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WORK TITLE: Fire and Blood
WORK NOTES: trans by David Fernbach
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/14/1957
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Italian
http://romancestudies.cornell.edu/people/faculty-directory/enzo-traverso/ * http://history.cornell.edu/enzo-traverso
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born October 14, 1957, in Gavi, Italy.
EDUCATION:University of Genova, master’s degree, 1982; School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Ph.D., 1989.
ADDRESS
CAREER
International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1989-91; Library of Contemporary International Documentation, Nanterre, France, 1992; University of Paris VIII, lecturer, 1993–95; School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, France, lecturer, 1994–97; University of Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France, assistant professor, 1995-20o9, professor 2009-13; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2013-. Has also been visiting professor at Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Universidad de Valencia, Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Freie Universität of Berlin, UNAM of Mexico City, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and Universidad Tres de Febrero of Buenos Aires.
AWARDS:Awarded Premio Pozzale, Empoli, Florence, 2014, and Huésped de Honor Extraordinario, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2016, both for his historical essays.
WRITINGS
Has contributed chapters to books, including Max Weber et les paradoxes de la modernité, edited by Michael Löwy, Presses universitaires de France (Paris, France), 2012; De quelle couleur sont les Blancs?, edited by Sylvie Laurent and Thierry Leclère, La Découverte (Paris, France), 2013; Cataclysm 1914: World War I and the Making of Modern World Politics, edited by Alex Anievas, Brill (Boston), 2015; 1937-1947: La Guerre-monde, edited by Alya Aglan and Robert Frank, Gallimard (Paris), 2015; Rethinking Antifascism, edited by Hugo Garcia, Mercedes Justa, and Xavier Tabet, Berghahan Books (Oxford, England), 2016; Modern Jewish Thinkers, edited by Jacques Picard, Jacques Revel, Michael Steinberg, and Judith Zertal, Princeton University Press ( Princeton, NJ), 2016; and La vie culturelle en France, edited by Christoph Charle and Laurent Jeanpierre, Editions du Seuil, 2016 (Paris, France), 2016.
Has contributed articles to journals, including Consetallations, Historical Materialism, Illusio, Storiografia, Le Crieur, and Acta Poetica.
SIDELIGHTS
Enzo Traverso, born in 1957 in Gavi, Italy, is a historian whose focus has been on modern and contemporary Europe. His areas of expertise include intellectual history, historiography, Jewish history, memory studies, critical theory, and Marxism. Traverso studied at the University of Genoa in Italy, where he received his master’s degree in history in 1982. He went on to attend the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris and received his Ph.D. there in 1989. He has held teaching positions at the International Institute for Research and Education (Amsterdam, the Netherlands); the Library of Contemporary International Documentation (Nanterre, France); the University of Paris VIII; the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (Paris, France); and the University of Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens, France). He also has been visiting professor at Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Universidad de Valencia, Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Freie Universität of Berlin, UNAM of Mexico City, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and Universidad Tres de Febrero of Buenos Aires. Since 2013, he has taught at Cornell University, where he is the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities.
Traverso writes mainly in French, but many of his publications have been translated into English and other languages. Among his works are The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate, 1843-1943; The Jews and Germany: From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis” to the Memory of Auschwitz; Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz; The Origins of Nazi Violence; Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory; The End of Jewish Modernity; and Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945. He has also edited several collections of essays and contributed articles to journals, among them, Consetallations, Historical Materialism, Illusio, Storiografia, Le Crieur, and Acta Poetica.
The Marxists and the Jewish Question and The Jews and Germany
The Marxists and the Jewish Question looks at the historical association between Jews and the Left, focusing particularly on the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and the workers’ movements of the early twentieth century. Traverso also provides an overview of the views of Marxists with respect to Jews and anti-Semitism. A reviewer for Labour/Le Travail called the volume an “admirably informed and judicious study” of “loosely-constituted dogmas that defined the orthodox Marxist position on the Jewish question.”
The Jews and Germany offers Traverso’s critique of what has been termed an historic symbiosis between Jewish and German culture in Europe. In this book, Traverso explores what it meant to be both Jewish and German and examines the newfound interest in German-Jewish literary history. Florian Krobb, reviewing the book for Modern Language Review, stated that Traverso describes the symbiosis approach as “an attempt by post-Auschwitz Germany to reclaim and reappropriate the Judeo-German heritage.” The beginning of Traverso’s book, noted Krobb, is “devoted to dismantling the myth of a Judeo-German symbiosis” in an effort to prove that “the so-called Judeo-German dialogue was actually nothing but an inner-Jewish monologue, and that the Jews in German-speaking Europe remained outsiders, no matter how hard their assimilatory efforts.” Krobb found Traverso’s arguments “provocative” and “poignant.”
The Origins of Nazi Violence, Left-wing Melancholia, and The End of Jewish Modernity
In The Origins of Nazi Violence, Traverso makes the case that the Holocaust was not an aberration but instead the logical outcome of various antecedent events and precedents rooted in far-ranging mainstream ideologies of racial superiority and colonialism. As a Publishers Weekly reviewer summarized Traverso’s argument, the Nazi movement was not simply “a throwback to the barbarities of an earlier age” but the identifiable result of “major trends of European history since the 18th century.” In a review in the Nation, Russell Jacoby tried to place Enzo’s revisionist argument in a historiographical context: “The effort to comprehend the why and the what of Nazism not only proceeds but intensifies. Sixty years ago few wrote about the Nazi slaughter. Today an expanding literature addresses every aspect of it.” Traverso’s account, said Jacoby, “remain[s] loyal to German particulars while locating them in a wider European framework.” Jacoby thought that Traverso writes with “verve and style a provocative book about European violence,” taking the story from the invention of the guillotine through animal slaughterhouses to the modern factory system of production and prisons. In sum, Jacoby thought that Traveso “offers an indispensable lesson, especially for those who view Nazi genocide as a deviation from the main contours of modern history” in “an arresting and provocative essay on the savagery of progress.” In a review posted at H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Shelley O. Baranowski called the study “provocative,” stating that “one must admire Traverso’s ambitious synthesis of theory and recent scholarship.”
The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War. Since then, argues Traverso in Left-Wing Melancholia, those on the political left have struggled with a melancholic view of history in the context of failure. As Samuel Earle remarked in a review at the online magazine 3:AM: “Robbed of its telos, a clear endpoint, the left’s utopic imagination was emptied, hollowed out, and in its place there lingered only a sense of loss: the loss of a political movement, of an historical moment, of a dream—a dream that had not simply been destroyed but that had also, in light of the Soviet atrocities, become a sin.” Even today, Earle pointed out, “this symbolic link—between utopia, revolution, communism and barbarism—retains a firm grip on the public imagination.” Earle felt that Left-Wing Melancholia shines as a historical study when “Traverso remains focused to his theme,” adding that Traverso’s analysis of “the Left’s ‘culture of defeat’ is strangely uplifting.”
Jewish modernity, Traverso tells us in The End of Jewish Modernity, came into its own between the Enlightenment and World War II, spawning a flourishing of intellectual, scientific, social, literary, and artistic progress. During this period, Jews gained legal rights but still stood outside mainstream society. In a review in the Foreign Policy Journal, Jim Miles explained: “The idea of being a pariah, of being an “other,” with legal rights circumvented by various exclusionary practices based on an anti-Semitic ideas, is the undercurrent throughout the era of modernity.” But with the establishment of the state of Israel, the Jewish people found a place where they were no longer pariahs. Regarding this major shift in status for Jews (especially Israeli Jews), Miles then commented: “‘Modernity’—the philosophical, political, cultural, and academic intelligence that often acted against the establishment disappeared. It was replaced by a new pariah—the Palestinians who became subject to the same ghettoization the Jewish people had contended with for centuries. More broadly, the new ‘other’, the new pariah was all of Islam.” Miles summed up The End of Jewish Modernity as a “challenging read with much food for thought.” At the online magazine Red Pepper, reviewer Daniel Lazar acknowledged that Traverso’s understanding of Islamophobia as “anti-semitism redux . . . seems to have something in it.” However, Lazar asserted that Traverso overlooks the fact that “it is not petty prejudice that drives Islamophobia . . . but petrocapitalism in an advanced state of breakdown,” adding quite pointedly: “Economics come first – yet they hardly seem to enter into Traverso’s field of vision.”
Fire and Blood
In Fire and Blood, Traverso examines the period encompassing World War I and World War II as a seamless four-decade historical sequence of events. As Choice reviewer J. Rogers wrote, Traverso sees these two wars “as a coherent European conflict characterized by the elements of a civil war.” Rogers suggested that some readers might argue with Traverso’s too simplified distinction between “fascist and antifascist” but nonetheless recommended the book as a resource for scholars and graduate students. London Guardian contributor Adam Tooze appreciated the scope of the questions posed by Traverso: “How can we understand the ‘age of extremes’ (1914 to 1945) from a present—our present day in the west—that is in general terms allergic to ‘ideology’ and convinced that ‘there is no alternative’? What happens when an anodyne and self-satisfied liberalism projects its values back into an earlier era of intense political struggle?” Traverso begins his examination by looking at this own home region in Italy, the Piedmont, during two years of World War II. Tooze explained: “War and civil war merged, as partisans and their pursuers took hostages and made reprisals, German flamethrowers blasted the hillside and American bombers rained down fire. Politics became a matter of life and death.” Civil strife of this sort was rampant all over Europe—in Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, France, and Spain. Still, Tooze voiced reservations about Traverso’s focus: “If the aim is to destabilise liberal complacency by showing how civil conflict was sublimated into the great wars that shaped contemporary Europe, we need a more capacious and less literal-minded account than this.”
Writing at the left-wing political Web site Counterfire, Chris Bambery deemed Fire and Blood a “wonderful” book, calling out Traverso’s argument that “civilization and barbarism are not two absolutely antagonistic terms but two linked aspects of the same historical process, carrying both emancipatory and destructive tendencies.” Nitzan Lebovic, writing in Critical Inquiry, termed Fire and Blood a “highly readable, convincingly synthetic book” and commended Traverso’s revisionist vantage point, stating: “Reframing the story of the last century as a European civil war enables Traverso to avoid the clichés concerning the rise of nationalism and the multiplication of more ethnically discrete nations in favor of a more focused story spotlighting the fragility of that identity and the set of political, cultural, and intellectual interests that shaped it.” In an review at the PopMatters Web site, George de Stefano characterized Traverso’s account as an “incisive, challenging, and compelling interpretation of the European wars of annihilation, whose consequences still reverberate, and not only on that ravaged, still-divided continent.” Counter Punch writer Ron Jacobs understood the book as “much broader and more fundamental” than “a history of dates, battles, leaders, and armies” or “a political history detailing the debates between and within parties, legislatures and monarchies.” Because Traverso finds “meanings in the art, the film, and even the philosophical writings of the time,” Jacobs recommended Fire and Blood as a “nuanced and erudite” study of World Wars I and II and the interwar years.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June, 2016, J. Rogers, review of Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945, p. 1537.
Labour/Le Travail, 1996, review of The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate, 1843-1943, pp. 351-353.
Modern Language Review, Florian Krobb, review of The Jews and Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’ to the Memory of Auschwitz, p. 291.
Nation, October 13, 2003, Russell Jacoby, “Savage Modernism,” review of The Origins of Nazi Violence, p. 29.
Publishers Weekly, May 26, 2003, review of The Origins of Nazi Violence, p. 61.
ONLINE
Cornell University, Department of History Web site, http://history.cornell.edu/ (April 20, 2017), faculty listing.
Counterfire, http://www.counterfire.org (February 18, 2016), Chris Bambery, review of Fire and Blood.
Counter Punch, http://www.counterpunch.org (February 19, 2016), Ron Jacobs, review of Fire and Blood.
Critical Inquiry, http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu (March 24, 2017), Nitzan Lebovic, review of Fire and Blood.
Foreign Policy Journal, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com (July 29, 2016), Jim Miles, review of The End of Jewish Modernity.
Guardian Online, (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com (March 4, 2016), Adam Tooze, review of Fire and Blood.
Historical Materialism, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org (March 24, 2017), review of Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History, and Memory.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org (September 1, 2004), Shelley O. Baranowski, review of The Origins of Nazi Violence.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com (March 3, 2016), George de Stefano, review of Fire and Blood.
Red Pepper, http://www.redpepper.org.uk (December 9, 2016), Daniel Lazar, review of The End of Jewish Modernity.
3:AM, http://www.3ammagazine.com (March 24, 2017), Samuel Earle, review of Left-Wing Melancholia.
Enzo Traverso
Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities
Morrill Hall, Room 307
vt225@cornell.edu
Website(s)
Romance Studies Profile
Departments/Programs
Romance Studies
History
Jewish Studies Program
Graduate Fields
History
Romance Studies
Courses
HIST 4655 - Revolution: An Intellectual History
HIST 6655 - Revolution: An Intellectual History
HIST 8004 - Supervised Reading
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Enzo Traverso
Enzo Traverso
Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities
vt225@cornell.edu Office: KLR K361 Phone: email only
Enzo Traverso is a historian of modern and contemporary Europe; his research focuses on the intellectual history and the political ideas of the twentieth century. He was born in Italy, studied history at the University of Genoa and received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) of Paris in 1989. Before coming to Cornell in 2013, he taught political science for many years in France. He has been a visiting professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, the Universidad de Valencia, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Freie Universität of Berlin, the UNAM of Mexico City, the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and the Universidad Tres de Frebrero of Buenos Aires. His publications, all translated into different languages, include a dozen authored and edited collections. Several of his works investigate the impact of political and mass violence in the European culture. He is currently preparing a book on the representations of the Jewish intellectual in Germany, France and Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as an edited book on the history of revolutions. Awarded in 2014 (Premio Pozzale, Empoli, Florence) and 2016 (Huésped de Honor Extraordinario, Universidad Nacional de La Plata), for his historical essays.
Recent Courses
The European Civil War 1914-1945
Left-Wing Melancholia
The Holocaust in Postwar Culture (1945-1961)
Vogliamo Tutto! The Italian 1970s
French Memories
Intellectuals: A French History
Totalitarianism: Between History and Theory
Revolution: An Intellectual History
The Invention of Italy
Research Interests
Intellectual History
Historiography
Jewish History
Memory Studies
Critical Theory
Marxism
Selected Publications
Books:
*Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2017 (translated into French and Italian, forthcoming in Greek and Spanish).
* The European Civil War 1914-1945, London-New York: Verso, 2016 (original French, translated into Italian, Spanish, German, and Greek).
* The End of Jewish Modernity, London: Pluto Books, 2016 (original French, translated into Italian, Spanish, German).
* The Origins of Nazi Violence, New York: The New Press, 2003 (original French, translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and Greek).
* Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz, London: Pluto Press, 1999 (original French, translated into Swedish and German).
* The Jews and Germany: From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis” to the Memory of Auschwitz, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1995 (original French, translated into Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese).
* The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1843-1943), Atlantic Higlands & London: Humanities Press, 1994 (original French, translated into German, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish).
* Où sont passes les intellectuels? Conversations avec Régis Mairan, Textuel, Paris, 2013 (translated into Italian and Spanish).
* L’histoire comme champ de bataille: Interpréter les violences du xxe siècle, Paris: La Découverte, 2011 (translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Greek, and Polish)
* Le passé, modes d’emploi. Histoire, mémoire, politique, Paris: La fabrique, 2005 (translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Turkish, and Portuguese).
* La pensée dispersée. Figures de l’exil judéo-allemand, Paris: Lignes, 2003 (translated into Italian and Spanish).
* Il totalitarismo: Storia di un dibattito, Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2002; new, enlarged edition Verona: Ombre Corte, 2015 (translated into Spanish and Japanese).
* L’Histoire déchirée: Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997 (translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Czech)
* Siegfried Kracauer: Itinéraire d’un intellectuel nomade, Paris: La Découverte, 1994 (new edition 2006, translated into Spanish).
Edited Books:
* Le totalitarisme. Le XXe siècle en débat, Paris: Seuil, 2001.
* Storia della Shoah. La crisi dell’Europa, lo sterminio degli ebrei e la mémoria del XX secolo, (edited with Marina Cattaruzza, Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam), Torino: UTET, 2005-2006, 2 vol.
* Storia della Shoah in Italia. Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, (edited with M. Flores, S. Levis-Sullam, M.-A. Matard-Bonucci), Torino: UTET, 2010, 2 vol.
Selected Recent Book Chapters:
* “Entre le savant et le politique. Max Weber contre les intellectuels”, in Michael Löwy (ed.), Max Weber et les paradoxes de la modernité, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2012, pp. 109-128 (translated into Spanish).
* “Les juifs et la ‘ligne de couleur’”, in Sylvie Laurent, Thierry Leclère (ed.), De quelle couleur sont les Blancs?, Paris: La Découverte, 2013, pp. 252-261.
* “European Intellectuals and the First World War: Trauma and New Cleavages,” in Alex Anievas (ed.), Cataclysm 1914: World War I and the Making of Modern World Politics, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2015, pp. 201-215.
* “Prologue. 1914-1945: Le Monde au Prisme de la Guerre”, in Alya Aglan, Robert Frank (eds), 1937-1947: La Guerre-monde, Paris: Gallimard, 2015, vol. 1, pp. 23-58 (translated into Italian).
* “Antifascism Between Collective Memory and Historical Revisions,” in Hugo Garcia, Mercedes Justa, Xavier Tabet (eds), Rethinking Antifascism, Oxford: Berghahan Books, 2016, pp. 321-338.
* “Primo Levi: Memory and Enlightenment,” in Jacques Picard, Jacques Revel, Michael Steinberg, Judith Zertal (eds), Modern Jewish Thinkers, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 520-534.
* “Polarisations idéologiques,” in Christoph Charle, Laurent Jeanpierre (eds), La vie culturelle en France, vol. 2 De 1914 à nos jours, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2016, pp. 201-226.
Selected Recent Articles:
* “Interpreting Fascism: Mosse, Sternhell and Gentile in Comparative Perspective,” Constellations, 2008, vol. 15, no 3, pp. 303-319.
* “The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution”, Historical Materialism, 2008, vol. 16, no 4, pp. 205-212.
* “Marx, l’histoire et les historiens : Une relation à réinventer,”
Actuel Marx, 2011/2, no 50, p. 153-163.
* “Le cabinet du Dr. Kracauer”, Illusio, 2013, no 10/11, pp. 367-376 (translated into Spanish).
* “Illuminismo e anti-illuminismo: La storia delle idee di Zev Sternhell,” Storiografia, 2014, vol. 18, pp. 215-225.
* “Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: On Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World,” Constellations, 2014, vol. 21, no 3, pp. 425-431.
* “Spectres du fascisme: Les métamorphoses des droites radicales au XXIe siècle,” Le Crieur, 2015, no 1, pp. 104-121 (translated into Spanish and German).
* “Daniel Bensaïd Bewteen Marx and Benjamin,” Historical Materialism, 2016, vol. 24, no 4, pp. 170-191.
* “Imágenes melancólicas: El cine de la revoluciones vencidas,” Acta Poetica, 2017, vol. 38, no 1, pp. 13-48.
* “Historicizing Communism: A Twentieth Century Chameleon,” forthcoming in Southern Atlantic Quarterly, 2017.
Enzo Traverso
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Enzo Traverso (born 14 October 1957 in Gavi, Piedmont region, Italy) is an Italian historian who has written on issues relating to the Holocaust and totalitarianism. After living and working in France for over 20 years, he is currently the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.[1]
Contents
1 Education
2 Career
3 Bibliography
3.1 Original works
3.2 English translations
4 References
5 External links
Education
Enzo Traverso obtained a master's degree (Laurea) in modern history at the University of Genova (Italy) in 1982. After moving to Paris in 1985 to further pursue his academic trajectory he completed his PhD program at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in 1989. In 2009 he achieved the academic qualification of habilitation (accreditation to supervise research).[2]
Career
From 1989 through 1991 he worked for the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) based in Amsterdam, and after that in the Library of contemporary international documentation (BDIC) in Nanterre. He also held the position of a lecturer in the Departement of Political science at the University of Paris VIII (1993–1995) and at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) (1994–1997). In 1995 he was hired by the University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens as an assistant professor. He was later promoted to full professor, a post he held from 2009 to 2013, when he joined the faculty at Cornell.[2]
Bibliography
He writes mainly in French.[3]
Original works
Les Marxistes et la question juive, La Brèche-PEC, Montreuil, 1990.
Les Juifs et l'Allemagne, de la symbiose judéo-allemande à la mémoire d'Auschwitz, La Découverte, Paris, 1992.
Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d’un intellectuel nomade, La Découverte, Paris, 1994.
L'Histoire déchirée, essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1997.
Pour une critique de la barbarie moderne : écrits sur l'histoire des Juifs et l'antisémitisme, Éditions Page deux (Cahiers libres), Lausanne, 2000.
Le Totalitarisme : Le XXe siècle en débat, 2001.
La Violence nazie : Essai de généalogie historique, 2002, La Fabrique, Paris.
La Pensée dispersée : Figures de l'exil judéo-allemand, 2004.
Le Passé, mode d'emploi : Histoire, mémoire, politique, 2005, La Fabrique, Paris.
À Feu et à sang : De la guerre civile européenne, 1914-1945, Stock, Paris, 2007.
L'histoire comme champ de bataille : Interpréter les violences du XXe siècle, La Découverte, Paris, 2011.
La fin de la modernité juive : Histoire d'un tournant conservateur, La Découverte, Paris, 2013.
Mélancolie de gauche : La force d’une tradition cachée (XIXe-XXIe siècle), La Découverte, Paris, 2016.
English translations
Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, Verso, 2016
The Origins of Nazi Violence, New Press, 2003, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz, Pluto Press, London, 1999, translated by Peter Drucker.
The Jews & Germany: From the "Judeo-German Symbiosis" to the Memory of Auschwitz, U. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995, translated by Daniel Weissbort.
The Marxists and the Jewish question. The history of a Debate (1843-1943), Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1994, translated by Bernard Gibbons, ISBN 0-391-03806-0
"The Left is a history of defeats": an interview with Enzo Traverso
By Sonya Faure / 31 January 2017
Sonya Faure's interview with Enzo Traverso on post-fascism, left melancholy, and the memory of defeat was first published in Libération. Translated by David Broder.
A new edition of Christopher Hill's classic The Experience of Defeat is out from Verso this week.
Gustave Courbet, Un enterrement à Ornans, 1849–50.
Enzo Traverso has published two books in quick succession, which he himself sees as two parts of a diptych. In Nouveaux visages du fascisme ("Fascism’s New Faces," to be published by Textuel in February) the historian of ideas gives his definition of the concept "post-fascism" as he works to reveal the still-changing nature of the new populist and xenophobic currents from Le Pen to Trump. In Left-Wing Melancholia. Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, January 2017), he explains why the Left must draw on its inherent melancholia, a force for its own self-reinvention. Born in Italy, Enzo Traverso — a former far-Left militant and formerly an academic in France, today professor at Cornell University in the United States — places French political passions back at the heart of global debates, from the reconstruction of the Left to the populist temptation.
What is your analysis of the primaries for the Left [i.e. primaries to select the Parti Socialiste candidate for French president]
I do not think that the renewal of the French Left will come from the Parti Socialiste. We did indeed see this with the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders: movements external to traditional political organisms simply made use of these parties. In the United States a rising tendency that had notably been incarnated in Occupy Wall Street took over the Democratic primaries, making itself felt on the political stage by voting for Sanders… but not always for Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump a few months later. In Great Britain, Corbyn was able to bring together a mass of youth who joined Labour in order to vote for him as leader… without having any illusions about this party itself. That is one of the characteristics of the new movements on the Left: they no longer believe in parties, but "use" them.
Sanders and Corbyn embodied a dynamic that emerged outside of these parties. I see nothing comparable in the Parti Socialiste’s case.
[Left-wing candidate] Benoît Hamon’s likely victory in the primaries expresses the malaise of what remains of this party; it mirrors a shift in its internal balance, but is not a sign of its renewal. If Hamon is indeed the candidate, he will be pincered between Emmanuel Macron’s avowed neoliberalism and the anti-neoliberalism of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is decidedly more credible in his left-wing opposition to Hollande.
Will that be enough to create an alternative? Should we be expecting something else from the Left?
In Europe as in the United States, the Left is confronted with a historic shift. A cycle that began with the Russian Revolution finished in 1989, and the effects of its exhaustion in that moment are today becoming apparent. The Left is addressing a totally new world with tools it inherited from the twentieth century. The model provided by the Russian Revolution, which dominated the last century, is no longer operational. As for social democracy, it does nothing other than manage the social regression. The collapse of communism has paralysed the process by which the Left transmits its memory, and its culture has entered into crisis. Not only did the new movements like Podemos, Syriza, the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street and Nuit Debout arise in a world without a "horizon of expectation," to adopt the historian Reinhart Koselleck’s expression, and not only are they incapable of projecting themselves into the future, but they are also orphans: they cannot inscribe themselves in a historical continuity.
So 1989 swept away the memory of the Russian Revolution but also that of other possible models: the Paris Commune, the Spanish Civil War…
For a brief moment, the end of actually-existing socialism gave the illusion of a liberation for the Left. We briefly believed that a burden had fallen away and that a different socialism was going to be possible. In reality the shipwreck of Soviet communism engulfed together with it a whole series of other heretical currents: anti-Stalinists, libertarians… The history of communism found itself reduced to its totalitarian dimension.
The "Left’s culture has been emptied out, pure and simple," you write…
The Left was not able to reinvent itself. All the same, we are beginning to get a new perspective on certain elements of the past. You mentioned the Paris Commune. For a century it was made into an icon, as the first stage in a movement that led to the Russian, Chinese, and then Cuban revolutions. Today we are rediscovering it in a different light: the Commune’s history is a history of self-government, which ultimately appears close to what we have with the left-wing movements today. The communards were not workers at the Billancourt Renault factory, but precarious workers, artisans, the subaltern, including many bohemian intellectuals and artists. This was a heterogeneous sociological profile, comparable to the social pulverisation of the young people mobilising today.
But the Commune was also a defeat. Can the Left ever take inspiration from anything other than failures?
But the Left is a history of defeats! And even when revolutionaries did manage to overthrow the established powers-that-be, things almost always went badly… That is why melancholia is a fundamental dimension of left-wing culture. It was long repressed by a dialectical vision of history: however painful defeats were, they never put in question the idea that socialism was the inevitable horizon. History belonged to us. That allowed us to get over defeats. Today these resources are exhausted and left-wing melancholia is coming back out into the light of day. This is a hidden tradition that we find already in the memoirs of Louise Michel, Rosa Luxemburg’s texts on the eve of her murder, or in Gustave Courbet’s Un Enterrement à Ornans, an extraordinary analogy for the 1848 revolution, by way of a funeral. This was a consolatory melancholia, inseparable from hope, which could even strengthen their convictions.
How can this melancholia be inspiring and not only a source of resignation?
There is a Freudian vision of melancholia that we tend to simplify. Melancholia is considered a pathological bereavement, as an incapacity to separate oneself from the loved and lost object, and as an obstacle to moving forward. On the contrary, I think that melancholia can be a form of resistance, fed by a reflexive sensibility. For Koselleck, the history written by the conquered is a critical history, as against the apologetic history of the victors. Melancholia is a resource for knowledge, understanding and intervening in the present. On the Left there is sometimes a tendency to say "We have to start everything from scratch again." This lack of memory weakens us. It was one thing to invent socialism in the nineteenth century, but it is quite another thing to reinvent it at the beginning of the twenty-first, as if nothing had happened.
And the new left-wing movements do not manage to converge
The junction used to come by way of political mechanisms. In 1968 there was an objective convergence between the barricades in Paris, the Prague Spring and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, even when the actors in these movements had no experience of dialogue with one another. Today activists in Cairo, Istanbul and New York can have exchanges among themselves, and moreover they do so spontaneously. But there is such a cultural difference [compared to 1968]… in the 1960s a common critical thought nourished social struggles. What Sartre wrote was read in Asia and Africa. Today, the names of postcolonialism’s great critical figures mean nothing to the actors in the Arab Spring. Reinventing the fabric that weaves together a worldwide alternative culture is no simple matter.
The parties of the far Right do know how to win. You group them under the name "post-fascism." Why is that?
The concept of "post-fascism" seeks to grasp a transition process. It helps us to analyse these new contemporary forces on the Right, which are a moving, heterogeneous phenomenon, in the middle of their mutation. Some of them are cases of neo-fascism, like Jobbik in Hungary or Golden Dawn in Greece; others like the Front National have begun a metamorphosis. Most of these parties have a historical fascist matrix. That is true of the original Front National, in my view. Yet the current Front National can no longer be accused of fascism; its leader’s rhetoric has become republican. As for Trump, he is a post-fascist leader without fascism. He is the ideal-type picture of the authoritarian personality, such as Adorno defined it in 1950. Many of his public statements do also recall fascist anti-semitism: the virtues of a people rooted in a territory, as against the deracinated, intellectual, cosmopolitan and Jewish élites (Wall Street finance, the New York media, the corrupt Washington politicians). But his programme stands far from the statism and expansionism of the far Right parties of the 1930s. Most importantly, there is no fascist movement behind him.
Why not speak of populist movements?
I am very wary of the notion of "populism" — which would mean a form of anti-politics — since the common usage of this term brings together opposite political ideologies as one. For most commentators, populism is both Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement and the Lega Nord, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Trump, and Sanders.
The Podemos movement identifies with the word "populism"…
In Spanish-speaking countries "populism," borrowed from the history of the Latin American Left, takes on a different meaning: namely, that of re-integrating the popular social classes into a political system that excludes them. In Podemos’s view, populism will allow it to overcome an out-of-date Left-Right divide. This word cannot be used in the same way anywhere else in Europe. The populism of the post-fascist movements does indeed seek to bring the masses together against the élites, but on the basis of exclusion: the exclusion of the minorities with immigrant backgrounds. This means rallying the people by excluding part of it.
Does the word "populism" say more about who is using it than who it designates?
This is a trick that seeks to avoid any questioning as to the causes of populism. Why are movements that use demagogy and lies rising so quickly? They occupy the vacuum created by those in power. The rejection of politics took off at the end of the twentieth century, when politics had its ideological substance emptied out, instead becoming a pure and simple management of power. This is the reduction of politics to the "impolitic." Over these last few years all countries in Western Europe have seen changes of government, but without it being possible clearly to make out the differences, for instance with regard to economic policy. This conception of politics can only arouse opposition, and in the absence of "horizons of expectation" and left-wing utopias, it has been post-fascist parties who have occupied this space. And they have a long experience of rejecting institutions!
You write that in post-fascist discourse, "national identity" has replaced the "nation"
The nation is a historically dated form: everyone can today experience the global world. In the period of fascism, nationalism was aggressive and proceeded by way of military expansionism and territorial and colonial conquests. Radical Right forces today implicitly recognise how archaic this discourse is. Their xenophobia targets post-colonial-origin minorities, not other nations. All of them also accept that we cannot return to the nation-state such as it used to exist. On the rhetorical plane the nation is now reformulated as "national identity."
One of the particularities of post-fascism, you tell us, is that we do not know the way out of it…
Post-fascism has a fluctuating, unstable, and sometimes contradictory ideological content… It has not yet crystallised. The Front National today seeks to present itself as a "normal" political change, an alternative government, rather than as a subversive force. But if the European Union were to collapse tomorrow, and if economic crisis followed across the continent, in a climate of deep political instability, post-fascist parties like the Front National could radicalise, or even take on the features of neo-fascism…
The Origins of Nazi Violence. (Nonfiction)
250.21 (May 26, 2003): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
ENZO TRAvERSO, TRANS. FROM THE FRENCH BY JANET LLOYD. New Press, $24.95 (208p) ISBN 1-56584-788-1
Traverso, a political scientist who teaches in France, offers a clear thesis in this longish essay: Nazism was not an aberration or a throwback to the barbarities of an earlier age. Instead, it was very much a modern phenomenon rooted in the major trends of European history since the 18th century. The "rationalization" of killing that the Nazis perfected began with the guillotine of the French Revolution. Nazi racism had its origins in European imperialism and scientific advances, including Darwin's theory of evolution. The Nazis' total war drew on the model of WWI. The problem with Traverso's discussion is that he adds very little to ideas put forward by major social theorists like Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman. Moreover, he writes with broad generalizations that, in many instances, would barely survive historical scrutiny. The Nazis indeed developed an industrial-style killing operation. But fully 40% of European Jews were killed in face-to-face shootings or from the effec ts of malnutrition and disease in the ghettos. Traverso likes to invoke Frederick Taylor, the American apostle of time-management studies, to show that the Nazis implemented a capitalist-style system. But Taylor sought economic efficiency, which the Nazis never came close to accomplishing. And the primacy they gave to racial killings directly undermined the process of production. There is food for thought in this volume, but some of the theories do need to be tested against the historical reality of the Third Reich. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Origins of Nazi Violence. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 26 May 2003, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA102815878&it=r&asid=a115510f52b094f5607059aa5b0b5c3f. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A102815878
Savage modernism
Russell Jacoby
277.11 (Oct. 13, 2003): p29.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
THE ORIGINS OF NAZI VIOLENCE. By Enzo Traverso. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New Press. 200 pp. $24.95.
A refugee from Nazism and a distinguished New York psychoanalyst, Sandor Rado had thought long and deeply about Hitler's takeover of Germany. Years ago, the writer Otto Friedrich interviewed him in his Manhattan apartment and asked him why the Nazis came to power. "There is a long silence...'That is not an easy question that you ask me,' Dr. Rado says. Another long silence. Dr. Rado stares into the dusk of his study, thinking. Finally, he decides on his answer. He speaks very slowly, very carefully. 'I don't know.'"
Rado's "I don't know" may stand as the ultimate statement about the Nazi genocide, honest humility of reason faced with human irrationality. We don't know. Or we do know, but only in pieces and chunks? The whole continues to elude us. Yet the effort to comprehend the why and the what of Nazism not only proceeds but intensifies. Sixty years ago few wrote about the Nazi slaughter. Today an expanding literature addresses every aspect of it.
The more ambitious efforts to understand Nazism fall into two categories. One type identifies something specifically in German history as the root cause: German authoritarianism, feeble liberalism, brash nationalism or virulent anti-Semitism. From A.J.P. Taylor's The Course of German History fifty-five years ago to Daniell Goldhagen's recent Hitler's Willing Executioners, Nazism is understood as the outcome of a long history of uniquely German traits. Approaches like these command an immediate plausibility and often popularity. After all, Germany began the war and organized the genocide. "Nazi" designated a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. German malfeasance derives exclusively from German factors.
As satisfying as such an account may be, it runs into immediate problems. In isolating something peculiarly German, it seems to forget the map. Germany partakes of Europe--and Western civilization--and shares its strengths and weaknesses. Germany hardly monopolized anti-Semitism, for instance. Indeed, for decades anti-Semitism in France and in the Austrian empire far exceeded that in Germany. Edouard Drumont's Jewish France, a two-volume compendium of racist nonsense, sold more than a million copies in 1886. For many contemporary observers, the Dreyfus case of the 1890s pegged France as the most anti-Semitic country in Europe. Before World War I, two out of three Austrians voted for anti-Semitic parties. When Germany occupied Austria in 1938, a half-million Austrians wildly greeted Hitler in Vienna, a gathering whose size is still unsurpassed in Austria to this day. Hitler himself was Austrian.
If one approach to Nazism focuses on specifically German features, the other follows the opposite path, and highlights wider issues such as larger European anti-Semitism. Of course, these studies go beyond anti-Semitism to consider modern nationalism, capitalism, racism, mass society, totalitarianism and human psychology. In this category is Hannah Arendt's still-controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil, as well as Christopher Browning's much more recent Ordinary Men, a study of a German police battalion that rounded up and shot Jews. These books suggest that the nature of bureaucracy, the propensity for obedience or lack of imagination, render genocide "banal" or ordinary. Any nation or individual could be caught up in a murderous operation. If the German-centric method seems to ignore Germans' links to the rest of the world, the danger here is the opposite; it dissolves German history in a universal solvent. No one person or thing is guilty because everything is.
This risk is not news to Enzo Traverso, who seeks in The Origins of Nazi Violence to remain loyal to German particulars while locating them in a wider European framework. Indeed, the title suggests a narrowness that the book belies, and a more exact translation of the original French title, Nazi Violence: A European Genealogy, would have been preferable. Traverso teaches political science in France and has written often about Nazi genocide; perhaps his best-known book is a study of Marxism and the Jewish question. In fact, several of his books, including this one, resound with the Marxism of Gramsci and Adorno.
In weighing into specialized debates about Nazism, Traverso's introduction might put off the nonacademic reader. Yet he has written with verve and style a provocative book about European violence. He begins by discussing a machine named after a French doctor. In the early stages of the French Revolution, Dr. Guillotin suggested that a beheading device might lessen the pain and suffering that accompanied hanging by rope or decapitation by ax. The instrument that was perfected, and that carried the doctor's name, used gravity and a descending steel blade to swiftly separate head and body. It was viewed as a victory for compassion, since cruder execution procedures were abolished, and for equality, since the same method would be used for rich and poor. To later observers the guillotine came to signify the routinization of death. Even the executioner, once an inglorious and shadowy person, became just a regular state employee. For Traverso, the guillotine marks the entry of the Industrial Revolution into capital punishment. Executions became "mechanized and serialized...a technical process...impersonal...rapid." Soon "men began to be slaughtered as though they were animals."
Indeed, Traverso takes up the slaughter of animals and sketches how slaughterhouses in the nineteenth century moved out of the central cities to the outskirts--out of sight and out of mind. At the same time, the killing of animals became rationalized. He gives a short course on prison construction and the modern factory system, with its use of Frederick Taylor's ideas on the rationalization of labor--how to break it down into separate movements, measure it and render it more efficient and impersonal.
This is still only chapter one, but the results are not far off. Auschwitz stands not only at the end of this process but at its beginning--the industrialization of death. The four figures of the guillotine--the doctor, the engineer, the judge and executioner--"play an irreplaceable role" in "Operation T4," the Nazi gassing of the mentally ill, which preceded the genocide. The modern factory system finds its culmination in the death camps. "Through an irony of history, the theories of Frederick Taylor," writes Traverso, were applied by a totalitarian system to serve "not production, but extermination."
Traverso keeps up a fast pace, highlighting the forces of domination, racism and colonial expansion that make Nazi violence if not inevitable, then at least unsurprising. He assembles striking quotations from nineteenth-century colonialists and imperialists calling for the destruction of inferior peoples. Fed by social-Darwinist thought, these ideas were often put into practice. The Belgians, the British, the Germans and the French not only dominated Africa and East Asia through "rational organization," but caused a precipitate decline in their populations by disease, famine and overwork "that in a number of cases can only be described as genocide." In its massive killing, propaganda and cult of violence, World War I served as "an anteroom of National Socialism." Nor is Traverso's argument done. He takes up what he calls "class racism," the hatred of workers, which fed into the Nazi myth of the "Jewish Bolshevik," as well as nineteenth-century notions of euthanasia and eugenics, which targeted, and sometimes sterilized, the putatively unfit. For Traverso such ideas on eugenics and "radical hygiene," the fruit of liberal institutions and thinking, "provided Nazism with a number of essential bases."
Traverso offers an indispensable lesson, especially for those who view Nazi genocide as a deviation from the main contours of modern history. Yet he casts his net so widely that the Nazi slaughter seems almost expected. "The guillotine, the abattoir, the Fordist factory, and rational administration," he writes in his conclusion, "along with racism, eugenics, the massacres of the colonial wars and those of World War I had already fashioned the social universe and the mental landscape in which the Final Solution would be conceived and set in motion." The only surprise is that he leaves some topics out. He says nothing, for instance, about Western slavery, which surely would help his case.
It is worth backing up a bit. Traverso states early in the book that "the history of the guillotine provides a paradigmatic reflection of the dialectics of the Enlightenment." That phrase alludes to the wartime book by two refugees, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Yet that book underscores progressive and regressive moments of the Enlightenment that are missing in Traverso. His story reads like a one-way street, Enlightenment to genocide.
The issue is not simply that the groups and individuals who opposed the catalogue of evils that Traverso assembles go unmentioned; rather, it is the ambiguity at the center of Modernism that Traverso overlooks. The French Revolution brought us not only the guillotine but the metric system and the rights of man. Would Traverso have us believe that the uniformity of the metric system marked a step in the bureaucratization of death? More to the point, the rights of man belong to the same Enlightenment esprit. Indeed, the split between science and philosophy belonged to the future. Dr. Guillotin himself was a member of the first revolutionary assembly. Thomas Paine, the famed defender of rights in both the United States and Europe, expended much effort designing and building a new type of iron bridge. He is as "paradigmatic" as Dr. Guillotin of the dialectic of Enlightenment. Traverso refers often to Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, with its discussion of imperialism and racism, but forgets that her treatise revolves around the eclipse of the rights of man.
The problem can be framed differently--and returns to the basic conundrum of investigating Nazi genocide as something specific to Germany or, more generally, to Western society. All the vicious ideas and actions that Traverso plots bespeak the United States, Britain and--to some extent--the former Soviet Union as much as they do Germany. Yet the Allies defeated Germany and ended the genocide. The slaughterhouses of Chicago, the Ford factories of Detroit and American eugenics did not result in genocide but in a war against it. Where would Traverso be if this were not so? It is a mite too easy for the modern Western intellectual composing at a high-tech computer and zipping about in a sleek automobile to opine that modern society is intrinsically genocidal.
The fact that the Allies defeated Germany, however, can feed a complacency that Traverso forcefully punctures. History might have unfolded differently if Hitler had played his cards more prudently. Facts are not fates. After all, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, not the reverse, and invaded the Soviet Union, not the reverse. The home of the rights of man, France, succumbed to the German Army. Neither in Europe nor in the United States did the slaughter of the Jews raise especial concern. We can hardly take pride in a successful war against Germany motivated less by principle than realpolitik. For this reason Traverso's project--his insistence, as he says in his final sentence, that Auschwitz was "an authentic product of Western civilization"--is bold and salutary.
The danger of an undifferentiated indictment remains. Traverso says at one point that "Auschwitz introduced the word 'genocide' into our vocabulary." He is right, but also wrong. Raphael Lemkin, an emigre Jewish-Polish lawyer, coined the term in 1943 to alert the world to the slaughter of Jews by Germany--and for his efforts Lemkin died, as Michael Ignatieff has put it, "alone and forgotten in a Manhattan hotel." Traverso's formulation shares the old ailment of Marxist history. People with their individual bravery and guilt disappear under the steamroller of history. The universal engulfs the particular. No specifically German events or factors appear. Only in the last pages does Traverso unconvincingly introduce something he calls "regenerative anti-Semitism" as a uniquely German phenomenon that arises after World War I.
Traverso does not breathe a word of another unique constellation, the impact of the complete collapse of the German economy. The Great Depression hit all of Europe and the United States, but in France, England and the United States it largely drove politics to the left, in Germany to the right. Why? The Nazis were a fringe party until Germany was struck by vast unemployment. In 1928, before the Depression, the Nazi's won 2.6 percent of the vote; in 1932, they became the largest party. This is hardly irrelevant to the success of Nazism, but Traverso, whose scholarly sympathies lean toward Marxism, oddly fails to so much as mention it.
What was Nazism? We still do not know and perhaps never will. Yet in an era when the beneficence of the West is trumpeted, it is good to be reminded that modern barbarians emerged from within its portals, not from outside them. They were not distant mullahs following foreign scripts but familiar officials, citizens and soldiers schooled in Western thought and technology. For all its hyperbole, and because of it, Traverso has written an arresting and provocative essay on the savagery of progress.
Russell Jacoby, who teaches history at UCLA, is the author of The End of Utopia (Basic), The Last Intellectuals (Noonday) and other books.
Jacoby, Russell
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jacoby, Russell. "Savage modernism." The Nation, 13 Oct. 2003, p. 29. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA108331372&it=r&asid=91f99a0992bcaa9414740eff92f8095d. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A108331372
Traverso, Enzo. Fire and blood: the European civil war, 1914-1945
J. Rogers
53.10 (June 2016): p1537.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Traverso, Enzo. Fire and blood: the European civil war, 1914-1945, tr. by David Fernbach. Verso, 2016. 203p Index ISBN 9781784781330 cloth, $26.95; ISBN 9781784781347 ebook, $26.95
53-4555
D431
MARC
Traverso (political science, Cornell) has put forward the best arguments yet for viewing the 20th-century world wars as a coherent European conflict characterized by the elements of a civil war. The incredible levels of violence were matched only by the powerful ideological divide between "fascists" and "anti-fascists." While emphasizing the main intellectual and political elements, Traverso nevertheless embraces the experiences of the peoples' century to reinforce his thesis. The European civil war contained elements of total wars, revolutions, civil wars, and genocides. The author makes a very strong case for his interpretation of the half-century of destruction in Europe. The book is sure to provoke much discussion and debate about the functional reality of one Europe, what best characterizes the conflicts of early 20th-century European nations, and whether Europe's experiences were as unique or isolated from the rest of the world as Traverso argues. Readers might also question the level of abstraction in the book, notably, the simplifying ideological division between fascist and antifascist. David Fernbach should be congratulated on an excellent translation from the original French. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Graduate students and above.--J. Rogers, Louisiana State University Alexandria
Rogers, J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rogers, J. "Traverso, Enzo. Fire and blood: the European civil war, 1914-1945." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1537. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942966&it=r&asid=8bde0da199db62d79dce5d77c79fd80a. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942966
The Jews and Germany: From 'Judeo-German Symbiosis' to the Memory of Auschwitz
Florian Krobb
93.1 (Jan. 1998): p291.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1998 Modern Humanities Research Association
http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Journals/mlr.html
The Jews and Germany: From the 'Judeo-German Symbiosis' to the Memory of Auschwitz. By ENZO TRAVERSO. Trans. by DANIEL WEISSBORT. (Texts and Contexts, 14) Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 1995. 215 pp. 32 [pounds sterling].
Publications in the field of German-Jewish literary history have become legion in recent years. After decades of neglect and repression the rediscovery of all aspects 'Jewish' in German literary history is not only fashionable and politically correct but has also produced remarkable results, new insights, that is, into literary texts and their contexts. In his extensive essay on The Jews and Germany Enzo Traverso explains this recent interest in all things Jewish as an attempt by post-Auschwitz Germany to reclaim and reappropriate the Judeo-German heritage, in order to 'fill the spiritual void of a postwar era, as economically prosperous as it is intellectually impoverished' (p. xxi). However, in the chapters devoted to post-war German history, Traverso argues that the main current of German public opinion, particularly since reunification, is a repression of the memory of the Nazi past, which was replaced by a posthumous anti-Stalinism: 'It is not hard to understand that behind this apparent desire to break radically with Stalinism, in fact, lies the desire to free themselves from the Nazi past. The GDR is just the latest scapegoat for the insuperable German Schuldfrage' (p. 159). And: 'Reunified and amnesic, Germany is far from having overcome its past, which remains a cultural and political consideration for the future of the nation' (p. 161). Such a statement on Germany today is followed by a thorough discussion of several issues that have occupied the German public in the last decade, particularly, but not only, in the so-called Historikerstreit. Traverso strongly attacks the revisionists around Ernst Nolte, and convincingly reiterates the arguments why the annihilation of European Jewry at the hands of Nazi Germany should never be relativized or historicized; he fears, however, that political expediency has favoured an undifferentiated concept of totalitarianism, in which the NSDAP and SED regimes are mostly mentioned in the same breath and their similarities unduly stressed, which in turn served slowly to erode the public consciousness of the uniqueness of Auschwitz
The first part of Traverso's book is devoted to dismantling the myth of a Judeo-German symbiosis. He claims that the so-called Judeo-German dialogue was actually nothing but an inner-Jewish monologue, and that the Jews in German-speaking Europe remained outsiders, no matter how hard their assimilatory efforts. According to Traverso, the prototypes of Jewish outsiderdom are those of the pariah and the parvenu. In this context he discusses literary figures and well-known scholars, authors, and other historical figures: a whole chapter for example, is devoted to Joseph Roth, the proverbial pariah, who quite clearly enjoys the author's sympathy, whereas people such as Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Leo Baeck, Ernst Kantorowitz, Walther Rathenau, and Theodor Herzl, quite indiscriminately denounced as parvenus, receive a good share of criticism. Traverso arrives at his conclusions using a method and terminology that can be described as the investigation of national psyche (Volkerpsychologie), and obviously this approach is given to generalizations. On the whole, this book is a provocative, poignant, in its generalizations often polemical essay that achieves what it intends to achieve: to provide Zakhor, remembrance (see p. 161). However, some of the mistakes in the book are plainly annoying; for example: to suggest that the English 'respectability' equals the German 'Sittlichkeit' (p. 16) is simply wrong; to misspell the anti-Semite Wilhelm Stapel 'Stepel' in text, bibliography, and index (pp. 19, 165, 214) is inexcusable; to indicate that the English title of Joseph Roth's Juden auf Wanderschaft is Flight without End (p. 70) and to claim that Oskar Ehrenberg in Schnitzler's Der Weg ins Freie wants to work for a 'Christische Anzeiger [sic!]' (p. 82) suggests that neither author nor translator knows the works in question; to imply that Rosa Luxemburg actually corresponded with Rahel Levin-Varnhagen (p. 64) is simply ludicrous.
Matthias Richter's doctoral thesis is quite different in tone and argument: in his meticulously argued and documented study he traces the interrelation between Yiddish and High German throughout the two centuries of Jewish emancipation and assimilation (1750-1933), and in particular its representation in literature. Using a wealth of material, the author first explains the linguistic background to the literary texts with Yiddish elements in the Figurenrede: for example, the slow change within the Jewish community from using Yiddish as their vernacular to the adoption of High German. He then discusses the omnipresence of Yiddish, though no longer widely used, in German society until this century, and the prejudicial and even stigmatizing effect ascribed to this Judendeutsch or Jargon. In another comprehensive introductory chapter he outlines the difficulties and pitfalls in dealing with the use of Yiddish in literature, a kind of literary Yiddish (Literaturjiddisch), which cannot be regarded as a realistic representation of the language as actually spoken or be given an unequivocally negative quality, even though an affirmation of anti-Jewish prejudices was probably the most widespread function of Literaturjiddisch. The specific nature of any literary character's Yiddish language can be appropriately understood only when it is interpreted in the context of other components of the text, as part of what Richter calls Ensemblewirkung: 'Handlung, Konzeption und Konstellation der Figuren. Themen der Figurenrede, die Gedankenwelt und--dies alles umgreifend--die Haltung des Autors insgesamt' (p. 131), not forgetting the cultural, socio-political, and literary environment of any particular text. In the main part of the book Richter analyses the Figurenrede of Jewish characters as part of this Ensemblewirkung in eight representative texts. These range from Gottlob Stefanie's play Die abgedankten Offiziers (1770) to Joseph Roth's novel Hiob (1930). One strong point of the study is the author's attempt, whenever possible, to cite documents on the reception of the pieces discussed, and particularly of the Jewish figures, which enables him to measure his own findings on the function of certain features against the effect they apparently had on contemporary audiences. In so far as this can be achieved at all, the author manages to answer his own question: 'Die empirische Frage, welche der Haltungen bei der Wahrnehmung judischer Spracheigentumlichkeiten an den Tag gelegt wurden, gutmutige und harmlose oder bosartige und gefahrliche' (p. 153). His presentation of what could have become a potentially dry linguistic analysis thus offers balanced and judicious new interpretations of such important books as Freytag's Soll und Haben, Schnitzler's Professor Bernhardi, and several lesser-known works from Jewish ghetto fiction to anti-Semitic pamphlets, and makes for positively exciting reading.
The volume Kabbala and Romantik contains the fifteen papers (five in English and ten in German) presented at two conferences in Kassel and in Jerusalem in 1991 and 1992. It is one major purpose of this volume to redress Gershom Scholem's verdict that 'die Welt der Kabbala war der judischen Auf klarung des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Tat verschlossen' (p. 1), and to investigate the sometimes obscure ways in which cabbalistic thinking entered the philosophy and theology of nineteenth-century scholars, both Jewish and gentile. In this respect, most contributions revolve around two central points. First, the role of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is assessed: 'Schelling and his school were like a bridge between their own world [Gershom Scholem's and Franz Rosenzweig's] and the ancient Jewish sources of Kabbala' (p. 247). We are shown his role as a teacher who influenced a generation of thinkers, several of them Jews who attended his Munich lectures and later went on to Rabbinical positions and incorporated Schellingian ideas into their own theological and philosophical exploits, and his role as a student of cabbalistic ideas (chiefly the writings of the 'Christian' cabbalist Franz Josef Molitor) is discussed. Secondly, attention is drawn in several contributions to the fact that traditionalist Jewish thinking survived well into the nineteenth century, while at the same time the majority of the Jewish community was engaged in the process of auto-emancipatory reform, acculturation, and assimilation. Contrary to widely-held beliefs the proponents of the traditionalist movement were by no means all staunch reactionaries, out of touch and unable to change with the times. Some, who none the less tried to take account of contemporary intellectual tendencies by, for example, receiving a non-Jewish education before taking up their positions as Rabbis, were simply more cautious towards radical reform and complete assimilation: their writings reflect 'a balanced amalgam or modified compromise between Rationalistic and Romantic impulses' (p. 280). In the writings of such thinkers, Schelling's influence can again be seen, but so can traces of other intellectual currents of the time: for example, Mesmerism. Even though a number of interesting personalities are presented, the findings on the themes of the volume on the connection between cabbalistic and Romantic thought remain often quite vague, probably necessarily so, as very little concrete evidence for continued active pursuit of cabbalistic ideas can be cited. On firmer ground are those studies that try to reconstruct 'scientific' attempts to understand cabbalistic concepts, partly complementary to, and partly in crass contradiction to the rational historical approach adopted by the fledging Wissenschaft des Judentums in the 1820s and 1830s. The majority of the articles will be of interest to experts on Schelling and on non-reformist and non-assimilatory Jewish tendencies in the first half of the nineteenth century, but not to the general student of German literary Romanticism. In order to get a general idea of the theme of this volume it is enough to read Christoph Schulte's excellent introduction, which outlines clearly and systematically its main aspects.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Krobb, Florian. "The Jews and Germany: From 'Judeo-German Symbiosis' to the Memory of Auschwitz." The Modern Language Review, vol. 93, no. 1, 1998, p. 291+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20892812&it=r&asid=ebf4006c9c6c6a1656497c0d8e13be7c. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20892812
Marxists and the Jewish question: the history of a debate (1843-1943)
.37 (Spring 1996): p351-3.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
ENZO TRAVERSO had to choose either between organizing his difficult subject around a putatively coherent Marxist theory or around intellectuals and activists who considered themselves Marxists--not quite the same thing. He decided on the second option, but, as his admirably informed and judicious study progressed, it seems that he could not escape the obvious need to sum up and juxtapose the views of his several protagonists, not only against each other, but to consider them within a framework of the bedrock beliefs, perhaps, one might say more accurately, the loosely-constituted dogmas that defined the orthodox Marxist position on the Jewish question. The debate was conducted over a century principally within the boundaries of Central and Eastern Europe, starting with the 1843 publication of Marx's Zur Judenfrage and ending with the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Long before that heroic defiance occurred, there was little left of -- and even less to commend -- the Marxist idea of assimilation as the "solution" to Jewish identity. In the Marxist lexicon, assimilation was the step Jews would ineluctably be led to take after emancipation, an idea first set in motion during the Enlightenment, and associated most commonly with Moses Mendelssohn. Assimilation found its most faithful Jewish and non-Jewish adherents in Central Europe. Judaism, which was seen as an atavistic relic, both in its religious foundations and in the successive economic roles that Jews occupied from ancient to modern times, would simply disappear according to a general theory of linear and progressive capitalist development, leading, in Marx's words, beyond political emancipation to human emancipation. In other words, the last stage of history would eliminate all the historically determined and defining qualities that divided humankind. Jewish identity would vanish just as surely as all other identities, transforming all within a world composed of transparent human beings.
For all their reliance on scientific and positivist principles, a version of Messianism pervaded the debates. Though the presence of Messianic elements in Marxism was tracked down some time ago, it is endowed with fresh power in Traverso's book. For a number of Marxists, the religious aspects of Judaism were regarded as historically transitory. At the same time, they failed to recognize that the "final" stage of communism owed much to eschatology. Another kind of solution awaited Jews, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, and did not spare thinkers who devised their own Marxist amalgam. Walter Benjamin almost alone tried to tie secular Messianism to Marxism, and in doing so confronted Marxian doctrine at its weakest point -- its anti-utopianism which claimed that no representation of the future is possible without it being first constituted materially. In his own personal tragedy, as well as in his fascinating but failed attempt to fuse theology and materialism, he saw that neither Jews nor the Jewish problem would vanish or be dissolved, and that the denial of Judaism as a spiritual sensibility was due to a fatal reductionism that subsisted on a Marxist version of historical inevitability. Traverso points out repeatedly that Marxist doctrine avoided serious discussion of the complex nature of Judaism, and he implicitly includes in his critique the more notorious simplifications that Marxists tended to impose on the roots of anti-Semitism. That is why a figure like Benjamin stands out as a rebuke to the prevailing notions that disabled so many Marxists from seeing how Jewish participation in the making of modernity actually placed them in question in a wide context of change, rather than making them the question.
Many Marxists were uneasy that their loyalty to the prevailing ideology distorted their critical powers and weakened their positions in the practical political struggles that were to beset them as the non-Western European world plunged into a series of revolutions and war that demanded but rarely received a clear analysis of the nature of modern Judaism and modern anti-Semitism. The two are necessarily coupled, but were often not seen that way. Traverso reviews the positions of the principal Marxists in Germany and Austria -- Engels, Kautsky, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, Otto Bauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Alexander Parvus, Victory Adler -- and he alludes more briefly to others. But their self-consciousness as the authentic avatars of Marxism did not, as their theoretical efforts demonstrated, reveal either much originality or innovativeness. Those among them, who have been dubbed "non-Jewish Jews," including Marx himself, did everything to divest themselves of their origins, carrying further the process of assimilation initiated by their forebears, who had been prompted by a sense of liberation from a past that they thought was best jettisoned. In a specifically important way, the existence of cultural conventions of tolerance and the official measures of limited tolerance mitigated anti-Semitism sufficiently to encourage the expectation that it would in time fall by the wayside as the German population (though the conflicting and mutually hostile nationalisms of the Austrian Empire posed intractable problems) would fall behind a Marxist political program to embrace internationalism and achieve a peaceful transition to a non-capitalist and ultimately non-alienated world. That this belief was still being propagated when some of the best minds realized that the hope of assimilation had faded is a proof of the power of self-deception.
The most informative and richest sections of the book are to be found in Traverso's discussion of Jewish Marxists in Russia both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of them -- though Trotsky before his exile was an adherent of assimilation -- saw it as historically and culturally naive in a society that not only consigned Jews to the Pale of Settlement, but a society in which the state organized periodic pogroms and effectively prevented Jews from gaining higher education. In Russia, Judeo-Marxism took its clues and found strength from the presence of a vibrant Jewish culture, based on Yiddishkeit, a movement of secularization and modernization that possessed Yiddish as a force voicing the concrete realities of Jewish life. The Bundists took an impressive lead in systematizing these perceptions, intellectually outshone the proponents of an East European Zionism that was somewhat distinct from Herzel's, and also in the face of opposition from Lenin and Stalin, whose anti-Semitism was fully developed long before he took power. To his credit, Trotsky would in his exile reverse his earlier pre-Revolutionary stand on assimilation, acknowledge its bankruptcy as a practical political strategy, and focus instead on the more pressing problem of Nazi anti-Semitism as the modern form of barbarism.
Figures who may not be as familiar are Vladimir Medem and Ber Borokhov, as well as the young Abram Leon, who died in Auschwitz. Traverso commends Medem for his non-linear analysis and his pluralism, his rejection of the false allure of assimilationism, his perception of the national character of the Jewish question in Eastern Europe, and his effort on behalf of cultural national autonomy. But, according to Traverso, Medem's critique of Western Marxism faltered on an optic too narrow to perceive the cultural differences that distinguished liberal from non-liberal societies. Like Medem, Borokhov set aside assimilationism as an error, but he went much further in his concept of nationalism, endowing it with a "material base" as a necessary condition of identity that he predicted would not vanish: "The growing national specialization does not assimilate the Jews, but, on the contrary nationalizes him." (117) By 1917, he became a partisan of a Palestinian solution, advocating assimilation for the Arabs whom he thought would be naturally drawn to the benefits of a superior Western culture, a far cry from a multi-ethnic society that characterized Medem's ideas. Reluctant to give up the notion of class, Abram Leon developed a theory of the Jews as a "people-class" which recalled Max Weber's notion of "caste" or a "pariah people." Judaism, for him, embodied the interests of a precapitalist merchant class. His economic analysis, which relegated Jews to "a historically doomed economic function," caught between "feudalism in decomposition and a decadent capitalism" and which made them the prey of anti-Semites, signifies, as it were, a return to older categories that remained locked within a rigid theory. (215)
Traverso speaks about a renewal of Marxism, basing his hope on some of the perceptions of Benjamin, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Bundists who theorized on the possibility of detaching nation from territory. Obviously he sees the necessity of treating Marxism and communism as separate phenomena. Ten years after the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, Le communisme, a book by Dionys Mascolo, incarnated for Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish writer who had been living in exile in Argentina since the 1930s, some important materialist precepts. Gombrowicz was startled by the book's "absolute knowledge about reality and absolute ignorance," but above all by its author's inability to understand the world because "he wants to impose himself on the world ... and feels that the imposition is the only form of understanding." Gombrowicz was led to declare that communism was not so much a philosophical as a technical question. He asked with bitter irony why, if communism wanted to transform material conditions, it gave so much attention to spiritual matters and why so little to material ones. Communism, it might be added, left out the redemptive power of Judaism and the spiritual content of Marxism. The major question remains, as Traverso's book illustrates, how Jews fitted into but were never an integral part of the modern host societies in which they lived, yet were able to achieve, late in their histories, a cluster of voices to explain their condition. Together with their non-Jewish Marxist colleagues, they strained to develop a coherent theory, tried to impose it as an exclusive understanding on the world, but encountered a rather different reality. The most prescient of them laboured to acknowledge it. Most remained (Ruth Rischer is only one among many) unaware until too late that anti-Semitism had become a murderous doctrine, and that their labours had done almost nothing to prepare the world for so devastating a catastrophe. Traverso's book is to be valued for opening these questions to rigorous inquiry.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Marxists and the Jewish question: the history of a debate (1843-1943)." Labour/Le Travail, no. 37, 1996, pp. 351-3. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA30381322&it=r&asid=5cbe074f625409a1774434858c478eff. Accessed 24 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A30381322
Fire and Blood: The European Civil War by Enzo Traverso review – a history to destablise liberal complacency
Traverso argues from the left that we shouldn’t dismiss the conflict of the 1930s and 40s between fascists and communists as a clash of equally contemptible ideologies
Volunteers of the Spanish Republican militia in Barcelona in July 1936.
Volunteers of the Spanish Republican militia in Barcelona in July 1936.
Adam Tooze
Friday 4 March 2016 00.00 GMT
Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 14.30 GMT
Enzo Traverso’s provocative book, which first appeared in French nine years ago, poses a profoundly important question to modern history. How can we understand the “age of extremes” (1914 to 1945) from a present – our present day in the west – that is in general terms allergic to “ideology” and convinced that “there is no alternative”? What happens when an anodyne and self-satisfied liberalism projects its values back into an earlier era of intense political struggle?
To break open our complacency, in his brilliant opening chapter Traverso plunges us into the blood-soaked history of his home region of Piedmont, where for two terrible years between 1943 and 1945 the Wehrmacht and their fascist henchmen fought a final stand against insurgent partisans and the overwhelming might of the allied armies. War and civil war merged, as partisans and their pursuers took hostages and made reprisals, German flamethrowers blasted the hillside and American bombers rained down fire. Politics became a matter of life and death.
Traverso provides an unfamiliar perspective on these decades, one of European “civil war”. He argues that a state of more or less open civil strife extended around the Mediterranean from the 1930s to the 1940s – from Greece and Yugoslavia to Italy, France and Spain. Cloaked in the mythology of the resistance and Popular Front anti-fascism, as well as the hidden histories of collaboration, it left a deep imprint on postwar political culture. In Greece its reverberations could still be felt 70 years later in 2015 as Syriza vainly summoned the heroic memory of the partisans against the might of the eurozone.
But these days in France and Italy, anti-fascism has fallen on hard times. From the 1970s a bevy of historians and intellectuals, many of them, such as François Furet, former communists, began to re-evaluate the entire epoch, criticising and historicising both fascism and anti-fascism and tracing their bloody struggle all the way back to the French revolution, which was recast as the origin of all modern ideological conflict. Their anglophone counterparts are the new historians of the second world war, scholars such as Norman Davies and Timothy Snyder, who see in that conflict little more than a clash of dictatorships that made victims or perpetrators out of everybody who inhabited the “bloodlands”. Human rights and Holocaust consciousness, not politically compromised anti-fascism, are the new civic religion.
Against these apostles of anti-totalitarianism, Traverso sets himself to reinstating the old anti-fascist verities. If all violent political struggles involve tragedy, some deserve more than distanced moral evaluation. They deserve commitment. If we today live in a democratic and peaceful Europe, we owe a “debt towards those who fought to build it” even if that leaves us with an uneasy complicity with Soviet communism. We may regard Stalinism with horror, and especially with the benefit of hindsight. Faced with Hitler’s onslaught, one could not always afford to pick one’s allies. Tragic choices were made under extreme conditions. In interwar Europe the polarised division into left and right went to the heart of personal identities. Europe, in this new age of civil war, Traverso suggests, was experiencing something akin to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The cause on both sides was not merely that of national interest, but sacred and redemptive ideology. The enemy was demonised.
In his bid to resurrect the history of anti-fascism, Traverso clearly aligns himself with the left. Yet in interpreting Europe’s history between 1914 and 1945 as a “religious” war, and by treating the combatants as akin to religious zealots, he in fact mobilises the language and concepts of only one side in that conflict, namely those of the right. The contradiction is built into Traverso’s entire approach. He frames Europe’s civil war as a political and cultural event, and rules out consideration of economic and social crisis at the start. In so doing he falls in with the most basic convention of the liberal order that he seeks to criticise – the separation of the political and the economic.
For his heroes in the interwar left, by contrast, the ultimate target of armed struggle was always capitalism and the social and political order erected on it. However radical the left’s tactics, their ultimate aim was not the physical annihilation of the enemy but social transformation. If civil wars smashed existing laws and morality, this did not license an orgy of absolute violence. The challenge, amid the violence, was to build a new order. Indeed, in a civil war the promise of a new dispensation could be a powerful weapon. Already in the American civil war, Abraham Lincoln’s armies linked slave emancipation to a radical new military code. Tito’s and Mao’s partisans won over the Balkan peasantry with promises of land reform. What was distinctive about their war-making was not their sheer ruthlessness, but the way they combined military mobilisation with the reordering of society.
As Traverso recognises, the second world war was a terrible melange of internecine civil struggle, colonial-style occupation and high-tech total war. But these different dimensions of internal and external struggle were unified by more than just the terrible violence on which Traverso is fixated. The two great war machines that clashed on the eastern front, the Nazi Wehrmacht and Stalin’s Red Army, were created by regimes preoccupied with ensuring that total war did not result in the revolutionary conditions of civil war that had brought them to defeat in 1917-23. For them, violent domestic reordering and external war were inherently linked. In the wartime Soviet Union the collectivist apparatus, which Stalin had set in motion in the 1930s to subordinate the peasantry and impose crash industrialisation, was put to work in coercing a superhuman war effort. Hitler’s extraordinary campaign to extort food and slave labour from occupied Europe was designed to relieve pressure on the German home front and forestall a repetition of the collapse of November 1918. It was the brutality of German exactions, in turn, that triggered the upsurge of truly widespread resistance in France and Italy, setting the stage for the civil war conditions of 1943-44.
Max Beckmann’s The Night, which appears in the book.
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Max Beckmann’s The Night, 1918-19, which appears in the book.
But the threat of internal conflict was also a factor in shaping the war efforts of the liberal democracies, the chief exponents of the most long-range forms of modern total war – blockade and strategic bombing – which, on the face of it, seem most remote from the intimate violence of civil war. During the first world war and its aftermath the liberal powers, too, had learned an uncomfortable lesson in the fragility of domestic peace. In the second world war they held their home fronts together with promises of welfare to come, by mobilising the global resources of empire, and by making a virtue of fighting at long distance and with overwhelming force.
One of Richard Peter’s haunting photographs of a burned-out Dresden is used on the cover of Traverso’s book. He is harsh in his indictment of the violence and ethics of strategic bombing. But in his indignation he does not pause to consider how strategic bombing fitted within a distinctively liberal mode of total war – deploying a compaative advantage in high-tech weaponry to disrupt the enemy home front, while satisfying the desire for punishment and putting only a relatively small number of personnel in harm’s way. Antony Beevor recently remarked that the mediocre fighting performance of the British army on D-day and its tendency to rely on bludgeoning firepower reflected a“trade union consciousness”. Though dripping with contempt, it is a phrase that points to precisely what is missing from Traverso’s study of the politics of the age of extremes. He prefers the martyrs of the communist resistance to the tea-drinking Tommies who crushed nazism with weapons of mass destruction. He insists that we learn more from the vantage point of the vanquished than from that of the victors. But the result is a caricature, which falls short of its own commendable ambition. If the aim is to destabilise liberal complacency by showing how civil conflict was sublimated into the great wars that shaped contemporary Europe, we need a more capacious and less literal-minded account than this.
• Adam Tooze’s The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931 is published by Penguin. To order Fire and Blood for £16.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Mourn, and Organise! A review of Left-Wing Melancholia by Enzo Traverso
By Samuel Earle.
Left-Wing Melancholia review
Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (Columbia University Press, 2017)
One hundred years on from the Russian Revolution, we can look back and reflect on the strange, sad – some may say even sacrificial – role that the Soviet Union would play in both world history and capitalism’s future.
During the Second World War, the Soviet Union’s war effort ultimately rescued Western civilisation, its chief antagonist, from Nazism, an initial ally. The Soviet Union raised the red flag in Berlin months before Hiroshima, were responsible for three-quarters of the Germans military losses, and suffered an unparalleled ten million military deaths of their own.
But then in the war’s aftermath, having saved liberal capitalism from fascism, the Soviet Union may well have saved liberal capitalism from itself. The Soviet Union awakened Western leaders and economists to the need for economic planning and welfare provision, without which – from Keynesianism to the New Deal – modern capitalism would barely be imaginable. It was an ironic fate for a state that sought to overthrow it.
But the Soviet Union’s lasting legacy would run deeper still. Finally, through its violent descent into despotism and eventual collapse in 1989, the Soviet Union would not only discredit the ideals of revolution and communism on which it was founded, it would also affirm its arch-nemesis, capitalism, as the definitive answer to how societies are organised. The Berlin Wall fell and with it, an entire representation of the world. There were no longer alternatives to capitalism; it was the end of a contradiction, some said of history.
This symbolic shift wrought by the collapse of the Soviet Union, described by the Italian historian Enzo Traverso in his important new book Left-Wing Melancholia, threw the left into an existential crisis. Once characterised by the strength of its convictions, the left found itself submerged into a state of self-reflection and mourning – a state where, in the eyes of many, it still remains. Robbed of its telos, a clear endpoint, the left’s utopic imagination was emptied, hollowed out, and in its place there lingered only a sense of loss: the loss of a political movement, of an historical moment, of a dream – a dream that had not simply been destroyed but that had also, in light of the Soviet atrocities, become a sin.
Traverso calls this condition “left-wing melancholia”: the overwhelming feeling of a movement still burdened by its past, and without a visible future.
Of course, it was not solely the Soviet Union’s downfall that sullied the Left’s treasured symbols of revolution and communism. Monstrous acts around the world, so often committed in the name of communism – from the Killing Fields of Cambodia, to Mao’s mass graves, to Ethiopia’s Qey Shibir – all played a part. But as the inspiration for so many more, the Russian revolution’s transformation from a spring of socialist hope to a swamp of genocide and fear made it the most powerful anti-Marxist, anti-revolutionary symbol; it was pinned to the left in shame.
Some thirty years on, this symbolic link – between utopia, revolution, communism and barbarism – retains a firm grip on the public imagination. “Communism,” Traverso laments, has been “reduced to its totalitarian dimension”, such that it remains almost impossible to invoke one of these words without invoking all of them. To speak of utopias or revolution is to run the risk of the worst kinds of violence. When, for example, the British comedian Russell Brand made calls for a non-violent revolution in the run up to the 2015 UK General Election, few took him seriously, but those who did dismissed him just as swiftly. Does he know nothing of history? was the general response. “We know,” wrote the actor and writer Robert Webb, in an open-letter to Brand published in New Statesman, “that revolution ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder.” Webb’s answer was to re-join the Labour Party (he would later “re-leave” the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader).
In this linkage between revolution and repression, the status quo, as the opposite of revolution and therefore, symbolically, as the embodiment of peace, becomes sacrosanct. The young are called upon not to change the world – that would be too dangerous – but rather to ensure that utopias and their brutal shadows are not indulged in. Progress becomes defined as incremental adjustments to what already exists, whatever the scale of its injustices may be.
Traverso’s book is a stirring – if also at times straying – call for the left to challenge this narrative and rethink its past. He does not want to deny or downplay the gravity of any historical atrocity. Much less does he want to forget them. On the contrary, Traverso perceives “the tragedies and the lost battles of the past as a burden as a debt” – but also as “a promise of redemption”. He demands an active engagement with “the vanquished” of left movements – recognising their suffering and their commitments – to replace a passive, reductive remembrance of “victims”. The reality of the horrors of revolutions cannot force us to forget the reality – the resonance – of the hopes and aspirations that carried them.
To make his case, Traverso draws on German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was a thinker who famously insisted that the past could be transformed, and the future through it. Over the last decade, Benjamin has emerged as Marx’s heir, the master and magician of the melancholic left. A committed revolutionary thinker with little to no faith in the future, an anti-nostalgic who dedicates his time to collecting forgotten fragments of lost pasts – he is a fitting leader.
Benjamin compared his “form of remembrance” to “the method of splitting the atom”: an attempt to “liberate the enormous [or monstrous: ungeheure] energies of history that are bound up in the “once upon a time” of classical historicism”. All those forces, that is, that are lost in the binary narratives of history textbooks, between winners and losers, and executors and their victims. Benjamin never had the chance to complete this revolutionary form of remembrance, committing suicide in 1940 as he gave up on escaping the Nazi regime alive. He left his lifelong work, The Arcades Project – in which the atomic ideal is expressed – as an unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, masterpiece.
Traverso seeks to revive and advance this ideal. Far from an activist chant to “Don’t mourn, organise!”, this is almost the opposite: Traverso insists that only by looking back to and dwelling on the historical horrors and defeats of the past do we take the strength to move forward. It is a “strategic” and “future-oriented” memory, as he calls it, a revolutionary melancholia with one of Benjamin’s sharpest sayings at its heart: people are energised not by the image of liberated grandchildren, but by the image of enslaved ancestors. Perhaps one could say, then, on this premise, that Traverso’s rallying cry is to “Mourn, and Organise!” For Traverso, neither can be done effectively without the other.
As the Queen said to Alice, and as Benjamin would surely agree, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Enzo Traverso
Left-Wing Melancholia has its flaws. A reader suffers all the frustrations of a collection of essays masquerading as something more. Two of the middle chapters in particular, offering a historical account of Bohemia and an overview of the relationship between Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, feel out of place. Both were originally published in 2002, and there seems to have been little attempt to bring them into their new context.
Where Traverso remains focused to his theme, however, it is a brilliant piece of historical study and his insistence on the left’s “culture of defeat” is strangely uplifting. When the left feels so exceptionally defeated and deflated today, he reminds us that, in a sense, it has forever been thus.
He traces a transformation in the left from militants to melancholics, but suggests the left’s history has remained largely the same: false-dawns, unfulfilled promises and, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, “thunderous defeats”. He draws on film, art, philosophy and Marxist movements around the world – anti-colonial uprisings included – to paint a picture of a movement always premised on the twin peaks of struggle and equality, and that remains defiant, forever pessimistic and hopeful. “Defeat,” he says, never resulted “in defeatism or depression, because it was supported by a world vision that had its core in revolutionary utopia”.
Traverso does not seek to reclaim the lost symbol of communism, but he does defend the need for utopia. He suggests that the current rise of nostalgic nationalism in politics the world over – found, for example, in the successes of Donald Trump and Brexit – is partly a consequence of utopia’s absence. “The obsession with the past that is shaping our time,” he argues, “results from this eclipse of utopias: a world without utopias inevitably looks back.” As such passages show, although he does not delve into party-politics, his argument is explicitly strategic.
Despite its determination to be “future-oriented”, however, one cannot help but sense a nostalgia of its own creeping into Traverso’s study – reader and writer alike. One knows the nostalgia to be naïve – as Traverso makes clear, the past was not a pretty place – but, such is nostalgia’s way, it is there no less. It is a unique kind of nostalgia – a left-wing nostalgia, one could say – not so much for the past as for the future. It is the longing for a time when the future was a friendly place, when a telos – communism, socialism, a fairer system than this – waited beyond the struggle, one only needed to get there. In this respect, without a clear endpoint for today’s movement, the left feels not so much haunted by its past, as Traverso insists – it is happier there.
Happier for a time when, as Traverso tells us, “there were no final defeats; defeats were only lost battles”. One looked forward to the future with certainty, conviction and faith – emotions that are now so lacking in left-wing movements around the world, but which were once there in abundance, expressed in every medium. It was always a question of when, not if, capitalism would collapse. History was on our side, and the future was bright, whatever challenges lay before it.
The chapter that looks at film and art in the left – one of the book’s best – leaves a vivid impression. In Konstantin Yuon’s famous allegoric painting, The New Planet (1921), we see the October Revolution depicted as the dawn of a new world, born out of a cosmic clash and the collapse of an old one. Hope emanates from each beam of light, shining from somewhere over the horizon and illuminating the victorious discoverers. Some fifty years on, in a very different time and place, that same belief – almost arrogance – can be seen in the Marxist revolutionaries of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. In one memorable scene, Ben M’Hidi, the leader of the Front de Libération Nationale, is being interviewed during a press conference at the police station in Algiers. He is handcuffed and, outside, the FLN is struggling to match the military might of the French army. One journalist asks, “Mr. Ben M’Hidi … in your opinion, has the FLN any chance to beat the French army?” Unfazed, unflinching, Ben M’Hidi coolly replies: “In my opinion the FLN has more chances of beating the French army than the French have to stop history.”
What Traverso fails to appreciate, however, is that while the history of the left may well be a history of defeats, the nature of the defeat that we witness now is different. Where past defeats looked like yet more stones on the path to revolution, this defeat lacks sufficient weight to offer any kind of footing. (It would struggle to be the subject of a film, for instance.) It is a defeat characterised by silence rather than violence – an absence of ideas and leadership, a not-knowing-what-to-do. It is a defeat without “dignity”; more like a dead-end from which we will have to turn around or, what would be far worse, a dissolution of the collective will to keep walking. “The end is not an apocalyptic explosion,” Milan Kundera once said. “There may be nothing so quiet as the end.”
At the heart of this silence, Traverso understands, is the left’s loss of telos. History is not the ally it was thought to be. Telos is the opiate of revolutionaries; without it hope is hollow and defeats have a different ring. Even Traverso, who diagnoses this problem so well, cannot resist prescribing it too. “We can always take comfort,” he tells us, “that revolutions are never ‘on time’, that they come when nobody expects them.” This is false comfort: sometimes revolutions never come at all.
The fight to curb and contain – if not overthrow – capitalism will continue. Not because it can happen but because it must. In the oft-quoted words of Benjamin, “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.” There can be no certainty for the future or conviction on what the conclusion will be. As Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison notebooks, the only “scientific” prediction that can be made is “struggle”. The fight must be carried on, even if that means carrying on losing. At the very least, Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia reminds us of that.
Samuel Earle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samuel Earle is a freelance writer living in Paris. Twitter: @swajcmanearle.
Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945
February 18, 2016 Written by Chris Bambery Published in Book Reviews
Fire and Blood brilliantly recounts the European civil war of 1914-45, which brought the idea of capitalist progress to an end, argues Chris Bambery
Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, trans. David Fernbach (Verso 2016), 304pp.
The central thesis of this wonderful book is that between 1914 and 1945 Europe experienced a crisis of a scale only comparable to the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century. It was a political crisis, which saw the demise of the old liberal order during the blood bath of the First World War, and the entry of the masses onto the political stage, both from the left and the right; an economic crisis, the scale of which led the state to intervene directly in the economy; and it was an ideological and cultural crisis which saw the faith in inevitable progress thrown onto the bonfire.
What Traverso is doing is charting how, in the years from 1914 to 1945, the ideas that would eventually lead both to Auschwitz, on the one hand, and to the resistance against Nazi occupation, on the other, came not from the margins of European society but from its mainstream. Further, the violence of those years, culminating in genocide, stemmed from the industrialisation of mass murder, flowing from ideologies of racial supremacy and colonialism among others.
Before 1914 it was common to see European society, and capitalism in general, evolving in a generally progressive direction. Progress was the rule. This was true for the pre-First World War ‘pope of Marxism’, Karl Kautsky, who saw the outbreak of that war as an aberration. Traverso, echoing the arguments of those like Walter Benjamin, sees capitalism as not heading in a progressive direction but instead hurtling towards destruction in which massive technological advances are used, not for the benefit of humanity but for its destruction.
This is important because conventional accounts of the Second World War still portray the Holocaust as being an anomaly when, like the dropping of the atomic bomb, it was the culmination of this three decade long civil war. Traverso argues, ‘despite its specific features, the Nazi war against the Jews belonged to this European and global civil war’ (p.24). This in no way demeans the horror of the Holocaust but carefully places it in its particular origins within those years.
During the course of the First World War total war meant the aim became the total destruction of the enemy in which pre-war norms about protecting and respecting civilians went out of the window. The various powers were able to draw on the experience of colonial conquest to justify a war of extermination but also came to see it as a civil war in which their opponents were not a ‘legitimate enemy’ but seen as outcasts from civilisation,
A civil war has never taken place without massacres and similar horrors. Traverso engages with Trotsky’s justification for the methods employed by the Reds in the Russian Civil War which followed the 1917 revolution, ‘Their Morals and Ours’, and despite his criticisms concludes Trotsky was right that the Bolsheviks had to employ whatever means necessary to win a war they did not start and did not want.
This is not a simple history of those years. Rather it examines the ideas which underlay the mass movements of the inter war years, and why the morality of pre-1914 Europe was undermined by a generation scarred by the horror of the First World War.
It involves engaging with the ideas of left wingers, from Lenin and Gramsci to the Frankfurt School, and with those on the fascist wing, such as the German jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, and the philosopher, Martin Heidegger. It is uncomfortable to engage with such Nazi ideologues, but in this context legitimate. These were mainstream figures who would justify book burning and political violence. As late as 1962 Schmitt travelled to Franco’s Spain to deliver a lecture claiming the Spanish Civil War was a war of ‘national liberation’ against international communism.
Traverso quotes First-World-War hero and German nationalist, Ernst Jünger, at the moment of the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, describing the war on the Eastern front as ‘absolute, to a degree that Clausewitz could not have conceived, even after the experiences of 1812: it is a war between states, between peoples, between citizens and between religions, with the object of zoological extinction’ (p.63). That became true for the war as a whole as with the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the destruction of German cities and their civilian population by aerial bombing deliberately designed to create fire storms.
Yet Traverso does make a very clear distinction between the violence of the fascists and that of the left, despite his clear anti-Stalinism. The emergence of mass anti-fascism was a response to the barbarism of Hitler and co. In the course of first the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War, the anti-fascist forces were engaged in a very real civil war in which resistance movements had not just to fight the German occupiers but the forces of the native right who had rallied to the New Order.
Violence inevitably created counter-violence that often mirrored the violence of the enemy, and even its own ritual of killing. Thus the corpse of Mussolini was strung up in Piazzale Loreto in Milan, on April 29, 1945 and subject to the abuse of the crowd. What is less well known was that the bodies of murdered partisans had earlier been displayed at exactly the same spot.
In defending the violence deployed by the left Traverso does not spare Stalin’s Russia and he engages with non-Communist members of the resistance such as Carlo Rosselli and supporters of Trotsky. But he does, I believe, go a bit too far in defending popular-front anti-fascism, which was, for him, an alliance of all the shades of the left and liberals aimed at defending democracy. That alliance had a very clear limit; revolution was off the agenda. This was something Stalin signed the Communists up to. In 1937 the Spanish Republican forces conquered Barcelona in order to suppress the far left and to extinguish the elements of workers’ control established a year earlier when the city’s working class had risen up and defeated the fascist rebellion. In 1945 that same boundary was clear when the leadership of the Italian resistance limited the struggle to the creation of a liberal-democratic republic, despite the fact that armed workers were in possession of Milan, Turin and Genoa. Nevertheless, don’t let this get in your way of reading this fine book.
Traverso argues that civilization and barbarism are not two absolutely antagonistic terms but two linked aspects of the same historical process, carrying both emancipatory and destructive tendencies. He also points out that is true of all modern wars, pointing to the 2003 Iraq which combined the deployment of the most modern forms of weaponry with the most primitive forms of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.
At the very time the atomic bomb was used in August 1945 Albert Camus argued that science had been turned into ‘organised murder’ and concluded that humanity had to choose between ‘collective suicide and an intelligent use of scientific conquests’. That choice remains before us today.
Enzo Traverso. The Origins of Nazi Violence. New York and London: New Press, 2003. vi + 200 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-56584-788-0.
Reviewed by Shelley O. Baranowski (Department of History, University of Akron)
Published on H-German (September, 2004)
Nazism as the Laboratory of the West
Enzo Traverso's provocative essay, The Origins of Nazi Violence, locates the Holocaust in the material conditions and mental frameworks of the West that made the Jewish genocide possible (p. 6). Principally taking issue with Ernst Nolte, Francois Furet, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who, albeit by different means, place Nazi crimes outside Western history, Traverso argues that Nazism's uniqueness lay in its lethal synthesis of the West's various forms of violence (p. 150), or more specifically, its regimes of discipline and punishment; its imperialism; industrialized death and total war; its scientifically grounded racism; and finally its anti-Semitism and counter revolution. Traverso draws from the insights of Marxism generally and the Frankfurt School specifically, as well as Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt to place the Judeocide in a wider context than that of the history of anti-Semitism (p. 5). The Shoah, he suggests, was a logical outcome of Western pathologies, which the Third Reich combined and actualized.
Traverso opens by zeroing in on the products of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the guillotine, the prison, and the factory, including the abattoir. The guillotine serialized killing, transformed the executioner into a bureaucratic employee relieved of ethical responsibility, and de-sanctified capital punishment. While embodying the Enlightenment's hope of redemption, the prison, organized according to military standards, subjected prisoners to rigid discipline and constant surveillance, and transformed them into captive labor. Although factories, unlike prisons, employed free workers, they too adopted disciplinary and hierarchical practices, serializing and segmenting production, while alienating and dehumanizing workers. The abattoir, the methodical, mass-produced death factory for animals, became a cultural reference point for the systematic destruction of human beings. Taken together, key institutions of the dual revolutions introduced modes of violence that featured moral indifference, bureaucratic efficiency, and the militarized mobilization of labor in which work grew increasingly meaningless to the worker. Industrialization encouraged the spread of European settlers throughout the globe and especially the conquest of Africa, wherein the mission to civilize through progress presupposed its other, the primitive, dark-skinned savage whose bleak future Darwinism and eugenics foreordained. The extinction of inferior races, as much the result of administrative rationality as spontaneity, received its justification in the view that the savages would soon depart the earth as a matter of course, unable to adapt to a superior civilization and undeserving of normative ethical considerations. The belief that expansion would alleviate overpopulation, a crucial element in empire building, was not unique to Nazism. Moreover, imperialism introduced another ingredient to the Western exercise of power, conquest, ethnic cleansing, and extermination as the route to regeneration.
Finally, the mass conscripted armies of proletarianized soldiers, interventionist economies, and anonymous death of World War I derived from industrial and disciplinary techniques already in place and from imperialist practices: total war, that is, the elimination of the distinction between combatant and civilian, the racialized demonization of the enemy, concentration camps, and genocide. Yet the consequences of the war, particularly the Bolshevik Revolution, crystallized into the moment when Nazism came to the fore. In addition to creating a climate that spawned a recognizably fascist philosophy of death in which warfare and extermination became ends in themselves, the war's aftermath witnessed a populist counter-revolution, most powerfully expressed in Nazism, which co-mingled anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism, radical nationalism, and imperial expansion. Yet rather than promote a teleological version of European modernity with Auschwitz as its conclusion, Traverso is at pains to state that, although Nazi violence emerged from certain common bases of Western culture, Auschwitz does not represent the fundamental essence of the West (p. 150).
Using Arendt's distinction between origins as opposed to causes, as well as Foucault's geneology, the author maintains that while Auschwitz illuminates its own past, the past cannot be linked to Auschwitz as straightforward cause and effect. Thus, Traverso stresses the uniqueness of Nazism even as he analyzes its Western roots. The death camps of the Third Reich embraced the worst aspects of factories, abattoirs, and prisons, combining purposeless and humiliating work, assembly-line murder, and the evaporation of morality, the glue of human connection. Nazi Lebensraum took inspiration from British imperialism and the brutality of white settlers against Native Americans. Against Nolte, Traverso forcefully argues that imperialism was the real model for Nazi violence, not Bolshevism. But, he continues, the fusion of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism that followed World War I occurred with special vigor in Germany, which, to a degree not previously seen, biologized both. Despite the prevalence of anti-Jewish hatred in the West, only the Nazis joined the crusading spirit of Christian anti-Judaism with a biologically extreme anti-Semitism to produce mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Unlike previous colonial racism, the Nazi regime did not see the Jew as too primitive to avoid extinction, but rather as the enemy of civilization that it had to actively eradicate with every available technological, bureaucratic, and military means. In fact, concludes Traverso, the Nazi regime sought not merely to conquer territories but to Germanize them by remodeling the human race. Thus, if Germany did not deviate from a putatively liberal democratic West, a la Goldhagen and other adherents of the German Sonderweg, it became the laboratory of the West, having synthesized nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, imperialism, anti-Bolshevism, antihumanism, and counter-Enlightenment feeling, all of which existed elsewhere in Europe but which either remained muted or never entered into toxic combination (p. 148).
One must admire Traverso's ambitious synthesis of theory and recent scholarship, which results in a coherent and effective effort to place Nazism in its European context without sacrificing its distinctiveness. Rather than understand Nazism as simply an expression of modern bureaucratic and scientific rationality, he is sufficiently sensitive to its political and social context as to appreciate its counter-revolutionary core. By placing the Final Solution at the center of Nazi imperialism, furthermore, Traverso's recognition of the bond between anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism highlights the moment at which a centuries-old hatred became genocidal without reducing Nazism to the history of anti-Semitism. Traverso's effective discussion, finally, of the link between antisocialism and racism in the bourgeois dread of the dangerous classes, which emerged by the late-nineteenth century, begins to explain how the racism so mercilessly applied to native populations overseas and urban insurgencies in Europe, such as the Paris Commune, could be reconfigured to assault the Jews later.
Nevertheless, Traverso is less successful in explaining why fascism at its most virulently racist emerged in Germany rather than elsewhere. Traverso indicates that only in Germany did anti-Semitism become the central component of fascism, yet he does not develop his brief reference to the visibility of the revolutionary Jew after 1918. Eugenics, he notes, fell on especially fertile soil in Germany, yet his insistence that eugenics was a Western preoccupation as well begs some elaboration as to how Germany came to occupy a class by itself. If class racism helps to explain the historical pedigree of Jewish Bolshevism, why then did the Third Reich seek to redeem workers but destroy the Jews? Why did the Nazi regime pursue Lebensraum in the east first, rather than the recovery and expansion of its overseas empire when the German imperial imagination, which incorporated both Lebensraum and Weltpolitik, set Germany apart from other European imperialist powers? Why, finally, did National Socialism synthesize the worst aspects of Western civilizations while other nations did not? Admittedly, the author's main objective is to stress Nazism's Western lineage against some tenacious historical conceptions. Yet as brilliantly as the author succeeds in accomplishing that goal, and as obvious as the answers to my questions could well be, Traverso leaves us wishing for a reconstruction of German specificity without the baggage of past teleologies.
Nitzan Lebovic reviews Fire and Blood
Enzo Traverso. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945. Trans. David Fernbach Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso, 2016. 304 pp.
Review by Nitzan Lebovic
Civil wars, the Greek historian Thucydides wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, were an eruption of hate in which “general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity” were abolished and replaced by violence and depravity. In such wars, he added, “death raged in every shape.” In chronicling the war that erupted in 427 BCE between the Athenians and the Spartans, Thucydides was one of the first to point out what Enzo Traverso, two and a half millennia later, would characterize as “the breakdown of order within a state [that is] no longer able to impose its monopoly of violence. The enemy parties are not two regular armies but two factions within one and the same state, only one of which possesses a legal status, so that the distinction between civilian and combatant becomes highly problematic. The laws of war no longer apply” (p. 71). For Traverso, the characteristic lawlessness of civil war found its ultimate form in World War I, when a community of nations united by a sense of belonging to a larger culture tore itself to pieces. Thus the European breakdown of the “humanist vision of war” (p. 70).
This highly readable, convincingly synthetic book grounds its discussion of European identity—and what it means to be a humanist in the twenty-first century—in the collapse of jus bellum. For Traverso, a well-known historian of Nazi violence, humanism began with a failure to keep war under control. He explores and extends—from a historical perspective—the current idea of twentieth-century history as the “theater of war” and the breakdown of law, two kinds of crisis that civil war tends to trigger. From this perspective, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Spartacist revolution in Germany, the series of ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and the outbreak of the Fascist revolution in Italy, all belong to the same collapse of European norms.
Theoretically, Traverso’s key insights rely on the critical and antiliberal work of the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin and National Socialism’s “crown jurist,” Carl Schmitt, as well as the more recent explorer of emergencies, Giorgio Agamben. Historicographically, he follows and builds on narratives of the collapse of the liberal order, from Franz Neumann’s Behemoth to George Mosse’s Masses and Man, from Hans Kohn’s work on the rise of nationalism to Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes. The wide scope of this analysis adds a layer to the field, by avoiding the usual rise-and-fall story of Western modernity. If the polis has been stained since its earliest days by the crimson tides of internal conflicts, its constitutive order should be seen in a different light. What might it mean to be “European” when a father can slaughter his son, or if rape—as Herfried Münkler pointed out (see his New Wars)—can serve as part of a “war economy”? What does it mean if the supposedly dissonant relation between fascism and antifascism continued to fine-tune the post-1945 European march to success and unity?
It is both a strength and a weakness of Traverso’s book that he keeps, for the most part, to the rather familiar history of the two world wars. His narrative never strays from sources already well mined in spite of the alternative conceptual framework. So what does the history of civil war add to this discussion?
Reframing the story of the last century as a European civil war enables Traverso to avoid the clichés concerning the rise of nationalism and the multiplication of more ethnically discrete nations in favor of a more focused story spotlighting the fragility of that identity and the set of political, cultural, and intellectual interests that shaped it. This approach allows one to focus on the mechanisms that make possible such incredible explosions of violence, hatred, and fear rather than their ideological justifications. Traverso concludes that investing in “brutalizing . . . language and forms of struggle” (p. 51) are a necessary condition for genocidal violence. The postwar period of silence and suppression, followed by the backlash against fascism, makes up a state-supported form of “collective ethos” (p. 260). So while Traverso’s book helps to shed light on the internal limitations of classic historiography of postwar Europe, in line with Tony Judt’s Postwar, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Dan Diner’s notion of Zeitbruch, or Pierre Rosanvallo’ns critique of the anti-fa—he never extends his assessment to the world outside Europe. While scholars of total war have addressed such themes as globalization, “low-intensity warfare,” the neoliberal outsourcing of military capability, and the surveillance state, Traverso has nothing to say about these. This silence is troubling because it keeps his own narrative limited to the safe zone of the same historiography he wants to replace.
An Epoch of Annihilation Whose Consequences Still Reverberate
by George de Stefano
3 March 2016
In Fire and Blood, Historian Enzo Traverso sets his sights on two concepts: the facile equation of totalitarianisms, and the equally facile belief in the inevitability of historical progress.
Europe's (Second) Thirty Years' War
cover art
Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945
Enzo Traverso; Translated by David Fernbach
(Verso)
US: Jan 2016
Amazon
“Some places had been bombarded so heavily that the land was a mass of iron where nothing could ever grow again.”
So observes the narrator of Francois Truffaut’s 1962 film, Jules et Jim, as Jim, a former soldier, revisits the sites of World War I battles that left nothing but ruins. The war, a global conflict centered in Europe, resulted in 16 million deaths. It was also a total war that did not spare civilians; nearly half of those who died were noncombatants. Industrial and technological innovations—armored airplanes and tanks, submarines, machine guns, poison gas—made warfare more efficient, and more lethal, than ever before. Just two decades after the war that, according to Woodrow Wilson, was to “end all wars”, another even more devastating conflict broke out in Europe and became a global conflagration.
Some historians have conceptualized the 20th century European wars not as two separate conflicts but as one war with a brief interregnum. As the title of Enzo Traverso’s latest book makes evident, the Italian historian shares that view. In Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945, he analyzes the thought and actions of a wide range of historical actors to develop an argument not only about the conflicts but also about how they are remembered and interpreted, and their continued impact on European societies and politics.
Traverso, the author of several previous books on Marxism, World War II, and the Nazi regime, teaches political science in France, where Fire and Blood was first published, nine years ago. His family had first-hand experience of the second world war’s horrors; Germans occupied Gavi, his hometown in the northern Piedmont region, from 1943 to 1945. During those “two terrible years”, the valley around Gavi “became a microcosm of the civil war that was ravaging” the Italian peninsula and Europe. The Germans perpetrated horrific massacres against civilians, and bands of partisans began to organize in the mountains to fight the occupiers. After the war, Traverso’s father became the town’s first Communist mayor.
A leftist, Traverso wrote Fire and Blood partly to understand his own politics, including his youthful involvement with radical, extra-parliamentary movements in Italy in the ‘70s. But the debates that so consumed leftists during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s have been “relegated to the ideological arsenal of a bygone century” by the cataclysmic events of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. If it’s still imperative, as Marx wrote, not only to understand the world but to change it, “the ways to achieve it have to be radically reconsidered. And this experience needs to be contemplated without either nostalgia or resentment.”
Traverso’s idea of the historian’s role diverges from that of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theoretician, of “organic” intellectuals linked to “a class, a minority, or a party”, because such a commitment might risk “the critical autonomy” essential to the profession. He also rejects the idea of the historian as detached and above the fray. Critical distance is important, but so is “a measure of subjectivity”, an awareness of what connects the historian to the object of his or her research.
Traverso isn’t quite fair to Gramsci and his concept of the organic intellectual, and his downplaying of economics and class struggle leaves some lacunae in his treatment of the European conflicts. Still, he succeeds in his stated aim to “revisit or go beyond historical controversies regarding the interpretation of fascism, Communism, and the Resistance in order to situate them in a broader perspective, beyond the division into different contexts”.
His approach is multidisciplinary, drawing on social and cultural history and political theory. He uses the concept of a “European civil war” to explore what happened in what Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the age of extremes”, the period from 1914 to 1945, an epoch of war and revolution in which “the symbiosis between culture, politics, and violence” shaped “the mentalities, ideas, representations and practices of its actors.” Though critical of left-wing movements and leaders, he objects more to what he terms “the anachronism so widespread today that projects onto the Europe of the interwar years the categories of our liberal democracy as if these were timeless norms and values. This tendency blithely reduces an age of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions to the horrors of totalitarianism.”
Traverso, although he hardly ignores the suffering of civilian victims, concentrates on “the authors of violence, those who inflict it and those who, when they experience it, accept it as the foreseeable consequence of their choices.” “The object, in other words, is to rebalance the historical perspective by restoring visibility to the actors in wars and revolutions, the vanquished as well as the victors.” The vanquished in the European civil war include leftists (Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Leon Trotsky) but also conservatives like Ernst Jünger, an intellectual who fought for Germany in both world wars, and Carl Schmitt, a jurist, influential legal theorist, and Nazi Party member. Traverso considers the ideas of radicals and reactionaries “as the object of critical reflection and analysis” beyond “the sympathies or antipathies that attract me to some and estrange me from others”.
The author writes that the European civil war of the 20th century had “two ancestors”, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and the French Revolution; both events “changed the face of the continent”. Marx’s collaborator Frederich Engels was prescient enough to envision a parallel between the 17th century war and a future world war, predicting that the depredations of the Thirty Years’ War would “be compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent”. Such a war would destroy economies and bring about the collapse of existing states, as well as trigger a “universal lapse into barbarism”.
The European wars of the 17th and 20th centuries were “total wars” that were deadly not only for combatants but also for civilians, who died in the millions, whether from hunger and disease in the earlier wars, or by bombing, massacres, and genocide in the 20th century. The first represented a conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, between feudalism and absolutism. World War I emerged from “a classical conflict between great powers for continental hegemony” and, after 1917 and the Bolshevik revolution, between revolution and counter-revolution, culminating in World War II, “an irreducible war between hostile visions of the world.” The conflicts combined wars between states with civil wars, resulting in changes in national borders and political changes in state structures, and religious and ideological confrontations. Further, Traverso notes, both “thirty years’ wars” had Germany at their center, with both ending, “in 1945 as in 1648, by its division”.
Traverso examines cultural currents during and between the war years, elucidating themes of fear, gender and masculinity, and youth. Fascism, in both its Italian and German forms, embodied a cult of virility and misogyny. Fascism deplored what it saw as weakness and degeneracy—commonly attributed to Jews and homosexuals—and, as Mussolini said, regarded war as a form of “national hygiene”, a way to clean up the so-called dregs of society and to demonstrate manliness. Fascist culture glorified the soldier and combat, exalting physical courage and expressing contempt for death. Natalist ideology, conveyed in state policy and propaganda, glorified women as mothers whose role was to bring new fascists into the world. Soviet Russian propaganda relied upon similar themes and imagery, often depicting women as helpmeets to heroic male revolutionaries.
Traverso strongly rejects the “post-totalitarian wisdom” that posits an equivalency between fascism and the Communist antifascist left. In this thinking, only “humanitarianism” is a legitimate commitment, which, as Traverso observes, leads to the valorization of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who also was a Nazi party member, because he rescued his Jewish employees, rather than “the immigrants in France (Jews and Armenians, Italians and Spaniards) who fought against Nazism in a movement linked to the Communist Party”. If the anti-fascist combatants are mentioned, “it is to emphasize that they took the wrong path, that their cause no longer has any significance for our contemporaries, and that they should now reconcile themselves with their former enemies”. In today’s Italy, he notes, one consequence has been that both fascists and anti-fascist partisans are commemorated as patriots.
Traverso sets his sights on two concepts: the facile equation of totalitarianisms, and the equally facile belief in the inevitability of historical progress. Particularly good is his treatment of the “complexity of the relationship between antifascism and Stalinism”, which has been reduced to an approach “that sees the former as simply a creature and byproduct of the latter”. In his book’s last and best chapter, “The Antinomies of Antifascism”, Traverso reclaims antifascism from liberal and conservative attempts to assimilate it to Stalinism. Antifascism, he says, was not due to the force of a seductive ideology or a propaganda campaign; rather, it was “a collective ethos” of those fighting the Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco dictatorships. Moreover, antifascism never was the sole property of the Communists and, in fact, when Communism adopted the Popular Front strategy to combat fascism, it “did no more than adapt to a turn that had already begun” among leftists and intellectuals shocked by the rise of Hitler.
Antifascism, says Traverso, had many currents—“Marxist, Christian, liberal, republican” (and also anarchist)—but all of its components claimed the Enlightenment as their heritage. Antifascism “opposed the principles of equality, democracy, liberty and citizenship to the reactionary values of authority, hierarchy and race.” That shared ethos made it possible for a diverse movement to hold together its various strands.
Traverso does identify a “complex (and perverse) dialectic between fascism and Communism” that he feels explains the “culpable silence” about Stalin’s crimes among many intellectuals. The fascist threat itself, plus the prestige the USSR gained during World War II, led them to “ignore, underestimate, excuse or legitimize Soviet totalitarianism”. However, he argues, if one did not have to adhere to the “cult of Stalin” to defend the Soviet Union in the ‘30s, it also is true that “in Western Europe it was impossible to combat fascism without the contribution of the Communists and the Soviet Union”. Traverso cites a few Italian leftists, such as Gaetano Salvemini and Carlo Rosselli, to prove that it indeed was possible to be both antifascist and anti-Stalinist. They, however, were exceptions.
If Traverso deplores silence about or acquiescence to Stalinism among leftist antifascists, he is equally scornful of liberals who “oppose the beneficent virtues of a historically innocent and politically clairvoyant liberalism … to the antifascism of the 1930s intellectuals”. He points out that liberalism and its institutions, “exhausted and shaken” by World War I, were incapable of fighting fascism; not only that, it actually was the collapse of liberalism that led to fascism. Moreover, leaders of liberal democracies, like Winston Churchill, welcomed fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism. “In Germany, between 1930 and 1933”, Traverso notes, “the elites shed their liberal face and dismantled Weimar democracy for the advent of Hitler”. With liberalism “evaporating”, the Soviet Union seemed far more prepared to fight and destroy fascism.
Traverso observes that antifascism needed hope and a message of “universal emancipation”, which it seemed only the homeland of the October Revolution could offer. “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.”
For the author, the silence about the Holocaust among antifascist intellectuals is a bit harder to comprehend. Although no one foresaw Hitler’s plan as the total extermination of European Jewry, “a heavy threat hung over the Jews from 1933, even if its catastrophic culmination could not yet be grasped”. Antifascists, he argues, didn’t see anti-Semitism as a key component of Nazism but rather as “a propagandist corollary” of an anti-democratic, anti-worker movemen”. “An industrial and bureaucratic genocide was an absolute novelty whose possibility did not figure among the categories of antifascist culture.”
Traverso argues that “complacency” about Stalinism and “involuntary blindness” towards exterminationist anti-Semitism had a common thread: a “bitter and uncritical defense of the idea of progress, inherited from the European culture of the nineteenth century”. Regarding Nazism, Traverso opposes to this view that of the exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno, who saw German fascism not as a temporary detour on the road of inevitable historical progress but 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”. In Adorno’s view, Auschwitz was “an authentic product of the West: the emergence of its destructive side”.
When the temporary unity among antifascist forces ended after World War II, the antifascist legacy split into divergent streams: those who refused to choose between the Soviet Union and the US and its allies were marginalized, while liberals abandoned antifascism to become anti-Communists. In Europe and America, antifascism came to be associated ideologically with Communism, and Communism and fascism came to be seen as mirror-image totalitarianisms.
Although Traverso, who keeps a tight focus on Europe, doesn’t say so, this Cold War ideology governed US policy and behavior for decades, with disastrous results at home and abroad. I wish that Traverso had ended his book by making that point; or by more explicitly discussing the implications of his analysis for contemporary politics. Instead, he concludes with a sigh of despair and European self-loathing, as he shares the conviction of Adorno and his associate, the philosopher Max Horkheimer, that the only possible sentiment that Europeans should feel over their bloody history is shame.
Fire and Blood has other shortcomings. The English translation, by the British leftist scholar David Fernbach, is not always felicitous. The book also should have been better edited; sometimes it repeats ideas and arguments rather than develops them. In one section, Traverso notes that World War I was “neither foreseen nor wished for by its actors”; just two sentences later, he tells us that although the war had its causes, “it was neither foreseen nor intended by its actors”. Such lapses are distracting and regrettable. Ultimately, though, they don’t significantly detract from the author’s incisive, challenging, and compelling interpretation of the European wars of annihilation, whose consequences still reverberate, and not only on that ravaged, still-divided continent.
Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945
February 19, 2016
Fire and Blood, Socialism or Barbarism
by Ron Jacobs
I recently re-watched the German 1986 biographical fiction titled Rosa. It is a film about Rosa Luxemburg. The film itself is a bit more stylized than Luxemburg’s life probably was and its politics are not nearly as radical as Luxemburg’s were, but they do show her consistent anti-imperialism, her Marxism, and, on the personal level, the passion and intellectualism so obvious in her writings. I also recently finished the newly-published English translation of Enzo Traverso’s exceptional study of World Wars One and Two, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War: 1914-1945. This combination was remarkably compatible in its analysis of the history of that period.
To begin with, both the book and the film (via Luxemburg’s speeches and written words in the film) make the point that the colonialist period prior to World War One was not a period of peace and prosperity around the globe. It was, however, that for much of Europe. All the wars and such took place in other places in the world as colonial powers fought the native peoples (and occasionally each other through proxy and directly) for control of those colonies. The World Wars then, were called this only because of colonial hubris and arrogance which considered Europe as the “world,” while simultaneously rendering the non-European world to a lesser even non-human category. Of course, the label given the rest of the world then was “non-civilized” and not non-human, but the implication was (and is) the same.51bFdOb4JML._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_
This text is not a history of dates, battles, leaders, and armies. Neither is it a political history detailing the debates between and within parties, legislatures and monarchies. It is something much broader and more fundamental. In this book Traverso examines the meaning of the cataclysmic and catastrophic changes wrought by the carnage and movements these wars wrought. He looks for those meanings in the art, the film, and even the philosophical writings of the time discussed. In doing so, he makes his case that the decades of and between the two world wars were schismatic in nature. Indeed, the conflict was the historical equivalent of a natural disaster on a global scale, as if the flood of Genesis were remade in in poison gas, aerial bombardment, and apocalyptic politics. Or less, biblical but still religious, Traverso compares the effects of this European Civil War with the previous one we call The Thirty Years War.
In the nuanced and erudite discussion that makes up this reflection, Traverso invokes Nazi philosophers, Marxist ones and liberals. It his contention that the polarization made all too obvious by the carnage of World War One killed the remaining remnants of bourgeois liberalism; the very political philosophy that was birthed a century earlier during the years of French Revolution and American colonies war for independence after being conceived in the decades preceding those events. The pretense at tolerance maintained by the liberal political state was firstly applicable only to the colonizer nations and secondly attacked by the rightist yet revolutionary phenomenon called fascism. The intention and organizational approach of fascism was (and is) to polarize. The decades between the wars saw this approach take hold and met with an equal reaction from the Left.
This isn’t to say, though, that Traverso repeats the liberal trope that wants us to see Leftist responses to fascist provocations as equivalent. Likewise, he refuses to concede that the revolutionary violence of the oppressed somehow denies the justness of their cause. He does, however, note that violence in the name of revolution tends to bring the most authoritarian elements of the revolution to the fore, if only because the military becomes the most capable defender of the revolution against its foes. Traverso remarks on the tendency of those in the liberal center (both right and left) who decry revolutionary violence yet defend or excuses the violence of the state, as if this latter violence had greater legitimacy. In essence, he writes, this period was one where public’s perception of State violence as the only legitimate violence was successfully challenged. In its wake, new revolutionary states on both the Left and the Right were created. The rest of the century and most of the early twenty-first century involved a continuing rehash of this scenario.
One of the most interesting sections in Fire and Blood are the subsequent chapters titled “Imaginaries of Violence” and “The Critique of Weapons,” wherein Traverso examines technology along with the manifestations of the war in art and culture. These years, writes Traverso, were years where much of art and culture left its traditional search for beauty and became the tools of the political. In other words, culture became propaganda, both in favor of the State and in opposition to it. Philosophical musings were utilized to justify an inhumanity never seen. Intellectual became soldiers in the service of the war and its masters. Technology made mass murder possible on a scale beyond any previous conception. Despite the attempts by historians to denote fascism and its authoritarian brutality as a rejection of the rationality symbolized by technology, Traverso tells the reader it was that rationality’s predictable result.
Fire and Blood is more than a history of a catastrophe that began a hundred years ago. It is also a warning of a potential future. Traverso’s discussions of the use of terror and violence, the migrations of millions because of war and politics, the industrialized nature of mass murder via military weaponry and desensitized soldiers and airmen, the manipulation of the popular will via culture and media; all of this describes the world we live in today. From drone operators killing humans thousands of miles away to award winning films and television shows celebrating torture and racializing crime and murder; from the state of war instituted in 2001 after the Twin Towers and Pentagon went up in flames to the cynical, brutal and often incomprehensible civil war/war by proxy in Syria and the Middle East; the killing fields of Traverso’s exceptional history are a phenomenon that remains closer than one thinks. At the same time, the clues to preventing their repetition are inside this book, too. Even more valuable tools aimed at preventing a repetition of this apocalypse can be found in the writings and speeches of the revolutionary woman whose name began this review: Rosa Luxemburg. It was she who wrote in her pamphlet popularly known as The Junius Pamphlet: “Bourgeois society faces a dilemma; either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome – annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism…”
The End of Jewish Modernity: Book Review
By Jim Miles | Jul 29, 2016 | Middle East, Reviews | 3 |
The End of Jewish Modernity is a challenging read, but with much food for thought.
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Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity (London: Pluto Press, 2016).
Works of political theory, written within the sphere of intellectual/philosophical history, are generally a difficult read. The End of Jewish Modernity would probably do well in an academic discussion within the pretensions of political science or general philosophy programs, but it certainly would not be accessible to a general public reader.
Many of its references are rather arcane and esoteric, at least for the North American reader, in particular within the opening chapters—as is understandable from its European/Jewish lense of focus (“prism”). It tends to become more accessible as it works towards the era of current events (in this case, post-World War II) as it presents ideas more conforming to the description of what is said juxtaposed against what is done. Contradictions and inconsistencies within the Jewish/Israeli paradigm or brought out by looking at how “what you do speaks louder than what you say.”
In short, Jewish modernity is defined within the historical space between 1791 and the end of World War II and the creation of Israel as a Jewish state. The period of modernity is described as being within the framework of legal emancipation, but still excluded in general from society. That exclusion took various forms within the political, social, and cultural diversity of Europe with different burgeoning nation states reacting differently.
The idea of being a pariah, of being an “other”, with legal rights circumvented by various exclusionary practices based on an anti-Semitic ideas, is the undercurrent throughout the era of modernity. While looking for ‘place’ within European society, the Jewish people provided much of its intellectual talent, for both the arts and the sciences, and developed political philosophies.
This work’s emphasis on political theory resulted in two major strands. The first is the developing nationalistic ideas as Europe itself became a group of nation states roughly aligned by language and religion, with obviously many irregularities along and within the boundaries. The second idea is somewhat the opposite, an internationalism wanting to transcend boundaries of politics, language, and religion. The former for the Jewish people became the Zionist expression of intentions. The latter became—at least claimed by some—as the Bolshevik expression of Jewish thought.
After the Jewish people were no longer ‘pariah’, when they established their own state in Palestine, the ‘modernity’—the philosophical, political, cultural, and academic intelligence that often acted against the establishment disappeared. It was replaced by a new pariah—the Palestinians who became subject to the same ghettoization the Jewish people had contended with for centuries. More broadly, the new ‘other’, the new pariah was all of Islam.
Israel became a new exclusionary power, propped up by an empire—the U.S.—that subordinates nation states to its own purposes. Israel supports its narrative with two main threads. The first is the shoah, the genocide perpetrated by Germany in WWII and has become memorialized and sacralized not just in Israel but across Europe and North America. The conflation of anti-Semitism and Israel as the singular Jewish state is the second thread, allowing the state to define anything that goes against it as also being against all of Judaism globally.
For the first, the shoah, it is not as if other ‘nations’ have not faced and suffered genocide, including within the constructs of Naziism and WWII. Historical facts are generally not represented well including the ethnic cleansing of Palestine after the UN Partition Plan (which did not confer nation status to Israel as is also part of the narrative). This ethnic cleansing reached its apogee during the “War of Independence” and continues as a slow motion policy visible today through the many civic rules, ghettoization, military control, and settlement policies operating in Palestine. Israeli actions account for four out of the five conditions that are indicated by the UN Convention on genocide.
The latter thread of the narrative also presents problems for Israel. Being against Israeli actions because they are against humanitarian law is not anti-Semitism; nor in any particular way is it anti-Jewish—yes there is a difference. With the help of their imperial supporter, the increasing significance of anti-Islamic rhetoric has created a new other to be detested, avoided, hated, maligned and made into a modern pariah (okay, some of that is now trending towards Russia as the U.S. fears losing control of NATO and the EU). So people claiming to be liberals can at once protest against anti-Semitism, against Islamic atrocities, and against Russian aggression.
Right, getting a bit off topic there but the singularity is that an empire, an ethnic state, needs enemies if they are to control the destinies of the other nations of the world.
Traverso discusses this transformation from Judeophobia to Islamophobia, then continues with his analysis of ‘modern’ Israel in contrast to its previous “modernity”. His overall conclusion is strongly and clearly worded—no political science degree necessary:
Its [Israel’s] fate will then fatally follow that of South Africa under apartheid, and in the long run, neither the Bible nor the atom bomb will manage to save it…. Israel put an end to Jewish modernity. Diaspora Judaism had been the critical conscience of the Western world; Israel survives as one of its mechanisms of domination.
It took a while for the definition of Jewish modernity to become clear, but the latter statement presents it very concisely, no longer the conscience of the West, now one of its architects of control.
The End of Jewish Modernity will of course receive much critical political anger and it could simply be dismissed as being written by someone who is deluded. Overall, in spite of some of the not well known references in regards to the general public, it grounds its arguments in the reality of what is occurring today in the greater Middle East and across Europe. A challenging read with much food for thought.
Book Review: The End of Jewish Modernity
Author Daniel Lazar reviews Enzo Traverso's The End of Jewish Modernity
December 9, 2016
3 min read
octnov book3Enzo Traverso, a professor of humanities at Cornell, advances a twofold argument in The End of Jewish Modernity. The first is that the Jewish condition has become so normalised in the liberal west that traditional anti-Jewish hatred has all but vanished. The second is that it has not so much disappeared as morphed into Islamophobia. Both contentions are seriously askew.
The first would seem to have much going for it. Traverso points to the lurid Dominic Strauss-Kahn scandal in 2011, in which a wealthy descendant of rabbis and freemasons hired a fleet of expensive Jewish lawyers to defend himself against charges of rape.
‘One need only imagine the portrait of such a character that would have been penned by Édouard Drumont or Léon Daudet, by the pencils of Toulouse-Lautrec or the crayons of Caran d’Arche,’ Traverso writes. Yet the old anti-semitic tropes remained untouched: ’Everyone, even the most cynical, feared that by using these they would only discredit themselves.’
If ever an ideology had outlived its usefulness, anti-semitism would seem to be it. But appearances can be deceptive; anti-Jewish prejudice is not going away anytime soon. This is particularly so now that the global capitalist crisis is nearing full boil. Flashpoints abound: Israel, the perceived Jewish role in finance and also a continued Jewish prominence on the left. Any of these could trigger a conflagration.
The idea of Islamophobia as anti-semitism redux also seems to have something in it. ‘The beards, tefillin and kaftans of the Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe … correspond to the beards and veils of the Muslims of today,’ Traverso observes. ‘In both cases, the religious, cultural, clothing and dietary habits of a minority are mobilised to construct the negative stereotype of a foreign body that cannot be assimilated . . . In political terms, the spectre of Islamic terrorism has replaced that of Judeo-Bolshevism.’
This is too easy. As striking as such similarities may be, it’s the differences that make the phenomenon so difficult to combat. Islamist terrorism is not a revolt against capitalism. On the contrary, it is a product of a modern capitalist economy that places vast sums in the hands of Persian Gulf monarchies whose only exports are fossil fuels, Wahhabist bigotry and jihad. These are some of the most right-wing states in modern history, yet everyone patronises them, from Barack Obama to François Hollande, in order to keep the oil flowing.
It is not petty prejudice that drives Islamophobia, consequently, but petrocapitalism in an advanced state of breakdown. Economics come first – yet they hardly seem to enter into Traverso’s field of vision.
The Great Federation of Sorrows. Mourning and militancy in the age of Trump.
1st Jan, 2017
Dürer Melancholia
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Richard Seymour on Enzo Traverso and Daniel Bensaïd
Richard Seymour is an author, broadcaster and a founding editor of Salvage. Most recently he is the author of Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016). This review was originally posted on his blog Lenin's Tomb on 28 December 2016, and is a helpful introduction to Historical Materialism's symposium on Daniel Bensaïd in our journal's issue 24.4.
This began as a review of Enzo Traverso's Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History and Memory. But a review is usually a conclusion, the verdict on a closed book. This is, in fact, the beginning of something else.
I.
Our defeat is their redemption. The most raging, downwardly mobile, insecure, isolated, almost eclipsed social forces turn out to have a trump, after all.
The axis of global reaction encompasses Modi, Erdogan, Putin, and now the president-elect of the United States. The Brexit Right is victorious in Britain, and Marine Le Pen’s fascists are on the brink of another breakthrough in France. The revanchists of ‘white nationalism’ are energised, already racking up a body count, acutely aware that they have only a few years to “make America,” or its nearest equivalent, “great again”. Meanwhile, the Left is momentarily stunned, feeling almost a physical annihilation.
However, defeat should not be disabling. The history of the Left is a history of defeats. It is the history of the vanquished, necessarily. Marxism, Enzo Traverso reminds us, is a science of defeat. “The whole road of socialism,” said Rosa Luxemburg, “is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats”. In the traditions of the left, defeat is recognised as a vital pedagogical process, even as its tragic dimension overwhelms us.
The novelist Jules Valles dedicated The Insurrectionist, on the Paris Commune, “to the dead of 1871” and all who “formed, under the flag of the Commune, the great federation of sorrows”. But from the crushing of the Paris Commune came, thirty years later, an age of mass socialist parties all over Europe. From the demolition of the internationalist left in 1914, came the electrifying revolution of 1917.
Even the brutal murder of left leaders from Che Guevara to Victor Jara summon mass funerals, not as a symbol of “the end of a communist hope” but as “one of its expressions”. Defeat formed part of a texture of collective memory, a strategic factor in struggle.
Robert Motherwell - Plato's Cave.
II.
But to fight is also to mourn, since the Left “cannot refurbish its intellectual armoury without identifying empathetically with the vanquished of history”. And there is a work of mourning that has yet to be done. The sudden outbreaks of collective grief over dead celebrities are not in this sense fraudulent or mawkish. These deaths remind us of something that we're already feeling. A mourning that is thwarted.
For what collapsed with the disintegration of the USSR was not just an appalling dictatorship, but an “entire representation of the twentieth century” filled with revolutionary hopes. The Velvet Revolutions, unlike their forebears, did not arouse new utopias, but confirmed a regression to minimal liberal ideas of freedom and representation, already underway since the late Seventies.
Given the drastic contraction of historical possibilities disclosed by this process, the momentous defeat of left-wing struggles and working class movements unveiled, the absence of mourning is striking. Former communist parties, instead of working through their loss, chose to repress their past, opting to rename themselves ‘Democratic Left’ or similar substitutions. If Trotskyist currents did not collapse in the same way, they were left similarly adrift, where they did not simply enter into denial. The spectre of communism, Traverso argues, no longer haunts the bourgeoisie, announcing a “presence to come” – it haunts and taunts its former adherents, pricking their bad conscience.
For some reason, this was not a sinless defeat. A sin can, in secular terms, be seen as a special kind of defeat, a capitulation which attracts guilt. And the internalised stigma and guilt arising from the reduction of communism to its “totalitarian dimension” became, even in dissident, anti-Stalinist strains of socialism which had never invested their hopes in the Kafka’s Castle of the East, a resistance to working through this defeat. This “impossible mourning” is one way to understand the pervasiveness of left melancholia. Even the spurious ‘optimism’ of some of the remaining shards of the Left after 1989 was a result of disavowed melancholia, the refusal to mourn, the refusal to accept a loss.
Traverso’s work is therefore, firstly, a work of mourning. It aims to come to terms with left-wing melancholy, as a necessary condition for redemption. It offers us the image of what the psychoanalyst Jean Allouch calls a “dry loss”. According to Freud, mourning ends when we finally alight upon a new object, a new love. Allouch rejects this metonymy of objects. We don’t substitute one for the other, gaining something to compensate our loss. We have to make do with a loss with no compensation whatsoever. We have to go on having a relationship with someone who is no longer there. This is the working through that Traverso doesn’t so much propose as perform.
John Donne, melancholic fashion.
III.
Unexpectedly, Traverso’s book is a counterhistory of the Left from the point of view of today’s melancholia. This was, he insists, “always a hidden dimension of the left, even if it came to the surface only at the end of the twentieth century, with the failure of communism”.
This repressed substratum is painfully evident even at moments of exhortation. Marx’s greatest works, The Eighteenth Brumaire, and The Civil War in France, are formed by a “dialectic of defeat”. And yet Marx, as a leap of faith rather than reason, insists that socialism “cannot be stamped out by any amount of carnage”. Such declarations cannot but be achingly poignant in the nuclear age.
Socialism has always laboured in the shadow of catastrophe. Luxemburg, even at her most defiant, did not exclude the outright “triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery”. Trotsky saw in Nazi victory the potential “grave of civilisation”. No wonder that, for Walter Benjamin – the archetypal left-wing melancholic for Traverso – revolution is not so much a locomotion as the application of the brakes.
One of the Traverso’s ambiguities, however, is that it is never entirely clear in what sense he is invoking melancholia. Rather than deciding on a single, unambiguous sense, he layers meaning upon meaning. Classically, melancholia was a form of madness, a ‘black humour’, which also afforded privileged insight to the melancholic. During the Renaissance, melancholia was linked to prophetic ecstasy, the downward cast of expression merely the outward sign of a rapt soul. Early moderns such as Donne and Milton made a cultural fetish of melancholia, a stance bespeaking both profound sadness and an ironising, aesthetic attitude to one’s sadness. With a slight shift of emphasis, this could also become bitterly sardonic: ‘black humour’ in a different sense. Freud analysed melancholia as a pathology, the melancholic unable to separate from a lost object of love – and thus turning all the rage and bitterness that might be felt toward the deceased upon himself.
For Traverso, German renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I, provides a startling thought-image which arguably condenses all of these aspects of contemporary left-wing melancholia. The condition of the renaissance intellectual, amid a generalised crisis of faith, necessitated a resigned acceptance of the limits of human knowledge, and a withdrawal from the world. The refutation of the socialist telos, a determinism often strenuously disavowed while symptomatically shadowing its materialism, places the melancholic leftist in a similar situation.
Perhaps the most surprising – and, to some, alarming – aspect of left-wing melancholia is its prophetic dimension. Traverso argues for a “permanence, in the communist tradition, of a religious impulsion,” but why should materialism need a theological ally, as Benjamin claimed it did? In one sense, it might be a self-cure for melancholia. Luxemburg’s final words before she was executed is in this sense both a recognition of a dire situation and a declaration of faith: “history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory!” Allende’s final words before committing suicide invoked history in the same way: “History is ours, and people make history.” What reality declines to verify is nonetheless promised by history, a history made by people, the proletariat, our Messiah.
In another sense, however, the evocation of a “millennial tomorrow,” as Primo Levi described it, while giving meaning to the sacrifices made by left-wing activists, could also be an admission of the limits of ‘scientific’ socialism. For any discourse, Marxist or otherwise, to grasp the totality of reality within its terms is impossible. There is always a remainder, something left over that evades signification, and subverts predictability. The only ‘scientific prediction, said Gramsci, is struggle. When Lacan argued that Marxism is less of a worldview than a gospel which the announces the coming of a new dimension of discourse, he may have had this in mind. At its best, it is not a totalising philosophy, but an antiphilosophy.
The left-wing melancholic therefore has this in common with the religious ecstatic: both withdraw from the world and language to commune with another dimension of experience which is affective, and apophatically unsayable. The prophesy, in this sense, is not an historical guarantee: it is a wishing, a longing, a yearning.
Bernini's prophesy.
IV.
Memory is linked to yearning in traditions of Freudian Marxism. Marcuse argues that the function of memory is “to preserve promises and potentialities which are betrayed and even outlawed by the mature, civilised individual”. This implies that, far from being a lucid archive of the past, it is a trace of the structure of desire, strategically oriented toward its fulfilment.
Traverso argues that the Left today has lost this register of memory. Modern discourses of memory have a monumentalising character. In the reflux of 1968’s revolutionary hopes, with a reheated Cold War ‘antitotalitarianism’ signalling an exit from the Left for many intellectuals, the ‘duty to remember’ the century’s catastrophes became the basis of a cautionary tale aimed against utopian hopes. In Germany, the radical Left was compared to the Hitlerjugend while, on the Parisian Left Bank, reaction took the form of a ferocious campaign against the Union of the Left. The emergence of Holocaust memory as a civic religion took the place of antifascism.
Whereas the Left had evoked memory in a strategic sense, projecting the past into a desired future, there emerged instead the apolitical, administered commemorations of the ‘past’ in an endless present. A past in which there are only perpetrators and victims, in which history is a sequence of crimes against humanity only remembered to be avoided, and the vanquished only appear as bare-forked figures stripped of commitment and meaning in their struggles. Commemoration, argued Baudrillard in a famous essay on the ideology of the End of History, is a means of forgetting, a form of “necrophagous cannibalism … the work of heirs, whose ressentiment toward the deceased is boundless”. This is the necessary supplement to an historical identification with the victors, positioning the historian as – in the words of Daniel Bensaïd – a “notary of the accomplished fact”.
Against this logic, Traverso advocates the more politicised practice of ‘remembrance’. He attempts, through an exploration of the images, art and lifeworlds of the Left, not to reconstruct revolutionary traditions but to rescue lost scenes for the present. Needing to break out of the “homogenous,” “empty” time of the present, he reaches for Walter Benjamin, for whom the past becomes historical only when it forms a constellation with some part of the present.
In some respects, these constellations formed by past scenes with the present are personal. As an historian of the 20th century, Traverso remarks that historians are necessarily exiles, caught between two worlds, the one in which they live and the one they explore. Exile is a key term that repeats itself and acquires new resonances throughout the text. Trotsky’s long periods of exile leave him dependent on Bohemian communities of whom, as a Bolshevik, he would evince haughty disdain. Benjamin’s exile leaves him precarious, miserable, and at the mercy of friends and intellectual arbiters. “Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated,” says Adorno. This casting adrift is a melancholic vocation, and one senses Traverso feels this acutely as a left intellectual, strategically unmoored, separated from a familiar language.
In this sense, the logical thing to do with Traverso’s book would be to read it backward, from end to beginning. In that way, one finds a Marxist historian in mourning for his late comrade, Daniel Bensaïd, and pursuing the threads of his answer to post-Cold War melancholia, in his encounter with Walter Benjamin. Then, at each chapter, he broadens the optic, to take into view Benjamin’s relationship with another melancholic, Theodor Adorno; the Bohemian milieux in which melancholics and left-wing intellectuals found ambivalent refuge; the imaginary landscapes of socialism in art and cinema, and the melancholic turn between Queimada to Land and Freedom; the wider theoretical questions about memory and history; finally alighting on a general panoptic view of left-wing melancholia.
Reading it like this, one sees that the encounter between Benjamin and Bensaïd, the constellation the two very different moments of 1939 and 1989, have a strategic purpose. What Bensaïd sought from Benjamin, writing shortly after the collapse of communism, was a “principle of intelligibility”. For Benjamin, confronting the midnight of the century, “thinking emancipation and revolution” had become “a wager, an act of faith”. Bensaïd, confronting a far less cataclysmic but nonetheless existential crisis of the left and the workers’ movement, reproved the “frantic optimism” of the revolutionary left which could no longer be sustained, seeking in its place to conjoin the “sharp ax of messianic reason” to the “hammer of critical materialism”.
For Traverso, registering the Left’s defeat in a serious, rigorous way, necessitates a similar overcoming of “frantic optimism”. The art of memory, today, “lies in organising pessimism”. The task is to lucidly “recognise a defeat without capitulating in front of the enemy”.
Saturn devours his young.
V.
For all that Traverso’s book is a work of mourning, it may also be a warning: a fire alarm. One cannot help but wonder if part of the point of remembrance here is to, as he quotes Benjamin, “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”. Traverso has spent most of his recent works examining the questions posed by fascism, Nazi genocide, and world war. As an assayist of Jewish modernity, he has also been attentive to the rise of Islamophobic racism, the mulch on which the new far right is feeding.
In the context of capitalism’s gravest crisis since the Great Depression, the loss of a system alternative to capitalism has been keenly felt, and the consequences dire. “A world without utopias inevitably looks back,” says Traverso. The regressive cultural nostalgia that has accompanied the rise of Trump betokens the absence of utopia in an age in which ‘progress’ is identified with gradual refinements of the status quo.
Recently, in Radical Philosophy, Etienne Balibar acknowledged the increasing “eschatological” dimension of critique. He might as well have been speaking of left-wing discourse everywhere, for there is a ubiquitous sense of impending disaster, End Times heralded by a glow of orange. In this book, one is struck by the recurrent appearance of Benjamin’s “melancholy gaze,” his horrified warning of the coming fascist Antichrist, and his appalled reproach to “the self-satisfied optimism of our left-wing leaders”.
There is nonetheless an erotics of resistance buried in left-wing melancholia. The prospect of annihilation is, whatever else it might be, powerfully animating. There is nothing more alluring than a gallant struggle against the odds, especially if against all odds: think of the Communards, or the French Resistance. The mouth-watering Sehnsucht accompanying today’s melancholic disposition means that it is in no way equivalent to Olympian resignation.
Certainly, the melancholic may, as Milton puts it, “be seen in some high lonely tower”. Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, suggested that disillusioned ex-communists could withdraw to a watch-tower, and “watch with detachment and alertness this heaving chaos of a world”. Detachment, however, would be out of place in today’s melancholia, a dereliction in a world menaced by clickbait-fascists led by a reality television Duce.
The multiple mournings of this book – for lost worlds of communism, rebellion, Bohemia, radical art, revolutionary theory, as much as for Bensaïd and the broken dialectic of revolution – are thus rendered more poignant by its note of warning. The documents of communism, its ancient texts and photographs, have the feel of letters from a lost love, one not properly mourned – letters, which it is wrenching even to look at. But which it is no longer possible to avoid.
Almost in passing, Traverso quotes a luminous essay on gay liberation by Douglas Crimp, ‘Mourning and Militancy’. Amid defeats, oppression, murder in the streets and the cataclysm of AIDS, LGBT activists mourned, elegised, learned, and rebuilt their arsenals. But mourning was a vital, unmissable step in this process. “Militancy, of course, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”