9. Violenc and totalitarinism Flashcards
(109 cards)
1
Q
What is the dual state?
A
Fraenkel, who practised law in pre-Hitler Germany, finds that the Nazi régime consists, in fact, of two distinct states – one “normative,” the other “prerogative.” In the first the administrative and judicial bureaucracy operate according to rules; in the second the Party, and more particularly the Gestapo, operate free of any ultimate legal restraint. The second, of course, possesses complete power arbitrarily to supersede the first at any or all points.
2
Q
Where does totalitarian come from?
A
“The words totalitarian and totalitarianism are derived from the Italian totalitario and totalitarismo. They were first used as a play on words, a veritable conundrum, in an article entitled Majority and Minority by Giovanni Amendola which appeared in Il Mondo, May 12, 1923” (Bruno Bongiovanni)
3
Q
What was the term totalitarian originally referring to?
A
“Amendola coined the adjective «totalitario» to describe the true nature of the «winner-take-all» electoral system, which in those days was being debated in Italy’s lower house of parliament. “ (Bongiovanni)
4
Q
What was the totalitarian spirit?
A
“The totalitarian spirit, a threat to liberalist civilization, was for Amendola, and for the moment limited to Italy, a passing over to another age, or even the advent of a new paradigm, a historical turnover, which was here and there so utterly regressive, of political and civil forms of cohabitation” (Bongiovanni)
5
Q
When was the term totalitarian extend to mussolini?
A
“In an article that appeared in La Rivoluzione Liberale on January 2, 1925, the day before Mussolini’s famous watershed speech, Lelio Basso closed the semantic circle and coined the noun totalitarismo, synonym of the dictatorial manner of whoever, once having monopolized military power, scoops up all remaining power to transform it into a tool to be used by a single party that proclaimed itself interpreter of the unanimous will” (Bongio)
6
Q
How did mussolini describe his movement in 1925?
A
“It was somewhat like his January 3, 1925 outburst, when he took personal responsibility for what had happened, since the Matteotti incident. «You say we are ‹totalitarian›? Well, that’s right. We are ‹totalitarian›.»” (Bongio)
7
Q
How did Amendola use the term totalitarian in 1926?
A
“In July 1925, Giovanni Amendola, just before the attack and beating that led to his death on April 7, 1926 at a clinic in Cannes, used the adjective «totalitario» to compare Fascism and Bolshevism, intended as the total overturning of the foundations upon which the public life of European nations had rested for over a century” (Bongio)
8
Q
How did Arendt see totalitarinism?
A
“Hannah Arendt, despite being an heir to the great debate of the 1930s and early 1940s, actually denied the totalitarian nature of Italian fascism, which was considered a mere authoritarian regime that had let itself become involved, and was eventually destroyed, by the alliance with Hitlerism. According to Arendt, totalitarianism was indeed a category that incorporated only National Socialism (beginning in 1937– 1938) and Stalinist Bolshevism – beginning in 1928 and continuing until Stalin’s death” (Bongio)
9
Q
What sort of states are there in totalitarian regimes?
A
“Alongside a state that was indubitably authoritarian and a destroyer of freedom, though still based on laws (Normenstaat), there was another discretionary state founded upon the arbitrariness and the uncontested implementation of absolute political decision. This second state was in reality a non-state, a corrosive and destructive element situated within the heart of the law-based state” (Bongio_
10
Q
How did the dual states develop?
A
“Indeed, as the war situation worsened, the discretionary non-state tended to assume more weight until it progressively suffocated and crushed the state. At the center of the Nazis’ Bewegung was not the state at all, but the German Volk, Hitler’s master race, while at the center of the much more backward and archaic Bolshevism was the party, presided over by a cast with plebeian origins that had taken over the state, having survived with difficulty the great peasant revolution (1918 –1933) and the great purges (1934– 1939).” (bongio)
11
Q
How does Gerhard Beiser describe both national socialism and communism?
A
“Both, the national socialists one as well as Soviet communism, “were regimes with wide popular backing”; those in power imparted the “sense of moral certainty” and appeared in “moral garb”. The enthusiasm that was shown by large portions of the population in the effected countries for dictatorial systems and their ideologies led people in the 1920s and 1930s to draw analogies between ideologies and classical religions. Just as Bertrand Russell already in 1920 considered bolshevism to be a new religion, John Maynard Keynes said in 1925 that, like other religions, Leninism also had no scruples; Carl Christian Bry labelled communism a “religion in disguise” in 1925, Richard Karwehl, a minister from Hannover, spoke of national socialism in terms of “political messianism,” in 1931, Franz Werfel spoke of “religion or replacement religion,” and the Methodist Bishop John L. Nuelson from the U.S.A. wrote in 1938, “Hitlerism cannot be understood when one simply understands it as a political or social movement. It is a religion. It is certainly not a Christian religion, but a religion all the same. […] Hitlerism is certainly not just a religion; rather it is an organized church.””
12
Q
What does erligion give to people?
A
“Religion provides a cultural system that gives meaning, including conceivability, symbols and rituals in the form of communicative actions. With its help, cognitive and emotional, two central possibilities of dealing with contingencies are practiced and therefore direct human behavior in this world. On the one hand, religion satisfies man’s need for retribution, for restitution and retribution for what was withheld from him and repayment for what was done to him.” (Besier)
13
Q
What did communism and National socialism do?
A
“Communism and national socialism have competed with the model of a Christian revelation religion, as they promise to minimize the contingencies of human life – seen as primarily caused by repression – through an enormous political restructuring, and, in so doing, to reveal or even to devaluate the function of classical religion: system stabilization. “ (Besier)
14
Q
What was marxism leninism?
A
“This holistic understanding of “scientific theory” as a formula to save the world, which originated in the 19th century, especially in regard to its semantics, made Marxism-Leninism seem to be nearly a “secular”, a “political religion.”” (Besier)
15
Q
Why did people turn to national socialism?
A
“In national socialism, according to Varga, those declassed compensated for the loss of their “social honor” with a new “experience-group” -based doctrine, which appeared most utile to organize the disintegrating society. “As religious historians have long known, such despair constitutes the most important condition of every conversion and every new religion.” “ (Besier)
16
Q
What did national socialims and communism both seek to do?
A
“Though all their differences, according to an editorial in the Manchester Guardian from August 5th, 1936, what was constitutive for both dictatorships was that they undertook the arrogant as well as impossible attempt to establish heaven on earth.” (Besier)
17
Q
Voigt on religion
A
“Voigt states for both Lenin and Hitler a prevailing thought-reductionism as well as an absolute setting of a few norms, whose absolute claims on reality were realized through extreme violence: classes and class struggle for the one and race and folklore for the other. Voigt ascribes rational religious traditions to Marxism and irrational mysticism to National Socialism. The former destroys Christendom, the latter corrupts it.
18
Q
How does Maier see relion and politics?
A
“On the one side they exhibited “phenomena similar to religions,” on the other they behaved in ways that are decidedly “anti-church” and “anti-religious.” “We have, therefore, both,” writes Hans Maier in the introduction to the second volume, “a pronounced religious language, many formalities of religious and church history and at the same time an anti-religious face of modern totalitarianism.”” (Besier)
19
Q
Who could avoid the sacralization of politics?
A
“Almost no one was able to evade the fascination of creating a new society and a new, self-transcendent men, being allowed to dream of a redeemed existence, unless one was excluded from these final aspirations because of one’s blood line and was hence not allowed to take part in the revolution of life. “ (Besier)
20
Q
Where can we see the sacralisation of politics?
A
“Most symbolic for the decision to leave the old behind and start a new reality was the announcement of a new calendar. The personality cult that was borrowed from religious tradition and revolved around a revolutionary superhuman, who one could thank for the own exaltation, was at its highest in Lenin’s case, whose followers tried to make him “immortal” by mummifying him” (Besier)
21
Q
Where are some of the similarities between NS and USSR?
A
“One can not only see analogies here to religious history, but also between dictatorships. “Even though they are contrary in their contents, national socialist and Stalinist ideologies converged by justifying every sacrifice during their realization and the ability to commit in disregard of humanity. In this sense, they were connected as functional equivalents.” Hildermeier notes an entire list of common religious characteristics, such as the cadre’s “need for deliverance,” the establishment of rituals and celebrations, the creation of symbols, the staging of cultural worship as well as the justification of destitution and cruelty.” (Besier)
22
Q
How is communism like a religion?
A
“the historian Marcin Kula carried out a systematic examination of communism as a “political religion.” The author describes the analogies between the communist movement and the church. “Similarly to the church, the communist actions proceed according to a specific dogma.” Communism and religion pursue similar goals: the creation of a new man and of a community. The newly built socialist cities like Nowa Huta had a religious meaning: Places without sin should arise. Lenin and Stalin were stylized as secular saints; Lenin was almost worshipped religiously. He was depicted in house altars as a young, mature man. A real cult of relics developed around deceased great communists. Like the Christians consider Jesus’ grave and the basilica to be central holy places, the communists have an equivalent in Lenin’s mausoleum. “ (Besier)
23
Q
What is communisms catechism?
A
“Communism also has its own catechism, namely the ABC’s of Communism by Nikolai Bukharin and Jevgenii Preobrashenskii.” (Besier)
24
Q
If communism is a religion, why did it fail?
A
“One could say that one reason why communism perished was, that people simply no longer believed in it.”
25
How does the individual see themself in a totalitarian regime?
"The uprooted, modern man of the crowd no longer trusts his own judgment and becomes a victim of totalitarian propaganda and its ideologically-fictional world view. He has to believe in this artificial world view without own thought and without any personal spontaneity, if he does not want to risk being shut out. Those who resist this universal ideology are exposed to the state apparatus and to the secret police. The latter’s central device is but the concentration camp; such camps characterize the terror, as the essence of the total state" (Besier)
26
What are 6 things all dictatorships have?
"[Carl Joachim] Friedrich’s concept was based on six “decisive characteristics” that “all dictatorships have in common: an ideology, a party, a terrorist secret police, a monopoly on the media and news and a centrally controlled economy.” Only where all of these characteristics of the ideal type model are present together, constitute a “syndrome,” one can refer to the governmental system as a “totalitarian dictatorship.” The doctrine of a dictatorship wanted to encompass the entire life and all areas of society and pretended for its followers the vision of a utopian final state in this world." (Besier)
27
Did the public support totalitarian regimes?
"Moreover “research on perpetrators” underlined, that it were not only scrupulous incumbents, but rather a large portion of the German society that were either directly or indirectly involved in the massacres. Without their readiness to support, the national socialist system, an ineffective conglomeration of organizations often acting controdictorily, would not have been able to accomplish its goals. The majority of the German public so willingly followed the “charismatic leadership” of Hitler, that polycratic structures for the execution of the leader’s will and the national socialist ideology were not necessary." (Besier)
28
What are some distinct totalitarian characteristics?
"According to Aron the “totalitarian phenomenon” emerges in various societies, but admittedly with distinct characteristics. He also names important characteristics: the single party, the “absolute” ideology as the “official truth of the state,” a state monopoly on violence and the media, a far-reaching control of the economy and a comprehensive politicization, i.e. the “ideological dressing-up of all ideological mistakes and, as its final consequence, a terror of police as well as ideology.” Aron observed the most noticeable peculiarity of these characteristics in the national socialist state between 1941 and 1944 and under Stalinism between 1934 and 1938 as well as between 1949 and 1952." (Besier)
29
What is Aron's minimal criteria of totalitarian?
"Due to the increasing amount of empirical material, Aron reduced his concept of totalitarianism in the late 70s and 80s to two elements: a “merging of state and society and the implementation of an official ideology that commanded the obedience of all.” " (Besier)
30
What was the role of violence for the nazis?
"Between 1928 and the summer of 1932 Adolf Hitler and his NSDAP marched to a series of impressive electoral triumphs at the local, regional, and national levels that carried them from the fringes of German political consciousness to the very threshold of power. During these years, the NSDAP had assiduously cultivated a public image as an aggressive, brawling, combative party determined to confront the Marxist left not only at the ballot box but in the streets. Directed overwhelmingly against the Social Democratic and Communist left, political violence had been a staple of Nazi mobilization strategy and had paid handsome dividends since 1928." (Childers and Weiss)
31
Was nazi violence before 1933 unrelenting?
"The Nazis had selected their targets for terrorism carefully. The party tended to avoid direct confrontation with the state - the police and especially the military - and, until the fall of 1932, violent encounters with the parties and paramilitary organizations of the conservative right were infrequent. In their use of violence, the NSDAP had trod a very fine line between what Richard Bessel has aptly described as "roughness and respectability."" (Childers and Weiss)
32
Why were political losses occuring in the view of the nazi leadership?
"Less than three months after their greatest electoral victory, the National Socialists suffered a potentially crippling setback in Reichstag elections in the first week of November…In the aftermath of the November fiasco, the NSDAP was gripped by a crisis provoked in no small part, Nazi strategists believed, by the party's - but especially the SA's - embrace of political terrorism. What had gone wrong? Had political violence, an integral part of Nazi mobilization strategy throughout the party's dramatic rise, at last backfired?" (Childers and Weiss)
33
What were the elections of 1932 like?
"With four national elections and contests in virtually every state as well, 1932 was a year of almost constant campaigning. Each of those campaigns was accompanied by a rising spiral of violent clashes, usually between the storm troopers of the NSDAP, the SA, and the various street organizations of the KPD and the Social Democratic Reichsbanner. Political rallies routinely resulted in bottle- and chair-throwing melees, while the use of knives, guns, clubs, brass knuckles, and other weapons resulted in death or injury for hundreds. Indeed, in the final ten days of the July Reichstag campaign alone, the Prussian authorities reported over three hundred acts of political violence, in which twenty-four people were killed and almost three hundred more were injured. In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed to have lost seventy "martyrs". " (Childers and Weiss)
34
What did the SA resort to after electoral victories failed to get them to power?
"In the first week of August, frustrated SA units, severely disappointed by the party's failure to seize power following the 31 July elections, unleashed a massive terror campaign all over East Prussia and Silesia. The wave of bombings, shootings, and arson began on 1 August in Konigsberg. Acting on their own initiative, groups of SA men, convinced that only revolutionary action could now thrust the NSDAP into power, went on a binge of political violence that terrorized an entire city. Within hours the wave of terror spread beyond the capital, engulfing the entire province. On 2 August, Silesia also erupted in violence, as SA units, acting for the most part on orders from their regional and district leaders, went on the offensive against a wide variety of targets." (Childers and Weiss)
35
What began to happen to members of the SA before 1933?
"Throughout the late summer and early fall, symptoms of SA disaffection were widely reported. Morale in many SA units was low, and even reports of defections to the KPD and other radical formations had begun to circulate." (Childers and Weiss
36
What were the SA increasing dissafected with?
"Disaffection with the party's policy of "legality" and its emphasis on electoral campaigning had grown steadily within the SA over the year and by late summer had become a potentially serious problem. "The mass of SA [men] don't fully understand the repeated postponements of [decisive action]," the Untergruppe Hessen-Darmstadt reported in September. "They are pressing for the attack. To them, an open fight is preferable to this constant voting (WdhlereO), which in the final analysis leads to nothing, or at least to very little." (Childers and Weiss)
37
What was the attitude to legality within the rank and file?
"The September report from Stuttgart echoed these sentiments, adding that "a portion - probably the greater portion [of the rank and file SA men] - say to hell with legality."' The Karlsruhe SA was just as emphatic, stating simply that "no one [in the ranks] believes in the path of legality."" (Childers and Weiss)
38
Why did the nazis lose middle class support?
"The findings of the party's grassroots political network strongly suggested that the NSDAP had lost significant ground with elements of the middle-class electorate in November. Several reasons were given, but reports from all over the country insisted that SA terrorism in the late summer and early fall had contributed greatly to this decline" (Childers and Weiss)
39
What did Gau leaders say about SA violence?
"In discussing the party's poor showing in November, Gau officials in Silesia, for example, noted that "above all, the great number of terroristic acts perpetrated by the SA must be mentioned here.... Today dozens of SA men are sitting in prison for these deeds .. ., and, needless to say, the awareness of SA attacks has hardly encouraged a desire to get out to the polls in a large segment of the voters."" (Childers and Weiss)
40
Who did SA leaders criticise, showingt the split in the party?
"It is indicative of the magnitude of that conflict that at a meeting of the Nazi leadership in Munich on 8 November, SA leaders reportedly responded to charges of undermining the campaign effort by lashing out at Hitler's policy of legality, claiming that it, not the SA, was losing support for the NSDAP" (Childers and Weiss)
41
Who did people not mind violence by the SA being used against?
" Yet, in their bloody confrontations with the Communists or Social Democrats, the Nazis sought to tread a fine line, appealing to both a middle-class desire for "law and order" and a widespread antipathy toward the left. As long as Nazi violence was clearly directed against the Communists, as long as the party could present itself as the victim of leftist terror - a common refrain in Nazi self-representation - it could count on sympathetic coverage in much of the bourgeois press." (Childers and Seiss)
41
What solved the split in the party between leaders and the SA?
"Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933, at a time when the NSDAP's electoral popularity was clearly ebbing and SA patience was severely frayed, provided the party with the opportunity to resolve the interrelated strategic dilemmas that had surfaced in the fall campaign. With the NSDAP at last in power, the stormtroopers could be unleashed, allowing Hitler to meet the SA's desire for radical action and to do so under a cloak of pseudo-legality." (Childers and WEiss)
42
How could violence be portrayed after 1933?
"Nazi violence against the left, embraced wholeheartedly by the traditional right, could now be portrayed as necessary for the protection of the state and public order, allowing many of those who had wavered or defected in November to revive the fatal illusion that the NSDAP was merely a nationalist party with limited ambitions and could be safely entrusted with Germany's future" (Childers and Weiss)
43
Was the German Democratic Republic totalitarian?
"Peter Grieder has no doubts on this score, describing the communist system as a form of Stalinist totalitarianism which survived in East Germany, albeit with certain modifications, until November 1989. He describes with impressive scholarship the way in which Walter Ulbricht built up his domination of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the East German state in the 1940s and 1950s and the circumstances under which he finally lost power in 1971" (A J Nicholls
44
Did people like life in the GDR?
"hardly suggests enthusiasm for life in the GDR. Nor does the fact that Thuringian families living near to West Germany risked stringent GDR border controls to escape to the west. On 2 October 1961, for example, 12 families numbering 53 people, including the chairman of a co-operative farm, fled from Boseckendorf, a village within 500 metres of the border. A further dozen villagers escaped later" (Nicholls)
45
What explains acceptance of the GDR regime?
"A gradual acceptance of the system in the later years of the GDR was connected with a substantial drop in the rural population, which made old farming methods impossible anyhow" (Nicholls)
46
From which perspective do totalitarian regimes appear all-encompassing?
"Ross's general conclusion is that totalitarian theories may seem convincing when looking at the GDR from the top down, but are less impressive when observing what actually happened in the factory or on the farm. Society always retained a certain autonomy, not least because the lower-level SED functionaries were neither brave nor efficient enough to implement government policies effectively" (Nicholls)
47
How did people in the GDR interact with the regime?
"He refers to this as a form of 'creative accommodation' which operated within a widespread 'culture of disrespect'. The latter phrase seems to sum up the situation rather nicely" (Nicholls)
48
Should fascism be understood nationally?
"Generations of scholars have convincingly argued that “fascism” needs to be liberated from inside the containers of national historiography. It should be understood instead as a political phenomenon with a distinct intellectual core and diverse national roots, but also crucially an international history" (Kalis)
49
What was at the heart of fascism?
"Violence, I argue, was at the heart of the fascist history-making project. It was destructive of the status quo and generative of a “new order,” the perceived nemesis of one kind of transcendence (internationalism-socialism) and the necessary vehicle for counter-transcendence. Fascist ideology invested violence with a critical redemptive function—in the short term deployed against the perceived agents of “decadence” that fascism was fighting against, and in the long term as the vehicle for creative destruction that would pave the way for a new domestic and eventually global order." (Kallis)
50
Did violence differ across fascist regimes?
"Indeed attitudes to violence and anti-Semitism divided the burgeoning family of interwar fascists/authoritarians, since not all forces of the “new” radical right embraced violence in similar ways, to the same degree, or with comparable ferocity to the Nazi regime; and certainly not all of them subscribed to the Nazi Final Solution to the so-called “Jewish Question.”" (Kallis)
51
How was violence utilised by the nazis from the start?
"From the very early days of the movement, a taboo-shattering kind of violence became an integral part of National Socialism’s assault on “decadence.” It was justified and praised by the regime as a necessary process of destroying enemies and a crucial step toward the production of a new world" (Kallis)
52
How does Aristotle Kallis describe the british form of fascism?
"In Britain, the BUF began its political life with a rather restrained attitude to anti-Semitism, with Mosley paying particular attention to distance his movement from the NSDAP until 1932–33. Original BUF members, like Richard Bellamy, noted how “the roots of British fascism were Italian and not German,” underlining Mosley’s affinity for Rome and Mussolini, in combination with his early disparagement of the Nazi ideas as “Teutonic fantasies.” Mosley gradually came to see both the Italian and the German regimes as variants of a single historical force, with the BUF offering a distinct and original British variant—that is, not mimetic of either model"
53
What is the significance of croatian fascism?
"But it was in wartime Croatia that the two violent transnational visions of a “fascist epoch” and the Nazi “new order” produced the most brutal example of how local and national violent agency intersected with history-making creative destruction. The so-called Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, HND) was forged from the ashes of the occupied and destroyed Yugoslavia in the spring of 1941" (Kallis)
54
How did Croatioan fascists see themselves?
"Like most of its kindred contemporaries, the movement had come to perceive its role in dual, history-making terms: first, as the harbinger of a long-awaited national self-fulfillment and regeneration of the Croat nation in its own (independent) country; and, second, as part of the vanguard of a new radical international cause that would transform the course of European and human history" (Kallis)
55
What sort of violence did the Ustasha use?
"Other measures introduced swiftly included confiscation of Serb and Jewish property, marriage regulations following a mixture of religious, ethnic, and racial ideas, and restrictions in movement and freedom of worship. But it was the overwhelmingly unruly, wanton Ustasha mass violence, seemingly uncontrollable in scale and very often ritualistic in execution, that proved to be the defining feature of Ustasha rule in the NDH. With its performative, culturally symbolic excesses, which appeared to have shocked even the authorities of the German army in Yugoslavia, the extreme character of Ustaše eliminationist violence offered another glimpse of recontextualization." (Kallis)
56
How did Nazi violence influence violence abroad by other fascist movements?
"But they also become entangled in the process of a history of transfers and intersections, where one taboo-breaking violent initiative liberated similar or even more radical demand in another part of Europe. In this respect alone, the role of National Socialist Germany, as both the purveyor of a unique chiliastic vision of a “new order” and the fanatical, uncompromising agent of creative destruction as an integral part thereof, must continue to be highlighted." (Kallis)
57
What has been used to explain the appeal of totalitarianism?
"Inspired by cultural history, researchers have instead revived ‘political religion’ theory as an analytical tool to explain the popular appeal and the success of totalitarian movements. Against the background of some general considerations and controversies about the applicability of ‘political religion’ theory to such diverse phenomena as Fascist Italy, anti-clerical National Socialism and anti-religious Soviet Communism" (Ulrike Ehret)
58
How did Isa Vermehren describe the appeal of nazism?
"the Fuehrer’s car! . . . Everyone sprang to their feet, saluted with raised arms and shouted ‘heil’. We had to cling to the barriers to prevent us from joining in – it was that infectious. One was already inflamed by the preceding procession. It was a mass-hypnosis one could escape only with greatest efforts. We all agreed we did not want to succumb to this hysteria. But if you did not watch out you saluted without wanting to. Legendary!
Isa Vermehren had always strongly opposed National Socialism yet she could hardly resist the thrill that surrounded the movement and the regime’s spectacles. Many of her contemporaries recalled the same almost irresistible magic magnetism and happy excitement fascist and communist movements and regimes could generate." (Ehret)
59
What are the two aspects of totalitarian governments - the dual state?
"Their focus is no longer limited to the dictatorial state and its economic, judicial and bureaucratic structure as set out in Carl J. Friedrich’s model of totalitarianism, but includes the ‘inner life’ of totalitarianism, its ideology, festivals, rites, language and symbolism" (Ehret)
60
Why is political religion useful for explaining totalitarianism?
"A key analytical tool of this cultural interpretation of totalitarianism is the concept of ‘political religion’ or the ‘sacralisation of politics’, which is said to offer an explanation to the fanaticism of the extremist believers and their excessive use of violence against their perceived opponents." (Ehret)
61
Why does Arendt believe people turn to totalitarian regimes?
"According to Arendt, the atomisation of society the loss of tradition, particularly of the ‘Roman trinity of authority, tradition and religion’, revealed the lack of purpose and meaning of being man/woman. Emerging into such a void, an ideology like National Socialism or communism appeared to offer men the total revelation of the world and ‘escape into wholeness’ they had longed for" (Ehret)
62
What is common to all totalitarian regimes?
"Less philosophical than Arendt, Friedrich and his colleague Z. K. Brzeskinski set down a model of totalitarian characteristics shared by all totalitarian regimes. These included an ideology that was based on a radical rejection of contemporary society, encompassed all life and aimed at creating a new man, a single party state, a terroristic secret police that controlled society, a news monopoly, as well as power and weapon monopoly, and a centralised command economy" (Ehret)
63
What is modern about totalitarian movements?
"their use of propaganda, the management of the public sphere, their appeal to the masses and their adoration of modern science testify to the modernity of totalitarian movements. Richard Overy also describes the modernity of totalitarian utopia in his comparison of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. In both systems, ideology was intended as an instrument of progress; in the case of Soviet communism as a means to further human progress (‘however imperfectly crafted’), in National Socialism as an instrument to advance one particular people" (Ehret)
64
How does Mosse see fascism?
"According to Mosse, fascism was no ‘ideology in the traditional meaning of that term, but a faith which could not be explained in rational terms’. It became a new religion through the repetition of slogans and symbols, the use of choruses and the participation of the people in group and mass ceremonies" (Ehret)
65
How did Emilio Gentile define political religion?
" In his 1990 article on totalitarianism and ‘political religion’, Gentile introduced ‘sacralisation of politics’ as a fundamental aspect of fascism that placed itself alongside existing religious traditions as an ally in the subjection of the masses to the fascist state. He defines ‘political religion’ in totalitarian movements as
a type of religion that sacralises an ideology, a movement or a political regime through the deification of a secular entity transfigured into myth, considering it the primary and indisputable source of the meaning and the ultimate aim of human existence on earth.
" (Ehret)
66
How is religion and ideology similar?
"From a secular perspective ‘religion’ resembles ‘ideology’ when Gentile defines it as a
system of beliefs, myths and symbols which interpret and define the meaning and the goal of human existence, making the destiny of an individual and of the community dependent on their subordination to a supreme entity.
" (Ehret)
67
How does political religion differ from civil religion?
"‘Political religion’ is furthermore distinct from ‘civil religion’, as it is more extremist and exclusive. It neither tolerates other political ideologies and movements nor does it grant the autonomy of the individual, but affirms instead the primacy of the community." (Ehret)
68
How are outsiders to the political religion treated?
"Outsiders to this community are consequently seen as prime enemies against which the use of violence is legitimised (if not essential) in order to defend the ‘elect community’. The scale Gentile envisages is vast. It is only legitimate to speak of a ‘sacralisation of politics’ if myths and beliefs are transformed into a principal controller of a collective existence and become the subject of a cult." (Ehret)
69
Is national socialism a religion according to Gentile?
"Based on Voegelin, National Socialism is seen in this interpretation as a genuine religious phenomenon whose existential core was of religious character. At its roots lay therefore religious experiences that led to the manifestation of a new faith. Indeed, of the three European dictatorships, the National Socialist cult can convincingly be described as a ‘political religion’ (in Gentile’s definition). Klaus Vondung refers, for instance, to Himmler’s SS Ordensburgen with their ceremonial halls, the celebration of National Socialist holidays and festivals that meant to replace Christian baptism, marriage and funerals (but were hardly taken up by the population) – all this resembled the organisational and ritual forms of the Christian churches" (Ehret)
70
What is an aspect of christianity that hitler used?
"The Christian apocalypse, the prophecy of an endzeit struggle between the forces of light and dark before the chosen community can enter paradise, is projected onto Hitler’s worldview of a fundamental struggle between the races, between ‘Aryans’ and Jews, that had to be won before the German people achieved the promised Reich. " (Ehret)
71
What do critics of political religion say?
"Critics argue that neither of the two was nor saw itself as a ‘religion’. In response to such criticism Gentile and Griffin stress that ‘political religion’ refers to a secular belief. National Socialism and fascism certainly celebrated a sacralised ideology in their ceremonies and processions, the mysticism and the assimilation of eternal scientific laws to a religious narrative" (Ehret)
72
What parts of fascism and bolshevism appealed to people?
"Fascist ideology might have been woolly and communist doctrine contrived, but contemporaries did respond positively to the political content of these ideologies. In the case of fascism and National Socialism this was above all the promise to fight Bolshevism and restore order in societies that seemed torn between nationalistic (fascist) and communist factions, bordering on civil war. In Soviet Russia it was the pledge to safeguard the achievements of the ‘people’s revolution’ of 1917 that could regularly stir popular support for the party and its leaders" (Ehret)
73
Is Mussolini and his movement part of a political religion?
"Mussolini’s rule has traditionally not been part of the totalitarian duo of National Socialism and Soviet Communism because of the cooperation of the traditional elites and the Catholic Church and Fascism’s difficulties in pervading the countryside of southern Italy. That Mussolini has joined a ‘triumphirat’ with Hitler and Stalin in new totalitarianism studies follows the broader definition of totalitarian movements and their aspiration of (not success in) creating an all encompassing, total society." (Ehret)
74
Is race a necessary part of political religion?
"Racism was simply not important to Soviet Communism, neither as ideology nor as a means to rule. Yet the revived definition of totalitarianism by Griffin and Gentile manages to accommodate National Socialist racism with the aid of ‘political religion’. Not social structures, economic developments or class struggles determine the peculiar dynamism of totalitarian movements but their ‘palingenetic ideology’ or ‘political religion’. In the case of the National Socialist worldview this primarily takes the form of ‘race’, in Soviet Communism it was the welfare of one class, but both are part of the movements’ specific ideology" (Ehret)
75
Where participants victims or willing people in totalitarian political religions?
"Diverse studies, including those on Soviet mass spectacles and Soviet church policy, have shown the reciprocal relationship between the ‘totalitarian’ state and its population, where the latter should be seen as participants rather than victims of Stalinist Russia. Jochen Hellbeck and Stephen Kotkin assert that the state might have set the rules but the people would eventually craft their own ‘personal Bolshevism’. While these studies reject any notion of an omnipotent state, they leave at the same time no doubt about the pervasiveness of Soviet policies and culture that reached into the most private spheres." (ehret)
76
When was Sturm 33 established?
"Established in spring 1928, the Sturmabteilung’s (SA’s) Sturm 33 was known in the Berlin area for its bloody street fighting. Four years after its founding, the well-known journalist Gabriele Tergit observed in the Weltbühne that “People know it—when Sturm 33 is involved, . . . there is terror. But no newspaper says as much any longer, no police pass it on as news—it is civil war as habit.”" (Sven Reichardt)
77
How was action central to Sturm 33?
"through his actions, the individual became successively more entangled in the SA, which operated as a closed community in which security and violence, hierarchy and solidarity were closely interwoven" (Reichardt)
78
What did the SA offer?
"the organization offered young members a kind of emotionalized ersatz family that tied care to a specific paramilitarism and violence against Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews" (Reichardt)
79
When was the first instance of Sturm 33 violence?
"The first episode of violence occurred in November 1930 in Charlottenburg’s Edenpalast dance hall when around twenty SA men attacked members of the “Wanderfalke” Communist workers’ sports association who were celebrating. Following a smaller brawl with a working-class athlete named Willi Schwarz, the SA men intruded into the locale in the evening. First there was a scuffle in the cloakroom, after which they reached the upper hall and then shot into the mass of dancing people, injuring three men" (Reichardt)
80
When was the first murder of SA sturm 33?
"The first murder occurred less than a month later, at the end of January 1931, with the SA-Sturm locale again being at the center of the events. Four Communists had entered the locale to drink beer. Shortly after, one of the SA men, who sat in the adjacent room, spotted the Communists, who tried to flee from the men when they stormed in from the room. Again, the SA men stabbed the victims in the back, but this time one of the wounds was deadly: Max Schirmer, a laborer, was able to run a few steps down the street before collapsing" (Reichardt)
81
What did violence give to Sturm 33?
"This “dreadful balance-sheet of blood” brought the SA-Sturm a form of publicity entirely in line with what the Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels had envisioned. After his appointment as Gauleiter in November 1926, he had played the violence card to make the small, sectarian Nazi Party publicly known. “People spoke about us,” he would write a little later. “People discussed us and it did not fail to occur that among the public there were increasing inquiries into who we actually were and what we wanted.” And in fact, the strategy of violence had been successful" (Reichardt)
82
When and why were the Nazis banned?
"But since Goebbels could no longer control the escalation of violence he had unleashed, the party was banned for a year; it was allowed to resume activities at the end of March 1928." (Reichardt)
83
What claims did the communists make about the Sturm 33?
"What the Communist daily Welt am Abend noted in February 1931 had been reality for months: “According to all observations it turns out that in Charlottenburg a well-organized murder division of Nazis exists . . . [that] . . . Literally terrorizes . . . the area around the Hebbelstraße.”" (Reichardt)
84
What did the use of violence determine within the SA?
"The full willingness to use violence here served as a basis for prestige and renown: those who were most brutal were highest on that internal scale. Military experience and violent acts were considered legitimate ways of behaving through which one could command respect and indeed admiration" (Reichardt)
85
What was the link between unemployment and the SA?
"In September 1931, the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts depicted the connection between unemployment and joining the SA almost like a self-evident mechanism: “When the nineteen-year-old locksmith apprentice Konrad Domning, previously convicted and sentenced to a year in jail because he had participated in one of the Sturm 33 homicides, was asked [in court] why he joined the SA, he offered the classic answer: ‘My boss went broke, winter had arrived, and I didn’t have an apprenticeship!’” As simple as this explanation may seem in view of the mass of unemployed who took other paths as the path of political radicalism, it was very accurate when it came to the SA, an organization that contained a very high percentage of unemployed men" (Reichardt)
86
What age were the members of Sturm 33?
"The young average age of SA men is also very striking. In Sturm 33, the average age in 1933 was twenty-five, with 87 percent of the men consisting of adults too young to have fought on the front in World War I" (Reichardt)
87
What bound the people of Sturm 33 together?
"To a special degree, the Charlottenburg SA-Sturm was comprised of endangered young men or what the historian Detlev Peukert has termed “failed existences.” As noted, their crisis-stamped biographies were characterized by employers’ economically grounded cessation of business, employment beneath training level, frequent changes of workplace and type of work, frequent and long-term unemployment, often tied to social decline. What tied the Charlottenburg SA people together was their descending social trajectory, not simply belonging to a specific social stratum." (Reichardt)
88
What did the SA offer?
"As a militarized men’s association, the SA offered a kind of symbolic partial disbursement of a better future: of hoped-for communality and an existence filled with meaning. This was combined with the SA’s promise of a basic, violent change of “system.”...In place of the seemingly hopeless “fate . . . of unemployment,” a fresh perspective on the future had emerged." (Reichardt)
89
What is the significance of nicknaming?
"We see here that entry into the SA-Sturm was staged like a rite of passage in which new members gave up their old names, marking their new identity through uniformization and the assigned nicknames with which they would be addressed by comrades in the future. The new phase in life began with swearing an oath to the SA group, which served to strengthen the abandonment of the old identity and gaining of the new." (Reichardt)
90
What happened after full integration into the SA?
"By the end of socialization into the SA-Sturm, a moral dependence was developing in which the individual had to understand himself ever less as free and ever more as part of what Hannah Arendt has termed a “total organization.”" (Reichardt)
91
First is the first social development that drove people to Sturm 33?
"Three social developments supported the success of the socialization of political violence through the SA-Sturm units. For a start, the Great Depression that began in 1929 produced a form of unemployment that, as Detlev Peukert has impressively shown, was above all centered on youth and young adults in Germany. Intensified further, it would then affect male workers in the industrial cities" (Reichardt)
92
What is another factor that drove young people to the SA?
"Early on, the image of the heroic soldier left its stamp on children, a cultural continuity with the Great War being established in the Weimar period through media such as war novels and novellas and war films, and activities such as scouting games. In this way a young male generation was conditioned for war without having experienced it directly, in a period marked by increasing militarization of social and political life" (Reichardt)
93
What was the unifying element of the SA?
"The rejection of individual freedoms meant voluntary incorporation into a community that was internally hierarchized through charisma, willingness to use violence, and an absolutizing stance. Violence was the unifying element of the SA’s camaraderie." (Reichardt)
94
Did the violence leading up to 1933 end after the nazi seizure of power?
"In the years leading up to Hitler's appointment on 30 January 1933, Nazi violence was brought to the streets mainly by desperadoes and radicals, especially the Storm Troopers (SA). This violence became an integral part of the "seizure of power," and, in the wake of the Reichstag fire a month later, was sanctioned and given legitimacy by emergency decrees. Leading Nazis argued that the "terror from below" had to run its course in order to protect the German state from an (alleged) imminent communist putsch, and to safeguard Hitler's rule. However, this "hot terror" was allowed to continue long after the consolidation of power and in the absence of a genuine threat to the new regime.'" (Gellately)
95
What two sorts of terror operated in nazi germany?
"Alongside this "hot" terror, which involved open, even public, physical assaults on putative enemies, there developed simultaneously a cooler, administrative, or "legal" terror. Behind the scenes it was clear before the summer of 1934 that if and when violent means were to be employed, they were to be organized and directed not by the SA or party hotheads, but utilized purposefully and systematically by new institutions such as the Gestapo, the secret state police, the bulk of whose personnel were not part of the "brown hordes," but drawn from Weimar's "non- political" police forces" (Gellately)
96
What was the main perpetrator of terror after 1933?
"The newly formed Gestapo quickly became the key functionary of the terror system, armed with novel powers of arrest and detention, linked to other organizations of party and state, with an expanding network of concentration camps at its disposal. This system endeavored not only to enforce new "laws" and to keep track of old enemies, but also took on more ambitious tasks, such as the generalized surveillance and control of the population" (Gellately)
97
Why was violence used after 1939?
"Initially at least, some leaders, including Hitler, expressed reservations about unleashing the terror, because there were some people who merely took advantage of it to reap personal gains and thereby disrupted the economy. With the approach of war, and especially after its outbreak in 1939, many of these reservations disappeared as the regime cracked down on all forms of noncompliance in order to ensure that the home front not collapse as, it was alleged, had happened in the revolution of 1918" (Gellately)
98
How was violence typically used after 1933?
""hot" ("extra-legal") terror, reminiscent of the early days of the regime, flared up during the pogrom of November 1938 (Kristallnacht). But by and large, the preferred method of operation inside Germany proper, at least until the winter of 1944/45, was through administrative routine and police procedure, with violence and brutality meted out mainly behind closed doors at Gestapo headquarters, or in the camps" (Gellately)
99
What picture does the top down approach to nazi terror paint?
"Until recently most investigations of the Nazi terror system adopted a perspective of "history from the top down." These accounts apply the techniques of administrative and legal history, and delineate the institutional evolution and the roles of the main organs. The general impression that emerges is that institutions such as the Gestapo were fashioned into an effective "weapon" by skilled technocrats and (allegedly "apolitical") specialists inherited from the Weimar Republic. According to this view the Gestapo, which one way or another acquired the competence it needed to impose the will of the dictatorship, soon dominated the country and became a veritable "thought police."" (Gellately)
100
What can an explanation of the nazi terror state not be limited to?
"New perspectives on Nazi Germany can be gained from taking seriously his suggestion that the relations of power "necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State." On the one hand, "the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further ... the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations." In other words, the terror system, even in a so-called totalitarian regime, such as the one in Nazi Germany, cannot be explained simply by reference to the growth of the state and its technical competences" (Gellately)
101
What helped the functioning of the nazi terror state?
" If one reads-through some of the Gestapo case files which survive in Wuirzburg, Speyer, or Dusseldorf, what is immediately striking is the extent of unsolicited informing from citizens. These political denunciations from the population at large, as several recent studies make clear, were indispensable in the functioning of the terror system. Tracking political "crimes" such as "malicious gossip," as one Gestapo insider candidly stated in testimony at the Nuremberg trials, was possible because "of reports which were sent in from private persons or other agencies outside the Police."" (Gellately)
102
How should we view the public in the nazi terror system?
"Instead of (implicitly or otherwise) regarding the German population as largely passive, it might be more useful to portray them as more active participants who, even as unorganized individuals from time to time, played a role in the terror system." (Gellately)
103
How were the nazi and stalin terror systems different?
"Charles Maier's analysis of the "dispute" raises a number of points that are particularly relevant to the discussion here. He rightly insists that "if we distinguish among different forms of democracy, we should classify forms of terror." After some useful general comments on comparative methodology, he deals with the similarities and differences between the Stalinist terror of the 1930s and the one in Germany. His main contention is that to a considerable extent terror was utilized inside Germany "to enforce an iron law of predictable consequences, any deviation from which was likely to consign the deviant (and Jews were deviants) to the realm of arbitrary power, torment, and dehumanization. The principle of Soviet terror was to enforce the arbitrary discipline of nonpredictability." (Gellately)
104
How did consostency differ between germany and russian totalitarian?
"Nazi Germany law might be officially oracular, but practice was consistent if brutal. In the Soviet Union no consistency could be expected. Quirks of fate doomed people or saved them" (Gellately)
105
What can the nazi terror system not be reduced to?
"Nazi terror cannot be reduced merely to force or coercion which, to be sure, it certainly employed at times. If terroristic elements were involved in the microphysics of power as these operated in Nazi Germany (or in other such regimes), they presupposed some degree of freedom and popular participation as well" (Gellately)
106
When did the Gestapo abandon procuderal violence?
"From the summer of 1944, and especially during the winter of 1944-45, the "apocalyptic end" of Nazism could be witnessed in cities, towns, and villages across the country as the Gestapo and other local authorities (including the retreating military) increasingly despensed with the last semblances of procedure and carried out public executions on their own authority" (Gellately)
107
What could hitler's regime not rely on only?
"Hitler's dictatorship likely could not have sustained itself through terror alone. Hardly less important to the maintainence of the regime, indeed, to some extent fueling the willingness of citizens to participate in the terror, was that most Germans accepted the legitimacy of Hitler's government and were willing to comply and cooperate. There is little doubt that many welcomed the restoration of "law and order," destruction of the "Communist threat," the elimination of unemployment, and establishment of the economy on a better footing than many people, until then, had experienced in their lifetime" (Gellately)
108
Did people need to be terrorised by the nazis?
"Given these and other legitimating successes, it has to be said that many people did not need to be terrorized or coerced as much as tempted and enticed into offering their support for the regime." (Gellately)
