According to the copyright page, this is the new expanded 2022 English edition of “Hitler: The Policies of Seduction,” first published by London House in 1999, (now with a new title). It was a very popular book that went out of print years ago. One reviewer wrote “biased,” which can be said about most non-fiction books, history, the social and political sciences, the humanities, and even the hard sciences. Half of the book consists of rarely know Hitler quotes. And viewing the world through Hitler’s eyes is usually warranted in order to understand Hitlerism.
Most interpretations after the Second World War had given interpretations describing Hitler as a mere instrument in the hands of capitalists, as an opportunist lacking in true convictions and only coveting power and authority, or as a psychopath who had been traumatized in infancy and was obsessed by antisemitic phobias. Years later the Nazi dictator had become the object of the entertainment industry. The illustrated biographies and documentary films about Hitler were appreciated as a soap opera that deals with the fate of nations.
After the 1960s, the biographers effort was to see the world as Hitler saw it, to tell the story as much as possible through his eyes. The books by Toland and Irving and historians like Karl Dietrich Bracher in his German Dictatorship, who during the 1960s and 1970s tried to set aside moral judgments and attempted to let the facts speak for themselves. This approach had certainly transformed the understanding of National Socialism.
There was also the frequent use of psychohistory in biographies of Hitler, which contributed to isolating him from his context or explained his politics by his mental pathology, as Rudolf Binion did in his book Hitler among the Germans, published in 1976. If Hitler was somehow pathologically ret*rded through the shock of his mother's death and his nervous blindness toward the end of the war, as Binion asserts, then National Socialism was nothing more than an accident of history. As for the books on Hitler the politician or military strategist, the image they projected was still basically the one that had been suggested by Alan Bullock.
None of the many books on Hitler could answer in a satisfactory way the question "why Hitler?" Those who want to understand history will have to abandon the satisfaction of replaying the drama for the more painful and sober task of historical analysis. The sources for the story of Hitler and the Third Reich are by now well known. There is no unknown Hitler. There is only a Hitler who needs to be better understood through the historical context of his life.
To comprehend Hitler better, we would need work similar to Renzo De Felice's biography of Mussolini. De Felice had put an end to the Marxist tyranny over history still fashionable in Italy and to which De Felice referred in his book. His two volumes once and for all buried this view definitively. In great detail De Felice presented an image of fascism that henceforth would condition historiography, with an approach that could also be applied to Germany. Was it not strange that no one had attempted to do for Hitler what De Felice had done for Mussolini? That responsibility fell principally on the tyranny of a certain type of social history in which Hitler biographies were in large part written by nonhistorians or by non-Germans. And yet, many of the sources are still available today.
As had been the case with Hitler, the Mussolini biographies reduced everything to an image of the opportunist politician, demagogic and histrionic, lacking ideas and principles, a dictator who was a bit absurd, a bit comic, always ferocious, consistently negative, beset by the times and places in which he had to act, as was the case in the biography by Denis Mack Smith. Here, many things seem to be true, but all the important aspects are missing. The view of Mussolini is one-sided because he is removed from his context and nothing in this biography transcends the immediate situation. Viewing Mussolini through the eyes of this book is easy and pleasant reading, but Mussolini made easy makes Fascism difficult to understand. The principal motive behind such a severe judgment was the simplification of a movement that should be considered seriously as part and parcel of the modern politics of the masses. For Mack Smith, instead, Fascism was only a negative fact: it was not a political doctrine, but simply a method to conquer power. But how could pure method succeed so well in mobilizing the masses? The English historian judged Fascism from the point of view of Anglo-Saxon liberalism and in the light of the English present. This prevented him from understanding that doctrine as formal political thought. It worthily continued the British tradition of always failing to take Italians seriously.
In the cases of both Hitler and Mussolini, historiography that concentrates on their personalities, reducing the new politics of their regimes to a mere instrumentation of propaganda, is a serious distortion of historical reality, because it leads to an equally serious simplification of fascism and National Socialism as experiences of mass politics, which constituted a fundamental dimension of the anthropological context in which modern man lived.
Radical right thinkers, leaders, supporters, and ideologies should be taken seriously, just like all other human actors and beliefs. One should not ignore, demonize, or ridicule their beliefs in a blatantly partisan fashion, nor rely solely on vulgar materialist factors or macro-societal developments to explain the complex behavior of extremist ideological milieus, including the radical right. National Socialist ideology must be taken seriously, in its own terms. It must not be dismissed as crazy, contradictory, or vague.
Neither should one be overly moralistic by characterizing the radical right simply as the embodiment of "evil," as something wholly "beyond the pale," as being opposed to all progress and thus being entirely "reactionary," or—by extension—as a milieu that is unworthy of serious and relatively unbiased study. One French scholar wrote: When one investigates the radical right, one is studying "evil." Such a jaundiced, simplistic, dismissive, and hyper moralistic stance would never be viewed as acceptable when writing about other extremist milieus, above all the radical left or the Islamists, which illustrates the overt political biases of many of today’s "progressive" academics. Moreover, given the tens of millions of "class enemies" and dissidents murdered by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and all of the other horrendous crimes perpetrated by communist movements and regimes, why should communists be viewed as being any less “evil" than National Socialists?
The bottom line is that polemical and partisan “activist research" is not the same thing as genuine scholarship, since the prioritization of promoting favored ideologies and advocating explicit political agendas is incompatible with the requisite emotional distance, open-mindedness, empathy, and pursuit of objectivity that are essential attributes of serious scholarship.
Zitelmann’s interpretations of fascism is one of the main three that has stood the test of time. Thanks to the pioneering work of a number of leading scholars, the older characterizations of fascism as an inherently conservative, wholly reactionary and entirely right-wing political phenomenon have given way to much more sophisticated and nuanced understandings. It now seems evident that fascism was originally the product of fin-de-siècle, first originating in France, that conjoined certain right-wing and left-wing doctrinal elements in order to create a new ideological amalgam opposed to both parliamentary democracy and communism. To borrow the pithy formula enunciated by French fascist Georges Valois, "fascism = nationalism + socialism."
First, fascism had an illiberal, anti-democratic, “anti-bourgeois” exclusivist type of nationalism. Second, an anti-materialist, non-Marxist variety of socialism that, while highly critical of "plutocratic" and “anti-national" capitalism for exploiting workers and thereby undermining the organic solidarity of the nation or racial group, did not advocate the outright expropriation of private property, but merely the political subordination of big capital to the interests of the nation (as determined by fascism). This view is exemplified by the work of scholars such as Zeev Sternhell, Eugen Weber, Renzo De Felice, Jeffery Bale, and Rainer Zitelmann.
I am talking specifically about the ideological core of fascism, not the ways it was later modified or manifested itself institutionally in the organization of fascist regimes. In certain fundamental respects, the latter resemble the totalitarian regimes established by other extremists with totalitarian ideologies, such as communism. Nonetheless, the best way to understand revolutionary ideologies of all kinds is during their earliest movement phases, as opposed to their later regime phase, during which intra-movement factional struggles and purges, necessary practical compromises, and other contextual factors beyond the control of revolutionary leaders and cadres typically end up corrupting and compromising their ideological purity.
As a result, every fascist movement was divided into a right-wing faction (i.e., those that were attracted primarily by its radical nationalism or, in the case of the Nazis, its racism), and a left-wing faction (i.e., those who were attracted mainly by its socialist and revolutionary promise). The ongoing struggle for influence and dominance between the left- and right-wing components of fascist movements typically led to bitter internecine strife that could only be dampened or resolved by strong, charismatic leaders. In the end, however, those leaders had to decide whether to move to the right or the left and, given that fascism and National Socialism were political latecomers on the scene and there was little or no "political space" on the left in interwar Europe, most opted to move to the right, in part for tactical reasons.
Right-wing fascists were more common in central and eastern Europe, while left fascists were more common in Western Europe, (with the partial exception of Spain). The fascist left made a comeback in several countries toward the end of the war, and especially the postwar period, after the fascist right was severely discredited. In postwar Argentina, for example, there was no “political space” available on the right side of the spectrum, so Juan Peron moved to the left and even had the support of the unions. Although he never sought to establish a regime of the fascist type, his justicialismo doctrine closely resembled fascism from a purely ideological standpoint.
The earliest left-fascist groupuscules in postwar Europe, most notably June Europe, were established even before the student and worker revolts of the New Left in 1968. In the wake of those dramatic events, newer, "hipper” generations of left fascists emerged during the 1970s and have since continued to expand their intellectual and cultural influence. Since the collapse of the “really existing” Communist states in Eastern Europe and the further discrediting of the entire Marxist revolutionary project, conditions have become even more propitious for the proliferation of left-fascist groupuscules. After all, there is now only one remaining so-called “imperialist” superpower, the United States, and “capitalist globalization” has largely replaced “international communism” as the chief threat to European independence. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising to discover that new generations of fascist radicals are actively participating in the "anti-globalization” campaign, supporting all sorts of anti-American regimes and movements in the Third World, retrospectively praising the causes and actions of left-wing Euro-terrorist groups and making “red-brown” political alliances with ex-Communists, ecologists and anti-Western left-wing nationalists. In that sense, case-studies of left-leaning neo-fascist groupuscles like Nouvelle Résistance not only help to shed light on the nature of fascism as a political phenomenon, but also lend further to Sternhell's and Zitelmann’s provocative thesis that fascism brought together diffuse currents of cultural criticism from both the extreme right and the far left in order to forge a new revolutionary ideology that would go “beyond right and left.”
Lade die kostenlose Kindle-App herunter und lese deine Kindle-Bücher sofort auf deinem Smartphone, Tablet oder Computer – kein Kindle-Gerät erforderlich.
Mit Kindle für Web kannst du sofort in deinem Browser lesen.
Scanne den folgenden Code mit deiner Mobiltelefonkamera und lade die Kindle-App herunter.
Dem Autor folgen
Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Wiederhole die Anfrage später noch einmal.
Wird oft zusammen gekauft
43,16$
Gewöhnlich versandfertig in 2 bis 3 Tagen
Gesamtpreis:
Um unseren Preis zu sehen, füge diese Artikel deinem Einkaufswagen hinzu.
Wähle Artikel zum gemeinsam kaufen.
Kunden, die diesen Artikel gekauft haben, kauften auch
Seite 1 von 1 Erneut startenSeite 1 von 1
Informationen zum Autor
Folge Autoren, um Neuigkeiten zu Veröffentlichungen und verbesserte Empfehlungen zu erhalten.
Spitzenrezensionen aus anderen Ländern
Rogelio Cordeiro Nogueira
Livro em ótimo estado. Rapidez na entrega.
Rezension aus Brasilien vom 28. August 2022
HG
Von einem Historiker für andere Historiker
Rezension aus Deutschland vom 27. Mai 2022mtp570
How History books should be written
Rezension aus dem Vereinigten Königreich vom 8. Mai 2022Jay
A carefully laid out argument supported my extensive documentation.
Rezension aus Kanada am 19. August 2022
