Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment
The ‘committed’ intellectual – en situation, according to the definition that Sartre would give some years later – experienced a golden age in the 1930s. The great turning-point that marked the politicization of intellectuals was not 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, but 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. This commitment often placed them in the magnetic field of Communism, though this was not the starting-point of their radicalization but only its result. In 1917, John Reed, for whom the Russian soviets ‘shook the world’, remained an exception.1 In 1934, on the other hand, Heinrich Mann was far from isolated when he published his anti-Nazi pamphlet Hatred.2 In 1924, Louis Aragon, the future official poet of French Communism, saw the October Revolution as no more than a mere ‘ministerial crisis’.3 No one could react to Nazism with the same levity. From 1933, the anti-fascist commitment of intellectuals was massive. In 1945, at the end of the war, antifascism was the hegemonic current in European culture.
The antifascist mobilization was marked, between 1935 and 1937, by two international congresses, the first in Paris and the second in Valencia, in republican Spain, with the participation of many of the most significant personalities in the culture of the time.4 It reached its apogee during the Spanish Civil War, when the defence of the republic was identified with that of European culture. Many writers enrolled in the International Brigades, or travelled to Spain to support the republic, including George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux and Arthur Koestler, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, Benjamin Péret and Octavio Paz. It was the dramatic character of the situation that explained their commitment, a choice of which the literature of the time has left us many testimonies. As Orwell explains in Homage to Catalonia, ‘I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.’5 Manuel, the hero of Malraux’s L’Espoir (1937), and Robert Jordan, hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), are both intellectuals who sacrifice art for the struggle. Politics took the upper hand. Simone Weil hated war and violence, but could not remain passive in the face of a conflict that touched her profoundly. ‘When I understood that, as much as I tried to believe otherwise, I couldn’t ethically refuse to participate in the war’, she explained, ‘that’s to say, I couldn’t wish every day, every hour, victory for some and defeat for others while doing nothing myself, I told myself that I must put Paris behind me and I caught a train to Barcelona with the intention of enlisting.’6 Eric Hobsbawm has shown very well the founding role played by the Spanish Civil War in the political identity of his generation. At that time, he wrote in The Age of Extremes,7 Spain was ‘the central front of their battle’ for all who wished to defeat fascism. In perfect symmetry, it likewise formed the ‘central front’ for those who sought to defend the fascist cause. In the eyes of Robert Brasillach, this was a ‘terrible struggle’ that had broken out ‘on one of the noblest European lands’, opposing ‘fascism and antifascism’. Far more was at stake here than just the fate of one nation. Spain, he wrote, ‘has transformed into a battle that is both spiritual and material, into a veritable crusade, the long opposition that was brewing in the modern world’.8
The Spanish Civil War also assumed a decisive symbolic dimension by drawing new frontiers and clarifying positions. The triangle between liberalism, Communism and fascism that had been in place since the end of the Great War, with the various systems of alliance that followed from it and the possibility, for a large part of the intelligentsia, of confining themselves to a neutral observer position, was now reduced to a single confrontation between fascism and antifascism. The choice became unavoidable. And the presence of many European writers in Spain, on both sides of the front, clearly shows the polarization of the intellectual field. The European civil war involved the militarization of politics and produced a deep metamorphosis in the world of culture: the transition from intellectual to fighter. The notion of ‘intellectual’ was enriched by a meaning unknown at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, as the attributes that defined its status were no longer simply pen and speech, but also weapons, even if only symbolically. It is true that the Great War had been an essential precedent from this point of view. But it was no longer a matter of responding to a patriotic appeal or putting one’s talent in the service of a national cause. The challenge now was to justify the choice of arms, sometimes to take up arms oneself, in order to defend a supranational cause in which the essential stake, far beyond the future of Spain, was the future of Europe.
Writers and poets put on uniform, not only Republican but also Francoist. Henri Massis and Paul Claudel wrote odes to the glory of Franco. Massis saw the ‘reconquest’ of Spain from the ‘reds’ as a ‘fever of creation mingled with the work of blood and death’, while Claudel paid homage to the warriors for the Christian faith, heralds of a ‘regenerated’ Spain.9 Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle each devoted a novel to the Spanish Civil War, respectively Les Sept Couleurs and Gilles. Their heroes crossed the Pyrenees to flee from bourgeois decadence and participate in the battle that was under way to forge the fascist ‘new man’. Falangist writers such as Ledesma Ramos and García Serrano discovered for themselves the myth of death in battle proclaimed by Ernst Jünger, in a conflict in which men worthy of the name carried a rifle and did not fear to face the enemy at the risk of their life.10
Republican poets responded to this aesthetic of combat by the politicization of their art – a politicization that involved the apology for antifascist violence as necessary. Two poems show this in an exemplary way. The first, ‘Spain 1937’ by W. H. Auden, postpones love until later, to make way for struggle:
Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love […]
Tomorrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but today the struggle.
Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death;
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.11
The second, ‘Spain in Our Hearts’, by Pablo Neruda, is a hymn to embattled republican Spain:
Generales
traidores:
mirad mi casa muerta,
mirad España rota:
pero de cada casa muerta sale metal ardiendo
en vez de flores,
pero de cada hueco de España
sale España,
pero de cada niño muerto sale un fusil con ojos,
pero de cada crimen nacen balas
que os hallarán un día el sitio
del corazón.12
Treacherous
generals:
behold my dead house,
behold Spain destroyed:
yet instead of flowers, from every dead house
burning metal flows,
yet from every hollow of Spain
Spain flows,
Yet from every dead child rises a rifle with eyes,
Yet from every crime bullets are born
that one day will find the target
of your heart.
This atmosphere in which commitment became crucial also explains the isolation of those intellectual circles that, despite seeking to anchor their reflections in the present, refused to be caught in the cleavage between fascism and antifascism. This was the case with Georges Bataille and the Collège de Sociologie who, on the basis of their anthropological interest in the sacred, subjected the myths and symbols mobilized by Nazism to a very subtle critique, but remained sceptical towards antifascism, as an ideology that in their view hid a new form of power.13 In the context of the time, such a position could hardly find political expression. It risked being confused with the ‘grey zone’ of the undecided and detached observers, or with an inherent self-restraint. Culture was polarized between fascism and antifascism. On the other side of the barricade, Drieu la Rochelle, Brasillach, Céline, Papini, Jünger, Godfried Benn, Wyndham Lewis and Knut Hamsun were not isolated. What became untenable was an attitude of indifference. The sense of paralysis, emptiness and impotence that invades Roquentin, the hero of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), had to give way to the ethical and political imperative of commitment that Sartre was to dramatize in The Roads to Freedom (1945) and proclaim in the first issue of Les Temps modernes, recalling that the writer had to be ‘in situation in his time’.14 In 1945, European culture stood under the sign of antifascism.
Several elements lay at the origin of the intellectuals’ political turn.15 First of all, Hitler’s coming to power in Germany – followed by Dollfuss’s clerical–fascist state in Austria, then Franco’s pronunciamento in Spain – produced a veritable trauma. If Italian Fascism had remained a national phenomenon, isolated, little known and poorly understood – to which a large sector of Italian culture had rallied, from D’Annunzio to Gentile, and even part of the avant-garde (the futurists) – the advent of National Socialism in Germany gave fascism a European dimension. Suddenly it appeared as a terrible threat not only to the workers’ movement but more generally to democracy and culture on a continental scale – a threat that went beyond the political sphere and seemed to challenge civilization itself. One needed only to listen to the declarations of the Nazi leaders to understand that the legacy of the Enlightenment was in danger: Goebbels proclaimed: ‘1789 will be erased from history’.16 Hence the need to preserve a threatened cultural legacy: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1933), written by Ernst Cassirer in the last days of Weimar, became a manifesto of German humanism in exile.17
Fundamentally, the Spanish Civil War only gave the European civil war a concrete and tangible expression that no one could escape. It was a political conflict in which values, ideologies, views of the world and conceptions of culture battled one another. The immediate motives that pressed intellectuals to join the antifascist movement and later the Resistance might have varied, with the predominance of a moral, political, or class choice from case to case, but they converged in the necessity of combat. What explains the spread of antifascism during the 1930s is neither the seductive power of an ideology nor the irresistible force of a propaganda machine, but its capacity to impose itself as a collective ethos on all those set on combating the dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco.18 As early as 1924, in his paper La rivoluzione liberale, Piero Gobetti presented antifascism as a ‘moral’ and existential choice, an ‘instinct’ even before taking the form of an ideology.19 The historian George Mosse stresses in his autobiography that antifascism was ‘both a political and cultural movement’, to which one could commit oneself by investing in it a strong emotional charge.20 But it was by Albert Camus, a writer who was never a Communist, that the moral wellspring of this commitment was most clearly asserted, when he defined the Resistance in 1944 as an ethical rediscovery of politics: ‘We do not want a politics without an ethic, as we know that only ethics justifies politics.’21 The fate of Willi Münzenberg, the master of Comintern propaganda who broke with the German Communist Party in 1939 in protest against the Nazi–Soviet pact, well shows how, without such an ethic, the Moscow apparatus would not have been able to control its own functionaries.22
The pure and simple assimilation of antifascism to Communism is a retrospective projection of anti-Communist history, rather than a judgement formulated on the basis of a contextual analysis. The chronology of the genesis of antifascism is enough to refute the notion that its origin was Communist. Italian antifascism had begun to organize in the émigré communities of France and the United States by 1925, at the time that the ‘special laws’ were promulgated that completed the transformation of Mussolini’s government into a Fascist regime. It was the leading representative of Italian liberalism, Benedetto Croce, who took the initiative of publishing in Il Mondo, on 1 May 1925, a ‘manifesto’ of antifascist intellectuals. Two years later, the exile Concentrazione Antifascista Italiana united the majority of the democratic parties outlawed by Mussolini, from Socialists to Republicans, but without the Communists, in thrall to the sectarianism that dominated the Comintern’s political orientation at this time.23 In 1935, with the adoption of the Popular Front policy, the Communist policy did no more than adapt to a turn that had already been begun two years previously, among the left as well as in the intellectual world, under the shock of the Nazis’ coming to power in Germany. In France, the first appeal for united action against fascism came a few days after the riots of 6 February 1934. It was signed by leading Surrealists (André Breton, René Crevel and Paul Éluard) as well as writers attracted by Communism such as Jean-Richard Bloch and André Malraux. A few days later, the philosopher Alain and the ethnologists Paul Rivet and Paul Langevin established a Comité de Viligance des Intellectuels antifascistes.24 In Germany, Die Weltbühne, the left weekly paper edited by the independent socialist Carl von Ossietzky, had launched a campaign for a united front of the left against the Hitler menace as early as 1930, in response to the Nazis’ first electoral breakthrough. At this time, the German Social Democrats still placed their hopes in Hindenburg, while the Communist Party persisted in denouncing ‘social-fascism’.25 In short, far from being a by-product of the Communist parties’ adoption of the Popular Front policy, the anti-fascism of the intellectuals preceded it.
Antifascism was also identified with the struggle for peace, in a continent where the wounds of the First World War were still open and the political balance seemed ever more precarious. Italian aggression in Ethiopia, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the war in Spain, the Sino-Japanese war; then Munich, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and finally a new world war: the escalation aroused a growing anxiety in Europe that was echoed in art and culture. Nor should we forget that fascism made intellectuals a target of choice, as Goebbels had shown with the autos-da-fé of 1 May 1933, and was evidenced by the thousands of writers, journalists, scientists, academics and artists forced into exile. Antifascist culture, moreover, was to a very large degree a culture of exile, borne by a crowd of pariahs who wandered from one country to another, ambassadors of a humanist Europe threatened with annihilation. Antifascism was expressed in a constellation of magazines in German, Italian and Spanish, published by exiles in Paris, London, Prague, Zurich, Amsterdam, Moscow, New York and Mexico. In the words of the historian Peter Gay, it was here that the Weimar spirit found ‘its true home’.26
If it is beyond debate that antifascism contained a plurality of currents (Marxist, Christian, liberal, republican) and did not present a unitary profile, it remains true that its different components all laid claim to the Enlightenment heritage. This basis of values was universally accepted, even by the Communists, who sought to reconcile the defence of democracy in the Western world with the dictatorship of the Soviet regime in Russia. In the final analysis, it was fascism that cemented the unity of its enemies. Antifascism opposed its pacifism and a certain cosmopolitan spirit to the mysticism of nation and war. It opposed the principles of equality, democracy, liberty and citizenship to the reactionary values of authority, hierarchy and race. Against the vitalist and anti-humanist irrationalism of the apologists for a totalitarian order, it inscribed itself forcefully in the tradition of the Enlightenment, in its universal conception of humanity, its rationalism, and its idea of progress. To fascist anti-liberalism, with its cult of leader and mass, it opposed the state of law, with its pluralism and individual liberties. In short, beyond its ideological and political cleavages, antifascism had the common objective of the defence of a threatened civilization. Fascism and antifascism confronted one another by each mobilizing their own values, their founding myths, their commemorations, their flags, their songs and their liturgies. Against the fascist political religion of force, antifascism championed the civil religion of humanity, democracy and socialism.27 Such was the shared ethos that, in a historical context that was exceptional and necessarily transitory, made it possible to hold together Christians and atheist Communists, liberals and collectivists. This convergence rested on a minimal but essential foundation, which relegated to the back burner conceptions that in other circumstances would be irreconcilable.
In the mid twentieth century, however, this return to the Enlightenment and the values of 1789 took on a new dimension, drawing the main lines of a European public space defined by cultural, ethical and political frontiers. Antifascism included all the constitutive elements of a ‘public sphere’ in the most traditional sense of the term: literature, science, the arts, the press. The antifascist cause was defended above all by a constellation of writers, including the most celebrated writers of France and Germany, joined by scientists such as the Nobel laureates Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, and artists such as Picasso and John Heartfield. It was expressed in a broad network of magazines and duplicated bulletins, side by side with certain mass-circulation press organs and sometimes entering the world of film, with movies such as Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), and Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). This public sphere clearly fitted differently into each particular national context, but it also developed internationally. The fascist threat was the cement enabling an exceptional coexistence of very divergent currents within a single movement, and antifascism was a public space in which choices crossed paths that were inevitably fated to come into conflict once this threat had dissipated. If, as Jürgen Habermas explains, the public sphere was born in the eighteenth century as a network of debate and critical exercise of reason, thanks to which civil society was able to differentiate from and in due course express its opposition to absolutism,28 antifascism organized and articulated the resistance of the democratic societies of the twentieth century to the advent of the modern dictatorships. It effected a union – temporary but real – between the workers’ movement and an intelligentsia that sought to give voice to the protest of a democratic public opinion. It is not accidental that antifascist intellectuals should often have seen themselves as philosophes of the twentieth century, whose essential function was to show the way to a public use of reason.
A complex (and perverse) dialectic between fascism and Communism lay at the root of the culpable silence of a large number of intellectuals towards the crimes of Stalinism. First the threat of fascism, then the immense prestige and historical legitimacy gained by the USSR during the Second World War, led a large section of their number to ignore, underestimate, excuse or legitimize Soviet totalitarianism. Many critics have stressed the limits of antifascist commitment, which was often both generous and myopic. It was not just the ‘organic’ intellectuals and fellow-travellers of Communism who refused to see the tyrannical aspects of Stalinism. André Gide’s Return from the USSR, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, all published between 1936 and 1940, were exceptions, which either remained unnoticed at the time they appeared, or – like Gide’s book – were soon forgotten after a momentary flurry of attention. In general, antifascism viewed the Soviet regime with a certain complacency, sometimes even with blind admiration. At the Paris congress of 1935, Magdeline Paz and Henri Poulaille had great difficulty reading out an appeal on behalf of Victor Serge, who had been deported to Siberia.29 The prevailing attitude towards the Soviet Union was not that of Gide or Orwell, but rather that of the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb – intellectuals who were fundamentally removed from Communism in terms of their background, culture and temperament, but who nonetheless published a book entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?;30 or that of the German writer Leon Feuchtwanger, who attended the Moscow trials and approved them enthusiastically in Moscow 1937. And yet it was not absolutely necessary to sacrifice to the cult of Stalin in order to defend the USSR in the 1930s.
The argument of François Furet, who sees the ‘entirely negative idea of “anti-Fascism”’ as a trick by which Communist totalitarianism extended its influence by disguising itself as a defender of democracy,31 simplifies historical reality in at least two ways. First of all, it forgets the non-Stalinist and even anti-Stalinist tendencies present within antifascist culture, in which very different individuals rubbed shoulders. These included Christian intellectuals such as Jacques Maritain, Luigi Sturzo and Paul Tillich, left liberals such as Carlo Rosselli and Raymond Aron, socialists such as Léon Blum, Rudolf Hilferding and Pietro Nenni, Trotskyists such as Pierre Naville, and the Surrealist writers André Breton and Benjamin Péret. Besides, this argument seems to ignore the fact that in Western Europe it was impossible to combat fascism without the contribution of the Communists and the Soviet Union. Mental repression of Stalinism was proportionate to the severity of the fascist threat. Following Malraux, Léon Blum chose to hold back his criticisms of the Soviet Union until 1938, while the pacifist Romain Rolland and the president of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, Victor Basch, decided in the end to accept the Moscow trials. Even Gide, attacked by the Communist press after his Return from the USSR (1936), recognized the necessity of an alliance with the Soviets.32 The psychological roots of such attitudes were grasped very well by the American writer Upton Sinclair who, in an essay on the Moscow trials, used the metaphor of the besieged city: ‘the people in besieged cities are simply not permitted to intrigue, or even to agitate, against the regime which is defending the city’.33
Few antifascists in Europe were prepared to denounce the crimes of Stalin, in the belief that, if the Communists were indispensable allies in the struggle against fascism, this did not justify silence about the Stalinist dictatorship, and that the antifascist combat itself risked losing legitimacy if Soviet despotism, with its trials, summary executions, deportations and camps, was accepted – to say nothing of the forced collectivization, which was not mentioned at this time even in the most bitterly anti-Communist literature. The latter included the Surrealists, who denounced the Moscow trials of 1936 as ‘an abject police set-up’, and the intellectual milieu around Partisan Review in New York, on whom Trotsky exercised a very strong influence. We could add the names of those Communist intellectuals who broke with Stalinism, including Paul Nizan and Manès Sperber, Arthur Koestler and Willi Münzenberg, not to mention the Italian liberal-socialism expressed in the movement Guistizia e Libertà. At his intervention at the Congress for the Defence of Culture in 1935, Gaetano Salvemini, exiled at this time in the United States, expressed his reservations: ‘I would not have the right to protest against the Gestapo and the [Italian] fascist Ovra’, he maintained, ‘if I tried to forget that there is a Soviet political police. In Germany there are concentration camps, in Italy there are islands converted into places of detention, and in Soviet Russia there is Siberia.’34 To Palmiro Togliatti, spokesman for Communist orthodoxy, Carlo Rosselli replied that his antifascism stood for self-management and a ‘libertarian’ Communism, not a new form of ‘cult of the state’ (statolatria).35 These examples prove that it was possible to be both antifascist and anti-Stalinist, and that the fascination exercised by Stalinism at this time over the antifascist intelligentsia was not irresistible. But these were exceptions, in a context in which the USSR was generally viewed with a favourable or indulgent eye.
This context also explains the great reticence with which the intellectual world received the first formulations of a theory of totalitarianism that presented Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany as twin forms of a new absolutism. Whether from the pens of ex-Communists (Franz Borkenau), liberals (Friedrich von Hayek), or Catholics of conservative orientation (Eric Voegelin and Waldemar Gurian), these theories appeared far more as the expression of a sceptical passivity and an impotent pessimism than of an effective and lucid commitment. The theorists of totalitarianism had certainly grasped the despotic nature of the Stalin regime, but the implicit conclusion of their argument – the impossibility of an alliance with the USSR – was unrealistic, especially after 1941. After being deeply shaken by the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939, the alliance between the antifascist intelligentsia and Communism was renewed in 1941, and strengthened by the Resistance. The majority of the theorists of totalitarianism themselves, starting with Raymond Aron, then acknowledged the indispensable character of a compromise with the USSR in the struggle against Nazism.
There is a certain anachronism in the approach of those who, like François Furet, oppose the beneficent virtues of a historically innocent and politically clairvoyant liberalism, the true antithesis of any totalitarianism, to the antifascism of the 1930s intellectuals. This vision is quite illusory, inspired by a retrospective conformism and devoid of any historicization. One of the factors in intellectuals’ adherence to Communism, in a context of international economic depression and the rise of fascism, lay in the deep crisis of liberal institutions, which were exhausted and shaken by the First World War, undermined by nationalist drives, and incapable of opposing fascism. If fascism was generated by the collapse of the old liberal order, how could the latter provide a basis for combating it? And it was a basis all the more questionable, in that while fascism had indeed destroyed liberal democracy, it had not attacked the traditional elites. In Italy, the main pillars of the liberalism that emerged from the Risorgimento – the monarchy, the bourgeoisie, and even a non-negligible part of the cultural world (for example, Giovanni Gentile) – had adhered to fascism. In the classic homeland of liberalism, Great Britain, Winston Churchill had saluted the victorious struggle of Italian fascism against the ‘bestial passions of Leninism’.36 In Germany, between 1930 and 1933, the elites shed their liberal façade and dismantled Weimar democracy in preparation for the advent of Hitler. After the deaths of Fried-rich Naumann and Max Weber, then the emigration to the United States of Carl Friedrich and Hans Kelsen, no leading figure of liberalism remained in a German culture dominated by the conflict between Bolshevism and Nazism.37 After the crisis of 1929, Keynes no longer believed in the future of capitalism; his therapies were essentially designed just to extend its survival. In such a context in Western Europe, the USSR seemed far better prepared to bar the way to fascism than did the traditional forces of an evaporating liberalism.38 In Spain, Ortega y Gasset refused to take a stand in the Civil War, seeing it only as an ineluctable consequence of the revolt of the masses in the age of modern ‘hyperdemocracy’. He left Madrid in 1936, resigned to seeing Francoism as the lesser evil.39 Miguel de Unamuno, rector of the university of Salamanca, had approved the coup d’état, but immediately been censored by the military. His death, a few months after the pronunciamiento, was a symbol of the defeat of the Spanish liberal elite.40 Liberalism now appeared as a phenomenon of the past, in deep crisis and fated to inevitable decline in a continent divided between Bolshevism and fascism. In 1936, the British Labour intellectual Harold J. Laski wrote that liberalism had been dismissed from the stage by the Great War, a historical turning-point that he compared with the Reformation and the French Revolution. It had a glorious past, but no future: ‘When a system is fighting for its life, it has no time for the habits of a debating society. The passion of conflict makes reason its slave.’41 The political commitment of intellectuals could now find an outlet only within the antifascist movement, as Piero Gobetti proclaimed in 1924, in his manifesto La rivoluzione liberale.42
It is certainly possible to criticize the intellectuals who maintained the myth of the USSR for having lied to themselves and contributed to deceiving the antifascist movement, making themselves propagandists for a totalitarian regime instead of the antifascist movement’s critical conscience. But we can also be certain that in Europe (the New Deal in the United States remains a separate case) no mass mobilization against the Nazi menace would have occurred under the leadership of the old liberal elites. The struggle against fascism needed a hope, a message of universal emancipation, which it seemed at this time could be offered only by the country of the October Revolution. If a totalitarian dictatorship like that of Stalin became the embodiment of these values in the eyes of millions of men and women, which is indeed the tragedy of twentieth-century Communism, this is precisely because its origins and its nature were completely different from those of fascism. That is what liberal anti-totalitarianism seems incapable of understanding.
Antifascist unity was achieved in the mid 1930s under the impact of the coming to power of the Nazis, followed by the Spanish Civil War; it was deepened on a wider basis during the Second World War and the Resistance. Its breakup began with the outbreak of the Cold War, culminating with the division of Germany in 1949 and finally the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956, which deeply marked the intellectual world. All previous crises – the Moscow trials, for example, then the Nazi–Soviet pact – had been overcome in the name of the unity needed to stand up to the enemy. After the war, this argument could no longer be invoked. The ideological and political currents that had cohabited for more than a decade were from now on divided by a conflict that split the world into two antagonistic blocs. If between 1941 and 1945 Communists and liberals had put their differences in cold storage in order to combat Hitler, their opposition now stood in the full light of day. The common defence of the Enlightenment against fascism gave way to two divergent readings of its legacy. Those who refused to choose between the USSR and the ‘free world’ found themselves marginalized. Liberalism abandoned antifascism to don the guise of anti-totalitarianism, which meant anti-Communism. Antifascism now ceased to be a shared ethos, and was identified in ideological terms with Communism.43 In the countries of the Soviet bloc it was quickly transformed into a state ideology, while in the West the Communists became official repositories of its memory. With the exception of Italy, where republican institutions were compelled to base their legitimacy on the rejection of a twenty-year-long Fascist past, the conservative and nationalist components of the Resistance showed themselves increasingly reluctant to call themselves antifascist.
In the intellectual world, the end of antifascist unity was symbolized by polemics and ruptures that had a strong impact on public opinion. In France, there was the open confrontation between David Rousset, a former Trotskyist deportee and now a Gaullist, and Les Lettres françaises, the literary review of the Communist Party that denied the existence of Soviet concentration camps.44 There was also the rupture between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Les Temps modernes. In Italy, Il Politecnico, one of the main periodicals born out of the Resistance, edited by Elio Vittorini, had to withstand the criticism of Togliatti in the pages of Rinascita, the official review of the Italian Communist Party, which attacked its conception of the autonomy of culture at a time when culture had to choose its camp and submit to the aesthetic and political norms set in Moscow.45 In Germany, the antifascist spirit that had accompanied the fall of Nazism and found representatives in the new generation of writers, as well as among former exiles, could not survive the division of the country into two states. In the Federal Republic it was tabooed, while in the GDR it was incorporated into official ideology.46 Aron, Silone, Koestler, Jaspers, Orwell and others joined the Congress for Cultural Freedom, while Sartre became, not without difficulties, a fellow-traveller of the Communists. Antifascism no longer defined the horizon of a European public space; it became a stake in the conflict over the public use of history.
Holocaust
The silence of antifascist intellectuals over the Holocaust is more complex to decipher. It is true that the genocide of European Jews – an extermination intended to be total – could not have been foreseen. However, a heavy threat hung over the Jews from 1933, even if its catastrophic culmination could not yet be grasped. The emigration of some 400,000 Jews from Central Europe between Hitler’s coming to power and the outbreak of war revealed the seriousness of this threat in unchallengeable terms. Yet, throughout the 1930s, anti-Semitism was never perceived by antifascist culture as a constitutive element of the Nazi system, but rather as merely a propagandist corollary of a regime that had singled out democracy and the workers’ movement as its enemies. Few intellectuals possessed the farsightedness of Gershom Scholem, who wrote from Palestine, three months after Hitler’s accession, to Walter Benjamin, exiled in France, a letter in which he defined the advent of Nazism as ‘a catastrophe of world-historic importance’. ‘The magnitude of the collapse of the socialist and communist movements is frightfully obvious’, he agreed, ‘but that of German Jewry certainly does not pale by comparison.’47 Later, in a letter to Benjamin of February 1940, he put the crucial question: ‘What will become of Europe after the elimination of the Jews?’48
Immediately after the war, the ‘final solution’ still seemed just one tragic page among many others, and held no more than a marginal place in intellectual culture and debate. Silence prevailed. Auschwitz was neither the Dreyfus Affair nor the Spanish Civil War – events towards which intellectuals had reacted by assuming their ‘responsibilities’. Sartre’s essay on the Jewish question, published in 1946, is a revealing example of this intellectual blindness. The editor of Les Temps modernes saw Jews as forgotten victims of the War, but he never made their genocide central to his reflection. After the Nazi extermination camps, the ‘Jewish question’ remained in his eyes bound up with the French anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair and the Third Republic. This famous essay, in which the gas chambers are hardly mentioned, might well be interpreted as the most significant symptom of the blindness of European culture in the face of the greatest tragedy of the century.49
This blindness had deep-lying causes, which arose both from the general context of the war and from the older incomprehension of the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism. Despite its specific characteristics, the Jewish tragedy was not dissociated from the suffering provoked by a gigantic massacre that had spared scarcely any nation, and its visibility was obscured in a continent in ruins. The fate of the Jews did not appear singular, and Nazi anti-Semitism was seen as an obscurantist and medieval residue. It was, in a stereotype that went back to the socialist culture of the late nineteenth century, the ‘socialism of fools’ – that is, simply a propaganda weapon. An industrial and bureaucratic genocide was an absolute novelty whose possibility did not figure among the categories of antifascist culture.50
This culture saw the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler only in terms of their ‘regressive’ character: anti-liberalism, anti-Communism, anti-parliamentarism and irrationalism. Fascism was thus reduced to its reactionary aspect. Only a few managed to see its roots in industrial society, mass mobilization and the cult of technology, recognizing it as a reactionary variant of modernity. From the ideological point of view, the fascist movements could not have been more disconcerting: a nebula in which conservatism and eugenics, cultural pessimism and ‘conservative revolution’, spiritualism and anti-Semitism, regressive romanticism and technocratic totalitarianism, all cohabited. This muddle of contradictory sensibilities concealed its ‘revolutionary’ nature, a rejection of liberal and democratic modernity aiming not at a return to a bygone past but at the establishment of a new order: hierarchical, authoritarian, inegalitarian, nationalistic and racial. Fascist mysticism was formulated in biological terms, its cult of technology was aestheticized, its contempt for democracy founded on the myth of the masses, its rejection of individualism proclaimed in the name of a ‘people’s community’ welded by war.
It is clearly impossible to grasp the modernity of fascism in its various forms on the basis of a philosophy of history that postulates the evolution of humanity towards the ineluctable triumph of reason. Yet an important characteristic of antifascism, which contributes to explaining both its complacency towards Stalinism and its involuntary blindness towards the Jewish genocide, was its bitter and uncritical defence of the idea of progress, inherited from the European culture of the nineteenth century: ‘The men and women of the Resistance resembled their spiritual ancestors of the eighteenth century, the philosophes.’51 The constellation of magazines that arose or revived in 1945 – Esprit, Les Temps modernes and Critique in France; Der Ruf and Der Anfang in Germany; Il Ponte, Belfagor and Nuovo Politecnico in Italy – explicitly appealed to this rationalism embodied by Lessing, Voltaire and Cattaneo. The return to freedom and democracy was experienced as a new triumph of the Enlightenment, reason and right, which made fascism appear a parenthesis, an ephemeral episode, an anachronistic and absurd fall-back into ancestral barbarism, a vain attempt to arrest the ‘march of history’. In this climate of confidence in the future, when history seemed finally to have resumed its natural course, the Nazi extermination camps were no more than the result of a tragic derailment. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, drew the rewards of the immense tribute it had paid to defeat Nazism. The struggle for progress coincided with defence of the socialist homeland. The philosopher Alexandre Kojève believed that he saw in Stalin, as Hegel in Jena had seen in Napoleon, the Weltgeist, the man of the end of history.52
For Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, National Socialism was a refutation of Hegel’s philosophy of history. In 1944, he also wrote that he had seen the Weltgeist, but in his case not on horseback, nor in the form of a Soviet tank, but in Hitler’s V2 rockets, these robot-bombs that, like fascism itself, ‘combined utmost technical perfection with total blindness’.53 His position – the philosophy of the Frankfurt School whose Jewish founders were now all in exile – shared the antifascist culture while remaining at its margins, aware that, despite its defeat, Nazism had already changed the face of the century and the image of man. For them, recognition of Auschwitz as a rupture in civilization was indissociable from a radical challenge to the idea of progress. If Nazism had tried to wipe out the legacy of the Enlightenment, it had also to be understood dialectically as a product of civilization itself, with its technical and instrumental rationality now released from an emancipatory aim and reduced to a project of domination. On this view, Auschwitz could not be apprehended as a ‘regression’ or a parenthesis, but was rather an authentic product of the West: the emergence of its destructive side. For Horkheimer and Adorno, in 1944, Auschwitz was the symbol of a ‘self-destruction of rationalism’.54 Far from celebrating a new triumph of Enlightenment, these isolated figures refused to see the Second World War as a victorious epic of progress. Before the spectacle of a civilization that had transformed modern technology into a gigantic destructive power, the only sentiment possible was one of shame.
A ‘promethean shame’,55 wrote Günter Anders, to match the disaster.
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1John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (London: Penguin, 2007).
2Heinrich Mann, Der Haß (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987).
3Louis Aragon, ‘Communisme et révolution’, in Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme, suivi de Documents surréalistes (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 204. On the impact of the October Revolution on the European intelligentsia, see Marcello Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS. L’Occidente e la Russia di Stalin (1927–1956) (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990), Chapters 1 and 2.
4On the Paris congress of 1935, see Sandra Teroni, ed., Pour la défense de la culture. Les textes du Congrès international des écrivains, Paris, juin 1935 (Dijon: Presses universitaires de Dijon, 2005). See also Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), Chapter 27; and Herbert Lottman, La Rive gauche. Du Front populaire à la guerre froide (Paris: Seuil, 1981), vol. II, Chapter 6. On the Valencia congress, see Andrés Trapiello, Las armas y las letras. Literatura y guerra civil (1936–1939) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1994), Chapter 10.
5George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 2.
6Simone Weil, ‘Letter to Georges Bernanos’, in Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1977), p. 77.
7Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 160.
8Robert Brasillach, Les Sept Couleurs (Paris: Godefroy de Bouillon, 1995), p. 156.
9See Christopher G. Flood, ‘Crusade or Genocide? French Catholic Discourse on the Spanish Civil War’, in Janet Pérez and Wendell Aycock, eds, The Spanish Civil War in Literature (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990), pp. 60–2.
10See Gareth Thomas, The Novel of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1975) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Chapter 4.
11W. H. Auden, ‘Spain 1937’, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), pp. 424–5. This was the original version of the poem, dated April 1937; a later version, slightly modified, is on p. 212 of the same text. It has never been translated into French, owing to its rejection by the author.
12Pablo Neruda, ‘I Explain Some Things’, in The Essential Neruda (Selected Poems), ed. Mark Eisner (San Francisco: City Lights, 2004), p. 67. The original is ‘España en el corazón. Himno a las glorias del pueblo en guerra (1936–1937)’, Obras completas, I. 1923–1954 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 1999), p. 371.
13On Bataille’s reticence towards antifascism, see Denis Hollier, ‘Desperanto’, New German Critique 67 (1996), pp. 22–6.
14Cited in Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905–1980 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 438.
15See Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Gli intellettuali e l’antifascismo’, Storia del marxismo, vol. III/2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 441–90.
16Cited in Karl D. Bracher, La Dictature allemande. Naissance, structure et conséquences du national-socialisme (Toulouse: Privat, 1986), p. 31.
17Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
18See Anson Rabinbach, ‘Legacies of Antifascism’, New German Critique 67 (1996), p. 7.
19Piero Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale. Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), p. 178. On Gobetti’s antifascism, see Aurelio Lepre, L’anticomunismo e l’antifascismo in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), pp. 50–4.
20George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 104.
21Albert Camus, ‘Au service de l’Homme’, in Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). This passage is also cited in James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 71.
22See Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg. Eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart: Klett- Cotta, 1966).
23See the ‘Manifeste des intellectuels antifascistes’ – also that of the Concentrazione Antifascista – in Enzo Collotti, ed., L’antifascismo in Italia e in Europa (Turin: Loescher, 1975), pp. 34–7, 75–6.
24See Nicole Racine, ‘Le Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (1934–1939)’, Le Mouvement social 101 (1977), pp. 87–113; Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de l’affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), pp. 98–9; Lottman, La Rive gauche, pp. 148–58.
25See István Deák, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
26Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 145.
27On the distinction between ‘civil religions’ and ‘political religions’, see Emilio Gentile, Les Religions de la politique. Entre démocratie et totalitarismes (Paris: Seuil, 2005).
28See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
29Lottman, La Rive gauche, pp. 178–84.
30This was the title of the original 1935 edition. In reprints from 1937 onwards, the question-mark was removed.
31François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 160.
32Nicole Racine, ‘Une cause. L’antifascisme des intellectuels dans les années trente’, Politix 17 (1992), pp. 79–85.
33Upton Sinclair and Eugene Lyons, Terror in Russia? Two Views (New York: R. R. Smith, 1938), p. 57. See also Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS, p. 279.
34Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Pour la liberté de l’esprit’, in Enzo Traverso, ed., Le Totalitarisme. Le XXe siècle en débat (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 248. See also Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS, p. 214.
35See Carlo Rosselli, Scritti d’esilio, vol. II (1934–1937) (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), p. 426. For context, see Aurelio Lepre, L’anticomunismo e l’antifascismo in Italia, pp. 68–70.
36See Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce. Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), pp. 330, 553.
37See Karl D. Bracher, Zeit der Ideologien (Stuttgart: DVA, 1982), vol. II, Chapter 6.
38Those liberals who fought against fascism, such as the Italian movement Guistizia e Libertà, chose to collaborate with the Communists. See on this question the testimony and reflections of Norberto Bobbio, one of its organizers, in his Dal fascismo alla democrazia (Turin: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997).
39On Ortega’s ambiguous relationship with Francoism, see Antonio Elorza, La razón y la sombra. Una lectura politica de Ortega y Gasset (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1984). Criticism of the abstentionism of Spanish liberal intellectuals during the Civil War, from 1937 onwards, is a key theme in the essay by Maria Zambrano, Los intelectuales en el drama de España (Madrid: Trotta, 1998).
40See Gabriele Ranzato, L’Eclissi della democrazia. La Guerra civile spagnola e le sue origini 1931–1939 (Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2004), pp. 359–65.
41Harold Laski, The Rise of European Liberalism (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997), p. 209.
42Gobetti, La rivoluzione liberale.
43See Enzo Traverso, ‘Le totalitarisme. Jalons pour l’histoire d’un débat’, in Traverso, ed., Le Totalitarisme, pp. 45–60.
44See Winock, Le siècle des intellectuels, pp. 460–5.
45See Nello Ajello, Intellettuali e PCI (1944–1958) (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1997).
46See Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR from Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 2000).
47Gershom Scholem, ed., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 39.
48Ibid., p. 265. See also Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York: NYRB Classics, 2003), p. 278.
49See Enzo Traverso, L’Histoire déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997), pp. 58–69.
50See Dan Diner, ‘Antifaschistische Weltanschauung. Ein Nachruf’, Kreisläufe. Nationalsozialismus und Gedächtnis (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1995), p. 91.
51Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance in Europe, p. 276.
52See Denis Hollier, ed., Le Collège de philosophie 1937–1939 (Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1995), pp. 67–8. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève. La philosophie, l’État, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), p. 336. See also Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 65–6.
53Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), p. 51.
54Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. xvii.
55Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. I. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985 [1956]), p. 23.