The novelty of 20th-century historiography does not reside in new theories (the last century was too rich in this respect), but in the veto exercised over its main issues. One such, the issue of communism, has been half-opened by Francois Furet and Stephen Courtois; the other, the issue of Hitlerism, is still under the interdict of the intellectual establishment. Jean-Paul Sartre used to be praised for saying that the century’s outstanding event was not the two world wars but the rise of communism; yet Hider’s rise to power is explained away as evil magic, treated like a black hole, known only for the period’s satanic mills. Otherwise, it was a non-event. Little children in America’s schools are told (in “social studies” classes!) to write about the “bad Nazis,” but historians researching the why’s and how’s of the period are also expected to cancel their efforts at objectivity.

Chronicles‘ remarkable March issue (“Fascism/Anti-Fascism: It’s still the same old story . . . “) tries to break through the barriers of censorship, although it is hard to open new channels when the legitimate ones are clogged by historians cum ira et studio. The question remains: Are we going to write about the Hitlerian period as a legitimate part of European history, or are we forever to employ the Orwellian (and Soviet) strategy to omit, re-write, and stuff down the memory hole true events and objective interpretations?

The so-called cliches and subterfuges of the Hitler era are genuine facts and historical factors. Bismarckian Germany (in 1920) lay morally and materially broken to pieces after Versailles, mainly the work of the French negotiators under the inspiration of Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras. The humiliation was proportionate with Germany’s earlier arrogance; the misery proportionate with the pre-1914 bourgeois prosperity-cum-welfare state. From 1920 to 1932, Germany was a cloaca, or at any rate the sick man of Europe. As Hitler approached power, new sectors of society found hope for revival. His methods and street-fights were not different from those of the communists, but at least the Nazis, unlike the Reds, were not agents of a foreign power. In the eyes of an increasing number of citizens, Weimar democracy was a ludicrous circus-show, and if medicine was to be administered, it had to be from the right.

Hitler had arrived from Vienna, itself a kind of model for “Weimar,” a mini- Sodom, as Karl Kraus described it. Civilization was on the decline, whether you follow Spengler, Carlyle, or Ortega. In this, Europe’s best minds agreed, but Hitler’s advantage over them was his non-status as an intellectual and thus his openness to concrete action inspired by popular philosophies and even more popular sciences: ethnology, psychology, biology, Darwinism. Hider’s conversations with Hermann Rauschning (the German commissioner in Danzig, later a teacher in Oregon) tell the story, almost in its entirety. (I have the 362nd French edition from 1939). Let’s simplify it, as if it were a Washington-based talk show: Are you a racist? asked Rauschning, National-Socialist head of the Danzig government. Hider explained: No, separate races, racial superiority are false notions, as any animal breeder will tell you. But this is the 20th century; science, including political science, has yielded to myth as a new principle, a new motor of history. In dealing with masses, nations, “races,” we must coordinate and lead them with big, half-obscure ideas. Communism and democracy are such. With Germans, democracy will not work; we choose different methods to restore national unity and the élan of collective will.

In propounding these notions —like them or not, they contain some contemporary truths, universally practiced—Hitler had good company. His ideas (I well remember) were far more popular than Marxism and liberalism. Reflecting on the inert human mass brought Father Teilhard de Chardin to regard concentration camps in Russia, Japan, and Germany as evolution’s efforts to massify mankind, endow it with a rudimentary collective consciousness. And I remember hearing UNESCO director Julian Huxley expound on the blessed future of humanity’s “collective head” at the Hague in 1946. Twenty years later in Brazil, Archbishop Helder Camara (variously called a “Marxist specimen” and a “second Goebbels”) entertained me with similar ideas of world unification. (Call it “globalization” if you wish.) And how about New Age, or the Reverend Moon’s mass wedding across the planet?

Srdja Trifkovic mentioned in the March issue that communism was not a snowy import from the Russian steppes, but a pure European product, containing verities and falsehoods, intellectual errors, mass-illusions. Yes, but so was Hitlerism: not a breakup of history but a part of it, with some respectable roots, and many poisonous consequences. Like Athens organizing the Delian League, like the Crusades, like Napoleon in Egypt and in Russia—it is all human handiwork. One cannot outlaw history or any of its chapters.

        —Thomas Molnar
Ridgewood, NJ