, all his life has gathered in them and formed itself into an incredible urge to escape, into a terrible fear of death, a fear of me.²

With those words Erich Maria Remarque described the fear of a dying enemy soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front, his famous autobiographical novel on the Great War. Violence and death, he added, dominated our lives and destroyed the reflexes acquired in civil society: ‘we cannot recognize ourselves when the enemies’ faces appear in our regard as hunted beasts.’ Soldiers had become ‘insensitive living dead who, through a stratagem and dangerous sorcery, are still able to run and kill.’³

‘You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex’, says Ferdinand Bardamu, the hero of Journey to the End of the Night, realizing that the war in which he has joined up as a volunteer is a real ‘apocalyptic crusade’.⁴ In his Storm of Steel, Ernst Jünger describes the fear of the soldier in his trench as ‘a curious coldness’, not physical but emotional coldness. In the face of danger, he remarks, soldiers shudder with fear and ‘if you cross the wire entanglements, and set foot in no man’s land, the shivering intensifies to a faint, teeth-rattling unease’.⁵ A huge literature of testimonies indicates a major feature of the shared experience of soldiers of the Great War: the terrible and overwhelming feeling of the presence of death in their everyday lives. In his major work on the First World War as it was experienced by the subaltern classes, Antonio Gibelli quoted the letter of an Italian soldier, written on Carnival day 1916, in which he remembered the dances of this traditional festival, one year earlier. Now, on the contrary, he had the feeling he was dancing with death: ‘I am near to death here, it passes beside me all the time.’⁶

Attacks were synchronized. In each trench, an officer conducted a countdown, and at zero soldiers climbed into no-man’s-land. Thousands of them could be killed in a few hours by the enemy’s machine guns. Awaiting the order to attack, the soldiers experienced terrible moments of growing anxiety, trembling hands and shaking knees, while the blood rose to their heads. Those who were paralysed by fear and could not find the strength to go ‘over the top’ were threatened and often shot by the military police: a necessary punishment in order to impose respect for authority and prevent any possible mutiny. According to the testimony of an English soldier, they were literally terrified: ‘Some were coughing, some were vomiting, some were singing, and some were screaming. It was terrible.’ The horrific wounds inflicted by mechanical weapons were well known to all the men living in the trenches. The technological massacre produced thousands of corpses that were completely unrecognizable, the Unknown Soldiers who were to become the symbolic figure of total war.

The experience of soldiers in the trenches and on the battlefields was shared by a generation. But such a traumatic experience was not transmissible; it could not be integrated into a historical continuum linking the generations and consolidating the feeling of a common culture. Walter Benjamin took individual ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis) as the starting-point of his reflections on the decline of the figure of the storyteller in modern societies. The storyteller narrative, Benjamin observed, presupposes a ‘transmissible experience’ (Erfahrung) – a founding experience for the tradition of a community that is able to find in the past the elements that weave together the framework of its present existence.⁷ The violent, industrialized and anonymous death of modern warfare contrasts greatly with the experience of death as a natural event in traditional societies, where it is seen as a natural fact and can have ‘a high exemplary value’ in the eyes of living human beings. Benjamin recalls the representation of death in medieval paintings, ‘where the bed of the dying becomes a real throne room, towards which everyone comes via the open doors of the house’, thereby indicating that this perception of death is the source of the storyteller’s authority:

It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life – and this is the stuff that stories are made of – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it – suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is the very source of the story.⁸

Benjamin continues his analysis by characterizing the Great War as a moment of rupture in which the bodily experience of death in the ‘battle of materiel’ can no longer be restored by narrative nor evoked in an epic form, thus leaving its witnesses abandoned to themselves: ‘A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.’⁹

The experience of violent death in modern war was not only impossible to transmit but also impossible to depict, as many art historians stressed when analysing the painting devoted to the Great War. Philippe Dagen notes the deep hiatus that exists between the testimonies of painters mobilized on the front lines, often crude and terribly realistic, and their works, almost always incapable of representing the horror of lived experience. Their paintings sketch the contours of a ‘cubist war’ dominated by technology, machines and steel, or else show a landscape of ruins to offer a pacifist message that is far from showing the violence of wholesale massacre. That is why the Great War ‘marks a rupture between contemporary history and painting’.¹⁰ Among the rare exceptions are the water-colours and a few canvases painted by Otto Dix during the war years that show soldiers dying in the trenches. They are far more impressive than the conventional and epic ‘War Triptych’ that he finished in the late 1920s.

The photography and cinema of the war years also fail to escape this rule. Though imposed in these cases by the censorship of the general staff, this was often internalized by soldiers as a duty of decency and modesty to preserve their dignity. In the photos Marc Bloch took in the Argonne in 1915, there are neither dead nor wounded, simply life in the trenches and landscapes eviscerated by mortar shells.¹¹ Blood flowed far more freely in the melodramas of the silent films than in cinema devoted to the war. In 1919, the Italian critic Pier Antonio Giarazzo drew attention to this occlusion of violence on the screen, always evoked by metaphors, allusions, or watered-down sublimations, but never presented in its crudest reality: ‘We see our heroic soldiers leaping from the trenches, we see bayonet assaults … We never smell the pervasive and constant stink of corpses, inescapably filling the air on all sides, mixed with the rather rancid smell of kitchen slops.’¹² Similarly, he wrote with a cold and excoriating humour, just as patriotic rhetoric exalts a ‘fine death’ on the field of honour and not ‘a fine double amputation’, films remained very discreet on the concrete forms of soldiers’ physical and psychological suffering: ‘We never see on the screen the terrible fear compelling a simple man … to live awaiting imminent death in a lair dug into the earth, or in a hole in the rock, or behind his machine gun.’¹³ Immediately used by governments as a propaganda weapon, cinema would become in the course of the conflict the privileged refuge of an army and civilian population that sought to escape, for the duration of a film show, their everyday preoccupations. According to Gian Piero Brunetta, cinema halls were places where people tried to ‘exorcise death’.¹⁴

After the First World War, death would no longer be depicted or represented by narratives or images of mourning that inscribed it in the uninterrupted flow of a natural history. Here again, the Great War marks a historical turning-point, breaking the continuity of life experiences and transforming the mental landscape of European societies. Landmarks become confused, tradition seems destroyed, and the old order collapses. For the soldiers, the violence of war remains the source of a lived experience in many respects not transmissible, but the feeling of fear produced by such an experience seems to invade the world after the war. This is certainly, as George Mosse analysed it, a symptom of the brutalization of European societies subjected to the trauma of the Great War.¹⁵ Curiously, few writers have studied the traces left by the feelings and emotions that accompanied the eruption of violence into political struggle and language. The fear that arose in the twentieth century in a world devastated by total war, industrial massacre and bombed towns has not yet found its historian. In this field, there is no comparable research to the work of Jean Delumeau on the Christian fear of the ‘besieged city’, when life was dominated by fear of Satan, the Last Judgement, and wars of religion.¹⁶ Attempting to address this historiographical lacuna, Joanna Bourke suggests that we turn to ‘aesthesiology’ (from the Greek aesthesis): the study of feelings and emotions in a secularized world that tends to privilege ‘anaesthetic’ treatments for neutralizing sentiments. Thus, we should analyse the culture of postwar societies by reconstructing ‘a history of emotional and bodily reactions to the external world’.¹⁷ This applies above all to the fear of death, in particular the fear of violent death, which so deeply marks the European mental landscape of the 1920s and 1930s. In some respects, this analysis reveals the deep contradictions of the civilizing process, leading both to the rationalization of social practices and to the self-control of individual instincts. On the one hand, we have the modern rationality of destructive technologies and mass armies; on the other hand, the hidden emotions of a social world disfigured by violence.

This feeling of fear is not always explicit. In most cases, it affects mentalities in the form of a widespread and elusive anxiety, without appearing on the surface. It remains latent in a world that conserves an appearance of civility and whose history, as Lucien Febvre explained in 1941, is that of a ‘more or less slow suppression of emotional activity by intellectual activity’.¹⁸ In these circumstances, it is the hidden face of the countless monuments commemorating the fallen that were erected throughout the continent, from the majestic memorials of the capital cities to the small statues and plaques in village squares. These were the symbols of a popular memory that recognized the sacrifice of the vanquished. A common aspect of these monuments in all countries, as Reinhart Koselleck has pertinently remarked, lies in their tendency deliberately to elude the concrete phenomenon of death.¹⁹ They convey moral values, celebrate the fatherland and glorify the heroism of the combatants. Sometimes, as in the monument created by Käthe Kollwitz for the German war cemetery of Vladslo, in Belgium, they represent mourning, showing parents weeping over the tomb of their sons. Exceptionally, as in the monument at Casamassima, an Italian village near Bari, they more explicitly evoke death by showing a corpse over which an angel with a crown descends – a winged mater dolorsa. But the image of violent death, the most universally shared experience of the soldiers, remains invisible. It is a sort of taboo constantly exorcised and sublimated by the romanticized image of heroic warfare. Even in the most anti-militaristic films, death is evoked by metaphors and transcendent images, as in the closing scene of Abel Gance’s J’accuse! (1919), when the fallen soldiers rise from their graves to denounce those responsible for their useless sacrifice.

Historiography, notably the works of Philippe Ariès, often emphasizes the tendency towards the privatization of death in modern societies. No longer accepted as a natural and inevitable aspect of existence, a salient moment that punctuates the ritual life of a community, death is now regarded with horror as an irreparable loss, a source of suffering and mourning, outside the public space and withdrawn into the intimate sphere of individuals.²⁰ A major consequence of this privatization of death lies in its isolation: it is first of all medicalized in the family space, then relegated to closed cemeteries outside the centre of towns. The result is that mourning becomes an individualized practice. Clearly, the Great War was a historical turning-point which challenged this tendency that had developed throughout the nineteenth century. The modern intolerance of death was suddenly replaced by its public appropriation in the form of ritualized commemorations unifying national communities around their fallen soldiers. Collective practices of mourning belong to the process of the ‘nationalization of the masses’, and the transformation of nationalism into a ‘civil religion’ of the secularized world, which George Mosse has described so well. The millions of dead in the Great War thus appeared as sacrificial victims of a ‘holocaust’ in the name of the fatherland. But such collective appropriation of death always supposes the exorcism of its modalities, forms and phenomenology. It is impossible to show death in war in the same manner as old paintings represented a person on his deathbed.

The traces of violence, however, were visible everywhere in postwar societies. German artists of the Weimar period depict a society devastated and disfigured by violence. Max Beckmann, Ludwig Meidner, Otto Dix and George Grosz paint scenes of murder, towns inhabited by human wrecks, bodies consumed by sickness, mutilated men in the streets, reminiscent of the photographs of the Gueules cassées (Fig. 1). In a perspicacious essay on Grosz, Günther Anders recognizes his genius in reinterpreting ‘still life’ after the war, creating a new pictorial genre that Anders calls ‘murdered life’. In the history of painting, ‘still life’ always depicts lifeless and cold objects – objects removed from ‘the framework of human life’. Grosz’s drawings and paintings of the 1920s, on the contrary, illustrate a ‘murdered life’: landscapes dominated by horror in which death can never be natural. Perhaps we should use the adjective ‘natural’ in its Hobbesian sense, designating death in a world where ‘to be killed’ (Getötet-sein) becomes ‘the most natural and current modality of being’.²¹

Figure 1. Ernst Friedrich, Gueules cassées, ‘broken mugs’ of the First World War

In order to understand the change produced by the Great War, one could compare two famous pictorial representations of death both created in Germany, one before and the other after 1914. ‘Death in the Sickroom’ (Der Tod im Krankenzimmer), painted by Edward Munch in Berlin in 1893, is a canvas dominated by silence (Fig. 2). The various figures depicted show the pain and affliction of a family gathered around a sick woman stretched out on her bed, attending her in her agony. Some of them are praying. The feeling this composition evokes is that of a resigned and internalized suffering, an austere scene of dignity, honour and respectability typical of a bourgeois Protestant family of the nineteenth century.²² Far from shaking the community, this death seems to strengthen its unity and exalt its values. If we compare this canvas with ‘Night’ (Die Nacht), painted by Max Beckmann between 1918 and 1919, the contrast is striking (Fig. 3). He represents a scene of murder in a loft. Three criminals are strangling a man seated on a table reminiscent of a torture instrument. One murderer tightens a knot around his neck while another restrains him. His wife, near to him and half-naked, seems hung by the arms, with her legs splayed apart, as if she has been raped. A terrified little girl looks upon this spectacle of violence, along with another woman dressed in red, probably an accomplice of the murderers. Various objects lie in confusion on the ground. Death here is no longer natural or peaceful, but belongs to a context of chaos and violence. Like many others of the same period, this expressionistic painting recreates the atmosphere of Germany following the defeat of 1918, the collapse of the Reich, and the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. One might see it as an allegory of the killing of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, whose body was thrown into a Berlin canal after she was murdered at night by a Freikorps gang. It could also be seen as a transfiguration of the painter’s own memories of war, as he was demobilized in 1915, after less than a year of combat, suffering from mental collapse.

Figure 2. Edvard Munch, Death in the Sickroom (Der Tod im Krankenzimmer), 1893

Figure 3. Max Beckmann, The Night, 1918–19

Presented in allegorical form, fear and horror in the face of violence, destruction and death are the ingredients of ‘Guernica’, an icon of twentieth-century culture that requires no description here. Picasso’s painting had been inspired by the bombing of this small Basque town by German planes allied to Franco, and was displayed in the pavilion of the Spanish Republic at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1937. In this allegory of the Spanish Civil War, violent death crushes human beings, animals and objects, acquiring a tragic, choral dimension that transcends the various elements in its composition to capture the essence of a whole epoch.

The movies of the years between the two world wars are likewise an interesting mirror of a traumatized culture. Among many other films, I draw attention to one of the masterpieces of German expressionistic cinema: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). This film depicts a totalitarian, modern, mechanized universe in which industrial workers live like slaves, incorporated into a machine evoking a pagan divinity: Moloch. In his famous book From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Siegfried Kracauer interpreted this movie as a prefiguration of National Socialism, stressing that the audience were disturbed by a futuristic representation that appeared as a synthesis of Wagner and Krupp, mythology and technology: on the one hand, the pathos and the grandiosity of the romantic composer; on the other, the mechanized world of modern factories. This suggestive interpretation is, of course, anachronistic: when he shot this film, Lang was not thinking of a future totalitarian society; he was thinking of the Great War. Though perhaps, in realizing a posttraumatic movie, he prefigured Nazism. The crucial scene in which the machine explodes, engulfing its workers – ritually sacrificed to Moloch – is a depiction of the bombings of total war. The stretcher-bearers gathering the dead and wounded workers after the explosion clearly evoke a landscape after a battle. The slaves engulfed by this mechanical monster were the allegorical representation of the Great War as a holocaust, a sacrificial massacre.²³

Trauma and Hysteria

During and after the Great War, fear of violent death became the object of a new branch of medicine and psychology that tackled the traumatic neuroses afflicting soldiers. From the first years of the conflict onwards, psychoanalysis investigated these war traumas, with Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham and Sigmund Freud himself devoting major studies to them.²⁴ The scientific lexicon was enriched with new words such as shell-shock, war hysteria, neurasthenia, battle fatigue, and so on. The French psychologist André Léri, one of the first analysts of these war traumas, described this phenomenon precisely: ‘After a severe and emotional shock, accompanied or not by physical commotion or wounds, the brave soldier becomes a coward. He is shorn of his warrior courage. When he hears the guns he is afraid, trembles and can neither conquer nor hide his confusion.’²⁵ Giving evidence to the commission established by the British War Office in order to study shell-shock in 1921, the officer J. F. C. Fuller observed that the soldier exposed for a long period to the violence of combat became ‘obsessed by fear’, prey to a ‘nervousness’ that was more akin to a kind of ‘mental terror’ than a physical fear in the traditional sense of the term.²⁶ The director of Moscow’s psychiatric hospital, I. Oreckovskij, quoted a testimony that gave other details of this syndrome: ‘After the battle … I could not sleep: I was extremely sensitive and was startled by the smallest noise; I had the feeling of always hearing gun-fire; my nerves were particularly affected by the fear of battle, the spectacle of blood and the lamentations of wounded soldiers.’²⁷ For his part, the German military psychologist F. Pick thought that the sexual impotence observed among many traumatized soldiers could be the consequence of ‘a suppressed fear of death’,²⁸ a diagnosis that coincides with that of the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham.²⁹

In his social history of the First World War, the social historian Frédéric Rousseau established a detailed phenomenology of this ‘censored’ fear: ‘Weak knees, legs giving way, trembling hands, paleness, acceleration of the rhythm of the heart, small imperceptible tics, stomach-ache, buzzing in the ears, etc.’³⁰ After summarizing the various pathologies linked to war neurosis, Eric Leed observes that they share a single basic diagnostic: ‘Cowardliness, shell-shock, combat exhaustion, anxiety, depression, terror, trauma, neurasthenia, loss of identity are all terms which suppose fear as an internal, invisible and hidden state of mind.’³¹ After affecting the body, fear penetrated into the mind and broke down the wall protecting the inner self from external threats. In the hospitals, traumatized soldiers reproduced the same postures they had adopted in the trenches to protect themselves from enemy fire: curled up in a foetal position, with arms folded over the stomach. Some kept silent, others suddenly emitted terrified screams. Many of them were paralysed, overcome by uncontrollable trembling, amnesia, stammering, and the desire to run away. The phenomenology of fear was extremely varied.³²

The tendency was very widespread among the doctors, psychiatrics and anthropologists of that time to reduce all these symptoms to a unique modern sickness already investigated well before the caesura of the Great War: hysteria.³³ The manifestations of war neurosis all seemed to coincide with the features of hysteria that had been detected by Charcot at the Paris hospital of La Salpêtrière, in the late nineteenth century. This phenomenology was subsequently systematized into a negative view of the ‘outsider’, most commonly identified with the figure of the Jew or the homosexual, ideal-type embodiments of ‘degeneration’ in the modern world. Effeminate, nervous, fearful, cowardly, psychically disturbed, both physically and morally weak, inclined to abstract intellectualism rather than to action, these ‘outsiders’ anticipated the pathologies of the soldiers afflicted by shell-shock. From now on, the war was not the result of a pre-existing degeneration but only its revealer, with the virtue of cleaning up society by eliminating its human scraps. ‘War was the supreme test of manliness’, George Mosse wrote in summing up this view, ‘and those who were the victims of shell-shock had failed this test.’³⁴ For pacifists, strongly opposed to this nationalistic stigmatization, the madness of war was often an object of compassion, even becoming a source of inspiration for artistic avant-gardes attracted by anarchism and Communism. One of the founders of the Dada movement, Jean Arp, had himself simulated madness and been discharged from military duty. André Breton, who had served during the war as a doctor in a military hospital, was fascinated by the tales of traumatized soldiers, which led him to invent the surrealistic principle of automatic writing.³⁵

In contrast with these stereotypes of the weak and ‘degenerate’, there arose that of the heroic combatant forged by the trenches. As the antipodal figure to the traumatized soldier, for the hero the conflict was an occasion to express his virility and strength. In his essay War as an Inner Experience (1922), Ernst Jünger described battle as an original, cathartic moment of life: ‘It hammered, engraved, hardened us and transformed us into what we are today. This war formed us for fighting and we will remain warriors for the rest of our lives.’³⁶

The experience of the Arditi, the assault troops created by the Italian army in 1917 to carry out the most dangerous military operations and terrorize the enemy, illustrates this metamorphosis of fear into hatred. These were volunteers, originally united by a search for adventure rather than by ideological affinities. Immediately idealized by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who viewed them as the incarnation of the Nietzschean superman, they shared a quasimystical cult of combat based on the exaltation of physical courage and contempt for death. D’Annunzio presented them as an ‘aristocracy of courage’ devoted to struggle and fulfilling themselves through the expression of their most aggressive instincts. Their songs celebrated youth (‘Giovinezza, giovinezza’) and idealized death in combat as both an existential aim and a patriotic sacrifice: ‘I am young and strong / my heart does not tremble in my chest / I go to death smiling / rather than to dishonour. (‘Son giovane e son forte / non mi trema il petto in cuore / sorridendo vo’ alla morte / prima di andare al disonor.’)³⁷ After the War, the Arditi did not disarm, and experienced great difficulty in reintegrating into civilian life. They became major actors in the civil war that shook Italy between 1919 and 1925, from the Turin factory occupations to the consolidation of the Fascist regime. The vitalist and aggressive nationalism of the Arditi forged both the style and the practices of nascent fascism (squadrismo), subsequently becoming one of its foundational myths. The vision of Fascist militiamen as ‘a class of warriors, always ready to die’, capable of storming the offices of left-wing parties and trade unions as ‘they would storm an Austrian trench’, became a commonplace of Fascist rhetoric. After embodying the traits of the nationalist soldier, the ardito would be celebrated as the forerunner of the Fascist ‘new man’, the model of a superior man born in battle and building the new civilization that the Duce desired.³⁸ Fascism had transplanted the myth of the Bolshevik threat onto the anxiety and insecurity widespread in European societies since the Great War. It had transformed anxiety – which psychoanalysis defines as a generic feeling of fear, not focused on any particular object – into fear of a concrete enemy:³⁹ Communism and revolution. But its ambition did not stop there, as this fear had to be transformed into hatred, to mobilize crowds against the enemy. Such, according to Carl Schmitt, was the secret kernel of politics.⁴⁰ Once it came to power, fascism ‘institutionalized’ this hatred through propaganda and terror, as Franz Neumann would note later on.⁴¹

The anxiety born out of total war was thus mingled with the fear that, like a terrible frisson, had shaken the ruling class of Europe after the October Revolution of 1917. This fear could feed itself on rumours – treason, the stab in the back, plots – that exacerbated tensions and impelled violence. In this climate, myths such as that of the ‘German gold’ supplied to the Bolsheviks, or of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, as peddled by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which many press organs seemed to credit, could find a very wide echo.⁴² The propagation mechanisms of these myths and rumours were similar to those of the ‘great fear’ of 1789 analysed by Georges Lefebvre;⁴³ but this time the wave of violence that this triggered was not directed against an ‘aristocratic plot’ but against the revolution. Instead of burning the châteaux, witch-hunts against reds took place in Berlin, Munich and Budapest.

In what way was the internal state of mind of the survivors of the trenches transmitted to society as a whole? This question arises because the neuroses bound up with the traumatic experience of the war that affected the generation of ex-combatants were only the visible aspect of a fear that spread beyond these memories to invade the social and mental space of Europe, following a total war that had broken down the frontier between combatants and civilians, in which civil society was simply the rear of the battlefield. In other words, fear became a general feeling suffusing the collective unconscious.

The German-language Czech writer Ernst Weiss, in his novel The Eyewitness (1938), tells the imaginary story of Hitler, an Austrian soldier who suffered from hysterical blindness following a gas attack on the Western front, and was cured by a Jewish doctor treating him with hypnosis. When he understood the extraordinary power of this method, he learned to believe ‘blindly’ in himself and managed to ‘hypnotize’ a whole nation, submitting it to the will of a fanatical and anti-Semitic nationalist.⁴⁴ War, shell-shock, madness, hysteria, nationalism and anti-Semitism are the ingredients of this novel which illustrates the tendency of fascism to transform the anxiety generated by the war into hatred of the enemy (Jewish, Bolshevik or anti-German).

In his classic book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer detected the traces of this fear in German films of the 1920s, a privileged realm of mass culture where ‘people’s internal dispositions’ find expression on the screen. The movies were ‘visible hieroglyphics’ that could be analysed.⁴⁵ Let us leave aside disputes over aesthetics (a film is never the simple reflection of a collective unconscious) and try to see whether this fear of violent death, so rigorously censored in commemorations and monuments (the realms of public mourning), finds expression on the screen.

Some years ago, Carlo Ginzburg drew attention to a forgotten movie by Ernst Lubitsch, Broken Lullaby, a love story that takes place in a context marked by the horror of war, in the era of postwar reconciliation between France and Germany. We are in Paris on 11 November, the anniversary of the armistice. In an atmosphere of popular festival, a band opens the military parade, attended by ex-servicemen, and among them on the pavement are many mutilated men. The camera fixes on their wooden legs, showing the effects of the war on a generation, subtly indicating the suffering hidden by such a joyful façade. Then the procession passes a hospital. A sign on the door asks visitors to be silent. The camera enters the wards of the hospital, where we see confined in an endless set of beds the war wrecks showing their pain, horrified expressions, and silent suffering. Suddenly, triggered by a close-up of the clock on the wall, the silence is broken by a cry of terror, uttered by one of countless ‘crazy’ men who have returned from the trenches. Such a scene, observes Ginzburg pertinently, is worth more than any antiwar treaty.⁴⁶

Collective fear is the subject of M (1931), the classic film by Fritz Lang (Figs 4 and 5). It depicts the fear that spreads through a town ravaged by a child murderer. The fear also grips the murderer himself, victim of an uncontrollable impulse to kill. He is a schizophrenic with a double personality who discovers with horror his own crimes, as he confesses after his capture (by criminal gangs from the city’s lower depths, in a reversal of roles that emphasizes the disorder of postwar Germany). Kracauer presented the hero of M, played by Peter Lorre, as a ‘regressive rebel’, symbol of a collective psychology created by the war and pushing society to accept the National-Socialist order as a protective authority. Kracauer emphasizes a permanent oscillation, in this film, between ‘the notions of anarchy and authority’.⁴⁷ The connection between M and the traumatic experience of the war is suggested by a scene in the first part of the film, in which the murderer walks the city streets in search of a victim. On a wall is clearly visible a poster for G. W. Pabst’s Westfront 1918, a movie produced by the same company as Lang’s, Nero Film (Fig. 4). This fleeting allusion is not just a mere advertisement, but provides a key for interpreting the movie.⁴⁸ The violence that takes innocent lives, and the fear that surrounds it, were a legacy of the war. The murderer is invisible, hidden within the town, just as the enemy during the war, hidden in his trench, was both close by and invisible.

Figure 4. Still from Fritz Lang’s M, eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, 1931.

Figure 5. Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s M, eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, 1931.

Lang had thought of starting the film with a war scene, in order to show the origin of his character’s deadly impulse: he would then have defended himself at his ‘trial’ by evoking the trauma he had suffered at the front. In the end he abandoned this explicit reference, no doubt for fear of giving an apologetic tone to his portrait of the murderer.⁴⁹ The whole film, however, is bathed in an atmosphere of fear and terror typical of postwar Germany. The mobilization of the population in search of the murderer is reminiscent of the ‘total mobilization’ of the war year (Jünger’s essay of this title dates from 1930), while the head of the criminal gang is reminiscent of Goebbels, in both his style of dress and his voice.

Fear and violent death continue to impregnate Fritz Lang’s first American film, Fury (1937). This tells the story of a lynching in a small town, Strand, where an honest citizen, interpreted by Spencer Tracy, is imprisoned and condemned for a crime he did not commit. When the rumour of his arrest begins to circulate, the crowd outside decides to set fire to the prison where the innocent man is held. As a transposition onto the screen of the ‘pack’ analysed by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, this hysterical mob becomes uncontrollable and murderous. The message transmitted by this movie deepens the diagnosis suggested by M: the civilizing process is not irreversible; regression to a primitive, literally Hobbesian state of nature dominated by the law of violence is a permanent possibility. If, as Lang’s biographer Lotte Eisner suggests, M showed us that ‘any one of us might turn a murderer’, Fury added an indispensable corollary: any one of us can be killed.⁵⁰ The Ku Klux Klan’s lynching campaigns in the South of the United States (as well as the book-burnings in Nazi Germany) were probably the events which inspired this movie, but the Great War remained in the background. Produced in 1937, it presaged the Kristallnacht of the following year.

War deaths were not absent from the photography of the 1920s and 1930s. The images in illustrated magazines of that time would often become authentic icons of the twentieth century – for instance, the death (whether real or simulated) of a Spanish Republican soldier photographed by Robert Capa in 1937. Death also appears in the photographic books devoted to the Great War by the anti-militarist propagandist Ernst Friedrich, the author of War Against War! (1924), as well as in a nationalist writer such as Ernst Jünger, a virulent critic of pacifism and abstract humanism, in his preface to Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges (1930).⁵¹ The fear of violent death, however, is never really ‘represented’ by the photography of the interwar period. Suggested or indirectly revealed, it is not always detectable with an iconography-oriented interpretation that focuses on the values embodied in the images. We can detect it only by an iconology-oriented reading that, concentrating on the images deprived of their ‘aura’ and analysed in their context, reveals their ‘intrinsic meaning’.⁵² Traces of it have therefore to be sought out as ‘evidential paradigms’.⁵³ Such a method, already anticipated by Kracauer when he suggested we analyse photographic documents not only as works of art but also and above all as ‘indexical imprints’ of reality, can offer many surprises.⁵⁴ The cultural historian Susan Buck-Morss, for example, has interpreted a famous set of Hitler postcards as visual testimonies of the form that fear took at that time. Taken in 1928 by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, these pictures were widely distributed in Nazi Germany (Fig. 6). As emblematic manifestations of the ‘aestheticization of politics’ developed by Nazism, they show Hitler speaking at a mass rally. Presented as possessed by a form of mystic strength, his figure emerges out of a dark space, and we can imagine the pathos of his voice. In any case, the meaning of his words is summarized by the captions at the bottom of the pictures. His gestures – the arm raised towards the sky, the hands touching his chest as a sign of sincerity, the focused look, the staring eyes, the mouth wide open in the fervour of his speech – are supposed to express a feeling of unshakable strength. The captions suggest nationalist fanaticism and the will for revenge. The energies of Germany had to be directed towards redemptive action. This was the aura conferred by National Socialism on the charismatic image of the Führer, onto which it sought to project the messianic hopes of the people. This ‘secular icon’ embodies various elements – those on which the myth of Hitler was based in the 1930s, and those that today connote the demoniac image of totalitarianism, with all its symbolism and its negative power (the ‘fascinating fascism’ described by Susan Sontag).⁵⁵ But when we remove this symbolic dimension, these images also appear as documents recording another aspect of the past. We know that these photos were not taken during a mass meeting, but rather in Hoffmann’s Munich studio.⁵⁶ We also know from many testimonies that Hitler carefully cultivated his own image, his gestures and facial expression in front of a mirror, following the advice of the opera singer Paul Devrient.⁵⁷ Thus, Buck-Morss suggests that we turn the traditional interpretation of these pictures upside down, seeing in them not an expressive but rather a reflexive effect. From this perspective, Hitler gave back to the crowds their own images and feelings, rather than stimulating an emotion through a symbol and a mythical transfiguration. Considered from this point of view – freed from their artificial aura – these images demonstrate neither strength nor aggressiveness but simply a feeling of fear.⁵⁸ This reading is also supported by certain observers of the time, such as the critic Konrad Heiden, who in 1936 denounced the factitious character of these images, proposing that they be seen as nothing but ‘objective views of the “Hitler material”’.⁵⁹ They perfectly correspond to the typology of the symptoms of fear elaborated by nineteenth-century scholars such as Dr Duchenne, author in 1862 of a treatise entitled The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, in which he proceeded to an ‘electro-physiological analysis of the passions’,⁶⁰ and Darwin, ten years later, who studied fear with the help of several photographs published in the work of his French colleague (Fig. 7). When fear grows and transforms itself into terror, Darwin explains, the nostrils dilate, the lips tremble, the eyes fix on the source of dread, the muscles stiffen, the hands open and close alternately, and the arms stretch out as if indicating a threat or spontaneously cover the face in a protective gesture.⁶¹ If we forget the conventional factors that inevitably guide our reception of the pictures of Hitler (given how familiar we are with his appearance and history) – in other words, if we abandon an iconography-oriented interpretation of them and forget the historical figure that they portray, seeing him simply as a man – they appear as a representation of terror, or a fit of madness in a hysterical individual. They evoke the manifestations of war neurosis, and also summon up other images of the fear that gripped the society of this time, such as the pathos of Peter Lorre in M, when he evokes the murderous demons possessing him (Fig. 5). Subjected to such an interpretation, these images of Hitler remain historical documents, but they are not ‘evidence’ in the sense of the photographs or films exhibited at the Nuremberg trials, which constitute sources in a strictly historical sense of the word (the past ‘as it actually happened’). They are documents that reveal, despite their aims, the essence of an epoch. Buck-Morss could have referred to the artists of the 1930s who had prefigured her intuition. The photomontages (Günther Anders preferred to call them ‘counter-montages’)⁶² published in the German weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung by John Heartfield to demystify Nazi propaganda were based on the same principle. In the special issue devoted to the Reichstag fire trial in September 1933, he depicted Goering, ‘the butcher of the Third Reich’ (Fig. 8). Goering’s stocky figure occupies the whole space, with the burning Reichstag behind him. He holds an axe in his hand and his uniform is stained with blood. His mouth is wide open, his eyes are bloodshot; he is screaming, and his face is suffused by hatred – but it could also seem an expression of terror, if seen in isolation. Fear, violence and terror compose this image and suggest a new iconography, in complete contrast to that of Nazi propaganda.

Figure 6. Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann of Hitler rehearsing for his speeches, 1927, for distribution by the Nazi party as postcards.

Figure 7. Terror, Dr Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne performing facial electrostimulus experiments for his photographic study of emotions, 1862.

Figure 8. John Heartfield, ‘Goering: The Executioner of the Third Reich’, cover for Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung magazine, 14 September 1933.

We must mention one final image: the ‘Angelus Novus’ of Benjamin’s theses of 1940. Of course, fear does not explicitly appear in the Klee canvas that the German-Jewish philosopher transformed into an allegory of history. But it is nonetheless present in the portrait of the angel in Benjamin’s famous ninth thesis. Borne away from paradise by a storm that prevents him from closing his wings and recomposing the ruins of history that spread across the earth under his eyes, the angel turns towards the past with an expression transfixed with fear. His aspect is not so different from those we have seen in the traumatized soldiers of the Great War or the heroes of the expressionist Weimar films. ‘His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.’⁶³ He contemplates a landscape of ruins that we had called progress but that was revealed to be an uninterrupted chain of catastrophes. His fear is the fear of the vanquished of history who are threatened with being forgotten if fascism is not stopped (‘even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious’). Thus, fear is a feeling intimately linked to the understanding of history, being interwoven with ‘the image of the past that unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.’⁶⁴ Such a fear obstructs any kind of empathy on the part of the vanquished with the enemies, and, finally, is correlated with ‘a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim’: the hope of a revolutionary interruption of the catastrophic course of history.⁶⁵

Behemoth

In an essay of 1955 devoted to the writer Hermann Broch, Hannah Arendt put the ‘experience of death’ at the centre of the preoccupations of an intellectual generation that had passed through the Great War, notably in Germany. This generation, she emphasized, was able to restore to this theme the ‘philosophical dignity’ it had lost since the time of Hobbes. According to Arendt, postwar philosophers drew inspiration from the experience of a conflict dominated by the ‘fear of violent death’ in order to reflect on the ‘anxiety’ of man facing ‘inevitable mortality’.⁶⁶ If we try to go beyond this general remark, it is clear that the new relationship to death created by the war could take different forms, from the pacifist humanism of Romain Rolland and Erich Maria Remarque to the aesthetic exaltation of mechanical violence of the Italian futurists – from the fascist contempt for death to the mystic nihilism of Ernst Jünger, who celebrated war as a nation’s regenerating sacrifice. The existentialist approach to death found its deepest expression in Heidegger, a philosopher whose principal work, Being and Time, could well be interpreted in the light of the historical caesura marked by the world war. Heidegger devoted a chapter of this book to the fear of death, summarized in the following words: ‘the being-towards-death [Sein-zum-Tod] is essentially fear [Angst]’.⁶⁷ This approach, Heidegger took care to point out, does not refer to death as the fulfilment of the cycle of life, as a physiological and natural phenomenon, and the fear he refers to should not be interpreted as simply the reaction to an ordinary death. In Being and Time, death is defined as a permanent existential condition, a possibility that dominates and crushes man at every moment. In other words, death is the natural modality of being ‘thrown’ (geworfen) into the world, which consequently becomes a ‘being-for-death’. For Heidegger, the fear that derives from the awareness of this possibility of death as an ontological condition – the fear invading life that is reduced to a permanent wait for death – constitutes Eigentlichkeit, the most authentic form of existence.⁶⁸

In 1933, when he was appointed rector of Freiburg University and sought to give a political dimension to his existentialism, Heidegger cited Leo Schlageter as an example of ‘authentic existence’. This young Freikorps militiaman had been executed ten years earlier for organizing attacks on the French forces occupying the Ruhr, and was the object of annual celebrations by the Nazis, as a martyr to their cause. In his commemorative speech delivered in Freiburg, Heidegger celebrated Schlageter as a national hero who had accepted death, as ‘he could not escape his destiny, which was to die both the hardest and the greatest death, with a firm will and a clear heart’.⁶⁹ His sacrifice had not been useless, finding its meaning in the struggle for the rebirth of Germany. Now, authenticity no longer lies simply in the understanding of death as an ontological condition, but above all in acceptance of the consequences of political commitment against an enemy, in both national and civil war.

But fear of death is a major aspect of the political philosophy of the interwar period well beyond Heidegger’s existentialism, and it triggered in particular a new reading of Hobbes. For the English philosopher of the seventeenth century, the state of nature is a kind of bellum omnium contra omnes, a permanent state of war in which anarchy and violence predominate – two effects of an original natural equality between men. In contrast, the political state is an absolute authority capable of imposing order and subjecting men to its sovereignty in exchange for protection: obedience against peace and security. Fear of death is a kind of leitmotiv in Leviathan, latent in its theory of ‘natural right’ (conflictual equality) and ‘natural law’ (rational association).⁷⁰ In his reading of Hobbes, Carl Schmitt overlooks anything that might bring the author of Leviathan into a convergence with classical liberalism (such as his theory of contract), and emphasizes his view of the political as an answer to the fear of violent death. Turning the Hobbesian perspective radically upside down, Schmitt no longer identifies violence with a pre-political state of nature, but transforms it into the very core of the political. The central topic of Hobbes – protection and submission – becomes for him the paradigm of the total state at the time of total war. According to Schmitt, the modernity of Hobbes’s thought lies in the essential affinity between Cromwell’s England and twentieth-century Europe. Hobbes elaborated his vision of the state ‘in the terrible time of civil war, [when] all the legitimate and normative illusions with which men like to deceive themselves regarding political realities in periods of untroubled security vanish’.⁷¹ Thus, the idea of ‘a war of all against all’ should be considered neither as the ‘monstrous product of a troubled and uneasy imagination’ nor as the description of nascent market capitalism (as was the view of Ferdinand Tönnies and, more recently, C. B. Macpherson), but rather as the foundation of a ‘specifically political’ thought.⁷² With an existentialist accent, Schmitt emphasized that Hobbes’s thought was born in the midst of a civil war in which ‘concrete human groupings’ were in violent confrontation.⁷³ It is on this basis that Schmitt builds his classic definition of the political as the realm of the conflict between friend and enemy, always implying the possibility of physical death. In his eyes, war is not the ‘goal’ of politics but rather its ontological condition – this being the existentialist core of his thought.

The young Leo Strauss shared this interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy in its main lines. In 1932, long before becoming a leading figure of American conservatism, he published his critical commentaries on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political in the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Strauss perfectly grasped Schmitt’s tendency to transfer to the political realm what Hobbes defines as the state of nature. ‘Whereas Hobbes in an unliberal world accomplishes the founding of liberalism’, Strauss explains, ‘Schmitt in a liberal world undertakes the critique of liberalism.’⁷⁴ This approach seems to him very pertinent in the present context, where the essential task of politics is not to ‘hide’ but to develop conflict. ‘The affirmation of the political’, Strauss writes, ‘is the affirmation of the state of nature. Schmitt opposes the affirmation of the state of nature to the Hobbesian negation of the state of nature. The state of nature simply is the status belli.’⁷⁵

Some years later, when already exiled in the United States, Strauss published his first book, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1936), in which he renewed in some respects his interrupted dialogue with Schmitt and reaffirmed his view of the fear of death as the core of Hobbes’s political theory. Reflecting on Hobbes’s semantic choices (the expression ‘fear of death’ instead of ‘conservation of life’), Strauss concluded that the author of Leviathan was undoubtedly referring to ‘violent death’. The root of his rational construction of the state machine lies in the fear of being killed. Thus, all of Hobbes’s political philosophy rests on a moral postulate: ‘death, the primary and greatest and supreme evil, the only and absolute standard of human life, the beginning of all knowledge of the real world, [man knows] originally only as violent death.’⁷⁶ This fear, this fundamental desire for self-preservation in the midst of a hostile world, constitutes the anthropological basis for the entire political philosophy of the author of Leviathan, where, according to Strauss, it ‘takes the place of the Telos’.⁷⁷

In 1938, it was Schmitt’s turn to publish a book on Hobbes.⁷⁸ His emphasis here shifted to the opposition between Leviathan and Behemoth, the two famous Hobbesian allegories of the state and sedition. In other words, the notion of violent death now appears in its most political form: that of civil war. In Leviathan, the state is depicted as an anthropomorphic representation (at the same time a ‘mortal god’, an artificial body, and an animated, human mechanism), and civil war is assimilated to a sickness.⁷⁹ In Behemoth, the book Hobbes wrote at an advanced age analysing the English civil war, this is reduced to a simple act of sedition by an illiterate and brutal mob, ignoring its social and political causes. Its roots lay in disobedience, and Hobbes hastens to add that a prompt suppression would have snuffed out the revolt before it could destroy the monarchy.⁸⁰ Hobbes does not consider either Behemoth or Leviathan, the two biblical monsters, with great philological attention.⁸¹ For him they are simply political metaphors of anarchy and order, disobedience and sovereign authority, civil war and the state. Schmitt now reinterpreted this dichotomy by identifying Behemoth with democracy and Leviathan with dictatorship. The bellum omnium contra omnes corresponded to civil war, to anarchy and Communism. Liberalism, for its part, tried to ‘neutralize’ the conflicts by separating the state and civil society; but the only result it obtained was to promote a return to chaos by weakening the state and legitimizing, with its pluralism, a conflictual equality. The state, on the contrary, transformed ‘wolves’ into ‘citizens’, and assured their security by their submission to its power. Under the Weimar Republic, Schmitt concluded, democracy had acted as a dangerous Behemoth, while Nazism had rebuilt the Leviathan after 1933. ‘Modern state and modern police’, Schmitt concluded, ‘came into being simultaneously and the most vital institution of the security state is the police.’⁸² In this fascist reading, the critique of liberalism acquires a strong anti-Semitic connotation. Sketching a genealogy of liberalism as a mechanism for ‘neutralizing’ the state, Schmitt dates the start of the liberal tradition from Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and locates its apogee in the constitutionalism of Friedrich J. Stahl. In his view, this legal positivism of Jewish origin could only have led to the result, very visible under the Weimar Republic, of ‘massacring a Leviathan overflowing with life’.⁸³

During the Second World War, the metaphorical image of Behemoth was used in an opposite sense to that invoked by Schmitt, even implicitly arguing against him, by Franz Neumann, a political scientist affiliated to the exiled Frankfurt School, who had been Schmitt’s student. Under this title, in 1942 he published a book in which this biblical monster designates National Socialism. Against the traditional vision of Hitler’s dictatorship as a form of absolute power, monolithic and centralized – a sort of omnipotent Leviathan dominating a nation of obedient subjects – Neumann presented Nazi Germany as a modern Behemoth. Of course, it was a totalitarian, racist and imperialist state, but under its monolithic façade it was corroded by deep internal contradictions that it failed to overcome. These derived from a charismatic power that could not dispense with the state as its essential instrument, profiting therefore from its prerogatives, such as the monopoly of violence, but suffering also from its constraints, in particular the coexistence of a series of bureaucratic and ‘rational’ instruments that were incompatible with a purely charismatic domination. Neumann saw Hitler more as a mediator than as an absolute dictator. The ‘polycratic’ structure of the Nazi regime reflected a conflict between the army, the Nazi Party, the economic elite and the state bureaucracy. Though these all profited from the regime, each pursued its own ends, defending interests that in the end tended to enter into contradiction with a charismatic power for which law, economy, army and bureaucracy were simply tools in the service of a project of racial domination. From these contradictions there arose, during the war, the Nazi Behemoth, ‘a non-state, chaos, the rule of lawlessness and anarchy’.⁸⁴

In the 1930s, artistic imagination had anticipated Neumann’s diagnosis. In 1933, John Heartfield recreated a famous canvas of the symbolist painter Franz von Stuck, ‘Der Krieg’ (1894), in which a young warrior with a lance rides his horse over ground covered by corpses. Behind him, Heartfield shows Hitler with a whip. Heroic war is a lie: in this landscape of death, Behemoth appears as a tired and pitiful horse. In 1939, the German artist Magnus Zeller painted ‘The State of Hitler’, a picture in which Behemoth takes the form of a gigantic, horrible divinity towering on a wagon drawn by a mass of slaves. Here, the multitude no longer forms, as in Hobbes’s Leviathan, the figure of the sovereign. The latter is turned into a Behemoth, a hideous fetish that oppresses and humiliates its subjects.

Schmitt, Strauss and Neumann were not wrong in seeing Leviathan and Behemoth as two fundamental figures of modernity. They coexisted in spite of their antipodal nature. The period between the wars saw throughout Europe a strengthening of states up to the rise of totalitarianism. After the Great War, various Leviathans restored order in the various national contexts, often at the price of bloody counter-revolutions and the establishment of dictatorships; but this did not prevent the continent from drifting towards a new war still more devastating than the last. In short, between 1914 and 1945 the Old World took on the traits of a gigantic Behemoth, a European civil war. Its mark was the eruption of violence and fear into culture, at a time in which death found once again its Hobbesian meaning: the permanent possibility of been killed.

Young Men

The actors in the European civil war were for the most part young men, and the representations they formed of their time were strongly marked by a gender cleavage. It is worth pausing for a moment, therefore, on these two factors: age and gender. The massive eruption of youth into the foreground was bound up first of all with a demographic change. World population, which numbered around 1 billion at the start of the twentieth century, had almost doubled by 1930. In Europe, several countries had experienced very strong demographic growth. Between 1880 and 1914, the German population rose from 45 to 68 million; the Russian Empire from under 98 to 161 million; Italy from 28.5 to 36 million, despite strong emigration; and the Hapsburg Empire from 37.6 to 51 million.⁸⁵ Youth imposed itself as a historical subject by asserting its desire for change, its need for action, its dynamism, and often its rejection of tradition. It was celebrated as a value in its own right, idealized as a redemptive force with the ability to renovate European societies that had become frozen in an obsolete and outworn dynastic order.⁸⁶ In 1914, the collapse of this order, symbolized by its glistening uniforms and crowned heads, opened the prospect of a future that young people were called upon to design and build.

During the interwar years, a new sociological view of youth was developed. In 1928, Karl Mannheim elaborated his concept of generation, a landmark in the social sciences. In his view, a generation cannot be reduced to an age-class engendered by the natural renewal of the population. He defined a generation as a group possessing a particular identity, marked by a founding event around which new problematics and new political cleavages are sketched out, within a particular social and cultural space. Its members share the same experiences, and divide into groups – ‘generational units’ – as a function of their social belonging, their culture, and their political options.⁸⁷

The protagonists of the European civil war belonged above all to the ‘front generation’ (also known in France as the génération du feu) that emerged from the trenches of the Great War. In a letter to Élie Halévy of 1936, Marcel Mauss drew attention to the striking features of the ‘active minorities’ born from the war, particularly the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany, both formed of young males, structured as ‘secret sects’, and cultivating a passion for activism and violence.⁸⁸ This judgement did not display an imperturbable ‘axiological neutrality’, but it did grasp an important aspect of the European political context.

The Bolshevik party that conquered power in Russia in October 1917 was made up of young militants, whose average age fell further during the civil war. Lenin, its founder and charismatic leader, was forty-seven when he headed the new Soviet government, and by far the eldest in its leadership. Trotsky, the most popular of the revolutionary leaders, was not yet forty, Zinoviev thirty-five, Kamenev thirty-four, Sverdlov thirty-two, and Bukharin twenty-nine, while Frunze and Tukachevsky, the two leading commanders of the Red Army under Trotsky, were respectively twenty-nine and twenty-one. In 1919, 50 per cent of the Bolshevik activists were under thirty, and only 10 per cent over forty.⁸⁹ The enthusiasm with which the new Soviet regime sought to dissolve the old patriarchal ‘bourgeois’ family was no doubt bound up with this age composition of activists ready to overthrow everything, in a conflict in which survival was at stake and it was only possible to survive at the price of a total transformation of society. One of the party’s slogans during the civil war, ‘Down with the capitalist tyranny of parents!’, well expresses this mind-set.⁹⁰

Similar considerations apply to the Communist parties born in Europe from 1919 onwards. Béla Kun, head of the republic of workers’ councils in Budapest, was born in 1885, the same year as its people’s vice-commissar for public instruction, György Lukács, while the secretary of the Communist Party, Mátyás Rákosi, was born in 1892. In Italy, the first secretary of the Communist Party, Amadeo Bordiga, was only thirty-two when he split the Socialists at Livorno in 1921; Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, who took over the underground leadership of the party in 1926, were born in 1891 and 1893 respectively. In Germany, the Spartacist uprising was led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, both the same age as Lenin; but those who took over the leadership of the party after their murder in January 1919 were far younger: Paul Levi was born in 1893, Ruth Fischer in 1895, Arkadi Maslow in 1891. And the same could be said of the leaders of the workers’ council republic in Bavaria, such as Eugen Leviné, born in 1881, or the playwright Ernst Toller, born in 1893. The KPD’s leading figure in the 1930s, Ernst Thälmann, was born in 1896. In 1926, 80 per cent of full-time KPD officials were under forty. Half the party’s cadres and 70 per cent of its activists had come into politics only after the fall of the Kaiserreich; the former members of the Spartacus League were now a small minority, to say nothing of those who had belonged to the SPD before the war.⁹¹ Under the Weimar Republic, the KPD was a party of young workers, then, when the economic crisis broke out in 1930 – of young unemployed, with the addition of a small but quite remarkable kernel of young intellectuals, such as Karl Korsch and Werner Scholem, both born in 1886.

The fascist movements made up the other major current capable of attracting the political radicalization of young people. This explains both their ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric and their desire to regenerate the world and build a new order, which had nothing much in common with the nationalism and conservative ideologies of the age before 1914. The founders of Nazism all belonged to the ‘front generation’, from Hitler (1889) to Hermann Goering (1893), Alfred Rosenberg (1893) and Josef Goebbels (1897). Leo Schlageter, the nationalist militant born in 1894 who died in 1923 fighting against the French occupation of the Ruhr, was their martyr and the emblem of the movement. The ranks of the Nazi Party swelled after 1930, with the arrival of a new generation too young to have taken part in the war, but which had been deeply marked by the terrors of defeat and economic crisis, as well as by the climate of civil war in the early years of the Weimar Republic. The economic and political crisis that the country fell into once more, with mass unemployment and the paralysis of the grand coalition led by the SPD, pushed these young people into a revolt (social, political, and also generational) that found its outlet in the Nazi mythology of national redemption, the construction of a thousand-year Reich, and the racial reshaping of German society. The student associations came under Nazi control in the mid 1920s. When the party came to power in 1933, the Nazis won the support of that fringe of young people who were called at this time the ‘lost generation’, and whom Detlev Peukert refers to as the ‘superfluous generation’ (überflüssige Generation),⁹² struck by a strong sense of impotence and often tempted by nihilism. Several Nazi leaders belonged among them, including Heinrich Himmler (b. 1900), Hans Frank (1900), Reinhard Heydrich (1904), Albert Speer (1905) and Adolf Eichmann (1906). Stressing the generational dimension of the Nazi movement, the historian Götz Aly analyses the Hitler regime as a kind of ‘dictatorship of youth’ (Jugenddiktatur), which indeed did not present itself as a dictatorship but as an extension of the youth movements, with their idealization of nature, community spirit and thirst for adventure.⁹³

The political movement that most explicitly proclaimed its roots in the younger generations, however, developing a real myth of youth, remains Italian Fascism. The Fascist ‘revolution’ that aimed to regenerate the Italian nation presented itself as the work of an aristocracy forged in the trenches (trincerocrazia), which reached adulthood by defying death, showing courage and fighting spirit. The myth of youth was all the stronger in that Italian Fascism did not in fact possess, at least in its early phase, a view of the world completely centred on race (and still less, of course, on class, which lay at the centre of Communist ideology).⁹⁴ Mussolini, the movement’s leader, was thirty-one when he left the Socialist party in 1914 and became a nationalist interventionist, and thirty-nine when he was appointed head of government in 1922. In the postwar age, fascism managed to coagulate the heterogeneous magma of nationalist currents, from revolutionary syndicalism to futurism, but its central core was formed by militants from the ‘front generation’, such as Achille Starace (b. 1899), Roberto Farinacci (1892), Dino Grandi and Giuseppe Bottai (both 1895). For twenty years, the Fascist regime sought to maintain the myth of youth, by means of a wide network of sport and student organizations that offered their members the illusion of constituting its leading force. Fascist iconography always gave youth pride of place (for example, in the Opera Nazionale Balilla), their joie de vivre exalted by ditties that echoed the rhythms of everyday life: ‘Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di belleza …’ ‘The majority of fascist leaders were young people during the last war’, Togliatti wrote in 1943, attracted to fascism ‘in the hope of a social revolution and a renovation of national life.’ But these illusions evaporated, while many were transformed into bourgeois or bureaucrats. It was the bureaucratization of the regime, moreover, and the relative ageing of its leading group, that favoured the formation of a new generation from the mid 1930s, less susceptible to propaganda and even openly critical, within which the anti-Fascist organizations dismantled by repression or hollowed out by exile reconstituted themselves – a generation that would be a nursery for the Resistance after 1943. ‘Once again’, Togliatti concluded, ‘we have arrived at one of those turning-points that historians call a generational turn.’⁹⁵

This generation waged the final stage in the European civil war, with a conflict in which all the elements of the warrior imaginary, nationalist and Fascist, erupted in full force. This imaginary, which had taken shape after 1918, was described as follows by the secretary of the Fascist party, Giuseppe Bottai, in his diary: ‘For me, making war and growing up were the same thing. And to make war, we need neither the will to power, nor solemn decisions, nor to overthrow norms. It is impossible to avoid adolescence. And war was our adolescence.’⁹⁶ The ethos of this Fascist generation was proclaimed by Ernst Jünger in the mid 1920s, in exalted tones that sum up the totalitarian rhetoric: ‘It is war that has made men and times what they are. Never before has a breed like ours appeared on earth to settle its quarrels and proclaim the master of the century. For never before has a generation arisen through so grandiose and shadowy a gateway as this war proved itself to be.’⁹⁷

Those who reached adulthood between 1939 and 1945 experienced not the blossoming of this mythology, but its crisis and collapse. The ‘new world’ that had arisen from the trenches in which a generation were immolated was in the process of crumbling. The desire to turn the page and build a new society took a different direction. The Resistance was the movement of a youth that no longer believed in the regimes that had idealized it, mythologized it, and cradled it in illusions. In the face of the Nazi domination of Europe, nationalism rediscovered its emancipatory dimension – the liberation of an oppressed homeland – and was often combined with a political commitment founded on universal values. In short, the imaginary of those who began the European civil war, the generation of 1914, was very different from that of the generation who finished it, the generation of 1945.

Female Allegories

It is not enough to say that the first world conflict propelled a new generation to the front of the stage. The hero who embodied this in his various characteristics – first of all those of the soldier, then those of the nationalist or revolutionary militant, and finally again those of the soldier, militiaman or résistant – proudly proclaimed his gender: he was male. George Mosse reminds us that the model of masculinity that emerged from the Great War drew on an older tradition. Back in the late eighteenth century, Winckelmann had laid down its codes by reference to the art of Greek Antiquity: a kind of physical, aesthetic and moral ideal, identified with bodily harmony, courage, and spiritual purity. At the end of the nineteenth century, the German youth movement – the ‘migrating birds’ of the Wandervögel – developed this ideal and gave it a new content, well summed up in the myth of masculine fraternity, the Männerbund. From 1914, the nationalist character of this tendency was strongly emphasized, and identified with the image of the soldier. War became the arena for the realization of this male archetype, transformed into aggressive virility. Masculinity became synonymous with strength, courage, virility, energy, will to action and solid nerves, but also with moral uprightness, generosity, beauty, nobility of spirit and idealism. Summarized in this way, the masculine ideal was inevitably opposed, as an absolute and irreducible antinomy, to all symptoms of ‘decadence’: weakness, cowardice, immorality, ugliness, monstrosity.⁹⁸ These evil and despicable markers were then focused, as we have seen, on Jewish and homosexual ‘outsiders’. Effeminate features – an unbridled sexuality, an excess of nervousness and intellectualism at the expense of physical activity – were the characteristics of individuals ‘outside the norm’, who weakened the body of the nation and condemned it to inexorable decline. The new humanity forged in the trenches despised and abhorred them; they would no longer have a place in the world it was preparing to build. The ‘worker’ described by Jünger had muscles and nerves of steel, in the image of a technology that, freed from the calculating and anonymous coldness of Zivilisation, could rediscover the shadowy enchantment of the elements. For the author of Storm of Steel, battle was a male experience of return to primordial nature, while for Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Ezra Pound and Julius Evola, it heralded the end of parasitism and bourgeois decadence.

In its most radical version, that of German nationalism, this conception led to an extreme form of misogyny. As Klaus Theweleit points out in Male Fantasies, ‘Love of women and love of the country are at opposite poles.’⁹⁹ The bouquet of quotations that he gives to demonstrate this makes eloquent reading. From Jünger to Ernst von Salomon, no one doubts for a single moment that the pleasures of battle are incomparably more sublime than those of physical love. Evoking the Freikorps of 1919, for example, Salomon writes: ‘Captain Flotow loved his cadets and his cadets loved him.’ In his memoirs, Captain Freiherr von Steinäcker likewise explains his decision to leave for the Baltic in order to combat the Red Army: ‘I had no second thoughts about tearing myself loose from wife and children and marching into the jaws of the Bolsheviks.’¹⁰⁰ These ‘jaws’, Theweleit comments, ‘seem to hide delights that women cannot provide’.

For Jünger, as we have seen, the Great War was made up of ‘sudden eruptions of sensuality’, and its violence generated an ‘exacerbated cult of masculinity, bringing about a change in relations between the sexes’.¹⁰¹ It was experienced by the soldiers, he adds, as a sensual experience, ‘night after night, under the sign of an unrestrained Eros’.¹⁰² The confrontation with the enemy was a source of ‘ecstasy’, i.e. an orgasm, ‘a frenzy with no regard for limits, comparable only with the forces of nature. Man was then like the roaring storm, the sea in fury, the rumbling of thunder.’¹⁰³

Misogyny and the eroticization of technology as a tool of destruction were the ingredients of Marinetti’s futurist novel The Steel Cubicle, in which he told of his adventures in the Great War with his A-74 armoured car, equipped with a machine gun installed as a ‘spine’ in the rear. His relationship with his vehicle was one of love, a source of the aesthetic and sensual pleasures celebrated in the futurist exaltation of the machine. Battle, or entering a town, became ‘forced coitus’.¹⁰⁴ There can be no doubt, reading this literature, what the nationalist militant ‘loves’: he loves his people, his country, his native land, his uniform, his comrades, battle, the warrior community, his weapons and his armoured car. In short, the list of his love objects is rich and varied, but there is no room in it for women.¹⁰⁵ They are totally excluded from the soldier’s masculine world.

Total war challenged the traditional division between the front lines, where battle took place, and civilian society in the rear. The latter was ever more involved in the conflict, both as a site of military production (material and symbolic) and as a target of enemy weapons. Women entered production en masse to replace the enlisted men, or themselves enrolled as nurses or auxiliaries. But it was precisely this major participation in the war effort that created the need to restore a strict sexual division in both propaganda and collective representations of the war. There is a striking continuity in the view of women conveyed by the posters of the First and Second World Wars: they are strictly relegated to the home front, which they dominate in the same way that men have a monopoly of the use of weapons. The female body, maternal and procreative, becomes the symbol both of the nation and of the victim.¹⁰⁶ With their children in their arms, women see their husbands leaving for the front (‘Women of Britain say: go!’),¹⁰⁷ summoning their compatriots to subscribe to the war loan or calling on soldiers to save them, as in the Soviet poster of 1942 that shows a mother with her son in her arms, threatened by a Nazi bayonet. While soldiers were always male and the aggressors were often shown with the features of brutes, even wild beasts, the victims, in contrast, were defenceless women and children. As ‘godmothers’ of soldiers, they provided moral support for the fighting nation. Many posters and postcards show them as nurses occupied in comforting and caring for wounded soldiers. One poster from the First World War shows a nurse with an angelic expression and a blouse that sports rescuing wings. In an American poster of the same period – ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’ – a nurse holds in her arms, like an angel, a wounded soldier lying on a stretcher (Fig. 9).¹⁰⁸ Less dramatic, the cover of an Italian illustrated magazine presents a buxom mother with a reassuring smile offering her breast to a clutch of babies, whom her milk transforms into little soldiers ready to serve their country.¹⁰⁹

Figure 9. Earl Alonzo Foringer, ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’, US Red Cross Christmas roll call, 1918.

In times of great events, woman embodies the national imagery inherited from the nineteenth century. In France in 1944, the Liberation assumed the features of a radiant woman draped in the tricoleur. But the allegory is not always a happy one, as she exalts the country’s tragedies as well as its moments of joy. Since the female body symbolizes the national body, her rape becomes a metaphor for the threatened and wounded nation. A famous poster of 1917 shows a gorilla advancing with big strides and open mouth, ravenous and menacing. It wears a Prussian helmet bearing the word ‘militarism’. Its right hand brandishes a sword on which a slogan of German propaganda can be read, ‘Kultur’, while its left hand grasps a horrified young girl, her breast exposed, trying in vain to repel this criminal embrace.¹¹⁰ This image, however, underwent a change of tenor between 1914 and 1945, for which the logic of civil war was itself responsible. During the Second World War the female body was no longer a symbol only of the violated homeland: it also became a symbol of treachery, of understanding with the enemy and national indignity. In 1944–45, a new representation was added to the older one of the violated woman: that of the ‘horizontal collaborator’. From a profaned sanctuary, her body changed into a source of sin and national shame, punishment for which inevitably involved both moral stigmatization and physical humiliation: head-shaving as a popular spectacle.¹¹¹

Fascism inherited the traditional sexual divisions and pushed them to an extreme, with its aesthetic of virility and its view of woman as prolific mother, reproducer of the race and ‘angel of the hearth’. Communism seemed initially to break this stereotype, proclaiming the emancipation of women and the dissolution of the bourgeois family, promulgating equality between the sexes and legalizing abortion. Aleksandra Kollontai theorized free love and announced the advent of the new woman, independent and mistress of her destiny. Many women enrolled in the Red Army (74,000 soldiers and 2,000 dead), and pictures of the 1920s show them parading armed alongside men in the defence of Petrograd. But in the end this turned out to be only an ephemeral parenthesis, as the sexual division once more reimposed itself in Communist culture. Eric Hobsbawm has even indicated a decline in the place of women in revolutionary iconography. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the popular image of the revolutionary subject acquired a more strongly masculine image, Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People giving way to the sturdy proletarians of the Bolshevik aesthetic.¹¹² The cover of the Comintern magazine, published in several languages from 1920 onwards, showed a heavily muscled blacksmith, with naked arms and torso, in the act of breaking with a gigantic hammer the chains of capitalist oppression that bind the planet. Revolution, like war, implied a sexual division. ‘The combative or even paramilitary ethos of certain Communist parties, the German Communist Party in particular’, writes Brigitte Studer, ‘led to a masculinizing of the forms of exhibition and stylization of Bolshevik identity.’¹¹³ Weak and oppressed, women were rescued by the action of the revolutionary movement; they very rarely appear as historical subjects. In contrast to the androgynous model championed by ‘bourgeois’ feminism, the Communist representation of the female body ended up reproducing the stereotype of woman as mother, relegated to the home, despite being reformulated in a strictly proletarian context. In short, like the ‘godmother’ and the nurse during the war, woman had to assist the male proletarian in his enterprise of transforming the world. Michael Rorhwasser and George Mosse have drawn attention to a novel by Karl Grünberg, Brennende Ruhr (‘The Ruhr in Flames’), published in 1929 in the KPD series of ‘red novels for one mark’, which conveys in an emblematic fashion this proletarian cult of strength and virility. Alongside bourgeois women, elegant but frivolous and corrupt, presented as a kind of negative archetype, there appear proletarian women imbued with healthy and constructive values who support their husbands’ strike, waged victoriously under the slogan: ‘All wheels stand still if your strong arm commands it.’¹¹⁴ A Soviet poster of 1920 sums up very well the ‘sexed’ view of history that dominated Communist culture (Fig. 10). The background shows factories and workshops. In the foreground there is once again the figure of a muscly blacksmith, striking down on an anvil. By his side is a woman who, with the help of large pincers, holds the piece of hot metal that he is in the process of shaping.¹¹⁵ The allegory is explicit: if socialism is the goal of history, the task of building it falls to a male proletarian; woman is simply his assistant, confined to an auxiliary role.

Figure 10. Nikolai Kogout, ‘We Smashed the Enemy by Force, We Shall Earn Bread by Toil. To Work, Comrades All!’, 1920.

As in Russia in 1917, the sexual division that dominates representations of the European civil war was put to severe test in Spain. George Orwell noted this in his descriptions of the Barcelona streets in the first months following the fascist levantamiento of summer 1936, when behaviour, forms of sociability and even dress codes underwent a sudden change. A new figure appeared in this context, that of the miliciana, who took over such traditional attributes of masculinity as military uniform and weapons, courage and participation in battle. This overturned the Catholic view of woman as the ‘angel of the hearth’ (angel del hogar), powerfully conveyed by Francoist propaganda. But despite the myth that gathered around this figure, widely represented on Republican posters, the miliciana remained an exception. Women dominated the civilian resistance, but gradually disappeared from the front lines. From 1937, a strict sexual division was also imposed in the Republican camp, with the traditional slogan: ‘Men at the front, women in the rear’ (los hombres al frente, las mujeres a la retaguardia).¹¹⁶ Republican propaganda now transformed women into weeping mothers and suffering victims. In her inflammatory speeches, Dolores Ibárurri, la Pasionaria, launched appeals for the whole world to hear ‘the painful cry of our mothers and our women’.¹¹⁷ The warrior imaginary ended up imposing itself even within the POUM, the far-left party that had organized volunteer women’s battalions in 1936. One photo shows these militants parading under a banner that sanctions the view of war as men’s business: ‘Better the widow of a hero than the wife of a coward!’¹¹⁸

Women in arms reappear in photos of the Resistance and in Soviet posters of the Second World War, alongside the more traditional iconography that shows them as producers, nurses and ‘godmothers’. This illustrates the tensions that marked the imaginary of the years 1914–45, without overturning traditional codes. The historian Claudio Pavone notes that in France the Resistance assigned women a role of ‘godmothers of the fighters and partisans’, while in Italy it enrolled them in an organization ‘for the assistance of the freedom fighters’. In Turin, on the day of Liberation, the (Communist) command of the Garibaldi brigades prevented women fighters from parading, for fear that they might be treated as ‘whores’.¹¹⁹

This is the context in which we have to set the myth of the ‘new man’, who characterized this era both in the USSR and under the fascist regimes. If there is a common feature shared by the socialist new man and his fascist counterpart, between the labour hero Stakhanov and the Aryan athlete sculpted by Arno Breker, it is in fact their sex.

______________

1Jean Norton Cru, Du témoignage (Paris: Allia, 1989), p. 68.

2Eric Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), pp. 154–5.

3Ibid. Translation from the German original by DF.

4Louis Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (New York: New Directions, 2006), p. 9.

5Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 44.

6Quoted in Antonio Gibelli, L’officina della guerra. La Grande Guerra e le trasformazioni del mondo mentale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990), p. 197.

7Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 83–107.

8Ibid., p. 94.

9Ibid., p. 84.

10See Philippe Dagen, Le silence des peintres. Les artistes face à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1996), p. 25.

11See Annette Becker’s comments in her preface to Marc Bloch, ed. Annette Becker (Paris: Quarto-Gallimard, 2006), p. xx.

12Quoted in Gian Piero Brunetta, ‘Cinema e prima guerra mondiale’, in Gian Piero Brunetta, ed., Storia del cinema mondiale, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 269.

13Quoted in Gibelli, L’officina della guerra, p. 48.

14Gian Piero Brunetta, ‘Cinema e prima guerra mondiale’, in Gian Piero Brunetta, ed., Storia del cinema mondiale, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), p. 274.

15George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

16Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of the Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).

17Joanna Bourke, ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History’, History Workshop Journal 55: 1 (2003), p. 113. See also Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago Press, 2006), pp. 353–6.

18Lucien Febvre, ‘Comment reconstituer la vie affective? La sensibilité et l’histoire’ (1941), in Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), p. 225.

19Reinhart Koselleck, ‘War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors’, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 310.

20Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

21Günther Anders, ‘Georg Grosz’, in Mensch ohne Welt. Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1983), p. 221.

22On Munch’s paintings on the subject of death, see Arthur E. Imhof, Ars moriendi. Die Kunst des Sterbens einst und heute (Vienna: Böhlau, 1991), pp. 123–59.

23See Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), whose fifth chapter discusses Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

24For an overview of the psychoanalytic approach, see Louis Crocq, Les traumatismes psychiques de guerre (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999).

25Quoted in Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Chapter 5.

26Quoted in Eric J. Leed, ‘Fateful Memories: Industrialized War and Traumatic Neurosis’, Journal of Contemporary History 35: 1 (2000), p. 95.

27Quoted in Antonio Gibelli, L’officina della guerra, p. 29.

28Ibid., p. 96.

29Karl Abraham, Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses (Whitefish, MN: Kessinger, 2010).

30Frédéric Rousseau, La guerre censurée. Une histoire des combattants de 14–18 (Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 157.

31Leed, ‘Fateful Memories’, p. 98.

32See Bruna Bianchi, ‘Delirio, smemoratezza e fuga. Il soldato e la patologia della paura’, in Diego Leoni and Camillo Zadra, eds, La Grande Guerra. Esperienza, memoria, immagini (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), pp. 73–104.

33On the ‘invention of hysteria’ in France, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie. Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, 1999). On the introduction and spread of the concept in Germany, see Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1998).

34George L. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as a Social Disease’, Journal of Contemporary History 35: 1 (2000), p. 104. On the relationship posited at this time between hysteria and degeneration, and the political uses that were made of it, see in particular Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

35See Annette Becker, ‘The Avant-Garde, Madness and the Great War’, Journal of Contemporary History 35: 1 (2000), pp. 71–84.

36Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als innere Erlebnis (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980).

37Quoted in Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista 1918–1925 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), p. 166.

38Quoted in Simonetta Falaschi-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: California University Press, 1997), p. 88.

39On the historical dimension of this problem, see Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History, pp. 189–92.

40Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

41Franz Neumann, ‘Angst und Politik’, in Demokratischer und autoritärer Staat, op. cit., p. 284.

42See Norman Rufus Colin Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 2006).

43Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

44Ernst Weiss, The Eyewitness (Proteus, London, 1978).

45Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler.

46Lecture given by Carlo Ginzburg at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in February 2001. Quoted by Philippe Lançon, Libération, 2 February 2001.

47Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Chapter 18.

48Anton Kaes, M (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), p. 42.

49Ibid., pp. 44–6.

50Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang (London: Secker &Warburg, 1976), p. 112.

51Ernst Friedrich, War Against War! (New York: Real Comet Press, 1987); Ernst Jünger, ‘Das grosse Bild des Krieges (Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges)’, Politische Publizistik, 1919 bis 1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001 [1930]), pp. 605–12.

52On the concept of iconology, see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 1972); on its application to historical investigation, see Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), Chapter 2.

53See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

54See Myriam Hansen, ‘Decentric Perspectives: Kracauer’s Early Writings in Film and Mass Culture’, New German Critique 54 (1991), p. 55.

55Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage, 1976).

56Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), Chapter 2.

57Ibid.

58Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October 62 (Autumn 1992), p. 39.

59Quoted in Rudolf Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler: Fotografie als Medium des Führer- Mythos (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1994), pp. 110–11.

60G. B. Duchenne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

61Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). See the commentaries in Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics’, p. 39, and Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History, pp. 11–19.

62Günther Anders, ‘Über Heartfield’, in Mensch ohne Welt, p. 179.

63Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, p. 249 (Thesis IX).

64Ibid., p. 247 (Thesis VI).

65Ibid., p. 245 (Thesis II).

66Hannah Arendt, ‘Hermann Broch 1886–1951’, in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harvest, 1970), pp. 111ff.

67Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 304–11.

68Ibid.

69Martin Heidegger, ‘Allocution prononcée le vendredi 26 mai 1933 à la mémoire d’Albert Leo Schlageter’, in Écrits politiques 1933-1966 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 115. See Rüdiger Safranski, Heidegger et son temps. Biographie (Paris: Grasset, 1996), p. 256.

70On the question of fear in the thought of Hobbes, see Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 30–50.

71Schmitt, Concept of the Political, p. 52.

72Ibid., p. 62.

73Ibid., p. 67.

74Leo Strauss, ‘Notes on Carl Schmitt: The Concept of the Political’, in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 102. On this ‘hidden dialogue’, see also John McCormick, ‘Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany’, Political Theory 22: 4 (1994), pp. 619–52.

75Strauss, ‘Notes on Carl Schmitt’, p. 115.

76Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 23.

77Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 198.

78Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (London: Greenwood, 1986).

79Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985).

80Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or the Long Parliament (London: Frank Cass, 1969), Dialogue IV. See also Arnold A. Rogow, Thomas Hobbes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), p. 258. On the Hobbesean concept of civil war, see Ninon Grange, ‘L’état de nature: miroir et modèle de la guerre civile’, Astérion 2 (2004), pp. 157–78.

81See Patricia Springborg, ‘Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth’, Political Theory 23: 2 (1995), pp. 353–75; and Paulette Carrive, ‘Béhémoth et Léviathan’, Cahiers de philosophie politique de l’Université de Caen 3 (1983), pp. 11–48. On the various metaphorical images of Leviathan, see above all Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes visuelle Strategien. Der Leviathan: Urbild des modernen Staates (Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 1999).

82See Schmitt, Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, p. 31.

83Ibid.

84Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), p. xii.

85See Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empires (New York: Abacus, 1989), p. 342.

86Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 63.

87Karl Mannheim, ‘The Sociological Problem of Generations’, in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), available at mediaspace. newmuseum.org. On this subject, see also Nia Perivolaropoulou, ‘Temps socio-historique et générations chez Mannheim’, L’Homme et la société 111–112 (1994), pp. 23–34.

88Éric Halévy, The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War (London: Allen Lane, 1967), p 223. The best book on the ‘front generation’ is still Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).

89Pierre Broué, Le Parti bolchevique. Histoire du Parti communiste de l’URSS (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1971), p. 131.

90See Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 86.

91Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), Chapter 6.

92Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 26–30, 234–5. See also Michael Kater, ‘Generationskonflict als Entwicklungsfaktor in der NS-Bewegung vor 1933’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11 (1985), pp. 229–34, and many of the essays collected in Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

93Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (New York: Metropolitan, 2008), p. 16.

94See Bruno Wanrooij, ‘The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism as a Generational Revolt’, Journal of Contemporary History 22: 3 (1987), p. 401.

95Palmiro Togliatti, ‘Generazioni vecchie e giovani nel Partito fascista’ (1943), in Opere (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979), vol. 5: 2, p. 244 (quoted in Wanrooij, ‘Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism’, p. 413).

96Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1982), p. 217.

97Jünger, Der Kampf als innere Erlebnis, p. 11.

98See George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 4.

99Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 30.

100Ibid., p. 29.

101Jünger, Der Kampf als innere Erlebnis, p. 35.

102Ibid., p. 38.

103Ibid., p. 54.

104Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, L’alcova d’acciaio. Romanzo vissuto (Milan: Serra e Riva, 1985), p. 23. See on this subject Timothy Campbell, ‘“Infinite Remoteness”: Marinetti, Bontempelli, and the Emergence of Modern Italian Visual Culture’, MLN 120: 1 (2005), pp. 116–21.

105Theweleit, Male Fantasies, p. 29.

106Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 11; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 338–9. On the feminization of the victim, see Marianne Hirsch, ‘Nazi Photographs in Post-Holocaust Art: Gender as an Idiom of Memorialization’, in Omer Bartov, Atina Grosmann and Mary Nolan, eds, Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 103.

107See the posters reproduced in Peter Paret, Beth Irwin Lewis and Paul Paret, eds, Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archive (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 52.

108Ibid., p. 60. See also Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War, pp. 51–3.

109See Antonio Gibelli, Il popolo bambino. Infanzia e nazione dalla Grande Guerra a Salò (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), p. 158.

110Poster reproduced in Paret et al., Persuasive Images, p. 24.

111See Alain Brossat, Les Tondues. Un carnaval moche (Paris: Manya, 1993).

112Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Men and Women: Images on the Left’, in Uncommon People (London: Abacus, 1998), p. 130; and George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), Chapter 5.

113Brigitte Studer, ‘La femme nouvelle’, in Michel Dreyfus and Bruno Groppo, eds, Le Siècle des communismes (Paris: Éditions de l’Atelier, 2000), p. 379.

114Cited in Mosse, Image of Man, p. 131.

115This poster is reproduced and analysed in Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 47.

116See Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Denver, CO: Arden Press, 1995), p. 206.

117Ibid., p. 58.

118Ibid., illustration 15.

119See Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance (London: Verso, 2014), pp. 531.

SEVEN

The Critique of Weapons

Combatant Muses

In 1919, Paul Valéry delivered his diagnosis of the ‘mortal’ character of civilizations, in tones reminiscent of Spengler. Meditating on the ‘extraordinary frisson’ that had ‘run down Europe’s spine’, he described the apocalyptic sentiment that had taken hold of culture. But his essay did not just seek to grasp the Stimmung of the age that was now beginning; he also indicated the dilemmas that faced intellectuals. He imagined himself, like a new Hamlet, contemplating an immense landscape of ruins from the terrace of Elsinore, inhabited by ‘millions of ghosts’ and stretching from Basle to Cologne, from the Somme to Alsace. Like two frontiers, ‘order and disorder’ marked out the space of this wounded continent: the disorder of war, and the order of what would later come to be called totalitarianism. The question that haunted this modern Hamlet was: ‘What is to become of me, as a European intellectual?’¹ The cultural history of the interwar years is a matter of different attempts, irreducibly opposed, to answer this agonizing question. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the Great War, European culture had undergone an aesthetic turn, perceptible in music (Ravel, Debussy, Schoenberg, Berg), in literature (Proust, Mann, Kafka, Conrad, Joyce), in painting (Braque, Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee) and in architecture (Gropius).² After 1918, there was now a political turn, affecting the art and literature of the Old World.

One of George Orwell’s last essays, ‘Writers and Leviathan’, is devoted to the relationship that took shape in Europe during the 1930s between intellectuals and politics. Starting from a broadly autobiographical reflection, he emphasized the almost inevitable nature of the irruption of politics into culture. Plunged into a ‘political age’, writers could no longer escape themes such as ‘war, fascism, concentration camps, truncheons, atom bombs’, even if they used literary metaphors without naming them explicitly. They could no longer enclose themselves in a world of aesthetic values, sheltered from the conflicts that were tearing the world. As Orwell wrote in one of his last essays, ‘No one, now, could devote himself to literature as single-mindedly as Joyce or Henry James.’³

The manifesto ‘For an Independent Revolutionary Art’, written in Mexico in 1938 by the writer André Breton, the painter Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky, contains the following passage: ‘We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution.’⁴ The same conclusion had already been drawn by Walter Benjamin two years earlier. The German critic, exiled in France, contrasted the politicization of art and culture – hence the commitment of artists and intellectuals – with the aestheticization of politics implemented by fascism:

Fias ars, pereat mundus, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.⁵

In other words, the intellectual has to confront the asperities of the present, ‘militate’ in his own manner, if he does want to find himself anachronistic and useless, a ‘man of letters’ living outside of his time.

The notion of the ‘intellectual’, which definitively entered Western vocabulary during the Dreyfus Affair, designates precisely this mutual interference between literature and politics that would profoundly mark the entire history of the twentieth century. Of course, this figure did not lack illustrious precedents, from the philosophers of the Enlightenment to the revolutions of 1848, in which a number of men of letters participated. But it is only at the turn of the century that the phenomenon takes on new dimensions, until it becomes during the period between the two wars a major aspect of European and Western culture. In The Treason of the Intellectuals, Julien Benda tried to capture this image of engaged men of letters with an ideal-type definition: ‘men whose function is that of defending eternal and disinterested values, like justice and reason’.⁶ Upon close inspection, though, intellectuals’ entry into politics was not always based on these values. The Dreyfus Affair was already a dispute between intellectuals: Maurice Barrès against Émile Zola, Édouard Drumont against Bernard Lazare. In other words: nationalism against universalism, anti-Semitism against equality, militarism against the republic. During the 1920s and 1930s, these conflicts were to become more pronounced: besides the intellectuals who mobilized to defend democracy, there were others who worked to destroy it. With its brutalization of European societies, the war had polarized the intellectual field between hostile currents. The cleavage between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment, into which the Dreyfus Affair gave an insight, now took on a more radical, even apocalyptic dimension, particularly in the defeated countries. It was superimposed on the confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution, Bolshevism and fascism. Now on the foreground of the stage was a new generation for whom the use of force and violence no longer posed a moral dilemma but was an almost normal fact, naturally inscribed in the course of history as a kind of anthropological law.⁷ This ‘generation of fire’ often sought inspiration from a galaxy of older intellectuals, themselves radicalized by the war, who metamorphosed the myth of decadence, whose prophets and ideologists they had been, into a bellicose appeal for national regeneration. Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian ‘soldier poet’, was an emblematic case. His vituperations against democracy – the ‘elective beast’ – escalated during the war into frenetic and subversive activism, marked by the discovery of a new political style that exerted a considerable influence on Mussolini. It was D’Annunzio who invented certain symbols of fascism such as the outstretched-arm salute (salute romano), the black shirt, and the bellicose shouts of nationalist gatherings (Eia, eia, eria, alalà!), as well as audacious actions such as the dropping of propaganda leaflets on Vienna. The military adventure of the occupation of Fiume (now Rijeka), where he proclaimed an ephemeral republic in 1919, gave the example of an intellectual for whom art and life, aesthetics and politics, the romantic exaltation of nature and the irrationalist idealization of technology, were indissociable, and for whom, quite coherently, nationalist commitment was translated into action. George Mosse quite rightly sees D’Annunzio’s trajectory as containing the ingredients of a new political liturgy, which Italian Fascism would take up and develop.⁸

Germany was the other country where the myth of decadence grew into a cult of regenerative violence at the end of the war. Among the writers who developed this mutation, the most widely read was Ernst Jünger. In his postwar writings, Jünger exalted combat as an ‘inner experience’ made up of ecstasy and masculinity, going on to proclaim, in 1932, the advent of a new era, that of ‘the worker’, a metaphor by which he denoted a totalitarian dictatorship, the crucible of race, technology, and will to power.⁹ Oswald Spengler, who had proclaimed the decline of the West in 1918,¹⁰ condemned to perish at the end of a life cycle that civilizations shared with biological organisms, discovered under the Weimar Republic the regenerating force of nationalism. He abandoned his Nietzschean pathos of decadence to adopt an idea of racial combat borrowed from social Darwinism. Meditating on the two ‘revolutions’ that threatened Western civilization – the ‘class struggle and the struggle of races’¹¹ – he had now found the force capable of saving Europe. The Germans, Spengler wrote in 1933, ‘are still sufficiently young to live, shape and decide the destinies of world history, whereas other nations are now too old and rigid to put up more than a mere defence’.¹²

A large part of European culture in the interwar years adhered to values opposed to the tradition of 1789. Nationalism, anti-Semitism, the ‘conservative revolution’, anti-democratic elitism and fascism all exercised a considerable attraction on a great number of intellectuals in Italy, France, Germany, and even a traditional seat of liberalism like England.¹³ Maurras and Drieu la Rochelle were just as influential in France in the 1930s as Malraux and Gide. Under the Weimar Republic, Ernst Jünger was just as famous as Erich Maria Remarque, and Oswald Spengler was much more widely read than Walter Benjamin or Ernst Bloch.

A literary prefiguration of this dichotomy – on the one hand, the democratic, rationalistic, antifascist intellectual, and on the other the romantic and apocalyptic nihilist rebelling against modernity – was portrayed by Thomas Mann in the early 1920s in The Magic Mountain. The two ideological protagonists of this novel, Settembrini and Naphta, have often been interpreted as the two souls of the author, who had published, during the Great War, a manifesto of the ‘conservative revolution’ under the title Considerations of an Unpolitical Man. (Twenty years later, however, exiled in the United States, he embodied the democratic consciousness of his country, denouncing the crimes of Nazism in appeals broadcast by the BBC.) Others have seen in this novel a literary transfiguration of the dialogue that Mann had begun with his brother Heinrich, whose philosophy was close to Settembrini’s humanist positivism. More recently, this novelistic conflict, set by the author in the heart of the Swiss Alps on the eve of the Great War, has been evoked as the prefiguration of another famous philosophical dispute, this time entirely real, that took place in Davos in 1929. This was the controversy between the last representative of the German Aufklärung, the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger, the young author of Being and Time, founder of a new form of political ontology that would lead him a few years later to welcome the Nazi regime.¹⁴

The trajectory of the European intelligentsia in the interwar years ran between these two philosophical and political poles, which though opposed were not always free of certain connections. Some critics have even advanced the hypothesis that Mann’s portrait of the nihilist Naphta was inspired by the young György Lukács, author of Soul and Form (1911) before he was drawn to Communism, and appointed vice-commissar for public instruction in the short-lived Hungarian soviet republic led by Béla Kun in 1919.¹⁵ Naphta, as a romantic, is a kind of Janus figure, with a conservative face and a revolutionary face. This intimate contradiction reminds us how many intellectuals – often Jews and antifascists – who played a considerable part in the renewal of political philosophy after the Great War, met along the way figures and currents of conservative thought with whom they engaged in a dialogue that involved both criticism and appropriation. Not only were Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas students of Heidegger; so were Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse and Günther Anders.¹⁶ The fact is that during the 1930s Naphta would have had to choose: his rejection of Zivilisation could fit equally into the Teutonic mythologies of National Socialism, even accepting its mystique of blood and soil, or into a radical critique of the face of modernity embodied by fascism.

In this historical conjuncture, Communism and fascism alone appeared capable of bringing a solution. There is a striking symmetry between Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (1920) and Jünger’s The Worker (1932), likewise between Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1929–35) and Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (1932). This is not of course a political affinity or a similarity of content: Trotsky and Gramsci theorize the emancipation of the proletariat, Jünger and Schmitt the end of the age of ‘discussion’ and the advent of the total state. One side prepares for revolution, the other for counterrevolution. If there is a symmetry between them, it bears on their common roots in the soil of civil war, where they were in merciless confrontation. After 1917, the theorist of the self-emancipation of the working class became the head of the Red Army, recognizing the imperative of a defence of Soviet power and even identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the power of a militarized Communist Party. Gramsci, for his part, conceived the revolution in the West as a strategy, in the military sense of the term, in which a ‘war of position’ (the conquest of political hegemony within civil society) preceded a ‘war of movement’ (insurrection) – just as, in the Great War, there was no offensive before a preliminary consolidation of lines by way of trenches.¹⁷ Jünger sketched the profile of the ‘Worker’ (Der Arbeiter) as an expression of a new humanity forged by the experience of war,¹⁸ while Schmitt described the emergence of the ‘total state’ as an ineluctable consequence of the conflict.¹⁹ The creative ontology of an emergent revolutionary subject – the proletariat as a force capable or reorganizing society – was translated, with both Trotsky and Gramsci, into a view of revolution as military confrontation, just as for Jünger and Schmitt the virtues of a warrior state had replaced the now obsolete values of liberalism. Marxists rejected both reformism and revolutionary spontaneity in favour of a reflection focused exclusively on the problem of force and coercion. In revolutionary iconography, socialism was no longer represented as the peaceful and confident advance of the working people, as painted in 1901 by Pellizza da Volpedo in Il Quarto Stato (Fig. 11).²⁰ It was now embodied by a disciplined army of armed workers, as in The Defence of Petrograd (1927) by Alexander Deineka, or the Republican propaganda photographs of the Spanish Civil War (Fig. 12). Revolution and counter-revolution, Communism and fascism, confronted one another in a mortal struggle, but sharing the awareness of belonging to an armed century, a century of war that has put an end to the age of peace, liberalism, parliamentarism, progress. Both conceived politics as an armed conflict, and the state as an instrument of war; liberal democracy seemed to them a memory of a bygone age. In 1918, Lenin launched his thunderbolts against the reformist and parliamentary socialism of the ‘renegade Kautsky’;²¹ a few years later, Schmitt proclaimed the death of liberalism, an archaic expression of a ‘class that discusses’ in an age that demand a sovereign who ‘decides’.²² The Bolshevik critique of social democracy and the fascist critique of liberalism shared the same awareness of an irreversible caesura with the past. Their values were radically opposed, but both believed in a new society engendered by war and revolution.

Figure 11. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, ‘Il Quarto Stato’ (The Fourth Estate), 1901

Figure 12. Volunteers of the Republican Militia, Barcelona, July 1936.

Legality and Legitimacy

Faced with the deep crisis of the Rechtsstaat and parliamentarism, the actors in the postwar revolutions and counter-revolutions no longer believed in the Weberian diagnosis that saw ‘legal domination’ as the modern form of power. It is not surprising, therefore, that Carl Schmitt referred to Lenin and Lukács as precursors of the opposition between legality and legitimacy, whose principal theorist he himself became in 1932, in the twilight of the Weimar Republic.²³ He refers here to two texts, both published in 1920, in which these two Marxists drew the balance-sheet of the revolutionary wave that had shaken Europe after the Russian October. The first of these was Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder by Lenin, directed against the leftist currents in the Comintern, in which Lenin defended the need to combine legal and illegal, parliamentary and insurrectional forms of struggle, according to concrete circumstances.²⁴ The second was an article entitled ‘Legality and Illegality’, written by the Hungarian philosopher in Vienna, where he had taken refuge after the crushing of Béla Kun’s republic of workers’ councils, and subsequently included in his collection History and Class Consciousness (1923). In this text, Lukács warns against the symmetrical pitfalls of ‘opportunism’, which adapts itself to legality and refuses to emerge from it, identifying the political struggle with parliamentarism, and ‘romanticism’, which idealizes clandestinity and rejects on principle any action in a legal context. Both attitudes are wrong, he concludes, as the choice between legality and illegality is purely tactical, and follows from the concrete circumstances in which the Communist movement has to operate. The revolution is the bearer of a new legitimacy, which in order to impose itself has to break the old state apparatus and its legal mechanism.²⁵ The assumption behind this dialectic between legality and illegality is a critique of the liberal view of the state as an entity above classes and their conflicts. This was the basis of the Bolsheviks’ conviction when they decided in December 1917 to dissolve the Constituent Assembly, a symbol in their eyes of a legality that was historically obsolete, and hence in contradiction with the legitimate power of the soviets (in which they held a majority, in alliance with the left Socialist Revolutionaries). In his pamphlet of 1918 against Kautsky, therefore, Lenin saw it as completely natural that ‘the interests of the revolution are higher than the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly’.²⁶

Schmitt, for his part, believed that the Rechtsstaat no longer corresponded to an age of civil war, and was being progressively replaced by the ‘total state’. At the climax of the crisis of the Weimar Republic, in 1932, he published an essay entitled ‘Legality and Legitimacy’ in which he analysed the now insurmountable contradiction that had opened up between the two concepts.²⁷ To his mind, legality was devoid of content, being simply a neutral procedure that adapted to different parliamentary majorities and found its achieved expression in the liberalism of the nineteenth century. Its deep essence consisted in a process of legal rationalization of power, whose ultimate culmination Weber had grasped very clearly: the modern bureaucratic state. State power became increasingly impersonal, since those who embodied it confined themselves to executing the law, which held them prisoner. In an epoch of economic and political crisis, however, such as that which had begun in Europe with the Great War, and still more so in Germany after 1930, liberalism proved impotent. In such an age, state power could no longer be limited to the application of norms, but demanded compelling decisions, which had necessarily to draw on a higher authority; this was the source of its legitimacy, in Schmitt’s eyes. This amounted to personalizing power, rehabilitating the older forms of domination (absolutism) by way of their modern equivalents (charismatic domination). In other words, the ethos of law had to make way for the pathos of action.

This line of argument inspired Schmitt’s view of the president of the republic: a ‘guardian of the constitution’ who, in order to preserve its spirit, arrogated to himself the power to suspend its norms, in the name of a legitimacy of power that prevailed over its legal forms. In 1932, he approved the coup de force by which President Hindenburg dissolved the Prussian government led by the Social Democratic Party, subjecting it to the authority of chancellor Franz von Papen (to whom Schmitt was an adviser). In the same spirit, he wanted the president to make use of Article 48 of the Weimar constitution to suspend the law, ban subversive parties (the Communist and Nazi parties) and establish a dictatorship. Faced with forces that wanted to use legality in order to destroy it, the state cannot defend itself by purely legal means. It has to move beyond the legality of its institutions and grant full powers to a sovereign authority capable of action. This was the meaning of the polemic between Schmitt’s ‘decisionism’ and Kelsen’s ‘normativism’, which began in 1928.²⁸ It goes without saying that Schmitt’s authoritarian solution did not aim at ‘rescuing’ the Weimar Republic, but rather at demolishing democracy and replacing it with a sovereign dictatorship (imposed by the president, if necessary with the sanction of a plebiscite).²⁹ That this was the underlying meaning of Schmitt’s proposal became clear in the light of his adhesion to Nazism just after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933.

The anti-democratic character of both Lenin’s and Schmitt’s contentions found attentive critics among the left. In her last essay, written shortly before her assassination by the Freikorps, Rosa Luxemburg reminded the Bolsheviks: ‘It is the historical task of the proletariat when it comes to power to create socialist democracy instead of bourgeois democracy, not to suppress democracy of any kind.’³⁰ Otto Kirchheimer, a young left-wing political scientist who studied under Schmitt and went on to have a brilliant academic career in exile in the United States, devoted a critical essay to Schmitt’s contentions in 1933. He pointed out that, even in the case of the democratic election of the highest state authority, if its ‘plebiscitary and monolithic authority’ came to substitute itself for parliament, it could then no longer be termed ‘democratic’, since there is no democracy without the liberty, equality and pluralism of its actors, and their right to participate and deliberate.³¹

The turbulent postwar climate polarized the intellectual field, creating paradoxical figures of revolutionaries and conservatives who embarked on surprising dialogues, inevitably bound to fail. This was not a case of coincidentia oppositorum, as liberal critics of totalitarianism claim, ever ready as they are to detect symptoms of a ‘red fascism’ and a ‘brown Bolshevism’: these extremes did not meet. Sought by a few isolated and paradoxical figures, such as Ernst Niekisch, theorist of ‘national bolshevism’ under the Weimar Republic, the path of convergence between revolutions of the right and the left proved a blind alley.³² It is true that some people at the time saw it as the dominant tendency. Curzio Malaparte’s Coup d’état: The technique of revolution (1931), in which he theorized the advent of an age dominated by catilinarios (the fascists and Communists)³³ united by the same will to seize power by force, and even by the same distrust of the methods of parliamentarism, found a considerable echo across Europe. But Malaparte’s brilliant prose clung to the surface of reality, and his attempt to include Trotsky as ‘one of the main creators of the modern technique of the coup d’état’, together with the ‘catilinarios of the right’, the fascists and ‘idolaters of the state’, made his pamphlet, rather than a textbook of insurrection in the age of the crisis of liberalism, simply a ‘textbook of mistakes’.³⁴

The mistake was entertained for a short while in 1923, during the wave of nationalism that shook Germany after the French occupation of the Ruhr. Karl Radek, the Comintern emissary in Berlin, analysed the Versailles treaty as an attempt to reduce the country to the rank of a colony, in which revolutionary struggle should therefore ‘place the nation first’.³⁵ On the basis of this diagnosis, Radek developed the ‘Schlageter line’, which paid homage to this young militant of the far right in the name of the struggle for the socialist liberation of Germany. ‘The fate of this martyr of German nationalism must not be forgotten, or merely honoured in a passing word. He has much to teach us, us and the German people.’³⁶ Convinced that the working class was already won to the Communist cause, Radek sought a way to win the pauperized petty bourgeoisie attracted by nationalism. This nationalism had made Schlageter a ‘wanderer into the void’, while Communism had to transform him and his like into ‘wanderers into a better future for the whole of humanity’.³⁷ This explains the contacts that the Communist Party maintained with the Nazis, a number of common meetings, and even a pamphlet in which the signatures of Radek and Paul Frölich appear alongside those of Ernst Graf Reventlow and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck – though the Nazis soon cut short an initiative that was working to the Communists’ advantage.³⁸

This ephemeral episode demonstrated the impossibility of a dialogue between revolutionaries of the left and of the right, but it revealed at the same time a strong impulse to extreme solutions in a catastrophic situation. The will to burn bridges with the past explains not only the attention that nationalist currents paid to the Soviet experiment, but also their own revolutionary language. Mussolini and Hitler both came to power legally, respectively appointed head of government by King Victor-Emmanuel III in October 1923 and by Chancellor Hindenburg in January 1933. The transformation of the political system came later, taking a few years in Italy, and adopting a more concentrated and traumatic form in Germany. Both Italian Fascism and German Nazism, however, saw these turning-points as genuine revolutions. For Mussolini, his accession to power was ‘an insurrectionary act, a revolution’.³⁹ The Fascist regime cultivated the legend of the march on Rome as an armed uprising that opened a new era. After the model of the French Revolution, it tried to introduce a new calendar. Year 1 of the ‘Fascist era’ was marked on 29 October 1922, in an event that continued to be celebrated as a national holiday until the fall of the regime.⁴⁰ In 1932, the tenth anniversary of the ‘Fascist revolution’ was commemorated with great pomp.

German nationalism adopted the same language. In 1925, Ernst Jünger wrote a number of articles for the newspaper Standorte designed to dispel the misunderstanding that presented the nationalists as ‘reactionaries’. After leaving the trenches, he admitted, they had to fight on the home front against the Spartacists – Communist revolutionaries who confronted them as ‘their own mortal enemy’.⁴¹ But this opposition to Bolshevism did not make the nationalists reactionary, since, while belonging to an old tradition that was equally valued by certain currents of conservative culture, they acknowledged the necessity of adopting ‘revolutionary methods’,⁴² in a context in which political struggle meant ‘the continuation of war by other means’.⁴³ ‘What matters for us’, Jünger concluded, ‘is not a revolution in the form of state, but rather a revolution in the soul, capable of creating amid chaos new forms that spring up from the soil.’⁴⁴ In other words, this revolution was simply the culmination of the profound changes provoked by the war. In his speech inaugurating the Reich Kulturkammer in November 1933, Josef Goebbels, as minister of propaganda, described Hitler’s rise to power as a ‘total revolution’. This was in his eyes a ‘revolution from below’ that was beginning to ‘forge the German nation into a single people’ (Volk). Like every genuine revolution, it aimed at a ‘radical transformation of our cultural life and our spiritual creation’.⁴⁵

Delio Cantimori, an unusual figure as a scholar and intellectual who passed from fascism to Communism in the course of the 1930s, strongly insisted on the ‘revolutionary’ nature of fascism. In 1931, he published an essay entitled ‘Fascism, European Revolution rather than Reaction’, in which he took care to make clear the meaning of this formula. In his view, it amounted to a new movement just as much as did Communism, with which it competed for the conquest of the Old World, the old Europe in need of reconstruction. Mussolini, he emphasized, was not a dictator in the sense of Primo de Rivera – an authoritarian and conservative military man – but rather ‘the head of a great national revolution’ that was completing the work of the Renaissance and the Risorgimento. Its subversive character, however, had little to do with the Jacobin tradition, whose heirs were rather to be found in Marxism and Communism. The fascist and Communist revolutions were mutually opposed. That is why fascism appeared in his eyes as a ‘dialectical synthesis of the demands represented by extreme revolution and extreme reaction’.⁴⁶ On the same lines, Mussolini had defined fascism as a kind of ‘revolution against revolution’. For historians such as George Mosse, Emilio Gentile and Zeev Sternhell, fascism was at one and the same time a revolution, an ideology, a world-view and a culture: a revolution, since it sought to build a new society; an ideology, because it had reformulated nationalism within a perspective that, after rejecting Marxism, was equally opposed to both conservatism and liberalism, seeking an alternative way – a world-view, as its political project followed from a view of history, seeking to create a ‘new man’ and presenting itself as the providential destiny of the nation; and a culture, since it sought to transform the collective imaginary, change lifestyles, and suppress any cleavage between private and public life. This was manifestly a ‘revolution of the right’,⁴⁷ its social driving force lying in the middle classes and its ambition being to construct a new civilization, focused on the state, the nation or the race.⁴⁸ In other words, a revolution both anti-liberal and anti-Marxist, ‘spiritual’ and ‘communitarian’.⁴⁹ It located itself at the opposite extreme from that of Communist revolution, which also carried an ideology, a world-view and a culture. As distinct from the Communist revolutions that had radically changed forms of property, all variants of fascism integrated the old economic, administrative and military elites into their system of power. The birth of fascist regimes always implied a certain degree of ‘osmosis’ with authoritarianism and conservatism. No fascist movement came to power without the support, whether enthusiastic or resigned, as the case might be, of traditional elites.⁵⁰ In short, any reference to a fascist ‘revolution’ should always be placed in quotes, to avoid sanctioning fascism’s own rhetoric and aesthetic. Philippe Burrin is correct in defining fascism as a ‘revolution without revolutionaries’.⁵¹ The ‘new man’ that fascism and Communism respectively wanted to forge was not the same, but the desire for change that ran across the devastated Europe of this time followed the lines of a magnetic field whose two symbolic poles were Rome and Moscow.

‘Dangerous Connections’

Extremes do not meet, but their opposition may proceed from the same starting-point – that of the European crisis, the definitive collapse of a political order and the need to find a radical solution for the future. The age of constitutionalism and deliberation seemed passé, swept away by a wave of destruction whose only recognizable characteristics were those of nihilism. This was the context in which the ‘dialogue’ between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt took place, a dialogue compromised in advance. Naphta could no longer escape a political choice. This figure from The Magic Mountain seems to unite in himself features of both the Jewish critic from Berlin and the Catholic lawyer from the Rhineland. Thomas Mann describes him as an apocalyptic philosopher simultaneously revolutionary and reactionary, an Orthodox Jew converted to Catholicism and trained by the Jesuits, a romantic socialist and an admirer of the counter-reformation, scathing about progress and prophesying catastrophes, for whom revolution and preservation found a meeting-point in ‘the dissolution of all worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God’.⁵²

It was Benjamin who took the initiative to contact Schmitt, in December 1930, writing him a letter in which he announced that he was sending him his book on German baroque drama. His interest in this right-wing, Catholic and reactionary philosopher was not surprising, on the part of an intellectual who had always paid great attention to right-wing thought, from Ludwig Klages to Stefan George and Marcel Jouhandeau. According to Gershom Scholem, who recalled his and Benjamin’s friendship in Munich with the future Nazi philosopher Hans Heyse, towards the end of the Great War, Benjamin ‘knew how to perceive the rumbling of revolution in the most reactionary authors’, and showed a great sensitivity towards what he called ‘strange interferences between reactionary theory and revolutionary practice’.⁵³ In a letter of June 1934 to Gretel Karplus, who was soon to marry Adorno, he confessed that his life and thought ‘moved on extreme positions’, taking shape as a result of the juxtaposition of antinomic points of view that his friends saw as ‘dangerous relations’ (gefährliche Beziehungen).⁵⁴

Benjamin’s book on the Trauerspiel, he explained in his letter to Schmitt, owed much to the writings of the Rhineland lawyer, particularly Schmitt’s Political Theology (1921) and his book on Dictatorship (1922), and Benjamin’s own studies of art history had only confirmed the postulates that underlay Schmitt’s ‘state philosophy’.⁵⁵ Schmitt failed to respond, but he kept the letter, mentioning it many years later in an essay on Shakespeare that was sprinkled with references to Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch.⁵⁶ What made for this affinity between two such different writers, in whom Jacob Taubes, one of the first to comment on this letter after it had long remained unknown (Adorno and Scholem decided against including it in the first edition of their friend’s correspondence), believed he detected one of the ‘most promising constellations of the Weimar Republic’?⁵⁷ Let us try to explore this ‘dangerous relationship’.

In his writings of the early 1920s, Schmitt theorized dictatorship as an anomic regime involving the ‘state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand). The suspension of the legal state, accompanied by restrictions on personal freedom and the removal of certain fundamental rights, could be either a temporary measure designed to preserve the state and re-establish law, or else, in the case of the constituent power of modern dictatorships, to establish a new legal order.⁵⁸ In Political Theology, the state of exception was linked to a power of ‘decision’ (Entscheidung), which Schmitt saw as the ultimate foundation of sovereignty. In the formula with which he opens his book, ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional situation.’⁵⁹ As distinct from the traditional dictator, constrained by law and possessing only a delegated and transitory power, the sovereign as defined by Schmitt possesses a power that is absolute, autonomous and unconstrained. In sketching the genealogy of the concept of sovereignty, he detects its origins in absolutism, the first expression of a secularization of political theology that replaces God with the sovereign. The initial steps in this process had been taken by Bodin, but it was Hobbes, according to Schmitt, who completed the transition from theology to the modern conception of sovereignty, by theorizing the state as a Leviathan that was both legislator and wielder of force (in Weberian terms, possessing both Herrschaft and Macht), requiring the submission and obedience of its subjects.

After the model of the church, whose legitimacy is based more on the faith of its believers than on established rules, and whose action is inspired by an omnipotent God rather than just the application of the law, the sovereign power depicted by Schmitt is not subject to any higher authority, as it possesses in itself the sources of its own legitimacy. In the context of the Weimar Republic, and particularly in its death-throes after 1930, this praise of sovereign and irrevocable decision sounded like an appeal to dictatorship, the imposition of which Schmitt called for by the application of Article 48 of the German constitution. This was in his view the only power in a position to overcome the paralysis of a democracy hemmed in by legality and its parliamentary institutions, and riven by internal conflicts, incapable of generating a stable executive and condemned to impotence. Decision was thus opposed to normativity and public debate, two constitutive features of the liberal tradition that had been identified at that time by Kelsen: a tradition whose Jewish roots (from Spinoza to Moses Mendelssohn and Stahl) Schmitt would go on to emphasize.⁶⁰ This appeal to decision against parliamentarism followed in a particular anti-liberal tradition – that of the Catholic philosophers of the counter-revolution, Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés, who had understood the fundamental alternative posed in 1789 and 1848: Catholicism or atheism, absolutism or socialism.⁶¹ Liberalism was no longer suited to an age that demanded another decisive choice: revolution or counter-revolution, socialism or the total state. In his writings of the 1920s, as we have seen, Schmitt laid down the theoretical premises for his future rallying to National Socialism.

In his work on The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), Benjamin, for his part, interpreted the birth of baroque allegory, with its images of melancholy sovereigns torn by insurmountable dilemmas, as the aesthetic reflection of an age of crisis. Contrary to the Renaissance, an age of cultural and artistic plenitude dominated by a harmonious ideal, in a context favourable to the rise of the sciences and arts, the baroque age was dominated by crisis. Its heroes were haunted by the sense of an imminent catastrophe, as if driven towards a ‘cataract’.⁶² The inner storm that troubled them was a function of an age of wars that made their dilemmas insurmountable. The hero of the Trauerspiel was indeed the prince who, like Hobbes’s Leviathan, ‘holds the course of history in his hand like a spectre’,⁶³ but the drama stems from the fact that he embodies a sovereignty that is now empty. As prince, he possesses a ‘supreme executive power’ that allows him to decree the ‘state of emergency’,⁶⁴ yet the situations in which he finds himself implicated prove that he no longer has the capacity to take such a decision.⁶⁵

Benjamin borrows his categories (sovereignty, decision, state of exception) from Schmitt, but he reverses the perspective. He sketches a portrait, in fact, of the baroque age, in which it is no longer Hobbes’s all-powerful Leviathan that stands at the centre but a group of tragic figures who, like Hamlet, are the prisoners of their dilemmas, and thus unable to act. A cruel fate condemns them to be not loved princes, but either tyrants or martyrs. If, for Schmitt, the state of exception, as antithesis of uncertainty and passive discussion, follows from the ultimate and compelling decision of the sovereign, for Benjamin, on the other hand, it seems to denote a state of permanent crisis. Giorgio Agamben correctly notes this deep cleavage between a conception of decision as restorative ‘miracle’ uniting sovereignty and exception, and that of the state of exception as catastrophe.⁶⁶ We must add, however, that this cleavage is deepened to the point of becoming unbridgeable when Benjamin interprets this catastrophe from the perspective of Jewish messianism, ascribing to it the characteristics of a redeeming apocalypse. In the view of the baroque world, he writes, ‘all earthly things collapse into a heap of ruins’. But this fall also represents an ‘allegory of resurrection’.⁶⁷ Thanks to the baroque transformation of death, hell is dialectically transformed into a ‘divine world’; the fall bears within it the premises of a redemption that, in the words of a poem by Lohenstein, will finally give a death’s head (Totenkopf) the countenance of an ‘angel’.⁶⁸

Benjamin’s messianic nihilism corresponds here to Schmitt’s decisionism. In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), he drew inspiration from Sorel – another border figure, halfway between Marxism and fascism – to theorize a violence that was no longer restorative of order and law, but ‘divine’ (göttliche Gewalt), ‘law-destroying’ and irreducible to any external constraint.⁶⁹ He saw this ‘unlimited’ and thus anomic violence as ‘revolutionary’, ‘the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man’.⁷⁰ It presented a double face, both theological and political. Theological, because it irrupted onto the stage of history, breaking its continuity like a redemptory apocalypse; and political, because of its revolutionary nature, analogous to Sorel’s ‘general strike’ that destroys the bourgeois order and creates a new proletarian one. In an essay that was very likely written at around the same time, ‘Theologico-political Fragment’, one of his most obscure and enigmatic texts, Benjamin gave this violence, both divine and revolutionary, the features of ‘nihilism’.⁷¹

In this respect, Benjamin’s theory is the very opposite of Schmitt’s. It was precisely against this redemptory violence that the Catholic lawyer called for a state of exception. In the 1930s, Schmitt exhumed the Catholic concept of katechon, of Pauline origin, which designates Christendom as a ‘restraining’ power – a force preventing the advent of the Antichrist and thus permitting, in this delay wrested from the powers of Evil, the unfolding of History. Between the Christian middle ages and the twentieth century, this force had experienced, according to Schmitt, several incarnations. It was inevitably destined to resurge at the moment when the Antichrist appeared in the form of the civilization of the secularized West, or the extreme form of atheistic Communism: ‘The belief that a restrainer holds back the end of the world provides the only bridge between the notion of an eschatological paralysis of all human events and a tremendous historical monolith like that of the Christian empire of the Germanic kings.’⁷²

The figure of the Antichrist also runs through Benjamin’s writings, particularly his 1940 theses ‘On the Concept of History’. Recourse to this image of Christian theology, in an argument permeated from start to finish by Jewish messianism, constitutes one of the many surprises of this text, but the sense of the metaphor is scarcely ambiguous. In the sixth thesis, where he refers to the images of the past that resurge ‘at the moment of danger’, when the ‘ruling classes’ threaten to achieve a definitive victory by destroying the tradition and memory of the defeated, Benjamin designates the Messiah not only as ‘redeemer’ but also as ‘subduer of Antichrist’.⁷³ A genealogical study of this thesis seems to indicate that the reference to Antichrist is taken from Fritz Lieb, a Swiss Protestant theologian of socialist leanings with whom Benjamin had friendly relations and a fruitful intellectual exchange. In 1934, Lieb had presented Nazism as a modern secular version of the Antichrist, thus giving the antifascist struggle a strong religious dimension. For Benjamin, the proletariat, as historical subject of the struggle against Nazism, had to understand the theological scope of this apocalyptic confrontation, since the enemy, the Third Reich, did not flinch from presenting itself as a promise of salvation in a new millennial realm.⁷⁴

Benjamin and Schmitt thus display two political theologies: one Jewish, the other Christian and Catholic; one revolutionary and messianic, the other conservative and ultramontane. For both of them, Antichrist embodied the enemy, but for one this took the form of Nazism, for the other that of atheistic Bolshevism. One hailed the advent of the Messiah, the rupture of the historical continuum inaugurated by the proletarian revolution; the other appealed to the katechon, buoyed up by a decisionist absolute power. One saw revolution as the concrete form of the Apocalypse – the transition from the present historic time to the messianic time of the future;⁷⁵ the other saw the katechon as the indispensable link between Christian eschatology and the life of Catholicism in a secular world.⁷⁶ These two political theologies faced each other on the basis of a common diagnosis of the crisis of the present, and the need to take a decision in order to escape from it – formulated moreover on the basis of the same analytical categories, but leading to opposite political therapies: revolution and counter-revolution.⁷⁷

Benjamin’s letter to Schmitt of December 1930 did not have a sequel. If a dialogue between them still seemed possible at that date, Hitler’s seizure of power three years later would dig an unbridgeable gulf. For Benjamin, the nihilism sketched in his writings of the early 1920s led on to Marxism – a Marxism that is certainly unclassifiable, strongly tinged with messianism and resolutely anti-positivist, but possessing nonetheless a coherent political profile. Schmitt’s political theology, for its part, found a political home in National Socialism.

In the eighth of his 1940 theses, Benjamin makes a final allusion to Schmitt, recalling the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ for whom the ‘state of emergency’ (he puts this in quotes) has now become the ‘rule’. To put an end to the catastrophic continuum of a history that unfurls as an uninterrupted triumphal procession of the victors, he proposes the establishment a ‘real state of emergency’, the only one capable of waging properly ‘the struggle against Fascism’ – in other words, the revolutionary interruption of the course of the world.⁷⁸ Benjamin still uses Schmitt’s concepts, despite distancing himself from them, but, as Taubes points out, he does so now with full awareness of having ‘assimilated them and turned them into their opposite’.⁷⁹ Far from being an example of coincidentia oppositorum, the relationship between Benjamin and Schmitt thus illustrates the polarization that the European civil war exerted on the intellectual field in the interwar years.

The year 1933 constituted a watershed in German political culture. It marked not only the rupture between Heidegger and his left-wing disciples, from Herbert Marcuse to Günther Anders, but also between Schmitt and his own left disciples, likewise Jewish, such as Franz Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer. The latter believed they had seen a congruence between Schmitt’s political theory and the Marxist critique of the liberal view of the state as ‘neutral’ entity, identifying legality and legitimacy in a political power separate from society and standing above the class struggle. From this perspective, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the journal of the Frankfurt School, had published very positive reviews of Schmitt’s writings, in particular on his view of politics as a field of conflict.⁸⁰ This misunderstanding was now very rapidly cleared up. In 1934, in the same periodical, Marcuse undertook a thorough demolition of German political existentialism, whose main expression he saw in Heidegger’s rectoral speech and Schmitt’s theses on the total state.⁸¹ As for Kirchheimer, he now took his distance from Schmitt in emphasizing that his critique of liberalism led not to a defence of democracy but to a championing of plebiscitary dictatorship.⁸² On all sides, confrontation with Schmitt’s work appears to have been an obligatory step. Mario Tronti was not wrong in asserting that ‘in the twentieth century, Marx incorporated Schmitt’.⁸³

Moral Dilemmas

In the aftermath of the Great War, European culture was a magnetic field traversed by high-tension currents. The confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution posed dilemmas of a moral order – the legitimacy of violence, the perpetual conflict between an ethic of values and an ethic of responsibility – but its actors very rarely shared a common public space in which to debate them. Despite being isolated and condemned to failure, certain attempts to do so deserve to be recalled here. There is Simone Weil’s famous letter to Georges Bernanos of 1938, in which she expresses her admiration and solidarity towards the author of Diary of My Times (1938).⁸⁴ Both were among the first foreigners to take part in the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, one impelled by her desire to fight on the republican side, the other by his Catholic faith and conservative instinct. Both ended up disgusted by the spectacle of frenzied violence and a triumph of immorality that they saw as conflicting with the values of Christian morality (a morality that Weil, despite her Jewish origin, shared unreservedly). For both, this experience of bitter disenchantment marked a political turning-point. After seeing the bloodbath perpetrated by the Francoists in Majorca, Bernanos broke with Maurras, who had supported these Falangist massacres, and wrote a book that bears personal witness and offers implacable accusation. Simone Weil had gone to Barcelona in August 1936 and enrolled in an anarchist militia, ‘an amazing mixture that absolutely anyone was allowed to join, and in which as a consequence immorality, cynicism, fanaticism and cruelty rubbed shoulders with love, the spirit of fraternity, and above all the demand for honour that is so fine among humiliated men’.⁸⁵ Her expectations, however, were very soon disappointed, after the first executions of priests and young people captured in clashes with the Falangist troops. In Bernanos’s book she recognized ‘this odour of civil war, blood and terror’ that she had experienced herself – an odour that was now intolerable and that no cause could justify. Like the Catholic writer who broke with Action Française on his return from Spain, Simone Weil took her distance from the anarchists. The original ideas had given way to a cruel and brutal war, distinct from ordinary wars in its total lack of respect for the enemy. Almost no one, she wrote in her letter, had been able to resist the impetuous rush of this civil war and preserve the principles of humanity. Among the exceptions was Bernanos, ‘monarchist and follower of Drumont’, to whom she consequently felt closer than to her former anarchist comrades of Aragon, ‘those comrades whom, however, I loved’, she wrote.⁸⁶

The same themes lay at the centre of a wider moral–political debate that arose on the margins of the intellectual scene, among outsiders of both Communism and liberalism. This involved on the one hand the historic figure of Trotsky, on the other a writer and a philosopher who had each always played a discreet role away from power, Victor Serge and John Dewey. The Russian revolutionary was exiled in Mexico, where he analysed the international situation and continued the battle against Stalinism, despite calling for intransigent defence of the USSR as a new war approached. After having taken part in the Russian Revolution and civil war, Serge had been deported by Stalin to a Siberian gulag and was now in Brussels, freed as a result of an international campaign. Dewey, for his part, agreed, at age seventy-eight, to chair a commission of inquiry into the Moscow trials that would unmask their slanderous character and prove the innocence of Trotsky.⁸⁷

In issuing the conclusions of this ‘counter-trial’, the liberal philosopher and leader of American pragmatism took the opportunity to add his personal reflections on the crisis and bankruptcy of Marxism, manifest in his view of Vyshinsky’s sinister productions. This aroused an immediate reaction from Trotsky, in the form of a pamphlet with a sharp and polemical style, Their Morals and Ours, published in New York in 1938. Though he did not explicitly mention Dewey, there could be no doubt that he was the real target.⁸⁸ The former head of the Red Army conducted with Dewey a polemical debate on the moral foundations of Marxism and the socialist revolution. The American philosopher’s positions were supported by the anonymous writer of the preface to the French edition, very likely Victor Serge, who had translated it. Trotsky wrote a further response, aiming this time at the libertarian critics of the Russian Revolution. This series of texts offers an extraordinary mirror of the moral–political dilemmas that beset the age of the ‘second Thirty Years’ War’. At the heart of this controversy lies civil war as a moral problem.

In the background to the debate were the Moscow trials, which as yet appeared only to a small minority as a monstrous falsification, and the Spanish civil war, whose violence already prefigured the horrors of the Second World War. These events, which Trotsky saw as part of an age of wars and revolutions, inevitably referred back to the Soviet experience and his own political choices, particularly during the civil war of 1918–21. In this essay, he undertakes an intransigent defence of his chosen course, rejecting the complaints of his liberal, social democratic and anarchist critics. At a time of triumphant reaction, he exclaims, these tend to emit ‘more than the usual amount of moral effluvia, similar to persons who perspire doubly in fear’.⁸⁹ The exiled revolutionary rejected the formal symmetries so dear to the ‘intellectual petite bourgeoisie’, unable to see the difference between Communism and fascism, Bolshevism and Stalinism, Stalinism and Trotskyism. With his pen dipped in gall, but not devoid of humour, Trotsky takes up the defence of the Jesuits – attributing to them the aphorism that ‘the end justifies the means’ – and recalls how selective they were in the choice of their weapons. He thus emphasizes the extremely debatable character of the methods employed by their Protestant enemies who, following Luther, called for the massacre of the rebel German peasants. He goes on to defend the morality of the Kaffirs, a people often referred to as ‘underdeveloped’, detecting in them principles of justice that were far more human than those of their European colonizers. And he concludes his argument by reasserting his interpretation of Stalinism: its crimes were not the result of ‘Bolshevik amoralism’ or atheistic Communism; they were the historical product of a revolution isolated and strangled by imperialism in a socially backward country.

After having dissociated Bolshevism from Stalinism, and thus revolutionary violence from the violence of a Thermidorean power that had in his view usurped the revolution, Trotsky championed the former, of which he had been one of the leading lights, and condemned the latter, in the name of a socialist morality aiming at human liberation. Defence of the revolution meant unconditional approval of all the political and military measures adopted by the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Since morality had a class character, it was impossible to provide an abstract definition of it, suspended in the void and untouched by social conflicts. As a consequence, ‘civil war explodes into mid-air all moral ties between the hostile classes’.⁹⁰ Recalling the ‘excesses’ that inevitably accompany any civil war, Trotsky thus justified the summary executions of the Cheka, the imposition of censorship, the outlawing of parties opposed to the Bolshevik regime, the taking of hostages, and even the execution of their family members (such as the children of the tsar).

To give him his due, as a good disciple of the Enlightenment, Trotsky does not deny certain ‘elementary moral precepts … worked out in the development of mankind as an integral element necessary for the life of every collective body’.⁹¹ But he rejects as naive illusion the idea that these can be translated in Kantian terms into a categorical imperative, which would be bound to break on the rocks of class struggle. Universal human morality can exist only in the concrete reality of a society divided into classes, and in each conflict it is embodied by one of the classes in struggle. The ideal of a universal morality could spread in the age of ‘liberal and progressive capitalism’ (Trotsky forgets the revolutionary origins of the Declaration of the Rights of Man), but when the world enters a new age of wars and revolutions – of civil war – its conflicts are bound to destroy, ‘definitively, irrevocably’, this morality valid for all. It is replaced by two opposing moralities: on the one hand that of fascism, on the other ‘that of the proletarian revolution’.⁹² In other words, in the age of European civil war, universal morality is embodied by Bolshevism.

Accused of championing a Machiavellian amoralism summed up by the formula ‘the end justifies the means’, Trotsky replies that Marxism does not know any dualism between end and means, the two being connected by a link that is not technical or purely functional but eminently dialectical. This formula, he adds, only raises a new question: What justifies the end? And if the end is human liberation, overcoming the oppression of man by man, this does not mean that all means are acceptable in order to achieve it. Means that are incompatible with the end aimed at must be excluded, as ‘organically the means are subordinated to the end’.⁹³ After this essential clarification, one would expect Trotsky to go on to establish necessary distinctions, spelling out for example which means are unacceptable on the part of those fighting to defend an emancipatory revolution. On the contrary, however, he proceeds to an apologia for terror as the ineluctable corollary of any civil war. As he presents it, this war is an anomic space in which the moral rules are suspended or transgressed in the name of a higher morality possessed by one of the parties in struggle:

Under conditions of civil war, assassination of individual oppressors ceases to be an act of individual terror. If, we shall say, a revolutionist bombed Franco and his staff into the air, it would hardly evoke moral indignation even from the democratic eunuchs. Under the conditions of civil war a similar act would be politically completely expedient. Thus, even in the sharpest question – the murder of man by man – moral absolutes prove futile. Moral evaluations, together with those political, flow from the inner needs of the struggle.⁹⁴

In their reply, Trotsky’s interlocutors take up the contradictions in his argument. In a short but incisive text, Dewey, as a rigorous analytic philosopher, abstracts from any consideration of a historical nature in order to attack the logic of the Russian revolutionary. After having postulated the subordination of means to an ethically based end – the liberation of humanity – Trotsky confuses this end with its means – the class struggle. Then, making the latter an absolute norm, he ends up reversing his original position and thereby subjecting the end to the means. This logical reversal enables him to free the means from a higher end. If the class struggle is a kind of ‘absolute law’, then this means transformed into its own end no longer needs any higher justification, as ‘it is automatically absolved from all need for critical examination’.⁹⁵

Victor Serge’s critique, far more tormented, proceeds not by a logical deciphering of texts but rather from lived experience. His difference with Trotsky, whom he defends against the slanders of the Moscow inquisitors, derives from a critical rereading of the first years of Soviet power, in which he now sees the germs of Stalinism. His defence of the Revolution takes on a self-critical tone that leads him to believe that the degeneration of Bolshevism began when the Cheka obtained the right to sit in closed session and decide on the elimination of enemies as it saw fit. In his prefatory note to the French edition of Their Morals and Ours, he recalls the decision of the head of the Red Army to authorize the system of hostage-taking, and deduces that, for Trotsky, ‘executing hostages takes on a different meaning according to whether the order is issued by Stalin or by Trotsky or by the bourgeoisie’. In short, as a good disciple of Machiavelli, Trotsky had transformed ‘ruse and violence’ into virtues. Placed ‘at the service of a justified goal’, these were perfectly legitimate means that became in the last analysis sources of ‘good’.⁹⁶

A serious doubt had arisen in Serge’s mind as to the methods adopted by the Bolsheviks during the civil war. Had not the extra-legal violence of the Cheka, the suppression of democracy and the repression of opponents, favoured rather than obstructed the rise of Stalinism and the transformation of the Soviet regime into a totalitarian dictatorship? Were these means not politically and ethically illegitimate for achieving a goal of human and social emancipation? Serge had already given his response to these questions in 1933, in a letter written in a Siberian camp that he would later include in his memoirs. This sounds an impassioned plea for a libertarian communist ethic: ‘Defence of man. Respect for man. Man must be given his rights, his security, his value. Without these, there is no Socialism. Without these, all is false, bankrupt and spoiled. I mean: man whoever he is, be he the meanest of men – “class-enemy”, son or grandson of a bourgeois, I do not care. It must never be forgotten that a human being is a human being.’⁹⁷

Trotsky responded to these criticisms with biting irony. He proposed to appoint Serge and his friends to head a commission charged with ‘drafting a moral code for civil war’.⁹⁸ He would then have the leisure to prescribe a series of morally unchallengeable norms – public trials, press freedom, a ban on bombing, on taking hostages, on heavy artillery, and even, why not, on firearms that ‘unquestionably exercise a baleful effect on human beings’ – fated to remain a dead letter as soon as hostilities erupt. This was a way of condemning oneself to ‘wander in confusion between two camps’, defending the cause of the oppressed without however being able to escape the morality of the class enemy.⁹⁹ Serge’s unease is clear, as proved by his attempt to deny having been the author of the preface attacked by Trotsky. He had already shown this unease the year before, in an article he wrote on Kronstadt. He acknowledged that the rebel sailors, brutally repressed by a ‘horrible massacre’, were not counter-revolutionaries, but added that their victory would inevitably have opened a breach for the counter-revolution.¹⁰⁰ In short, he simultaneously condemned and approved the repression of Kronstadt as an inescapable tragedy, politically necessary but morally detestable.

Serge’s meditation, melancholy and luminous, charged with the weight of defeat, was inspired by the experience of revolution, civil war and gulag. Trotsky, for his part, perceived in it the vestiges of a humanism that had been felled in the trenches of the Great War and buried by a new age of tensions and conflicts. Today, we can see it as the witness of an anti-totalitarian spirit. And yet, beyond their apologetic character – Trotsky defending his own political itinerary – it is the arguments of the former head of the Red Army that best convey the spirit of civil war, with its morality and its excesses. At bottom, he was not wrong to ask what Serge wanted: ‘to purge civil war of the practice of hostages, or to purge human history of civil war’.¹⁰¹ Like Machiavelli, whom historians have seen sometimes as an ‘apostle of evil’, sometimes as a representative of civic republicanism, and also like his French ancestors of 1793, Trotsky remains an enigmatic figure, both inflexible dictator and persecuted revolutionary. His prose is marked by the breath of an age of iron and fire.

______________

1Paul Valéry, ‘La crise de l’esprit’, Œuvres I (Paris: La Pléiade-Gallimard, 1957), p. 993.

2See George Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 82–95.

3George Orwell, ‘Writers and Leviathan’, in Collected Essays, vol. 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 409.

4André Breton and Diego Rivera, ‘For an Independent Revolutionary Art’, at marxists.org. This text is believed to have been co-authored by Trotsky.

5Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 211–44.

6Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: Transaction, 2006).

7Hans Kohn, Revolutions and Dictatorship: Essays in Contemporary History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), pp. 61–2.

8See George L. Mosse, ‘The Poet and the Exercise of Political Power: Gabriele D’Annunzio’, in Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1980), Chapter 4. On D’Annunzio, see also Renzo De Felice, D’Annunzio politico (1918–1928) (Bari/Rome: Laterza, 1978).

9Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982 [1932]).

10Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

11Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung. Deutschland und die weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung (Munich: J. C. Beck, 1933), p. 147.

12Ibid., p. xii.

13See Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism 1919–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1971).

14See Rüdiger Safranski, Heidegger et son temps. Biographie (Paris: Grasset, 1996), pp. 197–202.

15This hypothesis forms the centre of the entire second part of Judith Marcus’s book Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 53ff. On the multiple faces of romanticism, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Révolte et mélancholie. Le romantisme à contre-courant de la modernité (Paris: Payot, 1992).

16Heidegger’s influence on Jewish and often left intellectuals is analysed, if in a rather one-sided way, in Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

17See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume Three (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 129. On this subject, see Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review I/100 (November–December 1976).

18See Jünger, Der Arbeiter.

19Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007), pp. 22ff.

20Michele Nani, ‘“Dalle viscere del popolo”. Pellizza, il “Quarto Stato” e il socialismo’, in Michele Nani, Liliana Ellena and Marco Scavino, Il Quarto Stato di Pellizza da Volpedo tra cultura e politica (Turin: Istituto di Studi storici Gaetano Salvemini, 2002), pp. 13–54.

21V. I. Lenin, ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’, Pravda, 11 October 1918, available at marxists.org.

22In 1922, Carl Schmitt postulated the actuality of dictatorship, seeing it as the ‘contrary of discussion’. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

23See the reference to Lenin and Lukács in Carl Schmitt, ‘Das Problem der Legalität’ (1950), Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954. Materialen zu einer Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1958), p. 450. See also Carl Schmitt, Glossarium. Aufzeichungen der Jahre 1947–1951 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), p. 5.

24V. I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder’, in Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress, 1966), available at marxists.org.

25George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1968), p. 263.

26Lenin, ‘The Constituent Assembly and the Soviet Republic’, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

27Carl Schmitt, Legalität und Legitimität (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1998).

28See Dan Diner and Michael Stolleis, eds, Hans Kelsen and Karl Schmitt: A Juxtaposition (Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1999).

29See Olivier Beaud, Les Derniers Jours de Weimar: Carl Schmitt face à l’avènement du nazisme (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1997); and Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), Chapters 12 and 13.

30Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Zur russischen Revolution’, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1983), p. 363. [Translator’s note: In the English translation by Bertram Wolfe, reprinted in P. Hudis and K. Anderson, eds, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York: Monthly Review, 2004), this sentence is elided with the previous one, on p. 308.]

31See Otto Kirchheimer, ‘Remarks on Carl Schmitt’s Legality and Legitimacy’, in Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, The Rule of Law Under Siege, ed. William E. Schererman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 64–98.

32On ‘national-bolshevism’ and those currents of the German nationalist right attracted by the Russian Revolution, see Louis Dupeux, ed., La ‘Révolution conservatrice’ dans l’Allemagne de Weimar (Paris: Kimé, 1992), pp. 361–76; Ernst Otto Schüddekopf, Linke Leute von Rechts. Die nationalrevolutionären Minderheiten und der Kommunismus in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960); and Stefan Breuer, Anatomie de la Révolution conservatrice (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1996). For a philologically rigorous but less contextual analysis, see Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 79ff.

33Curzio Malaparte, Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution (London: E. P. Dutton, 1932).

34Sonia Blatmann, ‘La Technique du coup d’État: un manuel de l’équivoque’, Chroniques italiennes 4 (1995). On Malaparte, see Luigi Martellini, ‘Malaparte saggista politico: le “rivoluzioni europee”’, in Gianna Grana, ed., Malaparte scrittore d’Europa (Prato: Marzorati, 1991), pp. 95ff. Trotsky replied to Malaparte in the final pages of his History of the Russian Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket, 2007).

35See Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 725.

36Ibid., p. 727.

37Ibid.

38Ibid., p. 729.

39Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi (Milan: Hoepli, 1939), vol. IV, p. 293. See also Simonetta Falaschi-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 2.

40See Emilio Gentile, Il culto del Littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista (Bari/Rome: Laterza, 1993), pp. 90–8.

41Ernst Jünger, ‘Die Methode der Revolution’, in Politische Publizistik, 1919 bis 1933 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001), p. 116.

42Ernst Jünger, ‘Die Reaktion’, in ibid., pp. 119–25.

43Ernst Jünger, ‘Unserer Politiker’, in ibid., p. 64.

44Ibid., p. 18.

45Goebbels, ‘Die deutsche Kultur vor neuen Aufgaben. Rede zur Eröffnung der Reichskulturkammer in Berlin’, in Reden 1932–1945 (Bindlach: Gondrom Verlag, 1991), pp. 131–2.

46Delio Cantimori, ‘Fascismo, rivoluzione e non reazione europea’, in Politica e storia contemporanea. Scritti 1917–1942 (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), pp. 117–18. See also on this text Giovanni Miccoli and Delio Cantimori, La ricerca di una nuova critica storiografica (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), p. 30.

47Emilio Gentile, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? Histoire et interprétation (Paris: Folio- Gallimard, 2004), p. 152.

48George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of Fascism (New York: H. Fertig, 2000); Zeev Sternhell, ‘Introduction. Le concept de fascisme’, in Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Ashéri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 23–4.

49Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 289–91.

50Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 98.

51Philippe Burrin, ‘Fascisme: la révolution sans révolutionnaires’, Le Débat 38 (1986), pp. 164–76.

52Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 587.

53Gershom Scholem, ‘Walter Benjamin’, in Fidélité et Utopie. Essais sur le judaïsme contemporain (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1978), p. 134. On their friendship with Hans Heyse, see Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003), p. 99.

54Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. IV (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 441. For a detailed exploration of the relationship between the two philosophers, see Susanne Heil, Gefährliche Beziehungen. Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996).

55Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 558.

56See Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985).

57Jacob Taubes, En divergent accord. Apropos de Carl Schmitt (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2003), p. 51.

58Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. xl.

59Schmitt, Political Theology, pp. 16ff.

60On Schmitt’s anti-Semitism, see in particular Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000).

61Schmitt, Political Theology, pp. 53–66.

62Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2009), p. 66.

63Ibid., p. 65.

64Ibid.

65Ibid., p. 70.

66Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 56.

67Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 232.

68Ibid.

69Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 249.

70Ibid., p. 252.

71Walter Benjamin, ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’, in ibid., p. 313.

72Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos, 2003), p. 60. On Schmitt’s use of the concept of katechon, see Christian Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters in the Distinction Between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 160–7; Gross, Carl Schmitt und die Juden, pp. 284–301; and Horst Bredekamp, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’, Critical Inquiry 25: 2 (1999), pp. 252–4.

73Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, p. 247.

74On Lieb’s influence in Benjamin’s adoption of the image of the Antichrist, see Chryssoula Kambas, ‘Actualité politique. Le concept d’histoire chez Benjamin et l’échec du Front populaire’, in Heinz Wismann, ed., Walter Benjamin et Paris (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986), pp. 277–84; and Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ (London: Verso, 2006), p. 46.

75See the definition of the Apocalypse suggested in Gershom Scholem, ‘Pour comprendre le messianisme juif’, in Le Messianisme juif. Essais sur la spiritualité du judaïsme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1974), p. 31.

76Schmitt wrote in his diary of his belief in the katechon, in which, as a Christian, he saw ‘the only possibility of understanding history and finding a meaning in it’ (Glossarium, p. 63).

77See Ricardo Forster, ‘El estado de excepción: Benjamin y Schmitt como pensadores del riesgo’, in Jorge Dotti and Julio Pinto, eds, Carl Schmitt. Su época y su pensamiento (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2002), p. 131.

78Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Illuminations, pp. 248–9.

79Taubes, En divergent accord, p. 53. See also Heil, Gefährliche Beziehungen, p. 156.

80See in particular Karl Korsch, ‘Carl Schmitt, Der Hüter der Verfassung’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung I (1932). On the influence that Schmitt’s thought exerted on certain members of the Frankfurt School, see Ellen Kennedy, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School’, Telos 71 (1987), pp. 37–66; and Alfons Söllner, ‘Disciples de gauche de la Révolution conservatrice. La théorie politique d’Otto Kirchheimer et de Herbert Marcuse dans les dernières années de la république de Weimar’, in Gérard Raulet, ed., Weimar ou l’explosion de la modernité (Paris: Anthropos, 1984), pp. 113–28.

81Herbert Marcuse, ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State’, in Negations (London: Allen Lane, 1968), pp. 3–42. On the turn that this article marked in the Frankfurt School’s relationship with Schmitt, see Kennedy, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School’, p. 54.

82See Kirchheimer, ‘Remarks on Carl Schmitt’s Legality and Legitimacy’. This critique of Schmitt began Kirchheimer’s political evolution towards a rediscovery of classic liberalism.

83Mario Tronti, La politica al tramonto (Turin: Einaudi, 1998), p. 155.

84Georges Bernanos, Diary of My Times (London: Boriswood, 1938).

85Simone Weil, ‘Letter to Georges Bernanos’, in Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977), p. 77.

86Ibid., p. 409.

87See Commission of Inquiry, ed., The Case of Leon Trotsky: Reports of the Hearings on the Charges Made against Him in the Moscow Trials (New York: Merit, 1969). On the formation and work of this commission, see Alan B. Spitzer, ‘John Dewey, the “Trial” of Leon Trotsky and the Search for Historical Truth’, History and Theory 29: 1 (1990), pp. 16–37.

88See Pierre Broué, Trotski (Paris: Fayard, 1988), p. 865.

89Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (London: New Park, 1968).

90Ibid.

91Ibid.

92Ibid.

93Ibid.

94Ibid.

95John Dewey, ‘Means and Ends’, in Leon Trotsky, John Dewey and George Novack, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), pp. 70–1.

96Victor Serge, ‘On Their Morals and Ours’ – English translation by Mitch Abidor provided at marxists.org.

97Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York: NYRB Classics, 2012), p. 327.

98Leon Trotsky, ‘Moralists and Sycophants against Marxism’ (1939), in Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.

99Ibid.

100See Victor Serge, ‘Kronstadt’ (1937), in Léon Trotski and Victor Serge, La Lutte contre le stalinisme en URSS (Paris: Maspero, 1977), pp. 177–81.

101Leon Trotsky, ‘Moralists and Sycophants against Marxism’ (1939), in Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours.

EIGHT

The Antinomies of Antifascism

Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment

The ‘committed’ intellectual – en situation, according to the definition that Sartre would give some years later – experienced a golden age in the 1930s. The great turning-point that marked the politicization of intellectuals was not 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, but 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. This commitment often placed them in the magnetic field of Communism, though this was not the starting-point of their radicalization but only its result. In 1917, John Reed, for whom the Russian soviets ‘shook the world’, remained an exception.¹ In 1934, on the other hand, Heinrich Mann was far from isolated when he published his anti-Nazi pamphlet Hatred.² In 1924, Louis Aragon, the future official poet of French Communism, saw the October Revolution as no more than a mere ‘ministerial crisis’.³ No one could react to Nazism with the same levity. From 1933, the anti-fascist commitment of intellectuals was massive. In 1945, at the end of the war, antifascism was the hegemonic current in European culture.

The antifascist mobilization was marked, between 1935 and 1937, by two international congresses, the first in Paris and the second in Valencia, in republican Spain, with the participation of many of the most significant personalities in the culture of the time.⁴ It reached its apogee during the Spanish Civil War, when the defence of the republic was identified with that of European culture. Many writers enrolled in the International Brigades, or travelled to Spain to support the republic, including George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux and Arthur Koestler, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, Benjamin Péret and Octavio Paz. It was the dramatic character of the situation that explained their commitment, a choice of which the literature of the time has left us many testimonies. As Orwell explains in Homage to Catalonia, ‘I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.’⁵ Manuel, the hero of Malraux’s L’Espoir (1937), and Robert Jordan, hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), are both intellectuals who sacrifice art for the struggle. Politics took the upper hand. Simone Weil hated war and violence, but could not remain passive in the face of a conflict that touched her profoundly. ‘When I understood that, as much as I tried to believe otherwise, I couldn’t ethically refuse to participate in the war’, she explained, ‘that’s to say, I couldn’t wish every day, every hour, victory for some and defeat for others while doing nothing myself, I told myself that I must put Paris behind me and I caught a train to Barcelona with the intention of enlisting.’⁶ Eric Hobsbawm has shown very well the founding role played by the Spanish Civil War in the political identity of his generation. At that time, he wrote in The Age of Extremes,⁷ Spain was ‘the central front of their battle’ for all who wished to defeat fascism. In perfect symmetry, it likewise formed the ‘central front’ for those who sought to defend the fascist cause. In the eyes of Robert Brasillach, this was a ‘terrible struggle’ that had broken out ‘on one of the noblest European lands’, opposing ‘fascism and antifascism’. Far more was at stake here than just the fate of one nation. Spain, he wrote, ‘has transformed into a battle that is both spiritual and material, into a veritable crusade, the long opposition that was brewing in the modern world’.⁸

The Spanish Civil War also assumed a decisive symbolic dimension by drawing new frontiers and clarifying positions. The triangle between liberalism, Communism and fascism that had been in place since the end of the Great War, with the various systems of alliance that followed from it and the possibility, for a large part of the intelligentsia, of confining themselves to a neutral observer position, was now reduced to a single confrontation between fascism and antifascism. The choice became unavoidable. And the presence of many European writers in Spain, on both sides of the front, clearly shows the polarization of the intellectual field. The European civil war involved the militarization of politics and produced a deep metamorphosis in the world of culture: the transition from intellectual to fighter. The notion of ‘intellectual’ was enriched by a meaning unknown at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, as the attributes that defined its status were no longer simply pen and speech, but also weapons, even if only symbolically. It is true that the Great War had been an essential precedent from this point of view. But it was no longer a matter of responding to a patriotic appeal or putting one’s talent in the service of a national cause. The challenge now was to justify the choice of arms, sometimes to take up arms oneself, in order to defend a supranational cause in which the essential stake, far beyond the future of Spain, was the future of Europe.

Writers and poets put on uniform, not only Republican but also Francoist. Henri Massis and Paul Claudel wrote odes to the glory of Franco. Massis saw the ‘reconquest’ of Spain from the ‘reds’ as a ‘fever of creation mingled with the work of blood and death’, while Claudel paid homage to the warriors for the Christian faith, heralds of a ‘regenerated’ Spain.⁹ Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle each devoted a novel to the Spanish Civil War, respectively Les Sept Couleurs and Gilles. Their heroes crossed the Pyrenees to flee from bourgeois decadence and participate in the battle that was under way to forge the fascist ‘new man’. Falangist writers such as Ledesma Ramos and García Serrano discovered for themselves the myth of death in battle proclaimed by Ernst Jünger, in a conflict in which men worthy of the name carried a rifle and did not fear to face the enemy at the risk of their life.¹⁰

Republican poets responded to this aesthetic of combat by the politicization of their art – a politicization that involved the apology for antifascist violence as necessary. Two poems show this in an exemplary way. The first, ‘Spain 1937’ by W. H. Auden, postpones love until later, to make way for struggle:

Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love […]

Tomorrow the bicycle races

Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but today the struggle.

Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death;

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.¹¹

The second, ‘Spain in Our Hearts’, by Pablo Neruda, is a hymn to embattled republican Spain:

Generales

traidores:

mirad mi casa muerta,

mirad España rota:

pero de cada casa muerta sale metal ardiendo

en vez de flores,

pero de cada hueco de España

sale España,

pero de cada niño muerto sale un fusil con ojos,

pero de cada crimen nacen balas

que os hallarán un día el sitio

del corazón.¹²

Treacherous

generals:

behold my dead house,

behold Spain destroyed:

yet instead of flowers, from every dead house

burning metal flows,

yet from every hollow of Spain

Spain flows,

Yet from every dead child rises a rifle with eyes,

Yet from every crime bullets are born

that one day will find the target

of your heart.

This atmosphere in which commitment became crucial also explains the isolation of those intellectual circles that, despite seeking to anchor their reflections in the present, refused to be caught in the cleavage between fascism and antifascism. This was the case with Georges Bataille and the Collège de Sociologie who, on the basis of their anthropological interest in the sacred, subjected the myths and symbols mobilized by Nazism to a very subtle critique, but remained sceptical towards antifascism, as an ideology that in their view hid a new form of power.¹³ In the context of the time, such a position could hardly find political expression. It risked being confused with the ‘grey zone’ of the undecided and detached observers, or with an inherent self-restraint. Culture was polarized between fascism and antifascism. On the other side of the barricade, Drieu la Rochelle, Brasillach, Céline, Papini, Jünger, Godfried Benn, Wyndham Lewis and Knut Hamsun were not isolated. What became untenable was an attitude of indifference. The sense of paralysis, emptiness and impotence that invades Roquentin, the hero of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), had to give way to the ethical and political imperative of commitment that Sartre was to dramatize in The Roads to Freedom (1945) and proclaim in the first issue of Les Temps modernes, recalling that the writer had to be ‘in situation in his time’.¹⁴ In 1945, European culture stood under the sign of antifascism.

Several elements lay at the origin of the intellectuals’ political turn.¹⁵ First of all, Hitler’s coming to power in Germany – followed by Dollfuss’s clerical–fascist state in Austria, then Franco’s pronunciamento in Spain – produced a veritable trauma. If Italian Fascism had remained a national phenomenon, isolated, little known and poorly understood – to which a large sector of Italian culture had rallied, from D’Annunzio to Gentile, and even part of the avant-garde (the futurists) – the advent of National Socialism in Germany gave fascism a European dimension. Suddenly it appeared as a terrible threat not only to the workers’ movement but more generally to democracy and culture on a continental scale – a threat that went beyond the political sphere and seemed to challenge civilization itself. One needed only to listen to the declarations of the Nazi leaders to understand that the legacy of the Enlightenment was in danger: Goebbels proclaimed: ‘1789 will be erased from history’.¹⁶ Hence the need to preserve a threatened cultural legacy: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1933), written by Ernst Cassirer in the last days of Weimar, became a manifesto of German humanism in exile.¹⁷

Fundamentally, the Spanish Civil War only gave the European civil war a concrete and tangible expression that no one could escape. It was a political conflict in which values, ideologies, views of the world and conceptions of culture battled one another. The immediate motives that pressed intellectuals to join the antifascist movement and later the Resistance might have varied, with the predominance of a moral, political, or class choice from case to case, but they converged in the necessity of combat. What explains the spread of antifascism during the 1930s is neither the seductive power of an ideology nor the irresistible force of a propaganda machine, but its capacity to impose itself as a collective ethos on all those set on combating the dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.¹⁸ As early as 1924, in his paper La rivoluzione liberale, Piero Gobetti presented antifascism as a ‘moral’ and existential choice, an ‘instinct’ even before taking the form of an ideology.¹⁹ The historian George Mosse stresses in his autobiography that antifascism was ‘both a political and cultural movement’, to which one could commit oneself by investing in it a strong emotional charge.²⁰ But it was by Albert Camus, a writer who was never a Communist, that the moral wellspring of this commitment was most clearly asserted, when he defined the Resistance in 1944 as an ethical rediscovery of politics: ‘We do not want a politics without an ethic, as we know that only ethics justifies politics.’²¹ The fate of Willi Münzenberg, the master of Comintern propaganda who broke with the German Communist Party in 1939 in protest against the Nazi–Soviet pact, well shows how, without such an ethic, the Moscow apparatus would not have been able to control its own functionaries.²²

The pure and simple assimilation of antifascism to Communism is a retrospective projection of anti-Communist history, rather than a judgement formulated on the basis of a contextual analysis. The chronology of the genesis of antifascism is enough to refute the notion that its origin was Communist. Italian antifascism had begun to organize in the émigré communities of France and the United States by 1925, at the time that the ‘special laws’ were promulgated that completed the transformation of Mussolini’s government into a Fascist regime. It was the leading representative of Italian liberalism, Benedetto Croce, who took the initiative of publishing in Il Mondo, on 1 May 1925, a ‘manifesto’ of antifascist intellectuals. Two years later, the exile Concentrazione Antifascista Italiana united the majority of the democratic parties outlawed by Mussolini, from Socialists to Republicans, but without the Communists, in thrall to the sectarianism that dominated the Comintern’s political orientation at this time.²³ In 1935, with the adoption of the Popular Front policy, the Communist policy did no more than adapt to a turn that had already been begun two years previously, among the left as well as in the intellectual world, under the shock of the Nazis’ coming to power in Germany. In France, the first appeal for united action against fascism came a few days after the riots of 6 February 1934. It was signed by leading Surrealists (André Breton, René Crevel and Paul Éluard) as well as writers attracted by Communism such as Jean-Richard Bloch and André Malraux. A few days later, the philosopher Alain and the ethnologists Paul Rivet and Paul Langevin established a Comité de Viligance des Intellectuels antifascistes.²⁴ In Germany, Die Weltbühne, the left weekly paper edited by the independent socialist Carl von Ossietzky, had launched a campaign for a united front of the left against the Hitler menace as early as 1930, in response to the Nazis’ first electoral breakthrough. At this time, the German Social Democrats still placed their hopes in Hindenburg, while the Communist Party persisted in denouncing ‘social-fascism’.²⁵ In short, far from being a by-product of the Communist parties’ adoption of the Popular Front policy, the anti-fascism of the intellectuals preceded it.

Antifascism was also identified with the struggle for peace, in a continent where the wounds of the First World War were still open and the political balance seemed ever more precarious. Italian aggression in Ethiopia, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the war in Spain, the Sino-Japanese war; then Munich, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and finally a new world war: the escalation aroused a growing anxiety in Europe that was echoed in art and culture. Nor should we forget that fascism made intellectuals a target of choice, as Goebbels had shown with the autos-da-fé of 1 May 1933, and was evidenced by the thousands of writers, journalists, scientists, academics and artists forced into exile. Antifascist culture, moreover, was to a very large degree a culture of exile, borne by a crowd of pariahs who wandered from one country to another, ambassadors of a humanist Europe threatened with annihilation. Antifascism was expressed in a constellation of magazines in German, Italian and Spanish, published by exiles in Paris, London, Prague, Zurich, Amsterdam, Moscow, New York and Mexico. In the words of the historian Peter Gay, it was here that the Weimar spirit found ‘its true home’.²⁶

If it is beyond debate that antifascism contained a plurality of currents (Marxist, Christian, liberal, republican) and did not present a unitary profile, it remains true that its different components all laid claim to the Enlightenment heritage. This basis of values was universally accepted, even by the Communists, who sought to reconcile the defence of democracy in the Western world with the dictatorship of the Soviet regime in Russia. In the final analysis, it was fascism that cemented the unity of its enemies. Antifascism opposed its pacifism and a certain cosmopolitan spirit to the mysticism of nation and war. It opposed the principles of equality, democracy, liberty and citizenship to the reactionary values of authority, hierarchy and race. Against the vitalist and anti-humanist irrationalism of the apologists for a totalitarian order, it inscribed itself forcefully in the tradition of the Enlightenment, in its universal conception of humanity, its rationalism, and its idea of progress. To fascist anti-liberalism, with its cult of leader and mass, it opposed the state of law, with its pluralism and individual liberties. In short, beyond its ideological and political cleavages, antifascism had the common objective of the defence of a threatened civilization. Fascism and antifascism confronted one another by each mobilizing their own values, their founding myths, their commemorations, their flags, their songs and their liturgies. Against the fascist political religion of force, antifascism championed the civil religion of humanity, democracy and socialism.²⁷ Such was the shared ethos that, in a historical context that was exceptional and necessarily transitory, made it possible to hold together Christians and atheist Communists, liberals and collectivists. This convergence rested on a minimal but essential foundation, which relegated to the back burner conceptions that in other circumstances would be irreconcilable.

In the mid twentieth century, however, this return to the Enlightenment and the values of 1789 took on a new dimension, drawing the main lines of a European public space defined by cultural, ethical and political frontiers. Antifascism included all the constitutive elements of a ‘public sphere’ in the most traditional sense of the term: literature, science, the arts, the press. The antifascist cause was defended above all by a constellation of writers, including the most celebrated writers of France and Germany, joined by scientists such as the Nobel laureates Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, and artists such as Picasso and John Heartfield. It was expressed in a broad network of magazines and duplicated bulletins, side by side with certain mass-circulation press organs and sometimes entering the world of film, with movies such as Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), and Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). This public sphere clearly fitted differently into each particular national context, but it also developed internationally. The fascist threat was the cement enabling an exceptional coexistence of very divergent currents within a single movement, and antifascism was a public space in which choices crossed paths that were inevitably fated to come into conflict once this threat had dissipated. If, as Jürgen Habermas explains, the public sphere was born in the eighteenth century as a network of debate and critical exercise of reason, thanks to which civil society was able to differentiate from and in due course express its opposition to absolutism,²⁸ antifascism organized and articulated the resistance of the democratic societies of the twentieth century to the advent of the modern dictatorships. It effected a union – temporary but real – between the workers’ movement and an intelligentsia that sought to give voice to the protest of a democratic public opinion. It is not accidental that antifascist intellectuals should often have seen themselves as philosophes of the twentieth century, whose essential function was to show the way to a public use of reason.

Stalinism

A complex (and perverse) dialectic between fascism and Communism lay at the root of the culpable silence of a large number of intellectuals towards the crimes of Stalinism. First the threat of fascism, then the immense prestige and historical legitimacy gained by the USSR during the Second World War, led a large section of their number to ignore, underestimate, excuse or legitimize Soviet totalitarianism. Many critics have stressed the limits of antifascist commitment, which was often both generous and myopic. It was not just the ‘organic’ intellectuals and fellow-travellers of Communism who refused to see the tyrannical aspects of Stalinism. André Gide’s Return from the USSR, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, all published between 1936 and 1940, were exceptions, which either remained unnoticed at the time they appeared, or – like Gide’s book – were soon forgotten after a momentary flurry of attention. In general, antifascism viewed the Soviet regime with a certain complacency, sometimes even with blind admiration. At the Paris congress of 1935, Magdeline Paz and Henri Poulaille had great difficulty reading out an appeal on behalf of Victor Serge, who had been deported to Siberia.²⁹ The prevailing attitude towards the Soviet Union was not that of Gide or Orwell, but rather that of the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb – intellectuals who were fundamentally removed from Communism in terms of their background, culture and temperament, but who nonetheless published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?;³⁰ or that of the German writer Leon Feuchtwanger, who attended the Moscow trials and approved them enthusiastically in Moscow 1937. And yet it was not absolutely necessary to sacrifice to the cult of Stalin in order to defend the USSR in the 1930s.

The argument of François Furet, who sees the ‘entirely negative idea of “anti-Fascism”’ as a trick by which Communist totalitarianism extended its influence by disguising itself as a defender of democracy,³¹ simplifies historical reality in at least two ways. First of all, it forgets the non-Stalinist and even anti-Stalinist tendencies present within antifascist culture, in which very different individuals rubbed shoulders. These included Christian intellectuals such as Jacques Maritain, Luigi Sturzo and Paul Tillich, left liberals such as Carlo Rosselli and Raymond Aron, socialists such as Léon Blum, Rudolf Hilferding and Pietro Nenni, Trotskyists such as Pierre Naville, and the Surrealist writers André Breton and Benjamin Péret. Besides, this argument seems to ignore the fact that in Western Europe it was impossible to combat fascism without the contribution of the Communists and the Soviet Union. Mental repression of Stalinism was proportionate to the severity of the fascist threat. Following Malraux, Léon Blum chose to hold back his criticisms of the Soviet Union until 1938, while the pacifist Romain Rolland and the president of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, Victor Basch, decided in the end to accept the Moscow trials. Even Gide, attacked by the Communist press after his Return from the USSR (1936), recognized the necessity of an alliance with the Soviets.³² The psychological roots of such attitudes were grasped very well by the American writer Upton Sinclair who, in an essay on the Moscow trials, used the metaphor of the besieged city: ‘the people in besieged cities are simply not permitted to intrigue, or even to agitate, against the regime which is defending the city’.³³

Few antifascists in Europe were prepared to denounce the crimes of Stalin, in the belief that, if the Communists were indispensable allies in the struggle against fascism, this did not justify silence about the Stalinist dictatorship, and that the antifascist combat itself risked losing legitimacy if Soviet despotism, with its trials, summary executions, deportations and camps, was accepted – to say nothing of the forced collectivization, which was not mentioned at this time even in the most bitterly anti-Communist literature. The latter included the Surrealists, who denounced the Moscow trials of 1936 as ‘an abject police set-up’, and the intellectual milieu around Partisan Review in New York, on whom Trotsky exercised a very strong influence. We could add the names of those Communist intellectuals who broke with Stalinism, including Paul Nizan and Manès Sperber, Arthur Koestler and Willi Münzenberg, not to mention the Italian liberal-socialism expressed in the movement Guistizia e Libertà. At his intervention at the Congress for the Defence of Culture in 1935, Gaetano Salvemini, exiled at this time in the United States, expressed his reservations: ‘I would not have the right to protest against the Gestapo and the [Italian] fascist Ovra’, he maintained, ‘if I tried to forget that there is a Soviet political police. In Germany there are concentration camps, in Italy there are islands converted into places of detention, and in Soviet Russia there is Siberia.’³⁴ To Palmiro Togliatti, spokesman for Communist orthodoxy, Carlo Rosselli replied that his antifascism stood for self-management and a ‘libertarian’ Communism, not a new form of ‘cult of the state’ (statolatria).³⁵ These examples prove that it was possible to be both antifascist and anti-Stalinist, and that the fascination exercised by Stalinism at this time over the antifascist intelligentsia was not irresistible. But these were exceptions, in a context in which the USSR was generally viewed with a favourable or indulgent eye.

This context also explains the great reticence with which the intellectual world received the first formulations of a theory of totalitarianism that presented Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany as twin forms of a new absolutism. Whether from the pens of ex-Communists (Franz Borkenau), liberals (Friedrich von Hayek), or Catholics of conservative orientation (Eric Voegelin and Waldemar Gurian), these theories appeared far more as the expression of a sceptical passivity and an impotent pessimism than of an effective and lucid commitment. The theorists of totalitarianism had certainly grasped the despotic nature of the Stalin regime, but the implicit conclusion of their argument – the impossibility of an alliance with the USSR – was unrealistic, especially after 1941. After being deeply shaken by the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939, the alliance between the antifascist intelligentsia and Communism was renewed in 1941, and strengthened by the Resistance. The majority of the theorists of totalitarianism themselves, starting with Raymond Aron, then acknowledged the indispensable character of a compromise with the USSR in the struggle against Nazism.

There is a certain anachronism in the approach of those who, like François Furet, oppose the beneficent virtues of a historically innocent and politically clairvoyant liberalism, the true antithesis of any totalitarianism, to the antifascism of the 1930s intellectuals. This vision is quite illusory, inspired by a retrospective conformism and devoid of any historicization. One of the factors in intellectuals’ adherence to Communism, in a context of international economic depression and the rise of fascism, lay in the deep crisis of liberal institutions, which were exhausted and shaken by the First World War, undermined by nationalist drives, and incapable of opposing fascism. If fascism was generated by the collapse of the old liberal order, how could the latter provide a basis for combating it? And it was a basis all the more questionable, in that while fascism had indeed destroyed liberal democracy, it had not attacked the traditional elites. In Italy, the main pillars of the liberalism that emerged from the Risorgimento – the monarchy, the bourgeoisie, and even a non-negligible part of the cultural world (for example, Giovanni Gentile) – had adhered to fascism. In the classic homeland of liberalism, Great Britain, Winston Churchill had saluted the victorious struggle of Italian fascism against the ‘bestial passions of Leninism’.³⁶ In Germany, between 1930 and 1933, the elites shed their liberal façade and dismantled Weimar democracy in preparation for the advent of Hitler. After the deaths of Fried-rich Naumann and Max Weber, then the emigration to the United States of Carl Friedrich and Hans Kelsen, no leading figure of liberalism remained in a German culture dominated by the conflict between Bolshevism and Nazism.³⁷ After the crisis of 1929, Keynes no longer believed in the future of capitalism; his therapies were essentially designed just to extend its survival. In such a context in Western Europe, the USSR seemed far better prepared to bar the way to fascism than did the traditional forces of an evaporating liberalism.³⁸ In Spain, Ortega y Gasset refused to take a stand in the Civil War, seeing it only as an ineluctable consequence of the revolt of the masses in the age of modern ‘hyperdemocracy’. He left Madrid in 1936, resigned to seeing Francoism as the lesser evil.³⁹ Miguel de Unamuno, rector of the university of Salamanca, had approved the coup d’état, but immediately been censored by the military. His death, a few months after the pronunciamiento, was a symbol of the defeat of the Spanish liberal elite.⁴⁰ Liberalism now appeared as a phenomenon of the past, in deep crisis and fated to inevitable decline in a continent divided between Bolshevism and fascism. In 1936, the British Labour intellectual Harold J. Laski wrote that liberalism had been dismissed from the stage by the Great War, a historical turning-point that he compared with the Reformation and the French Revolution. It had a glorious past, but no future: ‘When a system is fighting for its life, it has no time for the habits of a debating society. The passion of conflict makes reason its slave.’⁴¹ The political commitment of intellectuals could now find an outlet only within the antifascist movement, as Piero Gobetti proclaimed in 1924, in his manifesto La rivoluzione liberale.⁴²

It is certainly possible to criticize the intellectuals who maintained the myth of the USSR for having lied to themselves and contributed to deceiving the antifascist movement, making themselves propagandists for a totalitarian regime instead of the antifascist movement’s critical conscience. But we can also be certain that in Europe (the New Deal in the United States remains a separate case) no mass mobilization against the Nazi menace would have occurred under the leadership of the old liberal elites. The struggle against fascism needed a hope, a message of universal emancipation, which it seemed at this time could be offered only by the country of the October Revolution. If a totalitarian dictatorship like that of Stalin became the embodiment of these values in the eyes of millions of men and women, which is indeed the tragedy of twentieth-century Communism, this is precisely because its origins and its nature were completely different from those of fascism. That is what liberal anti-totalitarianism seems incapable of understanding.

Antifascist unity was achieved in the mid 1930s under the impact of the coming to power of the Nazis, followed by the Spanish Civil War; it was deepened on a wider basis during the Second World War and the Resistance. Its breakup began with the outbreak of the Cold War, culminating with the division of Germany in 1949 and finally the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956, which deeply marked the intellectual world. All previous crises – the Moscow trials, for example, then the Nazi–Soviet pact – had been overcome in the name of the unity needed to stand up to the enemy. After the war, this argument could no longer be invoked. The ideological and political currents that had cohabited for more than a decade were from now on divided by a conflict that split the world into two antagonistic blocs. If between 1941 and 1945 Communists and liberals had put their differences in cold storage in order to combat Hitler, their opposition now stood in the full light of day. The common defence of the Enlightenment against fascism gave way to two divergent readings of its legacy. Those who refused to choose between the USSR and the ‘free world’ found themselves marginalized. Liberalism abandoned antifascism to don the guise of anti-totalitarianism, which meant anti-Communism. Antifascism now ceased to be a shared ethos, and was identified in ideological terms with Communism.⁴³ In the countries of the Soviet bloc it was quickly transformed into a state ideology, while in the West the Communists became official repositories of its memory. With the exception of Italy, where republican institutions were compelled to base their legitimacy on the rejection of a twenty-year-long Fascist past, the conservative and nationalist components of the Resistance showed themselves increasingly reluctant to call themselves antifascist.

In the intellectual world, the end of antifascist unity was symbolized by polemics and ruptures that had a strong impact on public opinion. In France, there was the open confrontation between David Rousset, a former Trotskyist deportee and now a Gaullist, and Les Lettres françaises, the literary review of the Communist Party that denied the existence of Soviet concentration camps.⁴⁴ There was also the rupture between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Les Temps modernes. In Italy, Il Politecnico, one of the main periodicals born out of the Resistance, edited by Elio Vittorini, had to withstand the criticism of Togliatti in the pages of Rinascita, the official review of the Italian Communist Party, which attacked its conception of the autonomy of culture at a time when culture had to choose its camp and submit to the aesthetic and political norms set in Moscow.⁴⁵ In Germany, the antifascist spirit that had accompanied the fall of Nazism and found representatives in the new generation of writers, as well as among former exiles, could not survive the division of the country into two states. In the Federal Republic it was tabooed, while in the GDR it was incorporated into official ideology.⁴⁶ Aron, Silone, Koestler, Jaspers, Orwell and others joined the Congress for Cultural Freedom, while Sartre became, not without difficulties, a fellow-traveller of the Communists. Antifascism no longer defined the horizon of a European public space; it became a stake in the conflict over the public use of history.

Holocaust

The silence of antifascist intellectuals over the Holocaust is more complex to decipher. It is true that the genocide of European Jews – an extermination intended to be total – could not have been foreseen. However, a heavy threat hung over the Jews from 1933, even if its catastrophic culmination could not yet be grasped. The emigration of some 400,000 Jews from Central Europe between Hitler’s coming to power and the outbreak of war revealed the seriousness of this threat in unchallengeable terms. Yet, throughout the 1930s, anti-Semitism was never perceived by antifascist culture as a constitutive element of the Nazi system, but rather as merely a propagandist corollary of a regime that had singled out democracy and the workers’ movement as its enemies. Few intellectuals possessed the farsightedness of Gershom Scholem, who wrote from Palestine, three months after Hitler’s accession, to Walter Benjamin, exiled in France, a letter in which he defined the advent of Nazism as ‘a catastrophe of world-historic importance’. ‘The magnitude of the collapse of the socialist and communist movements is frightfully obvious’, he agreed, ‘but that of German Jewry certainly does not pale by comparison.’⁴⁷ Later, in a letter to Benjamin of February 1940, he put the crucial question: ‘What will become of Europe after the elimination of the Jews?’⁴⁸

Immediately after the war, the ‘final solution’ still seemed just one tragic page among many others, and held no more than a marginal place in intellectual culture and debate. Silence prevailed. Auschwitz was neither the Dreyfus Affair nor the Spanish Civil War – events towards which intellectuals had reacted by assuming their ‘responsibilities’. Sartre’s essay on the Jewish question, published in 1946, is a revealing example of this intellectual blindness. The editor of Les Temps modernes saw Jews as forgotten victims of the War, but he never made their genocide central to his reflection. After the Nazi extermination camps, the ‘Jewish question’ remained in his eyes bound up with the French anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair and the Third Republic. This famous essay, in which the gas chambers are hardly mentioned, might well be interpreted as the most significant symptom of the blindness of European culture in the face of the greatest tragedy of the century.⁴⁹

This blindness had deep-lying causes, which arose both from the general context of the war and from the older incomprehension of the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism. Despite its specific characteristics, the Jewish tragedy was not dissociated from the suffering provoked by a gigantic massacre that had spared scarcely any nation, and its visibility was obscured in a continent in ruins. The fate of the Jews did not appear singular, and Nazi anti-Semitism was seen as an obscurantist and medieval residue. It was, in a stereotype that went back to the socialist culture of the late nineteenth century, the ‘socialism of fools’ – that is, simply a propaganda weapon. An industrial and bureaucratic genocide was an absolute novelty whose possibility did not figure among the categories of antifascist culture.⁵⁰

This culture saw the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler only in terms of their ‘regressive’ character: anti-liberalism, anti-Communism, anti-parliamentarism and irrationalism. Fascism was thus reduced to its reactionary aspect. Only a few managed to see its roots in industrial society, mass mobilization and the cult of technology, recognizing it as a reactionary variant of modernity. From the ideological point of view, the fascist movements could not have been more disconcerting: a nebula in which conservatism and eugenics, cultural pessimism and ‘conservative revolution’, spiritualism and anti-Semitism, regressive romanticism and technocratic totalitarianism, all cohabited. This muddle of contradictory sensibilities concealed its ‘revolutionary’ nature, a rejection of liberal and democratic modernity aiming not at a return to a bygone past but at the establishment of a new order: hierarchical, authoritarian, inegalitarian, nationalistic and racial. Fascist mysticism was formulated in biological terms, its cult of technology was aestheticized, its contempt for democracy founded on the myth of the masses, its rejection of individualism proclaimed in the name of a ‘people’s community’ welded by war.

It is clearly impossible to grasp the modernity of fascism in its various forms on the basis of a philosophy of history that postulates the evolution of humanity towards the ineluctable triumph of reason. Yet an important characteristic of antifascism, which contributes to explaining both its complacency towards Stalinism and its involuntary blindness towards the Jewish genocide, was its bitter and uncritical defence of the idea of progress, inherited from the European culture of the nineteenth century: ‘The men and women of the Resistance resembled their spiritual ancestors of the eighteenth century, the philosophes.’⁵¹ The constellation of magazines that arose or revived in 1945 – Esprit, Les Temps modernes and Critique in France; Der Ruf and Der Anfang in Germany; Il Ponte, Belfagor and Nuovo Politecnico in Italy – explicitly appealed to this rationalism embodied by Lessing, Voltaire and Cattaneo. The return to freedom and democracy was experienced as a new triumph of the Enlightenment, reason and right, which made fascism appear a parenthesis, an ephemeral episode, an anachronistic and absurd fall-back into ancestral barbarism, a vain attempt to arrest the ‘march of history’. In this climate of confidence in the future, when history seemed finally to have resumed its natural course, the Nazi extermination camps were no more than the result of a tragic derailment. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, drew the rewards of the immense tribute it had paid to defeat Nazism. The struggle for progress coincided with defence of the socialist homeland. The philosopher Alexandre Kojève believed that he saw in Stalin, as Hegel in Jena had seen in Napoleon, the Weltgeist, the man of the end of history.⁵²

For Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, National Socialism was a refutation of Hegel’s philosophy of history. In 1944, he also wrote that he had seen the Weltgeist, but in his case not on horseback, nor in the form of a Soviet tank, but in Hitler’s V2 rockets, these robot-bombs that, like fascism itself, ‘combined utmost technical perfection with total blindness’.⁵³ His position – the philosophy of the Frankfurt School whose Jewish founders were now all in exile – shared the antifascist culture while remaining at its margins, aware that, despite its defeat, Nazism had already changed the face of the century and the image of man. For them, recognition of Auschwitz as a rupture in civilization was indissociable from a radical challenge to the idea of progress. If Nazism had tried to wipe out the legacy of the Enlightenment, it had also to be understood dialectically as a product of civilization itself, with its technical and instrumental rationality now released from an emancipatory aim and reduced to a project of domination. On this view, Auschwitz could not be apprehended as a ‘regression’ or a parenthesis, but was rather an authentic product of the West: the emergence of its destructive side. For Horkheimer and Adorno, in 1944, Auschwitz was the symbol of a ‘self-destruction of rationalism’.⁵⁴ Far from celebrating a new triumph of Enlightenment, these isolated figures refused to see the Second World War as a victorious epic of progress. Before the spectacle of a civilization that had transformed modern technology into a gigantic destructive power, the only sentiment possible was one of shame.

A ‘promethean shame’,⁵⁵ wrote Günter Anders, to match the disaster.

______________

1John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (London: Penguin, 2007).

2Heinrich Mann, Der Haß (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987).

3Louis Aragon, ‘Communisme et révolution’, in Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme, suivi de Documents surréalistes (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 204. On the impact of the October Revolution on the European intelligentsia, see Marcello Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS. L’Occidente e la Russia di Stalin (1927–1956) (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990), Chapters 1 and 2.

4On the Paris congress of 1935, see Sandra Teroni, ed., Pour la défense de la culture. Les textes du Congrès international des écrivains, Paris, juin 1935 (Dijon: Presses universitaires de Dijon, 2005). See also Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), Chapter 27; and Herbert Lottman, La Rive gauche. Du Front populaire à la guerre froide (Paris: Seuil, 1981), vol. II, Chapter 6. On the Valencia congress, see Andrés Trapiello, Las armas y las letras. Literatura y guerra civil (1936–1939) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1994), Chapter 10.

5George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 2.

6Simone Weil, ‘Letter to Georges Bernanos’, in Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977), p. 77.

7Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 160.

8Robert Brasillach, Les Sept Couleurs (Paris: Godefroy de Bouillon, 1995), p. 156.

9See Christopher G. Flood, ‘Crusade or Genocide? French Catholic Discourse on the Spanish Civil War’, in Janet Pérez and Wendell Aycock, eds, The Spanish Civil War in Literature (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990), pp. 60–2.

10See Gareth Thomas, The Novel of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1975) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chapter 4.

11W. H. Auden, ‘Spain 1937’, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), pp. 424–5. This was the original version of the poem, dated April 1937; a later version, slightly modified, is on p. 212 of the same text. It has never been translated into French, owing to its rejection by the author.

12Pablo Neruda, ‘I Explain Some Things’, in The Essential Neruda (Selected Poems), ed. Mark Eisner (San Francisco: City Lights, 2004), p. 67. The original is ‘España en el corazón. Himno a las glorias del pueblo en guerra (1936–1937)’, Obras completas, I. 1923–1954 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999), p. 371.

13On Bataille’s reticence towards antifascism, see Denis Hollier, ‘Desperanto’, New German Critique 67 (1996), pp. 22–6.

14Cited in Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905–1980 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 438.

15See Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Gli intellettuali e l’antifascismo’, Storia del marxismo, vol. III/2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 441–90.

16Cited in Karl D. Bracher, La Dictature allemande. Naissance, structure et conséquences du national-socialisme (Toulouse: Privat, 1986), p. 31.

17Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

18See Anson Rabinbach, ‘Legacies of Antifascism’, New German Critique 67 (1996), p. 7.

19Piero Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), p. 178. On Gobetti’s antifascism, see Aurelio Lepre, L’anticomunismo e l’antifascismo in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), pp. 50–4.

20George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 104.

21Albert Camus, ‘Au service de l’Homme’, in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). This passage is also cited in James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 71.

22See Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg. Eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart: Klett- Cotta, 1966).

23See the ‘Manifeste des intellectuels antifascistes’ – also that of the Concentrazione Antifascista – in Enzo Collotti, ed., L’antifascismo in Italia e in Europa (Turin: Loescher, 1975), pp. 34–7, 75–6.

24See Nicole Racine, ‘Le Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (1934–1939)’, Le Mouvement social 101 (1977), pp. 87–113; Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), pp. 98–9; Lottman, La Rive gauche, pp. 148–58.

25See István Deák, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

26Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 145.

27On the distinction between ‘civil religions’ and ‘political religions’, see Emilio Gentile, Les Religions de la politique. Entre démocratie et totalitarismes (Paris: Seuil, 2005).

28See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).

29Lottman, La Rive gauche, pp. 178–84.

30This was the title of the original 1935 edition. In reprints from 1937 onwards, the question-mark was removed.

31François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 160.

32Nicole Racine, ‘Une cause. L’antifascisme des intellectuels dans les années trente’, Politix 17 (1992), pp. 79–85.

33Upton Sinclair and Eugene Lyons, Terror in Russia? Two Views (New York: R. R. Smith, 1938), p. 57. See also Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS, p. 279.

34Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Pour la liberté de l’esprit’, in Enzo Traverso, ed., Le Totalitarisme. Le XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 248. See also Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS, p. 214.

35See Carlo Rosselli, Scritti d’esilio, vol. II (1934–1937) (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), p. 426. For context, see Aurelio Lepre, L’anticomunismo e l’antifascismo in Italia, pp. 68–70.

36See Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce. Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), pp. 330, 553.

37See Karl D. Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien (Stuttgart: DVA, 1982), vol. II, Chapter 6.

38Those liberals who fought against fascism, such as the Italian movement Guistizia e Libertà, chose to collaborate with the Communists. See on this question the testimony and reflections of Norberto Bobbio, one of its organizers, in his Dal fascismo alla democrazia (Turin: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997).

39On Ortega’s ambiguous relationship with Francoism, see Antonio Elorza, La razón y la sombra. Una lectura politica de Ortega y Gasset (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1984). Criticism of the abstentionism of Spanish liberal intellectuals during the Civil War, from 1937 onwards, is a key theme in the essay by Maria Zambrano, Los intelectuales en el drama de España (Madrid: Trotta, 1998).

40See Gabriele Ranzato, L’Eclissi della democrazia. La Guerra civile spagnola e le sue origini 1931–1939 (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2004), pp. 359–65.

41Harold Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997), p. 209.

42Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale.

43See Enzo Traverso, ‘Le totalitarisme. Jalons pour l’histoire d’un débat’, in Traverso, ed., Le Totalitarisme, pp. 45–60.

44See Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, pp. 460–5.

45See Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI (1944–1958) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1997).

46See Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR from Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 2000).

47Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 39.

48Ibid., p. 265. See also Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003), p. 278.

49See Enzo Traverso, L’Histoire déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997), pp. 58–69.

50See Dan Diner, ‘Antifaschistische Weltanschauung. Ein Nachruf’, Kreisläufe. Nationalsozialismus und Gedächtnis (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1995), p. 91.

51Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance in Europe, p. 276.

52See Denis Hollier, ed., Le Collège de philosophie 1937–1939 (Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1995), pp. 67–8. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève. La philosophie, l’État, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), p. 336. See also Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 65–6.

53Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), p. 51.

54Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. xvii.

55Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. I. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985 [1956]), p. 23.

Illustration Credits

Figure 1. ‘Broken faces of the First World War’ © Ernst Friedrich, from Krieg dem Kriege, Berlin, 1924 (reissued by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore Spa, Milan, 2004).

Figure 2. Edvard Munch, Death in the Sickroom (Der Tod im Krankenzimmer), 1893. Oil on canvas, 134 × 160cm. Munch Museum, Oslo.

Figure 3. ‘Max Beckmann, The Night, 1918–19. © DACS 2015. Oil on canvas, 133 x 153cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-West-falen, Düsseldorf.

Figure 4. Hitler rehearsing for his speeches © Bavarian State Library/Image archive.

Figure 8. ‘Goering: The Executioner of the Third Reich’ © The Heartfield Community of Heirs/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2015.

Figure 9. ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’ © Collection Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine.

Figure 10. ‘We Smashed the Enemy by Force, We Shall Earn Bread by Toil. To Work, Comrades All!’ © David King Collection. 1920. Lithograph on paper.

Figure 11. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, ‘Il Quarto Stato [The Fourth Estate]’, 1901. Oil on poplar, 293 x 545cm. Museo del Novecento, Milan.

Figure 12. Volunteers of the Republican Militia © L’Illustration (lillustration.com).

Figures 2, 5, 6, 7 and 11 are in the public domain.

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures.

Abetz, Otto 104

Abraham, Karl 181

absolutism 34, 267–8

Action Française 26, 157

active minorities 204–5

Adorno, Theodor W. 42, 93, 237, 275–6

aerial warfare 93, 112–18

aesthesiology 173–4

aesthetic turn, the 219–20

Agamben, Giorgio 95, 241

agency 61–2

alliance system, collapse of, 1914 28, 38–42

Aly, Götz 207

Amendola, Giorgio 83

American Civil War 75, 147

amnesty 144–50

Anders, Günther 138, 177, 194, 225, 244, 276

annihilation, ethic of 108

anomic violence 241–2

Antichrist, the 242–3

anti-Communism 139, 271

anti-Enlightenment, the 28, 43

antifascism 5, 10–12, 260–1

cinema 265

Communism 17, 264, 266–72

mobilization 254–64, 270

and the Spanish Civil War 255–9

antifascist heroes 5–6

anti-liberalism 264

anti-Semitism 50, 57, 61, 186, 221–2, 272, 273

anti-totalitarianism 271

Aragon, Louis 254

Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung 194

Arditi, the 183–4

area bombing 114

Arendt, Hannah 28, 121–3, 126, 138, 196–7, 225

Ariès, Philippe 175

Armenian genocide 120

Armenians, refugees 122

Aron, Raymond 32, 268

Arp, Jean 183

atmo-terrorism 112

atrocities 16, 19

civil war 71–3

colonial 70–1

First World War 102

Second World War 90–1, 92–3

Auden, W. H. 257

Austria 40, 54, 77, 158, 259

Austro-Prussian war (1866–67) 36

authentic existence 197–8

authoritarianism 94

avant-garde, the 156–7, 259

Azaña, Manuel 4

Bainville, Jacques 40

balance of power system 36–42

balance of terror 41

Balkan wars (1912–13) 36

Baltic states, the 47, 59, 77, 124

barbarism 41, 93, 101–2

Barbusse, Henri 159

Barrès, Maurice 221

Bartov, Omer 107, 108

Basch, Victor 266

Bataille, Georges 259

Battaglia, Roberto 81–2

Bavaria 46, 206

Beckmann, Max 175, 177–8, 179

Belgium 101–2, 142, 143, 157

belligerent occupation 128

bellum justum 64–5

Benda, Julien 221

Benedicta massacre, the 16

Benjamin, Walter 4, 170–1, 194, 196, 220, 224, 237–44, 272

Berlin 45–6, 110–11

Berliner Tagblatt 157–8

Bernanos, Georges 246–7

Bloch, Ernst 224

Bloch, Jean-Richard 263

Bloch, Marc 164–5, 172

Bloxham, Donald 135

Blum, Léon 266

Bobbio, Noberto 159

Bodin, Jean 34, 66, 239

Bolsheviks and Bolshevism 25, 27, 28, 32, 231, 249, 251–2

dictatorship 96

extermination policy 9, 35

fear of 40, 49

internationalism 52–3

leadership 205

and legitimacy 228–9

use of terror 98–9

view of civil war 52

borders 124–5

Bordiga, Amadeo 205

Bottai, Giuseppe 208–9

Bourke, Joanna 173

Brancati, Vitaliano 97

Brasillach, Robert 256, 257

Braudel, Fernand 42

Breker, Arno 218

Brest-Litovsk, treaty of 45, 49

Breton, André 183, 220, 263

Broken Lullaby (film) 186

Bruck, Arthur Moeller van den 233

Brunetta, Gian Piero 173

brutalization 109–11, 173, 222

Buck-Morss, Susan 190–4

Bulgaria 77

Burke, Edmund 35, 123

Burrin, Philippe 236

Caillois, Roger 84, 163

camera, objectivity 90–1

Campos, Ismael Saz 149

Camus, Albert 141–2, 260–1

Canetti, Elias 126, 189

Cantimori, Delio 234–5

Capa, Robert 190

capitalism, global crisis of 2

Carretta, Donato 141

Caruso, Pietro 141

Casablanca conference, 1943 75, 76, 114

Cassirer, Ernst 224, 260

casualties

civilian 16, 32, 101–2, 106, 113, 114

civil war 91–2

Second World War 105–6, 114, 127

Spanish Civil War 56

catastrophe, age of 28

catastrophist scenarios 153–4

Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 164–5

Chamberlain, Neville 113

Chaplin, Charlie 94, 265

charismatic authority 96–8

charismatic community 96–7

charismatic power 97–8

Charles II, King of England 147

Cheka 51, 90, 99, 249, 251–2

Chesterton, G. K. 159

Churchill, Winston 32, 49, 60, 75, 76, 109, 130, 165–6, 268–9

church 239

cinema 172–3, 179–80, 186, 265

fear in German films 186–7, 189–90, 189, 193

civilians 4, 115

casualties 7, 16, 32, 101–2, 106, 113, 114

expulsions 118–26

stateless 121–3

war against 101–26

civilization 36–7, 93

civil religion 4, 264

civil wars 2–3, 4, 52, 70, 73–6, 80, 81, 250

atrocities 71–3

casualties 91–2

comparison with festival 84

emergence from 129

extreme violence 86–7

grey zones 82–4

interwar period 44–5, 45–56, 91–2, 184

legitimacy 56, 65–6, 100

psychological impacts 71–3

Second World War 57–61

Clark, Christopher 69

class genocide 9

class struggle 250–1

Claudel, Paul 257

Clausewitz, Carl von 66

Cochin, Auguste 9

cold violence 91–4

Cold War 16–17, 44, 60, 128, 139, 270

collaborators and collaboration 8, 16, 57, 58, 88, 139–50

collective guilt 138–9

collective innocence 139

colonialism 36–7, 70–1

Communism 25, 225–8, 265, 268

antifascism 17, 28, 264, 266–72

assimilation of antifascism 261–3

confrontation with Liberalism 33, 34

women under 215–16, 217

Communist International 48, 53, 55

Communist parties 17, 205–6

community solidarity 14

Congress for Cultural Freedom 272

conservative revolution 26

conviction, ethic of 6–8, 83–4

Corbin, Alain 92

Corradini, Enrico 159

Coubertin, Pierre de 68

counter-revolution 26, 48, 53–4

Crimean war (1853–54) 36

crimes against humanity 131, 133–6, 137–8

crimes against peace 131, 132–3, 136–7

Croce, Benedetto 262

Cromwell, Oliver 96

cruelty 86–7, 88–9

Cru, Jean Norton 168

cubism 156

cubist war 171–2

cultural bombing 116–17

cultural history 1–2

cultural pessimism 153

cycle 42–5

Czechoslovakia 125, 127

Czerniakow, Adam, suicide 8

Dagen, Philippe 171–2

d’Almbert, Alfred 67

D’Annunzio, Gabriele 159, 183–4, 222

Darwin, Charles 193

Deák, István 140

death 162, 163–4, 183–4

fear of 168–9, 173–4, 196–200

representation of 190, 170–1, 174–5, 177–9, 178, 179, 190

debellatio status 128–9

decadence 153, 210

De Gaulle, Charles 32, 58

degeneration 153, 223

Delumeau, Jean 173

democracy 2–3, 201, 222, 229–31

demographic growth 203–4

Denmark 142

deportations 102

Depression (1929) 39

Deutscher, Isaac 10

Dewey, John 247–8, 251

dictatorship 96–100

dictatorship of the proletariat 96

Die Weltbühne 263

Diner, Dan 48, 163

Dirlewanger, Oskar 81

distance, and moral indifference 93–4

Dix, Otto 172, 175

Donnedieu de Vabres, Henri 136

Douhet, Giulio 115

Dreyfus affair, the 221–2

Drumont, Édouard 221

dual power, formation of 74–5

dual state 100

Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume-Benjamin 193, 192–3

duelling 66–8

duty, sense of 73

Ehrenburg, Ilya 110

Eichhorn, Emil 46

Eichmann, Adolf 92

Einsatzgruppen 92, 104–5

Einstein, Albert 265

Eisner, Kurt 46

Eksteins, Modris 156

Elias, Norbert 34, 67, 85, 93

emancipation 93

empathy, danger of 3–4

empires, collapse of 45–56, 121

enemy 69–70, 71, 73–4

amnesty 144–50

dehumanization of 107, 110

humiliation 87

purging 139–44

trials 129, 129–30

enemy within 56

Engels, Frederick 30–1

English Revolution 34, 74–5, 95–6

Enlightenment 28, 123, 158, 260, 264, 265, 271

Estonia 47

Ethiopia 113

ethnic cleansing 125

eugenicists 154

European civil war 1

antecedents 30–42

cycle 42–5

interpretations 23–30

European public space 265

European unity, dissolution of 24–5

existentialism 197–8

extremes, age of 1

fascism 186, 225–8, 259–60, 265, 264, 273–4

aestheticization of politics 220–1

conflict with communism 28

and counter-revolution 26

emergence in Italy 53

futurism and 156

Nolte’s interpretation of 25–6

revolutionary nature of 235–6

support for 236

symbols 222

women under 215

and youth 206–9

fear 181–2, 194, 196

of death 168–9, 173–4, 196–200

in German films 186–7, 189–90, 189, 193

Febvre, Lucien 174

Fejtõ, François 126

Felice, Renzo De 10

female body 212–13, 214, 215

Fermi, Enrico 265

Ferro, Marc 89

Feuchtwanger, Leon 265

fifth column 56, 120

Finland 47

First World War 28, 43, 44, 161–7

atrocities 102

barbarism 101–2

battle of the Somme 163–4

battle of Verdun 24

brutalization of European societies 173

causes 68–70

Christmas Day truce, 1914 69

Churchill on 165–6

cinema 172–3

civilian casualties 101–2, 113

declaration of war 157

denunciations of 160–1

depictions of 168–75, 176, 177–80, 178, 179

Eastern Front 102

emotional impact 173–4

as European civil war 24, 25

and fear 169–70

German occupation of Belgium 101–2

militarization of political life 76

monuments 174–5

nationalistic fever 157–61

prefigurings 153–7

as sacrificial massacre 179–80

Second World War as continuation of 31–2

strategic bombing 112–13

total war 118–20, 163, 166–7

traces of violence 175, 176, 177

trauma of 180–95

treaty of Brest-Litovsk 45, 49

violations of neutrality 69–70

war crimes 101–3

war trials 130–1

women and 213

forced labour 120

force, proportionate 65

forgetting 148–50

For Whom the Bell Tolls (film) 265

Fosse Ardeatine massacre 7

Fraenkel, Ernst 100

France

Affiche rouge 77

amnesty 144–5

antifascism 11, 262–3, 271

antifascist immigrants 6

collaborators 142–3, 58

extra-judicial purges 141–2

fall of, 1940 104

and German expansionism 40–1

International Military Tribunal (IMT) 131–2

liberation of 58, 78

national imagery 213

nationalistic fever 157

reintegration 146

the Resistance 58–9, 78, 83, 218

Second World War casualties 105

Second World War civil wars 58–9

Third Republic 148

Vichy regime 58–9

Franco-Austrian war (1859) 36

Franco-British passivity 40–1

Franco, General Francisco 54, 94, 148

Franco-Prussian war (1870–71) 36

fraternity of peoples, principle of 35

Freikorps 76–7

French Revolution and Napoleonic wars 9, 30, 33, 34–7, 41, 43, 48, 74–5, 88–9, 96, 153

Freud, Sigmund 101n

Frevert, Ute 67

Friedrich, Carl 269

Friedrich, Ernst 119, 176, 177, 190

Frölich, Paul 233

front generation, the 204–9

Fuller, J. F. C. 181

Furet, François 11, 28, 28–30, 265–6, 268

Fury (film) 189–90

futurism 156, 197, 259

Gance, Abel 175

Garrone, Carlo Galante 146

Gasset, Ortega y 269

Gavi 12–16

Gay, Peter 264

generations 204

Geneva Conventions 65

genocide 4, 9, 62–3, 120, 134–5

Gentile, Emilio 235

Germans, ethnic, expulsions 125–6

Germany

antifascism 10, 263, 271–2

as Behemoth 202–3

casualties 106, 127

collapse of liberalism 268–70

collective guilt 138–9

collective innocence 139

comparison with Stalin’s Russia 267–8

cult of regenerative violence 223

damage 127–8

debellatio status 128–9

division of 270

expansionism 40–1

fascist seizure of power 99–100

First World War violations of neutrality 69–70

Freikorps 76–7

front generation 206–7

interwar period civil wars 45–6, 91–2

lost generation 207

nationalism 157–8, 233–4

policy of reconciliation 40

population 203

rearmament 40

refugees 121

rupture, 1933 244–5

Second World War casualties 106

and Spanish Civil War 55

Spartacist insurrection 46, 76–7, 205–6

superfluous generation 207

suspension of law 100

toleration of duelling 67

and the treaty of Versailles 38

unconditional surrender 128

unification 36

the Wandervögel 210

Weimar Republic 54, 201, 206, 229–31

will for revenge 191–2

Giarazzo, Pier Antonio 172

Gibelli, Antonio 169

Gide, André 265

Ginzburg, Carlo 93, 186

Globke, Hans 146

glory 162

Gobetti, Piero 260, 270

Goebbels, Josef 111, 115, 206, 234, 260, 263

Goering, Hermann 194, 195, 206

Gramsci, Antonio 3, 4, 159, 205, 225, 226

Graziani, Augusto 144

Great Britain 40–1, 105, 106, 117, 159

Great Dictator, The (film) 94, 265

Greece 59–60, 122

Greece, ancient 147, 148

grey zone 5, 6–7, 82–4

Grossdeutschland 125–6

Grosz, George 175, 177

Grünberg, Karl 216

Gueniffey, Patrice 9

Gueules cassées 176, 177

Guidi, Guido Buffarini 144

Habermas, Jürgen 3, 265

Habsburg Empire, collapse of 46–7

Haeckel, Ernst 158

Hague Convention 65, 79, 128

Halévy, Élie 204–5

Hamburg 45, 46, 77, 112, 114, 115, 116–17

Hangmen Also Die (film) 265

Hapsburg Empire, population 203

Hardy, Thomas 159

Harris, Sir Arthur 8, 114, 117

Hart, Reginald Clare 154

hatred 84–5

Heartfield, John 194, 195, 202–3, 265

Heidegger, Martin 197–8, 224, 225, 244, 245

Heiden, Konrad 192

Hemingway, Ernest 255

Herf, Jeffrey 155–6

heroic war 162–3, 172, 175, 202–3

Heyse, Hans 237

Hilberg, Raul 3

Hiroshima 112, 114, 138

Hirsch, Marianne 12

historians, role of 18–19

historical perspective 2–3

Historikerstreit 3, 25

Hitler, Adolf 25, 27, 40–1, 46, 94, 206, 233, 234, 259

as Behemoth 202–3

charismatic power 97–8

final solution 61–3

postcards 191, 190–4

suspension of law 100

war neurosis 194

Hobbes, Thomas 34, 65–6, 196, 198–203, 239, 240

Hobsbawm, Eric 28–9, 30, 215, 256

Hoffmann, Heinrich 191, 190–2

Holocaust 4, 41, 61, 61–3, 92–3, 104–5, 123, 124, 135–6, 272–6

honour 68, 162, 172

Horkheimer, Max 42, 275–6

Horne, John 101–2, 119

Horthy, Marshal Miklós 47, 121

Hoth, Hermann 108

hot violence 84–91, 93

house-on-the-hill syndrome 5

humanitarianism 5–6, 7, 8–9

human life, loss of value 155

hundred years’ peace 36–7

Hungary 46–7, 77, 121, 125, 127, 270

hyperbolic war 32

hysteria 182–5

Ibárurri, Dolores 218

ideological international civil war 28

ideological logic 29–30

ideology, power of 8

individual responsibility 133, 136

Ingrao, Christian 81

inhibition, loss of 85

intellectuals 220–2, 224–5, 228–36, 254–64, 268

Inter-Allied Information Committee 15

interdisciplinary approach 1–2

international law 75

International Military Tribunal (IMT)

charges 131–2

consequences 138–9

creation of 129–31

definition of crimes against humanity 133–6, 137–8

definition of crimes against peace 132–3, 136–7

and the principle of individual responsibility 133, 136

sentences 131, 132

International Socialist Bureau 38

interwar period 2–3, 44–5, 204, 219–28

armed insurrections 76–7

civil wars 45–56, 91–2, 184

moral dilemmas 245–53

preoccupation with death 196–200

irregular combatants, legal recognition 80. See also partisans

Italian Communist Party 205

Italian Fascism 207–8, 233–4, 259

Italian Social Republic (RSI) 57–8

Italy

amnesty 145–6

antifascism 10, 262, 271

antifascist heroes 6

Arditi del Popolo 53, 77

armed insurrections 77

civil war 14, 184

collaboration cases 143–4

deportation of Jews 15

emergence of fascism 53

Ethiopian war 113

extra-judicial purges 141

fascist seizure of power 99–100

First Republic 10

German occupation 5, 12–16, 57–8

grey zone 83, 83–4

Jews 15

the leggi fascistissme 100

liberalism 268

liberation of 13, 16

Liguria landings 13

nationalistic fever 159

partisans 13–17, 77, 81–2

population 203

racial laws 15

Risorgimento (1859) 36

reintegration 146

the Resistance 57, 57–8

Second World War civil wars 57–8

and Spanish Civil War 55

suspension of law 100

Traverso’s experience of 12–18

J’accuse! (film) 175

Jackson, Robert H. 133, 136, 138

Jacobinism 9

Jaspers, Karl 118, 126, 139

Jeanneney, Jean-Noël 67

Jewish messianism 241

Jewish question, the 273

Jews 7–8, 15, 50, 185

extermination of 41, 61, 61–3, 92–3, 104–5, 123, 124, 135–6, 272–6

Johnson, Andrew 147

Jonas, Hans 225

Judeo-Bolshevism, battles against (1918–20) 48

Jünger, Ernst 3, 4, 24, 113, 156, 169, 183, 187, 190, 197, 209, 210, 211, 223, 224, 225, 226, 234

jus ad bellum 64

jus in bello 64

jus publicum europaeum 33, 65, 68, 70, 102, 104

just cause 64–5

justice 82, 129, 129–39

just war 64–5

Kafka, Franz 161

Kant, I. 41

Kantorowicz, Ernst 162, 163

Karplus, Gretel 237

Kautsky, Karl 38

Keitel, General Wilhelm 75–6

Kellogg–Briand Pact 132

Kelsen, Hans 128, 132, 133, 136, 269

Keynes, John Maynard 39, 40, 269

killing 84, 163

Kirchheimer, Otto 231, 244–5

Koestler, Arthur 265

Kohn, Hans 31

Kojève, Alexandre 275

Kollontai, Aleksandra 215

Kollwitz, Käthe 174

Kondratieff cycles 42

Kondratiev, Nikolai D. 43–4

Konrad Adenauer Foundation 27–8

Koselleck, Reinhart 4, 174

Koyré, Alexandre 119

Kracauer, Siegfried 159–60, 179–80, 186, 187, 190

Kramer, Alan 101–2

Kranzbühler, Otto 138

Kraus, Karl 42, 159

Kriegel, Annie 11

Kronstadt mutiny 52, 252–3

Ku Klux Klan 190

Kultur 158

Kun, Béla 46–7, 121, 205, 225, 228

La Grande Illusion (film) 70

Lagrou, Pieter 106

Lamprecht, Karl 157, 158

Landauer, Gustav 46

Langemarck 162

Langevin, Paul 263

Lang, Fritz 179–80, 187, 189–90, 188, 189, 265

la Rochelle, Drieu 223–4, 257

Laski, Harold J. 269–70

Latvia 47

Lausanne treaty, 1923 121–2

law, suspension of 85, 100

Lazare, Bernard 221

League of Nations 39, 113, 122

Lebensraum 41, 61, 62, 104, 124

Leed, Eric 181

Lefebvre, Georges 185

legal civil war 56, 100

legal domination 228

legality, and legitimacy 228–36

legal revolution 99–100

Léger, Fernand 157

Lenin, V. I. 51, 53, 205, 227, 228, 229, 231

Léri, André 180–1

liberalism 9, 33, 34, 39–40, 201, 230–1, 239–40, 268–9, 271

Lieb, Fritz 243

Liebknecht, Karl 45, 46, 178, 205–6

literature, role of 5

lived experience 170–1, 173

Locarno Treaty 40

longue durée 43, 62–3

Loraux, Nicole 147, 149

Lorre, Peter 187, 189, 194

Louis XVIII, King of France 147

Löwith, Karl 24–5

Lubitsch, Ernst 186

Ludendorff, Erich 118–19

Lukács, György 205, 224–5, 228–9

Luxemburg, Rosa 4, 46, 161, 178, 205–6, 231

Luzzatto, Sergio 87

MacDonald, Dwight 137

Machiavelli, N. 70

Macpherson, C. B. 199

Madrid 56

Magris, Claudio 126

Makhno, Nestor 50, 51, 83

Malaparte, Curzio 31–2, 232

Malraux, André 255, 263

Mannheim, Karl 204

Mann, Heinrich 224, 254

Mann, Thomas 158, 224, 237–44

Manouchian, Missak 6, 77

Manstein, Erich von 108

Mao Zedong 79

Marc, Franz 24

Marcuse, Herbert 225, 244, 245

Marie, Jean-Jacques 86

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 156, 159

Martin, Jean-Clément 35

martyrdom 14

Marxism 25, 235, 244, 247–8, 250

Marx, Karl 26, 27

masculinity 209–10

mass culture 186

Massis, Henri 257

mass violence 3

Mathiez, Albert 157

Maurras, Charles 26, 223–4, 246

Mauss, Marcel 204–5

Mayer, Arno J. 9

mechanical equilibrium 39–40

Meidner, Ludwig 175

memory 3, 4, 147–8, 150

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 271

methodology 1–3

Metropolis (film) 179–80

M (film) 187, 189–90, 188, 189, 194

miliciana 217–18

militias and volunteer corps 80. See also partisans

Mitteleuropa 125–6

modernity 25, 26–7, 153, 203, 273–4

Möller, Horst 27–8

Moltke, Helmuth von 31

monuments 174–5

moral indifference 93–4

morality 6–8, 81–2, 249–50

Morgenthau, Henry 128

Moscow trials, the 247, 248, 266, 267, 270

Mosse, George 175, 182, 209–10, 216, 222, 235, 260

motherhood 213

Moulin, Jean 11

Munch, Edward 177, 178

Munich, beer-hall putsch 46

Münzenberg, Willi 261

Mussolini, Benito 53, 87, 94, 97, 207–8, 233–4, 235, 262

Nagasaki 112, 114, 138

Nantes, edict of, 1598 146–7

national imagery 213

nationalism 31, 37, 43, 158–61, 221–2

German 157–8, 233–4

and misogyny 210–11

national mobilization 119

natural law 64

natural rights 123

nature, state of 198, 199

Naumann, Friedrich 125–6, 158, 269

Nazis and Nazism 61–3, 206–7, 233

anti-partisan campaign 80–1

anthropological critique 259

as Antichrist 243

as Behemoth 202–3

justification of war 111

prefigurings 179–80

Neruda, Pablo 258

Netherlands 8, 142, 143

Neumann, Franz 184, 202, 244

Neumann, Sigmund 31

neutrality, violation of 69–70

Niekisch, Ernst 231–2

Nietzsche, F. 26–7, 28

nihilism 25, 236–44

Nolte, Ernst 1, 9, 25–8, 53

Norway 142, 143

Novi 16–17

nuclear weapons 112, 114, 138

Nuremberg trials see International Military Tribunal (IMT)

Olympic games 68

Oradour-sur-Glane massacre 92–3

Oreckovskij, I. 181

organic equilibrium 39–40

Orwell, George 216, 220, 255, 265

Ossietzky, Carl von 263

Ottoman Empire 36, 120, 121–2

outlaws 71, 73–4, 82, 123

pacifists 182–3

Pamplona 54

pan-Germanism 41

Papini, Giovanni 155

Paris 77, 78, 88

Paris Commune 148

Partisan Review 267

partisans 76–84

partisan war 81n

Patton, General George S. 109

Pavelić, Ante 59

Pavese, Cesare 4–5

Pavone, Claudio 81, 218

Paz, Magdeline 265

Pearson, Karl 154

Pemán, J. M. 54

Peukert, Detlev 207

photography 172, 193, 190–4

Picasso, Pablo 178–9, 265

Pick, F. 181

Pirenne, Henri 157

Planck, Max 158

Poincaré, Raymond 157

Poland 57, 104, 124, 125, 127, 132

Polanyi, Karl 36–7

political convictions 7

political justice 129, 129–39

political life, militarization of 76

political militancy, 1970s 17–18

political religion 264

political theologies 243–4

political theory 1–2

political turn 219–28

politics 64, 220–2, 224–5

population transfer 120, 124, 127

population, world 203–4

postmemory 12, 17

post-traumatic stress disorder 180–5

Poulaille, Henri 265

power, charismatic 97–8

Pravda 130

Preston, Paul 54

prisoners of war 105, 140

Protocols of the Elders of Zion 185

psychic economy 85

psychological impacts, civil war 71–3

public sphere 265

purges 139–44

Radek, Karl 49, 232–3

Ramos, Ledesma 257

Ranzato, Gabriele 90

rape 110–11

Rawls, John 3

reactionary modernism 155–6

rearguard combatants 115

Rechtsstaat, the 229–31

reconciliation 150

Red Army 110–11, 215

redemptory violence 242

Reed, John 254

refugees 102, 121–3

Reichenau, Walther von 108

Religion, Wars of 64

religious conflict 32

Remarque, Erich Maria 168–9, 197, 224

remembrance, political prohibition of 147–8

Renan, Ernest 148, 149

Renoir, Jean 70

Resistance 5, 7, 16–17

France 58–9, 78, 83, 218

Italy 57, 57–8

responsibility, ethic of 6–8, 83

restoration 145–6

revenge 88–9, 141–2, 191–2

Reventlow, Ernst Graf 233

revolution 9–10, 24, 26

Communist 43, 236

and counter-revolution 48, 53–4

and legitimacy 228–9

of the right 235–6

Trotsky’s defence of 98–9

revolutionary language 233

revolutionary right 43

revolutionary terror 98–100

revolutionary violence 249

Rhineland, militarization of 40

Richards, Sir Henry Erle 103

Riefenstahl, Leni 97

right to life 65

Rivera, Diego 220

Rivet, Paul 263

Robespierre, Maximilien 35, 89

Rolland, Romain 159, 161, 197, 266

Rome 141, 233–4

Rome, ancient 94–5

Roosevelt, Franklin D. 75, 76

Rorhwasser, Michael 216

Rosenberg, Alfred 32, 48, 206

Rosselli, Carlo 267

Roth, Joseph 126

Rousseau, Frédéric 181

Rousset, David 271

Royal Air Force, Bomber Command 113–14

Roy, Claude 78

RSI (Italian Social Republic) 57–8

Russell, Bertrand 159

Russian Civil War 39, 47, 48–53, 72–3, 83, 86–7, 89–90, 121, 248, 251–2

Russian Revolution 10, 27, 28, 44–5, 48, 254

October 25, 43, 74–5, 185

Russia, tsarist 36, 158–9, 203

sacrifice, morality of 6–8

sacrificial massacre 179–80

Salomon, Ernst von 210–11

Salvemini, Gaetano 267

Sarajevo assassination 29, 68–9

Sartre, Jean-Paul 254, 259, 271, 273

Scano, Andrea 16–17

Scheidemann, Philip 45

Scheler, Max 158

Schindler, Oskar 6

Schlageter, Leo 197–8, 206

Schmitt, Carl 3, 4, 79, 81n, 144, 184, 225, 226, 227, 237–45

definition of civil war 73–4

definition of crimes against humanity 134–5

on dictatorships 95–6

‘Legality and Legitimacy’ 229–31

political theology 100, 238–40, 243–4

reading of Hobbes 198–9, 200–2

Schnur, Roman 34, 100

Scholem, Gershom 237, 272

Sebald, W. G. 112–13, 118

Second World War 45, 164

air raids 109, 112–18

amnesty 144–50

atrocities 90–1, 92–3

battle of Stalingrad 24

bombing campaign 113–14, 115, 116–17

borders redrawn after 124–5

brutalization 109–11

Casablanca conference, 1943 75, 76

casualties 105–6, 114, 127

civil wars during 57–61

collaboration 57, 58

collective guilt 138–9

comparison with the Thirty Years’ War 31–3

as continuation of First 31–2

damage 127–9

declaration of war 132

Eastern Front 24, 31–2, 61–2, 81, 90–1, 104–11

as European civil war 24

fall of France 104

ideological logic 29–30

International Military Tribunal (IMT) 129–39

invasion of Poland 104, 132

Italy 12–16

Marxist interpretations 29–30

Normandy landings 115

Operation Barbarossa 61, 104, 104–11

partisans 76–84

population transfer 127

post-war purges 139–44

prefigurings 179–80

prisoners of war 105

rapes 110–11

refugees 122

representation of women 213, 215

revenge following 88

total war 60–1

unconditional surrender demands 75–6

as war against civilians 123–4

war crimes 103–11

war crimes tribunals 76, 129–39

and youth 209

secret sects 204–5

Serge, Victor 72–3, 98–9, 247–8, 251–3, 265

Serrano, García 257

shared values 36–7

Shoah, the 62, 135–6, 146

Sinclair, Upton 266

Sloterdijk, Peter 112

social Darwinism 154, 223

Social Democracy 38

social history 1–2

Socialists, peace offensive, 1912 38

social trauma 185–95

Sofsky, Wolfgang 87

Somme, battle of the 163–4

Sontag, Susan 192

South Africa 150

Soutou, Georges-Henri 39–40

sovereignty 33, 34, 65, 66, 238–9

Soviet Union 44, 265–7

casualties 127

comparison with Hitler’s Germany 267–8

deportation of collaborators 140

despotism 266–7

famine 51

German invasion of 104

the Great Terror 11

International Military Tribunal (IMT) 131–2

New Economic Policy 52

partisans 77

purges 140

rewards 275

and the Second World War 60–1

Second World War casualties 105–6

and Spanish Civil War 55

totalitarianism 11

treaty of Brest-Litovsk 45, 49

and the treaty of Versailles 38–9

war trials 130

women in 215–16, 217

See also Stalinism

Spain 6, 269

Spanish Civil War 45, 54–6, 60, 86, 178–9, 226, 227, 246–7

and antifascist mobilization 255–9

Falangist writers 257

International Brigades 17, 55, 255–9

pacto de olvido 148–9

partisans 77, 80

refugees 122

Republican atrocities 82, 90

Republican poets 257–8

symbolic daimension 256–7

and women 217–18

Spartacist insurrection 46, 76–7, 205–6

Spengler, Oswald 43–4, 223, 224

sport 68

Stahl, Friedrich J. 201

Stalinism 11, 247, 248–9, 252, 266–72

Stalin, Josef 60, 61, 94, 109–10, 111, 129–30, 275

state power 229

Sternhell, Zeev 235

stock exchange crash, October 1929 44

strategic bombing 109, 112–18

Strauss, Leo 199–200

Studer, Brigitte 215–16

Sudetenland, the, German annexation of 40

Tarde, Gabriel 67

Taubes, Jacob 237, 244

Taylor, Telford 117, 132, 135

technology, eroticization of 211–12

temporal categories 42

terrorism 18

theoretical transcendence, critique of 26–7

Theweleit, Klaus 210

Thirty Years’ War, 1618–48 30–4, 128

Thirty Years’ War, 1914–45 31–3, 34

Thucydides 71–2

The Times 37–8

Tito, Marshal 59, 79

Tocqueville, Alexis de 70

Togliatti, Palmiro 145, 205, 208, 267, 271

Tojo, Hideki 76

Toller, Ernst 46

Tönnies, Ferdinand 199

totalitarianism 2, 4, 9–10, 94, 267–8

total mobilization 24, 187

total war 32, 53–4, 60–1, 68, 115–16, 118–19, 163, 166–7, 212

Toynbee, Arnold J. 119

tradition, invention of 17

transcendence, Nolte’s critique of 26–8

transmissible experience 170–1

Traverso, Enzo 12–18

Triumph of the Will (film) 97

Tronti, Mario 245

Trotsky, Leon 3, 4, 43–4, 53, 74–5, 98–9, 205, 220, 225–6, 232, 247–53, 267

Truman, Harry 8

Ukraine 50, 83

Unamuno, Miguel de 269

unconditional surrender demands 75–6

United Nations 136

United States of America 43, 190

unity, dissolution of 24–5

unknown soldier 163

uprisings, 1848 43

Valéry, Paul 219

values, shared European 36–7

Vattel, Emer de 65

Vernichtungsmoral 108

Versailles, treaty of 38–9, 48–9, 124, 130, 132, 232–3

victims 3–4

victors, legitimization 138

Vienna, Congress of 36, 38, 39, 49

Villalvernia 16

Viola, Paolo 89

violence

anomic 241–2

against civilians 101–11

cold 91–4

historiography 9–10

hot 84–91, 93

legitimacy of 246

mass 3

as ‘midwife’ of history 9

Nazi culture of 81

as permanent possibility 189–90

redemptory 242

regenerative 223

revolutionary 249

state monopoly of legitimate 33, 65

symbolic dimension 86–7

traces of First World War 175, 176, 177

Vittorini, Elio 271

Volk 126

Völkischer Beobachter 32

Volpedo, Pellizza da 226, 227

Volpe, Gioacchino 119

Vovelle, Michel 88–9

war

biological justification 154

breakdown of law 68–70

changing views of 161–7

civilized 69

colonial 70–1

comparison with duelling 66–8

denunciations of 160–1

glorification of 162–3

heroic 162–3, 172, 175, 202–3

idealized 99–100

law of 64–5

and masculinity 210–12

as a slaughterhouse 164–7

women’s participation in 212–13

war crimes

definition 131

First World War 101–3

individual responsibility 133, 136

Second World War 103–11

tribunals 76, 117–18, 129–39

War Crimes Commission for Italy 144

war economies 119

war neurosis 180–5, 194

war of aggression 131–2, 134

Warsaw ghetto uprising 7–8

Warsaw Jewish Council 8

war trauma 180–5

Watchfulness Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals 263

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice 265

Weber, Max 6, 96–8, 138, 162–3, 229, 269

Wehberg, Hans 80

Weil, Simone 82, 246–7, 255–6

Weimar Republic 54, 201, 206, 229–31

Weiss, Ernst 185–6

Wieviorka, Olivier 58

Wells, H. G. 154, 159

Weltanschauungskrieg 107

West Germany 146

Westphalia, peace of 33, 36

Wieviorka, Annette 3

Wilson, Woodrow 39

witness. age of the 3

women 209–18

in arms 215, 217–18, 227

under Communism 215–16, 217

embodiment of national imagery 213

exclusion of 209–12

under fascism 215

the female body 212–13, 214, 215

the miliciana 217–18

and motherhood 213

participation in war 212–13

portrayal of 212–13, 214, 215

rape 110–11

Wood, Sam 265

workers’ movement 38

world civil war 34

world revolution 24

Wundt, Wilhelm 158

youth, impacts on 203–9

Ypres 70

Yugoslavia 59, 127, 140, 150

Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 245

Zeller, Magnus 202–3

Zimmermann, Herr 14

Zimmerwald 45

Zola, Émile 154–5, 221

Zweig, Stefan 160–1