Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

European Social Democracy
and 20 th Century Totalitarianism
My contribution concentrates on Central European and particularly
German social democracy which – although intimately bound up
with features peculiar to Germany – illustrates many aspects of
European social democracy. It had to fight both forms of totalitarianism.
This also applied to European social democracy as a whole,
albeit in different ways in individual countries.
When speaking of totalitarianism in this context, I am well aware of
the problems associated with the term. There were very different
forms of totalitarianism, dictatorship, or totalitarian dictatorship in
the 20 th century, and it is difficult to distinguish between the terms.
There is perhaps an even wider variety of theories of totalitarianism
which seek to explain this phenomenon. However, a distinction must
in be drawn between the totalitarianism of the Hitler dictatorship,
with its unparalleled crimes, and the closely related Italian dictatorship
that preceded it, on the one hand, and communist totalitarianism,
deeply imbued with Russian Bolshevism, markedly different from
National Socialist totalitarianism in certain respects, but equally
responsible for crimes against humanity, on the other hand.
All in all, it is quite clear that social democracy or democratic socialism
is at the very heart of anti-totalitarian thinking and action, a
fact which in my view is of considerable relevance to Europe’s
cultural heritage.
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The fundamental principles of social democracy
Bernd Faulenbach
Many documents on German and European social democracy
and also on the Socialist International since the Second World War
show that these parties were opposed to totalitarian dictatorships
on principle.
Bernd Faulenbach is a German historian and professor at the Ruhr
University in Bochum. He intervened actively in the Historikerstreit in
Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. Faulenbach is chair of the
historical committee of the SPD. He was member of many advisory
panels of national and regional governments, parliaments and museums.