Introduction: Legacies of Antifascism

Abstract

In the global life and death struggle against fascism there could be no middle ground, no neutral space, and no non-combatants. The negativity of antifascism was the exhilarating intellectual tonic of the epoch. As Klaus Mann wrote in 1938, Fascism - however paradoxical this sounds - makes it easier for us to clarify and define the nature and appearance of what we want. Our vision will oppose, point for point, the practice of fascism. What the latter destroys, socialist humanism will defend; what the latter defends, it will destroy.2 The Popular Front organizations of the 1930s embraced antifascists great and small, from commanding intellectual figures like Roman Rolland, Heinrich Mann, and Harold Laski to those countless foot soldiers who bought