Anti-fascist Struggle Research Articles

Images of Absence: Death and the Language of Concealment in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Marielle Sutherland

590 Reviews Lidice (I943) to demonstrate the comic potential ofHitler and theThird Reich: 'Es braucht sehr viel gutenWillen, diesem Roman etwas abzugewinnen' (p. 478). The weaknesses in Mann's literaryoutput aremirrored in thepersonal misfortunes of thisbasically generous and principled man. Thanks toextensive research inunpub lished archival sources, Flugge isable topresent amore detailed account thanhitherto possible of Mann's private life. In particular, he focuses onMann's twomarriages and at least a few of his countless love affairs.This not only throws a revealing light on some of theprotagonists and recurrent themes of the novels (Fluigge has a sharp eye for the interplay between lifeand art) but also heightens our awareness of thepain and humiliation caused by his domestic circumstances, especially during exile inNice and his finalyears inCalifornia. The contradictions are no less apparent in Mann's role as a public figure.The deservedly high esteem and moral authoritywhich he enjoyed because of his courageous opposition to Wilhelmine values, to theFirstWorld War, and toFascism and which turned him into a leading figurehead fordemocratic forces inGermany and Europe cannot disguise the fact thathe consistently underestimated Hitler and that, in the 1930s, he grew so dependent on his income fromSoviet sources thathe became an all-too-willing tool in thehands of his Communist paymasters and amere 'Popanz der Propaganda' (p. 335)-a bitterly paradoxical position foran intel lectualwho had once famously and influentiallywarned against thedanger of 'Geist' selling out to 'Macht'. Nevertheless, Fliigge insists that,however misguided invari ous ways, Mann deserves to be called a 'Widerstandskimpfer' (p. 304) since, unlike some others, he did not use exile just to ensure his own safety and a continuation of his literarywork but took a prominent part in the anti-Fascist struggle. Future editions of this stimulating and highly readable biography would benefit from an index and fuller referencing. Some of Fliigge's ideas also deserve further development, forinstance thedescription of Mann's fundamental aesthetic impulse as 'symbolistisch' (p. 200) or thecontention thathewas born before his time inaesthetic terms-that is, the suggestion that his love of dialogue and the literary fragment would have made filmhis natural art formhad he been born in a later age. Fliigge's portrait ofHeinrich Mann, warts and all, considerably enriches our knowledge and understanding of amajor, ifseriously flawed,writer who, unlike his younger brother Thomas (a somewhat unattractive figurehere), fell well shortof true literarygreatness. UNIVERSITY OF BATH IAN WALLACE Images ofAbsence: Death and theLanguage of Concealment in thePoetry ofRainer Maria Rilke. By MARIELLE SUTHERLAND. (Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, i64) Berlin: Weidler. 2oo6. 302 pp. E44. ISBN 978-3 89693-46I-I. One can hardly think of a topicmore central to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke than death. Contemplations of death haunt his work from the early poems andMalte Laurids Brigge tohis very late elegies and finalpoems. This fact may not be surprising fora poet constantly contemplating the transcendent realm andman's relationship to it,but thedevelopment of his thinking on this topicmay not be so evident. Is death a threshold to the transcendent realm or is itpart of this earthly existence? Can the individual (and most particularly the artist) still find a death of his/her own in the modern, dehumanized world? How does Rilke's thinking about death develop as he progresses in his poetic work? It isprecisely this development across the breadth of Rilke's work thatMarielle Sutherland traces in her volume Images ofAbsence. This volume refines and extends Sutherland's earlier doctoral work. She is an insightful young scholar who has turned her considerable talents to investigations of Rilke in recent talks, including Oxford's seminar series 'Nach Duino'. MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 59I Sutherland's analysis of the scope of Rilke's work is especially perceptive. She moves fromRilke's early poetry, inwhich life and death are polarized (with death given theprivileged place), tohis attempts tounify lifeand death within poetry.Rilke eventually creates a language of poetic figures inwhich he 'forges a space for,and lends a voice to,death as thatwhich exceeds ordinary language' (p. 283). In his late work, particularly theDuineser Elegien, Rilke creates poetic figures that go beyond normal human articulation to touch upon the empty category of death...

ANTI-COLONIALISM AND THE ITALIAN LEFT

Italy was, for a short period, an empire; and yet unlike other empires, it apparently lacked a vocal anti-colonial element. This article draws attention to the ambivalence of the Italian response to colonialism, by focusing on a specific moment of Italy's engagement with empire: the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1935. On the one hand, this colonial war (one of the very last to be fought) consolidated a mass consensus around the regime. However, the Ethiopian war can also be read as the first opportunity that the Italian left had to articulate its anti-fascism on an international scale. The archives documenting the activities of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) between 1935 and 1946 allow us to reconstruct an oppositional narrative to colonialism that developed among the Italian left in the fascist years. The PCI sent an emissary, Ilio Barontini, to Ethiopia, to organize resistance against the Italian occupying forces. This mission, together with other anti-colonial activities of the PCI in those years, can be read as a pre-history of Italian anti-fascist resistance. The men who went to Ethiopia on an anti-colonial mission were there fighting against some of their fellow Italians, foreshadowing the civil war that would mark the Resistenza between 1943 and 1945. While Italian imperialism was among the bloodiest colonial enterprises ever undertaken, it is shown that in the 1930s there did emerge a vibrant critique of it, whose energies flowed into the anti-fascist struggle in the war years.

Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust Toby Axelrod Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust, by Thomas C. Fox. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999. 177 pp. $55.00. As Germany agonizes over its latest wave of neo-Nazi violence, many fingers have been pointed at former East Germany. In the ten years since reunification, a higher proportion of violent xenophobic attacks have taken place in the former communist zone than in the west. Unanswered questions have resurfaced: Did the totalitarian East German state not only fail to destroy Nazi ideology, but actually ensure its survival? Is there a connection between today’s right-wing skinheads and the East German approach to Holocaust education? [End Page 115] In his book, Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust, Thomas C. Fox goes a long way toward answering these questions. The book provides a concise and thorough overview, both in a technical and interpretative sense, of how the Holocaust was seen in divided Germany from 1945 until today. The analysis, which calls upon other recent works such as Jeffrey Herf’s 1997 book, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, is both fascinating and depressing. Fox aims to “show that the East German state, with its highly controlled public sphere, attempted to reorganize, censor, and orchestrate Holocaust discourse in a massive effort to utilize the ‘Jewish question’ for its own political ends . . .” (p. 8). Ultimately, the author suggests that a “new history” will have to be written by the united Germany, overcoming the “lingering power of East Germany’s self-staging as an antifascist state” (p. 8). This complicated topic is only beginning to be researched, but facets have proved tantalizing to historians, journalists, and social scientists. Much thought has been given to the fact that East Germany’s official relationship with Nazi history differed markedly from that in the west. Fox’s book is one among several recent works by non-German scholars confronting the topic. Among the others are Herf’s book, as well as Tina Rosenberg’s 1995 book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism, and Ian Buruma’s thought-provoking 1994 work, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Vintage). Of these titles, Fox’s is among the most concise and scholarly, while the others have the advantage in style and accessibility to the general reader. There is a pervasive belief among western historians that East Germany did not exorcise its Nazi ghosts as successfully as did the west. Some in the east have taken issue with such conclusions. But the fact is that East German schoolbooks have been scrapped, teachers have been reeducated, and memorial sites revamped since the reunification in 1990. In his book, Fox, Associate Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at the University of Alabama, examines three main vehicles for transmission of the political message: historiography, concentration camp memorials, and literature and film. The stamp of socialist ideology may be seen in all three realms. Among Fox’s conclusions are: that East Germany’s “state-organized discourse” used the Holocaust to promote an image of the Socialist struggle against fascism; that the “foundation myth” of anti-fascist struggle enabled some Jewish survivors to remain loyal to the East German state; and that the state used “the language of traditional European anti-Semitism,” whether through anti-Zionist propaganda, refusing to recognize the genocide against the Jews and to pay restitution to survivors, or the persecution of Jewish citizens in the 1950s. Mr. Fox does not excuse West Germany for its whitewashing of Nazi crimes in the first two post-war decades. But he points out that, while the East German system [End Page 116] quickly became rigid and fixed, West German society gradually became more flexible and open. “[I]t is possible to argue that, despite denial and ever-present resistance, the West Germans indeed developed an important dialogue on the subject” of the Holocaust, writes Fox (p. 7). In the west, guilt may have been minimized or denied in the 50s and 60s, but in the east guilt was shoved westward. Communist Germany officially was the land...

?Against the Current?: Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto

;4 P emrepare to defend yourselves in case the enemy attempts to completely destroy your community!' This was the new slogan of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement in Warsaw in April 1942 when word spread of the destructive tidal wave engulfing Jews. By March of the same year, implementation of the Final Solution had reached Lublin and other ghettos within Germanoccupied Poland. While anxiously anticipating the Red Army's spring offensive after the Russian snows began to melt, the Hashomer Hatzair engaged itself in an antifascist struggle. These two commitments-a Jewish one and a pro-Soviet one-were two facets of the same dramatic landmark in the ideological odyssey that Hashomer Hatzair in Warsaw traversed between the outbreak of World War II and April 1943 when, alongside other groups, it led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, both of these concepts were foreign to the pre-war ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair.

"Against the Current": Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto

Prepare to defend yourselves in case the enemy attempts to completely destroy your community!" 1 This was the new slogan of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement in Warsaw in April 1942 when word spread of the destructive tidal wave engulfing Jews. By March of the same year, implementation of the "Final Solution" had reached Lublin and other ghettos within German-occupied Poland. While anxiously anticipating the Red Army's spring offensive after the Russian snows began to melt, the Hashomer Hatzair engaged itself in an antifascist struggle. These two commitments--a Jewish one and a pro-Soviet one--were two facets of the same dramatic landmark in the ideological odyssey that Hashomer Hatzair in Warsaw traversed between the outbreak of World War II and April 1943 when, alongside other groups, it led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, both of these concepts were foreign to the pre-war ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair. [End Page 63]

The Production of “Official Memory” in East Germany: Old Communists and the Dilemmas of Memoir-Writing

InEast Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led antifascist struggle. Intended to legitimate the SED regime, this official memory was rehearsed in countless “lieux de mémoire,” including films, novels, school textbooks, museum exhibitions, and commemorative rituals. Concurrently, party authorities encouraged Old Communists to share their past lives with younger East Germans; in particular, they urged Old Communists to write memoirs of their participation in the antifascist struggle against Hitler.

"How About Some Meat?": The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941-1946

Few federal agencies have stood closer to the center of the twentieth-century debate over government regulation of the American economy than the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Established during World War II to administer a system of rationing and price controls, OPA came to loom larger than any other wartime agency in the political consciousness of the Left or the Right. To recapture the place that OPA occupied in the political imagination, we need look no farther than the experiences of two young OPA employees, the American Communist party activist Jessica Mitford and the Republican lawyer Richard M. Nixon. Mitford, the daughter of British aristocrats, took a job in OPA after her wartime emigration to the United States. She viewed her experience close to the front line of the war against Fascism as anything in Washington. Not only did she help supervise the restriction of pleasure driving in an effort to conserve American resources for the anti-Fascist struggle, but as a field investigator she also felt empowered to go into local stores and hold the line against war profiteers, price gougers, greedy landlords, [and] violators of rationing regulations. Nixon, a far less enthusiastic OPA employee, found such an extension of government power frightening. He regarded his fellow employees as slide-rule boys and snoopsters. After only seven months as a lawyer in the tire rationing department, Nixon had grown disillusioned. He left in August 1942 to join the navy. Years later, Nixon was to claim that it was this brief wartime Washington experience that shaped his hostility to big government and overzealous bureaucrats. Nixon's friend and the only other Republican on the staff, J. Paul Marshall, explained, We both believed in the capitalist system, but

Le parti communiste algérien de 1939 à 1943

The Algerian Communist Party from 1939 to 1943, Charles-Robert Ageron. From 1936, when it was founded, to 1943, when it emerged from underground, the Algerian Communist Party followed faithfully the sinuous instructions of the Third international. It navigated to the best of its ability, from unity of action with the French to the anti-imperialist or anti-fascist struggle. The German-Soviet pact disorganized its action for a while and forced it underground. It then took up again the Leninist slogan of the struggle against imperialism. Not until 1946 did it adopt a nationalist attitude and strongly temper its wish for union with France.

The New High Tide of National Liberation Movements and the Antifascist Struggle of the Peoples of the Capitalist Nations During the 1930s

During the 1929-1933 economic crisis of the capitalist world, the monopoly bourgeoisie of the imperialist nations, in addition to further increasing their exploitation of the working people domestically, also vigorously introduced the crisis to the colonial and semicolonial nations. They depressed the prices of raw materials and engaged in an added dumping of "surplus" products, further aggravating the poverty and suffering of the people of these regions induced by foreign plunder. The contradictions between the oppressed nations and imperialism intensified, and the national liberation movements reached a new high tide.

The Politics of the Body: The Chilean Junta and the Anti-Fascist Struggle

The aftermath of the repression launched by the military coup d'etat of September 1, 1973, in Chile has brought with it the need for the victims of arbitrary arrest, torture, detention, and exile to find a way to express this unprecedented experience. Their testimonies respond to a rupture in the mode of collective perception of Chile's political development. The relative enforcement of bourgeois rights in previous decades, together with the acritical and general acceptance of an ideology that represented Chile as a nation with a solid democratic tradition, masked the intermittent massacres of workers, military plots, and repression of unions and left wing parties from the late 19th century to the present. Nevertheless, the military Junta's policy of systematic repression unquestionably marks a break in Chilean history that the intelligentsia has been forced to confront, analyze, and express. In particular, the coup and the repression have imposed new urgencies, themes, and forms on recent Chilean literature as it has sought to represent in artistic form the movement of the present. We should speak here of a literature founded on a patrimony of accumulated collective suffering. For this reason, a meditation on technique, its application, and concrete results cannot simply be located at the level of a solitary and gratuitous alienation. Chilean writers of the post-coup period are working to establish modes of consciousness and sensibility through which those who support the popular movement can think and feel the political tasks they will have to confront individually and collectively in the immediate future. Chilean literary criticism must also play a role in this process. This essay begins from the presupposition that literature is an ideological form. Literature is the imaginary representation of real social relations. Ideologies are typifications of human groups in the process of generating a culture. Human groups reproduce themselves as historical beings in the context of the prevailing cultural, economic, and political structures. Literature differentiates itself from other ideological forms-such as religion, philosophy, political theory, law, and science (to the extent that scientific practice remains bound up with ideology)-on the basis of its choice of anthropocentric representational

Italy: Trends and Problems

In order to discern the principal lines of development of historical research in Italy in recent years on the twentieth century (and further back as well), and to attempt an assessment of the results achieved, it would be necessary to study the whole of the twenty years since the Second World War. The collapse of fascism made possible a new intellectual vitality, and the seriousness and importance of the accompanying events military defeat of fascist Italy, victorious anti-fascist Resistance, end of the monarchy and commencement of the republic provided a stimulus for rethinking the country's previous history, at least from the Risorgimento onwards. In addition, the principal parties which had led the anti-fascist struggle and which were at last able to emerge into the light, strengthened by popular support in a manner new to Italian history, were immediately anxious to make their mark, not only upon contemporary Italy but also upon the country's past, which they boldly examined in search of themes to justify their own aspirations. In this way, the examination of conscience a theme which emerges in various fields of contemporary historiography and which had special reasons for asserting itself in Italy, the cradle of fascism was tempered, so to speak, and made less painful by post-Resistance optimism. In a stimulating essay on the weight attached to the theme of continuity in Italian historical writing, an English scholar has recently called attention to the particularly close link between history and politics in Italy. He regards this continuity and this link as surrogate for the non-existent tradition of a unified state. And there is no doubt that the tendencies noted by Woolf were operative in Italian historiography in the post-war period also, and especially in the first years after 1945, when political passions Editors' note: Unfortunately, for reasons of space it was found impossible to include Professor Pavone's valuable footnotes to this article. We have therefore extracted from them a list only of those works actually quoted or referred to in the text. This is to be found at the end of the article.