Nazi Revolution Research Articles

Русская эмиграция и США. Ф.А. Степун и М.М. Карпович (предисловие к публикации писем Ф.А. Степуна М.М. Карповичу)

The author examines a geopolitical line in the development of Russian philoso­phy in emigration. Not only the Russian revolution of 1917, not only the Nazi revolution of 1933–1935, but the Second World War changed the balance of power on the intellectual map of the world. Hitler was defeated by the Soviet Union with the help of the Anglo-American allies. As a result, two blocks emerged. They got a taste for the disposal of Europe and other countries of the United States, the USSR also strengthened, expanding the area of its influence (“Eastern bloc”). Should emigrants return to Russia? Bunin tried, but at the bor­der he turned back after reading articles about Akhmatova and Zoshchenko in the Pravda newspaper. Remain in a devastated and half-starved Europe, which has no time for emigrants? Or choose the third path where the track has al­ready been paved. Russian intellectuals from Germany have already settled in the United States, many have taken root there, some have returned. This, in essence, was the second emigration, the continuation of the first. There was already an experience of flight, but there was also a craving for German culture, which, despite the German Nazism sweeping through the world, Russian thinkers highly valued. They – as it should be in trouble – held on to each other. An example of this intellectual collaboration is Karpovich and Stepun.

Carl Schmitt as a theorist of the 1933 Nazi revolution: “The difficult task of rethinking and recultivating traditional concepts”

Carl Schmitt sees the 1933 Nazi seizure of power as a revolution that inaugurates an entirely new era of political-legal order. Analyzing Schmitt’s rarer Nazi-texts, diaries, and correspondence, I argue that from 1933 to 1936 Schmitt attempts to theorize the Nazi revolution by developing an entirely new political language of Nazism, cleansed from non-German ways of thinking, especially nineteenth-century liberalism. I focus on three conceptual transformations through which Schmitt understands the remaking of the German state: (1) The shift from the liberal democratic neutral state to a new one-party state or a Fuhrer-state dominated by a movement – a shift symbolized by the “death of Hegel”; (2) the transformation of sovereign power into Fuhrertum (“leadershipness”), represented by the symbolical deaths of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, whose thought cannot comprehend the totality of the Nazi movement, and (3) the perversion of the liberal-democratic equality before the law to the volkisch equality of the race (Artgleichheit) as the basis of all Nazi political–legal life. Criticizing previous interpretations of Schmitt’s Nazi thinking, I demonstrate that when Schmitt abandons his own decicionist thought in favor of concrete order thinking in 1933/1934 the idea of race becomes the basis of his political–legal thought.

Hitler in Los Angeles: How the Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross

Reviewed by: Hitler in Los Angeles: How the Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross Laura Rosenzweig (bio) Hitler in Los Angeles: How the Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America. By Steven J. Ross. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017. xviii + 414 pp. Hitler in Los Angeles: How the Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America presents a detailed account of Nazi activity in Los Angeles during the 1930s and Jewish efforts to combat it. The book begins by introducing readers to Leon Lewis, the Jewish attorney who ran this resistance operation. In 1933, Lewis was the right man in the right place at the right time. Lewis had been the first executive secretary [End Page 246] of the Anti-Defamation League during the 1910s and early 1920s, and when Nazi activity in Los Angeles suddenly emerged, Lewis was drawn back into Jewish defense work. A leader within the local chapter of the Disabled Veterans of America, Lewis recruited several veterans to infiltrate the Los Angeles chapter of the Friends of the New Germany (soon to become the German-American Bund) to find out what the group was up to. The veterans-turned-amateur-private-eyes were immediately welcomed by the leaders of the Nazi group and gained quick access to the group’s inner circle. They soon discovered that the Friends of the New Germany’s true political objective was to lead a Nazi revolution in the United States. Their early written reports document Nazi plans to infiltrate the California National Guard, gain access to the state armory, and stage a Nazi-style revolution in the United States. Lewis was stunned by what his colleagues were learning. He gathered these eyewitness reports and presented them to local law enforcement and to federal authorities to secure support and cooperation for the surveillance operation. He also solicited leaders in the Jewish community to help finance the operation, recruiting a select group of Jewish business leaders that included the executives of the Hollywood studios and organized the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC). For the next eight years, Lewis led the LAJCC’s undercover, anti-Nazi fact-finding operation. He channeled the information collected by the LAJCC’s informants concerning Nazi plots to two Congressional committees investigating “un-American” activity, to the FBI and to military intelligence to help them in their respective surveillance of these Nazi groups. Of particular note is the book’s coverage of the relationship between the Los Angeles German Consul Georg Gyssling, the Hollywood moguls and local Nazi groups, including new information revealing Gyssling’s life as a double agent. This comprehensive narrative demonstrates just how persistent and threatening Nazism was in Los Angeles during the 1930s and how it was met with an equal dose of Jewish persistence. Drawing on thousands of pages of informant reports from the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles Papers (CRC Papers), Hitler in Los Angeles takes the reader on a month-by-month, year by year journey through the 1930s, detailing Nazi plots and Jewish efforts to foil them. Thus, the book documents a new episode of American Jewish resistance to Nazism in Los Angeles in the 1930s for American Jewish historians, Los Angeles historians and historians interested in the origins and evolution of the Nazi movement in the United States. American Jewish historians may be disappointed with Hitler in Los Angeles for its lack of historiographic analysis. Ross, the son of [End Page 247] Holocaust survivors, explains in his prologue that he wrote this book to answer questions that plagued him in his youth. “How could Jews have been so passive in the face of such evil?” “Why was there not more resistance at home and abroad?” (1). As he researched this book, Ross realized that “Many American Jews did rise to oppose Hitler, but they could not agree on the best path of resistance. A divided strategy and inability to implement a single vision is not the same as passivity or a failure of will” (2). Ironically, Ross’s thesis, “how Jews foiled Nazi plots,” requires no historiographic analysis or explication because the very fact of...

Robert Ley's Dream of a Racist Utopia: The Welfare Program of the German People

Little more than a year after gaining control of the German government, Adolf Hitler proclaimed an end to the Nazi revolution and concentrated on working with established elites in industry and the...

A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932–1940 by Mary M. Solberg

A Undone: Documents from the Christian Faith 19321940. Selected, translated, and introduced by Mary M. Solberg. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2015. Pp. xvii, 486. $59.00 paperback. ISBN 9781451464726.)In selecting, translating, and introducing over twenty documents composed by members of the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement, Mary M. Solberg has filled a significant gap in the English-language literature concerning both the Struggle (Kirchenkampf) and the religious dimension of the Holocaust. Asking What were they thinking?? Solberg concludes the constructed a powerful myth that complemented, strengthened, and served Socialist goals (p. 3). They were true believers, not only in Jesus Christ, but also in Adolf Hitler and his Nazi revolution, whose work enabled other Germans to understand life in the Third Reich fully compatible with their Christian faith (p. 13).In her introduction, Solberg outlines her rationale for selecting documents, which includes chronology, key issues, and diverse authors and document types (pp. 27-31). She also reflects on what these sources can teach about the momentum of antisemitism, the power of public discourse, Christian self-identity, and the power of cultural context to shape the church (pp. 32-41).In terms of the Protestant Struggle, A Undone enables scholars and students to study the words and ideas of the (mostly) men who are often known simply as the enemies of Karl Barth, Martin Niemoller, and the Confessing Church. Solberg has selected an illuminating mixture of theological, church-polit- ical, and popular texts, many by prominent figures like Ludwig Muller, Joachim Hossenfelder, Reinhold Krause, Emmanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel. They envision a new church order in which Protestantism would be remade in the image of Socialism, reordered as a unified Reich ruled by an authoritarian Reich Bishop. (Solberg settles for the more muted terms National Church and National Bishop.) As a vigorous Volk church, membership would be based on blood, ministry directed solely to the racial community, and ultimate authority vested in the Nazi regime (pp. 48-50, 109-14, 400-04).One striking aspect of this vision was the invocation of Martin Luther, as in The Prophet, a section in The Handbook of the Christians (1933) written by Anna Ilgenstein-Ratterfeld. …

Violating Failures: Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Manifesto and Dada Berlin Anti-manifestation

Some of the greatest Marxist historical accounts of revolutionary events are the accounts of great failures. One needs only mention the German Peasants' War, the Jacobins in the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, the Chinese Cultural Revolution while numerous others lurk behind many of the battles of the proletariat throughout the twentieth century. In the most radical political engagement, such as the Cultural Revolution for Badiou, or the Nazi Revolution for Heidegger, failure also signals the end of the traditional mode of political engagement as such. But what is failure precisely? And what our confrontation with such failures really means for revolutionary politics and anarchist artistic movements of the early twentieth century such as Dada Berlin? The aim of this articleis thus toexamine failure's capacity to act as a mode of (political) resistance firmly rooted in revolutionary politics and radical anarchist cultural projects. As I argue, failure's radical properties are found in acts of ‘determinate negation'which exhibit a profound anti-conformist ideology that aims to shatter conventional standards of hegemonic value and seek to reshape and loosen the boundaries that determine lived experience in a socio-political and artistic level. To follow through this hypothesis, I explore the embodied activity of the ‘agonal’ embedded in the manifesto in relation to the failed revolution of SpartacusUprise in Berlin of 1919 and the aesthetic attitude of ‘anti-manifestation'exhibited by the deeply politicised, andintimately aliened to the Spartacus agitational project, cultural movement of Dada Berlin. In this context, failure, I argue, is appropriated into a function of doing of the ‘negative’ –anegative poiesis, whose violent tension,already embedded in the performativity of the genre of the manifesto that seeks to subject to the real the foundational force of a future to come,marks artistic praxis onto the political moment with such a creative vigour as if in violently seeking the arrival of the new world and its making.And by looking at Badiou's theories on the four modes of subjectivities, Zizek's reflections on the formation of Badiou's Event, in relation of Heidegger's ontological violence found in the essencing ability of language and of Luxemburg's political philosophy, failure reveals a truly ‘miraculous’ proposition that is other than acceptance of defeat but the call for fidelity, ‘the work of love,’ which resides at the heart of every such violating failure.

Review: The Triumph of the Dark European International History 1933-1939

THE TRIUMPH OF THE DARK European International History 1933-1939 Zara S. Steiner Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 1248 pp, US$65.00 (cloth) ISBN 978-0199212002With the second and final volume of her study of European international politics between 1919 and 1939, Zara Steiner has completed what is now the touchstone for several generations and beyond of international historians, international relations specialists, and the wider reading public interested in the period between the two world wars of the 20th century. Together with the first volume, this study is an immediate classic - one based on 20 of research and, before that, a distinguished scholarly record and accumulation of knowledge stretching back to the late 1950s. Demonstrating the same deft analytical hand that dissected the vagaries of European international history from the Paris peace conference to the collapse of the Weimar republic, a command of English and foreign language sources, and lucid prose, Steiner provides an exegesis that neither preaches about nor excuses the generation of statesmen, politicians, military leaders, diplomats, and journalists who dominated Europe and hold responsibility for the outbreak of a second world war in 1939. In the first volume of her study, she argued that by the end of the 1920s, the problems spawned by the First World War were resolved and continental stability had emerged from the chaos of war and revolution. This process was then undermined by the hinge years of the Great Depression, beginning in late 1929 when the disruption of the international economy, the concomitant undermining of democratic government, and the rise of radical prescriptions to meet the apparent failure of capitalism and democratic governance emerged.In this context, the central figure of this book is Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor after January 1933, supreme German leader after August 1934, and fountainhead of National Socialist ideology. Steiner's initial chapter, Brown dawn, looks closely at the Nazi revolution and the end of the quest for disarmament. She sees Hitler's ideology as nourishing the roots of a foreign policy designed to make Germany supreme in Europe and laying the basis for an eventual struggle with the United States to make Germany the sole world power: territorial expansion to the east, whereby the newly created states, including German- speaking Austria, would have to be brought within the Reich; the complete destruction of Nazidom's ideological enemy, Bolshevik Russia; and cleansing Europe of its subhuman races, especially the Jews. Through his dark social Darwinian lens, Hitler looked for the means and opportunity to achieve his foreign policy goals.Opportunism is central here. In his influential 1961 book, The Origins of the Second World War, the revisionist A.J. P. Taylor argued that Hitler did not follow a diplomatic blueprint but was pragmatic in foreign policy: announcing German rearmament in 1935, remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936, forcing the annexation of Austria in March 1938, detaching the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia six months later, occupying the Czechoslovak rump in March 1939, and initiating the Polish crisis in September 1939. In contrast, Steiner shows clearly that while Hitler was opportunistic, he was an opportunist who knew where he was going. He gambled on inaction by the other great powers, took risks, and proved daring in exploiting the openings given to him. He took the initiative and the other powers' leaders reacted.In Steiner's estimation, these responses were crucial to the origins of the Second World War. Engaged in a pyrrhic competition among themselves, all the successor states except Czechoslovakia gradually moved into the German orbit because the new Bolshevik Russian threat differed little from the old tsarist one. In Italy, Benito Mussolini found common ground with Hitler after the Italian conquest of Abyssinia in May 1936 and led his country away from London and Paris, which had temporarily united with Rome in a vain effort to contain Germany. …

Erich Auerbach and His "Figura": An Apology for the Old Testament in an Age of Aryan Philology

Auerbach’s goal in writing “Figura” and Mimesis was the rejection of Aryan philology and Nazi barbarism, based on racism, chauvinism and the mythologies of Blood, Volk and Soil, which eliminated the Old Testament from the Christian canon and hence from European culture and civilization. Following the Nazi Revolution of 1933 and the triumph of Aryan philology, Auerbach began writing “Figura,” published in 1938, where he provided an apology for the Old Testament’s validity and credibility, striving to prove that the Jewish Bible was inseparable from the New Testament contrary to the claims of Aryan philology and Nazi historiography. Auerbach’s “Figura” should be considered not merely as a philological study but also, and more importantly, as a crucial stage in his response to the crisis of German philology with Mimesis, in turn, seen as his affirmation, against Aryan philology’s Nazi racist and völkish views, of the humanist, Judeo-Christian foundation of European civilization.

Life and Death in the Third Reich (review)

Reviewed by: Life and Death in the Third Reich Jeffrey H. Jackson Life and Death in the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. 368 pp. $27.95. In this extremely nuanced and rich account of the Third Reich, Peter Fritzsche explores why individuals were pulled toward Nazism and how they accommodated themselves to its values. Synthesizing much of the current literature on the subject as well as offering powerful examples from letters and diaries (in particular Victor Klemperer, who is, perhaps, a bit overused), Fritzsche offers a fresh interpretation of how Nazism infiltrated the everyday lives of ordinary Germans. In his earlier book Germans into Nazis, Fritzsche explained how the tumultuous years after World War I laid the groundwork for a movement which advocated for German unity and offered the hope of recapturing the common cause that many people had felt at the outbreak of the conflict. This book is essentially the sequel to that study, carrying forward Fritzsche's examination of the process by which Germans evolved toward a general, widespread acceptance of most Nazi principles. Germans—rather quickly, Fritzsche notes—rationalized their growing belief in (or at least tolerance of) Nazism because [End Page 195] it offered improvements in their daily lives which helped to erase the bitter memory of defeat, and it activated the powerful sense of participation in a renewed community. Fritzsche is particularly interested in the active and self-conscious choices people made to accede to Nazism, and in doing so he both explores and complicates the line between "German" and "Nazi." Looking at how Nazism was built from the ground up, Fritzsche argues that he hopes "to examine how Germans in this period struggled with the Nazi revolution in various keys of desire, fascination, and dismay" (pp. 7–8). Indeed it was a struggle, and Frit-zsche is attuned to the unevenness with which Germans embraced Nazi goals and the varying reasons which individuals had for being pulled, sometimes haphazardly, toward Nazism or pushing back against it. The process of "becoming" a Nazi was highly individual and refracted through a range of experiences. However, as Fritzsche puts it, "This struggle is what Germans came to share in the Third Reich," and it bound them together in a sense of community which Nazism coordinated and channeled (p. 8). The Nazis framed that struggle in the starkest terms of "life and death," arguing that only they could reinvigorate Germany in the wake of World War I and the Weimar Republic. The urgency that dichotomy implied helped nudge Germans along the road to Nazism because it posited that the alternative was nothing less than extinction. To "regenerate national life in Germany," the Nazis ironically needed to "annihilate life" that threatened it (p. 5). Violence became a spectacle which allowed individuals to visualize unity and identity. Against this backdrop, Germans were able to see their movement toward Nazism as a "moral" choice in which the good was bounded by the notion of racial and national survival. Yet that black-and-white world that the Nazis painted for Germans played out in a variety of mundane ways throughout much of their reign. For instance, Fritzsche describes how the "Heil Hitler!" greeting became a subtle way to enforce conformity within the nation. Although one could not be sure that an individual German meant the phrase, and more traditional greetings remained in widespread use, to hear and say those words on a day-to-day basis created the "appearance of unanimity, which overwhelmed nonbelievers and prompted them to scrutinize their own reservations" (p. 24). As individuals accepted such small acts of cooperation with the Nazis, larger acts would become easier. World War II, of course, became the moment in which the Nazi premise of "life and death" was fully realized and enacted, especially on the brutal eastern front. The war created the ultimate national community, essentially playing World War I in reverse according to Fritzsche. Germans believed they [End Page 196] were undoing the devastation wrought upon them by Versailles, but only by eliminating their enemies in a war of complete and utter destruction. Death was elevated to the level of cleansing purge...

:Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

:Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

Life and death in the Third Reich

Life and Death in the Third by Peter Fritzsche. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. 368 pp. $27.95. In this extremely nuanced and rich account of the Third Peter Fritzsche explores why individuals were pulled toward Nazism and how they accommodated themselves its values. Synthesizing much of the current literature on the subject as well as offering powerful examples from letters and diaries (in particular Victor Klemperer, who is, perhaps, a bit overused), Fritzsche offers a fresh interpretation of how Nazism infiltrated the everyday lives of ordinary Germans. In his earlier book Germans into Nazis, Fritzsche explained how the tumultuous years after World War I laid the groundwork for a movement which advocated for unity and offered the hope of recapturing the common cause that many people had felt at the outbreak of the conflict. book is essentially the sequel that study, carrying forward Fritzsche's examination of the process by which Germans evolved toward a general, widespread acceptance of most Nazi principles. Germans - rather quickly, Fritzsche notes - rationalized their growing belief in (or at least tolerance of) Nazism because it offered improvements in their daily lives which helped ro erase the bitter memory of defeat, and it activated the powerful sense of participation in a renewed community. Fritzsche is particularly interested in the active and self-conscious choices people made accede Nazism, and in doing so he both explores and complicates the line between German and Nazi. Looking at how Nazism was built from the ground up, Fritzsche argues that he hopes to examine how Germans in this period struggled with the Nazi revolution in various keys of desire, fascination, and dismay (pp. 7-8). Indeed it was a struggle, and Fritzsche is attuned the unevenness with which Germans embraced Nazi goals and the varying reasons which individuals had for being pulled, sometimes haphazardly, toward Nazism or pushing back against it. The process of becoming a Nazi was highly individual and refracted through a range of experiences. However, as Fritzsche puts it, This struggle is what Germans came share in the Third Reich, and it bound them together in a sense of community which Nazism coordinated and channeled (p. 8). The Nazis framed that struggle in the starkest terms of and death, arguing that only they could reinvigorate Germany in the wake of World War I and the Weimar Republic. The urgency that dichotomy implied helped nudge Germans along the road Nazism because it posited that the alternative was nothing less than extinction. To regenerate national in Germany, the Nazis ironically needed annihilate life that threatened it (p. 5). Violence became a spectacle which allowed individuals visualize unity and identity. Against this backdrop, Germans were able see their movement toward Nazism as amoral choice in which the good was bounded by the notion of racial and national survival. …

Leo Strauss on ''German Nihilism'': Learning the Art of Writing

The year Leo Strauss published "Persecution and the Art of Writing" (1941), he prepared a lecture ("German Nihilism") that he never published. An analysis of this lecture shows that Strauss hadn't fully mastered the art of writing he'd discovered in others: his secrets are too exposed. In the context of "German Nihilism," it becomes clear that "Persecution and the Art of Writing" is about liberal persecution of authoritarianism, no the reverse, as liberals would assume. In response to recent apologias presenting Strauss as a liberal who didn't "write between the lines," a Strauss-style reading of "German Nihilism" disproves both claims.

“DEPRIVE THEM OF THEIR PATHOS”: KARL BARTH AND THE NAZI REVOLUTION REVISITED

AbstractThe role of Karl Barth's theology during the church struggle after the Nazi revolution in 1933 has been endlessly debated. I argue, first, that there is more continuity between “1925”, “1933”, and “1938” than most commentators have granted and that Barth never promoted an apolitical option. Second, I maintain that his theological imagination was restrained by the practices and structures of German (and European) Protestantism and his own acceptance at this time of a Christendom order. The church that his theology presupposed did not really exist.

Book Review: Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

Book Review: Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times: The Nazi Revolution in Hildesheim

At first glance, Andrew Bergerson's Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times appears to be another local study about the rise and legitimation of Nazism, one more addition to an already impressive list of similar undertakings. What distinguishes this work is the author's effort, through ethnography and oral history, to link the everyday neighborly practices of ordinary Germans in the Hannoverian town of Hildesheim to Nazi criminality. The result is an insightful and often provocative analysis of informal and unexceptional social behavior that paradoxically masked the more formal commitments of class, religion, and ideology in the name of civility, while simultaneously deepening those very same divisions.

Ordinary Germans in extraordinary times: the Nazi revolution in Hildesheim

Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: New Manners I: Conviviality in Hildesheim 1. Civility 2. Niveau 3. The Stroll 4. Dirty Politics II: Making Hildesheim Fascist 5. Coordination 6. Polarization 7. Administration 8. Epistemologies Conclusion: Dangerous Deeds Sources

Good and Evil Under the Swastika

Those who have survived terror of extermination often feel that all they do is tell story. What they have experienced and suffered remains incomprehensible and impossible to cope with; as Irving Howe says, they can only live with it, in a state of numb agitation.1 Like many others, he finds it foolish to believe that any amount of theoretical analysis help us to ultimately grasp it, and blasphemous to employ their experience for reconstruction of received doctrines, say about nature of evil.2 A few years ago I was invited to participate in a panel on nature of evil, in conjunction with Reclaiming Symbol/The Art of Memory, an Installation by Edith Altman, in State of Illinois Art Gallery. As I understood it, Altman's installation was designed to challenge such pious attitudes and explore ways out of numb agitation and utter powerlessness of victims. As she said in installation-brochure, the swastika loomed in my memory as a fear-producing image of my experience-of my people's experience-of victimization.... I needed to wrestle with it to transform this fear, and to go through dark while never forgetting its lessons.... By taking swastika apart, by deconstructing its meanings and disempowering it, I hoped to change its fearful energy.... My art is a healing ritual through which I want to extract evil from symbol to restore its validity as a positive symbol, to allow it to regain its age old position in culture.4 Her installation has continued to haunt me, and I would like to present in this paper some reasons for challenging immobilizing mystification of suffering and for believing that paying more attention to and analyzing symbols for inflicting it could help us not only to keep alive memory of suffering, but, more importantly, to learn from it something about nature of evil and what we constructively do about it. I begin my argument with question that I feel has been hastily and inadequately answered by many: On what grounds we declare-as we must-the Nazi extermination of millions of innocent people a crime against life? Based on an analysis of symbol of Nazi revolution and ambivalence of good and evil, I argue for a pragmatist response to this question that is fundamentally different from and, I suggest, philosophically more promising than moral answers recommended by Zygmunt Bauman, Irving Howe, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and others. In dealing with genocide as a pragmatist, I am not interested in appeals to self-evident, but ultimately dogmatic moral intuitions and condemnations, nor in mere memorializing of horrors and numb agitation of victims. Instead, I am preoccupied with experimentally controlled development of effective responses to barbarous acts which have outraged conscience of mankind, i.e., with mobilization of emotions for strategic development of progressive measures and institutional structures on state and global levels to forestall organization of monopolistic agencies of absolute powers For this purpose, I will briefly discuss in this paper use of swastika in organization of Nazi party program in order to learn a lesson from it about what we do to stop such organizations from reaching their goal. The swastika, which in our time has become symbol of evil, has been from time immemorial a sign of life and well-being all over world, including Americas. It has often been-and in parts of world it still is-used for protection against evil. The debate over original meaning of swastika reached its peak in late 1920's after it had been chosen as symbol for Nazi party program for radical renewal and reorganization of social life and engineering of a great society from stock of noble races. At outset, symbol still stood for human well-being, narrowly and strictly re-conceived in terms of racial purity and perfection. …

Opportunities and limitations: the new woman in third reich cinema

Despite National Socialism's infamous anti-emancipatory reputation, looking at the reality of Women's lives in the 1930s and 1940s, clear signs of ‘modernity’ have to be acknowledged. Despite openly segregating men and women into ‘gender spheres’, the Nazis at the same time increasingly included women into society and were aware of their use in the creation of a national community based on racial criteria. The Nazi period represented a thrust to create a revolutionary New Order with women playing a vital part in its realisation. This article assesses the impact of the Nazi revolution on the lives of women and evaluates its aims and manifestations within the context of Third Reich ‘normality’ and everyday life. Using examples from the hugely prolific entertainment film industry, it aims to illustrate the interrelation between social awareness and media representation. Seemingly unpolitical films show that the cinema – as part of Third Reich ‘everyday history’ (Alltagsgeschichte) successfully blended ideology and entertainment to depict the New Woman in her national role, and thus exerted an educational function by bringing women in line with the expectations and demands of the state.

Opportunities and limitations: the new woman in third reich cinema

Abstract Despite National Socialism's infamous anti-emancipatory reputation, looking at the reality of Women's lives in the 1930s and 1940s, clear signs of ‘modernity’ have to be acknowledged. Despite openly segregating men and women into ‘gender spheres’, the Nazis at the same time increasingly included women into society and were aware of their use in the creation of a national community based on racial criteria. The Nazi period represented a thrust to create a revolutionary New Order with women playing a vital part in its realisation. This article assesses the impact of the Nazi revolution on the lives of women and evaluates its aims and manifestations within the context of Third Reich ‘normality’ and everyday life. Using examples from the hugely prolific entertainment film industry, it aims to illustrate the interrelation between social awareness and media representation. Seemingly unpolitical films show that the cinema – as part of Third Reich ‘everyday history’ (Alltagsgeschichte) successfully blended ideology and entertainment to depict the New Woman in her national role, and thus exerted an educational function by bringing women in line with the expectations and demands of the state.

Book Review: Hitler's Enforcers. The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution

Book Review: Hitler's Enforcers. The Gestapo and the SS Security Service in the Nazi Revolution