Guerra civil espanhola: história, historiografia e memória

De Gabriela de Lima Grecco e Luciano Aronne de Abreu

"La Guerra Civil española de 1936-1939 fue por dife¬rentes razones bastante más que un conflicto civil de trascendencia restringida. Las acciones bélicas y políticas que acompañaron la contienda coincidie¬ron en el tiempo y se entrelazaron plenamente con la aceleración de la política de los regímenes fascistas que acabaría desembocando en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. [...] La Guerra Civil de España logró no solo eco sino una movilización internacional, que habría resultado inexplicable en un contexto diferente al de la década de 1930. Miles de jóvenes voluntarios se acercaron a las cajas de reclutamiento [...] y accedieron a salir hacia un país desconocido para luchar en las Brigadas Internacionales [...] Y algunos se fueron al frente a vencer al 'bolchevismo'. Guerra civil más cargada de significados globales resulta difícil de encontrar." JUAN PAN-MONTOJO Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

• Idioma: Português
• Editora: Editora da PUCRS
• Data de lançamento: 22 de ago. de 2022
• ISBN: 9788539713226

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THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION OF NAZISM: A CRITIQUE OF THE RACIAL STATE PARADIGM

DIEGO MARINOZZI[ 1 ] [ 2 ]

Nazism is intrinsically a moral act, a stripping away of the old man, which is corrupt and depraved, in order to put on the new. (…) We were on the threshold of a new age, and that new age, like the first years of Islam and Christianity, demanded new men. So described Jorge Luis Borges Nazism in the Deutsche Requiem written in 1949, as a moral act, as a new age. In this text, Borges did something that Nazism’s historians would only start to do in the 1990s: to take into consideration the perpetrators’ perspective in the analysis of Nazism.

Along the decades, the term Fascism and the comparison with the atrocities of the Shoah has been used and misused (Grinchpun, 2017). The 1990s introduced several changes in the historiography of Nazism. Firstly, the discussion about the nature of Fascism and the possibility of establishing comparisons among these regimes was reopened. Sven Reichardt mentioned four models of Fascism that emerged in this decade, models that were represented by four authors: Roger Griffin (The Nature of Fascism, 1991), Roger Eatwell (Fascism: a history, 1995), Robert Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004) and Michael Mann (Fascists, 2004). Inspired by the studies of George Mosse and Zeev Sternhell, Roger Griffin looked for the essence of Fascism in its ideological elements. Roger Eatwell also focused his attention on the ideology of Fascism, especially in the protagonists’ point of view and their pragmatism, something that lead Eatwell to define Fascism as a third way between right-wing and left-wing politics. Robert Paxton looked for a more dynamic definition of Fascism paying attention to the development of the movements in different stages while Michael Mann focused his study in the social bases of Fascist groups (Reichardt, 2007). A second novelty of the 1990s was the hegemony of the Racial State Paradigm in the historiography of Nazism. One of the most representative moments of this change of paradigm was the conference that took place at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 where the Marxian class perspective represented by Tim Mason was totally displaced by that of Detlev Peukert, focused on eugenics and racism (Gilner, 2010). A third important change introduced by the 1990s was the fall of the Soviet Union and the consequent openness of archives to the Western world that lead to a multiplication of regional investigations among which the book of Christopher Browning was one of the most relevant.

In the preface to his microhistory on the Police Battalion 101, Christopher Browning stated: Never before had I seen the monstrous deed of the Holocaust so starkly juxtaposed with the human faces of the killers. In his case study, which today is a classic in the historiography of Nazism, he attempted to make an Alltagsgeschichte, or as Browning called it, a thick description, of the criminals. The heuristic potential of the investigation relied on the effort to see the human faces of the perpetrators. No one better than Browning himself could explain the importance of this analytical approach:

Another possible objection to this kind of study concerns the degree of empathy for the perpetrators that is inherent in trying to understand them. Clearly the writing of such a history requires the rejection of demonization. The policemen in the battalion who carried out the massacres and deportations, like the much smaller number who refused or evaded, were human beings. I must recognize that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader –both were human- if I want to understand and explain the behavior of both as best I can. This recognition does indeed mean an attempt to empathize. What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving. Not trying to understand the perpetrators in human terms would make impossible not only this study but any history of Holocaust perpetrators that sought to go beyond one-dimensional caricature. Shortly before his death at the hands of the Nazis, the French Jewish historian Marc Bloch wrote, When all is said and done, a single word, understanding, is the beacon light of our studies. It is in that spirit that I have tried to write this book. (Browning; 1992: Preface XVII, XVIII).

A couple of years later, in a more provocative way, Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners tried to follow the steps of Browning by writing a thick description of Nazism. In his last words, Daniel Goldhagen defined this historical phenomenon as the Nazi German Revolution. It was a revolution because it was a destructive/constructive enterprise. It was a revolt against civilization and at the same time a singular attempt to make a new man, a new body social, and a new Nazified order in Europe and beyond. The Nazis looked for a transformation of consciousness, they wanted to instill a new ethos. On the other hand, it was an effort to deny the Christian and Enlightenment belief in the moral equality of human beings. The purest manifestation of this effort was the concentration camp which was the defining feature of German society during its Nazi period. (Goldhagen; 1996: 456, 457, 459) Goldhagen wanted to reestablish the active voice. The perpetrators had to be taken to the center of the understanding enterprise, and to achieve this it was necessary to restore to them their identities, grammatically by using not the passive but the active voice in order to ensure that they, the authors, are not absent from their own deeds. Inquiring into the motivational dimension was also an inquiry into the social construction of knowledge. (Goldhagen; 1996: 6, 20)

These two books written in the 1990s introduced a kind of rupture epistemologique in the studies of Nazism. From then on, it has been impossible to ignore the perspective of the perpetrators. Since then, it is no longer possible to write about the Nazi dictatorship based only on the accounts and stories of the victims; the voices of the perpetrators should also be heard, the ideas behind the criminal acts should also be understood. Both authors were inspired by Geertz‘s thick description concept and tried to employ an anthropological focus with the perpetrators. It is my interest in this article to consider this use of the anthropological focus and its utility in the current understanding of the Nazism. More specifically, my interest is concentrated in the term revolution employed by Daniel Goldhagen and the heuristic value of this term at the time in explaining the nature of Nazism.

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First of all, we have to say that one of the core principles of the anthropological focus is the use of the terms and symbols employed by the protagonists. The question is how they interpreted themselves, what they were doing, and how they put it into words. In this aspect, Goldhagen behaved himself as an anthropologist by calling Nazism a revolution, due to the fact that the perpetrators used this term to make reference to what they were doing in German society, and later on in Europe in general. Like the French revolution, January 30, 1933, when Hitler came to power, was for many Germans the beginning of a new time. It was named by the regime as the National Socialist Revolution. A couple of months later, Hitler himself declared the end of this revolution on July 7, 1933, when, from his perspective, the process of Gleichschaltung had been accomplished. At the beginning of 1934, Hitler stated that all the modifications introduced during 1933 were a vindication of the history of the German people. The Enabling Acts and the Nazification of the provinces, trade associations and democratic political parties were the core of this revolution that started on 5 March 1933 and ended on 6 July 1933. Following the model of the French revolution, a new way of counting time was introduced. For example, the annual report of the German Labor Front of Düsseldorf in 1936 stated: Düsseldorf in the fourth year of the National Socialist revolution. (Schmitz-Berning; 2000; 424,425) Once Hitler proclaimed the end of the revolutionary process, he rejected the idea of a permanent revolution describing it as nothing but struggles for power among politicians greedy for spoils. In 1934, the revolution was part of the past; now was the time for stability. The National Socialist revolution had reached its goal by inculcating its philosophy of life in the German people (Neumann; 1944: 59; Schoenbaum; 1980: 84), and so the revolutionary spirit had to move into a new stage. As Ernst Nolte said: For Hitler, wars were the revolutions of healthy people, war was the strongest and classical value of life (Nolte; 1984: 494). In January 30, 1944, Hitler made reference to his revolution of 1933, describing it as the salvation of a republic that was sick, divided and infested by the Jewish spirit and that was a victim of the Bolshevism. (Schmitz-Berning; 2000; 426)

However, the use of the term "revolution" by Hitler was not new; he had already employed it to interpret and describe his Putsch attempt in the evening of November 8, 1923. At that time, he proclaimed a "national revolution against the Jewish government of Berlin." Afterwards, in Mein Kampf, he expanded his explanation of what he understood as national revolution by comparing this moment with the German Campaign or Liberations Wars (Befreiungskriege) between 1813 and 1815 and the national uprising which took place in 1914 when Germany entered into the First World War. The core of the revolution had to be a new configuration of reality which would save a German society that was defeated, divided, and worst of all: did not understand the sense of time. (Schmitz-Berning; 2000; 413, 414) It was in these years, and especially during 1924, that Hitler had the chance to conceptualize, systematize and consolidate his own configuration of reality. It was in the prison of Landsberg where Hitler worked on the plainest and most expansive statement of his world-view, Mein Kampf.

"Mein Kampf gives an important insight into his thinking in the mid-1920s. By then, he had developed a philosophy that afforded him a complete interpretation of history, of the ill of the world, and how to overcome them. Tersely summarized, it boiled down to a simplistic, Manichaean view of history as racial struggle, in which highest racial entity, the Aryan, was being undermined and destroyed by the lowest, the parasitic Jew. The racial question, he wrote, gives the key not only to world history but all human culture. The culmination of this process was taken to the brutal rule of the Jews through Bolshevism in Russia, where the blood Jew had, "partly amid inhuman torture killed or let starve to death around 30 million people in truly satanic savagery in order to secure the rule over a great people of a bunch of Jewish literati and stock-market bandits. The mission of the Nazi Movement was, therefore, clear: to destroy Jewish Bolshevism. At the same time -a leap of logic that moved conveniently into a justification for outright imperialist conquest – this would provide the German people with the living-space needed for the master race to sustain itself. He held rigidly to these basic tenets for the rest of his life. Nothing of substance changed in later years." (Kershaw: 1998; 243)

It was during this time that Hitler completed his metamorphosis from the drummer to the leader, not only in his own perspective, but also in that of his followers, now with a configuration of reality, something that was essential in his mission to rescue Germany. He himself recognized in Mein Kampf that "without the possession of a strongly held Weltanschauung (world view or ideology) one can not conquer the masses. (Mosse: 1964; Preface VII) In Hitler’s concept of revolution it was the perception of the reality" the same or more important than the reality itself.

Far from being original, the ideas in Hitler’s Weltanschauung were taken from the Völkish ideological tradition. In contrast to the concept of revolution held by the leftist movements and the Marxism tradition, the Völkish groups made no reference to social changes as the ones that took place in 1789 or in 1917. Quite the contrary, they defended the idea of revolution as an inner transformation, a change in the inner nature. "A revolution of the spirit which would reduce present reality to its true proportions in the service of the Volk." Such revolutions had already taken place in Germany, Luther’s protestant reform being one example, along with the revolution of the German romantics (Mosse; 1964: 96, 97) During the Weimar Republic these revolutionaries’ ideas came from conservative writers, publicists and intellectuals like Wilhelm Stapel, Max Hildebert Boehm, Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann and Edgar Jung, intellectuals who advocated an anti-democratic, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist conservative revolution

"A counterrevolution intended to set back the elementary laws and values that allow the person to be in connection with the nature and with God reaching so the true order. Inner values in place of equality, the fair construction of a graded society in place of the social decomposition, the organic Führer growth in place of the mechanic election, the inner responsibility of the real self-government in place of the bureaucratic coercion, the right of the Volksgemeinschaft in place of the luck of the masses" (Sontheimer; 1968: 120).

The main task was the establishment of a new order or a new ethos where Germany was thought of as the model to be followed by the rest of the western civilization. The leading figure, the Führer, was the key to this new ethos. Leaders of notable ability, wisdom, and substance were those who will bind each individual to the service of the community (Kershaw; 1998: 136). In the first years of the Weimar Republic, one of the most important groups that disseminated these ideas was the Juniklub of Berlin. In 1923, the leader of this group, Moeller van den Bruck, published The Third Reich, a book which exposed the chiliastic ideal comprising a new Germany based on the model of the Germanic past. It was necessary to revive and make operative in a new age the traditions of medieval Messianism. It was Moeller van den Bruck who established the division of German history into three periods: Holy Roman Empire (First Reich), the German Empire (Second Reich) and a future Third Reich (Mosse; 1964: 281,282).

As Ian Kershaw stated, the merit of Hitler was more to be a propagandist than an ideologue. He just "advertised unoriginal ideas in an original way. Others could say the same thing but make no impact at all. It was less what he said than how he said it that counted. (Kershaw; 1998: 133) The fact that in 1928 the NSDAP had 300 orators who held 20,000 public speeches in the whole territory is a clear evidence of the propagandistic intentions of the party. (Wildt, 2008; 48) It was an ideological mixture which expressed the sentiment and resentment of the second half of the XIX century represented in authors like Lagarde, Langbehn, Gobineau, Dühring, Chamberlain, Fichte, Hegel and Nietzsche. Following the teaching of Sorel about the violence in the French Trade-union, of Mussolini and his Fascism and the theories of Lenin, the Nazis were dynamic in using the agitation and violence in their struggle for the hegemony against the other groups in the right sphere," stated Broszat. (Broszat; 1960: 22, 23, 40, 41) The importance of mobilization was something that Hitler had very clearly in mind as we can see in his discourses during those years. For example, in the second half of the 1920s Hitler wrote a memorandum where he said

"The aim of the political organization is the enabling of the widest possible dissemination of the knowledge seen as necessary for the maintenance of the life of the nation as well as the will that serves it. The final aim is thereby the mobilization (Erfassung) of the nation for this idea. The victory of the National Socialist idea is the goal of our struggle, the organization of our party a means to attaining this goal. (…) Organization should be kept to a minimum since "a world-view (Weltanschauung) needs for its dissemination not civil servants but fanatical apostles. (Kershaw; 1998: 403)

In these years Hitler slowly learnt that he had the ability to reach the masses. He realized that he could just speak, so simply and yet so effectively. Finally, he had discovered the awaited Führer – in himself – and that his mission was to embody the spiritual revolution of the Völkish groups and sects in the German people’s perception of reality. The myth around Hitler was in part based on the idea that he was one of the Volk, one like everybody else that belonged to this community, to this Volksgemeinschaft. Ian Kershaw has shown that the general esteem to this idea was not to be found in the person of Hitler itself, moreover the sources of Hitler’s immense popularity have to be sought in those who adored him, rather than in the leader himself. (Kershaw, 1987; 2)

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In 1940, Hermann Rauschning, a former German conservative revolutionary, categorized the National Socialism as a Revolution of Nihilism. According to Rauschning, the main goal of the regime was to gain complete control over the country by revolutionizing the ways of ruling. To make this possible, two preconditions were required. Firstly, it was necessary for an élite to make up the avant-garde of the revolution, and secondly, a continuity in the revolutionary process of disintegration was needed. The difference compared with other movements, such as the Anarchists or Communists, was that the destructive acts were disciplined, organized and followed a rational pattern of guidance and command. Rausching compared this destructive spirit and its effect on the people with the experience of the Wandervogel movement (Rausching; 1940: 20)

"The things that stir most men and fire their enthusiasm are the rhythm, the new tempo, the activity, that take them out of the humdrum daily life: with these things much can be done, the masses can be inflamed. They are matters of emotion, with much the same appeal as the call of the first Wandervogel movement, which brought men away from the security of their homes and sent them on a roving life: an emotion compounded of romance and boredom."

The use of violence was considered a worthy effort which liberates creative moral forces in human society which lead to social and national renewal. Violent direct actions were thought to replace democracy while corporatism, militarism and myth replaced the parliamentary system. (Rausching; 1940: 20, 22, 29)

Arguably, therefore, the Nazi revolution was the war – not simply because the war accelerated political, economic, and social change to a degree which had not occurred in peacetime, but more profoundly because in war Nazism was in its element. In this essence, Nazism was truly a revolution of destruction – of itself and of others on an unparalleled scale. (Kershaw; 2000: 171)

This violent, destructive and nihilist dimension of the Regime led Franz Neumann to describe it with a name taken from the Jewish eschatology: the Behemoth. Behemoth and Leviathan were two monsters, the first one ruled the land or desert and the second one the sea. They were also monsters of chaos and masters over the other animals. We find monsters with quite similar characteristics in the biblical Apocalypse, which were interpreted as the reappearance of Behemoth and Leviathan shortly before the end of the world when they will establish a rule of terror–but will be destroyed by God. Thomas Hobbes took these two names and made them popular in the humanities, giving a completely different meaning to these terms. Leviathan designated, according to Hobbes, a political system of coercion in which vestiges of the rule of law and of individual rights are still preserved. On the other hand, Behemoth was the representation of the English civil war of the seventeenth century. In other words, it was the symbol of a non-state, chaos, a situation of lawlessness, disorder and anarchy. Neumann described his work as an ideological study of a regime whose principal aim was the resolution by imperialistic war of the discrepancy between the potentialities of Germany’s industrial apparatus and the actuality that existed and continues to exist. It was an ideology with magical beliefs as the leadership adoration and the supremacy of the master race. (Neumann; 1944: Preface, 40) It was hard for Neumann to find a definition of the Nazi political theory. He preferred to define its ideology by naming what it was not. It was anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and profoundly anti-rational. Under this situation characterized by complete lawlessness, the ideologies that the Nazis used were just techniques of domination. Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy did not believe in these ideas and they did not take them seriously. The ideological pronouncements of the XX century Behemoth had only a purely propagandistic nature. (Neumann; 1944: 375, 381)

In the 1960s, those who used the term revolution to analyze Nazism focused their attention on the social functions and effects that the regime had in the German society. Ralf Dahrendorf, for example, saw in the totalitarian system established by Hitler’s government an effort to remove the autonomy of all spheres of social life. All the traditional loyalties and social ties of the German people, as the ones related to the region, religion, family or class, had to be destroyed. The Third Reich replaced the organic relationships with mechanical ones. The Gleichschaltung through new organizations, such as the Hitler Youth, the Labor Front, the Labor Service or the army meant the erosion of ethnicity, class, religion and education differences. The Volksgenosse figure came to replace all the former