Review Article

Sharif Gemie and Susanna Schrafstetter

Reassessing Anti-fascism

Lucienne Domergue, ed., L’exil républicain à Toulouse, 1936–39, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1999; 307 pp.; 2858164932, FFR 198 Hans Mommsen, Alternative zu Hitler, Munich, Beck, 2000; 423 pp.; 3406459137, DM 34 Michel Papy, ed., Les Espagnols et la guerre civile, Biarritz, Atlantica, 1999; 441 pp.; 2843941318, FFR 149. Serge Wolikow and Annie Bleton-Ruget, eds, Antifascisme et nation; les gauches européennes au temps du Front populaire, Dijon, Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 1998; 272 pp.; 2905965266, FFR 120.

Our problem can be neatly illustrated by a single anecdote. Consuelo Granda, one of the two heroes of Neil MacMaster’s oral history, Spanish Fighters, discusses her village in the Asturias during the summer of 1936. With her mother, she would visit the homes of the rich, collecting for the Republican War Committee. Invariably, they would meet with refusals, coupled with political denials: ‘We are not fascists’. Consuelo, however, refuses their denials: ‘They were all fascists, the whole lot.’1 One response to such exchanges is to note the uncertain boundaries of the term ‘fascist’. As early as March 1944, George Orwell was noting how the term was being manipu- lated and abused to the point where it became meaningless.2 More recently, François Furet has developed a similar argument, suggest- ing that the international communist movement successfully sub- ordinated European anti-fascism to its own ends.3 In each of the three nations we are considering — France, Germany and Spain — the forces of history acted to mould national historiographies that described and represented anti-fascist move- ments. From 1945 until about 1970, there was a national consensus in France around the Gaullist concept of the ‘Résistance-Nation’,

European History Quarterly Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 32(3), 413–419. [0265-6914(200207)32:3;413–419;026217] 414 European History Quarterly Vol. 32 No. 3 whereby the French nation was constituted through its united Resistance activities. In Germany there was a desperate search for a ‘usable’ past, leading to the secular canonization of Resistance heroes — the 20 July conspirators and the White Rose in the west, the Communist resistance in the east. The Spanish case is somewhat different. The post-1975 democratization was carried through in the name of national unity and reconciliation. Following the Franco-ist denigration of Republican forces as ‘anti-Spain’ there was a historio- graphical silence. Significantly, the most important works to circu- late on the Civil War were those written by foreigners: Brenan, Thomas and Carr. It has only been in the last decade that Spanish historians have begun to reconsider their history. These four books present some further considerations on the nature of anti-fascism. Significantly, all four are collections of essays: a suggestion that we are examining a historical field in which lines of argument are still unclear. Alternative zu Hitler is a collection of essays focused on the conservative resistance in Nazi Germany. It contains fourteen essays by Hans Mommsen, one of Germany’s leading experts on Nazi and Weimar Germany, written over the last thirty years. In contrast to the other books discussed here, Alternative zu Hitler follows the long historiographical tradition of research on resistance of the social élite. However, this is clearly not another hagiography of the heroes of 20 July 1944 bomb plot. Mommsen critically scrutinizes their political ideas, and reveals how they over- lapped with Nazi ideology. He argues that, while these resisters shared similar social backgrounds, they represented a variety of political ideas. The findings are not new but stand in contrast to some more recent praise for the 20 July conspirators.4 Mommsen’s analysis is grouped around four main areas. Follow- ing a brief introduction on the right to resist, two chapters consider the social background of the resisters and their views of German society. Mommsen goes on to analyse in detail the resisters’ visions for the future of Germany and Europe. A third cluster focuses on the role of leaders of working-class resistance within the 20 July con- spiracy. The fourth section is particularly important as it is dedicated to those aspects of the conservative resistance that until recently have been treated almost as a taboo: anti-Semitism amongst the resisters and the involvement of the military resisters in war crimes. Interestingly, in this context, Mommsen is able to show that the military resistance has to be seen as a separate entity with its own agenda, including the establishment of a military dictatorship as its immediate aim and saving the Wehrmacht from destruction as a key motive. He draws attention to tensions between the younger generals and Goerderler, refuting previous notions of harmony and Gemie and Schrafstetter, Reassessing Anti-fascism 415 unity. On the involvement of the military in war crimes Mommsen reaches a clear verdict: a number of those participating in the 20 July plot had previously participated in the war of extermination, had approved of it, and, in some cases, had actively promoted it. Papy’s book, Les Espagnols et la guerre civile, presents a wide- ranging collection of papers, published in French and Spanish. The papers are drawn from an international conference held at Pau, attended by French and Spanish historians. While the historiography of the Civil War is still dominated by the ‘politics first’ approach, these papers suggest some revision to this paradigm, moving into areas such as the social history of politics, the politics of identity and cultural politics. The work is divided into four sections: the first is innovative in taking seriously the concept of ‘Franco-ism’ as a distinct political culture. The second considers the experience of some Spanish regions during the conflict: the Basque country, Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia. Diplomatic aspects of the conflict are considered in the third section. This includes a stubbornly argued paper by Carlos Serrano, which makes the simple — but extremely important — point that the undoubted ability of the various communist parties to manipulate the anti-fascist cause should not be the conclusion of our analyses, but the starting point. Serrano stresses the ability of the anti-fascist cause to mobilize and to unite disparate strands, in ways that went beyond the communist agenda. Other essays in this work demonstrate his point. The last section analyses the experiences of the Republican exiles, with a particularly interesting essay by Jean Ortiz on the Spanish guerrilla bands in the southern French region of Béarn who operated on both sides of the Pyrenees. Based on papers given at a conference held in 1996, Wolikow and Bleton-Ruget’s collection Antifascisme et nation discusses whether the Popular Front government of 1936 marked a watershed in politi- cal history: this argument is presented in a forceful summary by Serge Wolikow in the collection’s introduction. The work is divided into three sections: international solidarities; the labour movement; and national identity. Once again, the papers are wide-ranging and sketch out the contours of an international wave of movements and reactions. Many return to the theme of the complex interaction (rather than simple opposition) of national and class identities during this period. One of the most impressive essays is by Rémi Skoutelsky, who considers the twin forces of nationalism and inter- nationalism among the volunteers of the International Brigades. While the communist leaders of this organization tended to propose a ‘Garibaldian’ patriotism, many of the volunteers considered that they were participating in an internationalist revolutionary move- 416 European History Quarterly Vol. 32 No. 3 ment. Their anti-fascism was aimed against both an external enemy (Germany or Italy), and a movement of internal subversion. Unlike the other works considered here, Lucienne Domergue’s L’exil républicain à Toulouse, 1936–39 is primarily a local study. However, it should be remembered that during the 1940s and 1950s Toulouse acquired an unofficial status as the headquarters of many Spanish exile groups. The work is divided into five parts: the refugees’ arrival; their political organizations; nationalisms in exile; culture in exile; and the situation in 1999. The central theme to which many of these papers return is the extraordinary ability of these marginalized and oppressed refugee communities to find the resources, firstly to survive as recognizable groups, and secondly, to lead some sort of fightback against Franco-ism and fascism. Their ability to do this is partly explained by the categories given above: the strands of politics, nationality and culture, which held these groups together in complex webs of loyalties and identities. The short essay by P. Laborie and J.-P. Amalric is a particularly impressive con- sideration of this theme, discussing the making, breaking and revis- ing of memory under these difficult conditions.

Read together, these books clearly raise important questions about the contemporary history of anti-fascism. The material they survey suggests that German resistance historiography is still largely focused on ‘icons of resistance’, while the French and Spanish histo- riography has, until recently, been dominated by histories of political movements and organization.5 There remain many crucial interpre- tative questions. First, there is the central issue of the boundaries of anti-fascism, and the relationship between the anti-fascism of the 1930s and the resistance of the 1940s. How are these to be con- ceptualized? Mommsen’s position is that what constituted resistance was ultimately decided by the Gestapo. However, for him, this means that it is appropriate to separate high treason from other forms of protest or opposition and to treat these activities as a separate category. Mommsen clearly attaches special importance to this specific form of resistance as ‘it was the only historically available alternative to Hitler’ (hence the title: alternative not alternatives). This is in contrast to more fluid, elastic definitions of resistance used, for example, by Detlev Peukert to analyse ‘grass-roots’ resistance within Germany. Mommsen highlights the notion of a ‘resistance without people’ underlining the lack of support of the resisters from the middle classes. However, it needs to be pointed out that top civil servants and officers in the higher ranks had more of an opportunity to resist. There is also a generational issue. The lower ranks were arguably more ‘Nazified’ having come of age in the 1930s. Yet we Gemie and Schrafstetter, Reassessing Anti-fascism 417 know very little about the potential of resistance among the middle ranks of the military, as almost no research has been done on this issue.6 Mommsen emphasizes that in the nationalist-conservative élite the boundaries between high treason and loyalty to the Nazis were particularly blurred: a point which is demonstrated by the ‘grey zone’ of partial ideological agreement and passive support for the conspirators by all those who ‘turned a blind eye’ towards suspicious activities. The other works, however, point to the importance of ‘soft’, cul- tural forms, of shared meanings and identities as forming a type of bedrock from which resistance could grow. In France and Spain, anti-fascism was a point of concentration, with which members of diverse political and cultural movements could identify. This cause provoked movements as diverse as the anarchist-dominated Council of Aragon (analysed by Julián Casanova in Papy’s work), the post- 1939 Spanish guerrilla movements, the International Brigades, the Spanish women’s Republican groups, which survived exile (see Vallès’ essay in Papy), the various international writers’ unions (evaluated by Racine in Wolikow’s collection) and a wave of inter- national aid organizations for refugees (see Alted, in Domergue’s volume). Surveying these four books, it is striking to see the variety of politi- cal guises through which anti-fascism was expressed. Of course, sceptics such as Orwell and Furet can correctly point to the potential for the political manipulation of the term, and Domergue’s collection — for example — details the bitter rivalries between Communist-led groupings and other factions: a rivalry which led to political violence between anti-fascists in 1944–45. But one’s final impression is of an effective unity for the common cause, strengthened by the shared experiences of exile, occupation and resistance. Clearly, this issue of the construction of an effective political unity merits further detailed study, leading in turn to the question of which factors motivated people to resist. On the one hand, resistance against Nazism drew representatives of the working-class leadership and conservative élites closer together. But, on the other, the context in which they were placed did not encourage moderate, pragmatic behaviour. In an important passage, Mommsen argues:

It is not easy to admit that National Socialism, or at least parts of what it stood for, penetrated so deeply into the thinking and acting of the German masses that only out of Utopian and/or deeply religious thinking could one mobilize the power to resist, while pragmatic politicians like Konrad Adenauer and Theodor Heus fell into resignation or could not see a chance for action. (xx)

Mommsen’s depiction of the ‘typical’ resister is of a zealot, an 418 European History Quarterly Vol. 32 No. 3 exceptional person who had the strength to refuse the logic of the Nazi hegemony. This suggests that such people were also likely to act amorally in their single-minded quest to oppose the power of the Third Reich. However, at this point, Mommsen’s radical refusal of hagiography can lead to a deeper unwillingness to recognize the ethical force of resistance in history. While all resistance groups were faced with extremely tough moral dilemmas, most succeeded in maintaining a sense of right and wrong against the inverted logic of the Nazi dictators. The sense that right was on their side was an important factor for movements such as the International Brigades, the Popular Front and the communities of Spanish exiles. The latter example is particularly impressive: many of these refugees only survived through the practices of mutual aid and solidarity which developed among them.7 As previously noted, all these works are collections of essays, not coherent theses. One is left with an impression of the heterogeneity of anti-fascism, reflecting the now obvious heterogeneity of fascism. Perhaps Orwell and Furet are right to be sceptical about the manner in which the terms have been abused. However, the lasting contribu- tion made by these works is to remind us of other ways in which the term was instrumentalized: a stark, blunt statement of how politics, society and government should not be organized; an evocation of a utopian sense of solidarity, of mutual aid and of idealism. This factor was certainly important in the formation of post-war Europe.

Notes

1. Neil MacMaster, Spanish Fighters; an Oral History of Civil War and Exile (Basingstoke 1990), 81. 2. See Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol III (Harmondsworth 1971), 135–9. 3. Le passé d’une illusion (Paris 1995). 4. See, for example, Joachim Fest, Staatsstreich: der lange Weg zum 20. Juli (Berlin 1994). 5. See for example, Andreas Schott, Adam von Trott zu Solz: Jurist im Widerstand (Paderborn 2001); the substantially revised edition of Thomas Vogel (ed.), Aufstand des Gewissens (Hamburg 2000); and the uncritical praise of the White Rose, Barbara Schüler, Im Geiste der Gemordeten die ‘Weisse Rose’ und ihre Wirkung in der Nachkriegszeit (Paderborn 2000). For France, see the special edition of Mouvement social Vol. 180 (1997), edited by Antoine Prost, entitled ‘Pour une histoire sociale de la Résistance’. Recent Spanish historiography is probably best represented by the work edited by Santos Juliá, Víctimas de la guerra civil (Madrid 1999) which includes a lucid interpretative essay by Juliá. 6. See Wolfram Wette, ‘Reichswehr, Wehrmacht, Antisemitismus und mili- Gemie and Schrafstetter, Reassessing Anti-fascism 419 tärischer Widerstand (1933–39)’, in: Gerd Ueberschär (ed.) NS-Verbrechen und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler (Darmstadt 2000), 19. 7. On the Spanish refugees, see the impressive study by Geneviève Dreyfus- Armand, L’Exile des Républicains espagnols en France (Paris 1999).

Sharif Gemie is Reader in History at the University of Glamorgan, and is currently writing a history of modern Brittany.

Susanna Schrafstetter is a lecturer in History at the University of Glamorgan, currently researching the topic of compensation for victims of Nazi persecution.

They jointly teach modules on twentieth- century European History.