Enzo Traverso. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945. Trans. David Fernbach Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso, 2016. 304 pp.
Review by Nitzan Lebovic
9 August 2016
Civil wars, the Greek historian Thucydides wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, were an eruption of hate in which “general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity” were abolished and replaced by violence and depravity. In such wars, he added, “death raged in every shape.” In chronicling the war that erupted in 427 BCE between the Athenians and the Spartans, Thucydides was one of the first to point out what Enzo Traverso, two and a half millennia later, would characterize as “the breakdown of order within a state [that is] no longer able to impose its monopoly of violence. The enemy parties are not two regular armies but two factions within one and the same state, only one of which possesses a legal status, so that the distinction between civilian and combatant becomes highly problematic. The laws of war no longer apply” (p. 71). For Traverso, the characteristic lawlessness of civil war found its ultimate form in World War I, when a community of nations united by a sense of belonging to a larger culture tore itself to pieces. Thus the European breakdown of the “humanist vision of war” (p. 70).
This highly readable, convincingly synthetic book grounds its discussion of European identity—and what it means to be a humanist in the twenty-first century—in the collapse of jus bellum. For Traverso, a well-known historian of Nazi violence, humanism began with a failure to keep war under control. He explores and extends—from a historical perspective—the current idea of twentieth-century history as the “theater of war” and the breakdown of law, two kinds of crisis that civil war tends to trigger. From this perspective, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Spartacist revolution in Germany, the series of ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and the outbreak of the Fascist revolution in Italy, all belong to the same collapse of European norms.
Theoretically, Traverso’s key insights rely on the critical and antiliberal work of the German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin and National Socialism’s “crown jurist,” Carl Schmitt, as well as the more recent explorer of emergencies, Giorgio Agamben. Historicographically, he follows and builds on narratives of the collapse of the liberal order, from Franz Neumann’s Behemoth to George Mosse’s Masses and Man, from Hans Kohn’s work on the rise of nationalism to Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes. The wide scope of this analysis adds a layer to the field, by avoiding the usual rise-and-fall story of Western modernity. If the polis has been stained since its earliest days by the crimson tides of internal conflicts, its constitutive order should be seen in a different light. What might it mean to be “European” when a father can slaughter his son, or if rape—as Herfried Münkler pointed out (see his New Wars)—can serve as part of a “war economy”? What does it mean if the supposedly dissonant relation between fascism and antifascism continued to fine-tune the post-1945 European march to success and unity?
It is both a strength and a weakness of Traverso’s book that he keeps, for the most part, to the rather familiar history of the two world wars. His narrative never strays from sources already well mined in spite of the alternative conceptual framework. So what does the history of civil war add to this discussion?
Reframing the story of the last century as a European civil war enables Traverso to avoid the clichés concerning the rise of nationalism and the multiplication of more ethnically discrete nations in favor of a more focused story spotlighting the fragility of that identity and the set of political, cultural, and intellectual interests that shaped it. This approach allows one to focus on the mechanisms that make possible such incredible explosions of violence, hatred, and fear rather than their ideological justifications. Traverso concludes that investing in “brutalizing . . . language and forms of struggle” (p. 51) are a necessary condition for genocidal violence. The postwar period of silence and suppression, followed by the backlash against fascism, makes up a state-supported form of “collective ethos” (p. 260). So while Traverso’s book helps to shed light on the internal limitations of classic historiography of postwar Europe, in line with Tony Judt’s Postwar, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Dan Diner’s notion of Zeitbruch, or Pierre Rosanvallo’ns critique of the anti-fa—he never extends his assessment to the world outside Europe. While scholars of total war have addressed such themes as globalization, “low-intensity warfare,” the neoliberal outsourcing of military capability, and the surveillance state, Traverso has nothing to say about these. This silence is troubling because it keeps his own narrative limited to the safe zone of the same historiography he wants to replace.
Fire and Blood brilliantly recounts the European civil war of 1914-45, which brought the idea of capitalist progress to an end, argues Chris Bambery
Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, trans. David Fernbach (Verso 2016), 304pp.
The central thesis of this wonderful book is that between 1914 and 1945 Europe experienced a crisis of a scale only comparable to the Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century. It was a political crisis, which saw the demise of the old liberal order during the blood bath of the First World War, and the entry of the masses onto the political stage, both from the left and the right; an economic crisis, the scale of which led the state to intervene directly in the economy; and it was an ideological and cultural crisis which saw the faith in inevitable progress thrown onto the bonfire.
What Traverso is doing is charting how, in the years from 1914 to 1945, the ideas that would eventually lead both to Auschwitz, on the one hand, and to the resistance against Nazi occupation, on the other, came not from the margins of European society but from its mainstream. Further, the violence of those years, culminating in genocide, stemmed from the industrialisation of mass murder, flowing from ideologies of racial supremacy and colonialism among others.
Before 1914 it was common to see European society, and capitalism in general, evolving in a generally progressive direction. Progress was the rule. This was true for the pre-First World War ‘pope of Marxism’, Karl Kautsky, who saw the outbreak of that war as an aberration. Traverso, echoing the arguments of those like Walter Benjamin, sees capitalism as not heading in a progressive direction but instead hurtling towards destruction in which massive technological advances are used, not for the benefit of humanity but for its destruction.
This is important because conventional accounts of the Second World War still portray the Holocaust as being an anomaly when, like the dropping of the atomic bomb, it was the culmination of this three decade long civil war. Traverso argues, ‘despite its specific features, the Nazi war against the Jews belonged to this European and global civil war’ (p.24). This in no way demeans the horror of the Holocaust but carefully places it in its particular origins within those years.
During the course of the First World War total war meant the aim became the total destruction of the enemy in which pre-war norms about protecting and respecting civilians went out of the window. The various powers were able to draw on the experience of colonial conquest to justify a war of extermination but also came to see it as a civil war in which their opponents were not a ‘legitimate enemy’ but seen as outcasts from civilisation,
A civil war has never taken place without massacres and similar horrors. Traverso engages with Trotsky’s justification for the methods employed by the Reds in the Russian Civil War which followed the 1917 revolution, ‘Their Morals and Ours’, and despite his criticisms concludes Trotsky was right that the Bolsheviks had to employ whatever means necessary to win a war they did not start and did not want.
This is not a simple history of those years. Rather it examines the ideas which underlay the mass movements of the inter war years, and why the morality of pre-1914 Europe was undermined by a generation scarred by the horror of the First World War.
It involves engaging with the ideas of left wingers, from Lenin and Gramsci to the Frankfurt School, and with those on the fascist wing, such as the German jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt, and the philosopher, Martin Heidegger. It is uncomfortable to engage with such Nazi ideologues, but in this context legitimate. These were mainstream figures who would justify book burning and political violence. As late as 1962 Schmitt travelled to Franco’s Spain to deliver a lecture claiming the Spanish Civil War was a war of ‘national liberation’ against international communism.
Traverso quotes First-World-War hero and German nationalist, Ernst Jünger, at the moment of the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, describing the war on the Eastern front as ‘absolute, to a degree that Clausewitz could not have conceived, even after the experiences of 1812: it is a war between states, between peoples, between citizens and between religions, with the object of zoological extinction’ (p.63). That became true for the war as a whole as with the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the destruction of German cities and their civilian population by aerial bombing deliberately designed to create fire storms.
Yet Traverso does make a very clear distinction between the violence of the fascists and that of the left, despite his clear anti-Stalinism. The emergence of mass anti-fascism was a response to the barbarism of Hitler and co. In the course of first the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War, the anti-fascist forces were engaged in a very real civil war in which resistance movements had not just to fight the German occupiers but the forces of the native right who had rallied to the New Order.
Violence inevitably created counter-violence that often mirrored the violence of the enemy, and even its own ritual of killing. Thus the corpse of Mussolini was strung up in Piazzale Loreto in Milan, on April 29, 1945 and subject to the abuse of the crowd. What is less well known was that the bodies of murdered partisans had earlier been displayed at exactly the same spot.
In defending the violence deployed by the left Traverso does not spare Stalin’s Russia and he engages with non-Communist members of the resistance such as Carlo Rosselli and supporters of Trotsky. But he does, I believe, go a bit too far in defending popular-front anti-fascism, which was, for him, an alliance of all the shades of the left and liberals aimed at defending democracy. That alliance had a very clear limit; revolution was off the agenda. This was something Stalin signed the Communists up to.
In 1937 the Spanish Republican forces conquered Barcelona in order to suppress the far left and to extinguish the elements of workers’ control established a year earlier when the city’s working class had risen up and defeated the fascist rebellion. In 1945 that same boundary was clear when the leadership of the Italian resistance limited the struggle to the creation of a liberal-democratic republic, despite the fact that armed workers were in possession of Milan, Turin and Genoa. Nevertheless, don’t let this get in your way of reading this fine book.
Traverso argues that civilization and barbarism are not two absolutely antagonistic terms but two linked aspects of the same historical process, carrying both emancipatory and destructive tendencies. He also points out that is true of all modern wars, pointing to the 2003 Iraq which combined the deployment of the most modern forms of weaponry with the most primitive forms of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.
At the very time the atomic bomb was used in August 1945 Albert Camus argued that science had been turned into ‘organised murder’ and concluded that humanity had to choose between ‘collective suicide and an intelligent use of scientific conquests’. That choice remains before us today.
Chris Bambery is an author, political activist and commentator, and a supporter of Rise, the radical left wing coalition in Scotland. His books include A People's History of Scotland and The Second World War: A Marxist Analysis.
https://www.counterfire.org/articles/book-reviews/18190-fire-and-blood-the-european-civil-war-1914-1945
European History review article
Book:
To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949
Ian Kershaw
London, Penguin, 2015, ISBN: 9780713990898; 624pp.; Price: £17.22
Fire and Blood: the European Civil War 1914-1945
Enzo Traverso
New York, NY, Verso, 2016, ISBN: 9781784781330; 304pp.; Price: £16.99
Reviewer:
Professor Stan Nadel
University of Portland
Citation:
Professor Stan Nadel,
review of European History review article,
(review no. 1977)
We have here two very different books utilizing two very different approaches to essentially the same period of history in Europe. And while the differences are enormous, each is excellent in its own way and both are major contributions to the historiography of Europe in the first half of the 20th century.
While Kershaw’s book is a brilliant example of a traditional period history, Enzo Traverso serves up an entirely different kettle of fish. Rather than trying to provide a narrative overview of Europe’s history from 1914–45, Traverso provides an analytic framework for understanding its basic structure and has chosen the formulation civil war because he distinguishes civil wars, which promote the elimination of opponents, from normal wars which simply aim at defeating them. He claims the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars as precedents, as he argues that all three cases involved international ideologically driven systems at war with each other and aiming to eliminate their ideological opponents, though the first failed to accomplish that and ended in the creation of the modern state system (and, in fact, rarely broke down on purely ideological grounds, but that’s not important here). While the first Thirty Years War ended as more a conflict of states than an ideological war, the second one (1914–45) started as a conflict of states that morphed into long term ideological conflicts between revolutions and counter-revolutions and ended with the elimination of fascism as the embodiment of counter-revolution.
Traverso begins with an ‘Anatomy of civil war’, in which he explores the differences between civil wars and ‘normal’ wars. Civil wars, he argues, are all about eliminating opponents and often involve the breakdown of contemporary standards of wartime behavior, treating enemies not as lawful opponents, but rather as outlaws, something that then leads to engaging in ‘atrocities and horrors’. They may involve ‘hot violence’ with undisciplined carnival-like suspensions of all rules, where rape, murder and theft are widespread and violence takes on symbolic dimensions that go beyond any instrumental considerations, while cruelty and humiliation become major practices just for their own sake. But they may also involve ‘cold violence‘, with disciplined mass murder in combat (often taking no prisoners) and genocidal programs implemented by bureaucratic organizations with little emotion involved. The European Civil War under consideration of course notoriously involved both forms of violence, often on unprecedented scales.
One of the most characteristic features of the 1914–1945 civil war was the extent to which it reversed the long term process of confining wars to military forces. Traverso traces the development of a ‘war against civilians’ that started with German atrocities against Belgian civilians and Austrian atrocities in Serbia in 1914. Bombing campaigns started with attacks on enemy troops, but as early as 1915–6 the Germans began turning to bombing English cities from Zeppelins (to little effect). That was just the opening round in a practice that ended with the massive aerial bombing campaigns of the Second World War that destroyed so many of Europe’s cities – bombing campaigns that went beyond the total war logic of trying to destroy an enemy’s war making potential to targeting cultural centers with no military significance. Civilians were targeted for territorial elimination through ethnic expulsion from occupied territories or to create ethno-national states – a process that began during the First World War but which continued in its aftermath when around 10 million people were displaced in the process of forming new states out of the former empires of Central and Eastern Europe. All of this paled in comparison with the mass displacements of the Second World War when civilian populations became designated targets and made up half the dead, and 40 million were displaced, often deliberately as in the German plans to remake the eastern part of Europe into a greater Germany. The end of the European civil war saw some of the losers not just defeated, but having their states dissolved (Germany) and their surviving leaders simply executed (Mussolini) or subjected to show trials in a symbolic victors’ justice that displaced national guilt onto leaders and thus opened the way for re-establishing the dissolved German state. In the formerly occupied countries there were mass purges of collaborators, spontaneous ‘wild’ purges followed by legal purges, expressions of the internal civil wars that accompanied the broader European Civil war. The purges were then followed by amnesties for the survivors bring the civil wars to an end across Europe.
Exploring the essence of civil war leads Traverso into an extended discussion of the culture of war that developed with and promoted it. The need to mobilize the entire resources of the state led to total war, a transition from war as a field of honor to war as a slaughterhouse justifying all possible measures. Traverso’s ‘imaginaries of violence’ is a brilliant cultural analysis of the literature, art and movies of the period. He goes on to discuss the element of fear, fear leading to trauma and hysteria on the battlefield (PTSD), but also to an ideology of violence as a test of manhood failed by the weak, but passed by strong men, heroes who were transformed into stone killers and fascist shock troops. Fear was used to mobilize hatred against the threat of actual enemies, but was also diverted into deadly hatred directed against Reds, Jews, and etc. Fear led to a desire for safety and order that became a major factor in the support of or acceptance of fascism. A strong demographic increase in young men in the generation before 1914 laid the basis for the development of the ‘front generation’ that not only fought the First World War, but which was the backbone of the ideological forces after the war – both Bolshevik and fascist. All, but especially the Italian fascists, promoted youthful images and were in fact movements largely populated by young men, opposed to effeminate and decadent bourgeois intellectuals, Jews and homosexuals. These were also imbued with a misogyny that required women’s participation in total war effort to be strictly policed along gender lines (at least outside the Soviet Union and Partisan forces) and which made ‘enemy’ women into legitimate targets for male aggression (we attack the enemy by raping, mutilating, and killing ‘their women’).
Civil war meant cultural warfare as political conflict became a major cultural theme post-1919 in art, literature and music. Culture was politicized and politics was aestheticized. While fascist politics and culture focused on contests for racial supremacy, communists and socialists focused on class struggles – both of which were instrumentalized to pursue the civil war where they confronted each other. Long before open warfare resumed, military iconography became predominant on both sides, and both abandoned all constraints of legality (rejecting them as illegitimate hindrances for revolutionary movements) as both communism and fascism grew out of the collapse of political order set off by the First World War and reached for radical solutions. After 1933 most intellectuals were drawn to anti-fascism and it became hegemonic in European culture by 1945 as fascism went down in flames – taking much of Europe down with it. Traverso makes it clear, though, that the anti-fascist alliance of intellectuals was not the result of Communist Party decisions, as was claimed later by both communists and anti-communists, but rather preceded the Popular Fronts promoted by the communists after 1935. Traverso argues that anti-fascism was basically rooted in Enlightenment culture while fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist ideologies were all anti-Enlightenment ideologies. He says it is true that anti-fascism mostly (though not universally) turned a blind eye to Stalinism, but he argues convincingly that the notion of Furet and others that it was just a Stalinist trick is fundamentally ahistorical – that there was a severe critique of Stalinism, but its critics were unable to follow through by rejecting any alliance with Stalinists until fascism was decisively eliminated after 1945.
Traveso’s discussion of the Holocaust points out the failure of anti-Fascist intellectuals to take seriously the role of Antisemitism in the 1930s – and even after 1945 Sartre’s Anti-semite and Jew focused on French Antisemitism and Dreyfus rather than Auschwitz. He argues that seeing the fascists and Nazis only as obscuritanist reactionaries missed their revolutionary modernization effects and hence their ability to engineer a high-tech mass extermination campaign. Recognizing that modern reality required abandoning the philosophical premise that humanity was bound to an evolutionary process of enlightenment, something only some members of the Frankfurt School were prepared to do at the time, he concludes that ‘[f]ar from celebrating a new triumph of enlightenment, these isolated figures refused to see the Second World War as a victorious epic of progress. Before the spectacle of a civilization that had transformed modern technology into a gigantic destructive power, the only sentiment possible was one of shame’ (pp. 275–6).
Traverso’s attempt to reframe Europe’s history from 1914–45 under the rubric of civil war is not always entirely convincing, but it is full of insights and is well worth reading and considering – and perhaps re-reading and reconsidering several times over.
August 2016
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https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1977
Fascinating Antifascism
— Alan Wald
Fire and Blood:
The European Civil War, 1914-1945
By Enzo Traverso
Translated by David Fernbach,
London: Verso, 2016. Pages +293, $26.95 hardback.
ENZO TRAVERSO HAS pulled off the rare reconstruction of a past epoch that pulsates with electric immediacy. Fire and Blood fashions events happening seventy-five-to-one-hundred years ago to feel as lively and pertinent as political debates taking place at present. His principal topic is the hell that was the center of Europe’s two world wars climaxing in a deluge of totalitarianism and genocide, and the devil is back today.
The most menacing revenant from this “Age of Extremes” (as Eric Hobsbawm called it) comes to us in the shape of a spectacular growth of the Right across most of the same continent, with counterparts in the United States not hard to find. Reactionaries now as then traffic in a political imaginary of noxious aliens in their midst — non-Aryans, non-Christians, immigrants — and rally around a mythologized distinctiveness of their national cultures and threatened traditions.
New systems of violence are unleashed, and talk of the deportation and even annihilation of populations marked by religio-ethnic difference is being heard again. Are we facing the latest staging of a persistently revived historical drama?
As a mirror held up to the present, the non-fiction horror story that is Fire and Blood has the merit of never pretending to offer prophetic forecasts or conclusory admonitions; there are no ready-made answers for the new millennium. Rather, it commends a model and method for how to analyze a disaster that profoundly affected all that came after; the point of the book is how this past with a genetic link to our present is remembered and interpreted.
We are in an exceptionally new situation, but elements of older experiences may clarify our vision if one finds the proper means of access.
Against Liberal Anachronisms
Traverso, an Italian-born former Parisian professor now teaching at Cornell University, throws down the gauntlet to the current academic and public treatment of these earlier decades.
Several of his previous books — especially The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1990; English translation, 1994) and Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism After Auschwitz (1999) — addressed in detail Marxist approaches to the problem of anti-Semitism as history marched toward the 1941-45 slaughter of the European Jews. He has contributed an article on “the European Cataclysm” to Against the Current (issue 176, >https://solidarity-us.org/node/4422).
In eight chapters divided into two parts, Fire and Blood provides a larger framework and perspective on the epoch as a whole. That amplified structure is the controversial theory of Europe as the site of a prolonged, continental-wide conflict, involving far more than just hostile states, but repeated confrontations by adversarial population components of an overarching “European civil war.”
This is a construct often associated with Paul Preston’s The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (2007). The deep national roots of the conflagration were intertwined with continental-wide battles: between modernity and conservatism; concerning regional autonomies and imperial tradition; pitting the urban proletariat and peasantry against capital and landed property; and civil wars within civil wars triggered by the triangulated relationships among Communism, liberal democracy and fascism.
A principal incentive for Traverso’s new embrace of the argument is to contest those scholars and popularizers who evaluate the brutalities of the period by accentuating near-metaphysical totalitarian evils of the fascist Right and Marxist Left, the dangers of ideology, and the virtues of absolute liberal principles. Collectively, such approaches obscure the actual choices faced by humanity in a full-scale state of catastrophe.
Traverso’s affirmation of the first part of his new paradigm begins with a succinct and riveting dissent: “[Fire and Blood] aims to establish a historical perspective against the anachronism so widespread today that projects onto Europe of the interwar years the categories of our liberal democracies as if these were timeless norms and values.” (2)
The upshot of such erroneous thinking is that “Oskar Schindler has dethroned Missak Manouchian [the martyred French-Armenian Communist poet and leader of a Resistance network of immigrant workers]. The example kept in mind is the businessman (a Nazi party member) who rescued his Jewish employees, rather than that of immigrants in France (Jews and Armenians, Italians and Spaniards) who fought against Nazism in a movement linked to the Communist Party.” (6)
Traverso’s chief culprit for such historical obfuscation is to be found in the ideological imposition after World War II of a limited political spectrum consolidated by intellectual elites and popular demagogues. For this muddle, kudos should especially go out to those who displaced the category of antifascism by “anti-totalitarianism.”
The political term “totalitarian” emerged in the 1920s to describe a one-party despotic state; after World War II, the German-born emigré political theorist Hannah Arendt inaugurated a stimulating debate about the degree to which systems such as German fascism and the post-Lenin Soviet Union were updated versions of old tyrannies or new forms owing to the role of ideology.
In the Cold War, however, “anti-totalitarianism” took on a life of its own as a makeshift doctrine that subsumed Communism into Nazism. The former’s tradition of anti-fascism was nearly erased, and the conflation of the two facilitated harsh international policies toward and domestic repression of the entire Left — including nationalist movements aiming at decolonization.
Many other Left-wing books have explored this phenomenon, but a distinction of Traverso’s volume is that a diversified antifascist culture, vital in the history of endeavors to animate a radical socialist mobilization since the 1920s, receives equal space in many of its complexities.
A Critical Framework
To illuminate the concrete relations between violence, culture and politics in years of escalating terrors, Traverso presents a Marxist notion of Europe as a continent torn apart by a civil war (including revolution and counter-revolution) from 1914 to 1945.
This is a critical framework because “these [liberal] norms turn out to be invalid” due to civil war having “its own logic and its own ‘laws,’ which fatally imposed themselves on all the combatants.” Simply put, “it is a false perspective to try to analyze with the spectacles of Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls an age that produced Ernest Jünger [who wrote on technology and modernity] and Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt and Leon Trotsky.” (2, 3)
Ethical and historical categories are not the same, and Traveso’s shift in template brings the interconnections between politics and culture into thrillingly sharp focus. His morally intricate story is especially instructive for those of us who aspire to harmonize hopes and struggles across national borders, revitalizing revolutionary socialist culture through an internationalism from below.
Which brings us to the other half of the book’s paradigm: Traverso’s examination of the challenging “antinomies” of the antifascist tradition that evolved in response to the growing power of the Right.
Antifascism, persisting to the present in beguiling and sometimes perplexing recollections, to my mind incongruously recalls facets of Susan Sontag’s celebrated contention in her 1974 essay, “Fascinating Fascism.” Antifascism, too, is a multifaceted mode of political practice as well as an aesthetic, together subject to a sequence of misapprehensions.
With fascism, according to Sontag, the perceptual subterfuge is due to a curious retrieval of pilloried cultural styles of the past; with antifascism, according to Traverso, the perpetrators of misperception are the distorting prisms of Communism, liberalism and anti-totalitarianism.
In a criticism of ex-Leftist Francois Furet’s The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1995), Traverso observes: “The complexity of the relationship between antifascism and Stalinism is avoided a priori by an approach that sees the former as simply a creature and byproduct of the latter.” (11)
No Rocks Unturned
Yet Traverso, who personifies critical autonomy within a committed Left stance, often sees partial truths in the claims of adversaries such as Furet; he will even quote from the notorious Le Livre noir du communism (1977) if there are facts he believes accurate. (51) The effect is that there are no rocks he refuses to turn over as he confronts, rather than flees from, what blinkered minds may find unsettling about antifascist theory and practice.
Civil war is at all times a lamentable horror even if the armed struggle of antifascist resistance was an essential and proper choice:
“If I mention the atrocities of the Spanish Republicans, it is not to put them on the same footing as the Francoists. If I mention the hideous spectacle of the lynching of Mussolini and the public hanging of his corpse, or the mass rapes of German women by Red Army soldiers as they advanced toward Berlin in May 1945, this is not to cast collaborationists and resisters as equal avatars of an interchangeable violence, nor to equate Soviet war-making with that of the Nazis.” (19)
Traverso is equally undaunted in acknowledging that the Soviet-enmeshed, antifascist experience contains much ready-made material for the creation of fables, some of which he subjects to clear-eyed disapproval: “It is certainly possible to criticize the intellectuals who maintained the myth of the USSR for having lied to themselves and contributed to deceiving the antifascist movement, making themselves propagandists for a totalitarian regime instead of the antifascist movement’s critical conscience.” (270)
Acutely conscious that an amnesiac socialist tradition is a fragile one, Traverso makes no bones about affirming that, even in the mid-1930s, “it was possible to be both antifascist and anti-Stalinist, and that the fascination exercised by Stalinism at this time over the antifascist intelligentsia was not irresistible.” (267)
Just as he holds that, after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the political commitment of the Left could only find outlets within the broad antifascist movement in which Communists played an outsized role, he simultaneously seeks to reclaim the defeated and marginalized Left traditions he often cites in passing.
An Elastic Term
Fascism itself is a famously elastic term, often a scare word, or simply inflammatory “red meat” for all sides of the political spectrum.
It is true of course that anyone who has read about the menacing radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin in the 1930s knows that the United States is hardly immune to the poison of fascism, and there are currently a few parties in Europe of a neo-Nazi character (Golden Dawn). Moreover, it is natural to respond to new explosions of vile reaction based on what we think we have learned from earlier ones; nobody wants to trip over the same rock twice.
Yet brandishing the name “Nazi” in a reckless and incendiary manner is no solution. Neo-conservatives in the United States parse “Islamofascism” through mental structures governed by Munich and Pearl Harbor; should the Left now imitate them by explaining the Right-wing populist Donald Trump and Tea Party from an eighty-year-old vantage point?
This was a remarkably distinctive time from our own. Back then, the rule of industrial capitalism could only be maintained by mass terror in Germany; Communists controlled a huge country, the Soviet Union, and were on the offensive in the millions; and the appeal of Nazi political principles and culture to its middle class base was that Hitler projected a futuristic new world run by a race of supermen.
Do we really need to pull our volumes of Thucydides off the shelf to recall that passions overriding lack of careful thought lead to bad outcomes? Things today must surely be called by their correct names, including ugly ones, but a serious calibration of the social basis of political forces amassing on the Right, their ideology, and presently-existing structural determinations are what should govern terminology; not just rage and disgust at the bigotries of Right-wing populism and religious fundamentalism.
The Keys to Intelligibility
As a master class in historical analysis, Traverso ‘s full-on riveting reconceptualization of 1914-1945 as a “European Civil War” is a benchmark achievement in the flowering of socialist scholarship by the generation identifying with May 1968. (Traverso is actually a bit younger, born in 1957; no observer above the fray, he dates his entrance into organized revolutionary politics as 1973, and describes his adolescent self as “one of the final representatives of the ‘last generation of October.’” [17])
Along with a number of other recent publications, especially Leo Panitch and Greg Albo’s The Politics of the Right: Socialist Register 2016 (2015), featuring Geoff Eley’s indispensable “Fascism Then and Now,” such rigorous, activist-minded thinking is a precondition to forging the new political instruments that we need. The study of previous political forms gives our present a past, and such books stand as a rebuke to those who, even for the best of reasons, rush into the minefields of complicated earlier moments in a frenzy that can produce tendentious conflations.
For Traverso, terrific craftsmanship, kinetic prose, and dazzling competence as a scholar combine to clarify how the keys to intelligibility of the roots of the age of dictatorships and the holocaust can be muddled by a historical revisionism we must overcome. This is accomplished by grounding his treatment in the longer view of history commonly associated with the less economic-determinist renditions of Marxism, expressly identified with Isaac Deutscher and Arno J. Mayer.
In his chapter “Commencement,” for example, Traverso explains that the three decades telescoping the two World Wars “has two ancestors: the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 and the French Revolution a century and a half later…” (30) In “The Anatomy of Civil War,” he then describes how and why the ideology of the Bolsheviks became deformed in a manner parallel to that of the Jacobins.
Other chapters demonstrate that the World War II Allies were fully complicit in a “War Against the Civilians,” committing crimes against non-combatants even apart from the fire-bombings and atomic destruction of Japan.
In “Judging the Enemy,” Traverso takes us through the distressing process that led to the European victors’ eventually setting free “with or without a formal amnesty, almost every prisoner accused of fascism and collaboration, often reintegrating them into the state administration.” (146) Despite declarations of “Victory” by the Allies in 1945, there was no happy ending to this story.
The second half of the book is called “Cultures of War.” It begins with the brief “Eruption,” grounds itself more substantially in “Imaginaries of Violence” and “The Critique of Weapons,” and comes to an astonishing crescendo in “The Antinomies of Anti-Fascism” in which brilliant insights stimulate us repeatedly like shots of espresso. As to whether Traverso’s civil war concept can help us understand the relationship between violence, culture and resistance, his survey of the impact of the Great War on European culture should alone settle the matter forcefully.
Literature, art, music and intellectual thought are at this point traced as the political situation after 1914 morphs melodramatically. What began as a classical war between states becomes a continental-wide civil war “that engulfs nations, in which armies destroy civilian populations, and where there are quite simply no longer any rules but that of the complete destruction of the enemy.” (167)
Traverso’s very opening pages on the premonitions of this coming catastrophe draw the reader inexorably into the web of analysis he spins. Then, writing with a breadth of cultural reference and literary flair, his gripping details — about H. G. Wells, Giovavanni Papini, Arnold Schönberg, Filippo Marinetti, Siegfried Kracauer, Stefan Zweig — come to life with the narrative momentum of a novel.
Among his acute observations are those about “the hidden emotions of a social world disfigured by violence” which is the concealed “face of countless monuments commemorating the fallen that were erected throughout the continent” (174). A characteristic example is the Käthe Kollwitz war memorial in Belgium, which shows not violent death but parents weeping over a tomb.
The Culture of Violence Unleashed
Traverso next enters the moral and psychological world of the interwar decades to explore the further cultural consequences of the violence unleashed. Erich Maria Remarque, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin are only the first of a long list of his subjects addressing fear and death in fiction, photography, film, historiography, psychiatry, political theory, painting and sociology.
A subsection considers nationalist models of masculinity and the evolution of female depictions from “violated woman” to “horizontal collaborator” — “which inevitably involved both moral stigmatization and physical humiliation: head-shaving as a popular spectacle.” (215) His allusions are numerous but each clicks into place with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Turning more specifically to the challenges confronting intellectuals in the “Political Age” of the 1930s, Traverso uses a second long chapter to once again pursue the historical approach of moving from “prefigurations” of political poles (as in Thomas Mann’s 1920 The Magic Mountain) to the historical conjuncture in which Communism and fascism seemed to be the principal solutions to a catastrophic crisis — one that liberalism helped yield and could no longer contain.
With a Jamesian capacity for analytic nuance, Traverso revisits several famous literary encounters — Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky — to produce treatments that are as lucid for the novice as they will be illuminating for the specialist.
His succinct but stabbing conclusion contains meaningful if unnerving words from Trotsky, the “enigmatic figure” who was both “inflexible dictator and persecuted revolutionary.” In response to one of the most compelling critics of Bolshevik morality, Traverso notes: “At bottom he [Trotsky] was not wrong to ask what [Victor] Serge wanted: ‘to purge civil war of the practices of hostages or to purge human history of civil war.” (253).
This point is so germane to the excruciating paradoxes of Traverso’s book as to deliver a contact high.
Modernity’s Child
To be sure, the primary question for antifascists of the 1930s, or any other time, is whether one will submit to (or cooperate in) the imminent violence of others, or resist by force of arms. Nonviolent means of struggle for social change are preferable wherever that is possible, so the question of accurately recognizing authentic fascism, with its instantaneous brutality ruling out nonviolence, is a necessity.
In the Great Depression, the “committed” intellectuals were so massively in favor of transforming themselves into fighters, sometimes by pen and other times by sword, that it is hard to fathom the state of confusion that prevails in European culture at the present time. Traverso is near apoplectic in reporting that there has been an oscillation of understanding to the point where in Italy and Spain the pro- and antifascist veterans are forced to march together in national commemorations. (6)
This and several analogous developments hit like a sledgehammer as a call-to-arms for the historically-minded Left. Clearly there are areas of contemporary political and cultural life where stating the obvious has become an underrated skill: some civil wars are worth waging, and sides have to be chosen.
What ensues after a commitment to armed struggle, of course, is not a simple matter, as Trotsky’s challenge to Serge points up. The “Prophet Outcast” advocated the use of historical understanding to promote social transformation to permanently eliminate oppression, and he remained suspicious of abstract moral codes that no one actually follows in civil war. This makes sense, but, then again, later history provides reasons to be far less confident than Trotsky about the capacity of even a tried and tested genius to forecast the means that in point of fact will lead to desired ends.
Traverso, too, recognizes the dilemma. Purity — the programmatic catechism of sectarians — was never an option, and “real, existing” antifascism is an indispensible heritage of which the imperfections must be studied.
Antifascist Culture
Traverso’s chapter “The Antinomies of Antifascism” explains the genealogy of the movement in a manner that allows us to further understand why some degree of acceptance of co-operation with Stalinism was so plausible at the time, and why antifascism is hardly reducible to Stalinism.
Antifascist culture emerged in the 1920s, prior to Communist interest, and was never entirely coterminous; in fact, the Soviet leadership’s 1935 turn from “Third Period” ultraleftism in the direction of the antifascist campaign was an adaptation to a growing movement from below. Thus a political and ideological cohabitation within antifascist culture existed from the beginning in Italy and into the early postwar era — social democrats, anarchists, Trotskyists, liberals, nationalists and more.
Nevertheless, relatively few once radicalized around antifascism could resist the magnet of Communism. Liberal institutions in Europe were incapable of fighting fascism until World War II broke out, and the United States intervened only when attacked by Japan. The convictions of the Communists, their will and vision of universal emancipation linked to ideals about the land of the October Revolution – even though the Soviet state was dramatically weakened by Stalin’s execution of the historic leaders of the revolution and the military — became nearly as decisive in the fight as the material resources of the Red Army.
Communists, not liberals, were the primary inspirational force behind 1930s resistance in Germany, Italy and Spain, and then in the 1940s among partisans throughout the continent.
A second puzzle developed in antifascist culture around the issue of what Max Weber called the “ethic of conviction” as distinguished from the “ethic of responsibility.” Should the Resistance act to hurt its enemy wherever possible, even when victory is a long shot; or should it hold back if some actions may lead to worse things (typically mass reprisals), despite intentions?
Today, in human rights discourse, the contrast might seem to be between those willing to sacrifice lives of civilians for a utopian cause as opposed to those simply “concerned for real human beings.” Should the goal have been the long-term liberation of humanity (utopianism) or the short-term object of aiding victims and preventing more casualties (humanitarianism)?
Early in the book, Traverso cites criticisms of the May 1942 attack on Reinhard Heydrich in Prague (followed by the massacre at Lidice) and the May 1944 Via Rasella assault in Rome (resulting in Nazi reprisals against 335 civilians in the Fosse Ardeatine), but concludes: “In the reality of a civil war…the wide spectrum of behavior of the actors involved seems often hard to pin down to one or other of Weber’s two ideal types.” The two “are never completely separated, being instead connected and mingled in various ways,” and “Resistance fighters put much effort into questioning the consequences of their actions.” (7)
For evidence of this, he cites the debate within the Jewish Resistance that preceded the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The armed Resistance had no chance of success and might even be judged by contemporary liberals as fanatics immolating themselves for a hopeless cause; yet their rivals, the leaders of the Jewish Councils who miscalculated that their personal collaboration with the Nazis would surely save more lives, are not the ones we honor today.
The Fate of the Jews
Nevertheless, it is precisely in the area of “the Jewish question” where Traverso posits a strong criticism of antifascist culture. To be specific, the fate of the Jews did not appear particular and prophetic. Antifascists saw anti-Semitism as part of a Nazi regression to Medieval irrationalism and obscurantism, and refused to disentangle the Jewish disaster from the overall misery of the colossal carnage that left Europe in rubble.
To acknowledge something new, different and modern in Nazi anti-Semitism is not the same as a Judeocentrism that refuses to fully recognize the monstrousness of non-Jewish killings among Russians, Poles and others, or that the German people were also victims of fascism.
Rather, this incapacity to grasp the war against the Jews as distinctively foreboding is judged by Traverso to be the mark of an incapacity to apprehend fascism itself as the child of modernity, albeit a reactionary variant. Contrary to an Enlightenment credence in the progress of civilization, genocide against the Jews was no anachronistic relapse but a part of the forward march of history.
Genocide was the product of an industrialized and bureaucratic new world that was already, and would continue, subordinating weaker peoples with the kind of technological and instrumental rationality at work in the death campus.
In Traverso’s view, the same kind of uncritical loyalty to the 19th century idea of progress that led to seeing Nazi anti-semitism as one of many ephemeral throwbacks also lay behind the illusions about Stalinism in antifascist culture. Communists as well as liberal fellow travelers could interpret the actions of the Soviet Union as a kind of Enlightenment on speed, perpetually in a state of emergency; the struggle for progress coincided with the defense of the Socialist homeland.
Yet today we are still faced with a cascade of violent tragedies engulfing millions that can be traced to modernization projects such as the capitalist restructuring of the 1970s and globalization. They feature technologically facilitated massacres by drone attacks as well as suicide bombers recruited through the internet; previously unimaginable mass migrations under acute duress; and racialized propaganda campaigns once again targeting refugees, immigrants and the stateless.
We now have boundless reasons to doubt the prevailing liberal and antifascist view that the end of World War II was the ineluctable triumph of Enlightenment reason. In the dissident genre of antifascist culture that Traverso seems to favor, there is more than an echo of Theodor Adorno’s dictum that sees Auschwitz not as a rupture with but as a product of modern “civilization.”
The Winds of History
Fire and Blood is the gleaming work of a scholar at the pinnacle of his craftsmanship; there are only a few places where the book briefly derails. Some readers may be disoriented by Traverso’s occasional use of “totalitarian” to characterize Stalin’s Soviet Union (10, 270), which seems to contradict his disparagement of the totalitarian model as the means by which attributes of fascism were transferred to communism after World War II.
Possibly, like Trotsky, Traverso is distinguishing between a Soviet political superstructure remarkably like that of Germany and Italy, even as the social-economic base and founding ideology of the state were dramatically dissimilar. (See Trotsky’s “The USSR in War,” September 1939.)
Another matter that could use a fuller exposition is Traverso’s view of the Popular Front, to which there are surprisingly few direct references. He is unambiguous about the impotence of liberalism in the crisis of the era, but far less searching about the limitations of the prevailing cross-class alliance.
A third inadequacy is a paucity of evidence about the case for the “European Civil War” model in the face of challenges that it allegedly downplays the international dimensions of the 30-year conflict and the role of the United States. Finally, I was surprised by the political identification of Albert Camus as “a writer who was never a Communist” (260); in Algeria, Camus in 1935 joined the French Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1937 as a “Trotskyite.”
Blood and Fire does not tell us “what to do next,” but gives us a past that opens up the future to informed innovation. Much of the narrative seems to point back to roads not taken and decisions not made. To create a radical present, then, contemporary rebels need to look beyond conventionally-acclaimed success stories to the revolutionary traditions that Stalinism and liberalism have done their utmost to bury.
My sense is that Traverso himself signaled a desire to emulate one of the great heresiarchs of this legacy in his opening commendation of “the limpid prose of Isaac Deutscher… borne by the winds of history with its torments and contradictions.” (10) Mission accomplished!
July-August 2016, ATC 183
Fire and Blood, Socialism or Barbarism
by RON JACOBS
2016 COUNTERPUNCH
I recently re-watched the German 1986 biographical fiction titled Rosa. It is a film about Rosa Luxemburg. The film itself is a bit more stylized than Luxemburg’s life probably was and its politics are not nearly as radical as Luxemburg’s were, but they do show her consistent anti-imperialism, her Marxism, and, on the personal level, the passion and intellectualism so obvious in her writings. I also recently finished the newly-published English translation of Enzo Traverso’s exceptional study of World Wars One and Two, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War: 1914-1945. This combination was remarkably compatible in its analysis of the history of that period.
To begin with, both the book and the film (via Luxemburg’s speeches and written words in the film) make the point that the colonialist period prior to World War One was not a period of peace and prosperity around the globe. It was, however, that for much of Europe. All the wars and such took place in other places in the world as colonial powers fought the native peoples (and occasionally each other through proxy and directly) for control of those colonies. The World Wars then, were called this only because of colonial hubris and arrogance which considered Europe as the “world,” while simultaneously rendering the non-European world to a lesser even non-human category. Of course, the label given the rest of the world then was “non-civilized” and not non-human, but the implication was (and is) the same.
This text is not a history of dates, battles, leaders, and armies. Neither is it a political history detailing the debates between and within parties, legislatures and monarchies. It is something much broader and more fundamental. In this book Traverso examines the meaning of the cataclysmic and catastrophic changes wrought by the carnage and movements these wars wrought. He looks for those meanings in the art, the film, and even the philosophical writings of the time discussed. In doing so, he makes his case that the decades of and between the two world wars were schismatic in nature. Indeed, the conflict was the historical equivalent of a natural disaster on a global scale, as if the flood of Genesis were remade in in poison gas, aerial bombardment, and apocalyptic politics. Or less, biblical but still religious, Traverso compares the effects of this European Civil War with the previous one we call The Thirty Years War.
In the nuanced and erudite discussion that makes up this reflection, Traverso invokes Nazi philosophers, Marxist ones and liberals. It his contention that the polarization made all too obvious by the carnage of World War One killed the remaining remnants of bourgeois liberalism; the very political philosophy that was birthed a century earlier during the years of French Revolution and American colonies war for independence after being conceived in the decades preceding those events. The pretense at tolerance maintained by the liberal political state was firstly applicable only to the colonizer nations and secondly attacked by the rightist yet revolutionary phenomenon called fascism. The intention and organizational approach of fascism was (and is) to polarize. The decades between the wars saw this approach take hold and met with an equal reaction from the Left.
This isn’t to say, though, that Traverso repeats the liberal trope that wants us to see Leftist responses to fascist provocations as equivalent. Likewise, he refuses to concede that the revolutionary violence of the oppressed somehow denies the justness of their cause. He does, however, note that violence in the name of revolution tends to bring the most authoritarian elements of the revolution to the fore, if only because the military becomes the most capable defender of the revolution against its foes. Traverso remarks on the tendency of those in the liberal center (both right and left) who decry revolutionary violence yet defend or excuses the violence of the state, as if this latter violence had greater legitimacy. In essence, he writes, this period was one where public’s perception of State violence as the only legitimate violence was successfully challenged. In its wake, new revolutionary states on both the Left and the Right were created. The rest of the century and most of the early twenty-first century involved a continuing rehash of this scenario.
One of the most interesting sections in Fire and Blood are the subsequent chapters titled “Imaginaries of Violence” and “The Critique of Weapons,” wherein Traverso examines technology along with the manifestations of the war in art and culture. These years, writes Traverso, were years where much of art and culture left its traditional search for beauty and became the tools of the political. In other words, culture became propaganda, both in favor of the State and in opposition to it. Philosophical musings were utilized to justify an inhumanity never seen. Intellectual became soldiers in the service of the war and its masters. Technology made mass murder possible on a scale beyond any previous conception. Despite the attempts by historians to denote fascism and its authoritarian brutality as a rejection of the rationality symbolized by technology, Traverso tells the reader it was that rationality’s predictable result.
Fire and Blood is more than a history of a catastrophe that began a hundred years ago. It is also a warning of a potential future. Traverso’s discussions of the use of terror and violence, the migrations of millions because of war and politics, the industrialized nature of mass murder via military weaponry and desensitized soldiers and airmen, the manipulation of the popular will via culture and media; all of this describes the world we live in today. From drone operators killing humans thousands of miles away to award winning films and television shows celebrating torture and racializing crime and murder; from the state of war instituted in 2001 after the Twin Towers and Pentagon went up in flames to the cynical, brutal and often incomprehensible civil war/war by proxy in Syria and the Middle East; the killing fields of Traverso’s exceptional history are a phenomenon that remains closer than one thinks. At the same time, the clues to preventing their repetition are inside this book, too. Even more valuable tools aimed at preventing a repetition of this apocalypse can be found in the writings and speeches of the revolutionary woman whose name began this review: Rosa Luxemburg. It was she who wrote in her pamphlet popularly known as The Junius Pamphlet: “Bourgeois society faces a dilemma; either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome – annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism…”
More articles by:RON JACOBS
Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest offering is a pamphlet titled Capitalism: Is the Problem. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.
Enzo Traverso
https://history.cornell.edu/enzo-traverso
Enzo Traverso
is a historian of modern and contemporary Europe; his research focuses on the intellectual history and the political ideas of the twentieth century. He was born in Italy, studied history at the University of Genoa and received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) of Paris in 1989. Before coming to Cornell in 2013, he taught political science for many years in France. He has been a visiting professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, the Universidad de Valencia, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Freie Universität of Berlin, the UNAM of Mexico City, the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and the Universidad Tres de Frebrero of Buenos Aires. His publications, all translated into different languages, include a dozen authored and edited collections. Several of his works investigate the impact of political and mass violence in the European culture. He is currently preparing a book on the representations of the Jewish intellectual in Germany, France and Italy at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as an edited book on the history of revolutions. Awarded in 2014 (Premio Pozzale, Empoli, Florence) and 2016 (Huésped de Honor Extraordinario, Universidad Nacional de La Plata), for his historical essays.
