Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume III - Historiaonceib ...

328 Interpreters of totalitarianism1945 to 1948, he made intensive criticism of all attempts, whether open orhidden, to restrict the freedom of artistic creation and warned against theone-party state. After 1948, Kalandra numbered among the first victims ofthe political trials in Czechoslovakia. Imprisoned in 1949. In 1950 he wascondemned to death as ‘Trotskyite’ in a show trial and executed.WorkWith essays from the 1930s and 1940s (Prague, 1994), the collection entitledDer Intellektuelle und die Revolution provides a survey of Kalandra’s analysisof the intellectual currents of his time. During this period, Kalandra isespecially interested in the relationship between the individual and thesupra-personal collectivity. Kalandra always condemns the left intellectualswhen they let their individual insights be corrected by the mythic, collectivelogic, thereby succumbing to a fideism that is inaccessible to any kind ofrational criticism. Given the tension between the individual and the collectivity,Kalandra’s philosophical work always circles around two themes:around the problem of the rise, transformation and atrophy of ideologicalsystems on the one hand and that of an anthropology that does notallow itself to be restricted by Marxist materialism on the other. From1933 on, Kalandra criticises the National Socialist Weltanschauung, onehe exemplifies with reference to National Socialist political processes.Elections, for example, do not occur for their own sake, but are said toserve solely to mobilise adherents and disorganise opponents. NationalSocialist thought is said to construct magical connections: the temporalcoincidence of the execution of two German anti-fascists (Sally Epsteinand Hans Ziegler on 10 April 1935) and Hermann Göring’s weddingevince the barbaric understanding according to which Göring’s happinesswas to be assured through the spilling of innocent human blood.Kalandra makes a similar argument concerning the Stalinist show-trials,for which reality is said to be overpowered by symbols whose actual goalis not the maintenance and enforcement of order, but the creation of anatmosphere of fear.Kolakovski, LeszekPolish philosopher. Born 23 October 1927 in Radom. Studied philosophy atthe University of Lódz from 1945 to 1950; assistant in logic at the Universityof Lódz from 1947 to 1949. From 1950 to 1959, assistant of AdamSchaff at the University of Warsaw. Attained his doctoral degree in 1953,with a work on Spinoza. In 1956, leader of the intellectual oppositionduring the ‘Polish October’. Research trips in 1957 to Amsterdam andParis; from 1958 to 1968, professor of the history of philosophy at theUniversity of Warsaw. In 1966, exclusion from the Communist Party – to whichhe had belonged since 1945 – on grounds of an accusation of revisionism. Loss