The Aporias of Marxism / Archaism and Modernity. By Enzo Traverso
Enzo Traverso is an Italian historian of the Holocaust and totalitarianism
The Aporias of
Marxism: In a letter to Walter
Benjamin, dated 13 April 1933, Gershom Scholem described the rise of Nazi
Germany as ‘a catastrophe of world‑historical proportions’ which permitted him
for the first time ‘to comprehend deeply’ the expulsion of the Spanish Jews in
1492: ‘The magnitude of the collapse of the communist and socialist movements,’
he wrote ‘is frightfully obvious, but the defeat of German Jewry certainly does
not pale by comparison.’ These words, written in Palestine by a historian
of the Cabbala who had left Germany almost ten years before, seem today a good
deal more lucid than any of the Marxist analyses of the time.
In 1933, very
few intellectuals were aware of the fact that Hitler’s rise to power signified
the end of Judaism in Germany. The Jews, as Scholem bitterly observed in this
same letter, were powerless and continued desperately to cling to a national
identity that had been obstinately constructed over a century of assimilation.
The National Socialist laws were soon to abolish at one shot the gains made by
emancipation. The great majority of the tens of thousands of Jews who left
Germany were intellectuals and left-wing militants, Socialists or Communists,
whose Judeity made their position even more hazardous and precarious. The
official institutions of the Jewish community, notably the Zentraverein, tried
to find a form of coexistence and accommodation with the new regime.
German
archival materials: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/about.cfm
National
Citizenship Law & Law for the Protection
of German blood (1935)
The workers’ movement
was no more ready to deal with the catastrophe. From the end of the twenties,
Trotsky had seen the danger of German fascism: his warnings went unheeded. The
KPD and SPD were dismantled without offering any real resistance, after having
shown themselves incapable of obstructing the rise of National Socialism and of
providing an alternative to the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. However, in
1933, nazism unleashed its attack on the workers’ organizations, not on the
Jews. Nazi anti‑Semitism developed gradually and inexorably, passing through
several stages: first discrimination and the questioning of emancipation again
(1933‑35); then economic depredations and persecution (1938‑41); finally extermination (1941‑45).
The destruction of the
workers’ movement was not a gradual process: it was, in fact, one of the
conditions for the consolidation of the Nazi regime. Paradoxically, while the
parties, the press, and the left‑wing militants were outlawed and persecuted,
Hitler was establishing and encouraging the development of Jewish institutions.
His object was to drive a wedge between the ‘Aryans’ and the Jews and to
eradicate any sentiment of belonging to the German nation that the latter might
still entertain. The result was that the anti-Semitism seemed superficial and
transitory by comparison with the absolute opposition of National Socialism to
the workers’ movement. In other words, nazism was perceived as a regime that
was far more antiworker than anti-Semitic.
Marxist literature of
the interwar period tended to explain Nazi anti-Semitism as a ‘tool’ of the
ruling classes, without seeing in it a new phenomenon. The Jews allowed Hitler
to depict himself as an anticapitalist, even as he defended the power of the
great economic monopolies. The policy of economic ‘Aryanization’ (which in
effect benefited some of the principal German trusts) was an expression of the
growing concentration of monopolistic capitalism as it clashed with Jewish
commercial capitalism.
This thesis, originally propounded by the Comintern
press in a language often bordering on the anti‑Semitic, occupied a central
position in the writings of Max Horkheimer from 1939‑42 (his point of view was
to change in the Dialectic of Enlightenment). The only
noteworthy exception was that of Trotsky, who grasped the modern and
qualitatively new character of Nazi anti‑Semitism and in 1938 raised an alarm
that was truly prophetic about the danger of a policy of
‘extermination’ of the Jews in the event of another war.
Their analysis of anti‑Semitism—or
silence about it—constituted a major weakness in the works of Daniel Guérin,
Arthur Rosenberg, Otto Bauer, and August Thalheimer on German fascism. In
1942, the year in which the death camps began to operate, Franz Neumann
published Behemoth, where he categorically denied any possibility
of a Jewish genocide. In view of its ‘instrumental’ character and political
value, Nazi anti‑Semitism could not ‘permit a total extermination of the Jews.’
‘The internal political value of Anti‑Semitism,’ wrote Neumann, ‘will,
therefore, never allow a complete extermination of the Jews.’ The foe cannot
and must not disappear; he must always be held in readiness as a scapegoat for
all the evils originating in the socio‑political system.’
Behind these
words, written by a sociologist who was both Marxist and Jewish, lay not only a
false analysis of reality, but also a psychological attitude, a desire to
banish the nightmare of the immense danger that loomed more and more clearly on
the horizon. It is the combination of this false analysis and psychological
attitude, shared at that time by the Left as a whole, that explains why the
appeal made by Samuel Zygielbojm, leader of the Bund, who commited suicide in London
in 1943 to ‘protest the extermination of the Jewish people’ and expose the
passivity of international public opinion, went unheeded.
In the postwar period,
Marxism seemed to have forgotten Auschwitz. Works devoted to the analysis of
fascism did not discuss the Jewish genocide. On the other hand, a strictly
economic notion of anti‑Semitism reemerged in the rare publications on the
Jewish question by historians of the GDR. According to the arguments advanced
by them, it was not the Nazi regime but the great monopolies that stood behind
the genocide (still depicted as a marginal event as against the persecution of
insurgent Communists): Eichmann was the representative of ‘German monopolistic
capitalism as a whole’ and in particular of the chemical combine IG‑Farben. Of course, ‘analyses’ such as these were no longer the result of a tragic
failure to understand, but rather of a conscious mystification of reality. Since the sixties,
more responsible studies have begun to appear, some very well documented, but
the basis for an understanding of the Jewish genocide is still the notion of
Nazi anti‑Semitism as the ‘economics’ of German imperialism.
In an article of 1987, Kurt Pätzold accepts the ‘singularity’ of the genocide [die Singularität des Judenmords], which he attributes to three factors: the ‘barbarous role of the state,’ the number of victims, and the modernity of the means of destruction, but concludes by reaffirming that the extermination was consistent with ‘the interests of German imperialism, oriented toward a policy of world domination.’
In an article of 1987, Kurt Pätzold accepts the ‘singularity’ of the genocide [die Singularität des Judenmords], which he attributes to three factors: the ‘barbarous role of the state,’ the number of victims, and the modernity of the means of destruction, but concludes by reaffirming that the extermination was consistent with ‘the interests of German imperialism, oriented toward a policy of world domination.’
Though the motivation
is different, an altogether analogous attitude is now discernible among certain
West German Marxist historians–Karl-Heinz Roth, Götz Aly, and Susanne Heim.
They see a basic ‘economic rationality’ behind the Jewish genocide which is
underwritten not by Nazi anti-Semitism but mainly by the plan to conquer
Eastern Europe and create a new world order… read more:
see also
Sander L.
Gilman on Nazism, Paranoia, & Language
(Excerpt from Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews)
(Excerpt from Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews)
Towards a Marxist Theory of
Fascism (1997) by Dave Renton
