Toward a Marxist Theory of Fascism and National Socialism

by Anson G. Rabinbach Helpless Anti-Fascism The period after World War II in West Germany was marked by historical amnesia about the era that preceded it. Perhaps no phrase was more indicative of the atmosphere surrounding the entire complex of social and political problems arising out of the Nazi experience than the common expression to terms with the (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit). This commonplace masked a widespread refusal to take seriously its implications. In the early 1960s Adorno posed the question, what does coming to terms with the past really mean? and pointed to the historical persistence of the causes of the past in the as evidence that the term served only to remove and dismiss history from consciousness.1V His question exploded the cliche and revealed the ideological in everyday usage. For Adorno the past could only be overcome when its continuity with the praxis of the present no longer prevailed. Now a decade old, the emergence of a Marxist discussion of fascism and National Socialism in West Germany has to be understood in this context. By the early 1960s the period of capitalist restoration and quasi-authoritarian rule under Adenauer and Erhard was still not over, nor had there been a real confrontation with the roots of National Socialism, either in West German universities or in the sphere of public opinion.2 The first task, then, in the development of a Marxist theory of fascism and National Socialism, was to critique the reception of the phenomenon. This critique had its historical origins in the mid-1960s with the emergence of the West German New Left, which pointed to the implicit connection between the authoritarian character of postwar German society and the absence of a significant response to Nazism. The first articulate challenge to prevailing notions of Nazism and anti-Nazism was formulated by a group of intellectuals writing for the West Berlin theoretical journal Das Argument, which devoted a number of its earliest issues to fascism theory.3 In his 1967

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• Political Gangsters and Nazism

  Open Access•Rudy Koshar•Comparative Studies in Society…•1986

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• History in an Off Key

  Open Access•Peter Hayes•The Business History Review•1987

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• Fascism and ideology

  Christopher Dandeker•Ethnic and Racial Studies•1985

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• Coming to Terms with the Future

  Jennifer Fay•New German Critique•2023

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