Abstract
‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Hitler said in a speech to his chief commanders before the invasion of Poland, silencing the latters’ fears that the Nazis’ ill-treatment of the Poles might be held against them by the so-called ‘civilized world’.2 Hitler’s rhetorical question is often (inappropriately) cited in the literature of the Holocaust, to show that, unlike the Ittihadist regime’s genocide of its Armenian population in 1915–16, the genocide of the Jews has been remembered, to the extent that it is now recognized as one of the defining moments of the dark twentieth century.
Fascism, National Socialism, or whatever you like to call this materialistic fervour which has become the inspiration of half a dozen Governments in Europe, starts by being an emotion; it only develops a plan and a philosophy after the emotional crisis has passed its height. And it is partly because Germany is still in the state of emotional hysteria that opinions and prophecies about her vary so tremendously. Vernon Bartlett
the problem of dictatorship is now one of the most urgent public problems. There are some Englishmen who regard it as more important than the Test Matches. G. R. Stirling Taylor1
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Notes
V. Bartlett, Nazi Germany Explained (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), p. 9;
G. R. Stirling Taylor, ‘Review of The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. X: The Augustan Empire 44 B.C.-A.D. 70’, English Review, 61 (1935) 629.
Cited in H. Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 4.
F. Borkenau, The New German Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), p. 132.
H.-J. Gamm, Der braune Kult: Das Dritte Reich und seine Ersatzreligion. Ein Beitrag zur politischen Bildung (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening Verlag, 1962), p. 63.
G. Norlin, Hitlerism: Why and Whither? (London: Friends of Europe, 1935), p. 5.
Cf. H. G. Alexander, ‘Whither Germany? Whither Europe?’, Contemporary Review, 144 (1933) 662: ‘the pagan faith that has brought a new hope to Germany’;
E. W. D. Tennant, ‘Hitler’, in The Man and the Hour: Studies of Six Great Men of Our Time, ed. A. Bryant (London: Philip Allan, 1934), p. 138: ‘in Hitlerism the Germans have found a new religion’;
Rev. E. Quinn, ‘The Religion of National Socialism’, Hibbert Journal, 36 (1938) 444–5: ‘The real religion of National Socialism consists in Germanism.’
See especially M. Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000);
and R. S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001);
see also H.-J. Schoeps and M. Ley, eds., Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion (Bodenheim: Syndikat, 1997);
C.-E. Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus: Die religiöse Dimension der NS-Ideologie in den Schriften von Dietrich Eckart, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg und Adolf Hitler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998);
P. Burrin, ‘Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept’, History & Memory, 9, 1–2 (1997) 321–49.
For interesting comparisons see E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)
and K. Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 11: ‘The Sacralization of Everyday Life’.
M. A. Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See also the introduction to chapter 2 below.
On evil as part of what makes us human rather than as a ‘transcendental’ concept, see J.-L. Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. B. McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
J. Katz, ‘Was the Holocaust Predictable?’, in The Holocaust as Historical Experience, eds. Y. Bauer and N. Rotenstreich (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), p. 24.
For the classic account, see R. West, The Meaning of Treason (London: Virago, 1982 [1949]).
See also A. Weale, Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994).
L. L. Jones, ‘Fifty Years of Penguin Books’, in Fifty Penguin Years (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 28, 30.
N. Joicey, ‘A Paperback Guide to Progress: Penguin Books, 1935–c.1951’, Twentieth Century British History, 4 (1993) 41.
On the concept of the ‘reading public’, see R. Williams, ‘The Growth of the Reading Public’, in The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 156–72.
See also R. Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
J. McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 59.
S. Wichert, ‘The British Left and Appeasement: Political Tactics or Alternative Policies?’, in The Fascist Challenge and the Policy of Appeasement, eds. W. J. Mommsen and L. Kettenacker (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 125.
S. Samuels, ‘The Left Book Club’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 2 (1966) 84.
G. Orwell, ‘Review of Searchlight on Spain by the Duchess of Atholl’, New English Weekly (21 July 1938)
reprinted in G. Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 1: An Age Like This 1920–1940, eds. S. Orwell and I. Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 383. Also cited in Joicey, ‘A Paperback Guide’, p. 37. Orwell also noted of the LBC (Collected Essays, p. 397), that ‘Here you have about 50,000 people who are willing to make a noise about Spain, China etc. and because the majority of people are normally silent this gives the impression that the Left Bookmongers are the voice of the nation instead of being a tiny minority.’
R. Griffiths, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Fascism (London: Duckworth, 2000).
Cf. D. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), for the idea of the ‘carnivalesque’ in explaining the Holocaust. See also my article ‘Genocide as Transgression’, European Journal of Social Theory, 6 (2003).
D. Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto, 1999).
J. A. Cole, Just Back from Germany (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), p. 328.
M. M. Green, Eyes Right! A Left-Wing Glance at the New Germany (London: Christophers, 1935). I discuss this book further later on.
M. Hermant, Idoles allemandes (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1935);
D. Guérin, The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany, trans. R. Schwartzwald (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994);
E. Levinas, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1990) 63–71;
W. Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, edited by Ernst Jünger’, New German Critique, 17 (1979) 120–8.
B. Crick, ‘Introduction’ to B. Granzow, A Mirror of Nazism: British Opinion and the Emergence of Hitler 1929–1933 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), pp. 20–1.
A. Schwarz, ‘British Visitors to National Socialist Germany’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28 (1993) 505.
A. Kolnai, ‘Pacifism Means Suicide’, The Nation, 148, 4 (21 January 1939) 87.
A. Kolnai, The Pivotal Principles of NS Ideology (handwritten ms, 1939), p. 3, in possession of Francis Dunlop.
R. Griffin, ‘The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (2002) 21–43.
D. D. Roberts, A. de Grand, M. Antliff and T. Linehan, ‘Comments on Roger Griffin, “The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (2002) 266.
R. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–39 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 53.
See also R. Bessel, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
E. Lengyel, Hitler, rev. edn. (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1933 [1932]), p. 239.
G. Orwell, ‘London Letter to Partisan Review’, Partisan Review (March–April 1942), reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Volume 2: My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, eds. S. Orwell and I. Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 213–14.
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Stone, D. (2003). Introduction: Responding to Nazism, 1933–1939. In: Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505537_1
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