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Enzo Traverso Understanding the Nazi Genocide Marxism after Auschwitz 11 RE O Understanding the Nazi Genocide Marxism after Auschwitz Enzo Traverso Translated by Peter Drucker Pluto P Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA with The International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) To the memory of Ernest Mandel (1923–1995), revolutionary intellectual and ‘non-Jewish Jew’, whose life and work taught me what internationalism is. First published 1999 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA English translation copyright © Enzo Traverso and IIRE 1999 The right of Enzo Traverso to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 1358 2 hbk IIRE Notebook for Study and Research No. 29–30 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Traverso, Enzo. Understanding the Nazi genocide : Marxism after Auschwitz /Enzo Traverso : translated by Peter Drucker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7453-1358-2 (hbk.) 1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Historiography. 2. Auschwitz (Concentration camp) 3. Genocide. 4. Communism and Judaism. I. Title. D804.348.T73 1999 940.53'18'072—dc21 99–18539 CIP Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN Typeset from disk by Gawcott Typesetting Services Printed in the EC by T.J. International, Padstow Contents IIRE Notebooks for Study and Research vi Foreword vii Introduction 1 1. Auschwitz, Marx and the twentieth century 7 2. The blindness of the intellectuals: historicising Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew 26 3. On the edge of understanding: from the Frankfurt School to Ernest Mandel 42 4. The uniqueness of Auschwitz: hypotheses, problems and wrong turns in historical research 63 5. The debt: the Warsaw ghetto uprising 79 6. The Shoah, historians and the public use of history: on the Goldhagen affair 90 Conclusion 105 Notes 109 Bibliography 136 Index 147 IIRE Notebooks for Study and Research Thousands, even millions of social activists, in trade unions, NGOs, ecological movements, students’ and women’s organ- isations, are wrestling with questions about a changing, globalising world. What ended and what began in history when the Berlin Wall fell? What realistic models can we put forward now in opposition to the reigning neo-liberalism? How can we resist neo-liberalism’s lurking counterparts: nationalism, racism, fundamentalism, communalism? The International Institute for Research and Education shares these grassroots activists’ values: their conviction that societies can and must be changed, democratically, from below, by those who suffer from injustice, on the basis of wide- ranging international solidarity. We exist to help progressives pose the questions and find the answers that they need. Since 1982 we have welcomed hundreds of participants from over 40 countries to our courses and seminars. Our Ernest Mandel Study Centre, opened in 1995, hosts lectures and conferences on economic and social issues of the post- Cold War world. We have built a network of Fellows who help with these tasks. Our Amsterdam headquarters and library are a resource for researchers and for gatherings of socially minded non-profit groups. Since 1986 the results of our work – on economic globali- sation, twentieth-century history, ecology, feminism, ethnicity, racism, radical movement strategy and other topics – have been made available to a larger public through our monograph series, the Notebooks for Study and Research. The Notebooks are now published in English as books by Pluto Press. Past Notebooks have also been published in other languages, including Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. Back issues of the 20 pre-Pluto Press Notebooks are still available directly from the IIRE. For information about our publications and other activities, please write to us: IIRE, Postbus 53290, 1007 RG Amsterdam, Netherlands; email: [email protected]. Donations to support our work are tax-deductible in several European countries as well as the US. vi Foreword With this book on Marxism and the Nazi genocide, the IIRE Notebooks for Study and Research enter new territory. Earlier Notebooks have examined central twentieth-century events such as the Russian revolution and Spanish civil war, but none has focused on the slaughter of millions of European Jews in 1941–45. Enzo Traverso’s work contends that no Marxism that fails to make sense of this defining moment of modern times can be much of a guide to the twentieth century now drawing to an end, or, presumably, to the twenty-first century that is about to begin. Traverso’s argument is that a Marxism capable of compre- hending the Shoah must be profoundly different in some ways from Marxism as it was commonly understood a century ago in the Second International. He questions the idea of socialism as an inheritor and continuation of capitalist progress. To this Second International Marxism he counterposes the Marxism of Walter Benjamin, who extrapolated from the history of ‘progress’ to foresee a nightmare from which only revolution could awaken us. Benjamin was among the few to appreciate late capitalism’s pent-up capacity for explosions of mass rage, exacerbated by bureaucratic organisation and advanced tech- nology. The Nazi genocide vindicated his prophecy. Traverso evokes the Warsaw ghetto uprising as an image for our times of what should impel us to rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative. The book’s argument is founded on a solid knowledge of and engagement with other recent writings on the Shoah, including those in English. It shows how it was rooted in fascism, and fascism in capitalism, without placing any simplistic equal signs. Traverso is able to show how racism and anti-Semitism are creatures of the present as well as of the past. He rejects a portrayal of anti-Semitism as an illness of the vii viii UNDERSTANDING THE NAZI GENOCIDE diaspora for which Israel is the cure, however. He argues that anti-Semitism can only disappear in a world where difference is tolerated and valued, a world attainable only by tearing out the deep social roots of intolerance. After leaving his native Italy and working for several years as editor of the IIRE Notebooks’ sister publications in French, Traverso has become the best-known writer on ‘Holocaust studies’ from the radical Left in the French-speaking world. Two of his earlier books have been published in English: The Marxists and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate (1843–1943) (Humanities Press, 1994), and The Jews and Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German’ Symbiosis to the Memory of Auschwitz (University of Nebraska Press, 1995). He has been a Lecturer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and is currently a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Amiens. For the opportunity to publish this book, we gratefully acknowledge the original French and German sources in which its different parts were first published. ‘Auschwitz, Marx and the twentieth century’ was written for the anthology Ausblicke auf das vergangene Jahrhundert, eds. Wladislaw Hedeler and Mario Kessler (Hamburg: VSA, 1996). ‘The blindness of the intellectuals’ was first presented to a collo- quium at New York University in April 1998 on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Anti-Semite and Jew and was published in English in October magazine (New York, no. 87, winter 1998); we thank October for permission to reprint Stuart Liebman’s English translation. ‘On the edge of under- standing’ was first published as an Afterword to the second French edition of Les marxistes et la question juive: Histoire d’un débat (1843–1943) (Paris: Kimé, 1997). ‘The uniqueness of Auschwitz’ was presented to the May 1997 conference ‘L’Homme, la langue, les camps’ at the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne, and first published in Pour une critique de la barbarie moderne (Lausanne: Editions Page deux, 1997). ‘The debt’ was first published in La Revue (Paris, April–June 1993). ‘The Shoah, the historians and the public use of history’ was first published in L’Homme et la Société (Paris, July–September 1997). Introduction One of the most notable enemies of the French revolution, Joseph de Maistre, criticised its declarations and constitutions which were supposedly based on the ‘rights of man’. ‘I have seen Frenchmen, Italians and Russians in my life,’ he wrote; ‘thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that it is possible to be Persian; but as for “man”, I must say that I’ve never met him in my life.’1 De Maistre’s contemporary Edmund Burke made the obvious point of the remark explicit, when he opposed the elusive ‘rights of man and citizen’ in the name of the historical rights of Englishmen, i.e. the hereditary privileges of the British aristocracy.2 Burke’s and De Maistre’s vision is not one we share. Their critique none the less highlights a real limita- tion of Enlightenment culture: its inability to achieve a synthesis between a universal conception of humanity and a recognition of human diversity. The case of the Jews is in this respect very much emblem- atic. The French revolution emancipated them, turning them into ‘men like everyone else’. But the price exacted from them for their equality was the denial of their particular identity. Once they became citizens, Jews were no longer supposed to be Jewish. Since the universal human being existed juridically only within the nation-state, Jews were called on to transform themselves into French men and women, Italians, Germans, and so on. The heirs of the Enlightenment, whether liberal, socialist or Marxist, did not dare to challenge this homogenising paradigm.

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