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

in the crystallization of fascism and communism as major political
movements. In a brief but very instructive polemical dialogue, two
prominent historians, Ernst Nolte and Francois Furet, credit the historico-genetic
approach as being “more convincing,” “of greater interpretative
force,” and “more interesting than the structural
comparison of Hitlerian and Stalinian totalitarianism” 28 but they interpreted
the inter-relationship between fascism and communism
differently. Speculating on the fact that the Bolshevik revolution
(1917) preceded the advent to power of National Socialism in Germany
(1933), Nolte argued that “Fascism was born as a defensive
reaction against communism,” 29 a view encapsulated in the catchy
phrase “Without-Marxism-there-is-no-fascism.” 30 In his view, Marxism
was “an original movement, the product of very old roots,” while
fascism was “a reaction of a secondary order, artificial in large part,
based on postulates.” 31 On this basis, Nolte established a “causal
nexus” between the Gulag system in USSR and the Nazi Holocaust,
seeing the second as a defensive reaction to the first. 32 This
controversial thesis stirred a heated debate in Germany over the
uniqueness of the Holocaust and the place of Nazism in German
and European history, called the “historians’ quarrel” (Historikerstreit,
1986-1989). The controversy started with a polemical exchange
between Ernst Nolte and Jurgen Habermas, and was soon
joined by major German and foreign historians. 33 During the debate,
Nolte’s view on Nazism as a mere defensive reaction against
Bolshevism was denounced as an attempt to shift the blame for
27 A. James Gregor, “Fascism and Bolshevism,” in The Faces of Janus: Marxism
and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2000), 128-148.
28 See the exchange between François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and
Communism, with a preface by Tzvetan Todorov (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press. 2001), 33.
29 These theses were elaborated on in Ernst Nolte, Marxism, Fascism, Cold
War (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982).
30 Nolte, Three faces of fascism, 21.
31 Furet, Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 25
32 Furet, Nolte, Fascism and Communism, 27.
33 See Forever in the shadow of Hitler? Original documents of the Historikerstreit,
the controversy concerning the singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic
Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993). For a critical evaluation of the Historikerstreit,
see Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians
and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1989).
139 Constantin Iordachi