From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Tue Apr 25 2006 - 17:37:55 EDT
Enzo Traverso. The Origins of Nazi Violence.
Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York and London:
New Press, 2003. vi + 200 pp. Notes,
bibliography, index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN
1-565-84788-1.
Reviewed by: Shelley Baranowski, Department of History, University of Akron.
Published by: H-German (September, 2004)
Nazism as the Laboratory of the West
Enzo Traverso's provocative essay, The Origins of
Nazi Violence, locates the Holocaust in the
material conditions and mental frameworks of the
West that made the Jewish genocide possible (p.
6). Principally taking issue with Ernst Nolte,
Francois Furet, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, who,
albeit by different means, place Nazi crimes
outside Western history, Traverso argues that
Nazism's uniqueness lay in its lethal synthesis
of the West's various forms of violence (p. 150),
or more specifically, its regimes of discipline
and punishment; its imperialism; industrialized
death and total war; its scientifically grounded
racism; and finally its anti-Semitism and counter
revolution. Traverso draws from the insights of
Marxism generally and the Frankfurt School
specifically, as well as Edward Said, Michel
Foucault, and Hannah Arendt to place the
Judeocide in a wider context than that of the
history of anti-Semitism (p. 5). The Shoah, he
suggests, was a logical outcome of Western
pathologies, which the Third Reich combined and
actualized.
Traverso opens by zeroing in on the products of
the French and Industrial Revolutions, the
guillotine, the prison, and the factory,
including the abattoir. The guillotine serialized
killing, transformed the executioner into a
bureaucratic employee relieved of ethical
responsibility, and de-sanctified capital
punishment. While embodying the Enlightenment's
hope of redemption, the prison, organized
according to military standards, subjected
prisoners to rigid discipline and constant
surveillance, and transformed them into captive
labor. Although factories, unlike prisons,
employed free workers, they too adopted
disciplinary and hierarchical practices,
serializing and segmenting production, while
alienating and dehumanizing workers. The
abattoir, the methodical, mass-produced death
factory for animals, became a cultural reference
point for the systematic destruction of human
beings. Taken together, key institutions of the
dual revolutions introduced modes of violence
that featured moral indifference, bureaucratic
efficiency, and the militarized mobilization of
labor in which work grew increasingly meaningless
to the worker. Industrialization encouraged the
spread of European settlers throughout the globe
and especially the conquest of Africa, wherein
the mission to civilize through progress
presupposed its other, the primitive,
dark-skinned savage whose bleak future Darwinism
and eugenics foreordained. The extinction of
inferior races, as much the result of
administrative rationality as spontaneity,
received its justification in the view that the
savages would soon depart the earth as a matter
of course, unable to adapt to a superior
civilization and undeserving of normative ethical
considerations. The belief that expansion would
alleviate overpopulation, a crucial element in
empire building, was not unique to Nazism.
Moreover, imperialism introduced another
ingredient to the Western exercise of power,
conquest, ethnic cleansing, and extermination as
the route to regeneration.
Finally, the mass conscripted armies of
proletarianized soldiers, interventionist
economies, and anonymous death of World War I
derived from industrial and disciplinary
techniques already in place and from imperialist
practices: total war, that is, the elimination of
the distinction between combatant and civilian,
the racialized demonization of the enemy,
concentration camps, and genocide. Yet the
consequences of the war, particularly the
Bolshevik Revolution, crystallized into the
moment when Nazism came to the fore. In addition
to creating a climate that spawned a recognizably
fascist philosophy of death in which warfare and
extermination became ends in themselves, the
war's aftermath witnessed a populist
counter-revolution, most powerfully expressed in
Nazism, which co-mingled anti-Bolshevism,
anti-Semitism, radical nationalism, and imperial
expansion. Yet rather than promote a teleological
version of European modernity with Auschwitz as
its conclusion, Traverso is at pains to state
that, although Nazi violence emerged from certain
common bases of Western culture, Auschwitz does
not represent the fundamental essence of the West
(p. 150).
Using Arendt's distinction between origins as
opposed to causes, as well as Foucault's
geneology, the author maintains that while
Auschwitz illuminates its own past, the past
cannot be linked to Auschwitz as straightforward
cause and effect. Thus, Traverso stresses the
uniqueness of Nazism even as he analyzes its
Western roots. The death camps of the Third Reich
embraced the worst aspects of factories,
abattoirs, and prisons, combining purposeless and
humiliating work, assembly-line murder, and the
evaporation of morality, the glue of human
connection. Nazi Lebensraum took inspiration from
British imperialism and the brutality of white
settlers against Native Americans. Against Nolte,
Traverso forcefully argues that imperialism was
the real model for Nazi violence, not Bolshevism.
But, he continues, the fusion of anti-Bolshevism
and anti-Semitism that followed World War I
occurred with special vigor in Germany, which, to
a degree not previously seen, biologized both.
Despite the prevalence of anti-Jewish hatred in
the West, only the Nazis joined the crusading
spirit of Christian anti-Judaism with a
biologically extreme anti-Semitism to produce
mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Unlike
previous colonial racism, the Nazi regime did not
see the Jew as too primitive to avoid extinction,
but rather as the enemy of civilization that it
had to actively eradicate with every available
technological, bureaucratic, and military means.
In fact, concludes Traverso, the Nazi regime
sought not merely to conquer territories but to
Germanize them by remodeling the human race.
Thus, if Germany did not deviate from a
putatively liberal democratic West, a la
Goldhagen and other adherents of the German
Sonderweg, it became the laboratory of the West,
having synthesized nationalism, racism,
anti-Semitism, imperialism, anti-Bolshevism,
antihumanism, and counter-Enlightenment feeling,
all of which existed elsewhere in Europe but
which either remained muted or never entered into
toxic combination (p. 148).
One must admire Traverso's ambitious synthesis of
theory and recent scholarship, which results in a
coherent and effective effort to place Nazism in
its European context without sacrificing its
distinctiveness. Rather than understand Nazism as
simply an expression of modern bureaucratic and
scientific rationality, he is sufficiently
sensitive to its political and social context as
to appreciate its counter-revolutionary core. By
placing the Final Solution at the center of Nazi
imperialism, furthermore, Traverso's recognition
of the bond between anti-Semitism and
anti-Bolshevism highlights the moment at which a
centuries-old hatred became genocidal without
reducing Nazism to the history of anti-Semitism.
Traverso's effective discussion, finally, of the
link between antisocialism and racism in the
bourgeois dread of the dangerous classes, which
emerged by the late-nineteenth century, begins to
explain how the racism so mercilessly applied to
native populations overseas and urban
insurgencies in Europe, such as the Paris
Commune, could be reconfigured to assault the
Jews later.
Nevertheless, Traverso is less successful in
explaining why fascism at its most virulently
racist emerged in Germany rather than elsewhere.
Traverso indicates that only in Germany did
anti-Semitism become the central component of
fascism, yet he does not develop his brief
reference to the visibility of the revolutionary
Jew after 1918. Eugenics, he notes, fell on
especially fertile soil in Germany, yet his
insistence that eugenics was a Western
preoccupation as well begs some elaboration as to
how Germany came to occupy a class by itself. If
class racism helps to explain the historical
pedigree of Jewish Bolshevism, why then did the
Third Reich seek to redeem workers but destroy
the Jews? Why did the Nazi regime pursue
Lebensraum in the east first, rather than the
recovery and expansion of its overseas empire
when the German imperial imagination, which
incorporated both Lebensraum and Weltpolitik, set
Germany apart from other European imperialist
powers? Why, finally, did National Socialism
synthesize the worst aspects of Western
civilizations while other nations did not?
Admittedly, the author's main objective is to
stress Nazism's Western lineage against some
tenacious historical conceptions. Yet as
brilliantly as the author succeeds in
accomplishing that goal, and as obvious as the
answers to my questions could well be, Traverso
leaves us wishing for a reconstruction of German
specificity without the baggage of past
teleologies.
Library of Congress Call Number: DD256.5 .T6813 2003
Subjects:
* National socialism.
* Political violence--Germany--History--20th century.
* Political violence--Europe--History--20th century.
* National socialism--Europe.
* Terrorism--Germany--History--20th century.
* Ideology--Germany--History--20th century.
* Racism--Germany--History--20th century.
* Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Causes.
Citation: Shelley Baranowski. "Review of Enzo
Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence,"
H-German, H-Net Reviews, September, 2004. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=119211096828815.
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