b Cataclysms . Advisory Board Steven E. Aschheim Hebrew University of Jerusalem Annette Becker Université Paris X–Nanterre Christopher Browning University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Natalie Zemon Davis University of Toronto Saul Friedländer University of California, Los Angeles Emilio Gentile Università di Roma “La Sapienza” Gert Hekma University of Amsterdam Stanley G. Payne University of Wisconsin–Madison Anson Rabinbach Princeton University David J. Sorkin University of Wisconsin–Madison John S. Tortorice University of Wisconsin–Madison Joan Wallach Scott Institute for Advanced Study Jay Winter Yale University b Cataclysms A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge Dan Diner Translated by William Templer with Joel Golb This book was published with the support of the . at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711 www.wisc.edu /wisconsinpress / 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Originally published in Germany as Das Jahrhundert verstehen, copyright © 1999 Dan Diner Translation copyright © 2008 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved 13542 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Diner, Dan, 1946– [Das Jahrhundert verstehen. English] Cataclysms : a history of the twentieth century from Europe’s edge / Dan Diner; translated by William Templer with Joel Golb. p. cm.—(George L. Mosse series in modern European cultural and intellectual history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-22350-7 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. History, Modern—20th century. I. Golb, Joel David. II. Title. III. Series. D421.D5613 2007 909.82—dc22 2007011770 To my father 1907–1990 who endured the century Contents Introduction 3 Contingencies and Periodizations / Reestablished Spaces and Revived Times / Peripheral Perspectives and Pivotal Events / Continuous Narrations and Intentional Omissions 1 Interpretations: Two Varieties of Universal Civil War 11 Warand Civil War / America and Europe / Balance and Hegemony / Constitution and Nationality / Freedom and Equality / Warfaring Virtues and Mechanized Death / Two Kinds of Anti-Bolshevism / Race and Class / Sea Power and Land Power / Demos and Ethnos / Self-Government and Self-Determination / Fascism and Anti-Fascism /West and East 2 Conversions: Nation and Revolution 59 War and Revolution / Society and Ethnicity / Expansion and Intervention / Red Nations and White Nations / Patriotic Wars / Borders and Minorities / Hungary and Rumania / Greeks in Odessa / Poles and Soviets / Stalin and Tukhachev- sky / Germany and Russia / Revision and the Status Quo / Hitler’s Wars / Poland’s Frontiers / Germany’s Unity vii viii • Contents 3Regimes: Democracy and Dictatorship 106 Weimar Lessons / Hermann Müller and Ramsay MacDonald / Tradition and Contingency / Stability and Crisis / England and France / Social Democracy and Radical Republicanism / Parliamentarianism and Authoritarianism / Cabals and Intrigues / Papen and Schleicher / Hitler and Hindenburg / Access to the Ruler / Emblematics of Contin- gency / Dictatorship and Dictatorship 4Cataclysms: Genocide and Memory 153 Eastern Questions / Ethnic Cleansing / Greeks and Turks / Armenian Catastrophes / Poland’s Demography / Germany’s Ideology / Eastern Expansion and Holocaust / Opposing Per- spectives / Memory and Narrative / Hierarchy of Remem- brance /Nazism and Stalinism / Labor and Death / Genocide and Class Extinction / Comparison and Perception 5 Dualisms: Decolonization and the Cold War 199 Translatio Imperii / Britain and America / Geography and Ideology / Greek Questions—Far Eastern Answers / Asian Crisis and Western Freedoms / Worlds Divided—Worlds Apart / Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek / Dulles and Mendès-France / Dien Bien Phu and European Integration / History Neutralized—History Revived Acknowledgments 251 Notes 253 Index 303 b Cataclysms Introduction Contingencies and Periodizations / Reestablished Spaces and Revived Times / Peripheral Perspectives and Pivotal Events / Continuous Narrations and Intentional Omissions b his narrative unavoidably contains omissions; no historical T presentation located beyond mere chronological recollec- tion can avoid the hazards of selection. For the historian, the abun- dance of material that reality offers necessitates a reduction of complexity. But these reductions are by no means employed arbi- trarily; rather, they are implemented according to claims of his- torical importance and meaning. And while the constructed nar- rations follow the guiding hand of historical judgment, they aim at a horizon of universal applicability. Periodization is one of the prominent tools available for histor- ical understanding. Considerations tied to an epoch’s movement from beginning to end catalyze further interpretation. Such tem- poral divisions apparently emerge from a distance, with hind- sight, the distinction between time experienced and time reflected 3 4 • having proverbial status. Nevertheless, there are exceptions— most manifestly those events earning the “real-time” qualification of being historical, which is to say events creating a strong impres- sion that contemporary intuition will later be ratified by reflective historical judgment. This impression was extremely widespread in 1989. Every- where people were gripped by a certainty that an entire epoch was vanishing before their eyes. And everywhere 1917 was invoked, at least implicitly, as the epoch’s beginning. In this manner, with the demise of Communism at the twentieth century’s end, the events of the October Revolution were demoted to an opening act. Thefollowing narration of the twentieth century’s history will thus adhere to a periodization framed by the temporal icons of 1917 and 1989 and the historical meaning those two dates encapsu- late. With the encapsulation rationalizing the omissions demanded by the historicization process, one of the narrative’s focal points will be those events understood to highlight the profound antago- nism between Communism and its opponents in a fundamental way. The antagonism unfolded as a political-social predicament that will be defined in these chapters as a universal civil war, a war articulated in terms of polarized semantic categories of “truth,” political belief, and ethical value. In the course of the twentieth century, this antagonism of values was played out in various, world-embracing conceptual modes: as freedom and equality, Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism, Capitalism and Communism, East and West. For this reason, the clash between Communism and its adversaries could well be understood as one of the two basic interpretive axes for under- standing the century. The axis is constructed vertically in that it cuts through nations, states, and societies. But its universal validity has been systematically confronted and called into question by va- lidity claims located on the second, horizontally laid-out axis: by conflicts and oppositions based on primordial emblems of belong- ing, which is to say ethnicity,nationality,religion, and culture. This Introduction • 5 became explosively evident when the universal civil war of ideol- ogy and values came to its sudden end in 1989. It turned out that the massive weight of principles and ideas, the overwhelming rhet- oric of opposing universalisms, had, as it were, merely temporarily neutralized a rhetoric grounded in highly particular legacies—a rhetoric of territory and ethnicity, distinctiveness and memory. History is an open process. Although the significance of this observation may have been sometimes inflated, its basic validity remains unchallenged. The past’s openness to future events is, to be sure, inscribed with paradox. Without any damage to facticity, the images of times gone by change in light of the living present. They become estranged, at times glaringly distinct. Hence the construction of history is marked by fundamental displacements in established narrations of continuity and causality. Contingen- cies pile up in place of such narrations. Temporal layers arrange themselves anew, endowing the epoch with an altered profile. The perception has thus emerged that the cold-war era has slipped outside the continuities of historical time, that its presence has waned, its epistemic value evanesced. And yet this presumed evanescence has not resulted in an empty temporality. Rather, the fabric of a time that has waned has been replaced by reanimated memories of a past long believed buried—laid ad acta. In short, following the caesura of 1989, the apparent return to the Europe of older historical spaces has been accompanied by a return of traditional historical times. Importantly, this sudden shift of temporal landscape did not just annul the ideological opposition between East and West; at the same time, the ideological, values-based interpretive axis for understanding the twentieth century also lost its interpretative monopoly. It was now obliged to share its hegemony with another interpretation—one that relied on ostensibly antiquated concepts such as ethnicity and geography. This new interpretive alignment would appear to reflect that of the nineteenth century while en- hancing the possibilities for its historical assessment: through a 6 • fusion of seemingly clashing historical axes, the character of each emerges. In this book they are reassessed in terms of a complex intermeshing of long-term and short-term tendencies. The perspective on twentieth-century