EuropeanCounterimages:ProblemsOfPeriodizationandHistorical Memory

EuropeanCounterimages:ProblemsOfPeriodizationandHistoricalMemory

byDanDiner

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EUROPEAN COUNTERIMAGES: PROBLEMS OF PE ATION HISTORICAL MEMORY

Dan Diner
The events we are watching unfold in the heart of Europe over the last few months, weeks and days - a chain of events evolving within ever smaller spans of time - invite the interested contemporary observer, fascinated and at the same time filled with a sense of apprehension, to conclude that he or she is witnessing a profound historical change. And there is no doubt that something has indeed come to an end: though you can certainly debate just what that something is. Attempts to grasp this dynamism of change are beset by an additional and complicating factor: namely that such a diagnostic enterprise tries to place events in a historical framework in order to explore the locus of the present against the backdrop of the past. The diagnosis of the current moment dons a historiographical costume, so to speak. It is thus no surprise when the outcroppings of such "views" include presumptuous notions claiming that the "end of history" is upon us, accompanied by a triumphant gesture alleging the victory of one form of society and polity over another. Last summer, in a widely discussed article, the American Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the final victory of western liberalism over its totalitarian alternatives in this century: namely fascism and communism. The open society, it seems, has finally defeated its enemies - history appears to be approaching fulfillment. As true as this apodictic, utterly certain realization of victory of western values over their totalitarian alternatives may appear - the associated and higWy questionable formula about the supposed "end of history" should give us pause for thought. Paradoxically, that notion reminds us of previous totalitarian temptations in history, since the proclamation of history's end is accompanied by a further claim: that an end has come to history's interpretation as a conditioning factor for further historical movement. Thus, this formula of the "end of history" prompts the suspicion that a status quo is being turned here into something fixed and eternal - a historical static state. However, any such premonition and announcement of eternity is just as millenial in mood as those other programmatic interpretations of history that were oriented toward' 'diesseitige Jenseitigkeiten" , secular and highly imperfect realizations of an ideal world beyond, and whose collapse is now taking place before our very eyes. Proclamation of history's imminent end is, I would argue, just as teleological and susceptible to the lure of totalistic thinking as those programmatic interpretations in the past that viewed their present as the' 'highest" or "final stage" in human prehistory, accompanied by the myth of the "ultimate battle." What separates these views, pitching one against the other, is only their underlying degree of
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material saturation and affluence - a historiosophy of the haves, or that of the have-nots. In these past weeks and days of the "Volkerfriihling" in what is Central Europe (culturally) and in Eastern Europe (politically) - days in which that old continent's center has been swept by stormy changes and aspires to reemerge as the focus and pacemaker of world events - other voices have also been raised. Giinter Gaus, an intellectual political thinker and journalist, one who perceived sooner than most the possible reemergence of the German question in Europe, has been talking simultaneously with Fukuyama, but in antithetical contrast, about the phoenixlike return of history. In Gaus' s view, history had been buried for 40 years, and initially in a somewhat hesitant fashion, then more and more agitated - that history has burst forth to rush once again into its old river bed in Europe. Surprisingly, both Fukuyama and Gaus are looking at precisely the same events, the same phenomena. However, they arrive at diametrically opposed interpretations. For the one, history has outlived itself, is over - for the other, it has just returned. What Fukuyama (the American) and Gaus (the German and European) have presented here are opposed interpretations of history based on the medley and jumbled character of the events which prompts two central questions: namely, the problem of the subject of history and secondly, the recurrent issue in historiography of the periodization of the past. It is unnecessary to point out that these two aspects are interlocked. Both the historical-philosophical presumption about the end of history as well as a somewhat less pretentious notion of postulating a "secular" break (a "secular" break in the original meaning of the word) in history and employing a metaphor of the "end of the century" are part and parcel of this complex nexus. As I see it, what is involved here is an attempt to systematize our century along two interlocking axes of interpretation: the axis of the confrontation of values, expressed by the metaphor of universal civil war (Weltburgerkrieg), and the axis of hegemonial confrontation, continental in scope, mostly between nation-states. The nature of the subject of and in history - is easily answered by both Gaus and Fukuyama. Their writings do not require any deep-hermeneutic analysis to yield up full meaning - their concepts are evident and available. For the American, standing firmly within the Anglo-Saxon tradition of civilization, those are quite clearly societal values, whose most triumphant song is once more being chanted in a world where everything has seemingly turned western: freedom and democracy, pluralism, property and market economy. And the victorious truth of that cloying prosperity cannot, in its dazzling insistence, be denied. Giinter Gaus, who is by no means at odds with those values, is of course concerned about another subject of history: the reappearance on the stage of actors long forgotten - Volk, Nation and Minoritiit, as he put it. A fundamental difference surfaces here: for America, which Hegel already characterized as a "bourgeois society without a state" , all political struggle was basically a struggle over values. Its nature in extreme was that of civil war. In marked contrast, something else underlay the concept of nation in the European sense - no matter how different its manifestation may be: namely the totality of ethnos. For America, every war it has fought to date has been a war for the sake of values: from the War for Independence to the Civil War to the interventions in

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this century in Europe in order "to make the world safe for democracy" and embark upon a "crusade for freedom". Firmly anchored in this tradition, Fukuyama understandably can happily proclaim the end of the universal civil war in the wake of the collapse of the value-adversary - of liberty over equality. The secular metaphor of the universal civil war is not new. It was given a literary embodiment by Emst Junger in his story "On the Marble Cliffs" (1939). Carl Schmitt, in trying to discern the emerging profile of our century, raised the notion to the basis of a new world order back in 1945 at the very beginning of the new era, polarized along a scale of values after the supposed end of the territorially based system of European nation-states. Today, after even the common public is reclaiming Minerva's owl, supposedly finally aloft in history's gloaming, one can rightfully diagnose his analysis as accurate in its essentials. The universal civil war of the 20th century, whose apparent end the historian might now ratify, was undoubtedly the dominant feature of our time. Proceeding from the October Revolution, whose universal promise of genuine equality stands degenerated today before the [mal tribunal of history in the form of published opinion and a world public, that civil war was extended, elongated on the international stage into the contrast between bolshevism and antibolshevism of differing and even historically opposed types: namely liberalism and fascism. It then continued on after 1945 in the form of the Cold War, whose armamental apotheosis materialized in the nuclear logic of deterrence. For more than a generation, this Manichean logic shaped the thinking and feeling of contemporaries. Virtually all conflicts were subsumed under this logic, even if they were in essence of a quite different nature. The bipolar, nuclear opposition became something like a mechanism to reduce the complexity of a highly complicated plural-state world system based on the principle of national self-determination. East and West kept down the multiplicity of conflicts and the principal actors to a low number, putting a historical brake on that key triad: Volk, nation, minority. If I am not completely mistaken, their time has come again - a hint that a periodization of this century now drawing to a close is not fully subsumed under the terms of the conflict of values. There are other and older conflicts in this century - in particular, the struggle for hegemony on the continent, that second axis along which history can be interpreted. Their catastrophic intermingling can be found in the central event of the century, the Second WarId War. Proceeding out from Europe's frontier country (Grenzland in the political-cultural sense) of this century , from Germany, it spread to engulf the world, and came to an end again on German soil. Germany - conceptualized as the Grenzland of the conflict of the century, in that the civil war was waged there domestically during Weimar by proxy for all of Europe, and after the victory of reactionism and fascism there, reached its highpoint in the war against the Soviet Union. In order to join forces as Allies, both the liberal West and the bolshevik East had to reach and accept a self-limitation on their respective ideological load. Long before that point, the world-revolutionary impetus of the bolsheviks had come to a standstill, as had the antibolshevik interventionism of the west. Yet in the face of Nazi German expansionism from its self-proclaimed "center" - antiliberal and hegemonial toward the west, anticommunist and racist toward the east - East and West returned to traditions of pure power politics based on military logic and situated

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beyond the perimeter of value and society. Liberty and equality joined hands against the Nazi myth of the biological inequality of mankind, which rejected both social equality and social freedom - united now as Anglo-Saxons and Russians against the traditional (as perceived) Prussian-German enemy. And although this traditional perspective of the Old Europe of the great powers - as though in a return to the traditional constellation of the First World War - was not in keeping with the racial nature of the National Socialism, it nonetheless prepared the way for its military defeat. Thus, this war was two things simultaneously: a European war for hegemony, whose axis was strung along the lines of confrontation between old contrasts and differences, and a universal civil war over values. In that struggle, the liberal West and the bolshevik East momentarily set aside their antagonism in values in order to confront the presumptuous challenge of a non-societal, biological world order, led by the Prussian-German nation-state. The fact that the old conflict over values between liberty and equality renewed itself once again after 1945 in terms of block power politics and then extended its stage to encompass the entire globe in correspondingly variant metamorphoses, points once again to its secular durability. This process extended all the way to the creation of two German states, interpretable as the concentrated territorialization of that civil war which, as communisnl against anticommunism, had originated in Weimar on German soil. With the sudden decay and collapse of the contrast in terms of a universal civil war between bolshevism and antibolshevism, the Cold War and nuclear bipolarity, the universal, value-oriented interpretational variant of the history of the 20th century also appears to have come to an end with the now-touted metaphor of the "end of history" . From the forgotten depths,.voices nlany thought had long since been forgotten can be heard once again: Volk, Nation, Minoritiit. Perhaps the most suitable example illustrative of the choreography of the current tidal change, the supplanting of an antagonism of values by the national interpretation of history anl0ng the peoples that have risen to a new political self-consciousness in political eastern Europe and cultural central Europe, is a renewed debate that has been forcibly reopened: namely the debate on the impact and historical significance of the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939. That pact appears to have the meaning of a kind of negative birth certificate for the consciousness of a new era to be marked by a German bonus and a Soviet/Russian malus. It was noted intelligently that Polish historians present at a recent international conference in Berlin to mark the outbreak of the Second World War had shown far more interest in August 23, 1939 than in the following September 1st. It nlay be a conlffionplace for the historian that he or she is more intrigued by what is hidden than what is open and evident - the content and nleaning of the supplementary secret protocol being of greater interest than the attack by the Wehrmacht against Poland and the military beginning of the war itself. It may also be that the stirring, indeed churning events in July and August of this year in Poland and the Baltic states contributed their share to making the past relevant to current events - yes, even as a political instrument. Yet behind the enhanced significance in 1989 of August 23, 1939, greater than that September 1st, what becolnes evident in the collective consciousness of the contenlporaries is a key transition in perspective: from an axis of historical

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interpretation based on conflict of value systems to an axis bound up with national interpretation and identity. It is not actual history which i~ relevant, but rather the significance of the historical metaphor for the past's future. While the complex of associations linked with September 1st has a direct connection with Hitler's war in eastern Europe, the 23rd of August for Poles (and not just for Poles) is associated almost exclusively with Stalin and the Soviet Union. Most certainly: The imperialist partnership of these two dictatorships in the carving out of spheres of interest in "Middle Europe" (' 'Zwischeneuropa' '), a term being banded about once again today, provided material for a great deal of comparative historical theory-building in the past. Yet its relevant associative meaning today does not lie in the making of analogies with totalitarianism.. Rather, the current relevance of the Hitler-Stalin pact functions to enhance and underscore that shift on the double-axis of historical interpretation in our century: from a confrontation over values to one of traditional national rivalry. In so doing, National Socialism is drained of its core - racialism and genocidal Lebensraum ideology - and reduced to a mere variant of continental nationalist hegemonism. The traditional national Russian-Polish antagonism, masked by now as a conflict over values (communism vs. liberalism), emerges more openly into evidence and, paradoxically, determines Polish consciousness far more than the National Socialist, biologically motivated policy of annihilation. To put it succinctly: in the collective Polish consciousness, Katyn is increasingly looming more significant, more salient than Auschwitz. Thus, the constant reference made to the Hitler-Stalin pact as a kind of negative birth certificate, a historical frame of reference for a new "Mittel-" and "Zwischeneuropa, " extends far beyond its immediate significance. Rather, it acts as a kind of introduction ushering in an era of historical reinterpretation in Europe - away from value conflicts to those between national collectives. The fact that the Russian-Polish antagonism lends itself as such an introduction to this new epoch is compelling: here more than elsewhere, the national element interlocks with social and worldrevolutionary dimensions, running like a red thread through historical reality's interlinkages. The dualism of the motives in conflict-national and/or societal terms are deeply rooted: Was, for instance, the incursion by Pilsudski into the Ukraine during the 1919-1920 war and his march all the way to Kiev the expression of Polish expansionism in Jagellonian colors - or a manifestation of western interventionism in the Russian civil war? Was the counteroffensive by Tuchachevski and his march on Warsaw part of a world-revolutionary strategy in a continental framework, aimed at least at Getmany and Berlin - or the fITst Great Russian mobilization, the defense of holy Mother Russia, which inspired Czarist officers to take up arms, an anticipatory prelude to the Great Patriotic War? And this quite aside from the internal Soviet struggle between the primacy of the civil war - the fight against Wrangel that Budjonnyj and Stalin had to wage in the south, and the march of Tuchachevski, more externally oriented, which led to his conflict with Stalin as political commissar on the southern front? You can take that perspective of interpretation of the Hitler-Stalin pact in terms of national history even further in looking at the more distant past: German-Russian

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cooperation in the 1920s, directed against Versailles, but especially against Poland - Rapallo 1922, the 1926 Berlin treaty, extending all the way down to August 23, 1939. This joining together of the double axes of the 20th century has further ramifications specifically in regard to the Polish dimension. Leaving aside September 17, 1939, the day when Polish territories were lost to the Soviet Union by military occupation of the eastern mixed ethnic area, the confrontation continues along the line of the traditional, the national axis: the decision of the Polish Home Army in August 1944 to take up arms against the German occupation forces was directed militarily against the Nazis; politically, however, it was aimed at Poland's traditional adversary - Russia (and thus the Soviet Union). Stalin's Machiavellian reserve in the form of the wait-and-see stand adopted by the Soviet forces in connection with the suppression of the Polish uprising in Warsaw in 1944 by the Nazis reveals that uprising in a new light: namely as a continuation of the Polish-Russian antagonism, an antagonism likewise marked in Polish national historical consciousness by the date August 1920. The civil-war like struggle in Poland at the end of the war between communist authorities and remnants of the Polish Home Army, which lasted down to the late 1940s, was an extension of this confrontation. This period witnessed a continuation not only of the mutual aversion between Poles an~ Russians, but also experienced the impact of a historically significant amalgam running through the national and civil-war-like antagonism: namely, elements of that traditional Central European antisemitism which identified Jews, almost in an organic way, with bolshevism. This was complicated and enforced in early postwar Poland by the perpetuation from the prewar period of the pesky problem of minorities. These components blended together then into the most fateful of all postwar Polish pogroms, the 1946 Kielce pogrom, an event of key importance for the later establishment of Israel - a polity which, though not in Europe, is of Europe. Let us continue to explore a bit further the central leitmotif here: namely the attempt to interpret the history of European consciousness, utilizing the juxtaposition of the significance in 1989 of August 23 vs. September 1, 1939, in terms of the axes of traditional confrontation for hegemonial control on the one hand, and universal or European civil war in connection with the mass extermination on the other. The memory filters operative in the current collective consciousness of the peoples of Zwischeneuropa tend, in significant fashion, to interpret their fate - shaped by Soviet domination and communist oppression - exclusively in national terms. In their consciousness, a bridge is built, shortcircuiting historical time and extending from the Hitler-Stalin pact, or May 1940 across to the consequences of the Second World War. One of those consequences was, of course, the return once again of Russian dominance: though now for other reasons, as indicated by the Hitler-Stalin pact, but as a result of the antibolshevik war of Lebensraum expansionism that had been waged by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. In contrast, the Hitler-Stalin pact (and particularly its secret supplementary protocol) could - at face value - be seen as part of the tendency of revision of the existing political and territorial order in Europe between the wars, no matter what motives the Soviet Union had in mind. With the territorial revisions, agreed upon in the secret

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supplementary protocol, the Soviet Union joined the ranks of the two powers bent on territorial revision in between the two World Wars: namely Germany and Hungary. The perspective of territorial revisionism changed abruptly with the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. The constellation of hegemonial and national revision characterizing the prewar period, and ultimately also harboring the explosive compound that acted to ignite and trigger the Second World War was suddenly supplanted by an antibolshevik, racial-ideological war of annihilation. The focus on the 23rd of August, 1939 and the Hitler-Stalin pact jibes well with an emphasis on a hegemonial, nationalistic struggle for power. A focus on September 1st, in contrast, anticipates the dimension pointing beyond any mere repetition of the First World War, to include the elements of universal civil war and mass extermination. Yet that focus must necessarily elude a consciousness focused exclusively on the national reconstruction of collective memory - as is the case today in (political) eastern Europe. Not every adversary of the Soviet Union in the Second World War fall back on that constellation which was so unique in the case of Finland. In a manner quite separate from the framework of the broader world war - and initially even with assistance from the western powers England and France- Finland was able to wage its own and distinctive defensive war against the Soviet Union, a war that actually belonged in terms of orientation to the prewar constellation of territorial revision. And this even when Finland had difficulty in distinguishing and separating its own forays against the Soviet Union from those of the Nazi forces within the framework of its "continuing war" in 1941. However, the difference contrasted with the German axis partners Hungary and Rumania is striking. Since the Finnish effort is framed in national terms, it has none of the authoritarian-fascist and antibolshevik impetus characteristic of Rumania and Hungary in their struggle against the Soviet Union. The Finnish war effort has its proper place in another system of coordinates, as difficult as this distinction may be in temporal and spatial terms, both politically and - what is probably far more important for constituting historical memory - that Finnish war effort has another system of coordinates in terms of consciousness. Poland, in contrast, does not experience a combination of all those elements which, if not characterizing the war as a whole, do characterize the events between 1939 and 1945: a hegemonial war with nationalist coloring, an antibolshevik European civil war and a project of extermination completely beyond the immediate dimension of combat and motivated by racial ideology. However, Poland suffered the abrogation of its own national existence as a supposed "bastard of Versailles" . It is - on the one hand - thus part of the total revision of the interwar territorialpolitical order and - on the other hand - becomes as well the first victim, truly the first, of a selective genocidal policy paving the way for future Nazi domination in eastern Europe based on biological criteria. What is lacking here from among the triad of elements characterizing the special nature of events in the Second World War as a whole is the motif of the antibolshevik civil war. That element could only be implemented in action against the Soviet Union as a communist regime. Antibolshevism, national enmity toward Russia and deep resentment against - as claimed: Jewish-colored communism as a manifestation of traditional antisemitism, are quite at home in Polish collective consciousness.

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The mass extermination, so it appears, that third dimension in the elemental triad of the events during World War 11 along with hegemonial hybris and the antibolshevik crusade, has not been given the place it ought to have been accorded in Polish consciousness. This is because it has been inserted more into the national martyrdom of the Polish nation, and is therefore less manifested in the racial Weltanschauung of the Nazi regime, In universal terms, the mass extermination is not a part of those two historical axes along which the century interprets itself. That event appears to stand like outside history, because it was not a component of the war effort in a national, hegemonial or even antibolshevik sense. It thus remained outside the scope of warfare itself. No interpretations related to the category of nation are available for application here. Similarly, the ideological interpretation and the definition of fascism derived from class antagonism remain inadequate as well. Mass extermination, the "Final Solution", and the eugenic theory and practice which paved its way, take on a special status - a status against which the historian, geared to uncovering strands of continuity, feels a need to rebel. He rebels by attempting to subsume the event under one of the elements of continuity running through the 20th century: either by including it as a component of an extreme nationalism that slaughters its victims in xenophobic fury, or associating it with the value-antagonism of the century - bolshevismlantibolshevism. Both interpretations can claim a connection with the double axis of the century, both can insist on continuity. Attempts to integrate the "Final Solution" - from the victims perspective into a nexus of national continuity appear to come relatively easy. Collective memory is, in any case, selective in accordance with the demands of the respective national myth. But the proof, that the "Final Solution" springs like a full-blown conception from antisemitism must necessarily raise numerous doubts. More challenging are those more frequent attempts in recent years to place the extermination of the Jews in the context of the above mentioned metaphor of civil war as an axis of the 20th century history. Both Ernst Nolte and Arno Mayer, each in his own manner and with opposed objectives, have tried to utilize one of the central axes of the periodization of this century - the conflict between communism and anticommunism - as an interpretative framework for explaining the "Final Solution". For both historians, the problem of periodization is of central importance, as well as the open or secret identifying of the Jews with bolshevism - for the one positive, the other negative. Arno Mayer, who attempts to establish a causal connection between the conduct of the war and the extermination of the Jews, constructs a periodization of the history of the 20th century revolving around the motif of total war, with the ideological antagonism as its core. The phenomena of war of annihilation, total war and the fascist, antibolshevik crusade are conflated and rolled into one, both conceptually and factually. Pursuing this kind of periodization, Mayer comes up with the rather forced notion of a "Thirty-Years-War" from 1914-1945. In so postulating, he fails to consider the fact that the totality characterizing the conduct of the war at the front during the First World War had not sprung from the ideological struggle between antagonistic parties on a European or universal level. Rather, this totality derived from the phenomena of the yet unknown effect of mass armies and the automatization and mechanization of killing.

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The fact that during the course of the war itself, images of the enemy developed that were increasingly ideological, framed in terms of ' 'civilizational contrasts", such as Werner Sombart's dichotomous pair "Handler und Helden" (tradesmen vs. heroes) to categorize Anglo-saxons and Germans, is another matter: it must be viewed as a consequence of the totality of the war, not its precondition. Focused on the ideological metaphor of civil war - communism against anticommunism as a conditioning factor for the "Final Solution", Mayer remains blind to a far more total facet on National Socialism - namely its racial ideology. The liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia beginning in the autumn and winter of 1939-40 was in no way related to that ideological antibolshevism which, at least in the initial phase, was utilized by the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union as the basis for the beginning stages of the extermination of Jews, acting in accordance with an expanded Kommissarbefehl. In his attempt at periodization, Arno Mayer undoubtedly wants to achieve something more comprehensive than simply to offer a new explanatory framework for explaining the' 'Final Solution". He is principally concerned with developing a critique of western anticommunism, especially its American variant, during the Cold War. Given his political stance and the logic of periodization, Mayer tries to press this into a mold including the preconditions for the "Final Solution". Nolte, in contrast, attempts to characterize the key watersheds in his periodization of the "European civil war" 1917/1945 in terms of the immediate antagonism bolshevism vs. antibolshevism. In his analysis as well, the identification of Jews with bolshevism plays a central role, even though he places the beginning of the deportation of Jewish victims in the context of the national and hegemonial confrontation in Europe, and portrays the Jews simply as traditional adversaries in war. Be that as it may: no matter how false the constant identification of Jews and communism may be in the consciousness of those peoples in Europe now awakening to a renewed flowering of national identity, that identification continues to have an impact, down into the present. The swan song of communism, carried up and into Germany as a consequence of that hegemonial and universal civil war unleashed by German National Socialism, harbors a disconcerting potential: namely the tendency to successively reduce and finally obliterate the meaning and importance of the "Final Solution' 'from the memory ofEurope's peoples. And this not just because the 40 years of Soviet rule have left a negative legacy that is being transfonned in historical memory into a bonus for Germany in Europe - Germany in Mitteleuropa. An easily repressed abstract event such as the mass extermination, which in any case is difficult to retain in memory, will, along with an identification of communist antifascism and the Soviet victory over Hitler's Germany, be submerged in an ever deepening amnesia. The interpretation of 20th century history in terms of national dimensions, the return of Yolk, nation and minority as key factors in Europe, undoubtedly also opens itself up to the Jews as Jews. The renewed interest in the history of the very people of Central Europe is evident. Yet the salient formative element of their historical fate there, the "Final Solution", in its intertwined linkage with Germany, is relegated to the limbo of forgotten history. Where regime and nation were so disastrously coupled and insolubly linked like in the Nazi German state, the reemergence of the one (Le., the nation) necessarily means the forgetting of the other (the regime and its deeds).

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Thus, with the decline of Soviet-brand socialism, forced upon the peoples of eastern and central Europe by the Red Army, the symbolism of the intertwined anti-fascist crusade, formerly an insoluble part of memory is also being buried away . Yet it cannot be forgotten that this memory also bore another element: namely the victory over Nazi Germany and the liberation of the survivors.
Translated by Bill Templer