Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism

POPUL AR OPINION IN TOTALITARIAN REGIMES

This page intentionally left blank

Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism Edited by

PAU L C OR N ER

1

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  The Several Contributors 2009 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Popular opinion in totalitarian regimes / edited by Paul Corner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–956652–5 (hardback) 1. Totalitarianism—History—20th century. 2. Public opinion—Europe—History—20th century. 3. Fascism—Italy—History. 4. Communism—Europe, Eastern—History. 5. Communism—Soviet Union—History. 6. National socialism—History. 7. Europe—Politics and government—20th century. I. Corner, Paul. JC480.P68 2009 303.3
809409041—dc22 2009022965 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–956652–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements This book is the outcome of a small workshop held at the Charterhouse of Pontignano (University of Siena) in June 2006. There were just twelve participants, very literally from all round the world. We spent two and a half days in the beautiful surroundings of the monastery enjoying wide-ranging and largely unstructured discussion. In the end we agreed that the whole event had been very productive and merited a joint volume. My first thanks must go, therefore, to Andrea Machetti and his staff at the Certosa for feeding us, making us comfortable while we talked, and helping us survive the remarkably unseasonable cold weather. The workshop was very much a collaborative venture and I have a debt of gratitude to a large number of people. My thanks are obviously due to all who made the often very great effort to take part. In particular I am grateful to Richard Bosworth, Ian Kershaw, and Jochen Hellbeck for suggesting other names to me at the outset. For the same reason I also have to thank some of those who in the end could not make it, especially Robert Gellately and Alf L¨udtke. For a wide variety of motives not all the participants have contributed chapters: nonetheless I wish to thank Marco Palla, Istv`an R´ev, Richard Bosworth and Jan Culik for their contributions to our discussions. And not all the contributors present here were present in Pontignano. Subsequently Otto Dov Kulka generously agreed to share the results of his recent research on popular opinion in Nazi Germany and Marcin Kula has provided a chapter on the state of research in Poland. Among others, Temma Kaplan helped me more than she probably realizes, and I benefited greatly from the advice of Marta Petrusewicz, who not only illuminated me on ‘People’s Poland’ but was of invaluable assistance in identifying possible contributors from what we used to call Eastern Europe. The workshop was financed through research grants from the Italian Ministry of the University (PRIN 2005) and from the University of Siena (PAR 2005). Neither grant would have been obtained without the help of the university Research Office and my thanks go to Roberta Pellegrini and Roberto Ricci for their guidance in making applications. This is also an opportunity to thank the Administrative Director of my department in Siena, who looked after the financial side of the operation. Without Marina Borgogni’s extraordinary competence we would not have gone very far.

vi

Acknowledgements

Finally I should like to thank Christopher Wheeler and Matthew Cotton at Oxford University Press for their constant courtesy and attention—and the three anonymous readers of the original manuscript for their many useful comments and criticisms. PC

Siena December 2008

Contents Notes on the Contributors Abbreviations 1. Introduction Paul Corner

ix x 1

PA RT 1 . T WO OV E RV I EW S 2. Popular Opinion in Russia Under Pre-war Stalinism Sheila Fitzpatrick 3. Consensus, Coercion and Popular Opinion in the Third Reich: Some Reflections Ian Kershaw

17

33

PA RT 2 . T H E F I R S T D I C TATO R S H I P S 4. Liberation from Autonomy: Mapping Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time Jochen Hellbeck 5. Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism Jan Plamper 6. Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany as a Factor in the Policy of the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’: The Nuremberg Laws and the Reichskristallnacht Otto Dov Kulka 7. Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions: The View from the W¨urttemberg Countryside Jill Stephenson 8. Fascist Italy in the 1930s: Popular Opinion in the Provinces Paul Corner

49 64

81

107 122

PA RT 3 . D I C TATO R S H I P A F T E R 1 9 4 5 9. Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice Marcin Kula

149

viii

Contents

10. Consent in the Communist GDR or How to Interpret Lion Feuchtwanger’s Blindness in Moscow 1937 Martin Sabrow 11. Demography, Opportunity or Ideological Conversion? Reflections on the Role of the ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’, or ‘1929ers’, in the GDR Mary Fulbrook

168

184

12. Tacit Minimal Consensus: The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship Thomas Lindenberger

208

Select Bibiliography Index

223 227

Notes on the Contributors P C teaches European History at the University of Siena. S F is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago. M F is Professor of History at University College London. J H is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Jersey. I K has recently retired from his position as Professor of History at the University of Sheffield. M K is Professor of History at Warsaw University. O D K teaches history at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. T L is director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres in Vienna, Austria, and teaches Modern History at Potsdam University, Germany. J P is a Dilthey Fellow in the ‘History of Emotions’ group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. M S is Director of the Zentrum f¨ur Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam. J S is Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh.

Abbreviations ACS

Central state archive, Rome

b.

busta (folder)

BA

Bundesarchiv (German Federal archives)

CSSR

Republic of Czechoslovakia

DGPS

Direzione Generale Pubblica Sicurezza (police department)

GDR

German Democratic Republic

GUF

fascist university organization

HstAS

State archive, Stuttgart

IMT

International Military Tribunal

KGB

Soviet Committee for State Security (secret police), post1954

KOR

Polish Workers’ Defence Committee

KPD

German communist party

MI

Ministry of the Interior

MVSN

fascist paramilitary militia

NEP

New economic policy

NKVD

Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (including secret police)

NSDAP

German Nazi party

OGPU

Soviet secret police service, pre-1934

PNF

Italian fascist party

PRL

Polish People’s Republic

PZPR

Polish United Workers’ Party

RGASPI

Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History

RGBI

Reich Law Registry

Abbreviations RNS

Reichsn¨ahrstand (Reich Food Estate)

SA

Sturmabteilung (storm troops)

SD

Sicherheitsdienst (security service)

SED

Socialist Unity Party (East Germany)

SOPADE

Exiled German Socialist Party (SPD) executive

SPD

Social Democratic Party of Germany

SPEP

Situazione provinciale economica politica

StAL

State archive, Ludwigsburg

Stimmungsberichte

reports on public mood

TsGA IPD

St Petersburg’s Central State Archive of Historico-Political Documentation

USHMM

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

VEB

Volkseigener Betrieb (state-controlled factory)

VfZ

Vierteljahreshefte f¨ur Zeitgeschichte

YVS

Yad Vashem Studies

xi

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction Paul Corner

What did ‘ordinary’ people think about the totalitarian regimes they lived in? How did they relate to those regimes? Did the Soviet people always resent and resist Stalinism? Was there really a mass consensus for fascism among Italians? Did the immense torchlight rallies of the 1930s represent a genuinely spontaneous expression of enthusiasm of the German people for Nazism? And does Ostalgie reflect a real sense of loss among former East Germans, still convinced of the superiority of the ‘workers’ and peasants’’ state? These are just some of the questions this volume seeks to answer. Rather surprisingly they are questions which, in the main, have not received the attention they deserve. Totalitarian regimes of one sort or another have been one of the distinguishing features of the twentieth century, yet a thorough analysis of popular opinion in these regimes—its characteristics, its changes over time—has been lacking until relatively recently. It is not difficult to find an explanation for this; at least in part the questions were not asked simply because we thought we already knew the answers. The rhetoric of the Cold War provided us with ready-made schemes that left little room for further investigation. For a long period before 1989—a period stretching back to the 1950s but reaching as far as Reagan’s invention of the ‘Evil Empire’—there seemed to be few doubts about what totalitarianism was like. The conventional wisdom on these regimes explained everything in terms of terror and coercion on the one side and propaganda on the other. This view was heavily conditioned by observation of the workings of the post-1945 communist bloc. If we knew that communists did not actually eat babies, our picture of life beyond the Iron Curtain was nonetheless highly coloured by images of secret police, the show trial and the gulag. If people supported these regimes, it was said, it was because they were either too terrified to oppose tyranny or brainwashed by propaganda into thinking that the regime was always justified in its actions. Either way they were seen essentially as victims of various repressive mechanisms. This was the position that saw its heyday during the Cold War, when Nazism, fascism, and communism were very rapidly assimilated to each other by the political scientists of the West. Indeed it is precisely the Cold War connotations of the very word

2

Paul Corner

‘totalitarianism’ which still make its use difficult, putting as it does regimes of left and right into the same category and associating all with the images provided by George Orwell’s 1984 or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But the study of popular opinion under totalitarianism has also been slow to take off for other reasons. The first is that it is intrinsically very difficult. In a sense the very idea of popular opinion in totalitarian regimes seems like a contradiction in terms. Repressive regimes of the type witnessed in Europe after both First and Second World Wars destroyed the public sphere very effectively and left little or no room for civil society to express openly any kind of spontaneous opinion. As everyone knows, the mechanisms of repression were designed to do just that. At a purely formal level the people thought what the regime told them to think. There is, therefore, at the outset, an enormous problem of sources which permit the historian to go beyond this formal level; and there is the further problem of the interpretation of the sources that are found. How do you interpret actions and words written and spoken in the context of and conditioned by (theoretically) total control? How do you interpret passivity and silence? The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism in Europe has greatly enhanced the availability of materials on Stalinism and the post-war Eastern European bloc, but—as with the material available for some time on Nazism and fascism—the problem of its use and its interpretation remains. Marcin Kula’s chapter in this volume addresses the question very directly, gently teasing out many of the methodological problems relating to sources and to their interpretation in respect of communist Poland and pointing to some possible solutions. In many respects they are solutions that can be applied very readily elsewhere. There is also a second and related problem that has deterred the study of popular opinion. This is the problem of definition. What constitutes popular opinion? Does it even exist? Why call it popular and not public opinion? Certainly, popular opinion is a very vague term. Here it is used in preference to public opinion because the latter has suggestions of pluralistic debate within the public sphere of civil society—a concept hardly appropriate to the circumstances of totalitarian states, where a public sphere of free debate and discussion, at least in the sense proposed by Habermas, clearly did not exist.¹ Such ‘public’ opinion as there was in totalitarian societies was almost entirely generated by official sources and used for internal political purposes or to strengthen the hand of governments in their foreign policies. Mussolini, for example, in 1935 organized mass rallies in all the principal cities of Italy with the declared intention of showing the world that the Italians backed his aggression towards Ethiopia. This was official ‘public’ opinion, but research suggests that it was far from being popular opinion, which police and Fascist Party reports from many areas indicated going in a very different direction from that intended by Mussolini. Thus, despite official assertions to the contrary, it would seem that a popular opinion did exist in some form. It may be very difficult to quantify because in certain circumstances it is unorganized, spontaneous, sometimes clandestine or semi-clandestine expression; in others

Introduction

3

it is heavily conditioned by the psychological claims made on the individual by the regime itself. But, as many of the essays in this volume seek to show, it does seem that, even in conditions of heavy repressive domination which denied the autonomy of the individual in respect of society, some kind of private space continued to exist, permitting the formation of something that can legitimately be called popular opinion. This was of course recognized by the regimes themselves, which, having suppressed all the channels that permitted genuine and spontaneous communication between regime and citizens, then became frightened by the silence and set up spy networks in order to find out what the people were really thinking. The extent of these spy networks (one only has to think of the Stasi in East Germany) is an indication of the importance that the regimes themselves gave to the monitoring of popular opinion—an importance related not only to the ever-present need to suppress dissent but also to the search for legitimacy in the eyes of the people which all regimes aimed to achieve. But, if popular opinion was important for the regimes themselves, is its study important to us? A general answer might be that hundreds of millions of people lived for decades under totalitarian regimes and that their history cannot simply be airbrushed out of the picture because they assume no role in our conventional view of such regimes. More specifically, however, despite the inherent difficulties in defining and identifying popular opinion, from the point of view of the historian or the political scientist the issue of popular opinion in totalitarian regimes is important because it relates to the fundamental workings of the regimes in question. Popular opinion may be one of the key factors in explaining the success or failure of any regime; indeed it is difficult to say anything useful about questions related to the stability, longevity, legitimacy and impact of these regimes without attempting an assessment of popular opinion. But there is a further element worthy of note. In our contemporary society characterized by the dominance of the media, constant communication, and perpetual publicity, in which political manipulation of the masses has become the norm, the experience of the individual within totalitarian societies assumes a particular importance. The degree to which such regimes succeeded in invading and colonizing the private sphere (while at the same time rendering ineffective the classical public sphere) has a wider relevance than that of the regimes themselves, just as, conversely, the degree to which the individual was able to resist such pressures and conserve a private space is also very significant. Indeed, the totalitarian experience is extremely important in any discussion of the politics of the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ and the increasingly blurred distinction between the two. A further reason for looking more closely at popular opinion is that it helps us to overcome the Cold War stereotype of totalitarianism, all heavy coercion and propaganda when related to the people, essentially a picture inhabited only by perpetrators and victims. With the passing of time the unsatisfactory nature of this simplistic ‘Cold War’ approach has become obvious. The collapse of communism

4

Paul Corner

in central and eastern Europe has inevitably stimulated (and to a certain extent permitted) the study of those societies with a view to understanding how they held together and what it was like to live in them. In the case of Soviet studies it has become possible to examine in detail the ways in which the communist message was transmitted by Stalin to the people during the 1920s and 1930s and to assess the people’s reaction to this message. As far as Nazi Germany is concerned the process of revision of accepted interpretations of Nazism had begun well before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Historians had turned their attentions away from the monolithic view of the Nazi state and towards the tensions existing within Nazi Germany, to the centrifugal forces of the polycentric state, and to the question of popular opinion under Nazism.² The issue of popular attitudes towards Nazism was, of course, a central problem in the attempt of Germans to come to terms with their past. Intimately linked to questions of national identity and to the legitimacy of the post-war German state, the ‘past which does not pass’ assumed a critical place in debates on the Nazi experience which took place from the mid-1980s onwards and gathered a new urgency after German Unification. It became extremely important to attempt to understand what ‘ordinary’ people knew about Nazi crimes (in particular, of course, but not exclusively, the Shoah), when precisely they knew what they did find out, and how they reacted to the knowledge they had. The responsibility of the Germans as a nation for war crimes was very much bound up with the replies which emerged from this type of enquiry. And even in Italy, where any sense of guilt in respect of fascism or of responsibility for the atrocities committed by fascist forces in Libya, Ethiopia, Greece and Jugoslavia was (and still is³) largely absent among Italians, the debate about consensus for fascism that developed in the mid-1970s around the work of Renzo De Felice suggested the beginnings of a more articulated approach to the study of the fascist experience, even though this approach rapidly became bogged down in the ideological quagmire of contemporary Italian politics.⁴ The ‘Cold War’ interpretation of totalitarianism was always essentially ‘topdown’ in its approach, analysing government and institutions and inferring from these (when any inference was attempted) the probable sentiments of the people. In some cases it seemed almost that the regimes represented a state without a society. Society was passive, dormant, totally repressed by the mechanisms of domination; the people were present in the picture only as a part of stateorganized ritual, apparently regimented and acquiescent. This volume hopes in some small measure to help to right the balance and give the people more than just a walk-on, flag-waving role. The point of departure of almost all of the essays presented here is the ‘bottom-up’ approach, accepting the framework of the dictatorial state but seeking to understand how people, in the course of their day-to-day lives, learned to adjust to that state—in some cases just to survive, in others to resist pressures, in others to integrate their existence more fully with the requirements of the regime. Several of the contributions here present make reference to the methodology of Alltagsgeschichte —usually translated as the

Introduction

5

history of everyday life—developed by Lutz Niethammer and Alf L¨udtke during the course of the 1980s and 1990s.⁵ The term itself risks being misunderstood; it sounds very much like social history with the politics left out; in fact, it represents a particular form of the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which starts from the realities of everyday life and then moves on to the consideration of the interaction between everyday life and the domination exercised by the regime, looking in particular at forms of adjustment and modes of self-defence devised by people in the course of their daily activities. How they adjusted, how that adjustment helped form some kind of popular opinion, inevitably had an impact on the workings of the system and was not, therefore, without significance. As already noted, totalitarian regimes were, in fact, notoriously attentive to the public mood; indeed, much of this volume is based on documentation provided by government agencies which were set up to monitor and assess the characteristics of that mood. The ‘bottom-up’ approach necessarily places the individual rather than the regime at the centre of the picture. This implies that, even in the highly coercive regimes in question, the individual was not merely a passive subject of authority, but had some real space for action and reaction. One of the issues dealt with in this book is, in fact, that of the extent and the nature of this space available for individual agency within the context of totalitarian domination. In what ways did people react and adjust? Was this reaction always defensive or did it also embrace some more positive aspects as far as the regime was concerned? Almost all the early totalitarian regimes aimed at the formation of the New Man (the New Soviet Man, the New Fascist Man) and posited, therefore, a kind of anthropological transformation of the individual. Were people required, therefore, not only to look outward in their adjustment to the totalitarian world, but also to look inward, to their private self, in order to come to terms with the requirements of the regime? Were individuals both formed and self-forming under totalitarianism? To what extent is it possible to employ the use of Eigen Sinn, that rather untranslatable concept relating to individual space, personal dignity, alternative cultures—all the areas in which the individual interacts with authority yet maintains some personal initiative and autonomy? The answers given here to many of these questions are often different, showing how difficult it is, in reality, to analyse all the regimes under the same general category of totalitarianism. For example, not all the essays here are couched in terms of individual resistance to the requirements of authority. Indeed, Otto Dov Kulka inverts the equation when writing about the ‘pressures from below’ that helped form Nazi policy towards the Jews. But the questions posed above inevitably raise a further issue—that, already touched on, of the relationship between the public and the private spheres. This was a key issue for all totalitarian states, which, within the logic of totalitarian ideology, formally denied the existence of the private, in the liberal individual sense. As a consequence everything became ‘public’, judged by the extent to which it pertained to the goals and objectives of the national community. Such a position had obvious

6

Paul Corner

implications for ordinary people. Individuals were compelled to relate to the state in some way; yet, as is evident from many of the essays here, this process of relating to the state was often lived with great difficulty in as far as, while the tension between the individual and the collectivity was supposed to be resolved in favour of the latter, individuals often discovered that, willingly or not, their private lives and their private thoughts conflicted with the demands of the regime. Where the regime presumed to preach the truth, this conflict could create serious problems of conscience. At the very least, the dividing line between the private and the public frequently became extremely uncertain, as people struggled between the competing forces of duty and conscience. All the contributions to this volume reflect a fundamental point of agreement—that the binary distinction ‘consent/dissent’ is far too simple and neat to be used in the context of totalitarian regimes. Marcin Kula argues that ‘the manichean question of whether people were ‘‘for’’ or ‘‘against’’ the solutions provided by the regime’ has, in fact, little sense; Thomas Lindenberger protests against historians’ ‘fixation’ with repression and resistance; and Jan Plamper even entitles his chapter on Stalinism ‘Beyond Binaries’. A picture drawn with ‘true believers’ on the one side and totally committed opponents on the other leaves a lot of people out; in the words of Lindenberger again, it risks being a story of two minorities. In a sense it is precisely the people in the middle, those who would be left out of such a history who are the subjects of this volume. Their attitudes were often far more ambivalent than the ‘consent/dissent’ division would permit, determined not only by the experience of daily life but also by the larger declared objectives of the regime; the first might provoke violent criticism, the second find strong approval. And attitudes would, of course, vary over time; here we are often talking about decades, during which time circumstances changed dramatically. But it is not only the rigidity of the binary division that invites criticism. With some justification certain of the contributors decry the tendency of analysts of totalitarianism to project the liberal, democratic model of political choice on to the circumstances of these regimes. The idea that the pretensions of totalitarianism were always experienced as an incursion on the free choice of the individual ‘self ’ would seem inappropriate to some cases (particularly the examples cited in the chapter by Jochen Hellbeck) because the individuals in question did not in any case identify with liberal, individualistic, political culture; in others because the culture of political choice was simply not present before the arrival of the regime. To make the point, it could be said that, even before the advent of fascism, southern Italian peasants had not spent a lot of time wondering about which way to vote. Popular attitudes were formed, of course, on the basis of personal experience of dictatorship and also on the basis of available information. This inevitably introduces the question of ideology and the related issue of propaganda. In totalitarian states the received wisdom was that provided by the regime and all regimes attempted in some way to define reality for their citizens, limiting

Introduction

7

access to information which contrasted with that definition and attempting to create a popular worldview coherent with the objectives of the regime itself. The elimination of alternative worldviews was always a feature of totalitarian regimes; people were not invited to look beyond what the regime provided, nor were they encouraged to consider alternatives. Indeed they were usually prevented, to a greater or to a lesser degree, from doing so. This points up the fact that, in a very concrete sense, totalitarian dictatorship needs borders which define it; the more impermeable they are, the better. Certain of the contributors to this volume examine in greater detail the processes by which the individual receives and assimilates the regime’s worldview, often transforming it through a process of personal ‘internalization’. Jochen Hellbeck goes so far as to assert that ideology only exists when assimilated, and therefore to some extent transformed, by the individual; in this sense ‘internalization’ is much more than simply taking on board a set of fixed ‘external’ ideas. It is a transformation of those ideas and, at the same time, a transformation of self. The ‘reflexive self ’ becomes central to the issue of the formation of popular opinion in the Soviet Union, therefore. Personal identity came to be bound up with the individual’s capacity to align his or her thinking with the tenets of the regime—or, at any rate, to be able to behave as if this were so.⁶ One is reminded here of Stephen Kotkin’s workers of Magnitogorsk who learn to ‘speak Bolshevik’ because that is the way in which they can best integrate themselves with the revolutionary community.⁷ Both Hellbeck and Kotkin would clearly argue, on the basis of this insistence on the centrality to the Soviet experience of personal transformation, that popular opinion was very much more than simple reaction to ideas and events. Not all the contributors to this volume would subscribe to this position, not because of rooted antagonism to the concept of the reflexive self in relation to totalitarianism, but because different regimes made different requirements of their subjects and the kind of approach proposed by Hellbeck would seem to be inappropriate to individual experience in other regimes. It could be argued, for instance, that, in comparison with Soviet communism, Italian fascism attributed relatively little real importance to the question of the transformation of the individual self, reserving its immediate attention for more external manifestations of support. Certainly, the realization of the New Fascist Man required the anthropological change at which fascism aimed, but, in its day-today practices, fascism’s imperative was more an external militarization of Italian society than a concern for the creation of a fascist self. Individual fascists might try to transform themselves, and undoubtedly some did, but those who did not were unlikely to suffer the same kind of exposure, humiliation and punishment as the Soviet citizens who failed to transform their pre-communist souls. Without returning to the out-dated idea that fascism had no ideology, it seems reasonable to suggest that fascism, despite the efforts of the fascist School of Mysticism,⁸ was more about action and behaviour than about modes of thought, although clearly rituals of behaviour were intended to determine, in the long run, the way

8

Paul Corner

people thought. As fascist leaders made clear, the anthropological revolution, the transformation of the old Italian into the New Fascist Man, was to be realized primarily through education and was seen as being a task concerning the formation of the next generation. In this sense, as in many others, fascism was always recruiting for the future. Similarly, as emerges from Ian Kershaw’s chapter in this volume, Nazi Germany laid very much less emphasis than the Soviets on the transformation of the individual or even, for that matter, the transformation of society. For Nazism, the ‘true’ German already existed, albeit in circumstances which prevented his or her authentic expression; the task of Nazism was precisely that of changing those circumstances in order that the qualities of the true German could make themselves fully felt. Support or lack of support for totalitarian regimes was not exclusively dependent on acceptance of the regime’s ideology, of course. It would seem that, as with all forms of government, once the moment of legitimation by origins had passed, totalitarian regimes had to seek some form of legitimation through results; at least to some extent they had to be seen to be working. A comparison of popular opinion between regimes suggests that this was not as easy as it might have seemed. Although regimes controlled access to information and therefore in many cases both lauded their own achievements and prevented effective and realistic comparison with what was going on outside the borders of the state (the GDR was a notable exception to this last aspect and paid the price), they did have to try to measure up to the promises which they themselves made in order to justify their retention of power. What is apparent from many of the chapters presented here is that in all of the regimes in question, a gap developed between promises, objectives, and their realization. Given the utopian objectives of many regimes, this was hardly surprising. The gap, however, forced people to inhabit a dual reality—that created by the propaganda machine of the regime which sought to define the reality in which people lived and that of their everyday experiences, often in sharp contrast with the propaganda. The degree to which they were able to live a dual reality depended, very naturally, on the force of the original message of the regime and the degree to which it was generally accepted. Here it might be expected that the concept of political religion would be invoked in order to provide an explanation of how people got over the divide between promise and reality. Rather surprisingly, perhaps, the concept is hardly used at all in this volume; contributors seem to prefer more pragmatic, less transcendental, explanations of popular attitudes, undoubtedly reflecting the fact that the object of study is ordinary people and not intellectual ideologues. For example, many contributors note that in most of the regimes in question there were some shared values—values and objectives proclaimed by the regime to which the people themselves subscribed and to which the regime could always make appeal, even if patently not respecting those values. Thus, in the Soviet experience of the 1930s, it would seem that the harsh and very obvious injustices of the Stalinist regime could be accepted at times in the name of a greater social goal in which

Introduction

9

people continued to believe. To some extent it is to the same phenomenon that Ian Kershaw points when he invokes Max Weber’s distinction between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ to explain Germans’ continuing attachment to Nazism, even in the face of the many evident negative aspects of the regime. And, as Thomas Lindenberger makes clear, East Germans could on the whole identify with appeals to anti-fascism, the virtues of work and the family, and promises of international peace made by the government. Conversely I argue in my chapter that the message of Italian fascism was essentially weak (and became progressively weaker during the 1930s)—a weakness that prevented any recourse on the part of much of the population to a dual reality which might have permitted them to accept economic hardship, rigid social control, and blatant corruption in the name of a greater objective. If there was a hint of dual reality in Italy, it was related to the figure of Mussolini himself, but this was an essentially personal attachment (sometimes passionately personal) and was often invoked, indeed, against the day-to-day experience of fascism. Notwithstanding the elaborate inventions of the Fascist School of Mysticism, the credible ‘higher truth’, the pursuable ‘extraordinary’, seems to have been strangely absent as a popular guiding principle. The other side of dual reality, that of everyday life, was constituted by what the regime could provide in concrete terms; totalitarianism had to come up with the goods if it was not to go ahead interminably with promises of ‘jam tomorrow’. Nazi Germany famously solved the problem through rapid economic recovery and full employment, but other regimes were less successful. The evidence suggests that, while optimism and sacrifices made in the name of the future could be justified for some years, there was a limit to people’s patience. At the same time a crucial factor in all of the regimes’ hold on the population was control of resources and the capacity to allocate (often scarce) resources according to political criteria. This capacity gave regimes an enormous power of blackmail over the population, a power very evident in the realm of welfare and social security, where benefits could be conceded or withheld on the basis of political obedience. The rather paradoxical relationship between social provision through the state and political repression by the state has suggested the term ‘welfare dictatorship’ to one prominent scholar of the subject, in this case related to the experience of East Germany, but elements of the same phenomenon are present in almost all the regimes in question.⁹ The provision of resources obviously conditioned popular opinion very greatly, inducing forms of voluntary or involuntary complicity with the regime. Those who opposed the regime might be induced to limit their opposition for fear of loss of state benefits of one sort or another; others might be induced to take up an opportunistic position, formally favourable to the regime, in order to have better access to the resources it could offer. For example, embracing the opportunities for sport or other leisure activities did not mean that one necessarily embraced the political objectives of the regime. As is clear, in such situations popular opinion is very far from

10

Paul Corner

reflecting a simple division between ‘us’ and ‘them’; access to resources was one of the things most likely to promote the formation of some kind of ‘we’. One of the benefits of comparison of long-standing regimes is precisely that of seeing how attitudes and opinions change over time. The parabola of communism is shown very clearly by the contrast between Hellbeck’s Soviet citizens, seeking in the 1920s and 1930s after that truth that would lead to personal transformation, and Vaclav Havel’s image of the Prague greengrocer in the 1970s, consciously and hypocritically living ‘within a lie’.¹⁰ With the exception of Nazi Germany, in a sense too short-lived to witness the same involution, all the regimes here show the similar signs of evolution and decline, moving from (a sometimes very limited) dynamism to stagnation and entropy.¹¹ In this last respect, a further constant of these regimes is that of corruption and opportunism; the highly discretionary (ab)use of power is almost always present. This may in part be related to the fact that one of the characteristic features of many of the regimes is that, as time passed, the second-level leadership was of increasingly poor quality, reflecting practices of recruitment and also motivation for holding office. Fascist Italy, for example, seems to have had great difficulty in finding competent and honest local administrators during the later part of the regime. This was partially a consequence of tensions existing between local political imperatives and those of the centralizing government—a feature of most regimes. Frequently it was also related to generational change—or, on occasions, as in the Italian case, to the lack of it. As Mary Fulbrook demonstrates in this volume, the importance of generational change is to be related not only to turnover and substitution but also to the precise life experiences of the dominant groups within the new generation. In the case of the GDR the difference between generational cohorts, some with direct experience only of Nazism, some with slightly longer experience, seems to have been decisive in determining their contribution to the new socialist state after the Second World War. The personnel of totalitarian control is also an important factor, therefore. A point made by Jill Stephenson in her contribution—and one I also make—is that the quality of local leaders was often a key determinant in the formation of popular opinion in respect of the regime. A number of chapters allude to the political problems inherent in the study of popular opinion. Sheila Fitzpatrick hints at the way in which, during the 1970s, the highly innovative ‘revisionist’ research she and others were carrying out on the Soviet Union—a Soviet Union seen for the first time ‘from below’—was interpreted in some quarters as being an attempt to justify the Soviet regime and whitewash the many horrors of Soviet communism. A similar accusation has been levelled at some of the scholars of the East German regime, who have also tried to understand what kept people and power together for so long in the GDR during the post-war decades. Quite clearly none of the people writing here would attempt to deny or to justify the terrible sufferings caused by the system of the Gulag, Auschwitz, or the operation of the Stasi. The accusations

Introduction

11

of justification evidently arise from an inability to accept that the attempt to comprehend the workings of totalitarian regimes must include some effort to understand how people lived in these regimes. If this leads to the identification of sometimes positive attitudes to the regimes on the part of the people, this in no way justifies those regimes; if anything it simply underlines the nature of the problem in indicating the complexity of the relationship between authority and the individual. What is at issue is the identification of structures of domination and the understanding of the many ways these structures were experienced at ground level. From the historical point of view, finding elements of consensus for communism can explain a great deal about how the regimes functioned and why many were able to last so long. It may also say a great deal about their legacy. The accusation of justification would seem to be much better aimed at the Italian case, where the post-1945 orthodoxy of a fundamentally antifascist Italy, victim of the regime, was challenged in the 1970s by the thesis—to which I have alluded above—that there was, in reality, a mass popular consensus for fascism and that most Italians, far from being victims, were very enthusiastic participants in the fascist ventennio. While this challenge represented a welcome invitation to rethink the politically convenient orthodoxies of politics in the Italian Republic, the thesis of mass consensus has also been distorted and employed in some quarters to exonerate the regime, the argument being (put very simply) that if most Italians agreed with fascism, it could not have been so bad after all. Here justification—through the identification of popular support—is very apparent. In reality, as I seek to argue in my chapter on Italian popular opinion, neither the premise of this argument nor the conclusion would seem to be valid. Nonetheless the distortion of the consensus thesis makes it more rather than less important to discover the extent to which people did find aspects of fascism which made them at least suspend their resistance to a repressive regime and sometimes, undoubtedly, to support it. Almost inevitably, given the nature of the regimes under study, the sources which can be used to establish what popular opinion really was at the time are limited and, in many cases, unreliable. Opinion polls were in their infancy and unknown in many of the earlier dictatorships examined here. Private first-person diaries represent wonderful sources, but those (like the diary of Victor Klemperer) that speak directly of political events and experiences are rare (the Soviet case illustrated by Hellbeck is very clearly an exception). Much use is made in almost all the studies presented here of reports that the regime itself initiated through the use of spies and informers or through the regular reports of the police to the ministerial and party authorities. As already suggested, all regimes were extremely sensitive to popular opinion and made great efforts to understand what was going on and to monitor changes in the public mood; as a consequence archives are often full of very detailed accounts of conversations overheard at the bus stop or in the train, odd comments passed in the bar, or ribald remarks repeated at

12

Paul Corner

the market. The difficulties inherent in the situation are fairly obvious. If people had any idea that they were being controlled, they would say what they were expected to say (unless, as happened not infrequently, to judge by police reports, they were drunk and had abandoned caution). Talk reserved for the ‘kitchen table’ rarely found its way into official reports. In much the same way informers might be tempted to say things that the authorities found interesting in order to justify their position and their payment. Thus exaggeration and invention might creep into the confidential reports. It is, in fact, only through experience that it is possible to judge the level of veracity of this kind of information and police reports remain sources to be used with a measure of caution. Jan Plamper’s discussion of the use of the Soviet svodki is of particular relevance here. In much the same way memory provides only limited clues as to the real nature of popular opinion. Memory changes over time to adjust to new realities and, on occasions, to protect the private conscience. Amnesia—sometimes voluntary—often steps in. In relation to dictatorship most people tend to cast themselves as victims rather than perpetrators; guilt is inevitably attached to someone else. Thus the accounts that emerge are highly personalized and frequently distorted by time. On the other hand there can be the risk of idealization. The old e´migr´e Russians who play chess on the Boardwalk at Brighton Beach in New York and reminisce in glowing terms about life in ‘the Union’ would seem to have lost their bearings at some point after contact with the USA.¹² And a not dissimilar phenomenon is visible with the nostalgia for East Germany, even present among young people who never knew the regime, clearly more about identity and present difficulties than about the realities of life under the SED. As with the police reports referred to above, the interview with the ‘survivor’ is often to be used with caution. In conclusion something must be said about the uses of comparison. Does the attempt to compare such different regimes, in power in societies with undoubted great differences between them, have any sense? Any well-informed reader of this introduction will no doubt have already expressed on several occasions the sentiment, ‘But that is not true of X dictatorship’. Precisely. The point of comparing regimes which are different in so many ways, as is inevitable with political systems of both left and right that span a period of more than seventy years, is to make distinctions, to note the differences, because it is these that permit us to recognize what is specific to each regime—which in turn helps us also to recognize where it is possible to generalize. The examination of popular opinion has proved to be a very good way of making this comparison. Popular opinion is the point at which structures of dictatorship and domination intersect with ordinary people. Far from being a very limited aspect of the study of totalitarianism, therefore, popular opinion represents a key area for understanding how totalitarian regimes work in practice, viewed both ‘topdown’ and ‘bottom-up’. The essays that follow all, in their different ways, address this subject.

Introduction

13

No t e s 1 See

J¨urgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). The original German is from 1962. 2 Exemplary in this sense is the work of Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1983). Kershaw’s contribution to this volume provides an overview of the evolution of approaches to popular opinion in Nazi Germany since his study of Bavaria appeared. 3 Berlusconi’s famous declaration that, unlike Stalin, ‘Mussolini never killed anyone’, made to The Spectator in 2004, is a case in point. 4 The polemics were centred around the third volume of Renzo De Felice’s massive biography of Mussolini which claimed, against the prevailing view of Italians as essentially victims of fascism, that there had been a substantial degree of popular support for the dictator. See R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2 ( Turin, 1974). The debate is examined in greater detail in my chapter in this volume. 5 For a good introduction to this methodology see Alf L¨ udtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experience and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995). 6 These ideas are further developed in Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). 7 See the influential (but also much contested) work of Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995). 8 It is perhaps significant that the School was created only in 1930. 9 See Konrad Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999). The term ‘welfare dictatorship’ is employed by Jarausch himself. 10 Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, reproduced in id., Open Letters (London, 1991), 125–214. 11 Interesting insights into this type of evolution are provided in Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York, 2004). 12 Sheila Fitzpatrick throws light on this phenomenon in her chapter included in this volume.

This page intentionally left blank

PART 1 T WO OV E RV I EW S

This page intentionally left blank

2 Popular Opinion in Russia Under Pre-war Stalinism Sheila Fitzpatrick

What is popular opinion? One approach would assume that it corresponds to some some kind of general will, in other words, something unitary. That’s the way people thought about it in the French Revolution. By contrast, orthodox Marxists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere dismissed the idea that there was a single ‘people’ (narod), hence a single popular opinion; instead, there was necessarily an array of class opinions (bourgeois, proletarian, kulak, poor peasant, etc.). However, the apparent breadth of the array often concealed a binary: proletarian/bourgeois, good/bad;¹ and so it was with opinion²—meaning essentially opinion about the government—where the binary was ‘positive’ (pro-Soviet, ‘proletarian’) and ‘negative’ (anti-Soviet, ‘bourgeois’). Historiographically, popular opinion became an overt concern of scholars only comparatively recently. This is because Western historians did not have access to any real data, and Soviet historians, who had limited access, generally did not write about it because it was too sensitive a topic.³ For scholars writing in the 1950s and 1960s, the only way to get opinion data was to generate it themselves by questioning e´migr´es about their opinions in retrospect, which is what was done (with great effect) by the post-war Harvard Interview Project, whose subjects were refugees from the Soviet Union in Germany and New York in the early 1950s.⁴ Many scholars at this time undoubtedly assumed that there was no public opinion in the Soviet Union because under a totalitarian regime, there could be no public. Thus, the pioneering 1950 study by Alex Inkeles treats ‘public opinion’ as an artefact of propaganda, with only a cursory bow to the findings of his own Harvard project data that, in light of the deviant opinions of his refugee interviewees, propaganda was perhaps not as efficient at forming public opinion as might be supposed.⁵ Yet, even within the framework of thought that denied the possibility of real popular opinion, Western observers were always on the lookout for negative, dissident attitudes: like the Soviet secret police, they hoped to discover the rare Winston Smiths who had managed to liberate themselves from Newspeak.⁶

18

Sheila Fitzpatrick

The first attempt to approach the topic of popular opinion was made in the 1970s by ‘revisionists’, critics of the totalitarian model approach, many of whom were social historians with an instinctive ‘bottom-up’ approach, in contrast to the ‘top-down’ approach of the political scientists who dominated Sovietology in the 1950s and 1960s. The revisionists framed the issue as an investigation of ‘social support’ for the regime. As social support presumably generated positive opinions, this was an implicit reversal of the more familiar interest (on the part of the NKVD/KGB as well as of Western scholars during the Cold War) in negative opinion; and the revisionists’ apparent privileging of the positive provoked a lot of criticism. Nevertheless, the revisionists’ working premises were those that came naturally to social historians: first, that all societies have a history (even if the totalitarian model, with its atomized and passive population suggested the contrary), and second, that political regimes generally satisfy some social interests and rarely survive by force alone. The focus of revisionist scholarship was on the inter-war period, and the main objects of investigation in the 1970s were workers, peasants and young people who were upwardly mobile from the peasantry and urban working class, often via formal affirmative action programmes. With the classified sections of Soviet archives closed, and assuming that public statements could not be taken at face value, no direct evidence of support/popular opinion was available, so it was a matter of inference from behaviour and the scholar’s own assessment of interest and cost/benefit. Revisionist labour historians found substantial working-class support for the Bolsheviks in 1917 and a few years thereafter, but their claims about such support for the 1920s were modest and for the 1930s virtually non-existent.⁷ This was a tribute to the scholars’ respect for data, as at least some of them had probably originally hoped to find evidence of lasting working-class support for the Bolsheviks’ ‘proletarian dictatorship’. With regard to peasants, revisionist scholars, including the Marxists among them, tended to be very sceptical about Bolshevik claims that the regime was supported by the ‘poor peasantry’ and opposed by ‘kulaks’ (prosperous peasants), concluding that this kind of class division of the peasantry was artificial and the categories largely meaningless.⁸ Collectivization was seen as a regime policy that the peasantry as a whole strongly disliked,⁹ and almost the only discussion of social support in this connection was a pioneering study of urban workers’ (not peasants’) support via volunteer participation in the collectivization drive.¹⁰ The argument that large-scale upward mobility into a new Soviet elite generated social support from the beneficiaries (known to contemporaries as vydvizhentsy, literally, promoted people)¹¹ was accepted within the revisionist group rather grudgingly, as the Marxist labour historians tended to be uneasy with the idea that workers might put individual opportunity ahead of class consciousness. Outside the revisionist group, a different objection was raised, namely that to speak of ‘upward mobility’ and ‘affirmative action’ in a Soviet context was to

Russia under Pre-war Stalinism

19

misuse concepts which properly related to democratic societies, and implicitly to justify the Soviet regime. Urban youth was considered by revisionists to be a likely source of social support for the Soviet regime, but for some reason almost no serious work was done on it. As for the educated elites, social support was identified as coming from the young militants of Cultural Revolution (the so-called ‘communist intelligentsia’) at the end of the 1920s,¹² as well as from upwardly mobile, Soviet-trained engineers,¹³ but revisionist scholarship rarely challenged the then reigning assumption that the ‘old Russian intelligentsia’ had always kept the Bolsheviks at arms’ length, resisting attempts to coopt them, and staunchly defending freedom of thought and professional autonomy.¹⁴ This reticence was in line with the spirit of literary scholarship of the 1970s, which with the notable exception of Katerina Clark’s work¹⁵ still considered ‘orthodox’ Soviet literature to be out of bounds, assuming that interesting artistic works produced during the Soviet period would necessarily be implicitly or explicitly anti-Soviet. For a long time, we had virtually no evidentiary basis on which to talk about popular opinion, except for the Harvard Project. Memoirs were few and far between, and moreover subject to heavy censorship.¹⁶ Neither published statements of endorsement of the regime and its policies nor official allegations about anti-regime opinion in such venues as show trials could be taken at face value. The revisionists could only deduce opinion from actions: those who volunteered for collectivization were assumed to share the Soviet values that underlay the programme; those who benefited from proletarian affirmative action programmes were assumed to be grateful. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, formerly secret archives opened, disclosing various possible types of evidence: for the inter-war period, surveys (svodki) of ‘the mood of the population’ made by the secret police;¹⁷ citizens’ letters to authority (including some statements of opinion on public matters along with petitions, complaints, and denunciations), which were often summarized for their ‘popular opinion’ input and sent upwards to the party leaders;¹⁸ formal public discussions (narodnye obsuzhdeniia) on issues of the day, such as abortion and the new Constitution, as well as police reports on what people were saying informally outside the formal meetings, and similar reports on informal comments overheard during soviet elections and censuses. Untypically, the 1937 population census, later suppressed, included a kind of ‘popular opinion’ question: ‘Are you a (religious) believer?’ Given that religious belief was unacceptable for a communist or ‘conscious’ Soviet citizen, this was a tricky question indeed, but 57 per cent answered it affirmatively.¹⁹ The first reaction of social historians was to greet the svodki with joy as an equivalent of the Stimmungsberichte in Nazi Germany, the closest thing we were likely to get to a Gallup poll in Soviet circumstances, though some objected to using police reports as a basis for assessing opinion.²⁰ Svodki, along with citizens’ letters, were the main source base for the major archive-based study of

20

Sheila Fitzpatrick

popular opinion, Sarah Davies’s Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia.²¹ The initial assumption was that when the secret police presented a report on the mood of the (general) population, that was literally what they meant. More recently, Terry Martin’s (not yet published) work on information circulation in the Soviet Union, based on extensive work on svodki, has called that into question, raising the possibility that the ‘opinion’ on which local secret-police officers reported was often that of persons under suspicion (na uchete) rather than a broader sampling of the general population. Martin also concludes that by the end of the 1920s the political leaders had mainly lost interest in the information from svodki, being less interested in opinion in general than in warnings about where active unrest was likely to flare up.²² As already noted, svodki tended to focus on negative opinion, and this was true of the whole category of ‘secret’ archival material that opened up at the beginning of the 1990s because of the close connection between the secrecy classification and negativity. Information on repression, strikes, revolts, and all kinds of actions associated with resistance became available on a large scale for the first time. This generated a substantial literature on resistance, mainly focused on peasants and influenced theoretically by James C. Scott’s work.²³ It was social historians who were primarily drawn to resistance studies, with the result that revisionists now found themselves pursuing ‘negative’ opinion with the same energy they had earlier pursued ‘positive’. But the ‘positive’ had not dropped out of the historiography. Paradoxically, however, it became the purview of a group of young scholars, many of them cultural historians, who self-consciously opposed themselves to the older generation of revisionists as well as to the ‘grandfather’ generation of totalitarians, and earned the name of ‘post-revisionists’. So far, all the approaches to popular opinion discussed (including that of the Soviet secret police) analysed opinion (‘mood’) in terms of different social and class groups as well as by geographical location and ethnicity: the usual categories were workers (proletariat), peasants/kolkhozniki (broken down in the 1920s into ‘poor’, ‘middle’, and ‘prosperous’ [kulak] peasants), white-collar,²⁴ intelligentsia, and youth. These approaches shared the sociological premise that collective (class, group) mentalities exist, and that analysis of opinion in terms of class or group is generally more meaningful than analysis of national populations as a whole. The problem with this is that thinking is done by individuals, not groups or classes, whose existence as coherent entities in the real world—as distinct from the mind of the analyst—may always be disputed. In the mid-1990s, Stephen Kotkin introduced a new approach to the subject when he focused on public discourse (not differentiated by class or group), implicitly treating popular opinion as a unitary thing.²⁵ From Kotkin’s perspective, the Soviet Union in the 1930s was full of people trying to ‘learn Bolshevik’ together—that is, learn and simultaneously create the codes of ‘Stalinist civilization’. Stripped of class consciousness—or rather, stripping themselves of their former habits of thinking as peasants, Bashkirs, Old Believers, or inhabitants of the village of

Russia under Pre-war Stalinism

21

M in N province—Kotkin’s subjects, newly arrived residents of the industrial city of Magnitogorsk, built from nothing in the middle of the steppe in the 1930s, were in the process of fashioning themselves as Soviet citizens. Though the rich empirical data came from Magnitogorsk, a place without tradition where everyone came from somewhere else, Kotkin’s reading of ‘Stalinism as a civilization’ (that is, as a cultural system) was clearly intended to apply to Soviet society as a whole. The template of ‘Stalinism as a civilization’ has since been adapted by younger scholars such as Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin to focus specifically on ‘Stalinist subjectivity’, which amounts to a Foucauldian version of Weltanschauung.²⁶ They understand ideology not as something imposed from above on a society but as something produced by the society; and what they are trying to show is how the process of production works in specific individuals (not groups). This means that first-person documents (diaries, memoirs, autobiographical statements of various kinds) are often the major source base: Hellbeck’s first work, for example, analyzed the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, a kulak’s son living in Moscow in the 1930s and trying (as his diary describes) to squeeze the kulak elements from his soul and turn himself into a true Soviet person.²⁷ While post-revisionist scholarship uses different terminology, there is a sense in which it, too, addresses the revisionists’ ‘social support’ issue, for those Soviet citizens who are earnestly thinking themselves into a positive relationship with ‘the Soviet project’ (what an earlier generation of scholars would have called the Soviet regime and its goals) can surely be understood as providing support for the regime. The approach differs from the revisionists’, however, in the scope of its claims: on the one hand, smaller (focusing on the individual, not the group or class), on the other, more global (not limited to a particular group or class). If the global claims may be doubted (‘speaking Bolshevik’ was probably not a major preoccupation on the kolkhoz or for the 57 per cent of self-declared believers in the population), they are very plausible for at least two overlapping groups of the population: urban youth and victims of social stigmatization. (Hellbeck’s Stepan Podlubnyi belonged to both of them.) Young people in towns provided much of the enthusiasm and adventurous spirit that (despite and along with terror) marked the 1930s. It was they who responded to calls to volunteer for various causes like collectivization and pioneering the Far East, and who, judging by memoir and other evidence, were inclined to think of the Soviet project as their own. Victims of stigmatization are, on the face of it, a much less likely group of Soviet supporters; indeed it is misleading to call them a group in this context, since any sense of commonality they may have possessed had to be suppressed in the service of becoming Soviet. Nevertheless, there is evidence that some of the most passionate, sometimes almost hysterical, support for the Soviet cause came from people whose families had been dekulakized or who had experienced other forms of discrimination. Such people were often young, embracing Soviet values even as they were renouncing or separated from their

22

Sheila Fitzpatrick

stigmatized parents. Golfo Alexopoulos’s study of petitions from disenfranchised persons shows how eloquently those who were victims of discrimination could write about their attachment to Soviet values. Of course, eloquence is no proof of sincerity, and the disenfranchised had good practical reasons for wanting to recover their civil rights. But we find a similar combination of identification with Soviet values and experience of class discrimination not only in contemporary sources like the Podlubnyi diary but also in interviews with elderly women conducted in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It appears that in many individuals the experience of discrimination produced a particularly intense and anxious form of Soviet patriotism, expressive of a longing to belong to the community on the part of those who knew what it meant to be outcast.²⁸ Other lines of scholarly enquiry have illuminated particular branches and aspects of ‘popular opinion’ in the Stalin period. Literary scholarship has been transformed over the past twenty years by the acceptance of ‘Soviet literature’ as an object of study and a new focus on ‘socialist realism’ as something more than a means of political control of writers.²⁹ The new British-based field of Russian cultural studies rejects a simple ‘top-down’ approach to Soviet culture and contests the assumption that dissident literary texts are the only ones that matter.³⁰ In the field of history of science (flourishing since 1991, largely through the contributions of a lively cohort of young Russian scholars), the old preoccupation with issues of autonomy and freedom of thought has given way to an almost ethnographic interest in the scientific world and the way it interacted with the political one. Instead of dealing with an alien ‘Soviet regime’ as antagonists or outsiders, the scientists are assumed to be part of it.³¹ Analyses like Jochen Hellbeck’s of the diary of the writer Alexander Afinogenov³² have shown how passionately many intellectuals embraced the regime in the 1930s, and the same point is made with regard to Jewish intellectuals (a substantial presence in the Soviet Russian intelligentsia) in Yuri Slezkine’s work.³³ Scholars have become much more interested in ethnic and national questions since the collapse of the Soviet regime, and their researches have revealed a spectrum of attitudes among particular ethnic/national groups at different times. Some of this scholarship addresses the question about nationalities (meaning non-Russians) that was the focal point of nationalities scholarship during the Cold War, namely resistance to Moscow and attempts to evade its domination and protect the national tradition. But it has become increasingly clear to scholars that Soviet Moscow was in its own way a protector and even creator of nations.³⁴ Terry Martin has written about affirmative action policies on behalf of ‘backward’ national minorities (the national counterpart to the class-based affirmative action mentioned above).³⁵ Yuri Slezkine has shown the importance of Jewish support for and identification with the Revolution and Soviet regime in the inter-war period.³⁶ David Brandenberger has investigated the policy shift of the mid-1930s toward increasing tolerance (encouragement) of Russian

Russia under Pre-war Stalinism

23

national sentiment, characterizing it as ‘an ideological ‘‘Big Deal’’ of sorts’, meaning a regime concession to a popular demand made in implicit exchange for loyalty.³⁷ Any summary of the major advances in our knowledge of popular opinion on the Stalin period over the past decade, and its changes over time, must be highly subjective. For me, the most striking single contribution has been Slezkine’s on Jewish support for the Soviet project—a topic that was previously more or less taboo for scholars because of Nazi propagandists’ obsession with ‘Jewish Bolshevism’—which shows the quasi-official anti-Semitism of the late Stalin period to be a real breakpoint for Soviet Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals, not (as suggested by earlier scholarship) simply more of the same old history of persecution. Another significant advance has been the gradual dismantling of the (self-)image of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia as a group of heroic dissidents throughout the Stalin period and the concomitant recognition that the intelligentsia was in fact an elite and comparatively privileged group. As intelligentsia opinion comes to seem more positive, however, peasant opinion is increasingly confirmed as highly negative throughout the Stalin period, as well it might have been, given the circumstances of collectivization and the subsequent brutally high rate of agricultural procurements and taxation. Even the Second World War, in general clearly a rallying point for patriotic popular opinion,³⁸ left peasants largely unaffected—except perhaps for those who managed to use military service as a way of avoiding return to the kolkhoz. The urban population seems in general to have been better disposed than the rural towards the Soviet regime, despite the abrupt fall in living standards at the end of the 1920s; and my reading of the attitudes expressed in Leningrad workers’ letters to authority in the 1930s is that a residual identification with the Revolution and Soviet regime remained, at least in the Leningrad working class.³⁹ But Sarah Davies is surely right in emphasizing the outrage of workers at the 1938 and 1940 labour laws, which may well have been a real turning-point in labour attitudes.⁴⁰ Certainly Filtzer’s study of labour in the post-war period suggests that very little worker identification with the regime survived, at least for the younger generation inducted into manual labour in the 1940s, among the depressed and often alienated blue-collar workers of the early 1950s.⁴¹ In a comparative perspective, the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union was surely much less popular among its own broad population than the Nazi one in Germany.⁴² This may partly be because Nazi terror was much more predictable in its objects: if you did not fall into one of the stigmatized categories, you had no particular reason for fear. But I suspect that an even more important reason was that living standards improved under the Nazis, whereas under the Stalinist regime they dropped sharply at the end of the 1920s and did not recover until the 1950s. There was no attitudinal equivalent in the Nazi period to the solid alienation of Soviet peasants (still more than half the total population in the pre-war period) as a result of the unpopular and in many ways disastrous

24

Sheila Fitzpatrick

experiment of collectivization. In assessing popular opinion, one also has to take account of the fact that those who found themselves outside the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War generally didn’t want to return, and that this seems to have applied across the board, regardless of class, nationality or life experience in the Soviet Union.⁴³ C O N C LU D I N G C O M P L I C AT I O N S The account of popular attitudes I have given so far assumes that, whatever the limitations of our knowledge in practice, the question of whether Soviet citizens supported or opposed the Soviet regime could in principle be answered. In other words, if we had total access to the relevant data, we could make definite identifications of individual attitudes, place them on a continuum from negative to positive, and on this basis make statements about the degree of satisfaction of the population as a whole and of its component parts (groups, classes). But there are difficulties with this assumption that must be addressed. The first question is whether, in substituting ‘popular opinion’ for the term we would use discussing opinion in a Western society, namely ‘public opinion’, we have not carried out some sleight of hand to evade the problem that one cannot have public opinion without a public, that is, something capable of being a ‘carrier’ of opinion.⁴⁴ According to most definitions, totalitarian societies do not have a public (or, to change the terminology, a civil society). When totalitarian regimes close down the caf´es and coffee houses in which opinion is formed,⁴⁵ suppress voluntary organizations not directly controlled by the state, restrict professional autonomy, censor publication, and punish people for anti-regime talk, they eliminate civil society and public opinion (the argument goes), leaving only an artificial ‘popular opinion’ that is a reflection of regime propaganda. Demonstrably, however, people in the Soviet Union had opinions that were not reflections of regime propaganda. These opinions, moreover, were not conceived and guarded in solitude. They were part of everyday sociability—exchanged with friends and strangers at work, in trains, at markets, in the kitchens of communal apartments and dormitories, or standing in queues. They even displayed another characteristic of a Habermasian public sphere, namely conscious separation from the sphere of the state.⁴⁶ The jokes that were ubiquitous in Soviet society expressed a collective subaltern mood or opinion, often framed for humorous effect as a dialectical inversion of a familiar official clich´e, and were diligently gathered by the secret police for exactly this reason.⁴⁷ The police also monitored the venues of everyday sociability, using informers as, in effect, their poll-takers. It seems, therefore, that our problem of slippage between ‘popular’ and ‘public’ opinion is not consequential after all: we have found a public, though not one of Western ‘bourgeois’ type, and this public has its opinion, even if that opinion is

Russia under Pre-war Stalinism

25

elaborated and exchanged not in a coffee house but over a bottle of vodka split three ways between strangers in a stairwell. The second problem is the assumption that individuals have a single, static opinion (or, in the secret police’s terminology, ‘mood’) rather than a shifting range or repertoire of opinions (moods), some of them mutually contradictory. This would be a questionable assumption in any context, but particularly the Soviet one, in which many observers have identified duality as a key component of popular thinking. There are a number of different versions of the duality argument. One is the duality of present and future—the claim that the lineaments of the (better) future can be discerned through the (imperfect) present—which is central to socialist realism. Scholars are increasingly treating socialist realism not just as ‘official Soviet dogma’ but as a popular habit of thought as well.⁴⁸ This means that a Soviet citizen thinking in this way might be perfectly aware of the imperfections of the present without questioning the premise that Soviet society was in the process of ‘building socialism’; in other words, his opinion about Soviet society might be negative (with regard to the present) and positive (with regard to the future) at the same time. Russian-speaking foreigners will recognize remnants of this way of thought surviving into the late Soviet period in the popular habit of giving almost any question about Soviet society a double answer: first ‘in principle’ and then ‘in practice’ (as in ‘V printsipe, this is where you buy tape-recorders; v praktike, none are on sale’). Another kind of duality popular with Western scholars in the post-Stalin period—as well as in dissident circles of the Soviet intelligentsia—was that between public and private utterance. In this framework, Soviet citizens were seen as invariably saying one thing in public and the other in private, the first opinion being positive about the Soviet regime, the second negative; and it was usually taken for granted that only the second opinion was sincere.⁴⁹ This has recently been disputed with regard to the late Soviet period by a young Russian-born anthropologist, Alexei Yurchak, who argues that the existence of an ‘official’ Soviet language, whose use on public occasions was obligatory and which was widely mocked in private by the younger generation, did not mean that the mockers’ attitude to Soviet values was necessarily hostile or dismissive.⁵⁰ It has also been disputed for the Stalin period by Stephen Kotkin (who considers the question of ‘true’ belief to be unknowable, but understands Soviet citizens to be involved in a collective project of mastering ‘Soviet’ ways of thinking⁵¹) and historians of ‘Stalinist subjectivity’ like Jochen Hellbeck. Yet, even accepting the validity of these arguments, we are still left with a consensus that Stalinist citizens knew two ways of thinking, only one of which was ‘Soviet’.⁵² Harvard Project interviewers saw duality from yet another angle: they were interviewing a population of post-war refugees who, by definition, had rejected the Soviet Union but still praised many of its features. The leaders of the Harvard Project concluded that Soviet citizens generally liked the system, especially its

26

Sheila Fitzpatrick

welfare features, but disliked ‘the regime’, that is, the men who ran it.⁵³ Why, liking the system, they still wouldn’t go back, was implicitly answered by the observation that they had a strong sense of the punitive aspects of the regime and would expect to be punished.⁵⁴ Two of the Project’s psychologists, Eugenia Hanfmann and Helen Beier, reflected further on this phenomenon in their in-depth analysis of six Russian refugees. Although the group included three who had joined the Vlasov Army during the war to fight the Soviet Army under German protection, and might therefore be presumed to be particularly hostile to the Soviet regime, they found that all but one member reported past attachment to Soviet values and, even more surprisingly, none seemed strongly hostile to the Soviet Union, even when being interviewed as refugees by Americans in 1950 (that is, during the Cold War), and two were definitely sympathetic.⁵⁵ To be sure, the refugees spoke of events in their Soviet pasts (arrests, purges, failure of Soviet authorities to provide support in time of need) that had disillusioned them. But most responded as if their opinion of the Soviet Union, as well as their decisions to leave the country, were largely the product of the circumstances of the moment, particularly the fact that, as former POWs in most cases, they were bound to be under constant suspicion if they went back. One interviewee seemed to speak for the majority of the group when he said that he ‘would not have hesitated to return to the Soviet Union if he could have been certain of his safety’.⁵⁶ To their perplexed interviewers, it seemed that they were simultaneously pro- and anti-Soviet. Whether one accepts any or all of these theories of the duality of Soviet opinion, it is reasonable to register a note of caution about any absolute statements we may be tempted to make about popular opinion in the Stalin period. Different opinions, which may seem mutually contradictory, can coexist over long periods in the one individual, let alone in a social group.⁵⁷ This is particularly true when a binary convention prevails (as it has done among Western Sovietologists, as well as in the Soviet secret police and probably the Soviet population as well) of treating opinion (mood) as a binary toggle switch which is either in the ‘anti-Soviet’ or ‘pro-Soviet’ position, but cannot be in-between. If we substitute ‘generally tending toward’ for any absolute statement about individual or group opinion, we will be on safer ground. But even that does not do justice to the peculiar ambiguities of popular opinion in the world’s ‘first socialist society’—or at least the first to have made negation a structuring principle of subaltern discourse and turned the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic into a popular art form. No t e s 1 This

is a basic argument in Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000), esp. 12–16. 2 Called ‘mood’ (nastroenie) in Soviet bureaucratic language.

Russia under Pre-war Stalinism 3A

27

rare exception was the 1938 survey of attitudes of young peasants, published in the 1970s along with a more recent survey as Sotsial’nyi oblik kolkhoznoi molodezhi po materialam sotsiologicheskikh obsledovanii 1938 i 1969 gg., ed. V. E. Poletaev et al. (Moscow, 1976). 4 The two general volumes generated by the Harvard Interview Project were Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) and Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Other specialized studies by Project members are listed as appendices in both general volumes. 5 Alex Inkeles, Public Opinion in Soviet Russia: A Study in Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, Mass., 1950). Inkeles was aware of the phenomenon of citizens’ letters of complaint (Alex Inkeles and Kent Geiger, ‘Critical Letters to the Editors of the Soviet Press: Areas and Modes of Complaint’, American Sociological Review 17 (1952), and ‘Critical Letters to the Editors of the Soviet Press: Social Characteristics and Interrelations of Critics and the Criticized’, ASR 18 (1953)), as was Fainsod (Merle Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), ch. 2 (‘The Right of Petition—Letters to the Press and Party Headquarters’)), but neither scholar conceptualized them as having anything to do with popular opinion. 6 See George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (London, 1950), which contains an appendix elaborating his idea of ‘Newspeak’, a revised version of the English language ‘whose purpose was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible’. 7 On workers’ support for the Bolsheviks in 1917, see Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981) and S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge, 1983). For a revisionist position on the early post-Soviet years, see William G. Rosenberg, ‘Workers’ Control on the Railroads and Some Suggestions concerning Social Aspects of Labor Politics in the Russian Revolution’, Journal of Modern History 49:2 (1977), 1181–1219, and idem, ‘Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October’, Slavic Review 44:2 (Summer 1985), 213–38 and ‘Reply’, in the same issue, 251–6. The latter article was strongly criticized by Vladimir Brovkin, who argued that workers were not eternally frozen into a posture of support for Soviet power, regardless of their attitudes in 1917 (Slavic Review 44:2, 244–50; see also his book The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, 1987)). There was comparatively little revisionist work on workers in the 1920s until William J. Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow 1918–1929 (Urbana and Chicago, 1987). As for the Stalin period, the model for an approach emphasizing Bolshevik mistreatment of workers and betrayal of the promises of the ‘proletarian revolution’ was set by the Menshevik Solomon M. Schwarz in his Labor in the Soviet Union (New York, 1951) and confirmed with a more abundant research base by Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization (Armonk, NY, 1986). 8 Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans. Irene Nove (London, 1968), esp. 41–80. Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia, 1910–1925 (Oxford, 1972).

28 9 Lewin,

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Russian Peasants, parts 2 and 3. Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York and Oxford, 1987). As a belated postscript to the 1970s discussions of (absent) peasant support for collectivization, I wrote an article in the 1990s proposing that, while there were supporters of the Soviet regime in the villages in the 1920s—many of them young Red Army veterans from the Civil War—such people tended to leave the villages quickly once employment opportunities opened up in the towns (which happened on an unprecedented scale as a result of the industrialization drive, coincident in time with collectivization). The article has so far appeared only in Russian (‘Vopros sotsial’noi podderzhki kollektivizatsii’ [The question of social support for collectivization], in Otechestvennaia istoriia XX Veka, ekonomicheskaia, politicheskaia i sotsialnaia zhizn’: V pamiati V.Z. Drobizheva, ed. Efim Pivovar (Moscow, 2004)), but should be published shortly in Russian History. 11 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, 1979). 12 Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington, 1978). 13 See Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility and idem, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite’ (1978), reprinted in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992). 14 For example, Loren Graham, a scholar sympathetic to revisionism when it emerged in the early 1970s, made the ‘revisionist’ point that the Soviet government was a big supporter of science, with a policy towards the Academy of Science that was ‘not entirely one of coercion for the sake of political control’, but still framed the early relationship of the Academy and the new regime in terms of the autonomy battle: see Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party 1927–1932 (Princeton, 1967), esp. pp. viii, 200, 208–9. Graham’s pupil Kendall Bailes, studying the engineering profession, wrote cautiously of a ‘fragile’ working relationship between the technical intelligentsia and the regime, in which ‘the forces of mutual attraction proved stronger than the forces of mutual repulsion’. Noting that ‘the technostructure . . . grew in size, status, and material privileges’ and ‘elements of [it] . . . had influence and some power’, he nevertheless shied away from any suggestion of partnership or overt recognition of what revisionists called ‘social support’ for the regime on the engineers’ part. See Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, 1978), esp. 410, 413, 422. 15 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981). 16 On problems of the memoir in the Soviet period, see Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘Soviet Memoirs as a Historical Source’, in A Researcher’s Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola (Armonk, NY, 1990), 233–54. 17 The bulk of the svodki remain inaccessible in the still-closed KGB archives, but some rich deposits have been found, e.g. in the Leningrad party archive, and in Ukrainian archives. 10 Lynne

Russia under Pre-war Stalinism 18 For a typology

29

of this source, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens’ (1996), reprinted in Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton and Oxford, 2005), 155–81. 19 For peasants’ comments and calculations on this question, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994), 204–6, 294–5, 20 For this criticism, see Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia’, Kritika 1:1 (2000), esp. 76–9. 21 Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1933–1941 (Cambridge, 1997). Svodki are also a major source for Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), whose chapter 7 (‘Conversations and Listeners’) surveys the main types of newly available ‘popular opinion’ data on the 1930s. 22 Based on a reading of draft chapters from Terry Martin’s book-in-progress, Policing Soviet Politics: An Informational Interpretation of Stalinism, 1921–1954. 23 James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976) and idem, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985). Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1996) and idem (ed.), Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2002); Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants; Jeffrey J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). Resistance is also an important theme in Davies, Popular Opinion. 24 Sluzhashchie or state employees was a Soviet statistical category separate from the workers, despite the fact that a strict Marxist analysis should have treated them as a white-collar branch of the proletariat. 25 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995). 26 The programmatic statement is I. Halfin and J. Hellbeck, ‘Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s ‘‘Magnetic Mountain’’ and the State of Soviet Historical Studies’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas 44 (1996). Relevant works are Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003) and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). The Russian scholar Oleg Kharkhordin, also influenced by Foucault, worked separately on similar lines in his book The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999). 27 Hellbeck edited Podlubnyi’s diary for German publication as Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931–1939 (Munich, 1996) with a long introduction which is published separately as ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), 77–116. Hellbeck’s recent book, Revolution on my Mind, offers a detailed analysis of four diaries, including Podlubnyi’s. 28 See Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, 2003); Barbara A. Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck,

30

Sheila Fitzpatrick

A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, 1997); Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, ch. 6. 29 See e.g. Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, 1997); Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford, 1997) and idem, The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture (Stanford, 2001). 30 Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (Oxford, 1998). 31 See e.g. Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997); Alexei Kojevnikov, ‘Games of Stalinist Democracy: Ideological Discussions in Soviet Sciences 1947–52’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, 142–75. 32 Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 285–345. 33 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton and Oxford, 2004), esp. 222–42. After showing the size of that presence in various professions, Slezkine concludes that ‘there is no doubt that the Jews had a much higher proportion of elite members than any other ethnic group in the USSR. In absolute terms, they were second to the Russians, but if one divides the elite into groups whose members came from the same region, shared a similar social and cultural background, and recognized each other as having a common past and related parents, it seems certain that Jews would have constituted the largest single component of the new Soviet elite, especially (or rather, most visibly) its cultural contingent . . .’ (236). 34 For this argument, see Yuri Slezkine, ‘The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism; and Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1929–1939 (Ithaca, 2001). 35 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, esp. 17–18 and 125–81. 36 Slezkine, Jewish Century, esp. 216–54. 37 David Brandenberger, ‘Soviet Social Mentalit´ e and Russocentrism on the Eve of War, 1936–1941’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas 48:3 (2000), 406. His book National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002) also deals with the issue of Russian nationalism, but more in a context of mobilization (i.e. top-down) than of popular sentiment (bottom-up). 38 See Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001). 39 This is my interpretation of the letters’ frequent complaints about elite privilege, which appear to me to be asserting a special relationship to the revolution, hence a special claim on the regime’s attention, as well as invoking the spectre of betrayal and deception. Davies, however, focuses only on the theme of betrayal and deception (Popular Opinion, 43–8 and 133–8). 40 Davies, Popular Opinion, 43–8.

Russia under Pre-war Stalinism 41 Donald

31

Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002). 42 Alf L¨ udtke and I have written a joint essay on the Nazi–Soviet everyday comparison, ‘Energizing the Everyday: On the Breaking and Making of Social Bonds in Nazism and Stalinism’, which explores these themes. See Beyond Totalitarianism: Nazism and Stalinism Compared, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer (Cambridge, 2009). 43 The ambiguities of refugees’ attitudes to the Soviet Union discovered by the post-war Harvard Interview Project are discussed above, 25–26. 44 J¨ urgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 2. 45 This actually happened in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s, though as a probably unintentional by-product of the abolition of urban private enterprise. 46 See Sarah Davies, ‘ ‘‘Us’’ against ‘‘Them’’: Social Identity in Soviet Russia, 1934–41’, in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, 47–70. 47 On Soviet jokes, see W. Chamberlain, ‘The ‘‘Anecdote’’: Unrationed Soviet Humour’, Russian Review 16:3 (1957), 27–37, and Robert Thurston, ‘Social Dimensions of Stalinist Rule: Humor and Terror in the USSR, 1935–1941’, Journal of Social History 24:3 (1991), 541–62. For a comparative dimension, see F. K. M. Hillenbrand, Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (London, 1995). 48 See, for example, the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 94:3 (1995), ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko: ‘Socialist Realism Without Shores’, and Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste’, in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1994), 238–56. Another duality from the sphere of cultural studies is Vladimir Paperny’s ‘Kul’turna 1/Kul’tura 2’ in his book Kul’tura dva (Moscow, 1996), translated by John Hill and Roann Barris as Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge, 2002). 49 A pioneering study by an e´migr´e sociologist was Vladimir Shlapentokh’s Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York, 1989). 50 Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006). For his critique of Western assumptions about ‘binary socialism’, see 4–8. 51 Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, esp. 228–9. 52 This image is reinforced by memoirs like those of Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer, trans. Gary Kern (New York, 1980); Raisa Orlova, Memoirs, trans. Samuel Cioran (New York, 1983). The drama of these autobiographies lies largely in the coexistence of these two opinions and the trauma of the switch between them. This is a one-time event in the memoirs, but there is no reason to exclude the possibility that many Soviet citizens who never made a permanent dissident choice

32

Sheila Fitzpatrick

were capable of switching back and forth according to their immediate circumstances and company. 53 Bauer et al., How the Soviet System Works, 133–7. 54 Ibid., 116: ‘The mass of the Soviet population appears to suffer rather uniformly from the fear of punitive action by the regime . . .’. 55 Eugenia Hanfmann and Helen Beier, Six Russian Men—Lives in Turmoil (North Quincy, Mass., 1976). The lone interviewee who expressed no past attachment was Nikolai, a deserter from the Soviet occupation army in Germany in 1948, who also, however, expressed no strong anti-Soviet feelings. 56 Alexei, the most homesick and pro-Soviet of the respondents (Hanfmann and Beier, Six Russian Men, 63). 57 In Kotkin’s useful formulation (Magnetic Mountain, 228), ‘elements of ‘‘belief ’’ and ‘‘disbelief ’’ appear to have coexisted within everyone . . . Even in the case of the category of ‘‘true believers’’ it is necessary to think in terms of a shifting compromise, of rigidity and the search for slack, of daily negotiation and compromise within certain well-defined but not inviolate limits . . .’.

3 Consensus, Coercion and Popular Opinion in the Third Reich: Some Reflections Ian Kershaw

I Remarkably, research on the social history of the Third Reich did not begin in earnest until the 1970s. When it did, the issues of consensus and coercion were a central theme, and any assessment of those was inevitably related to the findings of the early work which was starting to be undertaken at that time into popular attitudes towards the Nazi regime and patterns of behaviour among ordinary Germans. Before the 1970s, little empirical research had been carried out into these issues. The general tenor of interpretation tended to place the emphasis upon a population reduced to helpless passivity by the repression and terror of a totalitarian state. The corollary was that backing for the regime, apart from diedin-the-wool Nazi fanatics, was chiefly a propaganda product. That is, people were bamboozled into support for the regime through relentless propaganda and the demonic personality of a pied-piper. It was a heavily ‘top-down’ view of the way the relationship between the regime and German society operated. The stress was laid upon a combination of repression and manipulation. And, implicitly if not always intentionally, there was an apologetic undertone to the prevailing form of interpretation. If people were helpless in face of the weight of repression in a terroristic police-state, or were blinded by indoctrination and manipulative propaganda, blame and responsibility for what happened could be clearly delineated and squarely attached to Hitler, a clique of his henchmen, and a minority of wild-eyed enthusiasts, somehow detachable from German society as a whole. A breakthrough in challenging the early, persistent stereotypes was unquestionably the ‘Bavaria Project’, which began in 1973 under the aegis of the renowned Institut f¨ur Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) in Munich. Directed by the outstanding historian of Nazism at the time, Martin Broszat,

34

Ian Kershaw

the project led to a series of important publications which appeared between 1977 and 1983.¹ It was commissioned to carry out research into ‘Resistance and Persecution in Bavaria during the Nazi Era’. This could have been a fairly predictable, historiographically somewhat sterile, enterprise. Instead, Broszat pressed for an extended definition of ‘resistance’, which allowed for the inclusion of a multitude of forms of minor deviance from the conformist behaviour expected by the regime. Since the regime politicized practically every aspect of public life, and imposed a ‘total claim’ on society, all sorts of behaviour which would be unnoticed in a democracy (such as telling political jokes, listening to foreign broadcasts, or dancing to jazz) could be viewed as opposition and punished. The ‘German’ greeting was the symbol of the forced compliance that represented national unity. So even saying ‘Guten Tag’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler’ was taken as a sign of disaffection.² Under Broszat’s direction, the project turned into a major exploration of a vast array of forms of political nonconformity—or ‘dissent’, as I preferred to call it.³ But if the project focused on dissent, consent was never far away. In fact, it became ever clearer that dissent towards certain aspects of the Nazi regime and its ideology was perfectly compatible with consent in other areas. Approval of and complicity in components of regime policy often went hand in hand with partial rejection and opposition. The same person could both approve and disapprove, depending on the area of policy or aspect of the regime. The ‘Bavaria Project’ was an early (and major) example of ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ (the ‘history of everyday life’), a genre which, once started, spread like a bush-fire in the next few years. The uncovering of the history of the Nazi era ‘from below’ caught the imagination, and not just of professional historians. History workshops sprang up in many places in Germany. The social (and local) history of the Hitler dictatorship shaped new perspectives. And shifts in interpretation started to impose themselves. The more research into grass-roots behaviour during the Third Reich was carried out, the more it seemed that ‘everyday’ forms of complicity, approval and willing cooperation manifested themselves. Whereas it had once seemed possible to envisage a ‘normality’ in daily life which was detachable from the crimes of the regime, the new research increasingly revealed that ‘everyday’ existence and the road to Auschwitz were umbilically connected. From now on, therefore, the emphasis shifted gradually but inexorably from the resistance–opposition–dissent spectrum to that of approval–complicity–consensus. But the links between the two also became apparent. Instead of a sharp black–white delineation of proand anti-Nazi attitudes, the new picture was murky grey. And whereas the ‘Bavaria Project’ had operated on a notion of regime and society ‘in conflict’ (as the subtitle of the publications had it), much newer writing rejected the implication in this formulation that the regime stood somehow ‘over’ society, and pointed to the impossibility of drawing such a sharp line between the two.

Consensus, Coercion and the Third Reich

35

All this was connected with another historiographical development. Strange though it might now seem, the centrality of the Holocaust had not been mirrored in historical writing before the 1980s. Increasingly thereafter this deficiency was more than adequately remedied. The attention switched, too, from the prewar period, which had remained the central chronological focus of research during the 1960s and 1970s, to the wartime experience of Nazism. With this, research started, often for the first time, systematically to explore aspects of the regime’s criminality in areas beyond the murder of the Jews, such as the grievous maltreatment of foreign workers compelled to labour in German factories, or the conscious policies of starvation which led to the deaths of vast numbers of Soviet prisoners-of-war. Ordinary German soldiers, serving in the Wehrmacht, were now shown to have been implicated in some of the worst crimes of the regime.⁴ A sharp division between an ‘unblemished’ Wehrmacht and the criminal SS, a division sustained by post-war memoirs of former leading generals, could no longer be upheld. The unfolding of the ‘Final Solution’ posed no exception to this. The time was ripe, therefore, for the claim made in Daniel Goldhagen’s bestselling book in the mid-1990s, that ordinary Germans had been ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’.⁵ The early generalization of a society repressed into submission had been replaced by a society of perpetrators willing to collaborate in the most inhumane policies ever known. Coercion had given way to consensus as a general understanding of the way ordinary people thought and behaved during the Third Reich. Goldhagen’s book came under heavy fire from historians for its undifferentiated, broad-brush claims about German society’s approval for the genocidal thrust of anti-Jewish policy. But in popular consciousness, not least in Germany itself, there is no doubt that Goldhagen struck a chord. Moreover, the sense that the Nazi regime could reckon with the support of the vast majority of Germans was represented inside as well as outside the academy. The shift from the earlier emphasis upon opposition to the later stress on consensus found its apogee in Robert Gellately’s book, Backing Hitler, which appeared in 2001.⁶ Gellately had made his mark with an important, and justifiably well-received, book, published in 1990, The Gestapo and German Society.⁷ He showed in this study, on the basis of surviving Gestapo files kept in W¨urzburg and relating to the region of Lower Franconia, that police enforcement of Nazi racial policy was frequently made possible by the denunciations of ordinary citizens. He fell short of implying collective guilt for the German population. But in Backing Hitler, just over a decade later, this implication seems inescapable. On the very first page, he claims that despite ‘pockets of negative opinion, rejection of Nazism, and even examples of resistance, the great majority of the German people soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter end in 1945’.⁸ The wide-ranging consensus embraced, in this interpretation, even the terror apparatus itself, which enjoyed extensive popular support, not least since, Gellately argued, the terror was selective, targeted at unpopular minorities,

36

Ian Kershaw

and did not affect most Germans. The inference to be drawn from the assertion that the German people in their overwhelming majority had backed Hitler to the end was that they carried responsibility for the regime’s terror and criminality. It was, in Gellately’s view, a society in which the regime’s enforcers could rely upon—could in fact only operate through—the active support of ordinary Germans, keen to denounce their fellow citizens in the interests of conformity and racial solidarity. The old ‘top-down’ view of a repressed and terrorized population of a totalitarian state had been in effect replaced by a ‘bottom-up’ approach in which the regime was, in a sense, as Gellately saw it, manipulated from below.⁹ Gellately’s interpretation did not stand in isolation.¹⁰ But it was the most forthright statement of the view that the Third Reich was a consensual regime from beginning to end. Unsurprisingly, given such a bold assertion, a backlash soon began to set in. Already, in the wake of the fall of the Soviet bloc (and in particular of the German Democratic Republic), a renaissance of the totalitarianism theorem had taken place. Whereas, in the latter stages of the Cold War, totalitarianism as an explanatory concept had fallen into much disrepute, the revelations about the Stasi state and equivalent moving stories about the suffering of ordinary citizens at the hands of the organs of the Soviet police and security forces restored it to the centre-ground of interpretation. The tone was switching back, even before Gellately’s book appeared, to a renewed emphasis upon the repression of the police state. In some ways, the reaction to Gellately’s book has been to shift that emphasis still further, when applied to the Third Reich. Summarizing much recent work, Richard Evans has commented, with regard to Gellately’s arguments: ‘To speak of a self-policing society understates the element of top-down terror and intimidation in the functioning of the Third Reich’, where ‘increasingly brutal and violent conditions loomed over everyone’.¹¹ So the pendulum, which began in the 1970s to swing from coercion to consensus, and reached its farthest point in this direction with the appearance of Gellately’s book, now appears to be swinging back again towards coercion. The wheel seems likely to be reinvented. Gellately’s book, and the challenges to it, pose, of course, the obvious question of what might be said to constitute ‘consensus’ in a highly repressive police state. The term is, in fact, difficult enough to define in a democracy, where governments (or the main party in a coalition government) are often backed by only a minority of the electorate. But in a democracy, people at least have a choice. They can openly voice their opinions in a variety of media (which can be tested in opinion surveys). And they can reject a government at the next election. In Nazi Germany, the only elections were periodic plebiscites, without oppositional parties, with entirely one-sided propaganda, with no safeguards on secrecy, where some votes were patently falsified, and where a negative vote attracted sanctions. From the outset there was no possibility of unseating Hitler’s regime from below. Social and political controls functioned at all levels. The

Consensus, Coercion and the Third Reich

37

Gestapo was only the tip of the iceberg in this respect. The Nazi Party had a presence through its functionaries even in tenement blocks to ensure outward forms of compliance. Even mild criticism of the leadership was punished. Any expression of dissenting opinion was potentially hazardous. The least form of subversive activity had to reckon with draconian reprisals. Opponents of the regime did well to keep quiet. Nothing suggests that the third or so of voters who still supported the left-wing parties before the Nazi takeover became overnight converts to the new regime. For most, it was a matter of battening down the hatches, keeping heads down, avoiding trouble with the new overlords, and going through the motions of outward accommodation to the demands of the regime. Consensus here was for the most part coerced. Beyond all this, opinion was constantly manipulated by a relentless barrage of propaganda. In the absence of a free press, no public formation of oppositional opinion could be constructed. In a crowd screaming ‘Heil Hitler’ with upraised arms, it took courage not to join in. Yet the very greeting was a sign of outward acceptance of the regime and its leader. These well-known and self-evident restrictions of a ‘closed’ society controlled by repression make it difficult to speak of anything other than a manufactured consensus, and that only among the parts of society not terrorized into submission. Even so, if used in a more differentiated and nuanced way than Gellately allows, a notion of consensus is still necessary to understand the regime’s dynamism and effectiveness. II Until 1933, it is of course possible to measure support for the NSDAP’s manifesto for national renewal through the Party’s performance in pluralistic elections. At its height in free elections, in July 1932, it was supported by 37.4% of voters. In March 1933, when Hitler was already Reich Chancellor and his political opponents were being terrorized, it won 43.9% of the vote. Remarkably, a further 30.5% even in these conditions supported the parties of the Left (SPD and KPD). The remaining quarter or so of the electorate, beyond Nazi voters, it is fair to suggest, supported at least some of what the Nazis stood for. There was an overlap in values and extensive agreement, for instance on the need to rebuild national strength, revitalize the economy, restore ‘order’, recover ‘lost’ territories taken away under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, destroy communism, end the divisiveness of pluralistic democracy, and accept strong authoritarian leadership. Hitler and his regime were easily able to exploit this platform for widened support over the coming years. There was, in other words, a basis for the rapid extension of Nazi support. This could be called an underlying consensus. The term does not mean that there was blanket approval for what the regime did or full immersion of Nazi values. And it does not imply,

38

Ian Kershaw

as Gellately suggests, that the support remained largely intact until the end of the Third Reich. But it does indicate backing for a good deal of what the regime represented, and put into political practice, at least in the ‘good years’ until the middle of the war. Even several years after the war, around half of West Germans had positive memories of the pre-war years.¹² Without this backing, much of what transpired in the Third Reich seems barely explicable. It does, however, raise the question of how it is possible to gauge approval in conditions where expression of oppositional opinion was dangerous and where ‘public’ opinion was solely that of the regime. Once pluralistic elections ceased in March 1933, this can only be done impressionistically, and through drawing on sources which are extraordinarily difficult to evaluate. This material largely comprises the reports on ‘the situation’ or the ‘mood of the people’ compiled by a variety of Nazi authorities, supplemented for the pre-war years by regular reports produced by the exiled Social Democratic organization based in Prague, then later in Paris (now calling itself the ‘Sopade’). Interpretation of both sets of reports is fraught with difficulties. But generalizations about attitudes and behaviour of the population cannot avoid these sources. Numerous agencies of the Nazi state had to report regularly on the ‘mood’ of the population.¹³ Local police stations, for example, sent in reports to the district office, which in turn compiled a report for the head of the district administration (or, in towns and cities, the mayor). A further report went up the chain to the head of the regional administration, and from there to the ministry of the interior. Separate, parallel, reporting was carried out, for instance, by functionaries of the Nazi Party at all levels, by the local and regional offices of the Propaganda Ministry, by the judicial administration, by the Gestapo, and by the Security Service (the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst). Consecutive, unbroken series of reports covering the whole period of the dictatorship are available for only a few scattered localities and at regional level only exist intact for Bavaria. The central digests of SD reports started in 1938 and became frequent during the war, then ceased in the summer of 1944 (because some Nazi leaders thought them too defeatist in tone), though reports from some localities are extant down to April 1945. Naturally, the reports were heavily coloured in different degrees by pro-regime bias. And they scarcely presented a scientific sample of opinion. At the grass-roots level, hearsay formed the basis of most reports. Conversations were overheard in pubs, on trams, or in the workplace and elsewhere. What was said often represented desired opinion, such as positive comments about the F¨uhrer’s latest speech. The farther up the ladder the reports were produced, the more bland, by and large, they became. Lower down, relatively unsophisticated minds could sometimes record critical opinion in a way which would be siphoned out higher up. Given the weighting of the reports as a whole, it can generally be said that a good dose of scepticism is justified when they cite pro-regime comments. The negative remarks or behavioural patterns recorded, on the other hand, often speak for themselves.

Consensus, Coercion and the Third Reich

39

The ‘Sopade’ reports have an opposite bias.¹⁴ These reports were based upon information smuggled out of Germany by members of the illegal opposition. This information was collated by ‘Border Secretaries’ situated in a number of places just beyond the German frontier. The reports of the ‘Border Secretaries’ were sent to headquarters in Prague, where they were assembled into monthly digests called ‘Germany Reports’, then reproduced and distributed, for instance, to sympathizers abroad. The main focus was on opposition in factories and workplaces, but the reports also embraced wider issues such as popular reactions to foreign policy, attacks on the Christian Churches and the persecution of the Jews. The self-evident tendency here was to exaggerate the scale and significance of opposition. That being so, comments about the penetration of Nazism, the popularity of Hitler, the jubilation about foreign-policy triumphs and so on, carry weight. Taken in their entirety, critical assessment of these contrasting types of reports allows patterns and fluctuations of opinion to be impressionistically discerned. What comes across strongly is the differentiated nature of this opinion. Certain aspects of regime policy attracted vehement criticism. Prominent among these were the attritional attacks on the Christian Churches. To speak of consensus behind the regime in this area would be impossible. There is no doubt, for instance, that the vast majority of Catholics—a third or so of the population—bitterly resented the assault on Catholic institutions, traditions and observances that reached its height between 1935 and 1937. But the same critics of the regime in this particular issue could and did applaud the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, and other ‘triumphs’ of an assertive foreign policy—once, that is, the threat of war had dissipated—and praised Hitler for his statesmanship. This type of ideological schizophrenia was even more marked in the case of Franconian Protestants, who openly (and successfully) protested at the deposition of the Lutheran bishops of Bavaria and W¨urttemberg in 1934 while remaining most fervent Nazi supporters in a region which was a hotbed of vicious antisemitism. The grievances and discontents of daily life—for example, among farmers over agricultural policy, among industrial workers over low wages and pressurized working conditions, and among a variety of middle-class groups over myriad sectoral interests—are omnipresent in the reports. The Party functionaries, who were the visible face of Nazism in localities, often bore the brunt of the antagonism and ill-feeling. Hitler, on the other hand, represented the ‘sunny’ side of the regime, remained largely exempt (at least in the form of expression) from the criticism, and was widely admired for the ‘achievements’ which propaganda attributed almost exclusively to him personally. Specific animosities were, it is plain, perfectly compatible with wide-ranging consent to key facets of Nazi rule and approval of Hitler’s leadership. The consent cannot, however, be separated from the constant shaping through propaganda and the equally ever-present threat of recriminations for expressions

40

Ian Kershaw

of political nonconformity. That is, whatever consensus existed was both manufactured and coerced. This does not mean that it did not exist. A ‘Sopade’ report, following Hitler’s announcement in March 1935 that general military service was being reintroduced in contravention of the prohibitions of the Versailles Treaty, commented that the euphoria outdid that of August 1914. ‘People can be compelled to sing’, the report ran, ‘but not forced to sing with such enthusiasm. . . . Hitler has again gained extraordinary ground among the people. He is loved by many.’¹⁵ Even given the level of coercion and the impossibility of measuring opinion, it seems hard to deny that down to 1941 the Nazi regime could exploit large swathes of popular approval for its policies and the ideas behind them. An underlying consensus does not seem an inappropriate term for this. A test-case for consensus, at its sharpest point, is provided by the so-called ‘Jewish Question’, the quintessence of Nazi ideology. Interpreting opinion on the persecution of the Jews poses significant difficulties.¹⁶ All the indications are, nevertheless, that the regime was successful between 1933 and 1941 in deepening the awareness both of a ‘Jewish Question’ and of the desirability of finding a ‘solution’. Given the unyielding demonization of Jews by propaganda and the hazards in venturing any positive or friendly remarks seen to be supportive of the number-one ideological enemy, this was scarcely surprising. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between methods and goals (which were never precisely defined). The methods used by the Nazis were often criticized, even when the aim of ‘removing’ the Jews from Germany was apparently supported. At the very beginning of the Third Reich, in April 1933, for example, many people ignored the boycott of Jewish stores, which was called off after a day. For the most part, this probably did not represent any pro-Jewish feeling, but merely the economic advantages of the low prices in department stores. Economic benefit was the reason, a year or two later, that Bavarian farmers claimed to prefer Jewish to ‘aryan’ cattle-dealers. It was said they offered better prices.¹⁷ This in itself said nothing about the underlying attitude towards Jews. The open violence inflicted on Jews was also widely criticized. Again, the motives were not necessarily human sympathy. Often the disturbance of law and order was what angered people. The pogroms of November 1938, dubbed ‘Reichskristallnacht’, provided further evidence of these reactions. The vandalism by Party hordes, the destruction of property and waste of economic resources were all strongly criticized—and deep into Party circles. Many felt that what had happened was a disgrace in a ‘cultured people’. Signs of sympathy on human grounds were less evident, although Jewish eyewitness accounts provide evidence that it was not altogether lacking. But for all this criticism, there is little to suggest that a society free of Jews was an unpopular idea. Support for the Nazi aim coexisted with disapproval of the methods deployed in reaching it.

Consensus, Coercion and the Third Reich

41

In wartime conditions, doubtless influenced by the greatly amplified antiJewish propaganda in 1940–1, there is every indication that animosity towards the Jews sharpened considerably. SD reports suggested wide support for the introduction of the Yellow Star in September 1941, and for the deportations which began that autumn, implying (at a time when mass murder was beginning) that people favoured ‘a radical solution of the Jewish problem’.¹⁸ How widespread such views were is, however, impossible to gauge with any accuracy. The reports themselves mention some negative comment, attributed mainly to ‘church circles’. In the circumstances, it seems obvious that the most vociferous comments recorded in the reports were inevitably going to be those of supporters of the deportations. Most people were rightly fearful of speaking out too loudly if they disagreed with what was happening. Accepting that there was increased support for regime policy towards Jews, there is simply no way of measuring the levels of opinion, or of knowing what the many who did not speak out in favour of the deportations were truly thinking and wanting. Whether there was a consensus, and, if so, how large it was, is, from the evidence, impossible to know. Evaluating attitudes towards other discriminated minorities is scarcely easier. Attacks on communist and socialist opponents in the initial highly repressive phase of the regime in 1933–4 were certainly popular outside the subcultures involved. It is hard to imagine that the same was not true of the persecution of widening categories of ‘deviants’, ‘a-socials’, ‘criminal types’, gypsies and homosexuals, where the Nazis could easily play upon pre-existing prejudice. The limits of consensus were, however, reached when the mentally sick became targeted in the ‘euthanasia action’ of 1941. Public protest was, it is true, largely confined to Bishop Galen’s famous sermon in August that year. However, when rumours of what was taking place seeped out, widespread unease and disquiet among the population were evident.¹⁹ Negative opinion could scarcely find expression. But it evidently existed. The halting of the main ‘action’ (though the killing of the mentally ill continued in the concentration camps) itself indicated the Nazi leadership’s awareness that they had to tread warily with public attitudes in this matter. No obvious consensus underpinned the murder of ‘euthanasia’ victims. With the changing fortunes of war, from the winter crisis of 1941–2 onwards, it becomes increasingly difficult to speak of a ‘consensus’ behind the regime. The signs are that Hitler himself was becoming less popular, even before the disaster of Stalingrad brought clear indications that people for the first time were now holding him personally responsible for the mounting catastrophe.²⁰ In the last phase of the war, between 1943 and 1945, the reports are full of criticism of more or less every facet of the regime. In this phase, the terror which the regime had exported now boomeranged back on to the German people themselves. It is broadly true to say that terror before the war had been selective (though with ever widening targets) and that those not belonging to targeted sectors of the population were left generally unmolested if they did not step out of line. Even

42

Ian Kershaw

this generalization is, however, in danger of underplaying the fear that was real and never far from the surface in this society. In any case, the extent both of repression and of the fear of it were changing at the latest by the middle of the war. Anything taken to be a ‘defeatist’ comment could now have the direst consequences, irrespective of social class or status. The intensified terror and extreme repression, as the regime lashed out ever more wildly in its death agonies, are themselves an indicator of sharply dwindling support. To suggest that the consensus ‘broadly held’ even though some citizens ‘had had enough’²¹ conveys a misleading impression of the state of opinion as the Third Reich lurched towards G¨otterd¨ammerung and offers only the faintest of nods towards the widespread longing by this stage to see the back of the Hitler regime.²² That the regime was able to hold out to the bitter end, until Hitler was dead in his bunker and Germany laid completely in ruins, can be explained in various ways. But popular ‘consensus’ is not one of them. Only pure guesses are possible at the proportion of Germans still genuinely supporting the Hitler regime in its last weeks. Perhaps 10 per cent or so might be a reasonable ‘guesstimate’. But whatever the figure might have been, the crucial fact was that it was a minority still holding power and prepared to use it ruthlessly, since it had nothing to lose. Most of the rest by this stage wanted no more than the end of the war to come as quickly as possible, praying that the British or Americans reached them before the Russians did. III Acquaintance with the mass of opinion reports surviving from the Nazi state, complex and difficult though these sources are, allows little scope for sweeping generalizations about attitudes and behaviour of the German people during the Third Reich. There is too much evidence of daily dissent and even manifestations of limited opposition and protest—limited in significance, certainly, but noteworthy just the same—to support notions of a society terrorized by a totalitarian state into meek submission and automaton-like obedience and compliance. The opposite generalization, of a consensus holding to the end, of a society which never seriously deviated from its backing for Hitler and the regime, seems equally flawed. A survey of the reports on popular opinion suggests a more nuanced interpretation. Outside those social groups excluded from the ‘national community’—supporters of the banned left-wing parties, persecuted minorities (in prime place, Jews), and other ‘outcasts’—it does seem reasonable to suggest an underlying consensus behind the regime which did not start seriously to collapse before the middle of the war. This was rooted in the deep antipathies towards Weimar democracy and the visceral hatred of socialism in wide sections of the population. Brutal repression of perceived internal enemies was seen as a reasonable price for the economic recovery and national revitalization that took place in the

Consensus, Coercion and the Third Reich

43

early years of the Third Reich. And an almost all-pervasive sense of national resentment (greatly bolstered, of course, by propaganda) at the humiliating loss of Germany’s great-power status since the end of the First World War provided the backcloth to the greatest area of consensus, that produced by Hitler’s foreignpolicy triumphs in the 1930s. By 1938, however, worries that Hitler was leading Germany into another war were widespread and mounting. These dissipated during the victorious first phase of the war. But once the corner was turned in the winter of 1941–2, and the prospect of a glorious final victory evaporated once and for all, to be replaced by mounting disasters, the underlying consensus itself started to give way before largely collapsing between 1943 and 1945. This ‘underlying consensus’ existed at the intersection of the social expectations of national ‘salvation’ which accompanied Hitler’s rise to power, and the constantly propagated utopian vistas of the regime’s long-term goals of a dominant, prosperous and united Germany. The representative figure of this future vision was Hitler, and the expectations placed in ‘heroic’ leadership, and constantly pumped-up by a propaganda machine in overdrive when it came to the manufacture of the F¨uhrer cult, meant the personalization of this consensus in the Leader’s ‘great achievements’. Beneath this veneer of consensus, however, the everyday realities of the Third Reich revealed a society which belied the propaganda image of a united ‘national community’. The ways in which Nazism impinged upon everyday life were divisive rather than unifying. Areas of consent might be discerned; a general consensus cannot. Propaganda slogans about putting the community before the individual, and sacrifice today for prosperity and happiness tomorrow, had a hollow ring for the millions low down the social ladder who saw their own working conditions deteriorate while the rampant corruption and arrogance of power above them were all too evident. The disappointments and disillusionment of daily life could, however, find compensation—though not on a lasting basis—by the affective integration of a ‘national community’ united behind the goals invested in the almost deified ‘F¨uhrer’, who, to utilize concepts of Max Weber, stood outside and beyond the sphere of the ‘everyday’ (‘das Allt¨agliche’) and represented another, ‘exceptional’ (‘das Außerallt¨agliche’), sphere.²³ This was the functional reality of ‘charismatic domination’. As long as Hitler stood for the building of a great and powerful Germany, extending her borders through a series of successful coups attained without bloodshed, then war with unheard-of military triumphs and with minimal losses, the superficial consensus layered on the daily disenchantments and grievances could hold. But the euphoria of the ‘triumphs’ soon subsided again into the greyness of everday existence. Such euphoria could be repeated as long as good fortune prevailed. But, as Hitler himself said, it could not be ‘bottled up and preserved’.²⁴ And it could not be sustained once irredeemable failure and irreversible misfortune set in. The ‘exceptional’ sphere with its focus on the ‘vision’ embodied by Hitler naturally incorporated the ‘struggle’ to defeat and destroy the perceived enemies

44

Ian Kershaw

of a ‘national community’, a notion which gained definition only through those excluded from it. A functional purpose of the persecution of the Jews was to channel pent-up aggression towards ideological targets which, in reality, had no connection with the grievances of everyday life. Many Germans had no actual contact with Jews. This did not prevent propaganda portraying Jews as Germany’s enemies gaining ground, with corresponding approval of a future Germany without any Jewish presence. By 1941, antisemitism’s main role was no longer to mobilize the masses, but to justify and prepare the population for the steps that were leading to the ‘final solution’. The torrent of anti-Jewish propaganda, nevertheless, far from abating, actually intensified thereafter in the attempt to reinforce acceptance of the regime’s paranoid view that destroying the Jews was an essential part of Germany’s war effort, and also to spread a sense of complicity in the final showdown with the arch-enemy which, it was more than hinted, was now under way.²⁵ The impact was to remind people that terrible things had been carried out in Germany’s name and make them fearful of whatever punishment and retribution might follow at the end of the war. Before the rapid downward spiral of support between the ‘Stalingrad’ winter of 1942–3 and the end of the war, what consensus there was could, then, be located in the ‘exceptional’ sphere of the regime. In contrast, the ‘everyday’ sphere encompassed conflict, division, dissension and discord reflective of lingering and persistent pluralisms beneath the trumpeted unity of the national ‘community of fate’. That dissent and opposition could never be translated into popular revolt was the consequence of the high level of terroristic repression carried out by the desperate agencies of the dying regime, which, at the grass-roots level, could depend upon assistance from the dwindling minority of Nazified fanatics. The accompanying all-pervasive intimidation did the rest. With the end of the war obviously approaching, quiescence, not suicidal opposition, was an obvious strategy for most. But that the regime was able until the middle of the war to unleash such dynamism and energy, invested in the pursuit of national ‘salvation’, is barely explicable without acknowledging the success in mobilizing society—or at least large sections of it—behind ‘visionary’ goals which entailed war and genocide. Consensus and coercion were inextricably entwined in the manufactured support for the regime’s ideological goals.

No t e s 1 Martin

Broszat et al. (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols. (Munich and Vienna, 1977–93). 2 For an excellent analysis of the symbolism of the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, see Tilman Allert, Der deutsche Gruß: Geschichte einer unheilvollen Geste (Frankfurt am Main, 2005).

Consensus, Coercion and the Third Reich 3I

45

defined my usage in Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–45 (Oxford, 1983), 2–4; and ‘ ‘‘Widerstand ohne Volk?’’ Dissens und Widerstand im Dritten Reich’, in J¨urgen Schm¨adeke and Peter Steinbach (eds.), Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1985), 779–98. 4 A key stage in making a wider public aware of what specialists in the field had long since taken for granted was the major ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’ which began to tour main German cities in 1995, entitled ‘Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944’ (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht between 1941 and 1944). 5 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York, 1996). 6 Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001). 7 Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1990). 8 Gellately, Backing Hitler, 1. 9 Ibid., 199–203. 10 The detailed study by Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 1999), reached conclusions which, regarding the persecution of the Jews, in many ways complement those of Gellately. Johnson (483–4) was, however, careful to distance himself from ‘the recent trend in historical research’ which ‘threatens to underestimate and obscure the enormous culpability and capability of the leading organs of Nazi terror, such as the Gestapo, and to overestimate the culpability of ordinary German citizens’. 11 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London, 2005), 114, 117. Evans has even more strongly criticized the emphasis upon consensus and underlined the ‘topdown’ terroristic nature of the regime in his British Academy Raleigh Lecture of 2006. 12 Ulrich Herbert, ‘Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of the Third Reich’, in Richard Bessel (ed.), Life in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), 97. 13 Published editions of such reports include: Heinz Boberach (ed.), Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938–1945, 17 vols. (Herrsching, 1984); Martin Broszat, Elke Fr¨ohlich and Falk Wiesemann (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit: Soziale Lage und politisches Verhalten der Bev¨olkerung im Spiegel vertraulicher Berichte (Munich and Vienna, 1977); Bernhard Vollmer (ed.), Volksopposition im Polizeistaat: Gestapo- und Regierungsberichte 1934–1936 (Stuttgart, 1957) (for Aachen); Franz Josef Heyen (ed.), Nationalsozialismus im Alltag (Boppard am Rhein, 1967) (for Koblenz-Trier); Robert Th´evoz et al. (eds.), Pommern 1934/35 im Spiegel von Gestapo-Lageberichten und -Sachakten (Cologne and Berlin, 1974); J¨org Schadt (ed.), Verfolgung und Widerstand unter dem Nationalsozialismus in Baden (Stuttgart, 1976); Thomas Klein (ed.), Die Lageberichte der Geheimen Staatspolizei u¨ ber die Provinz Hessen-Nassau 1933–1936, 2 vols. (Cologne and Vienna, 1986); and, with specific reference to the persecution of the Jews, Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard J¨ackel (eds.), Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945 (D¨usseldorf, 2004).

46 14 The

Ian Kershaw

‘Sopade’ reports, both central and the regional ones on which the digest draws, are to be found in the Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie in Bonn. A seven-volume reproduction of the Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands [‘Sopade’] 1934–1940 (Frankfurt, 1980) made the central reports widely available. They were carefully utilized by Bernd St¨over, Volksgemeinschaft im Dritten Reich: Die Konsensbereitschaft der Deutschen aus der Sicht sozialistischer Exilberichte (D¨usseldorf, 1993). 15 Deutschland-Berichte, 2.279. 16 See, for important assessments, David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford, 1992); Peter Longerich, ‘‘Davon haben wir nichts gewußt!’’: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich, 2006); and also the reflections of Otto Dov Kulka, ‘The German Population and the Jews: State of Research and New Perspectives’, in David Bankier (ed.), Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941 (New York, Oxford and Jerusalem, 2000), 271–81. The superb edition of relevant reports edited by Kulka and J¨ackel (see note 13) makes the sources available but cannot solve the problems of interpretation. 17 See Kershaw, Popular Opinion, 240–4. 18 Kulka and J¨ ackel (eds.), Die Juden, 456–9, 470–2, 476–9, 485–6 (quotation, 486). 19 For the damaging effects on public morale in W¨ urttemberg, where one of the killing asylums, Grafeneck, was situated, see Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: W¨urttemberg under the Nazis (London, 2006), 126–34. 20 Some indicators of this, not drawn from the reports on ‘mood’, can be seen in G¨ otz Aly (ed.), Volkes Stimme: Skepsis und F¨uhrervertrauen im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2006). 21 Gellately, Backing Hitler, 3, 226. 22 It is difficult to reconcile such generalizations with, for instance, the picture of one German province in the last phase of the war in Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 191, 313. 23 See Weber’s comments on the specifically ‘exceptional’ nature (‘spezifisch außerallt¨aglichen Charakters’) of ‘charismatic domination’ and the threat of ‘routinization’ (‘Verallt¨aglichung’) in Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie, Studienausgabe ( T¨ubingen, 1985), 142–8, 661–2. 24 Helmut Heiber (ed.), Lagebesprechungen im F¨ uhrerhauptquartier 1942–1945 (Berlin, 1962), 284. 25 Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 183, points out that over half of the wartime antisemitic lead stories in the main Nazi newspaper, the V¨olkischer Beobachter, were published in the single year of 1943, when the numbers of Jews living in Germany had fallen drastically and while the ‘final solution’ was in full swing.

PART 2 T H E F I R S T D I C TATO R S H I P S

This page intentionally left blank

4 Liberation from Autonomy: Mapping Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time Jochen Hellbeck

In May 1935, Nikolai Ustrialov, a 44-year-old law professor who had lived for the past decade and a half in Harbin, crossed the border into Soviet Russia to return to his homeland from which he had emigrated after the defeat of the White movement in 1920. Formerly a provincial leader of the liberal Kadet Party, Ustrialov rethought his political convictions in the years of emigration. For a time he propounded a programme of ‘national Bolshevism’, which approvingly read the Soviet policies of the NEP period as a turn away from misguided communist principles and a rebirth of the Russian imperial state. The sweep of Stalin’s industrialization programme in the late 1920s and early 1930s prompted Ustrialov once more to reconsider his views, as he began to sing odes to the socialist construction campaign. Along with most other Russians living in Harbin, Ustrialov worked for the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway. At some point he was awarded Soviet citizenship, for by 1929, in the wake of the Soviet–Chinese conflict, the Soviet state allowed only naturalized citizens to work for its railway. When the Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo in March 1935, a total of 25,000 former railway workers and employees, including Ustrialov and his family, boarded the Manchurian railroad one last time to return to the Soviet Union.¹ The diary in which Ustrialov documented his journey and his subsequent life in the Soviet Union resonated with a striking historical consciousness. As he pointed out, the year of his return marked a historical threshold in the life of the Soviet Union at large. Walking through the streets of Moscow while an international youth festival was being held, he observed the ‘cohorts and legions of youth, the wonderful early autumn sun, the sounds of orchestras screaming from the loudspeakers, sounds filled with bravura and fighting spirit, resounding in a major key. . . . An existential pathos. Yes, it is so clear that our revolution is an upsurge, a beginning, a thesis in a new dialectical cycle.’ Consistent with his belief that the Soviet regime was progressing historically to a new stage of development, Ustrialov apprehended the young athletes at the youth

50

Jochen Hellbeck

festival as incarnations of this progression. They appeared to him as exemplars of the new socialist man. There was also a strong self-reflexive component in his observations, for Ustrialov’s ability to recognize the contours of the new socialist world was proof to him that he himself possessed the purity of thought required of a true Soviet citizen.² In the diary he constantly tested his inner disposition toward the Soviet system: was he truly inspired by the enthusiasm and belief that characterized the ideal Soviet citizen, and thus in a position ‘to earn a Soviet biography’—regardless of the fact that his passport certified his Soviet credentials? The task was difficult, perhaps even impossible. Ustrialov sensed how different he was from the parading youth in their white athletic outfits whom he enviously observed from a distance. Their vigour and exuberance only reinforced his own sense of being old and historically outlived: ‘We are a dying generation. The Soviet epoch is the sunset for us and our lives.’³ Ustrialov and the other returning Russians from Harbin were under intense and constant NKVD surveillance. The security police had instructions to investigate the social and political past of every returning individual. They were believed to be foreign spies, working under instructions of the Japanese state. As early as in 1936 several harbintsy had been arrested and a public campaign was under way exposing them as Japanese agents. Under these circumstances it was exceedingly difficult for Ustrialov to begin a new life. His applications to teach law were turned down (for some time he was able to work as Professor of Economic Geography in the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineering), as were many of the essays that he submitted to the Soviet press (Izvestiia did publish some of them, however, and as late as April 1937).⁴ Ustrialov characterized these setbacks in characteristic ways. It was an unbearable thought for him to see himself being reduced to a mere bystander of history’s march toward completion: ‘I want to be up to my neck in activity—only not to be superfluous in our time, in a historical moment—when the fate of our great country, our great revolution, is being decided.’⁵ As time went by, Ustrialov became increasingly frustrated with his failing efforts at finding integration, and he complained to the diary about how he was being treated by Soviet authorities. Yet these complaints only made matters worse, for he read his doubts as expressions of the very unreformed, ‘old’ and ‘heretical’ self inside him that barred him from entering the new Soviet society. He resolved to attack these ‘pessimistic’ moods with redoubled effort. Among the many personal documents—letters, diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, etc.—made available by the opening of the Soviet archives, there is a large corpus of strikingly self-reflective materials in which the author’s self appears as both subject and object of reflection. This essay focuses on one of them, the diary of Nikolai Ustrialov. Yet Ustrialov was far from alone in thinking about himself in such terms. Other personal records from the same period may not match his diaristic observations on the level of their articulation, but they express a similar desire to participate in a time deemed to be historically extraordinary,

Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time

51

a similar urge to ‘earn a Soviet biography’, and a similar fear of being relegated to the sidelines of history or indeed be crushed by history. Their authors strove toward an enlarged sense of life, identified with the beauty, vigour and youth of the marching collective. Life was measured in terms of emotional and intellectual inclusion in this age. By contrast, the spectre of a life evolving outside the collective or the flow of history recast the individual into a ‘superfluous man’ (lishnii chelovek), a person useless for society and without a purpose in life.⁶ The study of these narratives discloses an arena of revolutionary politics that for a long time was not visible to researchers. We can now follow how individuals took up the revolution’s impetus for total transformation as they proceeded to sculpt or remake their own lives. These acts of individual self-fashioning often originated amidst intense social and political pressures, but in most instances they were more than political and utilitarian in character. The striving to align one’s life with the revolution and give it meaning and direction held important moral as well as existential significance. To refer to these scenarios as acts of ‘internalization’ of communist ideology is misleading, if this implies that the ideology originated in the party or other Soviet institutions, external to the individual in question. Ideology, Ustrialov’s diary and other personal narratives show, does not pre-exist the subject: it is only in the act of individual appropriation, as authors reflect on their lives and reframe it through the lens of a ‘worldview’, that ideology comes to life. The mechanisms by which ideology is embodied, while coming to life at the same time, complicate our understanding of the relationship between authoritarian regimes and individual citizens, between public and private, and between ideological and non-ideological realms—entities often conceived of in dualistic terms. These considerations form the theoretical focus of my essay. They are also relevant to the study of popular opinion under totalitarian regimes. As other contributors to this volume point out, the attempt to understand what people in such regimes ‘really’ thought has obvious appeal, but in view of the source basis that it relies on—surveillance reports produced by the security police—carries a number of dangers. Surveillance reports, often complete with direct quotes from individuals overheard by informants, seem to bring us closer to the people than most other available sources; yet their immediacy and atmospheric richness can be deceptive. We don’t know whether the people chronicled in the report truly spoke the very words attributed to them, or whether their statements were translated, in the very process of being recorded by informants, into an idiom that made more sense for the NKVD and served its operational needs. Moreover, the reports are structured by intellectual assumptions on the part of the political police that the subjects who are recorded in the records may not have shared.⁷ NKVD reports typically characterized their subjects in terms of social ‘class’ (in the eschatological understanding of Soviet Marxism) and political views, differentiating between ‘conscious’, ‘positive’ views on the one side, and ‘negative moods’ or, indeed, ‘counter-revolutionary’ positions, on the other. To simply

52

Jochen Hellbeck

adopt this language of class would mean to accept as ‘social reality’ a set of templates that in the communist messianic mind represented temporal roadmarks toward the communist future (with ‘petty-bourgeois’ expressing a greater distance toward that future than ‘poor peasant’, which in turn ranked behind ‘proletarian’).⁸ To use the political fault-lines drawn up in the security police reports would reproduce the ruling communists’ manichean and exclusionary political imagination, and not consider the much broader subjective effects of the Soviet revolution. Such an analysis, to return to the example with which I began, would turn a blind eye to the revolutionary ferment animating the diary of Nikolai Ustrialov who in the secret police files appeared as nothing but a diehard counter-revolutionary and spy, waiting to be exposed. A critical reading of these sources therefore ought to begin with an analysis of the categories and divisions used by the regime’s surveillance bodies to make sense of social reality. Studies of popular opinion based on surveillance reports run yet another danger, of producing snapshots of individuals bereft of a biographical trajectory. By replicating the frozen images provided by the reports (‘Worker Petrov was overheard as saying . . .’, ‘housewife Elena Ivanovna complained . . .’), they run the risk of exploding isolated episodes into individuals’ beliefs and commitments writ large. Several contributors to this volume respond to the problem by calling for an understanding of individuals as situative and essentially hybrid subjects, perfectly able to espouse multiple and even contradictory attitudes. This makes sense, but is it really a solution? Analytically this proposition represents a step back, rather than forward, for it leaves us with subjects who appear to act freely in circumstances which are not mapped out in close detail and have no structuring effect on the individual. By contrast, a close investigation of firstperson records such as the diary of Nikolai Ustrialov illuminates a set of concerns and commitments that combine to form a distinct biographical trajectory. This development is often not free of doubts, struggles and backslidings, and yet what it reveals in the first place is an imperative to work through them, to rationalize and reconcile observed problems and contradictions. It is therefore important that we redirect our enquiry of who individuals were, from the identification of select expressions of opinion—whether overheard by the secret police, collected by e´migr´e organizations (witness the Sopade reports produced by the German Social Democratic Party), or culled from personal diaries by researchers themselves—to an understanding of subjectivity as a processual quality. This is especially true in the Soviet revolutionary context, where notions of the ideal personality were predicated on intense struggle and the striving toward transcendence. Just as in the case of surveillance reports, an enquiry of first-person narratives has little to offer if it reads the views expressed in the document merely as reflectors of a social reality, as a window to the author’s subjective experience. Much more is gained by directing attention to the context and the problems that accounted for the creation of the very source and the notions of self represented in it. The emphasis shifts from an analysis of individuals’ subjective worldviews

Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time

53

to the self as a particular problem of the age. To use Ustrialov’s example, our enquiry moves from an examination of the ‘reliability’ and ‘subjective bias’ of his personal record to the reasons that impelled him to represent himself as a subject of history and scrutinize every thought and observation for their historical meaning. Such an analysis brings into view a larger forcefield of thinking about, and acting on, the self in accordance with revolutionary standards of rationality, transparency and purity, which described the very core of the revolution of 1917. The language of self did not originate in a preformulated, canonical corpus of ‘state ideology’. It thrived, rather, in a larger revolutionary ecosystem of which the communist regime was as much producer as product. The commitment toward self-improvement, social activism and self-expression in concert with history long predated the Russian revolution; it was intensely cultivated and reproduced in the circle culture (kruzhki) of Russia’s liberal and socialist intelligentsia. In fact, to be worthy of the ascription intelligent was to show a disposition as a critically thinking subject of history. This nineteenth-century legacy shaped the self-understanding of revolutionary actors in 1917, and it provided the matrix for the politics of social identity and individual self-definition, pursued by state and citizens alike.⁹ Ustrialov’s case illustrates this point well. A reading of his diary notes against the ‘ideological language of the Stalinist state’ as the sole frame of reference would lose sight of a larger continuum of thinking and acting about himself that extended back in time beyond the years of Stalin’s rule. Writing in the early 1920s, Ustrialov recalled how in the days of civil war he had been ‘tormented’ by an ‘irrepressible feeling’ that forced him to make a confession to a fellow officer: he wanted of course the White movement to prevail, but ‘the pathos of History is on their [the Reds’, J.H.] side, nevertheless. Ours is not the new Russia, the future. Only former people [byvshie liudi] . . . Something is wrong here.’¹⁰ The ‘pathos of history’ referred to the act of leading Russian society toward the perfect end of historical time, an act that fell to the vanguard formation of the Russian intelligentsia. It was this intelligentsia legacy which grounded Ustrialov’s search for self-realization throughout a prolonged revolutionary moment, from the 1910s through the 1930s, and which by the same token supplied the frame in which his intense reflections on himself as a historical subject took place. The fact that Ustrialov made his efforts to align himself with the course of the revolution the theme of his personal diary clashes with an assumption widespread among historians that Soviet citizens responded to the pressures of the Stalinist regime by withdrawing and concealing their selves. Many historians project onto the Soviet scene a liberal subjectivity, as they endow Soviet citizens with individualist strivings and a fundamental desire for individual autonomy.¹¹ Yet the sources from that period more often speak a different language: of individuals longing to escape from a position of individual autonomy which they frequently associated with a historically outlived, ‘bourgeois’ form of existence, and seeking meaning, purpose, and completion within an imagined larger collectivity. This

54

Jochen Hellbeck

desire was prominent, as Sheila Fitzpatrick’s essay in this volume points out, among social groups stigmatized by the Soviet regime—‘class enemies’, such as kulaks and their dependents, or ‘former people’ like Ustrialov. Yet the flight from autonomy, I would claim, was not confined to distinct social groups. As especially diary narratives show, even authors who were not openly stigmatized by the regime responded with alarm when they began to voice personal thoughts in a departure from ‘common’ goals and needs. They feared that a desire to stop fighting and be left in peace was evidence of old, ‘bourgeois’ instincts creeping up in them. The state of their consciousness, these authors felt, had the power of altering their social identity. To this extent the problem of autonomous thought was not bound to firmly delineated stigmatized classes; it had a universal quality.¹² Not every self-reflective diary from this age, to be sure, shows the workings of a socialist subjectivity, with its triple valuation of self-expression, collective action and historical purpose, in equal measure, and even fewer reveal the sum of its defining traits. But this disposition mapped the default position for selfdefinition in the Soviet realm. Some self-narratives, like Ustrialov’s, painted the contours of this self in sharp relief, others did so more implicitly. It denoted a self-consciousness that is best understood not as something one could possess once and for all, but as a state of mind that was attained in the very act of critical self-engagement and the search for transformation, of raising the self above its petty, parochial concerns onto a higher plane of thought and action in tune with the revolution and with history. As an ideal form of personhood it was markedly illiberal in the sense that it lacked a positive evaluation of autonomy and private values.¹³ Remarkably the contours of this ideal of socialist selfhood as well as its structuring effects on the self-narratives of people living through the Stalin era has not been recognized—in part because of missing sources, but in larger measure because of an insistent liberal bias, the history of projecting liberal views onto the Soviet scene, and along with this an insistence to see Stalinera individuals as fully constituted (liberal) subjects who defined themselves against external political and ideological challenges.¹⁴ Highly prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, ideology later receded from the vocabulary of scholars of communism and fascism. Its disappearance has a variety of reasons: the demise of totalitarian theory with its simplistic understanding of ideology as an instrumentalist weapon; the concurrent rise of social science methods in the historical profession which assumed a universality of social developments and denied ideology any shaping role; and lastly social history, which emerged in reaction to intellectual history and its preferences for high culture and topdown narratives of ideological dissemination. The current postmodernist climate in Western academic culture—distrust of overarching narratives, for fear of their hegemonizing thrust, and instead the favouring of moral relativism and a protean, situative and performative reading of subjectivity—also makes it

Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time

55

difficult to register systems of power that generated absolute intellectual and emotional commitments.¹⁵ Most markedly the prevailing distrust against ideology is expressed in the domain of Alltagsgeschichte, a prolific subfield of social history. It is a remarkable fact that Alltagsgeschichte enjoys greatest currency in the context of one of the most self-consciously ideological regimes of the modern age, the Third Reich. The very assumption of an ideological regime seems to prompt the question how people ‘really’ lived and how their everyday—a sphere presumed to lie outside the reach of ‘party’ or ‘state’ ideology—evolved. Practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte deliberately disconnect their areas of enquiry from ideological projects of the party state, they foreground individual actors and the clusters of local meaning (Eigen-Sinn) inhabited by them, and they thus posit a gap in translation which the grand homogenizing designs of the state fail to cross.¹⁶ And yet the insistence on the primacy of everyday life over the realms of ideology runs the risk of ignoring the conceptual underpinnings of life, its definition and purpose, in a specific period. Such meaning is not universal and not to be culled from universal strategies of daily survival. I find it difficult to subscribe to the proposition, which at first sight may appear basic and unassailable, that Soviet citizens sought to live ‘ordinary’ lives.¹⁷ Many of them strove—or were made to strive—for extraordinary lives, and by the same token Stalinism was an extraordinary period not just because of the excesses caused by the regime, but because of a larger cultural disposition toward the extraordinary. In other words, I believe we must historicize the conceptual underpinnings of the meaning of life, of personal life, and of an epoch. In light of such reconceptualization we are bound to come to very different conclusions about the terms of interaction between the Soviet regime and its citizens.¹⁸ The question to be asked is what ideology offered to individuals in substantive terms, independently of its instrumentalist uses. Why was it appealing, and what about it was appealing? Which parts of the ideological text did an individual appropriate, and what were the effects of this productive encounter between ideology and the self? Hannah Arendt observes that ideologies ‘always contain in themselves the logic of their respective ‘‘idea’’ ’. The idea contains in itself a logical process which is spun out by ideology. Arendt seems to suggest that ideology is not a ready-made, fully articulated text; rather, it unpacks itself, like compressed software, in the process of individual appropriation. Yet Arendt is not interested in the individual as an active subject. For her ideology itself is the driving force, and in encountering the individual it eliminates subjectivity: ‘ideological thinking is . . . independent of all [individual] experience’ and represents an ‘emancipation of thought from experienced and experiential reality’.¹⁹ This view underrates individuals’ active and creative participation in the appropriation of ideology, a process which asked them to rework, rather than abandon, subjective experiences. Ideology worked by impelling individuals to read the world through its lens, to structure their sense of self and thereby render it

56

Jochen Hellbeck

meaningful. This was a creative task which could assume as many different shapes as the amount of individual subjects it produced. Individuals poured considerable subjective labour into this process. Raising psychological experience to ideological consciousness was a demanding challenge that kept generating contradictions, experiences of failure, and moments of doubt. But rather than privileging such moments as static expressions of self, I suggest that we appreciate the larger, often dialectical, structures of self-becoming in which they were embedded. Similarly, we should understand strategies of ‘rationalization’, which were very widespread in personal sources from this period, less as desperate attempts to ‘rationalize away’ uncomfortable truths (as modern psychology would have it) than as a constitutive mechanism of ideological appropriation. Rationalization—the ability to detect a rational logic in random acts of state policy, such as sudden arrests of relatives or friends, or one’s own misfortune—was essential for Soviet citizens who were supposed to believe in scientific laws of development and the rationality of their existence. Stalin-era contemporaries were constantly asked to rationalize, to make their daily observations fit ideological mandates. The more their observations parted from the required viewpoint, the more they were expected to struggle to reinhabit the grid. An individual’s ability to rationalize a phenomenon was thus a characteristic of mental strength and spiritual health. What is more, these mechanisms were not solely internal processes, meant to restore one’s peace of mind. Individuals applied this agenda of ‘mastering ideology’ also to their social lives as workers and citizens, such as when they denounced bosses at work or signed public letters calling for the execution of enemies of the people.²⁰ While I have so far focused on the plasticity of the self in relation to ideology, the same understanding must be applied to ‘ideology’ (or ‘the revolutionary project’) itself, which I am using as a reified term and certainly not to refer to a bordered, discrete, and essentialized entity. Instead of a one-dimensional dyad—ideology vs. the self—we should move toward a multidimensional investigation that examines the plasticity of each of these poles, and indeed highlights the processual character of their interaction, rather than presenting them as ready-made poles. Returning to the individual, I suggest that we shift our understanding of ideology from a pre-given, fixed textual corpus, in the sense of ‘Communist Party ideology’, to a ferment working in the individual and producing a great deal of variation, as it interacted with the subjective life aspects of a given individual. This perspective restores the individual as an agent, but as an ideological agent. Instead of privileging discourse as the sole historical agent, I suggest a circular or dialogical notion of ideology and subjectivity. The individual operates like a clearinghouse where ideology is unpacked, personalized, and in the process the individual remakes himself into a subject with distinct and meaningful biographical features. And in activating the individual, ideology itself comes to life. Ideology should therefore be seen as a living and adaptive force, it has power only to the extent that it operated in living individuals who engage their selves and the world as ideological subjects. Much of the logic of

Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time

57

the revolutionary master-narratives of transformation (transformation of social space and self-transformation), collectivization (collectivization of individualist producers and collectivization of the self ), and purification (political purge campaigns and acts of personal self-improvement) was provided and reproduced by Soviet citizens who kept rationalizing unfathomable state policies and thus were ideological agents, on a par with the leaders of party and state. Ideology, thus understood, was a living tissue of meaning that was seriously reflected upon. Ideology created tensions, as it often stood in marked contrast to individuals’ observational truth. The point, however, is not to focus on the points of tensions themselves but to see how individuals worked through them: how intolerable they found a condition of a ‘dual soul’, how little appeal a retreat into private life had for them, and how they applied mechanisms of rationalization, often in dialectical form, in attempts to restore harmonious notions of self. Much of the ideological tension and work in the early Soviet system did not take place between the state on the one hand and its citizens (as fully constituted selves) on the other, but in the ways citizens engaged their own selves.²¹ Ideology and subjectivity however were intertwined in even more intricate ways. So far we have discussed only how the subject appropriated ideology that was presumably enforced on her/him. Yet there is an anterior dimension to this interaction. In reading the desire Ustrialov and many of his contemporaries expressed to live a purposeful and significant life it seems that there was a widespread urge to ideologize one’s life, to turn it into the expression of a firm, internally consistent, totalizing Weltanschauung. This orientation toward meaning and social inclusion, which also spurred a heightened awareness of one’s biography, intersected with the communist project of remaking mankind, and the regime was thus able to channel strivings for self-validation and transcendence which emerged outside of the ideological boundaries of Bolshevism properly speaking. The concept of the ideological subject, to repeat, does not apply to all empirical Soviet individuals or to the totality of an individual even if his writings show evidence of such a disposition. What it refers to is a culturally specific frame of selfhood, of what constitutes a desirable life. For the Soviet inter-war period, and conceivably for much of Europe between the 1920s and 1940s as well, ideology in the sense of a personal Weltanschauung and a heightened sense of one’s biography was constitutive of subjectivity. This orientation did not manifest itself at all times; Soviet citizens may not have articulated it when they stood in bread lines and cursed the state distribution system of goods, but it appeared (or, more accurately: was generated) when they recited their autobiographies or justified themselves in public, and often also when they sat down privately to reflect on their lives.²² Within the larger communist frame, the Stalin era stood out as a particular time period defined by Stalin’s and other communist leaders’ deliberate decision to force Soviet society through a historical leap, toward the end of historical

58

Jochen Hellbeck

time.²³ This sense, vividly reflected in documents from the Stalin period, of the present time as a threshold moment of world history, coupled with an extraordinary willingness to resort to violent means in order to cross the imagined threshold, generated countless individual projects of self-transformation, which were similarly characterized by an unprecedented sense of possibility and necessity. These narratives in some sense depended on an environment of violence to come to fruition.²⁴ And yet, this does not necessarily diminish their experiential relevance. It is familiar to us from the history of religion that the discovery of truth is often based on prolonged and recurrent suffering. Within the years of Stalin’s rule, the mid-1930s again stood out. By 1935, the year of Nikolai Ustrialov’s return to the USSR, the exceeding violence of the collectivization campaign had abated, and the achievements of the socialist construction campaign were in fuller view. The physiognomy of Soviet Russia had visibly changed. Millions of people from the lower classes were receiving education and trappings of outward culture; the modern values of rationalization, discipline and science, relentlessly preached by regime activists, seemed to leave behind ingrained Russian notions of submission and apathy. Looking back from this vantage point onto the first two decades of Soviet power, observers with a trained dialectical eye could discern the zigzags of Revolution, Civil War, NEP, and Stalin’s second revolution as lawful developments culminating in the founding age of socialism. Such dialectical thinking received further validation when applied to the international context. The rise of fascism in Germany in particular confirmed the sense of an imminent final battle, the final dialectical clash on history’s progression toward the communist future. Ustrialov was obsessed with such thoughts. Dialectics, he noted in his diary, made his head spin, ‘like from first class champagne’. The Hegelian formula was so intoxicating because it provided a perspective of personal absolution and integration into the new society. The pictures of parading youth in Moscow filled him with a conviction that the revolutionary present marked a new beginning, ‘a thesis in a new dialectical cycle’. This dialectical upsurge would also put him personally back on track, free him from his erroneous past, spent on the losing side of history, and thrust him forward as a historical subject who comprehended and worked with the scientific laws that spiralled history forward and higher. Dialectics also explained (away) many of ugly and coercive phenomena in Soviet life that remained in plain view for the Manchurian visitor. In Ustrialov’s dialectical reading, these were vestiges of the old, barbarian past, bound to disappear as history progressed forward toward the bright future.²⁵ As he kept his Moscow diary Ustrialov was aware that he was being watched and followed with a great deal of suspicion. An entry in his journal eloquently evoked the ‘stares of cold ‘‘vigilance’’ and dignified distrust’ that greeted him in Soviet offices, to which he turned in search of work and a livelihood. Instead of finding integration, he was pushed back into a position of ‘painful isolation’

Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time

59

from society.²⁶ In view of this environment, Ustrialov’s diary can be read as a desperate attempt to prove to Soviet officials, and the NKVD in particular—that he was fully and genuinely committed to the Soviet cause. Yet the desire for integration also bore great intellectual and emotional relevance for Ustrialov personally. Long before his return to Soviet Russia Ustrialov had kept a diary, the principal purpose of which was to think through the pressing questions of his age, which for Ustrialov were synonymous with the pressing questions of his personal development. A firm believer in the existence of laws of history that shaped the lives of nations, and equally that of any individual, Ustrialov used his diary to align himself with the course of history. On one level, the intellectual trajectory of this erstwhile liberal Kadet who turned to national Bolshevism before embracing Stalin’s industrialization campaign, suggested considerable political adaptability; on another, it revealed a great deal of consistency, as Ustrialov always sought to understand his age and himself in historical and dialectical terms.²⁷ To think dialectically meant to inhabit a dynamic system of thought predicated on notions of struggle, contradictions and reconciliation. Above all it meant that you had to personally live and work through the problems of your age. In February 1937 Ustrialov learned that his teaching position in the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineering would not be renewed in the fall. In his diary he complained that he was unjustly accused as a ‘(socially) alien element’. But he felt immediately compelled to invalidate these protesting gestures, for they indicated that ‘microbes of petit-bourgeois individualism’ were still surviving in him. They only nourished the suspicion that he was not truly one with the socialist cause.²⁸ The dark voice of individual protest surfaced again and again. The last entry of Ustrialov’s diary, dated 4 June 1937, began with these words: ‘Sometimes you think—how good it would be not to think! Indeed, there is something restless and exhausting in the very chaos of one’s thinking. Black thoughts, like droning flies that circle around you and bite.’ For someone as dialectically conditioned as Ustrialov, these negating thoughts could not stand on their own. They called out to be critically engaged and refuted. The entry, a miniature exercise in dialectical thought, proceeded by rationalizing his despair and ending on an optimistic note: But, on the other hand, isn’t there in the nature of thought something that shines from inside and is capable of fighting the darkness of these black flies? Of course there is. Thus it appears that it is the antagonism between light and darkness that exhausts and wears out our cerebral apparatus. ‘The light has triumphed, but the apparatus has finally surrendered.’ How good it would be not to think!—Naturally that is nonsense. That would be tantamount to saying: ‘How good not to live.’ For—cogito ergo sum. What is the conclusion? Light, more light! Mehr Licht!²⁹

Ustrialov was arrested on 6 July 1937. In a letter to his wife that he sent from prison the next day he asked her to send him the diary notebook. Evidently

60

Jochen Hellbeck

Ustrialov believed that the diary would help him prove to the NKVD investigators that his political consciousness was beyond doubt. The prosecutors appear to have read the text differently. An investigating official underlined many critical and self-critical passages in the diary, as well as references to Soviet political figures and institutions. Ustrialov’s declarations of loyalty remained unmarked. In September 1937 the Military College of the Soviet Supreme Court indicted Ustrialov as a Japanese agent who had carried out espionage work against the Soviet Union from 1928 up to the day of his arrest. He was sentenced to death and executed in October 1937.³⁰ No t e s 1

Svetlana V. Onegina, ‘The Resettlement of Soviet Citizens from Manchuria in 1935–36: A Research Note’, Europe-Asia Studies (September 1995); on Ustrialov’s national Bolshevism, see Michael Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder, 1987). 2 ‘I verify myself. Isn’t there a form of anguish, and hence something depraved and defective in my love for the homeland? Am I not just attached to the birch trees and lindens of Old Russia? . . . I verify my deepest thoughts. And answer with my whole essence: no! . . . No, my heart beats for the life of the genuinely new, Soviet land, and I am excited by the sight of these wonderful factories, which express our growing strength, by the silhouettes of the birds of steel which soar into the skies’ (‘ ‘‘Sluzhit’ rodine prikhoditsia kostiami . . .’’ Dnevnik N.V. Ustrialova 1935–1937 gg.’, ed. Irina Kondakova, Istochnik 5–6 (1998), 3–100 (9–10, entry of 19 July 1935; see also 13, entry of 3 September 1935)). 3 Ibid., 41 (entry of 5 July 1936); see also 41 (entry of 4–5 March 1936). 4 Kondakova lists essays by Ustrialov published in Izvestiia on 14 December 1936 (on the new constitution); 10 February 1937 (on Pushkin); and 6 April 1937 (on Herzen), see ‘ ‘‘Sluzhit’ rodine prikhoditsia kostiami . . .’’ ’, 98–9, notes 329, 341, 384. 5 Ibid., 70 (entry of 18 February 1937). 6 This argument is more fully developed in Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). The monograph mentions Nikolai Ustrialov and his diary only in passing, however. 7 Studies that mine surveillance reports for analyses of popular opinion in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, respectively, include: Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941 (New York, 1997); Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, 1987), especially 49–66. Richard Cobb’s study of popular protest during the French Revolution provides a sensitive reading of how the political needs of the security police shaped the language of their reports. Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (Oxford, 1970), 49–58. 8 Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000).

Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time 9 See

61

in particular Susan Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (New York, 1998); Barbara Walker, ‘On Reading Soviet Memoirs: A History of the ‘‘Contemporaries’’ Genre as an Institution of Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790’s to the 1970’s’, Russian Review 59 ( July 2000), 327–52; Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia (Ithaca, 2002); Marina Mogil’ner, Mif o podpol’nom cheloveke: Radikal’nyi mikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet semioticheskogo analiza (Moscow, 1999). The term ecosystem is inspired by Katerina Clark’s notion of ‘ecology of revolution’, which connotes an organic and processual understanding of the politics and the culture of revolution in Russia, understood broadly, from the 1910s to the 1930s (Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), esp. 1–29; see also Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, 1997), 190–1). 10 N. Ustrialov, Pod znakom revoliutsii, 2nd rev. edn. (Harbin, 1927), 87. 11 When speaking of the liberal self, I do not refer to how selfhood was actually experienced in liberal societies, but to a theoretical construct grounding Western conceptions of self. Liberal ideology, Michael Halberstam points out, cannot function without the fiction of a non-political, private standpoint as the default position of the individual: ‘The possibility of making a distinction between the political and the non-political marks off a standpoint which the individual can take up outside of the collectively produced structures of the political community. This metaphysical standpoint or place is the locus of that self-defining choice, which remakes the community in accordance with the will or free choice of the individual subject. . . . Without the distinction private–public we are not able to think the liberal democratic conception of a community based on the consent of the individual subject.’ Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven, 2000); Anna Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Historiography’, Kritika 1:1 (Winter 2000). 12 This point is discussed at much greater length in Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. 13 I speak of socialist subjectivity, rather than the more often-invoked term Soviet subjectivity, because it is the socialist, illiberal orientation that constitutes its salient feature. On socialism defined as anti-capitalism, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (New York, 1994). On the Stalinist system as a variant of modernity, see, apart from Kotkin, David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New York, 2000); David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003). 14 For a critique of liberal readings of Soviet notions of self, see Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject’. 15 In my understanding of ideology in the Soviet context, I do not proceed from any given theoretical model, of which there are many. All of the more interesting theories of ideology, it seems to me, in one way or another stand in the Marxist tradition of defining ideology as a naturalization of a given reality, rendering it impervious to change. This perspective could also be applied to the Soviet case, in the sense that communist ideology—the self-representation of the regime—masked the real power relationships in the Soviet realm. But such a perspective obscures the qualitatively

62

Jochen Hellbeck

different status of ideology in the communist context. Unlike, say, bourgeois ideology which, in aiming to reproduce the current bourgeois order, sought to operate invisibly beneath the recesses of the conscious world, communist ideology was deliberate and transformative, and it targeted the conscious mind rather than the political unconscious. It was an open programme of action, a blueprint of a world to be realized. Toward the individual, communist ideology represented itself as total consciousness, and it called on the individual to raise his subjective psychology to this highest level of consciousness. For an excellent discussion of ideology as living tissue, see Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), introduction; see also Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York, 1991). 16 Alf L¨ udtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995). 17 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999). 18 In the realm of Sovietology, ideology has recently made a comeback in a series of studies which portray ideology as the shaping force of ‘the Soviet project’. These studies have been attacked by other historians as neo-totalitarian in spirit, and their conceptual contributions have perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged, but it is true that they apply a monologic understanding of ideology as a discrete set of ideas, which operates inexorably and seems to precede human appropriations and personalizations of it. See in particular Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York, 1994); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001). 19 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1979), 470. 20 On the problem and the mechanisms of ‘mastering ideology’ in the context of the Stalin era, see Eric Naiman, ‘Discourse Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet Subjectivity’, in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin (London, 2002), 287–316 (298). 21 Reflecting on cultural memory and ideology in the Soviet context, Michael David-Fox makes a related suggestion: to view (state) ideology and (personal) memory not in contradistinctive terms, as often is done, but as ‘mutually interactive phenomena’. Michael David-Fox, ‘Cultural Memory in the Century of Upheaval: Big Pictures and Snapshots’, Kritika 2:3 (Summer 2001), 601–13 (612). 22 For conceptions of illiberal selfhood across Europe, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (New York, 1984). 23 Stephen Hanson brilliantly explains the sense of historical acceleration that many experienced in the Soviet 1930s as an effect of a fundamentally new concept of time introduced by Stalin with the launching of the Five-Year Plans. Stalin sought to harness Soviet social and economic life to the heightened rhythm of a ‘charismatic-rational time’, with the goal of compressing conventional notions of time and catching up with the advanced bourgeois West. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997).

Self-Understandings in Stalin’s Time

63

24 One reason why the intense subjective appeal of the early decades of Soviet rule received

little scholarly attention until recently was that in thinking about the relationship between citizens and the state, scholars tended to project back in time attitudes that they personally observed during the final years of the Soviet regime, when detached modes of double-speak and cynical engagement of Soviet ideology were rampant (this approach especially informs Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)). Yet it is questionable whether we can project conceptions of self characteristic of the late Soviet regime back onto an era when the revolution was in full swing, in the form of an ideological apparatus with considerable powers of persuasion, when there existed as yet no sense of closing time—when, in brief, the existential stakes for Soviet citizens were raised to unprecedented heights. It is an altogether different question, in much need of further elucidation, how the heights of Stalin-era self-engagement (d)evolved over time into attitudes of critical detachment and alienation that were instrumental for the disintegration of the Soviet system as a whole. Two brilliant interpretations are Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, until it was No More: the Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006); Aleksandr Zinoviev, Nashei iunosti polet: literaturno-sotsiologicheskii ocherk stalinizma (Lausanne, 1983). 25 Many other sympathizers of the socialist cause experienced the mid-1930s as a distinctly Hegelian moment when world history was in the making and its principal agent, the World Spirit, appeared to reside in Moscow. See Jochen Hellbeck, ‘With Hegel to Salvation: Bukharin’s Other Trial’, Representations 107 (Summer 2009), 56–90. 26 ‘ ‘‘Sluzhit’ rodine prikhoditsia kostiami . . .’’ ’, 70 (entry of 18 February 1937). 27 Portions of Ustrialov’s diary from the civil war period are published in Russkoe proshloe (Leningrad), 1991, 2; 1993, 4. The Nikolai Ustrialov Papers in the Hoover Institution contain unpublished diary excerpts for the period 1920–35. Several of the essays published in the volume Pod znakom revoliutsii (1925, 2nd edn. 1927) contain multiple references to dialectics. 28 ‘ ‘‘Sluzhit’ rodine prikhoditsia kostiami . . .’’ ’, 67, 82 (entries of 6 February and 26 May 1937). 29 Ibid., 85–6. 30 Ibid., 4; Onegina, ‘The Resettlement of Soviet Citizens from Manchuria in 1935–36’. Of the 25,000 Russians who had returned to the Soviet Union from Manchuria in 1935–6, more than 10,000 were arrested during the Great Purges.

5 Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism Jan Plamper

The question of how people perceived the Stalinist world they inhabited has been at the centre of Western Soviet Studies from their beginnings in the late 1940s.¹, ² The ‘Smolensk Archive’—a Party archive of Smolensk administrative division covering the years 1917–38, captured by the Germans during the Second World War and later passed to American hands—contained most of the source genres that seemed to offer a glimpse into popular attitudes about the Soviet order and that would be ‘discovered’ on a larger scale during the ‘archival revolution’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.³ These sources included reports (usually to higher-up institutions) on popular moods gathered by various organizations and informers, and citizen letters (many of them complaints and denunciations) to Party leaders, organizations and news outlets.⁴ In the opinion of the early interpreters of these sources—the founding fathers of the so-called ‘totalitarian school’—distortions severely compromised the validity of the letters and reports. Distortions arose for various reasons, including fear of repressive measures that not only might fall on the person who spoke but could also extend to the person who recorded, or because the recorders emphasized negative impressions in self-justifying efforts to legitimate their jobs. For example, a secret police officer might blow out of all proportion the wrongs he would later rectify. How did the first Western interpreters of the sources on popular attitudes configure the Soviet subject? Early members of the totalitarian school framed the Soviet subject as one that usually (but not always) said what it thought. What the Soviet subject did, however, was not a major concern for these scholars, since they considered the potential for human action in ‘atomized’ Soviet society minimal.⁵ They took one thing for granted: the Soviet subject could not harbour multiple, overlapping and conflicting opinions at the same time. The Soviet citizen who shed tears over Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 and later in the day told an antiStalin joke would have seemed an utter paradox to them.⁶ Thus early totalitarian school scholars allowed for the existence of separate spheres of thought on the one

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

65

hand and utterances on the other (to a lesser extent, action), but they configured these spheres as monolithic rather than disaggregated, fragmentary entities. As for the terms that described the phenomenon of popular attitudes, both ‘public opinion’ and ‘popular opinion’ had a very specific ring to totalitarian school writers. Public opinion in Stalinist Russia was an oxymoron. There was no true public opinion, only manufactured public opinion, the end-product of Soviet propaganda. Fittingly, Alex Inkeles’s Public Opinion in Soviet Russia (1950), the first volume in Harvard University Press’s Russian Research Center series, carried the subtitle A Study in Mass Persuasion. To Inkeles and his collaborators Soviet public opinion and propaganda were synonymous. Indeed, the entire purpose of the Harvard Interview Project, a major sociological opinion survey of displaced persons who did not return to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, was to ascertain ‘authentic’ public opinion.⁷ This changed decisively in the late 1970s, when historians (who would later be designated ‘revisionists’) began to challenge the totalitarian school paradigm. In their minds too, authentic popular opinion existed out there, yet it could not be gleaned from interviewing Soviet defectors in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but rather from reading the available documents—above all the Smolensk archive—with different eyes.⁸ Once the Cold War blinkers were removed, they argued, these sources actually revealed that ordinary people were vocal and expressed a wide range of views. Indeed, the utterances of average Russians were proof of massive ‘support from below’ and some popular ‘resistance’.⁹ Thus the revisionists shifted agency from the Party-state to the people. This discovery of popular agency was of course a reflection of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the consequences that the sociopolitical changes of those decades created for the discipline of history. History’s purpose was to give voice to the people and empower the downtrodden and invisible—workers, women and peasants. It should be written from bottom-up rather than top-down. This was history-writing as an Exodus narrative: historians liberated suppressed social groups from captivity.¹⁰ In writing the history of those who had none, historians vicariously took part in the socio-political struggles of their day. To be sure, this kind of historiography was wrapped in the mantle of ‘objective’ social science as opposed to politicized, ‘subjective’ Cold War totalitarian scholarship.¹¹ The revisionists claimed that proponents of the totalitarian school had denied the Soviet people its voice and reduced it to accommodating, passive yea-sayers. An antithesis to ‘accommodation’ was born: ‘popular agency’, a term flexible enough to encompass notions ranging from ‘support from below’ to ‘resistance’. But, like the binary opposition of ‘totalitarianism’ vs. ‘revisionism’, the binary of ‘accommodation’ vs. ‘popular agency’ missed a great deal of continuity and overlap. In particular this binary missed the fact that totalitarian scholars had always suffered from ‘modal schizophrenia’ when it came to conceptualizing popular attitudes toward the Stalinist regime: on one hand the masses were

66

Jan Plamper

atomized and incapable of putting up a fight, on the other the regime was a priori illegitimate and often laughable; by implication, legitimacy—and agency—did rest in the people.¹² Perhaps no case illustrates this ambiguity better than archtotalitarianist Robert Conquest’s Stalin: on one hand Stalin was a demonic figure who usurped power after Lenin’s death and brutally forced the revolution from above on the unassuming, passive Russian peasantry; on the other hand Stalin was a psychopath whose illegitimate power could never overcome the massive resistance it met from below, from the Soviet demos.¹³ Or, on one hand, Stalin was ‘a vast, dark figure, looming over the century’, while, on the other, ‘One of his outstanding characteristics was, in many respects, a profound mediocrity.’¹⁴ Modal schizophrenia in fact made the totalitarian paradigm malleable and ultimately recyclable, as would become clear during the 1990s. Revisionists conceived of the Soviet subject in different ways from their totalitarian counterparts. When they read through the Smolensk Archive they were much more ready to believe what people were recorded as having said. Still, like their totalitarian school antipodes, revisionists did not allow for the coexistence of multiple attitudes in a single subject within short windows of time. The revisionists too believed that a subject could be either active or passive, resisting or compliant. A subject who was resisting one minute and compliant the next had no place in their framework. The person who cried on the morning of Stalin’s death and told an anti-Stalin joke in the evening thus was no less paradoxical for the revisionists than for their totalitarian predecessors. When the Soviet archives started opening in the late 1980s, and especially after 1991, specialists were astonished by the magnitude of sources on popular sentiments. Had the cohort of young Ph.D. students doing archival research during those years paid more attention to the Smolensk Archive and the existing historiography, their excitement perhaps would have been more the thrill of rediscovery rather than discovery. But that was a period of collective archival inebriation and orgies of document fetishism. The hangover only set in during the latter part of the decade. In retrospect, the real discovery about the archival documents that materialized was their variety. Few cared to look closer and beyond binaries, but to those who did, it became clear that the contents of a type of document entitled ‘special report on the moods of the population’ (spetssvodka ob obshchestvennykh nastroeniiakh) could vary greatly. Sometimes this ‘special report’ was instigated by a political crisis like a strike against worsening work conditions during the First Five-Year Plan when it was crucial to the Party leadership to understand what was happening on the ground outside Moscow;¹⁵ sometimes it was generated by local organizations who used it to advance their own interests in the centre—for example, the case where the report described a situation where things had gone amiss and could only be solved by better staffing or a move to a larger building; sometimes the report belonged to the ongoing surveillance effort and was produced quite simply because of the tenacity of bureaucratic practices.

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

67

A heated, often acrimonious scholarly debate ensued. This debate touched on many kinds of popular mood sources but it soon zoomed in on what came to be collectively called svodki (singular, svodka). The debate had several highpoints, two of which must be mentioned: (1) the publication of Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997), and (2) a 1997 Yale conference ‘Assessing the New Soviet Archival Sources’ organized by Andrea Graziosi (including the resulting special issue of the journal Cahiers du Monde Russe (1999)).¹⁶ I will concentrate on the Davies book. This study was based on her doctoral research at the Leningrad Party archive (which at that time had been renamed as St Petersburg’s Central State Archive of Historico-Political Documentation, TsGA IPD). In the collections on the communication of Leningrad’s Party leadership (Obkom) with the secret service NKVD she found scores and scores of svodki. Her interpretation constituted what one might call a form of neo-revisionism or even hyper-revisionism. Like her revisionist predecessors, Davies saw not a passive, atomized populace, but an active, vocal one. She emphasized, however, resistance more strongly and more starkly than the original revisionists.¹⁷ Davies found a resisting populace pitted against a repressive state, a condition of ‘Us against Them’, and, with nods to Mikhail Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson, called this relationship a ‘dialogue’.¹⁸ Thus the Soviet Union as a nation of resisters came into being. Yet, as even her fiercest critics were ready to acknowledge, in reality Davies had uncovered a far greater, and more multifaceted, variety of ‘opinions’ in the svodki than anyone else had hitherto done.¹⁹ For the first time the fact that svodki record multiple, conflicting and overlapping utterances made by a single person over very short periods of time jumped out at the observer. Almost tragically, she continued to shoehorn this abundance into the binary schemas of ‘resistance’ vs. ‘accommodation’, ‘people’ vs. ‘state’, and ‘positive’ vs. ‘negative opinion’. For example, Davies subsumed a panoply of responses to the Stalin cult under chapters entitled ‘Affirmative Representations of the Leader and the Leader Cult’ and under ‘Negative Representations of the Leader and Leader Cult’.²⁰ Davies was soon criticized for not paying enough attention to the political and epistemological factors that shaped the production of svodki. As one critic put it, ‘these reports are more telling about the secret police and its interests’ than about the events they purport to chronicle.²¹ And yet, none of Davies’s critics showed how the svodki ‘are more telling about the secret police and its interests’. While these critics produced concrete readings of similar sources for earlier periods (more below), they never set out their own interpretations of the Stalin-era svodki. For the most part, they used different sources, such as diaries and official autobiographies.²² What is more, their approach suffered from a specific variant of ‘modal schizophrenia’ too, even though it was of a different kind from that of the totalitarian school scholars of the 1950s and 1960s. It assumes that the svodki are not authentic enough and therefore cannot be read

68

Jan Plamper

as reflecting real popular sentiment. What the svodki can do is authentically tell us something about which categories the regime deemed important to report in and in what kind of language the reporters did record. Having said that, the entire approach is embedded in the sediment of poststructuralism, which ultimately disposes of the authenticity question. Poststructuralism levels sources, reducing them to text. Seen as text, the svodki might very well be subjected to decontextualized readings that seek truth at the surface.²³ While Davies soon gravitated toward Sheila Fitzpatrick and the ‘Chicago school’, her critics were grouped around the opposite pole of Stephen Kotkin and the ‘Columbia school’. Kotkin had not only written Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (1995), a case study of the Stalin-era metallurgical town Magnitogorsk and arguably the most influential work on Stalinist Russia of the 1990s, but as an assistant professor at Princeton had taught with Mark von Hagen a legendary graduate seminar at Columbia University, where the students read classics on Western Europe alongside classic work on Soviet history and tried to find out how the former could speak to the latter.²⁴ Some of the graduate students who took part in Kotkin’s 1991 Columbia seminar extended his research interests to their own archival work. Peter Holquist deserves to be singled out, because his work is directly relevant to the svodki question. During 1991–2, while researching a dissertation on the Revolution and Civil War, in the windfall from the archival revolution, Holquist came on caches of White svodki that often predated those of the Bolsheviks.²⁵ How could this arch-Bolshevik, Stalinist invention have existed in White territories during the Civil War as early as 1918? Svodki, Holquist argued, were part of the beginning of surveillance practices that began with the First World War and the larger shift to a different, modern, mass-based definition of politics, in which the population’s opinion became an entity of importance—to be created, measured, and ‘sculpted’. This enveloped all political parties, including the Whites. The Bolsheviks were only one part of this larger shift. ‘Victory in the civil wars permitted the Soviet state to pursue surveillance more fully and within its explicitly Marxist framework. Yet the practices themselves had been elaborated by the imperial state in its total-war manifestation and constituted a common heritage for all movements of the civil wars’, writes Holquist.²⁶ So while the meta-question of what the Stalin-era svodki tell us about the regime if they don’t tell us anything about the people was never answered, Holquist answered questions of where they came from, how they emerged, and what they tell us about the regime(s) during the First World War, the Civil War, and NEP. Holquist’s strategy soon became part of a rubric that included similar approaches, suggesting that the Soviet Union should be compared with contemporaneous states and movements. This was a different kind of comparing from that done by the totalitarianists. For the latter there had never been any doubt that the Soviet Union was a priori backward and deficient. The new comparativists argued that this need not be so, that only by viewing comparable phenomena in a single space would commonalities

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

69

and differences emerge in sharp relief. This approach—institutionally based at Columbia—was tagged ‘plural modernity’, ‘modernities’, or ‘modernity’ school.²⁷ In fact, Davies’s support base at Chicago did not object to comparing; indeed, the members of the Chicago school actively engaged in comparisons. However, the Columbia and Chicago methods of comparison differed: Columbia comparativism was historical-genealogical and inspired by Michel Foucault, whereas Chicago comparativism was structural-morphological and inspired by political science. More importantly, members of the Chicago school drew different conclusions from their comparisons. For them the ‘neo-traditionalist’ elements seemed to outweigh the modern ones. In the letters, svodki, and denunciations, they saw elements of distinctly non-modern societies—patronage, clientelism and other elements of patrimonial society—which were far from the Weberian image of modern bureaucracy.²⁸ Nonetheless, there was more overlap between the two ‘schools’ than they cared to admit at the time. At any rate, after the totalitarian vs. revisionism binary of the 1980s, by the end of the 1990s the field of American Soviet Studies once more had a binary—Columbia school plural modernity vs. Chicago school neo-traditionalism. As for making sense of the svodki, the new binary created an interpretive standstill. The Chicago side continued to privilege resistance and, because it clung to the concept of an autonomous subject, could not accommodate the coexistence of multiple, conflicting recorded utterances by individuals. The Columbia side could have accommodated such fragmented individuals because it had forsaken the autonomous subject and adopted the image of a multiple, fluid, unstable one. But for some reason it did not and only carried out its maxim for the pre-Soviet and very early Soviet period, stopping short of Stalinism.

AV E N U E S F O R F U T U R E R E S E A RC H I : S O U RC E C R I T I C I S M , P R AC T I C E S A N D C O N C E P T UA L H I S TO RY (BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE ) I believe we would be well served if we extended to the NEP, Stalin and postStalin periods the kinds of meta-questions Holquist has posed for the period of the First World War through Civil War. What kinds of logic governed the making and circulation of the svodki? What functions did they serve? What does this tell us about the regime and its aspirations?²⁹ To put it in old-fashioned terms, we need more source criticism. Such an extension of Holquist’s project to the Stalin and post-Stalin eras could build on the meticulous groundwork neo-revisionist scholars have laid. To be sure, their agenda was a different one, namely to soften the impact of the inbuilt ‘distortions and biases [that] may have entered them [the svodki] at the different stages of their construction’ in order ‘to approximate ‘‘the past as it really was’’ ’.³⁰

70

Jan Plamper

Specifically, this should involve a search for documentation; first, on who recorded the svodki (Informers? If so, recruited how? Party workers? Of what educational background? What were other formative, socializing experiences?); second, on the guidelines those who did the recording received from (which?) higher-up authorities; third, on how the recorded utterances were put to use (Information for the regime? Secret service prosecution purposes?); and finally, on how all of these factors changed over time. Even more specifically, future research on the svodki will benefit from looking for the actual templates into which informers recorded what they purportedly heard. Which categories and rubrics were available in a given document? In other words, we would profit from looking beyond the ocean of surveillance reports we encounter in the archives to search for the rare documents that allow us to reconstruct how they were produced, much like Jean-Jacques Becker uncovered the categories given to French school teachers, who were then expected to push ‘public opinion’ during the First World War into these state-supplied rubrics.³¹ We know that the anti-Stalinist utterances recorded in the Leningrad svodki that Sarah Davies used could lead to the prosecution of those who uttered them, but we have not yet explored this question in more detail. Were some of these utterances made up to incriminate people in the eyes of the secret police anyway? Were certain things too taboo to record on paper, and would their incriminatory power transfer itself to the person who did the recording? The absence of direct parallels between the Hitler and Stalin cults in Informationsberichte, the East German equivalent of svodki, is instructive here.³² Such parallels are so patently absent as to suggest the existence of a deliberate taboo, related to a comparison that was deemed too sensitive to be recorded on paper. The population must have made the analogy, because it was exposed to Western media that made precisely this kind of comparison for propaganda purposes. And we know for certain that such East German intellectuals as Alfred Kantorowicz and Viktor Klemperer noticed the similarity between the two cults.³³ Put simply, we know far too little about these questions, and the little we do know has never been put together. Throughout our analysis of the problem we have to build on the post-1991 insight that there is a great variety of svodki that were vastly different in nature. These different svodki tell us different things and possess different degrees of truth-value. I do not see how we can avoid introducing such a hierarchy of truth-value (and thus moving away from radically levelling textual approaches). The Ivanovo-Voznesensk province secret police svodka about a 1925 combine spinners’ strike in a textile mill, a document that was instigated at the behest of the centre in Moscow and constituted the most important informational channel about this potentially threatening social action in a crucial area of the young Soviet Union, can more or less be read at face value.³⁴ The Leningrad svodka about ‘anti-Soviet incidents among Middle School students’ during the 1935 purge of ‘Trotskyites’ following the December 1934 Kirov murder cannot.

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

71

Seventh-grader Zinov’ev, who was said to have ‘agitated among the students for a demonstrative school lunch boycott’, in fact was suspicious enough before this alleged action.³⁵ The document characterizes him (in square brackets) as a ‘son of a servitor to the cult’, that is, a priest’s son.³⁶ Perhaps Zinov’ev ended up within the purview of the secret police on the basis of this family background. Perhaps his father was being prosecuted in the 1935 purge and Zinov’ev Junior failed to denounce him. Perhaps the charge was fabricated and adduced as supporting evidence in his father’s case. Perhaps his last name was the actual crux of the matter, as there were many cases of people who were indicted because they happened to share the last name of one of the members (Zinov’ev, Tomskii, Rykov) of the 1920s Stalin oppositions who ended up in the maelstrom of the show trials and purges of the 1930s. The question then becomes how we decide which svodka to read at face value, which not. As the case of the Leningrad svodka and seventh-grader Zinov’ev demonstrates, our best option still is a maximum of contextualization. The date and author of the document may matter. The immediate context in the document can be important. The title of the document, its genre, its specific category of ‘document production’ (deloproizvodstvo) might play a role.³⁷ The archiving practices that assigned it to the archival collection we retrieve it from can provide further clues. The many historical contexts we can access through other sources might be illuminating. A further issue is the relevance of resistance to various actors, that is, the question of resistance not as a thing itself, but as an object of the state. Did it matter from the perspective of the state? The answer will of course vary according to historical moment. The kinds of resistance the regime was willing to tolerate in, say, 1937, 1957, 1977 and 1987 differed widely. And what the regime was willing to tolerate in turn impacted the kinds of resistance the population put up. It is perhaps a truism that under Stalin the regime was much more interested in moulding people’s ideologies, in forming new Soviet men and women, whereas during late real-existing socialism under Brezhnev in the early 1970s the regime often contented itself with co-opting the bodies of its citizenry for symbolic practices. Under Stalin people needed to march in the May Day parades and ‘believe’ in the ideology offered to them. Telling an anti-Stalin joke, if detected, could not go unpunished, for Stalin stood symbolically for the ideology. In those years telling an anti-Stalin joke was always potentially lethal. Under Brezhnev it did not matter much if someone told an anti-Brezhnev joke, even if detected. As long as people marched duly in the May Day parades and offered their bodies for the mass-media representation of power to the regime and the outside world, the regime was content.³⁸ One caveat: this is not to deny the fruitfulness of explicitly constructionist approaches that look in official sources for keys to the discursive constitution of Stalinist reality. With another research agenda, one might well read the IvanovoVoznesensk province svodka on the 1925 strike or the Leningrad svodka on the

72

Jan Plamper

anti-Soviet actions among schoolchildren as developing categories of collective actors—‘spinners in the textile industry’ or ‘sons of servitors to the cult’—that in turn became self-ascribed and thus constitutive of reality.³⁹ Or one might see these documents as textually creating conspiracies in which people actually believed and which thus had concrete, truth-producing effects. Ultimately these meta-questions will lead to a larger history of concepts and institutional history of ‘public opinion’ and ‘popular opinion’ across cultures. What such a Begriffs-cum-institutional history might look like was intimated by Istv´an R´ev in his paper for the Siena conference upon which the present volume is based. In his paper R´ev sketched out some of the milestones in the tangled path of American research of ‘popular opinion’. After their emigration from Germany several members of the Frankfurt School collaborated at Columbia University in the study of contemporary American culture. Later some of them, including Leo L¨owenthal and Paul Lazarsfeld, moved to the United States Office of War Information (OWI) and worked on propaganda warfare on both the domestic and European fronts. Then, after the Second World War, these very people moved on to study Eastern European and Soviet public opinion. In so doing they brought their old categories and methods to bear on their new object of research. What is more, popular opinion research continued to be inextricably intertwined with attempts to shape this very opinion. L¨owenthal’s seven-year tenure as research director for Voice of America serves as a case in point. As Holquist has shown, the ‘meta’ line of enquiry in the svodki is best taken up in a comparative context. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the authoritarian East and Central European regimes of the inter-war period, the postwar Eastern European Soviet satellite states, but also the Western advertisement and polling industries are natural points of comparison—some of the other essays in this volume go a long way in opening up such comparative vistas. Thus, commonalities and differences will emerge. The comparative framework will introduce an important time-space vector into the question of the genealogies of which the surveillance practices the svodki were part. For instance, was Stalinist Russia of the 1930s simply ‘learning’ and in a case of political mimicry, imitating, its Nazi and fascist counterparts? Or was it continuing its own version of pan-European practices pioneered during the First World War, as Holquist’s own research suggests? Or was it inventing entirely new kinds of practices for its own purposes? Probably a combination of all of the above, but the question is an empirical one that ought to be pursued. And the precise amalgamation has yet to be determined. As for the Russian equivalents of ‘popular opinion’ or ‘public opinion’, in Stalinism neither the term nor the concept existed, as far as I can tell. It only appeared under Khrushchev as obshchestvennoe mnenie (public opinion) and, with it, also appeared social science studies and opinion research.⁴⁰ Along with this research, new outlets for popular opinion were introduced, such as the complaint books that were laid out in stores for customers to register their

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

73

criticism.⁴¹ The history of obshchestvennoe mnenie as a concept and the history of the new institutions and institutional practices of obshchestvennoe mnenie have yet to be written. Those who do write it would do well to remember Pierre Bourdieu’s insight—true, for democratic societies—that popular opinion is not a reflection of some genuine popular opinion that is out there, but rather an active entity that shapes the political. Politicians use, for instance, a 51 per cent figure in an opinion poll (often based on small samples and done under dubious circumstances) as proof of majority support for their position. The ‘consensus effect’, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘creates the idea that a unanimous public opinion exists in order to legitimate a policy, and strengthen the relations of force upon which it is based or make it possible’.⁴² AV E N U E S F O R F U T U R E R E S E A RC H I I : TOWA R D A M U LT I D I M E N S I O N A L S U B J E C T When it comes to actually making meaning of the svodki we might be well advised to move away from the autonomous subject. The time to do so actually is quite opportune. If works during the mid- to late 1990s noted a strong dichotomous division of sources in ‘us’ (the people) vs. ‘them’ (the regime) and generally broke the sources down into binaries of accommodation vs. resistance, affirmation vs. dissent, and consensus vs. coercion,⁴³ in the early 2000s voices that questioned this binary division of popular opinion grew louder, arguing that ‘resistance can be highly ambiguous’ and ‘multidimensional’, that its definition ‘is a difficult question which evades an easy answer’.⁴⁴ There now seems to be a consensual willingness to move beyond binaries like resistance vs. accommodation and to destabilize the larger binary of state vs. society in which these other binaries are ultimately embedded. Eigen-Sinn and other concepts of German Alltagsgeschichte are widely employed to grasp how individuals ‘colonized’, that is, adapted and reshaped, official discourse.⁴⁵ And identities are, of course, considered multiple and fluid. To be sure, when we get to concrete historical studies, the situation is quite different. Here we see historians falling back into ‘pro’ and ‘con’, ‘positive’ vs. ‘negative’ attitudes. On the ground the accommodation vs. resistance binary still reigns triumphant. Thus one of the first things to be done is to translate this conceptual willingness into concrete historical studies. The autonomous subject is a construct with a history of its own rather than a serviceable analytical category. In truth people can think many different things at the same time, say many different things that contradict one another over short periods of time, and act in many different ways that contradict one another. Another problem that the revisionist and neo-revisionist research shares is that it tends to overly aggregate individual voices into groups. According to the svodki ‘textile workers think’, ‘Red Army women of battalion N believe’, ‘Muscovites complain’, and ‘Kazakhs find’. To be

74

Jan Plamper

sure, group aggregates are important—and highly specific—from a state point of view, which believes groups to be acting differently from individuals. The important question then becomes how exactly the state constructs its groups. This does not mean that we need to adopt the state’s aggregation of individual voices into groups. C O N C LU S I O N To recapitulate, according to the totalitarian school what was recorded was not necessarily what people meant, and even if it was, it didn’t matter. The revisionist approach assumed that what was recorded was what people meant, and it mattered a lot because what people say always matters. These were the days of ‘history from below’. The neo-revisionist approach was a hypertrophied version of the revisionist approach; it introduced new documentation that bolstered the old thesis and shifted the emphasis to resistance. The poststructuralist approach was that what was recorded did not mean that people actually said, let alone meant it; and even where it did constitute what they had said and meant, this didn’t really matter. What matters is how it was recorded—and this tells us something about the regime. My own point has been that what was recorded as having been said sometimes was what people said, sometimes not, and it sometimes was what people meant, sometimes not. In those cases where what was recorded as having been said conflicted with something else recorded as having been said, this is very much possible and the historian should be open to this kind of heteroglossia and resist pushing it into binaries because of the assumption that there is an underlying autonomous subject. Ultimately the picture will not be complete without also taking into account the issue of memory and the contemporary socio-political relevance of the popular opinion question. Memory and popularity—was Italian fascism ‘popular’ among the people?—vary enormously from culture to culture, but they always influence the ways in which scholars approach issues of popular opinion. In contemporary Italy the view of some historians that there was accommodation under fascism—the ‘consensus’ thesis—legitimates the Mussolini regime post factum in the eyes of many contemporary Italians and, by extension, also legitimates neo-fascist parties in today’s Italy. In Germany the conclusion of historians that many Germans willingly followed Hitler does not translate into post factum legitimacy for the Nazis, nor does it help right-wing parties in the contemporary Federal Republic. For Stalinism the situation is quite different from the Italian and German cases. The discussion inside the historical discipline about accommodation/resistance to the Stalin regime has been restricted to Anglo-American scholarship. Unlike Italy and Germany, before 1991 historians from the Soviet Union had no part in this discussion, and after 1991 historians from the former Soviet Union participated only to a very limited extent. Post-Soviet Russia simply

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

75

never produced such a debate, therefore how contemporary Russia influences what historians do with regard to popular opinion is a moot question. And yet, as I hope to have demonstrated, the Anglo-American discussion has been greatly influenced by contemporary developments. Revisionists, for example, during the 1970s and 1980s were influenced by the social movements of their day and set out to re-empower the Stalinist subject, changing it from the atomized, Cold War totalitarianist image to a powerful agent. The situation of Russianists studying popular opinion today has improved considerably. The Cold War, and thus the immediate impact of Cold War culture, is over. What is more, there is no tradition—and this compares favourably with Italianists—of the relevance of their field of study (popular opinion in the Soviet Union) to contemporary Russia. When they talk about the question of popular opinion, Russianists have the luxury of developing specialist language, detached from the contemporary socio-political field. Their very insularity amounts to a comparative advantage. They should use this advantage wisely, as they push the popular opinion question into the post-Stalin years.⁴⁶ They will profit from doing so with a concept of the subject not as autonomous and monolithic, but rather as multidimensional. Only such a concept will be able to accommodate the mind-boggling diversity of human thought, utterance and action. Only such a concept will integrate a Soviet subject who pushed his way through the crowds toward the Mausoleum on the morning of 5 March 1953 and cried profusely, told an anti-Stalin joke in the evening, and went on to live another half-century. No t e s 1I

wish to thank Paul Corner, Jacqueline Friedlander, Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeck and Peter Holquist for their immensely helpful critical readings of this essay. It was completed under the auspices of Historisches Kolleg, Munich, where I had the good fortune to spend 2007–8 as a fellow. 2 I concentrate on English-language scholarship, because the major debates and paradigms regarding popular opinion were Anglo-American. For the most part these debates ignored existing French, German and Russian scholarship, such as Vladlen Izmozik, Glaza i ushi rezhima: gosudarstvennyi politicheskii kontrol’ za naseleniem Sovetskoi Rossii v 1918–1928 godakh (St Petersburg, 1995); Nicholas Werth, ‘Une source in´edite: les svodki de la Tcheka-OGPU’, Revue des Etudes Slaves 66:1 (1994), 17–27; idem and Ga¨el Moullec, Rapports secrets sovi´etiques: la soci´et´e russe dans les documents confidentiels, 1921–1991 (Paris, 1994); Viktor Danilov and Alexis Berelowitch, ‘Les documents des VChK-OGPU-NKVD sur la campagne sovi´etique, 1918–1937’, Cahiers du monde russe 35:3 ( July–September 1994), 633–82; idem, Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 1918–1939: dokumenty i materialy v 4 tomakh, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1998–2005). 3 On the history of the Smolensk Archive see K. A. Dmitrieva et al. (eds.), Vozvrashchenie ‘Smolenskogo Archiva’ (Moscow, 2005).

76 4 For

Jan Plamper

the earliest treatment of these Smolensk Archive sources under the rubric of ‘controls’ see Merle Fainsod’s classic, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 4, 83–5. 5 Consider Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulations, for example: ‘The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class’ (310); ‘Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals’ and ‘Mass atomization in Soviet society was achieved by the skillful use of repeated purges which invariably precede actual group liquidation’ (316). Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951). 6 Typically, so long as there was variation in ‘the political loyalty or disloyalty of the Soviet populace’, it pertained to generational or national groups. Variation in a single individual was out of the question. Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 490–1 (quote on 490). 7 For a succinct introduction to the Harvard Interview Project see Mark Edele, ‘Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8:2 (Spring 2007), 352–8. 8 For key revisionist works that used the Smolensk Archive in this vein see J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge, 1985); Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge, 1988); Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, 1988); Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York, 1987). Daniel Brower pioneered the rediscovery of the Smolensk Archive in the 1970s. See Daniel R. Brower, ‘Collectivized Agriculture in Smolensk: The Party, the Peasantry, and the Crisis of 1932’, Russian Review 36:2 (April 1977), 151–66. Also see William G. Rosenberg, ‘Smolensk in the 1920s: Party–Worker Relations and the ‘‘Vanguard’’ Problem’, Russian Review 36:2 (April 1977), 127–50. 9 For the support from below thesis, see Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans. from French (La paysannerie et le pouvoir sovi´etique, 1928–1930 (Paris, 1966)) by Irene Nove, with the assistance of John Biggart (Evanston, 1968); Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979). For the resistance thesis, see Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (Armonk, NY, 1986). 10 Carla Hesse introduced the—unpublished, to the best of my knowledge—working division of historiography into Genesis (nineteenth-century nationalist), Exodus (1970s left emancipatory), and Job (post-1989 anti-utopian) narratives in a Spring 1996 Berkeley graduate seminar, ‘Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’. 11 For a major revisionist’s autobiographical reflections on her goal to implement social science disciplinary conventions in the field of Soviet history, consider Sheila Fitzpatrick: ‘I have often denied being an ideologist or crusader for a cause, but in

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

77

fact in the 1970s I was a one-woman crusade to establish the discipline of history in the study of the Soviet past. The word ‘‘discipline’’ should here be taken in its broad as well as narrow meaning: I thought American Sovietologists needed the discipline (even the punishment?) of data and primary sources to make honest scholars out of them.’ Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Cultural Revolution Revisited’, Russian Review 58:2 (April 1999), 205. 12 Katerina Clark coined the term ‘modal schizophrenia’ to characterize socialist realism. See The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 37, 39. On artificial binary constructions of schools in scholarship see, most recently, Michael David-Fox, ‘Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas 54:4 (2006), 535. 13 See Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (London, 1991), 316. 14 Ibid., xv. 15 See Jeffrey J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 178–230. 16 See Cahiers du Monde Russe 40:1–2 ( January–June 1999). 17 This drew a lot of criticism. For example: ‘Clearly, Davies approaches her sources with a hierarchy of authenticity, whereby critical attitudes are immediately accorded a level of truth which is denied to professions of ideological loyalty’, as Jochen Hellbeck replied to a letter Davies wrote to the editors of Kritika. For Hellbeck’s reply, see Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1:2 (Spring 2000), 439–40 (quote on 439). For Davies’s letter see ibid., 437–9. 18 Sarah Davies, ‘ ‘‘Us against Them’’: Social Identity in Soviet Russia 1934–41’, Russian Review 56:1 ( January 1997), 70, 73. 19 To Stephen Kotkin, ‘Davies is one of the first historians to explore extensively an important new document—the summaries on popular mood prepared by the NKVD and party.’ See his otherwise highly critical review in Europe-Asia Studies 50:4 ( June 1998), 739–42. 20 See Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, chs. 10 and 11 respectively. 21 Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939)’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas 44:3 (1996), 344, n. 2. To be fair, svodki and surveillance were peripheral to Hellbeck both in this early article and in subsequent publications. 22 See, for example, Igal Halfin, ‘From Darkness to Light: Student Communist Autobiography during NEP’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas 45:2 (1997), 210–36; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). 23 This is a charge repeatedly levelled at the work of Igal Halfin and Oleg Kharkhordin. See, for example, Catherine Merridale’s review of Halfin’s Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003) in Slavic Review 63:3 (Summer 2004), 660–1; and Lars Lih’s review of Oleg Kharkhordin’s The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999) in Slavic Review 59:3 (Summer 2000), 704–5.

78 24 See

Jan Plamper

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995). dissertation that emerged was Peter Holquist, ‘A Russian Vendee: The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Territory, 1917–1921’, Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995. 26 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 238. Also see idem, ‘ ‘‘Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History 69:3 (September 1997), 415–50; idem, ‘Anti-Soviet Svodki from the Civil War: Surveillance as a Shared Feature of Russian Political Culture’, Russian Review 56:3 ( July 1997), 445–50. 27 For an early identification of a distinct ‘modernity group’ and a group of ‘neotraditionalists’ see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Introduction’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (New York, 2000), 11. 28 For examples of neo-traditionalist work in studies of the Stalin era see Terry Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism: Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (New York, 2000), 348–67; Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). For a review of neo-traditionalism, see DavidFox, ‘Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism’, 544–9. The neo-traditionalist school has its roots in the work of Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1988); Ken Jowitt, ‘Soviet Neotraditionalism’, Soviet Studies 35:3 ( July 1983), 275–97; and idem, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992), ch. 4. 29 I take it that Terry Martin’s new book-in-progress goes a long way in doing so, but it was unfortunately unavailable to me. For more on this book see the chapter by Fitzpatrick in the present volume. 30 Andrea Graziosi, ‘The New Soviet Archival Sources: Hypotheses for a Critical Assessment’, Cahiers du Monde Russe 40:1–2 ( January–June 1999), 55 (‘distortions and biases . . .’), 62 (‘approximate ‘‘the past as it really was’’ ’). 31 See Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Dover, NH, 1985), 97. 32 See my ‘ ‘‘The Hitlers Come and Go . . .,’’ the F¨ uhrer Stays: Stalin’s Cult in East Germany’, in Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (eds.), Personality Cults in Stalinism—Personenkulte im Stalinismus (G¨ottingen, 2004), 325–6. 33 Klemperer noted in his diary as early as 25 June 1945: ‘I have to start watching the language of the fourth Reich systematically. Sometimes it seems to differ less from that of the third [Reich—J.P.] than, for example, Dresden Saxonian [dialect—J.P.] from Leipzig Saxonian. When they call, for instance, marshal Stalin the Greatest of all Living, the most ingenious strategist, etc.’ Quoted in Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda f¨ur die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Berlin, 2006), 201. On Alfred Kantorowicz see ibid., 199. 34 On 14 November 1925 all 2,300 spinners at the Rodniki combine walked out from their workplaces to protest low wages. This transpires from an OGPU svodka 25 The

Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism

79

stored at the former Central Party Archive, today’s RGASPI, f. 17, op. 87, d. 197, l. 68ob. See Jeffrey J. Rossman, ‘Weaver of Rebellion and Poet of Resistance: Kapiton Klepikov (1880–1933) and Shop-Floor Opposition to Bolshevik Rule’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas 44:3 (1996), 381, 2n. Also see idem, Worker Resistance under Stalin, 16–17, 250 n. 45. 35 TsGA IPD, f. 24, op. 2v, d. 1188, l. 169. 36 Ibid. 37 For a move toward a history of deloproizvodstvo see Olga Glagoleva’s very useful Working with Russian Archival Documents: A Guide to Modern Handwriting, Document Forms, Language Patterns, and Other Related Topics ( Toronto, 1998); and my plea for taking archival construction and constructedness more seriously, ‘Archival Revolution or Illusion? Historicizing the Russian Archives and Our Work in Them’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Geschichte Osteuropas 51:1 (2003), 57–69. 38 The parallels to Syria under Hafiz al-Asad are numerous. In Syria, the Asad regime knowingly tolerated significant satire as long as the very university students who authored this satire allowed their bodies to be driven to stadiums and carry the poster that made up a part of Asad’s portrait. As Lisa Wedeen has written, Syria’s ‘regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those who consume them. Asad’s cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader’. Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, 1999), 6. Incidentally, it is ironic that this Foucault-inspired book is often adduced by Chicago school neo-traditionalists. 39 In this vein see Igal Halfin’s fascinating description of changing social classification in university admission statistics during early NEP, moving from Imperial to hybrid to Bolshevik categories, in From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000), 250. Also, see ibid., 278–82; idem, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); and idem, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh, 2007). 40 The Western application of these terms to the Soviet Union also awaits systematic exploration. This essay has briefly sketched how ‘public opinion’ functioned as an oxymoron in totalitarian school scholarship and was used as an uncritical stock term in revisionist scholarship. It should be mentioned that there has been a post-Cold War trend towards the diffusion of such concepts as ‘public opinion’ and even ‘public sphere’ (in the Habermasian sense), which are adapted to Soviet-type societies by means of sophisticated theoretical groundwork. See G´abor T. Rittersporn et al. (eds.), ¨ Sph¨aren von Offentlichkeit in Gesellschaften sowjetischen Typs: zwischen partei-staatlicher Selbstinszenierung und kirchlichen Gegenwelten / Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies (Frankfurt am Main, 2003). 41 On complaint books see Susan E. Reid, ‘In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6:4 (Fall 2005), 683 n. 36. Visitor comment books (knigi otzyvov) that were put out at art exhibits or

80

Jan Plamper

after theatre performances were another source type that came to function as a genuine instrument used to measure the opinions of cultural consumers during the Khrushchev years. Visitor comment books had been around since the 1920s but under Stalin they had turned into a mere representation of power, where their function was to show to the Soviet regime and the world abroad that Soviet art and theatre were for the people and by the people. On visitor comment books, see Jan Plamper, ‘The Stalin Cult in the Visual Arts, 1929–1953’, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001, 184–97; idem, ‘Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption: Post-Stalin Hybrids’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6:4 (Fall 2005), 755–62; idem, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Ithaca, 2009), ch. 6. 42 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Public Opinion Does Not Exist’, in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub (eds.), Communication and Class Struggle, vol. 1 (New York, 1979), 125 (emphasis in original). 43 See, for example, Davies, ‘ ‘‘Us against Them’’ ’. 44 Lynne Viola, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate’, in Lynne Viola (ed.), Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2003), 2, 43, 18. Also see the special (and inaugural) issue ‘Resistance to Authority in Russia and the Soviet Union’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1:1 (Winter 2000). 45 See, most recently, Malte Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg, 2006), 228–38. 46 Mark Edele has studied popular opinion on the basis of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’ cases. See his ‘More than just Stalinists: The Political Sentiments of Victors, 1945–1953’, in Juliane F¨urst (ed.), Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 167–91; idem, ‘A ‘‘Generation of Victors?’’ Soviet Second World War Veterans from Demobilization to Organization, 1941–1956’, vol. 3, Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2004, ch. 6. Rosa Magnusdottir has looked into popular opinion regarding America in her ‘Keeping up Appearances: How the Soviet State Failed to Control Popular Attitudes toward the United States of America, 1945–1959’, Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006.

6 Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany as a Factor in the Policy of the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’: The Nuremberg Laws and the Reichskristallnacht Otto Dov Kulka

I This chapter examines two sample cases of the interrelation between radical expressions of German popular opinion and the policy of the totalitarian racialist regime of the Third Reich concerning the ‘Jewish Question’.¹ A systematic examination of this relation became possible following the publication of a digital edition of all available secret Nazi reports on the German population’s attitudes toward the Jews and the anti-Jewish policy of the regime between 1933 and 1945.² Here, a text-analytical approach will be combined with quantitative, computer-based research. As already established in research, the Nazi leadership did not itself wholly believe in its own monolithic image of state and society as portrayed in the mass media and projected to the world. Consequently, the regime set up secret internal reporting systems to provide reliable information about the prevailing popular mood and about activities conducted by the different sectors of the population. Among the categories of surveillance and reporting, the subject of the regime’s ‘ideological enemies’ (weltanschauliche Gegner)—Marxism, liberalism, the socalled ‘political churches’, the conservative opposition, and the Jews—occupies a significant place. These reports on the attitudes prevalent in the German population toward the Nazi regime and its politics were also meant to provide an authentic picture that would be taken into consideration in deciding policies toward the Jews. The most important reports, generally called Lageberichte or Stimmungsberichte, were provided by a Reich-wide network of 30,000 agents and reporters employed by

82

Otto Dov Kulka

the SD alone, i.e. the security service of the SS,³ together with reports by the secret political police (Gestapo), the district governors (Regierungspr¨asidenten), and the local police. Additional reporting was done by the NSDAP party headquarters in Munich and by a variety of organizations, such as the SA and organizations for women (NS-Frauenschaft) and for teachers (NS-Lehrerbund), etc. In all reporting systems, the reports were written at different levels—local, district, regional—and compiled at the national level.⁴ According to a directive by Heydrich in 1937, the purpose of the SD reports written ‘for the political leadership of the Reich’ was ‘to fight the enemy with passion but to be ice cold and objective in the assessment of the situation and its presentation’.⁵ Similarly, the Gestapo and the district governors had already been asked in 1934 ‘not to adorn’ the information but to adhere to ‘frank reporting of the mood in the country’.⁶ On the other hand, the sometimes ‘pronounced pessimistic’ picture the regime received in the wake of this frank reporting prompted G¨oring and other leaders to complain about the reports. Their concern was that the often too realistic picture that the reports painted would lead ‘to a deterioration of the mood’ among the Nazi leadership. Subsequently, G¨oring, in his role as the Prussian prime minister, ordered the discontinuation of the reports by the Gestapo and the district governors in Prussia as early as 1936.⁷ The independent reports by the SD, as the most important reporting system, continued to be provided until the end of the war, as did other reports, though they were constantly subjected to severe criticism and attempts to suspend them by state and party leaders, particularly Goebbels.⁸ We have no evidence of similar criticism or references to the form and content of the reports on the part of Hitler. However, proof exists that the head of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, Lammers, received the reports on a regular basis, and that Hitler himself was either informed about their content or read them. On several occasions he made direct or indirect use of the reports. In January 1934, for example, Hitler made direct use of the Gestapo reports when he confronted representatives of the ‘Confessing Church’ in a heated discussion: Hitler countered very sharply that concern for the Third Reich should be left to him [. . .]. It was undeniable that in many cases Protestant pastors were whipping up feeling against the government and against National Socialism. To prove this he had Minister-President G¨oring read out a series of reports by the political police [i.e., Gestapo] on sermons and articles in the church press which contained such utterances.⁹

The reliability of the sources can be examined in several ways: by analysis and comparison of reports written for a parallel period by different authorities, and of the reports compiled on the local, district, regional and national levels. The credibility of the Reich-wide reports, which summarized conclusions that drew on reports from lower instances, can be examined by reference to the concrete description of the events and cases in local and regional reports. Furthermore, the guidelines and directives for the preparation of the reports have been preserved.¹⁰

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

83

In spite of the critical voices by individual party and state leaders, the instructions clearly show that the regime was interested in receiving reliable information regardless of whether it was sympathetic to its views—for in the totalitarian framework of the Third Reich, authentic information of this sort was not available from any overt, public source. Whatever the final conclusion on the degree of the reports’ reliability, one thing is clear: they reveal the picture presented to the regime and thus served it in its deliberations and decisions. In this respect, there is no doubt that this kind of ‘public opinion’ influenced, or could have influenced, the implementation of the regime’s anti-Jewish policy in its various stages. Though research on National-Socialist ideology and policy regarding the persecution and annihilation of the Jews had already developed both during and immediately after the war¹¹ and still continues to dominate the research literature, research on German society and on the Jews in the Third Reich began rather late. One reason for this was that even long after the war, the prevalent image of Nazi Germany was based on the sweeping generalization of a monolithic, regime-devoted population, represented in every illustrated standard work and encyclopaedia by pictures of enthusiastic masses and multitudes of flags to communicate the idea and reality of ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein F¨uhrer.’ Another reason was a rather agnostic approach by historians, who maintained that research on the German population’s opinion under the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich was impossible owing to the lack of any reliable sources.¹² In German historiography of the first post-war decade, silence prevailed regarding the Nazi regime and the fate of the Jews.¹³ This was also true of German society as a whole, where silence and the active denial of knowledge about ‘it’ had become the ‘secret national anthem’.¹⁴ The situation changed in the 1960s with the discovery and first publications of the secret Nazi reports on popular opinion.¹⁵ The availability of these documents permitted the development of a diverse research literature, beginning in the mid-1970s, including a number of studies devoted to the Jewish aspect.¹⁶ It is perhaps no accident that the first to conduct such studies covering the whole period of the Third Reich were non-German historians.¹⁷ One of the basic findings that has emerged from these sources is that beneath the cover of totalitarian uniformity (Gleichschaltung), social and religious structures and even political orientations of the previous period were preserved to a certain extent, revealing the population’s heterogeneous views on the government’s ideology and policy. The research on German popular opinion and the Jews in the Third Reich also brought about more variegated results, both on the local and on the national level. In general, the studies came to the conclusion that among the population there was a substantial minority of radical anti-Jewish attitudes, a marginal appearance of critical voices, and an overwhelming silent majority. They interpreted the apparent silence—in particular during the war

84

Otto Dov Kulka

years—as indifference,¹⁸ though some studies, such as Kershaw’s and mine, adduced different understandings and interpretations of the term, no longer considering ‘indifference’ as a neutral attitude.¹⁹ In my later publications, I have presented a different conclusion—that of a wide consensus among the population on the Jewish question—and Ian Kershaw has avoided reference to the term ‘indifference’ in his most recent comprehensive study on Nazi Germany and the Final Solution.²⁰ Although it was the significant achievement of this research on German society and the Jews to revise the one-dimensional historiography of persecution and annihilation, these initial studies, based on a more or less fragmentary body of documents, were in a way impressionistic, as Kershaw noted soberly, even for the pre-war period of the Third Reich.²¹ With the publication of the comprehensive edition of 3,744 documents in the Stimmungsberichte edition, of which nearly 1,000 are from the years 1939–45, a systematic re-examination of the various attitudes of the population has become possible, and we can no longer speak either of a ‘silence of the documents’ or of a silence of the majority of the German population. It seems to be obvious that many of the results of the research preceding the comprehensive edition of the Stimmungsberichte, including the concept of ‘indifference’, must now be re-examined, a task that has already begun in publications of the last few years.²² The main aspects of the re-examination cover not only the population’s reactions to the regime’s policy but also its active and passive participation in socially excluding and ostracizing the Jews: their isolation and removal from all spheres of life, their expropriation, their expulsion from their homes, the pressure for their removal from Germany by emigration and later by deportation, which finally meant the ‘removal of the Jews altogether’. In what follows, two situations will be re-examined in which the radicalized anti-Jewish attitudes and actions becoming dominant among the population preceded and influenced political decisions of the regime in regard to its policy on the ‘Jewish Question’. We shall look at, first, the developments leading to the Nuremberg Laws, and, second, the chain of events preceding the Reichskristallnacht. Concluding the chapter, we shall touch upon the question of whether this approach might yield similar results for the war years and the Final Solution. II The promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935 institutionalized the social exclusion of the Jews from German society, based upon a biological definition. The laws also legalized the exclusion of the Jews from the German national community by revoking their German citizenship. The racial definition of the Jew, as laid out in the first executive order of the Nuremberg Laws, was

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

85

the basis of all future ordinances and measures aimed at the ‘removal’ of the Jews. The laws were regarded by contemporaries as well as by the authors of the first comprehensive works on the fate of the Jews in the Third Reich as a historical milestone. They were viewed as a reversion to the Middle Ages, and at the same time as manifesting the ideological quintessence of the racialist Nazi dictatorship.²³ The historical significance of the Nuremberg Laws in the postwar public sphere re-emerged in 1960 with the political campaign against Hans Globke, who wrote the official Nazi commentary on the laws²⁴ and who since 1953 had served as director of the Adenauer Federal Chancellery. The campaign reached a peak during the Eichmann trial in 1961, when for the first time the full scale of the Holocaust became a central subject of Western public and media awareness, while the GDR media and historians in particular portrayed the Nuremberg Laws as constituting the instrument and the real origin of the mass murder of the Jews, and Globke as the person mainly responsible.²⁵ Precisely at that time, the West German Vierteljahreshefte f¨ur Zeitgeschichte published the posthumous memoirs of the former officer for racial affairs in the Nazi Ministry of Interior Affairs, Bernhard L¨osener, who, surprisingly, trivialized the Nuremberg Laws as a last-minute improvisation by Hitler and some top Nazi-Leaders without any legal preparation or ideological content.²⁶ It seems difficult to believe that the timing of the publication coincided with the public debate on Globke by pure accident. In the short introductory note to L¨osener’s text, the then editor of the VfZ, H[ans] R[othfels], apologized for the publication of the document without the usual source-critical comments.²⁷ The promised critical edition of the document has not appeared in the VfZ to this day. But since then the significance of the Nuremberg Laws has been marginalized in German and international historiography. Based on the 1961 publication of L¨osener’s memoirs, they have been depicted merely as an example of the totalitarian chaos and ‘Planlosigkeit’ of the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policy.²⁸ This interpretation was first questioned in an article that examined the administrative and legal preparation of the laws and in particular the significance and the consideration the decision-makers attached to popular opinion during the months preceding the promulgation of the laws.²⁹ This approach was taken further in recent years in works by several German historians of a younger generation.³⁰ Here, I will analyse the ‘pressure from below’, as reflected in the Stimmungsberichte, between November 1934 and the Reichsparteitag in 1935, where the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated. The question is, whether and to what extent the ‘pressure from below’ in this period had effects on the political decisions leading to the introduction of these laws. ‘Pressure from below’ is understood as all forms of radical initiatives from the population that internalized the ideological messages from above and aimed at an increasing radicalization of the policies against the Jews. Even though most of the violent actions were instigated

86

Otto Dov Kulka

by local party activists, they carried with them non-organized individuals and parts of the population and thus created a radical anti-Jewish atmosphere all over the Reich. To analyse the relation between the ‘pressure from below’ and its effects on the regime’s policies, a textual analysis will here be combined with a quantitative one.³¹ Already in November 1934 the District Office of Alzenau in Bavaria reported that ‘[. . .] in many SA circles there is talk that after the Saar plebiscite,³² harsh steps should be taken more generally against the Jews. In this connection, there was the expression of quite open threats of murder. These statements should not be taken lightly, since rash actions in this area could result in extremely serious consequences for the economy and foreign policy’ (CD484, B53).³³ A report of December 1934 from the Rheinpfalz also expresses the assumption that a harder line will be followed against the Jews after the Saar plebiscite.³⁴ These expectations were in fact realized during the following months, up until the introduction of the laws in September 1935, as the Gestapo situation report (Lagebericht) from the Government District M¨unster for May 1935 shows: As in most other places in the Reich, locally here in the district in recent weeks the Jewish Problem has once again become a focus of general concern. [. . .] In broad segments of the population, and especially in the ranks of the SA, the dominant view is that the time has now come to finally solve the Jewish Question once and for all. As they put it, they wish to come to grips from below with the Jewish Problem, and believe that the government authorities will then have to take action, following suit. (CD865, B122)

The ‘new antisemitic wave’ of 1935 was unleashed by the party press in April,³⁵ and by September 1935 hundreds of violent actions against Jews were initiated and carried out independently by local activists, with broader elements of the population swept up in this wave. The violence took a large variety of forms and affected all aspects of everyday life. The most frequent and most violent public expressions were anti-Jewish excesses (Einzelaktionen) and mass rallies, a boycott against Jewish shops and enterprises, and a variety of actions against so-called race defilement (Rassenschande). Remarkably, between January and September 1935, more than one in every two reports (389 out of 667) described these radicalized expressions of popular opinion—a number that gives a first overall impression of the scope of this eruption of anti-Jewish violence. Among the most violent mass demonstrations were those in Munich in May (CD863, B121), the so-called Kurf¨urstendamm-Krawalle in Berlin in July (CD1004, B139), and rallies with 30,000 participants in Stettin in August (CD1033) and 25,000 in Osnabr¨uck in August (CD1109, B151). The mood of early summer 1935 is pointedly summed up in a report by the Gestapo Berlin for June: [. . .] German Volksgenossen apparently regard them [the Jews] as fair game in every respect.³⁶ For that reason, in the past month as well, there have been a large number of outrageous incidents. The positive aspect of those events, however, is that the population

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

87

is clearly having its eyes opened ever wider, and that hostility towards the Jews is rising constantly. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the population should on occasion express its indignation and take the law into its own hands [. . .]. (CD933, B129)

The wave reached its crest in July and August. An example of the escalation, but also of clashes between authorities and population, can be found in the Gestapo report from Berlin for July 1935: For months, the Gestapo in Berlin has been observing a constant rise in the wave of antisemitism. [. . .] First at the beginning of June in Spandau and Pankow there were several demonstrations out in front of Jewish businesses. These rallies were suppressed by taking the Jews temporarily into protective custody, their seizure fully visible to the demonstrators. But soon the demonstrations increased in size [. . .]. (CD1004, B139)

From here, the report continues with a detailed description of the Kurf¨urstendamm-Krawalle with their violent boycott and destruction of Jewish ice-cream parlours and shops, and the manhandling of patrons and cinema-goers, among them foreign visitors. During these events the accusation of ‘Judenknechte’ (Jews’ lackeys) was hurled at the police by the public, and the report finally concludes with the topic of ‘race defilement’: In connection with these incidents, it must be noted that the police, forced to intervene in these cases, found itself in an extremely difficult situation, since most of the public had little understanding of its actions. The officials were greeted by the demonstrators and the rest of the public with shouts of ‘Jews’ lackeys [. . .]’. In several cases, the population has taken steps to publicly expose the Jewish race-defilers and their Aryan girlfriends by means of posters [. . .].³⁷ (CD1004, B139)

While the general tendency in the ‘antisemitic movement’ did not change in the following month, the tension between population and authorities increased, as reported by the Gestapo for Berlin: Everywhere in the population and the Party, people note the lack of a straight and clear line in policy on the Jews. As was already detailed in the last situation report, what is generally noticed is that the government and the Party are not working hand in hand when it comes to the Jewish Question [. . .]. In any event, police force alone will not be able to prevent a repetition of the demonstrations against the Jews. (CD1089, B146)

A characteristic picture of mass rallies against and pillorying of ‘race-defilers’ is given in the Gestapo report for July 1935 from Breslau: [. . .] After race defilement of Aryan women by Jews has finally been presented to the public in a very clear and unambiguous light, the bitter feeling against these criminals has assumed huge proportions, beyond any limit. There was not any abatement until a total of 20 Jews and 20 Aryan ‘females’ were taken into protective custody. The public reacted with loud applause to the internment of these race defilers in the concentration camp. Thus, on 30 July 1935, thousands of Volksgenossen gathered in the streets, hoping to witness the dispatching of these race defilers to the camp [. . .]. (CD1007, B141)

88

Otto Dov Kulka

The extent of scenes like this, which spread throughout the Reich, prompted even a Gestapo reporter from Bielefeld to speak of a kind of mass hysteria: [. . .] Large segments of the population have been seized by a certain kind of race defilement psychosis. They seem to sense race defilement everywhere, and in some cases have called for the state to proceed against race defilement on the basis of events that in some cases occurred many years ago. In these circles of the population, people likewise fail to understand why all those persons whom they named as guilty of race defilement were not sent to a concentration camp immediately for a long period of detention. [. . .] (CD1006, B150)

The Gestapo also reported on the impact on the Jewish population of the mass rallies, as can be seen in an August report from Osnabr¨uck on a demonstration attended by 25,000 people: ‘This anxiety psychosis [of the Jews] is so powerful that during a rally of the NSDAP at the Ledenhof in Osnabr¨uck, some of the Jews suddenly decided to leave town and did not return until the following day [. . .]’ (CD1009, B151). In smaller cities and towns as well, thousands participated in demonstrations and anti-Jewish violence, as described in special reports by the Gestapo from Aurich (East Frisia) on 27 and 30 July about ‘demonstrations in the North against Jews’ (CD1000, B140). The county commissioner of the small town of H¨unfeld (Hessen) did not hesitate to label what happened in provincial towns as ‘terror’: ‘The acts of terror against Jews and Jewish property continue unabated, since the perpetrators think they are protected from any sanctions under the law’ (CD985, B138).³⁸ In many places, the demonstrations turned into pogroms and the Jews under attack, if they did not flee, had to be evacuated, as was seen above in Osnabr¨uck: In Diez a. d. Lahn, a crowd gathered out in front of a Jewish orphanage and, using ladders, attempted to enter the building. It was successful in prompting the police to intervene and come to the aid of those inside, some 50 persons, mainly children, and deport them to Frankfurt am Main. Popular indignation was especially violent in Gladenbach, where three houses inhabited by Jews were ransacked. People forced their way into the houses and then turned on the water taps, or ripped out the pipes, so that the houses were totally destroyed by the water [. . .]. (CD1140, B154)³⁹

Across the Reich, the crowds accompanied the violent actions and massdemonstrations by hanging banners and painting slogans on the windows of Jewish shops, carrying ideological as well as practical messages such as: ‘ ‘‘Kauft nicht bei Juden,’’ ‘‘Juden und Judenkechte unerw¨unscht,’’ ‘‘Die Juden sind unser Ungl¨uck,’’ ‘‘Ohne L¨osung der Judenfrage keine Erl¨osung des deutschen Volkes’’ u.¨a.’ (‘ ‘‘Don’t shop with Jews’’, ‘‘Jews and Jews’ lackeys not wanted’’, ‘‘The Jews are our misfortune’’, and ‘‘No salvation of the German people without solution of the Jewish Question’’ ’) (CD627).

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

89

A quantitative analysis of documents of the period preceding the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 as compared with the same period in 1934 allows more concrete conclusions to be drawn about the developments.⁴⁰ For this analysis, the most widespread anti-Jewish phenomena have been chosen: ‘Einzelaktionen’ (individual actions) and ‘Rassenschande’ (race defilement), ‘Boykott’ (boycott), ‘Kundgebung’ (rally), and ‘Demonstration’ (demonstration). Table 6.1.

1 Jan.–15 Sept. 1934 1 Jan.–15 Sept. 1935

Total number of documents

Number of documents with: boykott∗ OR rassensch∗ OR einzelaktion∗ OR kundgebung∗ OR demonstra∗

228 667

63 (27%) 389 (58%)

The number of documents that mention anti-Jewish actions during the first three quarters of 1935 unequivocally shows the trend toward the radicalization of hostility in popular opinion—a kind of pressure from below—which had not yet been institutionalized by law. In addition to the computer-based analysis presented above, an intellectual quantitative text analysis of the reports (see note 39) from July and August 1935 in regard to ‘Einzelaktionen’ and ‘Rassenschande’ more than confirms these findings and provides a more differentiated picture of the situation. For this type of analysis, the following violent actions are understood as ‘Einzelaktionen’: anti-Jewish demonstrations, damage to and/or destruction of synagogues and cemeteries, manhandling of Jews resulting in injuries, and ‘protective custody’ of Jews in connection with these excesses and protests against ‘race defilement’. For the period between 1 July and 10 August 1935,⁴¹ the computerized search for ‘Einzelaktionen’ showed that 53 of 127 documents reported such actions, while the intellectual analysis of these texts showed that a total of more than 328 cases were involved. Or, to put it the other way round: the total number of anti-Jewish excesses was higher by at least sixfold than indicated by only a count of the relevant documents. This is also seen from a comparison of the computerized search and the textual analysis regarding ‘race defilement’ in reports between 1 August and 10 September 1935. The computerized search found that in this period, 40 of 158 documents reported on ‘Rassenschande’, while the textual analysis showed that these 40 documents actually reported on at least 185 cases. Some of the 185 cases were unspecific (‘a number of Jews and their non-racial-aware girls’ CD1034) while other reports, in addition to precise numbers, mentioned that ‘more persons’ have been affected (cf. CD1090). Based on these reports, the overall number of ‘race defilement’ cases reported for August can with certainty be estimated as considerably higher.

90

Otto Dov Kulka

This also is true for the ‘Einzelaktionen’ and other kinds of actions where the exact number of cases exceeds the findings because of the mechanism described here. As shown above, the violent ‘pressure from below’ and general lawlessness caused concern among local authorities responsible for public order and confronted them with a difficult situation: on the one hand their duty was to maintain public order, whereas at the same time they were part of the policy of the struggle against the Jew declared by the party and the state. Concern was also expressed by some segments of the population, who felt uneasy in the face of untrammelled public violence and even threatened by it, as a Gestapo report from Aachen for August 1935 shows: [. . .] The way the Jewish Question is being dealt with in my district has likewise caused great displeasure, since given their mentality, the Roman Catholic population initially sees the Jew as a human being, and only secondarily thinks of evaluating the matter from the standpoint of race policy. [. . .] It is thus very welcome that in future there are to be no more individual actions against Jews, especially since here in this district, such actions have in any case led to the most detrimental consequences in regard to our close foreign neighbours just over the border. [. . .] (CD1086, B147)

As the Gestapo reported from the district of Merseburg for September 1935, this attitude was not limited to religious circles: ‘Lack of proper understanding is prominent among the members of the so-called upper and better-educated classes. It is especially in these circles that we are often able to discern an almost complete loss of the racial primal instinct’ (CD 1224). The mounting pressure from below as presented in the reports created a reality, in which the local and regional authorities acted on their own initiative by adopting quasi-legal measures, which actually preceded the anti-Jewish laws of Nuremberg on the Reich-level. The ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour’ was preceded by the refusal of local registrars to perform marriages between ‘Aryans’ and ‘Non-Aryans’⁴² and by the daily arrests of men and women who were accused of ‘race defilement’. Also the ‘Reich Flag Law’ forbidding Jews to fly the German state flag and the Swastika was preceded by local initiatives as well as by a Reich-wide directive of the Gestapo.⁴³ Furthermore, the demand of the population for a law depriving the Jews of their Reich citizenship is reported by the SD in August 1935 in connection with the pressure from the ‘Volk . . . which according to its national socialist worldview wishes to see Jews ousted from Germany.’⁴⁴ All these kinds of radicalizing pressure from below, as presented in the reports, clearly influenced the political leadership of the Reich. This can be seen from the minutes of a high-level meeting convened on 20 August 1935 to discuss the necessary next steps in regard to the Jewish Question—a meeting that led to the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws a few weeks later. Participating were ministers of the Reich government, the heads of the Gestapo and the SD, and

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

91

others. The Bavarian interior minister and Gauleiter of Munich, Adolf Wagner, obviously based his conclusion on the reports about popular opinion from the preceding months: State Minister Wagner likewise criticized the violent excesses. He explained them by stating that in regard to the Jewish Question, there was a divergence of opinion between the government and the Party and also with some departments of the Reich administration. About 80 per cent of the population was pressing for a solution to the Jewish Question as spelled out in the Party platform. They thought that the Reich government had to keep that in mind, otherwise it would suffer a loss in its authority.⁴⁵

It should be mentioned that a few months earlier, in May, Adolf Wagner had been the chief instigator of the violent anti-Jewish mass demonstrations in Munich. Among the ministers who spoke along similar lines was the president of the Reichsbank and conservative minister of economic affairs, Hjalmar Schacht, who had already spoken out against the violence and lawlessness in a public speech in K¨onigsberg on 18 August 1935.⁴⁶ He commented on the detrimental ‘exaggerations and violent excesses of antisemitic propaganda. [. . .] The conclusion of his remarks was that the Party program of the NSDAP should be made reality, but solely on the basis of legal measures and decrees.’⁴⁷ At this stage, Hitler himself was disinclined to accede to the legislation proposals for various reasons. Thus, he rejected Schacht’s personal intervention on the matter in May, though, in the end, he followed the pressure from below.⁴⁸ There is no doubt that popular opinion, as it reached the authorities through the reports, played a role that cannot be ignored both in the preparations as well as in the final political decision on the Nuremberg Laws. The laws were intended to meet two goals alike: the spectacular realization of a basic principle of the revolutionary ideology which the movement had preached from the outset of its political path; and the simultaneous institutionalization of the revolutionary ideology and its militant manifestations within a controlled legal framework. This appears to be one of the stages of a complex dialectical relationship between government policy and popular opinion in the Third Reich. The reports on the population’s reactions to the Nuremberg Laws are eloquent from this point of view: The new laws on Jews have sparked great enthusiasm among the enlightened population. The activists and old veteran fighters in the movement are also very satisfied, and generally people are shouting with joy: ‘The state is still revolutionary, after all! The points of the Party platform have not been forgotten!’ The violence against the Jews has ceased almost completely as a result of a strict decree issued by the Interior Ministry and an unmistakable statement on these matters by the F¨uhrer.⁴⁹

While the Gestapo of Kassel reports enthusiastic acceptance of the Nuremberg Laws as realization of the Party programme they had striven for, making violence no longer necessary, in Aachen the reaction was more qualified. According to the Gestapo there, the laws were welcomed only in so far as they were to prevent

92

Otto Dov Kulka

further anti-Jewish violence: ‘The new laws announced in Nuremberg were not greeted by the population with unanimous approval. [. . .] The only aspect praised is that this legislation will prevent excesses in antisemitic propaganda and violence.’⁵⁰ Several other reports mention critical utterances about the laws and the earlier violence but emphasize the desirable contribution they will make toward the goal of isolating and excluding German Jewry: ‘The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour was also received for the most part with a sense of satisfaction. One major reason for that is because psychologically it will lead, more so than through unpleasant individual actions, to the desired goal of isolating Jewry. However, there are some who have mixed opinions regarding this law.’⁵¹ Similarly, the Gestapo report from Berlin comments on the laws as a clear and final measure for the exclusion of the Jews from German society: The new laws passed by the Reichstag at the Convention of Liberty, in particular the Law on the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service and the Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, have finally cleared the air and brought clarity after years of struggle between Germandom and Jewry. In future and for all time to come, no interference is possible in the v¨olkisch affairs and concerns of the German nation, and is forbidden.⁵²

The far-reaching teleological meaning of this significant step of 1935 toward the ‘removal’ of the Jews is most pointedly expressed in one of the ubiquitous anti-Jewish banners and graffiti paintings ‘from below’: ‘Keine Erl¨osung des deutschen Volkes ohne L¨osung der Judenfrage’.⁵³ The dialectics between pressure from below and measures from above are also integral to further decisive stages in the development and realization of fundamental ideological principles in the Third Reich, in which the solution of the Jewish Question, with its multiple implications, was of central significance.

III The Reichskristallnacht is perhaps the most thoroughly researched chapter in the pre-war history of German Jewry in the Third Reich. Historiography, as well as Jewish and German collective memories, mainly presents the traumatic image of the November 1938 pogrom as an event of destruction and devastation in the course of one night and one day.⁵⁴ As is well known, the government’s pretext for the entire action was the dramatic news of 9 November 1938 about the death of the first secretary of the German embassy in Paris, vom Rath, as the result of Hershel Grynszpan’s assassination attempt two days earlier. A revealing document that sheds light upon the pre-history of the Reichskristallnacht is the Reich-wide SD report for January to October 1938—that is, for the ten months preceding the pogrom. The report is dated 1 November 1938,

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

93

about a week before Kristallnacht: ‘The attitude of the population to the Jewish Question was manifested in the very numerous individual actions, especially in recent months, which in most instances were promoted by the local Party organizations’ (CD2529, B354). A more graphic account of the nature, scope and circumstances of the events in those recent months is given in the monthly Reich-wide SD report for October 1938, which was discovered several years ago in the Osobyi-Archive in Moscow: The intensified anti-Jewish attitude in the population [. . .] had its most powerful expression in actions against the Jewish population. In the south and south-west of the Reich, this violence at times took on the character of a pogrom [italics my own]. In a number of towns and localities, the synagogues were destroyed or set on fire, and the windows of Jewish shops and homes were destroyed. In the Gau Franconia and in W¨urttemberg, the Jews in a few localities were in some instances forced by the population to leave their residence immediately, taking along only the barest essentials. (CD2529, B353)

As in the previous section, a quantitative, computer-based analysis has been carried out, followed by an intellectual analysis and a manual examination of the texts. The results show that 76 of 161 detailed reports from all parts of the Reich report on 117 ‘Einzelaktionen’ [individual actions] against the Jews between 1 March and 8 November 1938. Often only non-quantified information referring to ‘numerous events’ is given, without exact numbers, so that the total number is actually considerably higher than 117. A great many of the actions were those events of destruction and violence that the above-mentioned report did not hesitate to describe as having ‘the character of a pogrom’.⁵⁵ It turns out that the pattern of anti-Jewish rioting and violence and even the cleansing of whole localities of Jews was extremely widespread during the period of May to October 1938, a time of brink-of-war tension over the Sudeten crisis with Czechoslovakia, and even before that in relation to the tension around the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938. The reports also allow an insight into the mood and reactions of the Jews in this period; the most insightful example appears in the Reich-wide SD report for September 1938: The mood of the Jews in the territory of the Reich was shaped in the past report period almost exclusively by the situation in foreign affairs. It gave rise to the most sundry and varied rumours about the possible way in which Jews might be treated in the event of war. [. . .] Jews in general had fears of being sent to a concentration camp, or of being disposed of in some other manner. (CD2509, B347)⁵⁶

The first example of a pogrom-like destruction of Jewish houses and synagogues and attacks on Jews occurred in connection with the Anschluss of Austria. In his report for March 1938, the district governor of Lower Franconia and Aschaffenburg writes about six such events ‘on the occasion of the incorporation of Austria’ in his district alone, namely in Adelsberg, Burgsinn, Gem¨unden, Mittelsinn, Kleinlangheim and Lohr (CD2399, B313).⁵⁷

94

Otto Dov Kulka

The remarkable radicalization of all forms of anti-Jewish activity by the population was triggered by the escalation of the Sudeten crisis following the Czechoslovakian mobilization on 20 May 1938. The fear of imminent war is in general presented as related to the role ascribed by the population to ‘the Jew’ as the force that provokes war against Germany. During the war itself, this link became fatal for the Jews, particularly in the years after the invasion of the Soviet Union and the American entry into the war in 1941, when the European conflict became a world war.⁵⁸ In this context, the anti-Jewish mood found expression even in quite remote provincial towns, as reported from the local police office of Sandberg in Bavaria on 27 September 1938: ‘The mood in the population can be best described as depressed. It (the population) is anticipating a large-scale war. People are in complete agreement with the need for measures to care for the refugees from the Sudetenland, and they also show very great compassion. In general, the ‘‘Jew’’ is held responsible as the originator of these critical times’ (CD2525). This accusation reinforced the demand for the complete ‘removal’ of the Jews down to the very last of them from the German Volksgemeinschaft: In the days prior to 1 October,⁵⁹ many instances were noted where the Jews still living in the area were following the mounting tension with a kind of inner joy. From this it could be concluded they are indulging in a kind of relish in their anticipation of the coming war. This gave rise among the German population to a justified sense of repugnance. It then was vented in many places in action against the Jews after the positive solution to the question of the Sudeten Germans was found. [. . .] If a number of illegal means were employed in this connection, that is only understandable. [. . .] In any event, it is necessary to press forward with the struggle against the Jews, even if by permissible means, until the last Jew has finally disappeared from our Volksgemeinschaft.⁶⁰

To reach the goal of removal, pogrom-like actions were carried out even before the tensions culminated in the Reichskristallnacht. A cumulative report by the governor of the Palatine district for October 1938 explicitly underlines this connection in reporting on the devastation wreaked on the synagogue in Leimersheim on the night of 9 to 10 October 1938 and other Palatine synagogues and houses of Jews. After listing a large number of ‘Einzelaktionen’, this extensive report for October, written on 9 November, the eve of Kristallnacht, sums up by noting that all reports from the various places that contributed to this regional compilation provide the same ‘justification’ for the actions: The reason for all these events lies once again in the behaviour of the Jews during the period of high tension. [. . .] The population wants to see the Jews get out of the villages and leave, and seeks to avenge itself in this way for the insolent behaviour of the Jews during the critical period in September. This justification for the actions of the population runs through all the reports. (CD2538, B355)

Altogether, the Sudeten crisis and tensions caused by the fear of war are explicitly mentioned in 17 documents—each of which reports on more than one case—as

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

95

reasons for violent anti-Jewish excesses. Aside from these explicit reports, the connection is implicit in most of the other documents on such incidents. All actions that typify Reichskristallnacht —the destruction and devastation of synagogues and Jewish houses, manhandling of Jews and attacks against them, their arrest and expulsion—can already be found with increasing intensity during the first ten months of the year. The unspecified number of cases of synagogues damaged and destroyed was not only a result of anti-Jewish violence from below as described in 11 documents.⁶¹ In two spectacular cases, total destruction was initiated and carried out from above: in Munich in June on special order by Hitler, and in Nuremberg in August at the initiative of Streicher.⁶² As explicitly stated in one of the reports, the Nuremberg action was intended as the first stage of a ‘Großaktion’ and ‘tens of thousands of Volksgenossen were present at the historic hour’.⁶³ Similarly, the bimonthly SD report from Berlin for June and July 1938 spoke about widespread boycott actions initiated by the party leadership that spiralled into destruction, looting and physical violence against Jews and appear, in retrospect, as rehearsals for the Reichskristallnacht: Beginning on 10 June 1938, a Jews’ operation [Judenaktion] was carried out in Berlin, initially only in a few sections of the city. All formations of the Party participated, as instructed by the Gau Direction. The operation reached its high point on 20/21 June 1938, when all the Jewish shops in Berlin and the signs of the Jewish lawyers and doctors were painted over with the word ‘Jew’ and the Star of David. In the course of the operation, there was here and there destruction and plundering of Jewish shops, as well as physical assaults. The operation was ended on the afternoon of 21 June 1938. [. . .] (CD2458, B332)

According to the Reich-wide SD report for July, similar actions occurred all over Germany (CD2473, B341). The cases reported from provincial towns and villages range from the devastation of synagogues to full-fledged pogrom-like actions initiated from below. One example of a heavily damaged synagogue is from the district of Main Franconia, where, in Mellrichstadt, the interior of the synagogue was completely destroyed in an action that saw mushrooming public participation: ‘The first attack involved a small number of individuals, and then people from the gathering crowd chose to join in on the destruction’ (CD2513, B350).⁶⁴ In the same district, Jewish farms were attacked and damaged, a Jew was beaten up and ‘the embitterment of the population found an outlet in similar excesses against the Jews at other places’.⁶⁵ In many places the situation escalated, as for example that described by the SD in a special report for 27 September 1938, from Wiesbaden district, where in Nassau/Lahn a large crowd gathered against the local Jews: The house was surrounded by the crowd, and windows and shutters were smashed. The Jew Walter Rosenthal was taken into protective custody by the police for his own safety. A further report will soon follow. Another incident occurred in Rauenthal/Rhg., where

96

Otto Dov Kulka

a male and female Jew commented on the current foreign situation in remarks to the residents, saying that in two years they would once again be in power. The following night the people dragged these two persons from their beds and, whips in hand, forced them to march in their nightclothes through the streets of the town. (CD2510, B348)

The pattern of the police taking Jews into protective custody ‘for their own safety’ when the situation lurched out of control can be found repeatedly, for example in a report for May 1938 on a mass gathering in Bad Alzenau that turned into a violent excess (CD2441, B328). Under the impression of the Sudeten crisis, the violence against the Jews in this period of brink-of-war tension preceding the Reichskristallnacht resulted in Jews leaving several places or being forced out by the population, making the towns ‘judenrein’ [free of Jews]. As a result of the murders and atrocities perpetrated against Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia a great indignation flared up against the local Jews in the market town of Bechhofen, district office Feuchtwangen, and in Wilhermsdorf, district office Neustadt a.d. Aisch. The Jews then left Bechhofen and Wilhermsdorf. These localities are now completely free of Jews, like the entire district of Feuchtwangen.⁶⁶

During the months preceding the Reichskristallnacht, there were of course other voices in the population as well. Some of them either openly or implicitly criticized the anti-Jewish violence, while others expressed their apprehension in the face of the increasing brutality and lawlessness of the pogrom-like actions. In the same Reich-wide SD report for October 1938, which describes the extent and details of the pogrom-like actions, the reporter also mentions: ‘It was possible to note that the Catholic population generally disapproved of these actions’ (CD2529, B353). Similar critical voices from different parts of the population had already been noted earlier in a Reich-wide SD report for April and May 1938. It describes ‘a strengthened anti-Jewish attitude among the population’ on the one hand and ‘indirect support for the Jews on the part of strict Catholics and Protestants, and among farmers’ on the other (CD2434, B324). A local SD report of 15 May 1938 from Hanau reports on critical voices emanating in particular from socalled ‘bessere Leute’, a term generally used for the liberal bourgeoisie (CD2435, B325). However, there is no doubt that this new wave of ‘intensified anti-Jewish attitude in the population’, to quote again the cumulative Reich-wide retrospective report for October, written a few days before the Reichskristallnacht, ‘had its most powerful expression in actions against the Jewish population’ and that the radical trend regarding the Jewish question was then dominant. It can now be concluded that the Reichskristallnacht pogrom was an expansion and a centrally organized escalation from above of the patterns of anti-Jewish violence that had swept Germany from below during the previous months of the year.

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

97

As shown, the often minute and identifiable details given in the local and regional reports on the events of this period confirm the reliability of the Reich-wide SD reports that were the point of departure for this chapter.⁶⁷ It was these reports, summarizing the information provided by lower reporting levels across the Reich, that were presented to the political leadership and served it in its decision-making. The decision on the Kristallnacht pogrom itself was made at the highest level, and according to recent research, was also motivated by and aimed at foreign politics.⁶⁸ The pogrom as such remains a milestone in the historical awareness of Germans and Jews, as well as one of the central issues in the historiography on the Third Reich in the pre-war period. But, as it is now evident, it was by no means an isolated event unleashed on the night of 9–10 November 1938, just as the Nuremberg Laws were not Hitler’s improvised initiative on the eve of the Reichsparteitag of 15 September 1935. The pressure from below preceding the Nuremberg Laws almost unavoidably brought about the institutionalization of the radical demands in the form of legislation that also sought to put an end to the uncontrollable public violence. In 1938, on the other hand, the pressure from below created local patterns of massive violence which, following the decision from above, were readily available to be expanded and escalated into the Reich-wide pogrom of Kristallnacht, with all its implications and consequences. As such, the population’s attitudes and actions—the radicalized ‘pressure from below’—provided a background for the political leadership’s decisions. This long-unresearched dimension of violence and destruction from below preceding the Reichskristallnacht went hand in hand with the well-researched radicalization of the Judenpolitik from above. This began in the economic sphere with the escalation of Aryanization in 1937, continued with measures of administrative and political terror, such as registration of all Jewish property in April 1938, and was followed by mass arrests of Jews in June 1938 and the first mass expulsions from Germany of Jews with Soviet citizenship in February and Jews of Polish citizenship in October 1938.⁶⁹ In the course of this radicalization of anti-Jewish politics, the Reichskristallnacht itself was of course an event of major historical significance. Even though no central, uniform order was issued, an unambiguous signal to the party leaders—based on a clear decision by Hitler—was given by Goebbels immediately after the news arrived of vom Rath’s death on the evening of 9 November. Heydrich followed this up with his urgent telegram of 1.20 a.m. on 10 November, in which he directed the Gestapo and the SD to inform immediately the already ‘active’ Gauleiters and district party leaders of his orders.⁷⁰ The message they received was that the police had been instructed to tolerate most forms of violence and not to tame the anti-Jewish excesses but rather to arrest as many Jewish men as local prisons could hold and later deport them to concentration camps.⁷¹ Any orders from above for the pogrom, however, could not have been carried out with such immediacy and effectiveness in all parts of the

98

Otto Dov Kulka

Reich without the patterns of violence and destruction developed during the preceding months.⁷² Even though the SD did not initiate the November pogrom, it was more than aware of the ‘wrath of the people’ (Volkszorn) as an accelerating factor in the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’. This is seen in the SD memorandum of January 1937 for Heydrich ‘On the Jewish Problem’: The most effective way to deprive the Jews of a feeling of security is the wrath of the people, as manifested in violence. Although this method is illegal, it has a long-lasting effect, as the ‘Kurf¨urstendamm riot’ showed. [. . .] Psychologically this is all the more comprehensible, since the Jew has learned a great deal from the pogroms of recent centuries and his greatest fear is of a hostile mood which can spontaneously turn against him at any time. (CD2063, B252)

On 24 November 1938, a mere two weeks after the Reichskristallnacht pogrom, the views of the secret SD memorandum found their public expression in the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps, where a frighteningly precise prediction of all the subsequent steps leading toward the Final Solution of the Jewish Question was published. It envisaged the removal of the Jews from all spheres of the economy, their marking, their ghettoization, and, finally, the unavoidable annihilation ‘by fire and sword’.⁷³ Both the destructive violence of the Reichskristallnacht and the cold rationalistic thinking of the SD, the central drive behind the Judenpolitik, were already then part of the ‘genocidal mentality’ in Nazi Germany, as tellingly analysed by Ian Kershaw.⁷⁴ That no further pogroms like the Reichskristallnacht took place in Germany was probably due to the mainly negative reactions of the German population, even though the dominant thrust of their pragmatic arguments concentrated on criticism of the futile destruction of ‘German property’.⁷⁵ The regime’s radicalized anti-Jewish policy was subsequently channelled into other forms, including the complete removal of the Jews from the German economy⁷⁶ and the use of Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps as hostages to exercise pressure on the Jews to enforce and accelerate emigration. The outbreak of the war brought in its wake two different policies—for the Reich and for occupied Poland. In Germany, renewed local ‘Einzelaktionen’ of anti-Jewish violence from below and the ‘old fighters’ demand for large-scale actions were reported, but the Gestapo ordered all these activities to be nipped in the bud.⁷⁷ In Poland, however, murderous violence against the Jews was unleashed by the SD-Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht immediately with the invasion.⁷⁸ Concluding, the complex dialectical interrelation between popular opinion and political decisions in Nazi Germany existed throughout the history of the Third Reich. As shown here, this relationship played a significant role in the two situations of 1935 and 1938—although in two different ways.

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

99

Regarding the attitudes of the German population during the war years, a similar examination based upon the Stimmungsberichte can now be undertaken of the situation preceding the decision on the deportation of the Jews from Germany and during the Final Solution. For this future research, the question will not only be what the German population knew about the fate of the Jews, but also what the majority wanted in regard to the solution of the Jewish Question.⁷⁹ No t e s 1I

wish to thank my assistants Corinna Kaiser and Irene Aue for their most valuable help with the quantitative research for this article.

For a broader scope that includes less radical voices, and even some critical of the regime’s anti-Jewish policy, see my articles: ‘ ‘‘Public Opinion’’ in Nazi Germany and the ‘‘Jewish Question’’ ’, Zion: A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History, 40:3–4 (1975), 186–290 (in Hebrew with English summary); English version of 1982 reprinted in Michael R. Marrus (ed.), The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews (Westport and London, 1989), pt. 5: Public Opinion and Relations to the Jews in Nazi Europe, vol. 1, 115–50; idem and Aron Rodrigue, ‘The German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich: Recent Publications and Trends of Research on German Society and the ‘‘Jewish Question’’ ’, Yad Vashem Studies (YVS) 16 (1984), 421–35; Kulka, ‘The German Population and the Jews: State of Research and New Perspectives’, in David Bankier (ed.), Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941 (New York and Oxford, 2000), 271–81. 2 Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard J¨ackel (eds.), Die Juden in den geheimen NSStimmungsberichten 1933–45, Schriften des Bundesarchivs 62 (D¨usseldorf, 2004); book and CD-Rom (hereinafter referred to as Stimmungsberichte). 3 This figure was given by the head of the SD reporting system, Ohlendorf, in 1945. See Heinz Boberach (ed.), Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938–1945 (Herrsching, 1984), 16. A recent study on the SD in Saxony arrived at a figure of 2,746 agents and reporters for this region alone. Carsten Schreiber, ‘ ‘‘Eine verschworene Gemeinschaft’’: Regionale Verfolgungsnetzwerke des SD in Sachsen’, in Michael Wildt (ed.), Nachrichtendienst, politische Elite und Mordeinheit: Der Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsf¨uhrers SS. Hamburg (Hamburg, 2003), 57–85, here 84. 4 On the various systems of the reports, their development, and evaluation see Kulka: ‘Die N¨urnberger Rassengesetze und die deutsche Bev¨olkerung im Lichte geheimer NSLage- und Stimmungsberichte’, Vierteljahreshefte f¨ur Zeitgeschichte (VfZ ) 32 (1984), 582–624, here 582–600; David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 4–10. 5 Reinhard Heydrich, ‘An die SD-F¨uhrer der SS-Oberabschnitte’, Reichsf¨uhrer SS, Der Chef des Sicherheitshauptamtes, Berlin, 4 September 1937, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BArch) R 58/990, Bl. 23. 6 Staatsministerium des Innern, ‘Berichterstattung in politischen Angelegenheiten, 17 July 1934’, Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, MA 106669: ‘Besonderer Wert ist darauf

100

Otto Dov Kulka

zu legen, daß im Interesse einer ungeschminkten Unterrichtung der Reichsregierung alle pers¨onlichen und sonstigen R¨ucksichten ausgeschaltet werden und daß u¨ ber alle politisch wesentlichen und f¨ur die Stimmung im Lande maßgeblichen Ereignisse und Zust¨ande r¨uckhaltlos berichtet wird.’ 7 Facsimile in Stimmungsberichte, 552/3. 8 See Aryeh L. Unger, ‘The Public Opinion Reports of the Nazi Party’, Public Opinion Quarterly 29 (1965), 565–82; Boberach 1984 (as in n. 3), 36 f. 9 See Bishop Wurm’s notes about the reception in the Reich Chancellery on 25 January 1934, in Peter Matheson (ed.), The Third Reich and the Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, 1981), 43. An example of an indirect reference can be found in Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on 15 September 1935 following the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. The speech clearly reflects the descriptions that were presented by the reports from across the Reich (see Kulka 1984, as in n. 4, 620f.). On 10 November 1938, Hitler refers to the dramatic shifts in public opinion in the critical situations before and after the Anschluss of Austria and the Munich agreement (Bankier 1992, as in n. 4, 12f.). On another occasion, in his ‘Table Talk’ of 25 October 1941, Hitler clearly referred to a public rumour when he remarked that ‘it’s good when the horror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry’ (Werner Jochmann (ed.), Adolf Hitler: Monologe im F¨uhrer-Hauptquartier 1941–1944: Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims (Hamburg, 1984), 106). Similarly, on 15 May 1942: ‘And it is the same Jew, who once stabbed us in the back, over whom our so-called bourgeoisie now sheds tears when we ship him off to the East!’ (Andreas Hillgruber (ed.), Henry Picker: Hitlers Tischgespr¨ache (Munich, 1963), 145). 10 See facsimile in Stimmungsberichte, 550f. For internal critical evaluations of the reports by the SD Main Office and the Main Office’s directives to the report writers at the regional level (Oberabschnitte) cf. Yad Vashem Archives, 0.51 OSO/48. 11 Mainly literature by exiled German historians and post-war works by non-German historians, e.g. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London, 1942); Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (New York, 1941); Leon Poliakov, Breviaire de la haine: le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (Paris, 1951); Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 1953); Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews (Chicago and London, 1961). 12 ‘[. . .] A strict line is to be drawn between Nazism during the so-called period of struggle, before accession to power and Nazism after this accession. [. . .] No single word was spoken or written after 30 January 1933 which gives any direct indication of the feeling of the masses.’ Eva Reichmann, Hostages of Civilization: The Social Sources of National Socialist Anti-Semitism (London, 1950), 190f. 13 See Otto Dov Kulka, ‘Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung u¨ ber den Nationalsozialismus und die Endl¨osung’, Historische Zeitschrift 240 (1985), 599–640, here 609–14 (revised English edition in Yisrael Gutman (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust Period ( Jerusalem, 1988)). 14 Frank Bajohr and Dieter Pohl, Der Holocaust als offenes Geheimnis (Munich, 2006), 9; see also Peter Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutschen und die

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

101

Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich, 2006), 7; and Bernward D¨orner, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte (Berlin, 2007), 605. 15 During the four decades preceding the publication of our Stimmungsberichte, most of the editions limited themselves to a regional scope or to certain periods of Nazi rule, and information regarding the Jews could be found only scattered through them. For a complete overview of the various editions, see introduction, Stimmungsberichte, 17–19. 16 For an overview of these studies, see Kulka and Rodrigue 1984 (as in n. 1), and Kulka 2000 (ibid.); for an updated research review, see Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 10–21. 17 The first such studies on the topic were published in 1975 and 1983 by Israeli and British historians: Kulka 1975 (as in n. 1); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983), 224–77, 358–72; in 1992 another comprehensive study followed by another Israeli researcher (Bankier 1992, as in n. 4). The first systematic German studies appeared only after 2004 and already made use of the digital data prepared for the Stimmungsberichte edition: Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14); also Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft als Selbsterm¨achtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939 (Hamburg, 2007); D¨orner 2007 (as in n. 14) as well as Frank Bajohr: ‘The ‘‘Folk Community’’ and the Persecution of the Jews: German Society under the National Socialist Dictatorship, 1933–1945’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20:2 (2006), 183–206; Bajohr and Pohl 2006 (as in n. 14). 18 The first to introduce the theory of indifference into postwar historiography was Marlis Steinert, though her study touched upon the Jewish Question on only 15 of 387 pages in the quoted English edition. She adopted the term ‘indifference’ from the analysis of methodologically highly problematic statistics in a postwar publication of the German psychologist M¨uller-Claudius and drew an analogy to a study of Gabriel A. Almond on the indifference and isolationism of American society during the war (Marlis G. Steinert, Hitler’s War and the Germans: Public Mood and Attitude during the Second World War (Athens, Ohio, 1977), 136f., nn. 121, 125. Mommsen and Obst, who in 1988 also based their study uncritically on M¨ullerClaudius’s ‘statistics’, added to the topos of indifference the concept of ‘repression’: ‘[. . .] die Gleichg¨ultigkeit zumal gegen das Schicksal der Juden verkn¨upfte sich mit einer am Ort und Zeitpunkt des Geschehens einsetzenden Verdr¨angung [. . .].’ Hans Mommsen and Dieter Obst, ‘Die Reaktion der deutschen Bev¨olkerung auf die Verfolgung der Juden 1933–1943’, in Hans Mommsen and Susanne Willems (eds.), Herschaftsalltag im Dritten Reich: Studien und Texte (D¨usseldorf, 1988), 374–421, here 420. 19 For his most quoted and often misinterpreted dictum, ‘The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference’ (Kershaw 1983, as in n. 17, 277), Kershaw subsequently coined the term ‘moral indifference’: ‘[. . .] apathy and ‘‘moral indifference’’ to the treatment and fate of the Jews was the most widespread attitude of all. This was not a neutral stance’. (Ian Kershaw, ‘German Popular Opinion and the ‘‘Jewish Question’’, 1939–1943: Some Further Reflections’, in Arnold Paucker

102

Otto Dov Kulka

(ed.), Die Juden im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1943 ( T¨ubingen, 1986), 365–86, here 383f. Even earlier, indifference had been described as an ‘abysmal indifference to the fate of the Jews as human beings’ that ‘reached the point of almost complete depersonalization.’ Apparently, for the majority of the German people ‘the means of ‘‘removal’’ and the fate of those being ‘‘removed’’—be it segregation within Germany or emigration, deportation to ghettos and camps or systematic mass murder whose objective was the extermination of a whole people—genocide—did not constitute a problem for them.’ (Kulka 1975, 259, here quoted from reprint 1989 (as in n. 1) 149f.). 20 Cf. Kulka 2000 (as in n. 1); Ian Kershaw on ‘The Dialectic of Radicalisation in Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy’ in his article ‘Hitler’s Role in the ‘‘Final Solution’’ ’, YVS 34 (2006), 7–43, here 26–31. See also Bajohr: ‘Vom antij¨udischen Konsens zum schlechten Gewissen: Die deutsche Gesellschaft und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945’, in Bajohr and Pohl 2006 (as in n. 14), 15–79. 21 See his statement ‘The development of trends of opinions after 1933 can be reconstructed only in an impressionistic way.’ Ian Kershaw, ‘Allt¨agliches und Außerallt¨agliches: Ihre Bedeutung f¨ur die Volksmeinung 1933–1939’, in Detlev Peukert and J¨urgen Reulecke (eds.), Die Reihen fest geschlossen: Alltag im Nationalsozialismus: Vom Ende der Weimarer Republik bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Wuppertal, 1981), 273–92, here 274. 22 Longerich 2006 and D¨ orner 2007 (as in n. 14); Bajohr 2006 and Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17). 23 See for example G[ustav Otto] Warburg, Six Years of Hitler: The Jews Under the Nazi Regime (London, 1939); and the first comprehensive works on the ‘Final Solution’ by Poliakov 1951, Reitlinger 1953 and Hilberg 1961 (as in n. 11). 24 Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Reichsb¨urgergesetz vom 15. September 1935: Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre vom 15. September 1935: Gesetz zum Schutze der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes vom 18. Oktober 1935 (Munich, 1936). 25 See for example Ausschuß fur Deutsche Einheit (ed.), Globke und die Ausrottung der ¨ die verbrecherische Vergangenheit des Staatssekret¨ars im Amt des BundeskanJuden: Uber zlers Adenauer (Berlin/GDR, 1960); idem (ed.), Neue Beweise f¨ur Globkes Verbrechen gegen die Juden (Berlin/GDR, 1960). These and similar brochures were also published in other languages, including English, French and Spanish. The publication of numerous articles in papers and journals began in the same year. 26 Bernhard L¨ osener, ‘Als Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des Innern’, VfZ 9 (1961), 264–313. 27 L¨ osener himself expressed his wish that the document should be published ‘at an appropriate point in time’. See ibid., 263. This appropriate occasion seems to have been the Eichmann Trial, mentioned by Rothfels, which he regarded as an opportunity to improve the image of German ‘Conservative’ Bureaucracy. On Rothfels’ role in German postwar historiography and the Institut f¨ur Zeitgeschichte, see Nicolas Berg: Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

103

(G¨ottingen, 2003) (chs. 2.3, 3.2 and 3.3); idem, ‘The Invention of ‘‘Functionalism’’: Josef Wulf, Martin Broszat, and the Institute for Contemporary History (Munich) in the 1960s’ Yad Vashem: Search and Research-Lectures and Papers 4 ( Jerusalem, 2003). 28 The first links in this chain of trivializing the Nuremberg Laws based on L¨osener’s memoirs appeared in the publications of the Institut f¨ur Zeitgeschichte in 1962 and 1965. These were Hans Mommsen’s documentation ‘Der nationalsozialistische Polizeistaat und die Judenverfolgung vor 1938’, VfZ 10 (1962), 88–94, here p. 76 and n. 30, and in the first comprehensive German history of the Holocaust by Helmut Krausnick (then director of the Institute): ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, in Helmut Krausnick and Martin Broszat (eds.), The Anatomy of the SS-State (London, 1970), 17–110, here 44f. Since the early 1970s, L¨osener’s memoirs have been referred to uncritically by mainly so-called functionalist historians, e.g. Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews 1930–1939 (Urbana, 1970), 121–5 and 131f.; Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (D¨usseldorf, 1972), 126–32; Mommsen and Obst 1988 (as in n. 18), 384–485. This approach was also adopted by the Israeli historian Leni Yahil in her Hebrew-language comprehensive history of the Holocaust, HaShoah ( Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, 1987), ¨ 100–2, which also appeared in German as Die Shoah: Uberlebenskampf und Vernichtung der europ¨aischen Juden (Munich, 1998); and most recently by the American historian Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001), 122. 29 Kulka 1984 (as in n. 4), 615–24. 30 Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 75–100; Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17), 260–6. For a detailed deconstruction of the historiographical myth created by L¨osener with his 1961 publication, see Cornelia Essner, Die ‘N¨urnberger Gesetze’ oder: Die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933–1945 (Paderborn, 2002), 113–34. 31 The analysis for this period is based on local and regional reports, completely preserved for Prussia and Bavaria, and on sporadic reports from other Reich regions. No Reich-wide reports were preserved for this period, either by the Gestapo or by the SD. 32 The plebiscite on the political status of the Saarland was held on 12 January 1935. 33 Since the quantitative analysis used here is based on the complete digital version of the Stimmungsberichte edition, all documents are quoted with the CD-Rom number (CD . . .). If the document has been included in the printed volume of selected documents, the book number is also given (B . . .). The translation is based on the forthcoming English edition of the book (New Haven, 2009/10). 34 SA-Standarte 22 Zweibr¨ ucken (Rheinpfalz), Report for December 1934 (CD548, B84). 35 Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 75f. 36 ‘Deutsche Volksgenossen betrachten sie anscheinend in jeder Hinsicht als Freiwild.’ 37 Even though a law against ‘race defilement’ was not yet in existence, 72 persons were arrested in Berlin in July on charges of this offence, according to this report.

104 38 For

Otto Dov Kulka

a detailed description of the violence in the German provinces up to 1939, see Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17). 39 District Governor Wiesbaden, Report for August 1935. 40 This computer-supported research was carried out with the help of the search engine of the Stimmungsberichte CD-Rom. The search produces the number of documents in which a certain keyword is found but not the considerably higher number of occurrences of that term in the text. The group of documents pre-selected in this way was then researched by what is professionally called an intellectual analysis that makes use of traditional means of textual analysis to obtain a comprehensive result. 41 Most of the reports are monthly, written during the first ten days of the following month. For example, the reports for June had to be submitted by 10 July. As a result, the period of examination here includes reports on the situation in June and July 1935. 42 See CD535, B78; CD762; CD933, B129; CD1048; CD1082 as well as Stimmungsberichte, 729f.: Mischehen, and 741: Rassenschande. 43 See CD868; CD883; CD894; CD1004, B139, as well as the Reich-wide ordinance of the Gestapo of 12 February. See also Stimmungsberichte, 683f.: Flaggengesetzgebung. 44 CD1082. 45 Minutes of the meeting (Chefbesprechung) of the heads of the Reich and state ministries, the Gestapo, the SD and others, 20 August 1935 (Preussisches Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Rep. 320, Nr. 513), excerpts quoted in Kulka 1984 (as in n. 4), 616–19. The minutes were actually taken by L¨osener himself, though in his memoirs (as in n. 26) he does not mention this meeting at all. The mentioned fear of a ‘loss in the authority’ of the government appears in several preceding reports like in the Cologne Gestapo report for June 1935: ‘But ultimately what suffers in both instances is the authority of the state’ (CD942, B133). For an analysis of another version of the minutes of this meeting, kept by the Gestapo, see now Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17) 261–4. 46 See Documents CD1099, B148; CD1141. 47 See Kulka 1984 (as in n. 4), 617. 48 On the explicit reference to the preceding reports on popular opinion in Hitler’s speech on the occasion of the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws at the Reichsparteitag, see ibid., 620. 49 Gestapo Kassel, Report for September 1935 (CD1215). 50 Gestapo Aachen, Report for September 1935 (CD1202). 51 Gestapo Koblenz, Report for September 1935 (CD1216). 52 Gestapo Berlin, Report for September 1935 (CD1209, B158). 53 ‘No salvation of the German people without the solution of the Jewish question’, Stapostelle Regierungsbezirk Koblenz, report for February 1935 (see CD627). 54 Hermann Graml, Der 9. November 1938: ‘Reichskristallnacht’ (Bonn, 1955); Walter H. Pehle (ed.), Der Judenpogrom 1938: Von der ‘Reichskristallnacht’ zum V¨olkermord (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 10–117, as well as particular chapters in almost all comprehensive books on the Third Reich and on Nazi Germany and the Jews. For a

Nazi Germany and the ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’

105

select bibliography see Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 374 n. 1. On German popular opinion and the National Socialist ‘Judenpolitik’ in 1938, see in particular: Kershaw 1983 (as in n. 17), ch. 6 (iii) ‘Crystal Night’; Bankier 1992 (as in n. 4), 85–8. A different approach, pointing to the context of the preceding radicalization ‘from below’, was taken in Kulka 1982; see reprint in Marrus 1989 (as in n. 1), 129–38: ‘The Munich crisis and Kristallnacht’. Following the Stimmungsberichte edition, it was further developed by Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 119–121 and Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17), 312–19. 55 While for 1935 only local and regional reports were preserved but no Reich-wide reports, the source situation regarding 1938 is different. We now have monthly Reich-wide SD reports at our disposal for the overall picture, but fewer of the more concrete and detailed regional and local reports. The local and regional reports from Bavaria, Westphalia and the Palatinate were more or less completely preserved, with sporadic reports from other regions of the Reich. Cf. n. 31. 56 The report uses ‘unsch¨ adlich gemacht werden’ for ‘being disposed of ’, a term used in German in particular for the extermination of pests. 57 Another Bavarian document reports on tensions between the German population and the Jews even before the Anschluss, during the ‘test mobilization’ on 10 and 11 March (District governor Upper- and Middle-Franconia, Report for March 1938, CD2397). 58 See most recently Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World 1940–1941 (New York, 2007), ch. 10; Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). 59 Following the ‘Munich Agreement’ of 30 September 1938, the Sudetenland was occupied on 1 October. 60 NSDAP Hofheim, Report for October 1938 (CD2545). 61 Thirteen cases are listed with names of the places, while a still larger number is unspecified. 62 For Nuremberg see CD2464, B336; for Munich: ‘Ein Schandfleck verschwindet’, Der St¨urmer, 26 June 1938. 63 District Governor Upper and Central Franconia, Report for August 1938 (CD2498, B343). 64 District Governor Main Franconia, Report for September, 10 October 1938. 65 CD2513, B350. 66 District Governor Upper and Central Franconia, Report for September 1938 (CD2515, B351). 67 A more detailed description of the period discussed here can be found in recent publications by Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17), 314–19 and Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 119–21, who used the documents of the Stimmungsberichte edition and other sources. 68 See Stefan Kley, ‘Hitler and the Pogrom of November 9–10, 1938’, YVS 28 (2000), 87–112. 69 See Saul Friedl¨ander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997), 257–68; Avraham Barkai, ‘Exclusion and Persecution:

106

Otto Dov Kulka

1933–1938’, in Michael A. Meyer (ed.), German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 4: Renewal and Destruction 1918–1945 (New York, 1998), 195–230, here 216–22; see also Stimmungsberichte, Zeittafel, 618–23. 70 For a detailed reconstruction of that evening and night, see Kley 2000 (as in n. 64). 71 IMT, PS 3051. 72 This has been persuasively demonstrated by Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17), 301–19, summarized on 318, and Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 119–21. 73 ‘Juden, was nun?’, Das Schwarze Korps, 24 November 1938, 47. Folge 1. See also Saul Friedl¨ander 1997 (as in n. 69), 212ff. 74 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London, 2000), 151ff. 75 See Kulka 1982, here quoted from reprint 1989 (as in n. 1), 132–8. 76 Directive on the exclusion of Jews from the German Economy, 12 November 1938 (RGBl. I, 1580). 77 See the directive of 9 September 1939, by the Gestapo Main Office in Stimmungsberichte, 632 and the reports on the suppression of the renewed attempts at anti-Jewish violence ‘from below’ in CD2972, B458; CD2988, B467; CD2991, B469; CD2993, B471. 78 See Jochen B¨ohler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939 (Frankfurt am Main, 2006); Saul Friedl¨ander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939–1945 (New York, 2007), 26–30. 79 See interview on the occasion of the release of the Stimmungsberichte at the Frankfurt book fair 2004: ‘Man wollte die Juden loswerden’. Trib¨une-Gespr¨ach mit Eberhard J¨ackel und Dov Kulka, Autoren des Buches ‘Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945’, Trib¨une—Zeitschrift zum Verst¨andnis des Judentums 43:172 (2004), 202–4.

7 Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions: The View from the W¨urttemberg Countryside Jill Stephenson

‘Popular opinion’ fascinates historians of dictatorships in which censorship, propaganda, police controls and sanctions prevent the open expression of citizens’ views of both public events and their own conditions. In regimes where the aim is simply to prevent the expression of views that are alternative or opposed to those of the ruling monarch or oligarchy, the monitoring of ‘popular opinion’ is generally of little interest. In Nazi Germany, however, the regime’s aim was actively to mould the views of ‘valuable’ Germans in order to elicit both enthusiasm for and collaboration with its structures, policies and projects. As different agencies of party and government became aware that they had no clear idea of how successful their efforts were, their response was to establish an increasing number of monitoring agencies to try to find out what ‘valuable’ Germans were privately saying and thinking. Robert Ley’s boast that ‘The only person in Germany who still has a private life is a person who’s sleeping’ was bombastic rhetoric which scarcely concealed the frustration of dedicated functionaries at their ignorance of what the popular mood actually was.¹ The great irony of this aspiring totalitarian state was, then, that it endeavoured to suppress spontaneous expressions of popular opinion, but its success in doing so meant that it lacked the barometers of the popular mood—free elections, independent newspapers, opposition political literature, among others—that afforded political leaders in pluralist polities some insight into the popular reception of both their policies and circumstances beyond their control. Ian Kershaw has described popular opinion in Nazi Germany as ‘an inchoate ground-swell of spontaneous, unorchestrated attitudes beneath the surface of the [regime’s] apparently monolithic unity . . .’.² What generated this ‘ground-swell’? Popular opinion was not autonomous or free-standing, nor was it uniform across Germany or even within its regions. It comprised an amalgam of experience, information and perceptions that mediated the responses of a community or

108

Jill Stephenson

group towards the policies and practices of the Nazi regime. The perceptions and the experience derived at least partly from context, from the situations in which people found themselves; that is, popular opinion was culturally conditioned. It was therefore not merely a response to the Nazi political system and the policies formulated by those in control of that system, although such a response did help to condition it. Popular opinion was, rather, the product of: both lived experience and the inherited memory of past experience; the expectations and aspirations of individuals and social groups; the reception of information delivered selectively and manipulated to promote the regime’s views and priorities; the reception of information delivered by non-regime agents, no doubt also selectively and similarly manipulated to influence the way in which national and Land policies were perceived in relation to the experience and aspirations of a particular group or community. Chief among these non-regime agents were the clergy of the Christian churches and covert or exiled members of outlawed political parties, in particular the Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD). To this extent, there was in fact some orchestration of popular opinion at local level, by the churches in particular. The mobilization of both pro-regime activism and a positive popular response to the regime’s worldview as well as its policies was the task delegated to the NSDAP after Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933. At a conference of Gauleiter on 2 February 1934, The F¨uhrer stressed: The most essential tasks of the Party were: 1 to make the people receptive for the measures intended by the Government; 2 to help to carry out the measures which have been ordered by the Government in the nation at large; 3 to support the Government in every way.³

The aim was to supplant previous allegiances and preoccupations and to implant in the popular consciousness a monolithic view that would be sufficiently extensive to leave no room for alternatives. The ambition of colonizing 100 per cent of ‘valuable’ Germans’ consciousness did not seem absurd to party cadres whose faith in Hitler and the ‘idea’ of National Socialism was messianic. Yet the party’s remit was less straightforward than it appeared at first sight. For a start, in the years 1930–3, Germans had voted for it in their millions, but votes—especially in these crisis-ridden years—did not necessarily translate into solid support for it and its policies. Further, the variegated ingrained experience, memories and preconceptions of different social, regional and confessional sections of the population meant that the party did not have a blank canvas on which to work. The baggage of both past and present could pose a barrier to the reception of the Nazi message, and thus to the formation of a favourable response. For example, while Munich was both the ‘cradle’ of the Nazi movement

Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions

109

and the location of the NSDAP’s headquarters, in the popular mind in south Germany the party’s leadership was associated with the government in Berlin, and Berlin was viewed with historic hostility as the seat of Prussian dominance.⁴ For rural W¨urttembergers in south-west Germany, the party’s organization was based in the towns and its functionaries showed little understanding of the rhythms and pressures of life in the countryside. This was true both before 1939 and, especially, during the war. The past cast a long shadow over the present in these areas, with recent memories of the Zwangswirtschaft (coercive economy) of the period of the First World War and after revived by Nazi controls on food production and distribution through the Marktordnung (market regulation), even before war was unleashed in 1939 and especially during the war.⁵ The Reichsn¨ahrstand (Reich Food Estate—RNS) was viewed as both ineffective in representing farmers’ interests and redressing their many grievances and coercive in imposing controls that were at odds with time-honoured practices such as bartering. Country dwellers had long memories, too, including inherited memories of enmity towards Prussia in the nineteenth century and even older folk memories of the ravages of the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century.⁶ The destruction of villages by Swedish troops in the 1630s was vividly brought to mind in those rural communities where Second World War bombing and, finally, enemy invasion wrought damage of a kind not experienced in the area for three hundred years.⁷ The party’s problem in rural W¨urttemberg was that it was perceived by many as the alien product of an urban political culture. Some members of rural communes did embrace National Socialism, a few out of conviction and more as a pragmatic or opportunist choice, and young people were generally obliged to enrol in the Hitler Youth. But when a choice had to be made between loyalty to Nazism or allegiance to the local community, its customs and its relationships, those who chose Nazism could find themselves in a cold and lonely place. In Ulm district, in the commune of Neenstetten, the NSDAP local branch leader complained that he was treated like an outcast. In Erbach, in the same district, a priest refused to conduct a marriage service because the bride was the daughter of a local Nazi functionary.⁸ Beyond that, rural relationships posed a barrier to penetration by Nazi norms and values. Villages might not normally have been havens of good will and neighbourliness, with petty jealousies and feuds part of their social fabric. In time of trouble, however, enlightened self-interest brought their members together in cooperation. For example, if one farmer’s barn caught fire, neighbours would rally round as members of an ad hoc fire brigade. When a member of a village died, every household would be represented at the funeral.⁹ Small wonder, then, that in wartime the illegal slaughtering of pigs—which could scarcely be accomplished in total secrecy—was generally perpetrated by a syndicate of village members, sometimes including a state official or a minor party functionary.¹⁰ This demonstrated the tension that existed between an office-holder’s loyalty to

110

Jill Stephenson

the regime that he served and loyalty to his native community, and it indicated that, for some, at least, loyalty to the community came first. Within this regime, where modern management methods were used to motivate the party faithful and to impose central control over them and their activities, there was an increasing obsession with feeling the pulse of the ‘racially valuable’ population’s mood. Various agencies assumed this mission in Nazi Germany, including particularly the Gestapo (secret state police) and the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service—SD) of the SS, which, from 1938, collected ‘Meldungen aus dem Reich’ (‘Reports from the Reich’).¹¹ In some areas, local government officials made regular reports to their regional superiors.¹² The Reich Minister of Justice received from the senior law officers in the L¨ander —the state prosecutors and supreme court presidents—monthly reports on legal affairs which, especially in wartime, increasingly recounted the popular response to events large and small, as well as the reactions of law officers to government policies and current events.¹³ The Reich Propaganda Ministry, too, was among those requiring periodic reports from its regional officers on the mood of the people in wartime.¹⁴ In addition, during the war the Party Chancellery collected ‘extracts from reports from the Gaue [NSDAP regions] and other offices’.¹⁵ These mostly piecemeal, uncoordinated efforts were responses to a situation where the Nazi regime’s controls that prevented the airing in public of a plurality of opinion had created a self-imposed barrier that denied it access to information about how it was perceived by the population at large. The creation of a plethora of monitoring agencies was a measure of its anxiety about this. The Gestapo had some success in keeping activists of the banned SPD and KPD under surveillance, yet this was not without its frustrations. In 1937, the D¨usseldorf Gestapo reported on the KPD: ‘Whereas until 1936 the main propaganda emphasis was on distributing lots of pamphlets, at the beginning of 1936 they switched to propaganda by word of mouth setting up bases in factories . . . . The shifting about of workers within the various factories . . . creates more fertile soil for the subversion of workers by the KPD.’¹⁶ SPD propaganda, too, was spread by word of mouth, facilitated by the fact that ‘many former SPD and trade union officials are now commercial representatives and travelling salesmen . . . . Despite the extent of these subversive activities, it has not yet been possible to catch a single one of these persons in the act and bring him to trial.’¹⁷ In urban strongholds of the banned left-wing parties, then, a hard core of former activists kept the faith, often at considerable personal risk. For W¨urttemberg’s rural inhabitants, the priorities were distinctive and clear: family, land, community, church. Attitudes towards the Nazi regime depended on how the direct and indirect effects of Nazi policy affected this tetrad. When Nazi policies were compatible with it, they had a chance of success. For example, some farmers in W¨urttemberg benefited from the RNS’s water supply or field drainage schemes which improved their land—if they could pay for them.¹⁸ But the Nazi Party’s—and its formations’ and affiliates’—efforts first to recruit

Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions

111

in rural areas and then to cajole members into active participation in them encountered a wall of obstructive social habit, not least in terms of allegiance to the local church. A local clergyman who gave a lead in obstructing the party’s attempts to reduce clerical influence within a community was highly likely to succeed, and, in doing so, to orchestrate popular opinion among his parishioners. In this regard, the Nazi regime scored an own-goal by expelling the senior Roman Catholic clergyman in W¨urttemberg, the Bishop of Rottenburg, from his diocese in 1938 for ‘provocation’ in the form of his refusal to vote in the plebiscite on the incorporation of Austria into the Reich. In fact, Bishop Sproll had been openly criticizing the regime on a limited range of issues since 1934, holding a well-attended series of open meetings in Rottenburg at which he spoke of the threat posed to the church by National Socialism. The Nazi press in W¨urttemberg, as well as NSDAP Gauleiter (regional leader) Wilhelm Murr, had become increasingly incensed by Sproll’s boldness and the influence that he manifestly exerted over W¨urttemberg’s Catholics. After Nazi thugs had attacked Sproll’s residence, Murr expelled the bishop from his diocese on the spurious grounds that his presence was a threat to the maintenance of law and order.¹⁹ Sproll’s absence caused consternation in Catholic circles, as the SD faithfully recorded, and, from this point onwards, Catholic churches in W¨urttemberg included a prayer for the bishop in every service.²⁰ Murr’s rashness had ensured that Catholic opinion remained faithful to the church and its hierarchy, while at the same time reinforcing the defensiveness that was already felt by Catholics as members of a minority denomination under the rule of an anticlerical regime. A few Catholics who were Nazi functionaries in W¨urttemberg resigned their offices because they found that they could not reconcile the increasing demands of Nazism with their faith. The majority of the small number of Catholics who remained as party functionaries eventually left their church. Of the much larger number of Nazi functionaries who were Evangelical (Protestant) Christians, many, including Gauleiter Murr, sooner or later left their church.²¹ The singularly autonomous Evangelical Church in W¨urttemberg had already had its own differences with the regime. The opposition of its leader, Land Bishop Theophil Wurm, to Nazi attempts to create a centralized state church led to his being put under house arrest in 1934 for alleged financial irregularities. His speedy release was the trigger for unrest among church members, including some ordinary NSDAP members, and owed much to popular protests demanding it.²² Wurm’s stock among W¨urttemberg’s Evangelical population remained high, with seven or eight thousand people attending a celebration of the Luther Festival in which he participated in the public forum of the Stuttgart city hall on 20 November 1938.²³ It seems, then, that a combination of resolute leadership by the leaders of W¨urttemberg’s two main denominations and inept lashing out at them by the W¨urttemberg NSDAP’s leadership ensured that the prestige and

112

Jill Stephenson

influence of the churches would persist, with ramifications for popular opinion that became apparent in a multiplicity of ways. For example, the SD reported in September 1940 that rural Catholics in W¨urttemberg were being instructed by their priests to treat Polish prisonersof-war and coerced workers with ‘Christian neighbourliness’, as co-religionists, completely contrary to the regime’s insistence on social apartheid between ‘Aryan’ Germans and ‘inferior’ Slavs.²⁴ Some priests had already encouraged their congregations to provide Poles in their locality with food, clothing and ‘small luxuries’, describing ‘the ‘‘poor Poles’’ [as] an example to German citizens of especial piety’.²⁵ At this time, both churches were locked in a battle with the W¨urttemberg party and state leadership over the latter’s attempt to replace religious education in schools with ‘ideological instruction’ (Weltanschauungsunterricht). Both churches instructed parents to insist on religious education, and many did, even in the face of pressure and threats from local party activists.²⁶ In Westerstetten, in Ulm district, two teachers who had tried to impose ‘ideological instruction’ on the commune’s children were ostracized, being obliged to take their meals in a neighbouring commune because no one in Westerstetten was prepared to provide them with food. This was a village where the NSDAP local branch leader had already made himself thoroughly unpopular.²⁷ Even before the war, the mood in the countryside was defensive and pessimistic. It was not only the hostility of W¨urttemberg’s Nazi leadership towards both churches, and particularly the Catholic Church, that had alienated much of the population. The reports of the W¨urttemberg SD from 1938 onwards demonstrate that the other issues that had the greatest impact on popular opinion in the countryside were the desperate straits to which many family farms had been reduced by the later 1930s, the effects of both conscription and the unavailability of essentials in wartime, and the controls imposed on food producers and traders. In wartime, the reports of the senior law officers in Stuttgart give an insight into the factors affecting the popular mood, in particular the course of the war and its mounting casualties but also more local issues such as the ‘euthanasia’ of mentally impaired persons at Schloss Grafeneck in M¨unsingen district in W¨urttemberg during 1940. Farmers in the vicinity of Grafeneck could see and smell smoke coming from its crematorium.²⁸ The Stuttgart State Prosecutor reported to the Reich Minister of Justice that rumours about ‘a mass murder of patients are circulating like wildfire’, with people refusing to allow relatives to be admitted to hospital or an asylum out of fear that they would be transferred to Grafeneck and killed.²⁹ The increasing precariousness of small-scale family farms owed much to the economic upturn after the depression, with reviving industrial concerns acting as a magnet for both hired agricultural labourers and farmers’ sons and daughters. The labour shortage was the greatest preoccupation, but the rural population perceived it as a symptom of attitudes and policies emanating from urban centres—where Nazi leaders were based—whose inhabitants at least implicitly undervalued the

Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions

113

role of agriculture in the national economy and dismissed rural communities as ‘backward’. In summer 1939, the SD reported that ‘the impression has been given that many measures are applicable only to the conditions of cities and large communes, to the disadvantage of the countryside’.³⁰ In wartime, there was a good example of this, with the wife of a serving soldier eligible for an allowance, as long as her husband was not a farmer. When, in 1940, provision was made for an allowance to be paid to the wife of a conscripted farmer, it was not universally applied and the amount decreed was set at a level where ‘a farmer’s wife with four or five children had to make do with between 45 and 60 marks, whereas the childless wife of a white-collar worker had about 150 to 180 marks at her disposal’.³¹ Conscription into the armed forces in wartime, which affected rural communities disproportionately heavily, both exacerbated the labour shortage on the land and added new preoccupations which influenced popular opinion. Until the invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the casualty lists were relatively limited, although individual families had losses to mourn. Beyond that, the top priority for farming families was the maintenance of the family farm as a going concern. The incremental conscription of adult males left many small farms with only women, children and elderly men to try to sustain them. The SD reflected the problems encountered, with reports of elderly parents or a family’s women struggling to manage land and livestock while sons or husbands were at the front. The unsympathetic dismissal by some of the regime’s officers of requests for the demobilization of a male family member to prevent the collapse of a farm or rural trade had its effect in reinforcing resentment among the rural population.³² As a partial replacement for men who had been conscripted, from autumn 1939 there was a major influx of foreign labour into Germany, to add to the voluntary migrants already there. The new foreigners were either prisoners-ofwar or coerced civilians; in the first instance, they were Poles, with western Europeans and then Soviet citizens following as military victories brought large numbers of Europeans under German control. The presence of vanquished foreigners in farming communes had a marked effect on popular opinion. On the one hand, families to whom foreign workers were allocated were relieved to have some compensation for absent family members. Especially where no native men remained on a farm, the arrival of a male foreigner was welcomed as an asset, and he was often treated as a member of the farming household. On the other hand, the regime forfeited any gratitude that it might have earned on this score by issuing and implementing threats against Germans who fraternized with foreigners working at close quarters with them. Allowing a Polish worker to eat at the same table as the host farming family was prohibited, but widely practised.³³ In particular, the pillorying by self-righteous NSDAP functionaries of women who had sexual relations with ‘inferior’ foreigners was shocking to the ordinary villagers who were their neighbours.³⁴ In many cases for the first time, ‘Aryan’ Germans who were not regarded as ‘politically unreliable’ or ‘socially

114

Jill Stephenson

irresponsible’ had a taste of the crude brutality which had, from the start in the 1920s, characterized local Nazi bullies when confronted with an ‘enemy’. Some villagers had already observed this kind of conduct when the SA, in particular, had harassed Jewish neighbours. In the minority of W¨urttemberg communes with a Jewish presence, Jewish traders—particularly cattle traders—and their ‘Aryan’ customers had been under pressure during the 1930s, with the scurrilous party press, especially the Flammenzeichen, naming traders and their customers and publishing photographs of their transactions.³⁵ The banning of Jewish traders by 1938 was soon followed by the atrocities of Kristallnacht, the November pogrom in which remaining Jews and synagogues in villages were attacked by SA men from towns or villages in the region—but generally not by their own neighbours. As one SA leader said, ‘I can’t do this in Oberdorf, because I’ve grown up with these people [Jews], gone to school with them and seen active service with them on the battlefield’.³⁶ In Buchau, even NSDAP members expressed their disapproval of the violence perpetrated by SA men from elsewhere.³⁷ The SD reported the misgivings of a range of ordinary W¨urttembergers. Some disapproved of the destruction of valuable resources, while others expressed compassion for fellow human beings. Commenting on the majority Protestant population, the SD observed that ‘the majority of the clergy and also of the Evangelical population disapproved, on the grounds that ‘‘the Jews, too, are human beings’’ and ‘‘you can’t set fire to places of worship, it’s blasphemy’’ ’. W¨urttemberg’s Catholics were said to be fearful, prophesying ‘when they’ve finished with the Jews, then it’ll be our turn’.³⁸ From the start of the war, resentment in the countryside was fuelled by the conscription of some farmers’ horses. This was a particularly acute issue because possession of a horse was not only a major practical asset on a farm but was also an indicator of social status. In addition, a variety of commodities used by the more prosperous or extensive farmers became almost or entirely unobtainable as a result of wartime restrictions; these included chemical fertilizer, weedkiller and fuel oil. There was a shortage of both craftsmen and materials for making repairs to agricultural machinery. Together, these shortages had the effect of depressing the efficiency and living standards of better-off farmers to the levels of the mass of small family farmers. For the latter, the chief grievance was that they could neither obtain new work shoes nor have their existing shoes mended because of a shortage of both shoemakers and nails.³⁹ With the farming community struggling to maintain farms in the face of these obstacles, opinion in the countryside seemed entirely negative, even before the invasion of the USSR in June 1941. While some families had already lost a father, a brother or a son in combat, from this point onwards the increasingly heavy rate of casualties was a source of grief for the fallen and acute anxiety for those still at the front, especially the eastern front. The SD reported in July 1941 ‘an increasing deterioration’ in the popular mood, which it attributed to the ferocity of the campaign in the east and the absence of detailed information

Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions

115

about the army’s fortunes in its progress reports. All of this was said to be causing anxiety among ‘women in all sections of society’.⁴⁰ The depletion of families through the loss of young men threw the longer-term future of farms into doubt, especially in the later stages of the war when the lack of able-bodied labour was reducing farming concerns increasingly to subsistence agriculture, which was disastrous for the towns. Foreign workers were a prized asset, but their numbers only partly compensated for the numbers conscripted. Recognizing their scarcity value, some foreign workers became assertive, with the result that women who were dependent on them sometimes became deferential to and even fearful of them.⁴¹ The absence of news about men who were ‘missing’ on the eastern front promoted depression, anxiety, nervousness. This was heightened by a pervasive fear that either the Red Army or the Wehrmacht (armed forces) would resort to the use of poison gas, the horrific memory of which in the First World War remained vivid.⁴² The entry of the United States into the war and British resistance to Rommel’s forces in North Africa added to the sense of gloom. The reports of the law officers captured the mood repeatedly, reporting, for example, that, by the end of 1941, the various fears and discontents had led to ‘resignation, war weariness and embitterment’, with particular worries about the continuing casualties.⁴³ This was even before the German surrender at Stalingrad, the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast and the invasion of Germany. The downward spiral of defeats and the progressive worsening of conditions for civilians depressed the popular mood, with the Stuttgart State Prosecutor reporting in May 1943 that ‘confidence in victory and trust in the leadership . . . has now been noticeably shaken’. By this time, it was said that W¨urttemberg’s farms had been denuded of native adult male labour. At the same time, casualties had reached First World War totals.⁴⁴ In August 1944, the Stuttgart SD admitted that ‘even those who up to now have believed unwaveringly . . . have lost faith in the F¨uhrer’.⁴⁵ Although the countryside did not experience bombing of the order of that devastating the towns, by later 1944 a number of villages had been hit, whether deliberately—because of a nearby strategic asset such as a rail line—or in error. Sometimes this was the result of the positioning of a decoy airport or other installation in the countryside, to protect the genuine article. Where a village was hit, the resentment was redoubled by this apparent favouring of an urban facility at the expense of a rural community.⁴⁶ To add to that, the mobilizing of the Volkssturm (home guard) from September 1944 seemed to many in W¨urttemberg a clear reflection of how desperate Germany’s plight had become. The SD reported that this news was ‘received negatively by the overwhelming majority of the population’.⁴⁷ In many rural areas, men simply failed to turn out when an attempt to rally the Volkssturm was made. In Musberg, in B¨oblingen district, it was said that ‘the Volkssturm was, in terms of organization, weapons and training, a stillborn child’. Even where the men did

116

Jill Stephenson

respond to the call to arms, in rural units the arms were generally few, out-of-date and defective.⁴⁸ The end of the war came late to W¨urttemberg, in April 1945. The rural population simply wanted it to be over. The prolonged resistance by generals obedient to Hitler’s will that they should fight to the last village and the last house, in a cause that was patently lost, was more than matched by some NSDAP fanatics who forced villagers to mount pitifully ineffective resistance to the invader, on pain of death. This was no idle threat, and individuals—including community leaders and local NSDAP functionaries—who tried to obstruct such doomed resistance were shot or hanged.⁴⁹ This signalled the final stage of the Nazi regime’s descent into brutality against even those citizens whom its officers regarded as ‘valuable’. These experiences and perceptions informed W¨urttemberg peasants’ attitudes to the central government in Berlin and to their more local Land government in Stuttgart. This does not mean that the rural population was intimately acquainted with the conduct of government in either of these locations, or that its members were well-informed about the flood of decrees that emanated from both. There appears to be an assumption, among well-educated historians and others, that Germans were aware not only of the broad contours of government policy but even of much of its detail. The facilities of the multimedia age have seduced people into imagining that ‘ordinary Germans’ were as well-informed as early twenty-first-century citizens in developed democracies who are politically aware. In Nazi Germany, modern facilities such as cinema and radio, as well as the press, were used extensively by the regime to propagate its point of view, with all rivals denied access to these media.⁵⁰ Urban Germans, who had easy access to these facilities, could be well-informed about the government’s stance on the subjects on which it endeavoured to engage the German public. Whether they all were thus well-informed is another matter. In wartime, particularly, political leaders and law officers in Stuttgart lamented the W¨urttemberg rural population’s failure to observe regulations regarding the production and distribution of foodstuffs or the treatment of forced foreign labourers.⁵¹ It evidently did not occur to political leaders and law officers in Stuttgart that those in rural communes remote from the centre of power might not be aware of regulations that were published in the press or broadcast over the air. Local Nazi functionaries were expected to keep their constituents informed about government requirements and to maintain morale, but they were increasingly thin on the ground in wartime. Further, the deficiencies within Gau W¨urttembergHohenzollern’s party organization, which predated 1933, were evident in peacetime and were exacerbated by conscription. In wartime particularly, it became evident that many of those in rural areas lacked either the ability or the will to master and enforce policies dispensed from the centre and to keep people’s spirits up.⁵² Having access to the media was no guarantee that people availed themselves of it. One self-righteous supporter of the regime claimed, in 1943, that in the

Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions

117

countryside ‘National Socialist radio propaganda is relatively seldom listened to, particularly in Catholic areas’.⁵³ In wartime, some elected not to listen to it to avoid news that would deepen their despair, while the lack of genuine information provided by German radio stations, in particular, was a grievance that drove people to listen to illegal enemy radio. Some in W¨urttemberg relied on Swiss radio for information, crediting its broadcasts with ‘extraordinary objectivity’.⁵⁴ Others listened to Radio Moscow, not because they were ‘Bolshevist sympathizers’ but because they had received anonymous messages promising that information about German soldiers ‘missing’ on the eastern front would be provided on Radio Moscow.⁵⁵ In this way, the absence of information from German sources had an influence on popular opinion, compounding the distrust of officialdom that already existed. Rural inhabitants, by contrast, might well not have access to these new media. It was a common complaint among urban female evacuees that the southern villages to which they were allocated lacked a caf´e and a cinema.⁵⁶ In W¨urttemberg, the cheap radio receiver, the Volksempf¨anger, was made widely available, but the SD reported in April 1939 that half of those that had been sold were defective.⁵⁷ In November 1941, the SD was still considering whether to require the installation of ‘community radio’ loudspeakers in all of W¨urttemberg’s communes. It was seen as an obstacle that, among the multifarious demands on them in wartime, mayors had to raise the funds for this from within their own communes and were responsible for organizing the installation of the loudspeakers themselves.⁵⁸ Popular opinion therefore was indeed ‘spontaneous’ in the sense of not being moulded by the regime, although the regime’s actions and sanctions certainly had an effect on it—generally an adverse effect. This can be adjudged a failure on the part of the NSDAP, within whose remit the generation of popular support for the government and its policies lay. Some aspects of popular opinion were, however, less spontaneous because they were orchestrated by a member of a community or group, rather than by an officer of the regime. An attitude of popular opposition to the regime’s anticlerical policies was consistent with many communities’ habit of regarding the church as both a devotional and a social centre. This attitude was often encouraged by a local clergyman. For example, priests gave a lead to young people by reviving banned church youth groups, repeatedly if necessary.⁵⁹ In the last days of the war, senior members of a commune—in some cases, a mayor—might encourage villagers to defy the regime’s orders to mount physical resistance to the approaching enemy. These examples may perhaps seem to have passed the point where popular opinion has given way to action. Yet the actions involved occurred not under duress but because of an essential collective sympathy with them on the part of the community or group—a sympathy deriving from common experience and perceptions which can reasonably be characterized as ‘popular opinion’.

118

Jill Stephenson

No t e s 1 Quoted

in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London, 2005), 107–8. A similar boast of Ley’s was: ‘There are no more private citizens. The time when anybody could do or not do what he pleased is past.’ Quoted in David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (London, 1967), 113. 2 Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983), 4. 3 Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939 (Exeter, 1984), document 157, p. 234. 4 Michael Kissener and Joachim Scholtyseck, ‘Nationalsozialismus in der Provinz’, in Michael Kissener and Joachim Scholtyseck (eds.), Die F¨uhrer der Provinz: NSBiographien aus Baden und W¨urttemberg (Constance, 1997), 21, 23, 25. On Bavaria, see Kershaw, Popular Opinion, 18, 36, 47. 5 Avraham Barkai, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy, trans. Ruth HadassVaschitz (Oxford and New York, 1990), 145. The Zwangswirtschaft was either implicitly or explicitly referred to in complaints about the new system. See, for example, Kershaw, Popular Opinion, 46. 6 On W¨ urttemberg and Prussia, see Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: W¨urttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 16–17, 20–3, 33. 7 Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (hereafter HStAS), J170: B¨ u1 (Aalen), Gemeinde Zipplingen; B¨u3 (B¨oblingen), Gemeinde Holzgerlingen; B¨u4 (Crailsheim), Gemeinde Oberspeltach; B¨u10 (Leonberg), Gemeinde Heimsheim; B¨u78 ( T¨ubingen), Gemeinde Entringen. See also Albert Ilien and Utz Jeggle, Leben auf dem Dorf: zur Sozialgeschichte des Dorfes und Sozialpsychologie seiner Bewohner (Opladen, 1978), 37–8. 8 Christine Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der w¨ urttembergischen NSDAP: Funktion, Sozialprofil und Lebenswege einer regionalen NS-Elite, 1920–1960 (Munich, 1998), 76. See also Thomas Schnabel, W¨urttemberg zwischen Weimar und Bonn, 1928–1945/46 (Stuttgart, 1986), 418. 9 Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, K110 (StAL), B¨ u48, ‘Betr.: Allgemeine Stimmung und Lage’, 1 September 1941, 15. 10 Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: W¨ urttemberg under the Nazis (London, 2006), 211–15. 11 For W¨ urttemberg, these are found in the Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, K110 files. In addition to archival resources, there are two published collections of these, both edited by Heinz Boberach: the single-volume Meldungen aus dem Reich (Munich, 1968); and Meldungen aus dem Reich (Herrsching, 1984), in 17 volumes. There is also Heinz Boberach (ed.), Berichte des SD und der Gestapo u¨ ber Kirchen und Kirchenvolk in Deutschland, 1934–1944 (Mainz, 1971).

Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions 12 For

119

Bavaria, these can be found in Martin Broszat, Elke Fr¨ohlich, Falk Wiesemann and Anton Grossmann (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, vols. 1–4 (Munich and Vienna, 1977–81). 13 These are found in the Bundesarchiv (BA), R22 files. For W¨urttemberg, the files are R22/3387 and R22/4209. 14 These are found in the BA, R55 files. 15 These are found in the BA, NS6, Partei-Kanzlei files, ‘Ausz¨ uge aus Berichten der Gaue u.a. Dienststellen’. They are available on microfilm, e.g. in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archive (USHMM). 16 Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 2, document 459, p. 592. 17 Ibid., document 457, pp. 590–1. 18 Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 52–3, 203. 19 Paul Sauer, W¨ urttemberg in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Ulm, 1975), 203–4; Joachim Scholtyseck, ‘‘‘Der Mann aus dem Volk’’: Wilhelm Murr, Gauleiter und Reichsstatthalter in W¨urttemberg-Hohenzollern’, in Kissener and Scholtyseck (eds.), Die F¨uhrer der Provinz, 492–3; J¨org Thierfelder, ‘Die Kirchen’, in Otto Borst (ed.), Das Dritte Reich in Baden und W¨urttemberg (Stuttgart, 1988), 83; Paul Sauer, Wilhelm Murr: Hitlers Staathalter in W¨urttemberg ( T¨ubingen, 1998), 89–91. 20 StAL, B¨u44, ‘Lagebericht des 4. Vierteljahres 1938’, 1 February 1939, 3. 21 Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der w¨ urttembergischen NSDAP, 47, 67–8, 140, 151, 168–9. 22 Schnabel, W¨urttemberg zwischen Weimar und Bonn, 411–14. 23 StAL, B¨u44, p. 4; Kurt Leipner (ed.), Chronik der Stadt Stuttgart, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart, 1982), 551. 24 StAL, B¨ u38: ‘Betr.: Kirchenbesuch von Kriegsgefangenen und polnischen Zivilarbeitskr¨aften’, 4 September 1940; ‘Betr.: Vergehen von Geistlichen gegen das Heimt¨uckegesetz’, 5 September 1940. 25 StAL, B¨ u37, ‘Betr.: Verhalten der Geistlichen gegen¨uber polnischen Kriegsgefangenen’, 9 February 1940. 26 Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 249–54. 27 HStAS, J170, B¨u18 (Ulm), ‘Betreff: Geschichtliche Darstellung der letzten Kriegstage’, Westerstetten, 20 September 1948. 28 Gerhard Sch¨afer, Landesbischof D. Wurm und der nationalsozialistische Staat, 1940– 1945 (Stuttgart, 1968), 119. 29 Quoted in Ernst Klee (ed.), Dokumente zur ‘Euthanasie’ (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 211–12. 30 StAL, B¨ u46, ‘Lagebericht des 2. Vierteljahres 1939’, 1 July 1939, 37–8. 31 Ibid., B¨ u37, ‘Rundschreiben Nr 49—Betr. Pauschwirtschaftsbeihilfe f¨ur einberufene Bauern und Landwirte’, 22 April 1940; Birthe Kundrus, Kriegerfrauen: Familienpolitik

120

Jill Stephenson

und Geschlechterverh¨altnisse im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, 1995), 261, 271. The quotation is from 271. 32 Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich (1984), vol. 13, no. 372, 1 April 1943, 5046–8; Broszat et al. (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 1, 154–6; Benigna Sch¨onhagen, T¨ubingen unterm Hakenkreuz: eine Universit¨atsstadt in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 1991), 317. 33 Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 270–3, 276–9. 34 Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der w¨urttembergischen NSDAP, 63–4. 35 Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 138–9. 36 Paul Sauer, Die j¨ udischen Gemeinden in W¨urttemberg und Hohenzollern: Denkmale, Geschichte, Schicksale (Stuttgart, 1966), 48, 50, 54, 57–8, 81, 90, 131, 145. The quotation is from Felix Sutschek, ‘Die j¨udische Landgemeinde Oberdorf am Ipf in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus’, in Michael Kissener (ed.), Widerstand gegen die Judenverfolgung (Constance, 1996), 146. 37 Paul Kopf, ‘Buchau am Federsee in nationalsozialistischer Zeit: die Ereignisse der Jahre 1934 bis 1938’, in Geschichtsverein der Di¨ozese Rottenburg-Stuttgart (ed.), Kirche im Nationalsozialismus (Sigmaringen, 1984), 288–90. 38 StAL, K110, B¨ u44, 4. 39 HStAS, J170: B¨u18, T¨urkheim, 1; B¨u10 (Leonberg), M¨unchingen, n.d.; G¨unter Golde, Catholics and Protestants: Agricultural Modernization in Two German Villages (New York, 1975), 40–1, 56, 92–3, 121–2; Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich (1984), vol. 9, ‘Anlage zu den ‘‘Meldungen aus dem Reich’’ v. 26.3.42’, 3538–41; vol. 16, 24 January 1944, 6281–4. 40 StAL, B¨u47, ‘Betr.: Allgemeine Stimmung und Lage’, 15 July 1941, 1, 8. 41 BA, R22/3387, Der Generalstaatsanwalt an den Herrn Reichsminister der Justiz, Nr 3130—Ia—2, 31 May 1943; R55/601, ‘T¨atigkeitsbericht (Stichtag: 4 September 1944)’, 7. 42 HStAS, J170, B¨ u3 (B¨oblingen), ‘Geschichte der letzten Kriegstage des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Musberg’, 18 October 1948; StAL, B¨u55, RSHA, ‘Meldungen aus den SD-(Leit)-Abschnittsbereichen’, 30 July 1943, 13921. 43 BA, R22/3387, Der Generalstaatsanwalt an den Herrn Reichsminister der Justiz, Nr 420b—35, 1 December 1941. 44 Ibid., 31 May 1943. 45 Quoted in Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), 220. 46 Leipner, Chronik der Stadt Stuttgart, 780, 783. 47 StAL, B¨u59, ‘Betrifft: Stimmen zum Erlass des F¨uhrers u¨ ber die Bildung des Deutschen Volkssturmes’, 8 November 1944, 1–2. 48 Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 316–18; HStAS, J170, B¨ u3, B¨oblingen. 49 Thomas Schnabel, ‘ ‘‘Die Leute wollten nicht einer verlorenen Sache ihre Heimat opfern’’ ’, in Landeszentrale f¨ur politische Bildung Baden-W¨urttemberg und vom

Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions

121

Haus der Geschichte Baden-W¨urttemberg durch Thomas Schnabel/Angelika HauserHauswirth (Ulm, 1994), 170–2; Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 326–9. 50 On the media and their uses, see David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London and New York, 1993). 51 Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 174, 282. 52 Ibid., 10–11, 85–8, 96–7, 105–7. 53 HStAS, E397, B¨ u37, ‘Betr.: Schwarzhandel auf dem Lande’, 5 December 1943. 54 Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich (1968), 13 July 1944, 438; StAL, B¨u55: 30 July 1943, 14105; 8 July 1943, 14062. 55 USHMM, NS6/414, Partei-Kanzlei, II B 4, ‘Ausz¨ uge aus Berichten der Gaue u.a. Dienststellen Zeitraum 21.2.–27.2.43’, 6. 56 HStAS, J170, B¨u18, ‘Betrifft: Geschichtliche Darstellung der letzten Kriegstage in der Gemeinde Oppingen Kreis Ulm-Do’, 5 October 1948; StAL, K110, B¨u48, 43–8. 57 Ibid., B¨u45, ‘Lagebericht des 1. Vierteljahres 1939’, 1 April 1939, 22. 58 Ibid., B¨u40, Rundschreiben Nr 119/41, ‘Betr.: Einf¨uhrung des Gemeinderundfunks’, 12 November 1941. 59 Ibid.: B¨ u45, pp. 5–6; B¨u37, ‘Betr.: Jugendarbeit beider Konfessionen’, 29 April 1940. See also Franz Josef Heyen (ed.), Nationalsozialismus im Alltag: Quellen zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus vornehmlich im Raum Mainz—Koblenz—Trier (Boppard, 1967), 258–9.

8 Fascist Italy in the 1930s: Popular Opinion in the Provinces Paul Corner

I For a long period after the end of the Second World War, the question of how ordinary Italians had related to fascism was rarely posed. In 1945, following military defeat and German occupation, Italian politicians attempted to rescue the country’s reputation in the eyes of the victorious powers by stressing the anti-fascist tradition within Italy and exalting the role of the Italian Resistance in the years 1943–5. Every effort was made to distance Italy from its fascist past and from its disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. As a result there was no Italian Nuremberg; trials of fascist military leaders—war criminals—were delayed and then suppressed (with the connivance of the Allies) and few political leaders were ever condemned.¹ Perhaps understandably, in the frenzy of postwar reconstruction there was little desire to delve into the past. For more than two decades after the war, fascism received little detailed attention from historians and the books that did address the phenomenon tended to limit their attentions to a chronicle of events with little pretence at providing any critical analysis of the successes and failures of the movement.² To some extent, it could be said that fascism disappeared—conveniently for many—into a black hole. On public occasions the regime would be deplored and it would always be stated very emphatically that there should be no return to fascism, but there was no real desire to ask deeper questions relating to popular attitudes towards the regime. Nobody seemed to want to find out who had been fascist and why. Emphasis on the centrality of the Resistance in the formation of the new Republic carried with it the strong, if unstated, message that most Italians had been anti-fascist and were therefore to be considered victims of a violent and repressive regime. It established an implicit distinction between ‘good Italians’ and ‘bad fascists’. This unstated truth seemed to make further examination of popular sentiment unnecessary.

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

123

Generational change and the complex ideological challenges of 1968 helped to generate a new curiosity in Italy’s fascist past. In the early 1970s—and with the increasing availability of documents on the fascist period—new studies began to appear. For the first time local studies of the origins and development of the movement were produced, shedding fresh light on the social composition of provincial fascism and answering at least some of the questions about fascist motivations. Foreign scholars contributed much to this new wave. A major advance was represented by the appearance, in 1974, of Adrian Lyttelton’s The Seizure of Power, which provided a detailed and analytical survey of the fascist movement in its early years.³ Significantly, most of this new research—indeed almost all—examined the fascism of the first half of the 1920s, tending to see the establishment of the regime in 1925–6 as a convenient stopping-point. Again, the implicit assumption seems to have been that with the triumph of a repressive state mechanism the story was over and that there was little left to explain. Most of this work was focused on the formation of the fascist movement itself and the early workings of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF). Institutional questions relating to the functioning of the fascist state and the way it transformed the structure of the liberal state it replaced also attracted the attention of a few scholars.⁴ Essentially this was history ‘from above’. The question of popular reactions to the movement was dealt with either through analyses of the early phase of open conflict between fascist and anti-fascist forces, through studies of the social composition of the early movement or through usually brief and often essentially celebratory analyses of the desperate and sometimes heroic resistance to fascism and the fascist squads offered by groups of communist, socialist and Catholic anti-fascist activists. To some extent this was a literature which served to reinforce the stereotype of ‘good Italians’, ‘bad fascists’, in which the population in general was victim of an evil minority. The shock to this rather comforting vision of the fascist past, in which most Italians had apparently been innocent and oppressed onlookers, was provided by Renzo De Felice’s assertion—made in 1974 in the fourth volume of his massive 4,000-page biography of Mussolini⁵—that there had in fact been a mass consensus for fascism among Italians. De Felice’s statement was related to the years between 1929 and 1934 and was justified not by specific research into popular attitudes but by his finding little obvious and open opposition to the regime in the archival documents related to those years. The methodology was unsophisticated—it rested on a simple consent/dissent binary—but the conclusion was, for the time, heresy on a grand scale. It not only upset the self-image of the Italian—anti-fascist and victim of the regime; it also by implication invited a revision of the accepted view of fascism, supposedly always the object of popular hostility. Mass consensus, if true, posed some fundamental (and very awkward) questions. Were—orribile dictu— the ‘good Italians’ in fact the same people as the ‘bad fascists’? Alternatively (if the Italians were to preserve the positive image of themselves), could it be that it was fascism that had not been so bad after all?

124

Paul Corner

These questions were, of course, not only complex historical problems but extremely sensitive political issues. The Italian left, still growing in strength in the 1970s, had built much of its reputation in the post-war period on its anti-fascism and its relationship with the Resistance and was very reluctant to give any credibility to De Felice’s thesis. Even making due allowances for false consciousness, it was axiomatic that ‘the people’ could not have been supporters of fascism. Nonetheless the revisionist cat was out of the bag. For more than a decade after the furore engendered by the appearance of the mass consensus thesis, the historiography of fascism tended to reflect political divisions, De Felice being rather unjustly assimilated to the right while the left continued to contest the consensus thesis. Surprisingly, there were few attempts to test the thesis empirically, such debate as there was being largely confined to the realms of theoretical discussion about the meaning of ‘consensus’ in dictatorial regimes. With the passage of time many historians began to feel that there should be more to life than simply arguing about De Felice and began to look for a way out of the impasse. A growing interest in social history during the later 1970s led to some attempts to study fascism from new angles. Victoria De Grazia tried to assess the social impact of fascist leisure organizations; Luisa Passerini and Maurizio Gribaudi used oral history techniques to examine popular memories of fascism in Turin. The rapid development of women’s history had a similar effect, providing some excellent studies of women’s experience of the movement.⁶ If the overall results were often fragmentary—something difficult to avoid in a country so regionally diverse as is Italy—the new initiatives did suggest a much greater flexibility in the approach to the question of popular attitudes than that provided by the rather sterile and largely theoretical black-or-white debate on mass consensus. A fresh impulse to the study of certain aspects of fascism emerged in the 1990s with the work of Emilio Gentile on the ideology of the movement. In fact Gentile had been arguing from the late 1970s the case for an original and coherent fascist ideology, but the full significance of his novel approach seemed to be appreciated only much later. Relating the development of fascist ideology firmly to its context in the crisis of European liberal and positivist thought in the years before 1914 and to the experience of the First World War and the immediate post-war, Gentile was perhaps the first to explain in convincing fashion exactly what went on in the heads of the fascist ‘true believers’. His emphasis on the efficacy of the fascist ‘political religion’ in winning converts to the movement opened new avenues to interpretation. Because of its inevitable reproduction of themes of fascist rhetoric of hope, joy and new beginnings—of an imagined rather than a real Italy—some of the work appeared to put a positive gloss on fascism and was criticized for this, even though Gentile was always careful to say that he was talking about a very restricted minority of largely intellectual Italians and that he was, in any case, concerned with explanation and not with justification. The overall effect of his work was to shift the debate on fascism away from the argument over the consent/dissent binary, more or less at a standstill, towards

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

125

one related to people’s perceptions and understanding of fascism. And this could be utilized both for fascists themselves, as Gentile had done, and also for others, much less clearly in the category of ‘true believers’. In particular it invited questions about the existence of a ‘fascist culture’ which might have permeated society to a greater extent than many were prepared to recognize. Gentile’s approach found many indirect supporters during the 1990s with the flowering of what has become known as the ‘culturalist school’ of fascist studies—a largely non-Italian school, much influenced by media studies, which focused its attention on language, theatre, art and architecture under fascism in order to argue that the regime had a specific, original and—above all—modern culture that generated a strong element of popular consensus for aspects of the regime. In many of the recent studies fascism as liturgy, symbol and spectacle, with a wide inter-class appeal, has come to replace more traditional ideas of fascism as class domination.⁷ If, at times, some of the literature makes it appear that culture and symbolic power is all that is in play (repression and social control rarely make an appearance), the ‘culturalist turn’ has undoubtedly revealed new avenues to the study of fascism and offered explanations of fascist success more in line with the ways in which fascism tried to present itself in positive manner to the population. Along with the work of Gentile, these studies help to explain some of the sources of what the fascists called their ‘faith’—their belief that fascism was in the right and would therefore necessarily triumph, sometimes, it seemed, against the logic of all reason. At the same time it has to be said that few of the studies manage to demonstrate the extent to which this new fascist culture did actually influence popular thinking and generate fascist ‘faith’. Cultural permeation is still seen very much in terms of an unverified ‘top-down’ process; the ‘bottom-up’ aspect of subjective cultural reception receives little attention.⁸ In fact, as we shall see below, fascist ‘faith’ was not always eternal. It would be pointless to pretend that the historiography of fascist Italy has not been, and is not still, heavily influenced by the political context in which it has been written. If there is now very clearly a new generation of younger historians less influenced by ideological considerations, Italy has still a long way to go to escape the shadow of its past. In a country that has notoriously failed to come to terms in any satisfactory way with its fascist experience, often oscillating unhappily between nostalgia and amnesia, old battles are still being fought through the pages of the history books. It is no accident that in recent years Italy has seen a very lively debate on the question of the public use of history. Contemporary revisionism has directed its attacks principally at the postwar ‘myth’ of anti-fascism and at the official memory of the Resistance and has had little to say about fascism itself. Even so, the space for a dispassionate assessment of how ordinary Italians related to fascism seems at times hardly to have grown any larger. Like fascism itself, the historiography of fascism often appears still to be dominated by factionalism; interpretations still tend to divide on current ideological lines. Each side chooses the terrain it prefers. The right, looking

126

Paul Corner

for some kind of justification for fascism, stresses the newly asserted ideological coherence of the movement and the many aspects of cultural and political novelty demonstrated by the regime, the economic and social modernization of the interwar years, and the consensus apparently shown by popular participation. The left, while conceding much more to this picture than was once the case, still highlights the violence of fascism, the rigid social control and heavy repression of dissent, and the disastrous foreign policy of the duce. In reality the study of totalitarian regimes suggests that the two positions are not antithetical but, at least in some respects, complementary. For totalitarian dictatorships, violence and repression on the one hand and participation and ‘enforced’ consensus on the other were two sides of the same coin. It is not necessary to deny one in order to assert the other. As a consequence, it is highly likely that—coming closer to Italy—in any assessment of popular opinion during the twenty years of fascist rule, one will find a mixed response to the regime from ordinary people, reflecting these two faces of fascism; that is, one will find people who were at the same time resentful of violence and repression, but much better disposed towards many of the innovations of fascism, including welfare, leisure activities and—for many—a very novel walk-on role in politics. The degree to which people were exposed to each of the two faces would, of course, condition their reaction to the regime. The landless agricultural labourers of the Po Valley who had borne the brunt of the attacks of the fascist squads in the early 1920s and had seen their wages reduced dramatically thereafter were likely to be diffident towards other aspects of the regime, even in later years. Most of the available evidence supports this supposition. Conversely, the office workers of Rome (a category greatly expanded by fascism during the course of the ventennio) who had not been on the receiving end of fascist violence (it was more likely that they had been perpetrators than victims), had secure jobs in a regime which respected hierarchy inside and outside of the office and which worshipped the state (their employer), were clearly going to constitute one of the categories most dedicated to the regime. Most ordinary people probably fell between these two extremes—aware of fascist arrogance and brutality but also aware of the changes that fascism was effecting in many areas that touched their everyday life. They did not necessarily embrace the dictatorial and expansionist politics of fascism, but certainly they were alive to the possibilities opened up by the regime for personal and family benefit. They knew equally well that the fascists controlled everything (except the church) and that access to jobs, resources, concessions, benefits, pensions, permits and so on often depended on not crossing swords with the regime.⁹ The combination of stick and carrot employed by fascism was very effective; it represented a kind of constant blackmail of the population, producing unavoidable collaboration and often inadvertent complicity with the regime—the type of relationship that all totalitarian regimes feed on. At the same time, however, it was a combination also suggestive of a kind of implicit paternalist

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

127

bargain; it was as if the fascists were saying, ‘If you behave, the regime will look after you.’ People were not only ordered to obey but were also, implicitly, invited to expect something from the fascists in return. Legitimation, therefore, not only depended on fascism’s allegedly glorious origins in the fight against ‘Bolshevism’ but was to be accorded to the regime at least in part on the basis of results. From the point of view of fascism it was imperative that the regime should work, or at any rate should seem to be working in the interests of the ordinary Italian; otherwise that implicit bargain would begin to break down. If it did break down, then the enforced consensus would not hold and popular reaction would be unpredictable. At the very least, given that alternatives to fascism were not available, an effect was likely to be felt in a negative impact on essential popular mobilization. The fascist regime was well aware of what was at stake. The propaganda image of fascist Italy during the 1930s was that of dynamism and efficiency; Italy—thanks to Mussolini—was not only catching up with its international competitors, in many respects it was overtaking them. International attention accorded to Mussolini seemed to confirm this. The message to Italians was that the nation was on the move. Government newsreels showed perfectly organized massed crowds cheering and smiling as the duce harangued them from some balcony or opened yet another provincial fascist headquarters. It seemed that fascism was a perpetual success story, and that it was lived by the population as such. There was, indeed, some truth behind the propaganda. Certainly there was much in fascism that was new and attractive to many people who had lived very confined lives up to that point. Trips to the sea, cheap railway tickets to permit visits to fascist exhibitions, new sporting and leisure facilities, a new, if limited, welfare programme—these were all tools the regime used and there can be no doubt that it used them to great effect. When necessary, fascism could organize mass rallies with participation on an unprecedented scale. Foreign observers were frequently impressed, although not all were convinced. Not for nothing did the Times correspondent in Rome refer to the Italians as ‘a population of prisoners, condemned to enthusiasm’.¹⁰ Yet nobody could deny that well choreographed mass demonstrations seemed to testify to the existence of a highly efficient political machine. What the cheering crowds were thinking is more difficult to assess. As with other totalitarian regimes, there was an official cult of consensus. In the big events people were required to behave as if they believed in the regime, often on pain of punishment.¹¹ Informers’ reports on mass rallies often suggested the mood was less radiant than the newsreels portrayed. The fascist officials who complained that the coercive measures used to bring people to the piazza made it impossible to judge the true level of enthusiasm for the regime had a point, although in reality the regime was less concerned about spontaneity than about regimentation and participation. Free will was hardly the issue; mass popular participation in rallies and demonstrations, by its very existence, communicated a message to those who participated. However briefly, in the public square people could feel part of the fascist community and sense the force of the movement.

128

Paul Corner

But the big events were relatively rare. This meant that the force they expressed, together with the sense of dynamism, youth and modernity so evident in much of the visual and literary production of fascism, had somehow to be translated from the exceptional event in such a way as to make constant contact with people’s everyday experience. Popular opinion would be formed around this process of translation. Here the role of the fascist Party, and of other local fascist organizations, was fundamental. It was local contact with fascism that determined most people’s attitudes to the regime. Central to this local contact were the provincial fascist federations. These were a key element in the top-down capillary network which spread from the centre to the peripheries of Italy and had responsibility for organizing and regimenting the solid local support on which the fascist movement depended. However, in the country of the hundred cities, each with its own identity and history, this structure often faced obstacles. These were, to a very great extent, related to the history of fascism itself. It is necessary to remember that the fascist movement had developed in the early 1920s as a series of local reactions to socialism, often linked to very local issues and subversive of the authority of the state; only after initial provincial victories did the movement begin to think about taking over the capital. Yet, long after the March on Rome and the establishment of a fascist government, local interests and local priorities frequently remained uppermost in the minds of many fascists, often frustrating the centralizing impulses of the government in Rome. The functioning of the provincial federations frequently reflected these tensions. Beneath the public image of efficiency and energy, provincial fascism was often anything but stable and dynamic. As was to be expected in the Italian context, popular opinion reacted primarily to the local experience of fascism rather than to many of the broader national and international dimensions. What happened in the provincial fascist federations was, therefore, of great consequence in conditioning the way ordinary people adjusted to fascism and what they thought of the regime. II One way of assessing the success of local fascist organizations is through the reports fascist informers made to the central authorities. Both Fascist Party (PNF) and police used informers extensively and many of their reports relate to the workings of the provincial federations. As in all totalitarian regimes, the fascist authorities placed a high value on accurate surveillance, evidently doubting the truth of their own repeated assertions of plebiscitary public approval. These reports are not, of course, the only source. The local fascist leaders (the federali) would also make regular reports on the situation in the province they controlled, as would the prefects. Anonymous letters of complaint and denunciation also found their way to the desks of Rome ministries. All these sources have their

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

129

different limitations, as we shall see below, but, read together and with the required caution, they provide a picture very different from that which fascism would have wanted to project about itself and they say a great deal about how some people, at least, were relating to the regime. As told by provincial reports, the story of the provincial federations during the 1930s is certainly not one of perpetual success. The instability of the 1920s, with frequent changes of the guard among local fascist leaders, inspections, denunciations, expulsions, re-admissions, and so on had not given way to a regime of calm and stability.¹² One fundamental problem, which had come to the fore in the late 1920s and which was to have a critical impact on popular opinion in the 1930s, was the lack of competent fascists able to undertake tasks of provincial organization and leadership. Many of the original pre-March-onRome fascists had, of course, fallen victim to the internal party squabbles of the 1920s; a few had moved to Rome to more important jobs. Both the anonymous fiduciari (police and party informers) and the prefects persistently recounted that good men were in short supply and that those local fascists who were in command were not up to the job. For example, in Padua in 1931 it was reported that there were problems because of the ‘difficulty of finding people who are able and ready to accept responsibility’ while, in the same province in 1932, it was stated that the federale was hampered in his work by the fact ‘of not having a sufficient number of able people available to whom he can entrust jobs involving direction. That depends . . . on the absenteeism of local people . . .’¹³ The prefect of Ferrara wrote, in 1934, that ‘among such a mass of people [in the province] there are very few who show themselves to be suitable for public office, particularly from the point of view of their intellectual capacity’.¹⁴ A later report, this time from the prefect of Piacenza, provided a perfect illustration of the problem (he was attempting to explain why things were going so badly in his province during 1937): The solution to the problem of the rejuvenation of office holders . . . depends on the preparation of cadres, which is in large measure beyond the competence and the possibilities of the Prefecture, being principally the job of other organizations. This sector is characterized by the most depressing squalor. In the course of the last fifteen years there has been no sign at all of the emergence of people able to take on jobs of a certain importance. All the people now used in the public administration belong to the category of those brought in from outside, not of those formed by Fascism.¹⁵

This was hardly a favourable comment on the work of the youth organizations in the province, but the same judgement on Piacenza was made in another, unsigned document which found its way to party leader Starace’s desk, almost at the same time: ‘The rejuvenation of office holders is impossible . . . because of the absolute lack of preparation of the cadres. In this field the Party has been totally absent . . . we need action by leaders who have much more authority than those to whom extremely important sectors of provincial politics are entrusted.’¹⁶ Although young men from the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (GUF—the university

130

Paul Corner

organization of young fascists) were drafted into service in the party organizations during the course of the later 1930s and there was to some degree the formation of a new group of young professional politicians, the quality of these people does not seem to have been high.¹⁷ Many attracted criticism for lack of experience or lack of imagination; some for both. The problems related to the quality of local leaders, to recruitment, and to generational change speak volumes about popular attitudes towards fascism. The mature tended to keep their distance and tried to avoid any involvement with administration; the young, unless they wanted a career, did likewise. Crucial to these attitudes was the fact that in many places, by the early 1930s, provincial fascist leaders were held in very low regard and people did not want to be associated with them. This was a direct result of the behaviour of the local leaders. Some were just black-shirted bullies, to be avoided when at all possible, but the most common accusation made against local leaders was that of affarismo, of using public office in order to further private financial or family interest. Examples are not difficult to find. A letter to a PNF central organizer, undated, but clearly from 1936 or 1937, declared that ‘The [fascist] Federation of Perugia is a den of thieves’ and went on to detail, with chapter and verse, the prison records, for theft and criminal deception, of certain of the local fascist leaders. Further examples come from the south of Italy. A signed letter from Naples in 1934 complained about the fact that the public officials had all set themselves up very well; ‘all the citizens have noticed that there is not one of them who—thanks to the position held—has not procured a life of ease and comfort’.¹⁸ In Reggio Calabria it was alleged that, ‘the Bosses go round by car, they couldn’t give a damn about anything and the only thing they know how to do is to extort money with threats’; the Federation itself was generally known as ‘the Federation of the blood-suckers’.¹⁹ Another letter of 1940, signed by four fascists, went further, comparing the fascio unfavourably to the mafia: ‘Here, once upon a time, the underworld was controlled by Michele Campolo [a noted mafia chief ]; now it’s worse because there is an organization of no-goods [the fascio] favoured and protected by the law. The police station and the prefecture are two sewers, the carabinieri even worse: they only help those who pay them . . . .’²⁰ Forced to defend himself from these allegations, the federale wrote that, on taking up office, he had had arrested ‘three employees of the Federation involved in barefaced robbery’ and that he had found a situation in which ‘nepotism [and] the most barefaced favouritism’ was the order of the day.²¹ These were not isolated incidents. Letters and reports to the party headquarters in Rome are packed with suggestions that local officials were filling their pockets and distributing contracts for public works and fascist-sponsored building projects to friends and family. A group of ‘elderly fascists’ in Naples wrote to the new PNF secretary Ettore Muti in late 1939, complaining that the party had consigned the city to ‘federali who love luxury too much and who have a well-padded wallet where their heart should be, to councillors who only think

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

131

about themselves and look to enrich themselves and their relations . . . .’²² A year later an anonymous writer from Pomigliano d’Arco (Naples) accused the Segretario federale of selling jobs to desperate unemployed workers, ‘L[ire]. 500 for a manual worker, L. 1500 for a building worker, price to be arranged for apprentice mechanics, etc. (besides gifts and other things)’²³ The federale of Modena, Feltri, was replaced in 1940 after a series of scandals involving mixing marble dust in the flour to make it weigh more (his cousin was the principal mill owner of the province), selling ‘red’ petrol reserved for agricultural uses illegally to others (he was the manager of the local AGIP petrol agency), and giving contracts for building work to his brother-in-law.²⁴ Such allegations suggest very strongly that, like many of the fascist leaders who rose to national prominence, fascist officials at a local level regularly used their positions for personal advantage. Money was not the only point at issue. Besides complaints about shady business deals, accusations that powerful fascists used their authority to obtain sexual favours were far from uncommon.²⁵ Popular opinion inevitably reacted to this, as is clear from the reports of the police spies. These show that, whatever the truth of the particular accusations—and many were no doubt generated by jealousies, rivalries and other private considerations—the belief that the provincial fascist authorities were corrupt and self-serving was generalized at popular level. Certainly, in the absence of open political differences under the dictatorship, the repeated struggles between local figures were fought almost entirely on the basis of attempts to destroy the reputation of the rival—a process that ensured that the fascist dirty washing was continuously being aired in public. The intimate language of local fascism was the language of calumny and it was inevitable that much of the mud would stick. This could not but affect popular attitudes to the fascist movement. What seems to have been a fairly generalized perception that fascist officials in the provinces were principally interested in furthering their own interests and those of their immediate circle was bound to produce cynicism and hostility on the part of those who remained outside the privileged circle. For some—for the industrial workers of Reggio Emilia or Padua, for example—the behaviour of the gerarchi (local fascist bosses) was no surprise; even though many of them put on the black shirt and took the fascist card because they needed work, they retained their former socialist allegiances.²⁶ But for many others—those perhaps who had initially suspended judgement on fascism or even supported it—the disappointment was evident; any residual confidence in the regime evaporated. For much of the 1930s, in fact, reports from the provinces continually underline the failure of the regime to attract genuine popular support as factionalism and corruption took their toll. Some recounted a disastrous flight from the movement. In many communes [of Reggio Calabria] . . . we note that, for a certain period, almost everybody had the membership card of the PNF, to the extent that the organization was

132

Paul Corner

transformed very rapidly into a battleground between the [traditional] factions which controlled the area. The consequences [were] easy to imagine. Total decadence in the organization, lack of seriousness in the disciplinary measures, deficiencies in the cadres, given that all the honest people who might have been able to make a notable contribution had fled.²⁷

As a consequence, the report continued ‘The fasci have been abandoned, closed now for months . . .’ and ‘The masses have lost confidence, are disillusioned, offended, blocked . . .’.²⁸ In other situations a direct link is made by party informers between corruption, affarismo and hostile popular opinion. After recounting the scandal surrounding the federale of Piacenza, the police spy concluded, ‘Profound squalor and the most crass indifference are nowadays . . . the most striking aspects of the situation in Piacenza, which reminds you seriously of something that is dead’.²⁹ A fascist from Vicenza wrote, at the end of 1938, that ‘I have to tell you that the Party is gradually becoming a dead weight . . . The things that are especially criticized and provoke bad feeling are the nepotism and the system of raccomandazioni.’³⁰ The same situation existed in Modena where the Prefect told the Party Secretary that the accusations levelled at federale Feltri were ruining the local party: ‘They have generated a total loss of confidence. Bread with flour containing marble dust, oil, petrol, local bosses, fascism—all one big minestrone of people and facts, presented on every kitchen table, damaging to certain people but above all damaging to the Party.’³¹ Mussolini did not escape criticism. In Naples, in 1938 a group of disgruntled fascists wrote, ‘Everywhere, in homes in suburbs and even in the convents they swear at and curse our Duce, and if it goes on like this the people will rebel . . . it’s not right that the people suffer because of a federale who doesn’t know how to be a federale . . . it’s not right that because of authorities who don’t know their duty, because of these newly enriched parasites, the people’s hearts are filled with hatred’.³² Sometimes people did rebel. At Pomigliano d’Arco near Naples in 1940 there were riots among the workers; the anonymous report on the events related the problems to the way in which the federale was selling jobs to the unemployed: ‘the principal reason for the worker discontent is to be sought in the systematic affarismo of the local fascist bosses’.³³ These expressions of discontent and disgust were worrying for the regime, but they in no way threatened its immediate survival. Popular opinion, hostile as it often was to the regime in its provincial manifestation, could not really make itself felt in any concrete way. People were afraid to react against injustice and exploitation; they were all too aware that there were spies everywhere. ‘People keep quiet because they are frightened’, wrote one police spy.³⁴ And they had reason to be frightened; violence never ceased to be a constituent part of fascism. Even before squadrismo was given its official second wind in the late 1930s, federali made no secret of the fact that they used violent methods against opponents; indeed some were clearly proud of the fact. The fascist leader of Reggio Emilia wrote to Starace in 1934 stating that a presumed ‘subversive’ had

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

133

died after throwing himself out of a third-floor window in order to avoid arrest (the usual story); he boasted that other suspects, on whose account it was not possible to prove anything, would be ‘dealt with in our usual fashion’ within the four walls of the fascist headquarters.³⁵ A signed letter from a fascist in Padua to Starace in late 1935 recounted that ‘someone was beaten up because he asked for a foreign newspaper’.³⁶ In the same town in 1937, during a ceremonial march of the soldiers returning from the African campaign, ‘two old men were beaten up because, without realizing it, they did not take their hats off as the column passed by’.³⁷ Similar reports are common. The perpetrators of violence were frequently members of the fascist militia—the MVSN. Set up in 1923 in the attempt to channel the violence and intemperance of the blackshirt squads into a formal and disciplined military organization, the militia seems to have distinguished itself throughout the ventennio for indiscipline and petty abuses of authority. People were unsure about what the precise powers of the militi really were, a fact which opened the door to invention. Prefects were continually compelled to report on situations in which former blackshirts had taken advantage of their militia uniforms to demand money from people, pretend privileged treatment (non-payment of bills was a favourite) or threaten reprisals for any hint of opposition. Allegations, often substantiated by subsequent investigation, spoke of gratuitous violence, theft, extortion, confidence tricks and occasional cases of murder and rape. Much of this illegal activity reflected the unhappy situation of parallel competencies of state and party. Militia abuses sprang from a presumed right on the part of those who had ‘made the revolution’ in 1922 to continue to command and to refuse recognition to the ultimate authority of the state. In report after report prefects were forced to point out that the activities of the militia were extremely vexatious for the local population, always terribly aware that the fascist militiamen considered themselves beyond the law and acted in the expectation of impunity. But, if it is clear that the open violence of fascism did not finish with the March on Rome but continued throughout the twenty years of the regime, people probably feared the fascist cudgels less than other forms of reprisal. Again from Padua, a document of April 1938 revealed that ‘all employers are obliged to denounce [to the authorities] those employees who refuse to join the Party’.³⁸ It was not difficult to imagine why. In both Naples and Reggio Calabria reports indicated that people could not speak out because they feared for their jobs; by attracting attention to themselves they risked the withdrawal of the fascist union card or the work permit. Other kinds of reprisal were possible. When, in 1937, the federale of Padua visited a poor area of the city to watch the distribution of food parcels by the fascist authorities, he was unwise enough to ask an elderly woman what she thought of the produce distributed. ‘She had the courage to tell the truth about both the quantity and the quality, both deficient.’ The next day the woman had her welfare permit taken away.³⁹

134

Paul Corner

As will be evident, the impression that emerges from a study of the local federations in the 1930s and early 1940s is anything but that of a perfectly oiled machine, efficiently carrying out at a local level the orders of central government, creating and cultivating consensus and directing the new generation towards the future fascist paradise of the New Italy. What does become apparent, rather, is popular apathy in respect of the Party. Certainly there were many aspects of fascism that working people might welcome. Limited welfare provisions, new labour laws and welcome, if much criticized, leisure activities were undoubtedly appreciated to a greater or lesser extent, according to opportunity and to need. But this appreciation does not seem to have carried over to an acceptance of the political and ideological message of fascism. Responsibility for this lay with the workings of the Party and the behaviour of fascist officials. The public image of the local fascist leaders—and of the local militia—was such that people found little to stimulate and much to repel them. In the absence of any prospect of change, or the existence of any alternative, a widespread reaction seems to have been simply to turn off. Indifference to public affairs—a kind of depoliticization—became common. This did not immediately threaten the survival of the regime, which had the means to ensure control. Yet, for a regime which had proposed anthropological transformation through popular participation and aimed at the moulding of people into the form of the New Fascist Man, it was a disaster.⁴⁰ It was as a consequence of apathy that the provincial federations lost contact with the people they controlled. Thus in Padua, which went through a serious crisis in early 1931, a special commissioner noted among the population, ‘General apathy about public affairs . . . Little enthusiasm in their ‘‘faith’’ . . . Total disorganization.’⁴¹ Intervention from Rome and a prompt rotation of officials would often restore the situation, at least for the time it took for factions to reorganize and re-emerge. This did occur in Padua, but by 1934 it was again reported that ‘The organizations live a meagre existence and carry on without any enthusiasm; the best people, who don’t have interests to look after, keep their distance and fascism is reduced to something that is purely external.’⁴² In Naples, in March 1934, very few people turned out to listen to a broadcast speech of the duce and a police informer spoke of the ‘worrying phenomenon of apathy and absenteeism among the population’, noting in the city ‘a spiritual climate of Muslim fatalism, cold, diffident and hostile’.⁴³ In the later 1930s, the reports of public disillusion rose. Economic hardship and high levels of unemployment in many places increased the expectations placed in local officials and made the corruption, inefficiency and factionalism of the provincial federations all the more intolerable. Even at the time of the Ethiopian war, popular attention seemed to be directed more towards local questions, in particular unemployment and high prices, than to those of Empire; the most common reference to the conflict relates to the problems of choosing those who were to go to work in Africa (as civilian labourers) from among

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

135

the mass of unemployed. The undoubted enthusiasm for the Italian victory seems to have been dissipated very rapidly as the contrast between the promised rewards of victory and the realities of its costs became evident. From Naples in September 1936 (just three months after the victory celebrations) it was said that ‘people talk a lot about hunger, unemployment, the unjust distribution of welfare. The population . . . attacks the institutions and the leaders openly.’⁴⁴ A report from Modena for the same month complained that ‘the population of the province of Modena, and particularly that of the town, showed up in very limited numbers in the public squares to listen to a broadcast of the speech of the duce from Avellino’.⁴⁵ The same lack of enthusiasm was recounted in Padua in 1937; ‘On the occasion of the speech of the DUCE from Tripoli, the loudspeakers installed in the two fruit and vegetable markets . . . spoke to the wind as usual.’⁴⁶ Again from Padua a local notable wrote to Starace to tell him that ‘The masses are exasperated because of misery . . . and everyone blames the present situation in the province on the local leaders.’⁴⁷ And soldiers who returned from Africa to face unemployment constituted a common difficulty of the later years of the 1930s, in Naples the soldiers arguing that the priorities of fascism’s imperial civilizing mission should be inverted: ‘First redeem the Neapolitans, then the blacks.’⁴⁸ The demobilized from the war in Spain only added to the Party’s headaches. By the end of the 1930s and before Italy intervened in the European war the reports of disaffection became ever more common. People could see the implications of Empire and were aware that war was looming; the prospect of fighting alongside the Nazis was almost universally unpopular. Indeed, many foresaw that a German victory could only be disastrous for Italy in the long run.⁴⁹ In addition unemployment remained high and the complaints about shortages and rising prices increased continually. A generalized atmosphere of depression seems to have pertained. Thus a fiduciario in Padua wrote in 1937 about the arrival home of a group of soldiers from Africa, ‘The company marched through the city amid general indifference’, while a month later he reported that ‘The ceremony to commemorate 23 March [1919; the founding of the fascist movement] took place amidst general indifference, without enthusiasm. The procession seemed like a funeral.’⁵⁰ A note from Vicenza in 1938 spoke very significantly of a fascism that had exhausted its energies. ‘The general impression is that the people are tired, that they are afraid of wars and economic collapse . . . the fascists are tired of the formalities of uniforms, of the perpetual parades, which they look on as an imposition.’⁵¹ From Padua on 21 April 1938 came the news that ‘The demonstrations in Padua took place as usual amidst general indifference.’⁵² In Piacenza it was observed that, in late 1939, ‘the critical spirit against the regime is more alive than ever’ and that ‘in recent times the PNF badge has disappeared from the buttonhole of many members’,⁵³ while by November 1939, ‘in the ranks of the old blackshirts or of the squads there is little enthusiasm. People criticize and arguments break out which are certainly not good for the prestige of the Party.’⁵⁴ A fascist inspector sent to Modena in early 1940 found that

136

Paul Corner

‘The dominant impression of the fascist situation in Modena is that of a diffuse sense of unease and of coldness, and, in certain areas, of real hostility and lack of confidence in the present leaders.’⁵⁵ In a later report he spoke of ‘the complete absenteeism of the population’.⁵⁶ Similarly in April 1940 an informer in Trento deplored the fact that the various local commemorations of the foundation of fascism had been marked by ‘total absenteeism’ and ‘absolute indifference’ on the part of both fascists and population. Things were no better in the South. In Reggio Calabria in 1940 a fascist inspector concluded that ‘The mass of the inhabitants [are] a long way away from the Party.’⁵⁷ The view from Rome provided by one informer in January 1940 summed it all up: ‘Unfortunately in the periphery . . . the misdeeds of this or that local boss have an enormous influence on the moral unease which weighs on the fascist masses.’⁵⁸ It is interesting to note that this disaffection even involved many among the young—those who might have been most influenced by fascist indoctrination at school and university.The GUF may have had its successes in generating a highly indoctrinated elite among students, but these successes seem to have been far from generalized among young people.⁵⁹ While it is undoubtedly true that many young people appreciated the new opportunities provided by the regime—for sport, for holidays, and for other leisure time activities—the utilization of the possibilities offered by fascism did not necessarily induce any attachment to the formal rituals of the Party. The ‘totalitarian thrust’ of fascism in the second half of the 1930s, with the anti-bourgeois campaign and the racial laws, seems to have done little to stimulate a new dynamism. An informer complained that the student demonstrations organized in Vicenza, Venezia and Padua in late 1938 against the French ‘were characterized more by the usual stupid student spirit (in the best of the hypotheses) than by the recognition of our cause against France’.⁶⁰ In late 1940 it was reported from Reggio Emilia that ‘the GIL [the fascist youth organization] . . . has hit rock-bottom’,⁶¹ while a Pro-Memoria of the same period related that: In the province of Modena and especially in the city there is a worrying situation with regard to the Party. [There is] a total division between everything that is the life of the Party and the life of the city and the province. The gerarchi work without producing results, and cannot find any—or almost any—support among the masses. Even the mass of young people from Modena live at a distance from the Party. They are full of scepticism and couldn’t care less.⁶²

At Schio in the Veneto, in 1940, almost no one turned up to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the fascist movement. The youth groups, who were ‘forced to participate’, disrupted the whole proceedings, ‘continually disturbing the speaker with their laughter, smoking and showing off in ways that were clear indicators of their total spiritual absence’.⁶³ The federale of Reggio Calabria wrote of ‘the complete disorientation of the student masses’.⁶⁴

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

137

If anything, matters in Piacenza seem to have been even worse. An official report on ‘Pre-military instruction’ of May 1940 informed Rome that The instruction takes place amid complete political and moral disorientation on the part of both the Comando Federale and that of the pre-military recruits . . . the lack of discipline of the recruits is shown by the fact that they turn up every Saturday simply because they are threatened with disciplinary measures or because of the belief that if they do not they would be denounced to the Military Authorities for habitual and unjustified absence. The young people show themselves to be without enthusiasm and unprepared for the duties and the obligations which the pre-military course imposes, unaware even of the moral reasons which are at the base of the organization of the military preparation of the Giovent`u del Littorio.⁶⁵

So much, it would seem, for a generation of New Fascist Men. III The picture as presented in these reports is pretty damning. But can the sources be believed? Anonymous letters of complaint and denunciation are, of course, the most suspect, even if the authors frequently explain—very apologetically—that it is more than their life is worth to sign with their name. Sometimes the complaints they make do result in official investigations, which may or may not verify the accusations, but which can at least be followed through the documentation. Federali would tend to put a favourable gloss on their activities, for obvious reasons; for the same reasons, they would tend to denounce other fascists considered competitors for local power. Similarly the prefect might try to magnify his own activity at the expense of the federale; here professional rivalries can often be detected. Both these sources need to be treated with caution, but frequently they reveal far more than the authors intended. After all, the reports could be subject to verification by inspectors and other third parties. The position in relation to police and party informers is more complex. It can, of course, be objected that, if the informers’ task was principally to identify opposition to the regime, then that is what they were likely to talk about. This objection has some weight, but it does overlook two points. The first is that identification of opposition does not seem to have been uppermost in many of the informers’ minds; by the 1930s direct opposition to the regime had become a problem of the past in most areas. A surprisingly large number of reports contain a strong element of fairly neutral monitoring of provincial situations which does not seem deliberately to seek out aspects hostile to the regime. Indeed, as we have seen, many of the reports are actually themselves directly critical of the workings of the local federations. Many reports suggest an individual performing what he considers his fascist duty and clearly come from committed fascists,⁶⁶ concerned by what they can see to be going wrong with the provincial movements. And

138

Paul Corner

it would not be true to say that the reports concentrate exclusively on negative opinion. On many occasions informers sent in reports that were very favourable to the regime, particularly in moments when they knew that the regime was very anxious to have public support. For example, after the mass national rallies held on 2 October 1935 to demonstrate to the world that the Italian people was behind Mussolini in his African adventure, informers were careful in many (though not all) cities to write feverishly enthusiastic comments for the consumption of the central authorities.⁶⁷ The second is that the kind of adverse criticism of the regime we have seen above is often related generally to the population and not to specific incidents or persons; it describes mood—and changes of public mood—rather than direct opposition. The reports utilized here are very rarely related to specific persons, under surveillance, as are some of the Soviet svodki. There would seem to be little reason for informers to exaggerate the negative aspects of public mood; by so doing they did nothing to increase their standing with their superiors and risked provoking a furious response from them (as sometimes happened, when the central authorities felt that the informer had a personal axe to grind). Indeed, many negative reports begin with a cringing apology; the bearers of bad news knew that they might be confused with the message. In more general terms, the style of the reports suggests a reasonable level of veracity. Whereas in the ecstatically favourable reports all the obligatory rhetorical phrases of the regime are put to work and it is possible to sense exaggeration and servility, with the others the language is more direct, cautious, and often very detailed and precise.⁶⁸ The attitudes described in many of the reports very obviously cannot be generalized to the whole population. It is very rare to find references to the thoughts and feelings of intellectuals or of the professional middle classes—groups undoubtedly in large part favourable to the regime. The reports cited above seem to be related in the main to the urban lower middle class and working class and, very often, to artisans and craftsmen. Essentially they are reports of what informers claim to have heard on the streets, in buses and trains, in bars and at the market. References to the attitudes of peasants or rural landless workers are rare for fairly obvious reasons relating to the practice of information-gathering.⁶⁹ That said, there seems little reason for doubting that the fascist regime was facing a very severe crisis of confidence among the more popular urban classes in the second half of the 1930s. In part this was related to material difficulties; many basic foodstuffs were in short supply, a black market was developing, rents and taxes were increasing, and, despite wage increases across the board, salaries had failed to keep up with prices. In these areas, fascism was not keeping its side of the bargain. But the informers note something else, equally serious for the regime. The novelty of fascism had long since worn off. If some people had reacted initially in a positive way to the liturgy of fascism, to its theatricality and to its symbols, they were now tired of the obligation to participate in fascist activities, tired of (expensive and uncomfortable) uniforms, weary of endless rhetorical

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

139

speeches, fed up with overbearing and dishonest local fascist bosses—and they were not hopeful but fearful for the future. Outside of certain groups of committed ‘believers’ (some of the GUF students were among these), there is very little suggestion of continuing allegiance to fascist ‘values’ or of the existence of anything that might be called a reaction to difficulties determined by a conscious ‘internalization’ of fascist ideology. To judge by their reported comments, people do not seem to have preserved a view of fascism characterized by a dual reality, believing in a ‘good’ fascism, betrayed in its day-to-day operation by a whole series of factors, but nonetheless still worth supporting because of the promise of its ultimate triumph. Fascism may well have had a coherent ideology, as many now insist, but the degree to which that ideology had penetrated among popular classes must be doubted (at least as far as is suggested by the informers’ reports). For many people, whatever virtues fascism might have had as an idea were continually being denied by the behaviour of real fascists. The comment, ‘This is not what fascism was supposed to be’ is sometimes heard from old blackshirts, usually those left on one side by the course of events, but it is certainly not a general theme of complaint. Instead it is far more common to find reference to comments couched in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’, indicating a very decided lack of identification with the regime.⁷⁰ Only in respect of Mussolini himself does there appear to have been an element of dual reality. As is well known, people often made a clear distinction between the duce and fascism, invoking the first against the second.⁷¹ It is undoubted that, in certain quarters, admiration for Mussolini verged on adoration, at times suggesting a strange symbiosis of fascist and Catholic mentalities in the production of a kind of political demi-god. Very often fascist ‘faith’ was intimately linked to the figure of Mussolini—charismatic superman considered to be the new genius of Italy, the personification of the belief in fascism’s ‘historic mission’ to reassert Italy’s primacy in Europe and even, for some, in the world. As in other dictatorial regimes, the cult of the leader was carefully organized in such a way as to associate the duce with what seemed positive about the regime—family values, apparent modernization, a strong sense of direction, and, for a period, proclaimed international political success—and to dissociate him from the day-to-day squalor of many of the provincial federations. Indeed the bad reputation enjoyed by provincial fascist leaders may well have worked to Mussolini’s personal advantage. For these reasons and undoubtedly for lack of any credible alternative, loyalty to Mussolini appears to have held up much longer at popular level than any loyalty to the regime, at least to judge from the informers’ reports. Belief in the wisdom of the duce provided reassurance, essential at a time when observed reality suggested that things were not really going as well as press and radio tried to make out. To some degree, however, this organization of the cult of the duce served only to produce what was termed mussolinismo, frequently distinguished from fascism itself. Indeed, there were even suggestions in some of the later reports that people were beginning to say

140

Paul Corner

that, while they would be happy to carry on with Mussolini as leader, the time had come for fascism to be wound up. Yet even with mussolinismo there are clear signs that, towards the end of the 1930s, a precociously ageing Mussolini was losing his hold on the public imagination. During the summer of 1939, when the fascist leader disappeared from public view for a couple of months, rumours were rife that he was ill, that he was paralysed, that he had been wounded in an attempt on his life, that (prophetically) he had been dismissed by the King and replaced by Marshall Badoglio, or more straightforwardly, that he was just dead and the news was being withheld. What is surprising about these rumours is that they provoked curiosity and some excitement but very little public dismay. Waning popular support would seem to testify to a fundamental problem which fascism had been unable to resolve. This was a very obvious, and very obviously increasing, gap between declared objectives and their realization. Not being transcendental in nature, the ‘political religion’ of fascism was subject to verification in this world, not the next, and Italians were clearly losing faith in fascism’s ability to provide the promised better future. The examples cited above indicate that the regime was losing, or had lost, all credibility with many Italians. It is striking the degree to which, after almost twenty years of bellicose fascist propaganda, people still shied away from the prospect of conflict and expressed grave doubts in 1939 and 1940 about Italy’s capacity to fight a major war, recognizing full well that other European states were much better prepared. It is equally surprising to find so many reports in 1938–40 of people exchanging information on the basis of what they had heard (illegally) on foreign radio stations. As one informer noted, many Italians no longer trusted the official sources of news and information; they recognized the bombast and falsity of fascist propaganda programmes. This loss of credibility among sections of the population indicates a basic failure on the part of the regime to ‘define reality’ in its own terms; other realities continued to exist, providing an often unwelcome point of comparison with the ‘realizations’ of fascism. In this respect, it is to be noted that, as a country highly dependent on international tourism and one in which there was also always continuous movement around the Vatican, fascist Italy was totally unable to close its borders in such a way as to isolate the population from other realities. If totalitarian dictatorship requires closed borders for it to be successful, fascism signally failed to meet the mark. The evidence to hand suggests that it is hardly even possible to speak, as Ian Kershaw does in relation to Hitler and the Germans, of a distinction between the ‘big’ and ‘extraordinary’ ideas of Mussolini and the ‘ordinary’ problems of everyday life, the first sufficiently strong and sufficiently shared by the population to make up for all the deficiencies of the second. Certainly, even at a popular level, Italians do seem on the whole to have agreed with Mussolini when he declared that Italy should assume her ‘rightful’ position in the Mediterranean and that the country should be treated with greater respect in the European concert. But assertions in this sense, made in the course of reported conversations, were

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

141

invariably followed by the consideration that changes in Italy’s position should only be achieved through peaceful means and, very frequently, by disparaging remarks about Italy’s real ability to make herself felt among the great powers. Even the achievement of the African Empire in 1936 did little to change the situation; as we have seen, people returned immediately to the problems of everyday life, in fact made more serious by the high cost of the war. The impression persists, therefore, that Mussolini’s ‘big’ ideas were too far removed from daily reality for them to have a strong hold on large segments of the population. Germans made a direct link between their improving material conditions and the improved position of Germany in the international hierarchy; Hitler was able to exploit this. It is difficult to find evidence, at least at the popular level, of this kind of linkage in Italy—something which would suggest that, in the final analysis, the fascist message was weak when put to the test. The aspirations towards national greatness were useful for internal mobilization—the various ‘battles’ of fascism around the revaluation of the lira, land reclamation, grain production, and the elimination of malaria—but seem to have lost much of their capacity for mobilization when applied to issues of foreign policy, particularly when Germany, France and Britain were involved. People understood very well that Africa was one thing, Europe another. And if there were doubts about the real improvement in Italy’s international standing, there were none when it came to the question of standard of living. A large number of the informers’ reports in the later 1930s speak of the day-to-day difficulties of the population—of the worsening of material conditions. There was no cooking oil, no flour, no coffee, no bread, no work—and so on.⁷² It seems clear that many people were busy just surviving from one day to the next and that fascist welfare was doing little more than distributing misery. In this context the sabre-rattling of Mussolini on the international scene had little relevance; he was applauded for keeping the peace, not for promising war. Few thought sanctions, imposed on Italy by the League of Nations after the aggression against Ethiopia, justified, yet there is hardly a single reference in the informers’ reports to people who considered that the difficulties of everyday life were caused by these sanctions. The sentiment seems to have been rather that, although the sanctions were unjustified and hypocritical, Italy was nonetheless beginning to get out of her depth. Despite the anti-English campaign mounted by fascism, right up to the Italian entry to the Second World War in June 1940 (and, indeed, in some cases, beyond) popular sympathies lay with Britain and France—the democracies—rather than with Germany. Any conclusions on this theme of popular attitudes to fascism must still be tentative and cautious, but it would appear that the ‘consensus thesis’ should be heavily qualified, at least for the closing peacetime years of the regime. Popular opinion may have been, as always, ambivalent about many things, but the tendency does seem to have been very decidedly towards doubt, scepticism and loss of confidence in the capabilities of the regime. And, as is well known, the collapse of support for the regime was even more rapid once Italy entered

142

Paul Corner

the war and suffered its first defeats. This does prompt the conclusion that fascism managed to impose itself on popular attitudes much less successfully than either National Socialism or Soviet communism. Although circumstances had obviously changed radically by September 1943, the relatively small number of Italians who followed Mussolini to Sal`o gives support to the view that there was never more than a limited and very fragile consensus at popular level for the fascist values proclaimed by the ideologues. In part this was probably due to the fact that the fascist regime was initially imposed (and maintained, to a certain degree, throughout the ventennio) with violence. Its source of legitimacy was always suspect. Moreover repression and very strict control of access to resources, to benefits and to privileges, did play a very important role in fascist domination, and people resented this, particularly when the distribution of resources was so often seen to be unfair. But it was also due to the weakness of the fascist message, less relevant to ordinary people’s lives than was the message of other regimes. The central message of national aggrandisement found only limited support, largely because most Italians’ priorities remained linked, as always, to the family, to the locality, and, in many cases, to the church. Fascism was most successful when it worked in parallel with those priorities, as is evident from the Concordat with the church; when it worked in other directions—and foreign policy was one of these—it became less relevant and was, as a consequence, much less successful. People certainly adjusted to fascism—they had no choice if they wanted to continue to live normal lives—but they retained their previous priorities in which local matters were often considered in the end to be more important than national issues. Thus it was a matter of great importance that it was precisely at the local level that fascism frequently failed to live up to its proclaimed image and that it was at the local level that its leaders often covered themselves with opprobrium. It was as a consequence of this that popular confidence in the regime waned dramatically during the course of the 1930s, giving way to popular ‘disgust’⁷³ with fascist politics and foreboding about the military implications of Empire and the direction Mussolini was taking.

No t e s 1

Michele Battini, Peccati di memoria: La mancata Norimberga italiana (Rome, 2003); Filippo Focardi, La guerra della memoria: la resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal 1945 ad oggi (Rome and Bari, 2005). 2 For a long time historians continued to cling to Angelo Tasca’s maxim: ‘for me, to define fascism is above all to write its history’. 3 Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919–29 (rev. edn. London, 2004). 4 Alberto Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario ( Turin, 1965).

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces 5 Renzo

143

De Felice, Mussolini ( Turin, 1965–97). The biography, which turned in fact into a kind of history of fascism, was completed posthumously after the author’s death in 1996. 6 Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent (Cambridge, 1981), and, eadem, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Los Angeles, 1992); Perry Willson, The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford, 1993) and, eadem, Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali (London, 2002); Luisa Passerini, Torino operaia e fascismo (Rome and Bari, 1984), and, eadem, Fascism in Popular Memory (Cambridge, 1987); Maurizio Gribaudi, Mondo operaio e mito operaio ( Turin, 1987). 7 Two examples of this tendency are Simonetta Falaschi-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle and the Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, 1997) and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, 1996). 8 A partial exception to this statement might be considered to be the study of Simona Colarizi, Le opinioni degli italiani sotto il regime 1929–43 (Rome and Bari, 1991). Colarizi‘s treatment of the question is certainly not that of the ‘culturalist school’, however. 9 For a more detailed treatment of these aspects see my ‘Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?’ Journal of Modern History 74 (2002), 325–51. 10 Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Ministero degli Interni (MI), Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza (DGPS), Polizia Politica (1927–44), b. 219, 12 September 1935. 11 Even in Italy today the myth of the spontaneous fascist rally persists. In fact rallies were carefully prepared weeks ahead of the event. People enrolled in all the different fascist organizations would be given a numbered card of convocation which they would hand in to officials at the entrance to the piazza, thus permitting the authorities to identify those who failed to turn up. Absence was punished with ‘severe disciplinary measures’. In general terms it continues to surprise that so much of fascism is still viewed through the ‘public transcript’ of the movement itself. It is remarkable that newsreels, for example, prepared by organizations founded and funded by fascism, run by fascists, intended to be used for propaganda purposes by the fascist authorities, are still often seen as presenting an authentic picture of popular sentiment towards the regime. 12 For a detailed account of the provincial federations in this period, see Salvatore Lupo, Il Fascismo: La politica in un regime totalitario (Rome, 2000). 13 ACS, Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), Situazione Politica Economica Provinciale (SPEP), busta (b.) 11, Padua, ‘Estratto della relazione del mese di maggio 1931’; ‘Estratto della relazione del mese di febbraio 1932’. 14 ACS, MI, Direzione Generale Amministrazione Civile, Affari Generali e Riservati, b. 150, 18 June 1934, quoted in Roberto Parisini, Dal regime corporativo alla Repubblica Sociale: Agricoltura e Fascismo a Ferrara 1928–1945 (Ferrara, 2005), 22. 15 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, Prefect Montani to Minister of Interior, 1 May 1937. 16 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, 3 June 1937. 17 See, for example, ACS, PNF, SPEP, b.18, Rieti, ‘La situazione politica di Rieti’, undated but 1940, where the federale, Giovanni Torda, ‘originating in the GUF’, is

144

Paul Corner

described as being without ‘personal prestige (and) without any obvious characteristic that would distinguish him from ordinary young people either for education or for ability’. The only serious study of the effective contribution of a second generation of fascist leaders fully confirms these conclusions; Marco Palla, ‘ ‘‘Fascisti di professione’’: il caso toscano’, in Luigi Ganapini (ed.), Cultura e societ`a negli anni del Fascismo (Milan, 1987), 31–49. Luca La Rovere, Storia dei GUF ( Turin, 2003), presents a more positive view of fascist youth and argues that a new ruling group never really had time to assert itself. 18 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, Volanti to Starace, 21 July 1934. 19 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, letter signed ‘Alcuni Malcapitati’ to Starace, 23 March 1938. 20 ACS, ibid., letter signed by four fascists, 21 April 1940. 21 ACS, ibid., Cassini to Mussolini, 24 May 1940. 22 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, 13 December 1939. 23 ACS, ibid., 18 July 1940. 24 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, report from informer 16 January 1940 and report of inspectors, undated but January 1940. 25 ‘Your son wants a job? He had better have a pretty mother or a sister’; ACS, ibid., b. 11, Padua, anonymous letter to PNF secretary Starace, 15 November 1935. 26 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 18, Reggio Emilia, ‘Reggio Emilia’, 18 October 1939; ‘there are a great many workers who, although they wear the black shirt in order to get work, as they themselves say, still think and feel like socialists’. 27 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, Pro-memoria Situazione Politica della Provincia di Reggio Calabria, undated but 1931. 28 ACS, ibid. 29 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, 13 September 1937. 30 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, ‘Vicenza: Spirito Pubblico’, 21 December 1938. 31 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, Prefect Passerini to Starace, 24 July 1938. 32 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, ‘fascisti anziani’ to Muti, 13 December 1939. 33 ACS, ibid., 18 July 1940. 34 ACS, MI, DGPS, Politizia Politica (1927–44), p. 220, Florence, 17 March 1939. An informer notes ‘. . . the general impression of being spied on everywhere and the mania, or rather the obsession, of believing that everywhere there are attentive ears listening’. 35 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 18, Reggio Emilia, 13 September 1934, underlining in original text. 36 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11. Padua, Baseggio to Starace, 21 October 1935. 37 ACS, ibid., 18 May 1937. 38 ACS, ibid., informer’s report to Starace, 23 April 1938. Obligatory enrolment in the PNF for public sector workers was introduced in 1938. 39 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 17 February 1937.

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces

145

40 Mussolini’s biographer, Renzo De Felice, notes this process. ‘Beneath the appearance of

an extreme politicization of the masses, an ever more marked and real depoliticization of society . . . led to an ever more accentuated separation from, and an ever increasing disdain of, the PNF and . . . to a general disgust for politics as such. . . .’ R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Lo stato totalitario 1936–1940 ( Turin, 1981), 221. 41 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, ‘PNF Padova. Rapporto sulla situazione fascista in Padova’, 27 March 1931. 42 ACS, ibid., Padua, 11 March 1934. 43 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, 20 March 1934. 44 ACS, ibid., 1 September 1936. 45 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, 15 September 1936. 46 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 20 March 1937. 47 ACS, ibid., Baseggio to Starace, 2 June 1938, in which he advises the PNF leader against the organization of a visit of Mussolini to Padua, ‘it would mean having HIM make a bad impression’. 48 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, letter from ‘a large number of soldiers returning from Africa’, August 1941. 49 ‘An industrialist said to me this morning that he did not think that Mussolini could agree with Hitler to fight a war of extermination, which would destroy everything that has been done in these 17 years of fascism. . . . the public is puzzled, disappointed, filled with anxiety’, ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 18, Reggio Emilia, ‘Reggio Emilia’, 18 October 1939. 50 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 17 February 1937 and 25 March 1937. 51 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, ‘Vicenza: Spirito Pubblico’, 21 December 1938. 52 ACS, ibid., 23 April 1938. 53 ACS, PNF, SPEP, Piacenza, 18 October 1939. 54 ACS, ibid. The antisemitic Racial Laws of 1938 had evidently done little to instil a new dynamism into the Party. In fact there are few references in the informers’ reports to any reaction to the laws at provincial level. 55 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, report of fascist inspectors, undated but January 1940. 56 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, ‘Situazione politica della provincia di Modena’, 16 January 1940. 57 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, 27 May 1940. 58 ACS, MI, DGPS, Polizia Politica (1927–44), p. 219, 12 January 1940. 59 See S. Duranti, Lo spirito gregario: I gruppi universitari fascisti tra politica e propaganda (1930–1940) (Rome, 2008). 60 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 21 December 1938. 61 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 18, Reggio Emilia, Relazione 12 December 1940, signed Mancini. 62 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, Pro-memoria, undated, but either 1939 or 1940.

146 63 ACS,

Paul Corner

MI, DGPS, Polizia Politica, Materia (1927–44), p. 219, 1 May 1940. PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, Quarantotto to Muti, 27 May 1940. 65 ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, 1 May 1940. 66 The identity of many of the informers is now known, although knowledge of their names does not tell us much. They are usually identified on the reports by a number written in the margin by the receiving body. Thus it is possible to identify certain informers as usually very critical of the regime, others as being generally more optimistic. Those who tend to report criticisms are in the clear majority. On this see A. M. Imbriani, Gli italiani e il duce (Naples, 1992). 67 The texts of some of the reports are so similar that one suspects a prompt from some administrative quarter before the demonstrations. 68 On this question see Ian Kershaw in this volume, who agrees that negative reporting is likely to be nearer the truth than is favourable comment. But see also Hellbeck’s doubts about this ‘hierarchy of authenticity’ in note 17 to Jan Plamper’s chapter in this volume. 69 Research carried out by students at the University of Siena suggests a fairly rigid division of opinion in the rural areas surrounding Siena, at least as far as the memory of fascism is concerned. Independent farmers—even small farmers—have favourable memories of the regime; people in dependent positions, including the poorer sharecroppers, have unfavourable memories. 70 Passerini, who quotes a woman interviewed as saying, ‘Fascism was over there; we were here’; Torino operaia, 159. 71 Many of the letters sent to Mussolini by ordinary Italians begged his intervention in order to right injustices suffered at the hands of fascist officials. The general assumption of these letters is that Mussolini did not know what was going on in the provinces; hence the common invocation: ‘If the duce only knew . . .’ (reproduced, with required adjustment, in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany). 72 It was shortage of coffee around Easter 1939 that created genuine alarm for public order among the authorities in Rome. According to some accounts, even the employees in the ministries—the backbone of the regime—were threatening ‘revolution’ as they met together in coffee-less bars and exchanged grievances. 73 The word used in the context of the late 1930s by Renzo De Felice to describe popular sentiment (see note 40). 64 ACS,

PART 3 D I C TATO R S H I P A F T E R 1 9 4 5

This page intentionally left blank

9 Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice¹ Marcin Kula

Some years ago Nathan Wachtel wrote a book in which he attempted to reconstruct the view the Peruvian Indians had of their world destroyed by the European conquest.² We ought to write a similar book on the view of the world held by people who experienced the communist system. The importance of the subject and the need for research in this area is evident; it is, after all, one of the most interesting questions concerning the history of communism. Historians, however, cannot just repeat intuitively that ‘the people’ were ‘against’, which, in any case, if referred to the whole period, would simply be wrong, just as it would not be true that people were ‘for’ or ‘against’ on every question. In reality they could be ‘in favour, but against’.³ And they could be against in their thought, but in fact collaborate fully with the establishment in both words and deeds. We are in a better position than Wachtel. Certainly there are more documents about those of us who have lived and worked during the era of communism than there were about the Indians. Even so, the difficulties remain enormous. To begin with I want to mention some rather obvious points and make a few reservations. The communist system did not produce the kind of materials which usually permit the historian in democratic countries to study the ideas people hold. As is well known, in the Polish People’s Republic [commonly ‘People’s Poland’, PRL] there were no free elections, there was no freedom of expression or free press, nor was there any construction of monuments according to the mood of the particular political groupings. Opinion polls were introduced only after 1956. Initially the authorities looked on them unfavourably and their use encountered a great deal of resistance. The first centre for opinion polls had to limit itself to assessing the reactions of people to radio programmes and was able to overcome this limitation only through the determination of a group of enthusiasts. It was at this time that Adam Schaff launched a debate on the ‘mania’ for ‘enquiries’—the very term indicates how the utilization of questionnaires for measuring public opinion was

150

Marcin Kula

seen as a ‘mania’ by the authorities, who were convinced that they knew what citizens thought better than the sociologists. Fundamentally the regime suffered from a strong schizophrenia on this point—on one hand wishing to believe that the people were with it, and on the other being intimately convinced that the reality was just the opposite. In any case, the authorities preferred not to ask anybody, and to avoid any situation in which popular opinion was publicly shown on the basis of representative sample groups.⁴ In studying the opinions of the proverbial ‘Mr Smith’ it is very difficult to identify an area of reflection. In fact, unlike the usual view, the world under communism did not divide into ‘society’ on one side and ‘power’ on the other. Rather there existed a continuum. Even members of the Political Bureau might find themselves thinking and speaking with the pronoun ‘them’, even if it was not clear who they were referring to. To the Soviet comrades, to the local hard-heads, to their own enemies within the Political Bureau, to their comrades in the secret services? Even members of the Political Bureau found themselves at times in the role of ‘Mr Smith’. Even high-level government officials avoided expressing themselves openly, and the diaries they wrote in secret were kept hidden in their country houses by the Mazuri lakes.⁵ Conversely, it is not possible to rule out a priori that the articles that appeared in the Trybuna Ludu reflected not only the ideas of the directorate of the Polish United Workers’ Party (communist), but also a part of the ‘working people of the towns and the countryside’.⁶ In a regime of denial of rights, in which the potential word is obliged to remain silent, the study of human opinion on certain questions is without sense precisely because such opinions are just not formulated. People who are not philosophers form positions about questions they have to face immediately. They begin to think only at the moment in which an alternative emerges and they then develop their ideas in discussion. All this was absent under communism in many situations. In fact, very often it is not appropriate to ask the Manichaean question whether people were ‘for’ or ‘against’ the solutions provided by the regime. Where an alternative was absent the formation of opinion was much more complex. Although discontented, people often did not imagine the possibility of other solutions with the consequences that would then have followed from their taking up positions. In a regime in which rights are denied, people express themselves not only with words and, very obviously, not only with writings. Sometimes, as has been known since the time of Cicero, silence can be very eloquent (cum tacent, clamant). In regimes of authentic terror, silence reigns. (Kapu´sci´nski: ‘What silence rises from countries where the prisons are full.’⁷) The silent and inscrutable face of the Indian, described in many reportages of Latin America, was not a reflection of any particular stupidity, as the Europeans believed, but of the experience of contact with Europeans, handed down from generation to generation.

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

151

In a regime in which rights are denied, the absence of certain material in the sources, at points where you would expect to find them, can testify, paradoxically, to the intimate thoughts of people, in as far as it represents a not accidental flight from a certain area of open reflection. In a regime in which rights are denied even the smallest actions, difficult to identify today, can constitute a strong statement. The yellow socks that Leopold Tyrmand⁸ wore as a sign of protest have by now become proverbial. When, in Czechoslovakia just before the Prague Spring, I saw groups of young men with long hair, I had no doubt that this was a way in which they wanted to demonstrate their distance from the regime: listening to a certain kind of music, drinking Coca-Cola or chewing gum underlined Western leanings. It would be possible to draw up a long list of these non-verbal modes of expression of attitudes to the regime, including nudism in the GDR. Sometimes these modes could be amusing. It would appear that one Polish biologist obstinately repopulated the Polish Kampinos forests⁹ with beavers because the dams they built worked against what was, in his way of thinking, the deleterious forest clearance scheme of the communists. This was his way of fighting to save the forests from the communists, and it had a clear ideological motivation. I am not competent to judge whether it was a scientifically sensible action or not. These modes of expression I mention present difficulties for the historian given their limited documentation and the lack of precision in the expression itself. After all, not everyone who dressed as a ‘beatnik’ was an aware and convinced anti-communist and not every nudist on the East German beaches was fighting against the regime. However, on other occasions, the wordless declarations could be radical in their drama, as with the protest suicides of Ryszard Siwiec in September 1968 in Warsaw¹⁰ and Jan Palach in January of 1969 in Prague. They could also be drastically unambiguous: at the beginning of 1971, during a meeting of Ł´od´z textile workers with the President of the Union Council, Władysław Kruczek, one of the workers turned her back, pulled her skirt up and showed her bare behind.¹¹ What mode of expression could be more eloquent than this, in a situation in which you can’t say anything? In a regime of denial of rights, participation in religious practices became a powerful means of expression of political ideas. People would sing, ‘Make us a free country, O Lord . . .’ The primate Wyszy´nski was considered a kind of interrex. During the celebrations of the Millennium of Poland (1966) the church made some very clear statements about the rulers. Commemorative plaques in churches were very expressive, sometimes even the writings on gravestones, even if these were checked, and were naturally subject to self-censorship. Some churches became particularly important elements in a discourse of stone and gesture against the regime; for example the church of St Charles Borromeo and the cemetery of Powa¸ zki in Warsaw. Sometimes the Easter tombs carried messages that were not only religious in content.

152

Marcin Kula

Obituaries, although obviously censored, in certain periods revealed a great deal about people’s thoughts and feelings. In a regime of denial of rights certain kinds of behaviour required by the authorities could paradoxically take on a meaning of protest. Allow me to quote a small personal memory from the time in which I was a doctoral student at the College of Planning and Statistics. I remember how, in 1968, many of us, at that time about to be expelled, took part in the May Day parade simply in order to annoy our own ‘red guards’. On that delicate borderline, on which it is difficult to catch somebody in the wrong, there could be much more serious demonstrations. In memoirs coming from one of the gulags there is a description of the day of Stalin’s death: the prisoners, told of the death of the Leader during a roll call, remained still. At that point the commander shouted, ‘Take off your berets!’ The prisoners carried out the order, except that the berets were hurled into the air. Without wishing to compare with this, we recount among ourselves that, after 1968, in the May Day parade, the University of Warsaw students would shout ‘Karol, Karol, Karol . . . Marx’. It is difficult to find out if this kind of homage to Karol Modzelewski, accompanied by a teasing of the authorities, really took place. As a category related to the above facts, we could mention the publication, thanks to the distraction of the censor, either intentionally or because of a printing error, of certain anti-regime articles, and the uproar they provoked. The mistakes of the censor were always noted straightaway by a large number of readers. Last but not least, certain actions, strikes and demonstrations against the authorities, some types of behaviour by the farmers, demonstrations at graves and during funerals, some funerals of open protest (for example that of father Popiełuszko or of Grzegorz Przemyk¹²), attempts to construct monuments against the wishes of the authorities (Katy´n)—these were all very strong forms of expression in which words, even if pronounced, were a secondary aspect. Paradoxically, the communist regime reinforced the expressive impact of such actions. What in any other system would have been a direct protest against particular persons or decisions, or a strike against an entrepreneur with an economic objective, here had a strong probability of becoming an anti-regime action, independently of the conscious intentions of the participants. At the same time it is necessary to remember that even strikes were not necessarily anti-communist in nature. Strikes in the communist period were much more frequent than we thought at the time, but often broke out for very prosaic reasons. And protest behaviour during funerals could create some problems of interpretation. After all Boleslaw Bierut was given the last farewell in Poland as one of ‘ours’ assassinated in Moscow (‘he went in a fur coat, he came back in a wooden one’). One anti-communist observer couldn’t believe what he saw.¹³ Sometimes everyday behaviour, like working badly, stealing, drinking, could reflect the ideas and the attitudes of the people. But even these are difficult to

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

153

interpret for the historian, given that laziness and theft are not necessarily a reaction to communism. The ideas people did formulate expressis verbis were spoken on various occasions. It is possible to find documentation about this in many different kinds of material, above all in the very normal routine materials produced in the course of the everyday workings of the state. Even the most controlled press allows us, not without difficulty, to observe human attitudes and reactions. Even the most hypocritical literature can be realistic, above all in trivial matters and insignificant descriptions. Even the most hypocritical of assemblies, the minutes of which were often kept, reflected many of the real thoughts of people. The same is true of the records of the union organization, in fact without any real autonomy. It is necessary to remember that, in ‘People’s Poland’, until around 1949 and then again after 1956 it was possible to say quite a lot; ‘a lot’, it must be understood, for a country of the Soviet bloc: freedom was not extended to all subjects, many of which could be dealt with only by allusion. Despite all the opposition of the regime, even on the occasions of the two referendums (of 1946 and 1987) and of two elections (of 1947 and 1957) something of the real opinions of the citizens was expressed. The present studies of these events, giving us back knowledge of their real workings, are also very important for an understanding of the effective opinions of society in given moments. It is not without importance that, in conformity with its ideology, the system had at least to pretend to be democratic, and even exhort people to criticize. It is sufficient therefore to know how to decipher the transcripts of the official meetings in order to be able to learn a great deal about the issues that upset the people. Obviously it is always necessary to bear in mind that those proceedings do not reflect either the totality of the ideas held by the public on any given question or the ideas of all those concerned. It is also necessary to take into account the specific ways in which the speeches were formulated and noted. The ideas expressed on official occasions followed an established stylistic convention and in the main touched on limited aspects of the problems discussed. The conventional formula was: ‘Our system is excellent, everything is going for the best in the best of worlds, it is only necessary to do something about issue x,’ or else, ‘Our way is right, it is only necessary to improve the supplies of basic goods for the population.’ This stylistic convention creates many difficulties today in the understanding of texts. For example, can a history student today understand what his current professor actually meant when, at the time, he said something like: ‘The general laws shown by Marxism are very important, but we must continually base our research on the analysis of the sources generated in the epoch we are examining. This is totally in conformity with the theory and the praxis of Marxism . . .’? A sizeable part of the contents passed by the censor was expressed in allusions and accents difficult to understand today. Even I, going through some of my old articles one day, could no longer understand why at the time I had been so proud

154

Marcin Kula

of getting some pieces past the censor. For example, today we are reproved for not having spoken of the Polish–Russian war of 1920, but rather of the decline of the revolutionary situation in Europe in that period—while for us it was obvious what we were really talking about. A separate problem, not to be overlooked, is the lack of part of the archive material and the chaos that exists in the archives (it is a paradox that the archive files may have been better kept in the Stalin era than in the subsequent communist period, when the cadres no longer felt terrorized to keep the documents, etc.). It is also necessary to remember that it is difficult to get from the document, in its original form, to its real meaning. Not only speeches but also minutes had their stylistic code; the secretaries were often of mediocre education and, besides, they were careful that minutes were not excessively detailed. A serried front on this score, very strong in the later communist period, generated a quantity of minutes, diffused throughout the institutions (beginning with Faculty Board and going right up to the Political Bureau), which are not interesting for the historian. But despite all the reservations and the difficulties expressed here, the richness of the information and expressive force of the people contained in material relating to ordinary administration can be surprising. To give an example, in the documentation of the Polish United Workers’ Party section of the ‘Pafawag’¹⁴ which I have looked at with my students, we have found a mine of information on the moods and attitudes of the workers, including declarations of a surprising sincerity made by those workers who decided to leave the party.¹⁵ A distinct category of material (but not necessarily distinct from the point of view of the archive) is that of the documents generated by the deliberate attempts of the authorities to test out ideas and social feelings. The regime was very interested in knowing what people were thinking. I remember that when my mother, Nina Assorodobraj, was organizing one of the first sociological enquiries in the context of her research project on historical awareness in Poland, the matter inevitably finished up in the Scientific Section of the Central Committee, where it excited as much curiosity as it met resistance. The methods used by the communists for gathering information on what people were thinking did evolve. After the introduction of martial law in 1981 they began to use more modern methods of polling public opinion. This was done in good faith, as far as we can tell, and seriously, to the extent that the direction of the new institute (the Centre for the Study of Social Opinion) was entrusted to an official near to General Jaruzelski. For much of the communist period, though, research was carried out with much more rudimentary methods. It was based on police reports; on party cells; on party inspectors sent on inspection visits; on the summaries made by party speakers about the questions they were asked during their talks and meetings; on the letters sent to the Central Committee by citizens; and on the reports the newspapers made about the letters sent to them for publication. In short, the apparatus of power grasped at anything that was available.

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

155

The analysis of this type of material is difficult and has to be carried out with caution. In the main it is material that does not lend itself to generalization. The intellectual level of the writers did not permit them to provide a comprehensive picture, and, for the functionaries of the party, it was much safer to talk about isolated cases than it was to risk generalization. Moreover, even these reports are formulated in a coded style. Excepting the ‘moments of truth’ which arrived in political crises, every secretary who wrote a report had on the one hand to position himself in such a way that he could not be accused of writing without critical and auto-critical sense, and on the other hand to avoid putting his head in the noose by laying himself open to accusations of defeatism and of having permitted the deterioration of his area. Even the police reports, usually more sensitive to negative aspects, observe a stylistic convention. When, in a volume which publishes the reports on March 1968, we read one which first presents a black picture—from the point of view of the regime—of the demonstrations and of the clashes between police and students and then goes on to talk about the way in which some policemen were approached by people who gave them flowers, thanking them for standing up to bands of crazy youths who evidently were too well off, we do not know where the truth lies.¹⁶ Despite the feelings that reading this kind of text gives rise to, we cannot exclude that some people really did offer flowers to the policemen at that time. A separate problem is presented when the head of the police information ‘factory’ is a man with personal political ambitions. It is legitimate to suppose that this had an impact on the content of the reports. All these reservations notwithstanding, the type of source indicated above represents a reservoir of material, often the only one existing. Without a study of the reports of the inspectors sent by the Central Committee to the provinces in the 1940s and 1950s, we would know less about the reality of that period.¹⁷ Without the research carried out, as soon as it was possible, in the police archives by Paweł Machcewicz, we should know a lot less about the events surrounding the revolt of Poznan in 1956.¹⁸ Without the police reports, already mentioned, published by Marcin Zaremba, we should know less about the events of March 1968. Without the analyses of the summaries of the speech-makers sent by the party to various areas of the province of Warsaw carried out by Mariusz Jastrza¸b for the Stalinist period and by Tadeusz Ruzikowski for the period of the commemoration of the millennium of Poland, we would know less about how ordinary people looked at a lot of things.¹⁹ The use of material produced by the political system and, above all, by its police concerning the thoughts of the people gives rise to sizeable ethical dilemmas. The historian often has the impression of spying on people in private situations and of reading opinions not intended for him. As long as it is a question of a group of people or of people who in reality are effectively anonymous it is easy to calm the conscience and, at the moment of publication, change or leave out the names. In their research, two of my colleagues even used the verifications carried out on

156

Marcin Kula

correspondence by the police, but since, volente o nolente, it was not possible to identify concrete flesh-and-blood figures behind the authors of the letters, the question did not present any further difficulty.²⁰ Their use is also made easier by the fact that the institutional continuity of the police who produced that material has been broken. The situation becomes more difficult when the protagonists of the police reports are either public figures or even people the historian knows personally. It must be remembered that a part of police information came from sources that were morally dubious: illegal wire-tapping, control of mail, or other illegal and morally objectionable activities. To leave out the names of public figures does not represent a solution because it reduces radically the value of the material, without taking into account that it would probably lead to rumours about the identity of the person in the text (or worse, about the identity of the informer). These are often very difficult problems. Some time ago Marcin Zaremba found some notes removed by the secret service from the pockets of Jan J´ozef Lipski, a known oppositionist. We discussed whether it was right to publish those notes, not only because of their private character, sometimes unpleasant towards third parties, but above all because of the deplorable way in which the text had found its way into the archives. Before we could get over our doubts, another historian, evidently with fewer scruples, published the material.²¹ In 1993 there was a polemic following the publication by Andrzej Garlicki of the recordings of telephone conversations of Stanisław Dygat made in 1971. The contents, sometimes defamatory in respect of a lot of people, shocked many, even though similar ideas certainly come up in private conversations at any time. The argument was not only about the contents of the calls, however, but about whether it was legitimate to use material coming from such ethically objectionable operations, even if historically interesting.²² Further materials that offer a view of the ideas and attitudes of ordinary people are those provided by the small ‘windows’ that the system itself left open for their expression. In a certain respect these constituted official channels of complaint. For ideological reasons the regime wanted to demonstrate how near it was to society. The rulers wanted (very humanly) to feel contact with the masses, to have a contact with people beyond the wall of their own functionaries. They realized that the lines of communication of the regime worked badly and, in their own way, wanted to make them more efficient, for which they needed to know what was not working. And also they wanted to create a safety valve for popular discontent. For all these reasons the rulers developed direct channels of contact with the ordinary people. These were constituted by large numbers of ‘cells of communication’ with the citizens within the state institutions and the party. On the ground floor of the Central Committee was a reception room for the complaints of the citizens. In a certain period every minister was supposed to have fixed visiting hours, during which the citizens could come to him with their

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

157

problems directly from the street. In the main newspaper offices units of contact with the readers were set up, essentially points for postal contact.²³ The relationship of the authorities with the ‘official complaint channels’ was ambivalent. They were satisfied when the number of letters sent to the Central Committee went down, reading this as a sign of a better functioning of the offices of the state. At the same time they were happy to receive the letters, seeing it as a proof that people had confidence in them. The people wrote massively to the newspapers, to the radio and to the authorities. Sometimes they even sent letters to the party secretaries in the flowers offered by the babies held up in people’s arms during the May Day parades. They wrote on a great variety of subjects, including those which in democratic countries are dealt with by the institutions through a normal legal process. Given that social life was poor, people also wrote about existential problems, with requests for advice and for many other things, and, given that daily life and the carrying out of material tasks was often difficult, among the papers of the many different institutions it is possible to find a quantity of letters far more eloquent than those sent to the institutions in more efficient countries. In no country with a market economy are there so many letters addressed to house builders and to the organizations that control them as were sent to organizations of building co-ops in the ‘People’s Poland’. And there are no letters to building entrepreneurs in the West that reflect in such a clear manner the life of the postulant as those written in communist Poland to the building co-ops and the relevant authorities. These letters are clearly a difficult source for the historian, because they are also written in a kind of stylistic code. They were written, after all, to deal with concrete problems—for example to accelerate the assignment of a house. On one hand, therefore, they betray a strong tendency to declare an excessive love for the authorities, and on the other to exaggerate the gravity of the situation of their authors. On many occasions, however, they were surprisingly sincere and always reflect a piece of life. We recognized this with interest, reading, for example, the remonstrances of voters for the electoral abuses of 1947, the denunciations sent to the Central Committee about functionaries of the party apparatus, the protests of the citizens against collectivization or the letters addressed to the Central Union of building co-ops.²⁴ We have had the same impression working on the letters written by the readers of the magazine Po prostu in the period of the turning-point of October 1956, preserved and made available by what is little short of a miracle, or on those, equally miraculously preserved, written by young people to the newspaper Swiat Mlodych in 1980–1.²⁵ Unfortunately sources like those mentioned above, although fundamental from the point of view of the present-day interests of historians, are being destroyed in large part. Much of the material, for example the letters to newspapers, is today the property of newspapers, which are no longer state institutions. The proprietors of the newspapers do what they like with the material, which means that, in the

158

Marcin Kula

main, they destroy it in order not to occupy space uselessly. What is worse, the state archive service destroys material in the context of the process of getting rid of papers. The rules governing this process were established some time ago and no longer correspond to the contemporary interests of historians. According to the rules at the moment, fundamental documents, including the originals of papers republished many times, are counted as important, and not the letters of ‘Mr Smith’. Of these the archive conserves only a (‘representative’) sample for general questions, in the conviction that nobody will ever be interested in a specific ‘Smith’. The lack of space in the archives and of money for conservation encourages this kind of selection, with great damage for historiography, and in particular for the efforts of historians to break down the silence of people once left without a voice—people who were ‘spoken for’. The communist system created other lesser ‘windows’ to let people express their opinions. There were the officially organized meetings between deputies, councillors and population, the ‘surgeries’ of the deputies, or the books of complaints in shops and the counters that took the verbal complaints of citizens about the way commerce was organized. Since it was in the interests of party sections and of the state to demonstrate the ‘contacts with the population’, all meetings were documented, while the books of complaints were entrusted to those responsible for control who were careful to reply to all protests. The complaints made to the organs of inspection could provoke an avalanche of letters. Very little is left of all this. The books of complaints and demands, if they still exist, are in the main now private property, and it is very unlikely that a private shop would conserve such relics. Recently it took the passionate involvement of a journalist to save some of these books from the pulper.²⁶ A kind of ‘window’ where, within certain limits, people could express themselves with relative freedom were the diaries written for various competitions. The ‘People’s Poland’ had revived the tradition of promoting the keeping of diaries by ordinary people, something that had been developed by Polish sociologists between the two wars. There were a large number of competitions. The original texts were collected by the Diary Society, which published a journal Polish Diaries. These original texts are useful for today’s historian in as far as only a selection were published at the time, and only, in the main, after passing the internal editorial censor and then the general censor, as with everything else. It is highly probable that authors censored their original texts themselves and that some of them wrote aiming at the prize; even so, the original remains a better source than the printed version. A further opportunity of expression, even if limited, was offered by the organizations which, despite everything, retained some level of autonomy. This was the case of the association of authors, for example. Their archives have frequently survived.²⁷ In this respect, the Union of Fighters for Liberty and Democracy (ZBoWiD) was an extremely interesting organization, channelling the thoughts and words of war veterans, many of whom were anything but

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

159

representatives of traditions dear to the communists. It is to be feared that the archives of these organizations, over which, with the change of regime, the state has lost direct control (fortunately!), may be destroyed or thrown away without any thought for the needs of research. One ‘window’ through which it was possible to express unorthodox opinions relatively freely (within the limits of the system) was through the cabaret and in some respects through the musical group or, for example, in the rock festivals of Jarocin. In different periods the authorities, with greater or lesser resistance, permitted their existence, considering these enclaves of liberty to be a kind of safety valve. After all, their public was made up of a very small percentage of the population. Naturally it is difficult to say how much of society related to them, but the difficulties of research in this area are also of another kind. It is true that many of the texts have been preserved, but sometimes it is anything but easy to understand today why they seemed then to look like dissent. Besides, it is hard to share the feelings of the crowd at that time, and in a cabaret this is as important as the texts and the performance. A very specific stage, from which ordinary people unknowingly gave an idea of their lives and even at times, in a more or less explicit manner, of their convictions, was that of the courts and the para-judicial institutions. The material these produced is an extremely interesting source for historians, even if very difficult to use. It is, naturally, in large part determined by the particular situation of those speaking. Unfortunately, in this case as well, there are gaps in the papers that are a real scandal. To give an example, the initial presumption that no one would be interested in ‘Mr Smith’ when he was called before the infamous Special Commission for the Fight against Abuses and Economic Damage has meant that the whole collection of papers relating to this case has been severely depleted. In the archives of the repressive institutions, and not only there, one can find the written texts of several clandestine organizations or of those generated by illegal initiatives and confiscated during the disbanding of those initiatives. These papers were often used as evidence in trials. Sometimes the documents are serious, but at other times they are so ingenuous as to invite tenderness, as with the case of the conspiratorial endeavours of young schoolchildren or scouts.²⁸ They remain, however, important sources. A whole body of interesting material grew outside of and despite the system. It is highly likely that the ecclesiastical archives, currently used very unevenly for analysing the relations between the communist state and the church, will become central for a knowledge of the ideas and the attitudes of ordinary people. The journal Tygodnik Powszechny, even if tolerated (sometimes very reluctantly!) by the regime, contributed to this kind of historical source produced outside the system, although controlled by it. Particularly important, it would seem, is the private archive of Jerzy Turowicz, for many years the editor of the weekly.

160

Marcin Kula

It was also ‘outside the system’ that people exchanged letters. This source has its limits because of the obvious caution of the writers—this varied according to the period—and the fact that many issues concerning social life appear only exceptionally in the private papers. It is also a source that survives badly. Few families preserve letters, and if they do, it is only until the next house move. It is not easy to collect such material, although sometimes one comes across surprising collections. It is essential to proceed with extreme delicacy when using epistolary material. But it does always represent a piece of authentic life. Even when—to give an example that came to my hands by chance—the letter of a young woman student who describes to her father the clashes of March 1968 in Warsaw does not offer any new information, it does nonetheless emanate an authenticity such as to permit one to feel the emotions even of those students who were not politically committed in those years. A tradition of world historiography in general and also of Polish historiography is that of using letters written by ‘ordinary’ people to other ‘ordinary’ people. There have been attempts to do this for the study of the affairs of the ‘People’s Poland’. Some time ago I myself had access, thanks to the ‘Solidarity France–Poland’ Association, to a collection of letters that French people and Poles wrote to each other after the introduction of martial law in Poland. The subject of the correspondence was the aid being sent to Poland by French families.²⁹ Another type of source that developed outside the system and sometimes against it was the diaries and the memoirs people kept locked away in their drawers. The production of such texts in regimes of compulsory silence has a long tradition in Poland. In the ‘People’s Poland’ these were produced above all by men of culture, but obviously not only by them. Some of these writings appeared when there was a ‘thaw’,³⁰ others were published secretly or in the West.³¹ Now many have been published and made public.³² The use of diaries and memoirs—and particularly their publication—often poses ethical problems. In the historical arena there are different positions in respect of this. In the case of the very interesting diaries of Maria Dabrowska³³ it was decided to respect the wishes of the author and wait in order to publish them in their entirety.³⁴ In that of the notable diaries of Stefan Kisielewski the editors decided to publish the original integral text on the grounds that an author whose texts had been so mutilated by the censor during his life should not have to suffer a posthumous censorship.³⁵ The decision of the editors is understandable, but it is easy to imagine the feelings of many people described by Kisielewski in his cutting way, certainly not always justified. Personally, I left out some names when I edited for publication certain notes of my father, intended for the locked drawer.³⁶ I couldn’t decide to reveal them: when I knew that my father would not have wanted it; when I was not certain that he would have wanted it; and when it would have harmed the named person on a personal (not professional)

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

161

level. Also in cases where I was afraid that, by leaving the name in, I was in fact settling my own accounts with someone at the expense of the author. I am fully aware, however, that, in leaving out some family names, I have taken away an important element from the historical source, all the more so because I could not really define the reasons for my choice, in the end very subjective. A few literary works were written outside of and despite the system, sometimes finishing in the locked drawer, sometimes enjoying unofficial distribution. Some were published in the West and came from there to Poland.³⁷ The most famous of these—The Silent and the Rowdy, or the Dance of the President —by Janusz Szpota´nski, was in a way given prominence by Gomułka himself when he talked about the book and its author in the worst possible terms during the party reunion on 19 March 1968. In the case of literary works the difficulty for the historian is not the use of the sources, which doesn’t present a problem, but that of measuring how far the author expressed the convictions of ordinary people and how far the works were diffused in society. A similar consideration is probably valid for certain paintings, sculptures and films not permitted to be shown. The same question can be put relative to a particular source that has developed ex post: today’s literary fiction about the years of communism. The rules of the profession would seem to dictate that it should be placed among the elaborations rather than among the sources, but very often it reflects the personal experience of the author, making it more like a memoir. The question then arises about the extent to which the most characteristic novel of this type, Madame by Antoni Libera,³⁸ reflects his personal experience, conditioned by his subsequent life and his present convictions, and how far it is the experience of a generation. In more general terms, how far it represents his present judgement on communism and how far it is a source about the latter. In my opinion, at least the descriptions of small scenes and realities do represent a source. Finally, the same question can be asked of the numerous recent publications of memoirs of opposition fighters, of prisoners, of people deported. Historians need to approach them with a strong critical spirit, but in the main they should be considered precious texts for our purposes. Among the sources of ideas and attitudes formed outside the system we must also consider collections of family documents and objects, just as we must look at the phenomenon of the conservation of the oral tradition. Professional historians rarely use this kind of material; oral history is used in Poland primarily by ethnologists.³⁹ The KARTA centre has had the great merit of collecting papers and other family materials from house to house. As the promoter of a series of competitions for schoolchildren called ‘History Nearby’, the centre has pushed young people to look at these reserves of family information and to turn to old people to ask them to tell them their memories. The works that have grown out of these competitions are preserved in the KARTA centre.⁴⁰

162

Marcin Kula

Sometimes at the margins of the system, sometimes outside it and against it, people would speak out during one of the frequent political crises in Poland. One very particular moment to air one’s ideas was provided at the moment of the fall of communism (including the elections of 1989) and the phase of the dismantling of the regime. Periods of regime change have always thrown light historically on the regime on the way out, and it was so this time as well. Certainly a great deal of material about the political crisis was produced by the political police and by the party authorities. But like all revolutions, the crisis also generated a large number of statements, texts and publications, produced outside the system, that reflected people’s ideas beyond the immediate crisis. These written texts, the printed materials that appeared during the major crisis of 1980–81, had a preliminary phase in the literature of the ‘second circuit’ that preceded that period and their continuation in the clandestine publishing of the years following the introduction of martial law. During 1980–1 and in the years of martial law a large number of diaries and memoirs appeared, generated by the sensation that people were living an extraordinary period of history. The texts produced in the circumstances described above were often collected at the time of the events which had given origin to them. Similar clandestine collections have their precedents in Poland, an example being those produced in the period of Nazi occupation. Some of the collections were published in the West.⁴¹ The production of the ‘second circuit’ was saved by some libraries in Poland, by some Western centres and by private individuals. The clandestine Association ‘Archives of Solidarno´sc´’ was set up in 1983 with the intention of preserving and possibly publishing the documents of the Solidarno´sc´ movement. The editorial series ‘Archives of Solidarno´sc´’, begun in conditions of illegality, continues today, and the Association is attempting to reorder the material it holds and to make it readily accessible. Both this material and the minutes, already published, of the meetings of the direction of the workers’ union Solidarno´sc´,⁴² constitute a very important source for the observation of the ideas, the positions and the public actions of the people.⁴³ The KARTA centre, already mentioned, has great merits in collecting material thrown up by the crisis of the communist system in Poland; it holds perhaps the largest collection of publications of the ‘second circuit’, including the ‘Solidarity’ newspapers. It can only be a matter of regret that some texts produced during the political crises have not been preserved. In 1968, for example, the Warsaw university students produced several registers of complaints against the actions of the police. As far as I know, those books have not been found. If they had been preserved, we would have had a modern cahiers des dol´eances, as the books were in fact called at the time. In different periods of the PRL, and with differing intensity, people had recourse to the ‘weak’ weapons to express their opinions about the reality around them; this included scratching out the eyes on the photographs and the portraits

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

163

of the leaders and covering the walls with writing, including lavatory walls. There have been several attempts by Polish historiography to use this kind of source,⁴⁴ but it is a difficult one. The information on these writings can only be found in police records. We cannot know how much of the writing was recorded. Nor is it easy to judge the full significance of the writings because it required very little to do it. Nor is it easily interpretable. To give an example, I remember when, in the first years of Stalinism, anti-communist writings appeared on the walls of the men’s lavatories at the Institute of History of Warsaw University. The then director, professor Tadeusz Manteuffel, worried about possible consequences, had the walls repainted and put up notices which read, broadly, ‘Keeping this place clean is a sign of the civility of man’. Three days passed quietly, but on the fourth under each notice was written, very carefully between square brackets, the phrase ‘Bolesław Bierut at the 100th Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party’. Now, was this a sign of anti-communism? Or just a student joke? Or both? The intentions of the writings in the tourist lavatories on the famous ‘Lenin itinerary’ (‘It has been ascertained that Lenin shat here’) or the scratching away of the red stars from the notices along the itinerary after 1956 were much clearer. These considerations related to writings can be applied generally to the most diffused form of expression people used under communism—the joke. The analysis is more complex because some were put in circulation by the authorities themselves. As in the case of writings we are not in a position to be able to assess where the jokes circulated and how much. Now it is often difficult to establish their chronology and the geography of their movements within the socialist bloc. Nowadays ‘everybody’ says that ‘everybody’ told jokes ‘all the time’ and ‘everywhere’—something evidently not true. A further very important mode of expression was gossip. This subject has been broached in one of the most interesting books on the ‘People’s Poland’, from which we learn which jokes were going round and the circumstances that generated them.⁴⁵ But as far as the role of gossip in social life is concerned, many aspects are probably simply impossible to study. To sum up: the study of the attitudes and ideas of people in the communist system is difficult, but there is some possibility of doing it. One thing is clear, unfortunately: excluding the totally exceptional cases in which we have comparable sources for the same period dealing with individual social groups in the different regions of Poland, or better, excluding the exceptional cases of availability of complete sources, standardized and sequential, we are never going to get to the kind of results usually provided by sociologists—that is percentage tables of distribution of opinion, accompanied by information about probable margins of error. We may be able to show what opinions were current and operative in society. We may perhaps be able to describe their typology, say something about their variability, but not define with any precision their frequency or their geographic and social distribution. On these points the

164

Marcin Kula

historian can do no more than trust his intuition, which more often than not is a mirror of his own opinions. One last point. The difficulties we have encountered in this area are in no way exceptional for historians’ work. In much the same way, specialists of other epochs try, for example, to study the ideas and attitudes of the peasant class which, for long centuries, did not leave obvious and systematic evidence of its thinking. After reading memoirs of emigrants published by the Institute of Social Economy, not particularly remote historically speaking, Maria Dabrowska wrote with enthusiasm: ‘Today, in the Memoirs, for all those who have ears to hear a Great Unknown has spoken: the peasant.’⁴⁶ We can console ourselves that despite everything we are in a better situation than she was.

No t e s 1 This

chapter appeared originally in Polish as an article in Pamiec i Sprawiedliwosc 1 (2002). The content and the footnotes have been updated by the author. The editor wishes to thank the journal for permission to reprint. 2 N. Wachtel, La vision des vaincus: Les indiens du P´erou devant la Conquˆete espagnole: 1530–1570 (Paris, 1971). 3 It was Lech Wałe ¸sa who, in a totally different context, once said: ‘I am in favour, but against.’ 4 N. Kra´sko, Instytucjonalizacja socjologii w Polsce: 1920–1970 (Warsaw, 1996); P. Kwiatkowski, ‘Pocza¸tki bada´n opinii publicznej w Polsce (1956–1964)’, in Idee a urza¸ dzanie ´swiata społecznego: Ksi¸ega jubileuszowa dla Jerzego Szackiego, ed. E. Nowicka and M. Chałubi´nski (Warsaw, 1999), 171–82; Narodziny bada´n opinii publicznej w Polsce, ‘Kultura i społecze´nstwo’, 4 (1999) [special issue]; A. Sulek, ‘Jak Gomulka postanowił powiedzie´c prawde¸ (Badania opinii w Polsce)’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 27.02.1998; idem, ‘Jak Stefan Nowak student´ow sondował’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2.03.1998; Z dziej´ow Polskiego Towarzystwa Socjologicznego: Materiały i wspomnienia, vol. 1, ed. E. Tarkowska (Warsaw, 1997), photocopied typescript. 5 M. F. Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1958–1962 (Warsaw, 1998) (and the subsequent volumes). 6 The formula used in the constitution of 1952. 7 R. Kapu´sci´ nski, ‘Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu’, in idem, Kirgiz schodzi z konia (Warsaw, 1988), 178. 8 A well known Polish writer (1920–85). After 1966 he lived outside Poland. 9 Dense forests near to Warsaw. 10 In protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. 11 Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1969–1971 (2001), 361. 12 A young boy murdered by the police in 1983.

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

165

13 A. Kijowski, Dziennik 1955–1969, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Bło´ nski (Krakow, 1998), 92. 14 A

railway carriage factory at Wrocław. Jagodzi´nska-Sasson et al., PZPR w fabryce: Studium wrocławskiego ‘‘Pafawagu’’ w pocza¸ tku lat pi¸e´cdziesia¸ tych, research directed by Marcin Kula, (Warsaw, 2001). 16 Marzec 1968: Trzydzie´sci lat p´ oz´niej, vol. 2: Dzie´n po dniu w raportach SB oraz Wydziału Organizacyjnego KC PZPR: Aneks z´r´odłowy, ed. M. Zaremba (Warsaw, 1998). 17 W. Grochala, T. Ke ¸dziora, M. Kielak, J. Kodym, M. Kula, T. Markiewicz and D. Smole´n, ‘Missi Dominici nowych czas´ow’, Zeszyty Historyczne 113 (1995), 3–39. 18 P. Machcewicz, Polski rok 1956 (Warsaw, 1993). 19 M. Jastrza¸b, Mozolna budowa absurdu: Działalno´s´c Wydziału Propagandy Warszawskiego Komitetu Wojew´odzkiego PZPR w latach 1949–1953 (Warsaw, 1999); T. Ruzikowski, ‘Obchody milenijne w Warszawie i wojew´odztwie warszawskim w 1966 roku’, in M. Brodala, A. Lisiecka and T. Ruzikowski, Przebudowa´c człowieka: Komunistyczne wysiłki zmiany mentalno´sci, studies edited by M. Kula (Warsaw, 2001), 261–373. 20 J. Kochanowski, ‘Lubelskie czarne gabinety: Sprawozdania cenzury wojennej z 1944 r’, in Polska 1944/45–1989: Studia i materiały, vol. 4 (Warsaw, 1998); P. Sowi´nski, ´ ¸eto: Obchody 1 Maja w latach 1948–1954 (Warsaw, 2000). Komunistyczne Swi 21 ‘Zapiski opozycjonisty: Fragmenty skonfiskowanego dziennika Jana J´ozefa Lipskiego’, ed. G. Sołtysiak, Przegla¸ d Tygodniowy, 18.09.1996. 22 ˙ A. Garlicki, ‘Słuchanie tw´orc´ow’, Polityka, 13.12.1993; polemica: J. Zakowski, ‘Stronniczy przegla¸d prasy’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 15.11.1993; T. Konwicki, ‘Tłok w łazience’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 16.11.1993. 23 The solutions cited here were obviously not the specific inventions of Polish communists. In the worst years in Moscow there was a special letterbox for letters to Stalin on the wall of the Kremlin. On the Polish solution cf. D. Jarosz, ‘Akta Biura ´ odło do badania rzeczywisto´sci społecznej w List´ow i Inspekcji KC PZPR jako Zr´ latach 1950–56’, in Polska 1944/45–1989: Studia i materiały, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1997), 191–216. 24 A. Dzierzgowska et al., Supliki do najwy˙ zszej władzy, research directed by M. Kula (Warsaw, 1996); D. Jarosz, ‘ ‘‘Fakty, kt´ore podajecie, sa¸ niedopuszczalne’’: Supliki chłopskie z czas´ow kolektywizacji (1949–1955)’, Regiony 1 (1992), 2–70; K. Madej, ‘B´oj o dom’, Wi¸eY 3 (1999), 146–59; idem, Sp´ołdzielczo´s´c mieszkaniowa: Władze PRL wobec niezale¨znej inicjatywy społecznej (1961–1965) (Warsaw, 2003). 25 A. Leszczy´ nski, Sprawy do załatwienia: Listy do ‘‘Po prostu’’ 1955–1957 (Warsaw, ´ 2000); K. Kosi´nski, Nastolatki ‘81: Swiadomo´ s´c młodzie˙zy w epoce ‘‘Solidarno´sci’’ (Warsaw, 2002). 26 G. Sroczy´ nski, ‘Biblioteka skarg i wniosk´ow’, Karta 32 (2001), 108–33. 27 D. Jarosz, ‘Działalno´sc´ Podstawowej Organizacji Partyjnej PZPR przy Zarza¸dzie Gł´ownym Zwia¸zku Literat´ow Polskich w latach 1949–1953 (w ´swietle akt własnych)’, Mazowieckie Studia Humanistyczne 1 (1999), 5–45. 28 I wish to thank Krzysztof Kosi´ nski for giving me access to certain of these texts. 15 D.

166 29 M.

Marcin Kula

Kula, Niespodziewani przyjaciele czyli rzecz o zwykłej, ludzkiej solidarno´sci, preface by J. Le Goff, postscript by K. Sachs (Warsaw, 1995). 30 See W. Kula, ‘Gusła’, in idem, Rozwa˙ zania o historii (Warsaw, 1958); republished in idem, Wok´oł historii (Warsaw 1988), 366–407. Rozwa˙zania o historii is also published in a Spanish translation (Mexico, 1984) and in Italian (Venice, 1990). 31 See L. Tyrmand, Dziennik 1954 (London, 1980). 32 See A. Kijowski, Dziennik 1955–1969, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Bło´ nski (Krakow, 1998); idem, Dziennik 1970–1977, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Bło´nski (Krakow, 1998); idem, Dziennik 1978–1985, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Bło´nski (Krak´ow, 1999); Z. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, ed. Z. Mycielska-Golik (Warsaw, 2000); idem, Dziennik 1960–1969, ed. Z. Mycielska-Golik (Warsaw, 2001). 33 A well-known Polish writer (1889–1965). 34 M. Da¸browska, Dzienniki powojenne: 1945–1965, ed. T. Drewnowski, vols. 1–4 (Warsaw, 1996). 35 S. Kisielewski, Dzienniki (Warsaw, 1996). 36 W. Kula, Rozdziałki, ed. Nina Assorodobraj-Kula and Marcin Kula (Warsaw, 1996). 37 Vedi K. Orło´s, Cudowna melina (Paris, 1973). Cf. idem, Historia ‘‘Cudownej meliny’’; Cudowna melina (Białystok, 1990). 38 A. Libera, Madame (Krakow, 1998). 39 A rare exception among historians: Z. W´ oycicka, ‘Od Weepers do Wieprza: Dzieje jednej wioski byłego wojew´odztwa olszty´nskiego w latach 1945–1956’, thesis prepared under the direction of Prof. W. Borodziej at the Historical Institute of the University of Warsaw in 2000–1, manuscript. 40 K. Lipski, ‘Jaka PRL ? Obraz Polski Ludowej w oczach uczestnik´ ow konkursu O´sorodka Karta ‘‘Historia bliska’’ w latach 1997–1999’, thesis prepared under the direction of M. Kula at the Historical Institute of the University of Warsaw in 2000–1, manuscript. 41 See Wydarzenia marcowe 1968 (Paris, 1969). 42 Komisja Krajowa NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie 3–4 listopada 1981, ed. T. Tabako and M. Włostowski, introduction by A. Paczkowski (Warsaw, 1999); Komisja Krajowa NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie w dniach 22–23.X.1981 (Warsaw, 1987); Komisja Krajowa NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie w dniach 11–12 grudnia 1981, (Warsaw, 1986); Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie w dniach 31.III–1.IV.1981 (Warsaw, 1987); Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie 9–10 kwietnia 1981, ed. T. Tabako, introduction by A. Paczkowski, revision by B. Kopka (Warsaw, 1996); Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie w dniu 23 kwietnia 1981, ed. T. Tabako and M. Włostowski, introduction by A. Paczkowski (Warsaw, 1995); Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie w dniu 4 czerwca 1981 (Warsaw, 1995); Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarno´s´c’’: Posiedzenie w dniach 2–3 wrze´snia 1981 (Warsaw, 1988). 43 Cf. among others the study based on the volumes of the minutes of the sessions of the National Commission of ‘Solidarno´sc´’: N. Boratyn et al., ‘Czynniki

Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice

167

okre´slaja¸ce dynamike¸ ruchu Solidarno´so´c w latach 1980–1981’, in Solidarno´s´c w ruchu: 1980–1981, research directed by M. Kula (Warsaw, 2000), 7–150. 44 B. Brzostek, Robotnicy Warszawy: Konflikty codzienne (1950–1954) (Warsaw, 2002); Ł. Kami´nski, ‘Historia jednego strajku’, Biuletyn Instytutu Pami¸eci Narodowej 6 (2001); W. Marchlewski, ‘ ‘‘Ten Uniwersytet to agentura Moskwy’’, czyli rzecz o napisach w toaletach Biblioteki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego’, Krytyka 30 (1988), 190–4 (ibid., 194–6, comment by P. Łukasiewicz). 45 D. Jarosz and M. Pasztor, W krzywym zwierciadle: Polityka władz komunistycznych w Polsce w ´swietle plotek i pogłosek z lat 1949–1956 (Warsaw, 1995). 46 M. Dabrowska in her introduction to Pamietniki emigrant´ ow: Ameryka Południowa ¸ (Warsaw, 1939), xii.

10 Consent in the Communist GDR or How to Interpret Lion Feuchtwanger’s Blindness in Moscow 1937 Martin Sabrow

I By the time he returned from the Soviet Union in February 1937 to his exile in France in Sanary sur Mer, the writer and poet Lion Feuchtwanger had had ample opportunity to feel the pulse of the Stalinist regime. For two months he had travelled through a country dominated by terror, in which anyone could be denounced from one day to the next, and in which the wave of persecutions had already taken the lives of millions of people—in the torture chambers of the cellars of the NKVD, in the gulag, or by way of the firing squad. Feuchtwanger had not left for Moscow unprepared. He had read Andr´e Gide’s Retour de l’URSS, published only a little before, which was an account of his impressions of Moscow life under Stalinism. And, while in Moscow, the German poet had looked into the eyes of power itself, having had a private conversation with Stalin lasting several hours. He had taken part in the second propaganda trial in Moscow and had been present at the ghastly hearings of the alleged Trotskyite plot against the elite of the Communist Party. And yet, on his return, he wrote an account of his journey—Moscow 1937 —in which he praised the Soviet Union as an achievement ‘to which a man can say, ‘‘Yes,’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ with all his heart’.¹ The man who wrote these words was not a fanatic, nor a communist, and he had certainly not become one while in Moscow. He was not forced to make these declarations. He had left for Moscow as a representative of a literary circle of the Popular Front with a great deal of sympathy for communism but ‘mixed with doubts’² and with the firm intention ‘to arrive at a fair and well-balanced judgement’.³ In no way can he be portrayed as someone ingenuous with respect to his times; his trilogy Waiting Room is enough to demonstrate this—an

Consent in the Communist GDR

169

immensely prophetic work in which he foresees the victory of the National Socialists in Germany, his own expulsion, even describing in the smallest detail the substitution of the ‘Jewish’ street names in the roads of Grunewald, the area where he lived in Berlin. Nor is the picture Feuchtwanger paints of the Soviet Union in any way uncritical; it is stinging about the ‘bureaucratism’ that makes life unbearable in Moscow and about the ‘psychosis of the parasite’ among the population, and it is very critical of the control the state exercises over art. The author himself took a lot of care to maintain the independence of his positions, and he was open-minded enough to find ‘it most difficult while in Moscow to remain impartial and prevent the annoyances of the moment from influencing me unduly in one direction or the other’.⁴ The phenomenon of the confidence shown by Feuchtwanger in Moscow 1937 is so difficult to understand because neither ideological conviction, nor political pressures, nor material corruption constitute a sufficient explanation. The secret of this confidence rests rather in the fascination of a widespread and tangible consensus that the author claimed to feel everywhere in the life of the Soviet Union. The account of his journey shows the change in the writer Lion Feuchtwanger, who, step by step, recognizing among the ‘Soviets’ the magnetic and highly suggestive effect of a diffuse consensus, moves from scepticism to exaltation. At the outset the author thought that ‘this attitude was the result of terror’, in part because he had been able to discern certain aspects of daily life, such as the lack of food and the ‘bureaucrats’, which contributed to rendering the life of Muscovites very difficult.⁵ Then, however, he seemed to be able to see that the ‘Soviet patriotism’ with which he was constantly confronted was effectively based on a ‘consensus omnium’, and the critical distance of the intellectual crumbled in the face of the pride of the interlocutors—a pride that ‘springs from so deep a contentment with the Soviet world, . . . that one cannot listen without feeling the same elation’.⁶ What made Feuchtwanger so blind that he did not see the totalitarian reality behind the ideological fac¸ade? His strange and imperturbable admiration for the Soviet regime was obviously directly connected to the fundamental attitude of monolithic agreement that he observed wherever he turned during his journey to Moscow. He found it at every turn, remarking that ‘everywhere in the country the people talk of their ‘‘happy life’’ ’ and describing the ‘feeling of strength and happiness which emanates from the Soviet youth’ as ‘certainly infectious’.⁷ But Feuchtwanger found the deepest reason for thinking that the close link between Stalin and his people was absolutely indissoluble outside empirical experience—in the power of reason. It was this that meant that the consensus of the Soviet people for its governors had no need of agreements and acclamations, because it was reason that engendered a real political consensus: ‘The recognition [. . .] that the state is not reserving the enjoyment of the good things for the few to the exclusion of the majority, . . . has become inherent in the mentality of

170

Martin Sabrow

the whole population, and has created a confidence in the leaders such as I have never found elsewhere.’⁸ Feuchtwanger’s unsentimental journey through Stalin’s empire was, in fact, a pilgrimage towards reason, in the adoration of which religious ecstasy and scientific distance become one. Upon reason rests the socialist economic plan, which guarantees everyone a worthwhile task in every moment, and upon it rests the assumed certainty of Soviet citizens that their prosperity is not a conjuncture, but the result of reasoned planning. The actual temple of consensus-based reason is, for the traveller, the capital of the Soviet Union itself: ‘Mathematics and reason, the hall-marks of the Soviet Union, are especially evident in the elaborate plan for the reconstruction of Moscow.’⁹ Thus the culture of consensus and the power of reason became for the poet in Moscow two faces of the same medal, the value of which could be seen in the much greater test to which the Soviet Union subjected its sympathizers during the 1930s: the participation, as an observer, in the trials held in the clean-up campaign against the closest collaborators of Lenin in the restructuring of Russia, in a Bolshevik direction, after 1917. A separate chapter of the account of Feuchtwanger’s journey to Moscow deals with ‘The Explicable and the Inexplicable in the Trotskyist Trials’. Even at a distance of more than seventy years the uninhibited certainty with which the author abandons the scruples he had held on leaving for Moscow is shocking. His readiness to identify with the Stalinist accusers and with their claque seated on the spectators’ benches reflects the intention to defend the Soviet Union from its internal and external enemies, even at the sacrifice of the basic values of humanity. In following years Feuchtwanger distanced himself only hesitantly from his inhuman apology for Stalin’s propaganda trials, which in the space of a few years brought to the dock all the members of Lenin’s Politburo with the exception of Trotsky and, obviously, Stalin himself.¹⁰ The evidence remains of the amazing blindness of a political commentator who was unable to report on the reality of oppression, on the fear of denunciation and the mass terror which, precisely in the period in which Feuchtwanger visited Moscow, caused thousands of victims.¹¹ In reality his appeal for approval and understanding to be shown towards the Soviet state generated incomprehension and disbelief above all among European emigrants. With the exception of Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch everyone took their distance from the account, and the position adopted by Feuchtwanger in favour of Stalinism became a stain that would accompany him to the end of his life, to the extent that in the USA the writer, even though of world renown, would be declared stateless. The hypothesis that Feuchtwanger lied publicly for strategic reasons¹² can be countered by the fact that he remained constant in his support of the Soviet Union in his private correspondence. Ludwig Marcuse did not interpret Feuchtwanger’s blindness as an intentional lie, but rather as intellectual nostalgia for the great powers. In the specialist literature, the ‘idealized image’ of the

Consent in the Communist GDR

171

Moscow trials given by Feuchtwanger is often interpreted as a profession of faith in the power of reason, in which both passion and political strategy are united.¹³ And in fact every page of the account of his journey testifies to a faith in progress that has quasi-religious aspects—something which led him to ignore the many weaknesses of the Soviet Union and to see it only as a land of unassailable certainty in the future: ‘What most thrills the onlooker is the knowledge that this model is no mere plaything, no fanciful Utopia of a Western architect, but that in eight years it will be a reality,’ notes Feuchtwanger in respect of a gigantic model which represented how Moscow would be in 1945.¹⁴ Moreover, his ‘practicable unknowing’¹⁵ has to be seen in the context of an era in which, to the writer, in exile, declared stateless, there seemed to be nothing beyond the choice between Stalin and Hitler. Certainly, intellectual vanity could have influenced Feuchtwanger’s attitude, impressed by a meeting with power, a meeting in which intellect and power were engaged at the same level. It is no accident that he underlines in his account that he is the first Western writer to have gone beyond the barrier of the conventional dialogue in his conversation with the dictator: ‘Bit by bit [. . .] he became more cordial, and soon I realized that I could talk freely to this man. I spoke openly and he accepted an open dialogue.’¹⁶ Thus the writer, expelled from Germany and now in the Soviet Union, became a person of great political importance and of wide influence. His readiness to neutralize Gide’s closure in respect of Stalin from both political and literary points of view was widely appreciated and resulted in his reply selling no fewer than 200,000 copies in Russia.¹⁷ But, in conclusion, all these motives are insufficient. There remain some areas of incomprehension that are not possible to explain—even considering his need to be believed or other traditional criteria. Neither passion nor vanity, nor even the pragmatic decision to accept the lesser evil in the obligatory choice between Hitler and Stalin, succeed in explaining fully exactly how an intellectual of world standing such as Feuchtwanger could put all his own moral credit on one side of the scales to the extent of describing the deadly abstruseness of the Moscow propaganda trials as realistic. In the pathos of his need for justification—‘Therefore I am bearing witness’¹⁸—one can discern a kind of claim to being incontestable: what is written possesses the absolute quality of an irrefutable experience. This experience is the intelligent compromise between the actors of Soviet society engaged in one of its most difficult operations: that is, in the confrontation between accusers and accused in the second Moscow trial of January 1937, at which Feuchtwanger assisted as a spectator. Once again it was the force of suggestion of consensus which captured him. He arrived in the court rooms with ‘the initial and very reasonable supposition [. . .] that the confessions were extracted from the prisoners by torture’¹⁹ and had to bend to the evidence before him of those who said with a smile, ‘You have seen and heard the accused. Did you get the impression that their confessions

172

Martin Sabrow

had been extorted?’²⁰ It was a question of life or death, yet in the trials the atmosphere was not that of battle without quarter, but rather of a collective attempt to solve a problem. There were no barriers to separate the court from the public, an amazed Feuchtwanger noted, and he tried to dissuade his readers from the idea ‘that there was anything manufactured, artificial, or even awe-inspiring or emotional about these proceedings’.²¹ His argument was based on the one irrefutable item of proof that the artificial reality of the Soviet world could offer him: the ‘most impressive feature represented by the confessions’, with their ‘precision and coherence’.²² None of the accused had made a simple confession, none had simply offered a rough draft. It was exactly this manner of finding the right way of expressing themselves which gave the confessions an air of unassailable authenticity, one which did not leave space for doubts about the honesty of the accused: ‘They all confessed, but each in a different way; the first with a note of cynicism in his voice; the second with a soldier’s uprightness; the third overcoming himself, not without an internal struggle; the fourth like a schoolboy who is sorry; the fifth lecturing. But everyone with the tone, the appearance, and the gestures of truth.’²³ It is precisely the pathos of the truth that convinces an uncertain Feuchtwanger, ensuring that he looks at the world of Stalin’s propaganda trials with the eyes of a faithful Soviet communist. ‘If that was lying or prearranged, then I don’t know what truth is’²⁴—with this passionate declaration Feuchtwanger, like a new Emile Zola, put at stake all his reputation as a poet, as a victim of political persecution, as the citizen of a better Germany, to testify about a Soviet society based on the acceptance of its citizens, which, even in the court rooms and in the discussion of crimes carrying the death penalty, maintained the consensus of its members. ‘The detachment and bluntness with which these men, just before their as-good-as-certain death, illustrated and explained their conduct and their guilt was unreal and uncanny.’²⁵ Feuchtwanger was not the only independent observer in those years who made propaganda for Stalin. Numerous intellectuals did the same and attempted to justify the propaganda trials in various ways—perhaps impressed by the official records of the trials²⁶ or by arguments connected to popular pedagogy²⁷ and by an acceptance of the right of the revolution to defend itself.²⁸ Not infrequently, however, behind these justifications lay hidden doubts and uncertainties. Man`es Sperber and Kurt Hiller subsequently revised their favourable judgements. Bertolt Brecht kept an ‘internal’ distance from his public position on Stalin’s politics, utilizing the principle of the ‘double discourse’,²⁹ and even Ernst Bloch, who, moving towards the public oratorial style of Wyschinski, considered the accused in the Moscow trials to be ‘political criminals and parasites of the first order’,³⁰ was—according to the testimony of his wife—deeply upset and indignant at the trials.³¹ Not so Feuchtwanger, who even in his private correspondence did not show signs of any ‘double opinion’, remaining faithful to his apologia of Stalinism and resisting all objections. Even in the face of the opposition of Arnold

Consent in the Communist GDR

173

Zweig, someone very close to him, who ‘leafed through Moscow 1937 shaking his head’³² because ‘there are principles and truths at stake about which we once agreed and which now you [. . .] consider outdated’,³³ he insisted in his idea that ‘I say yes to everything I saw there, very decisively, and the objections, both general and particular, seem to me slight and extremely stupid.’³⁴ It is possible to see even from the diary of his journey that it was not some long-held abstract idea which convinced him of the credibility of the accusations but, on the contrary, his extreme proximity as eyewitness in the court. It was the immediate impression provided by the self-accusations and by the unanimity of the court that created the substance of his judgement, unassailable by any critic. ‘But when I attended the second trial in Moscow, when I saw Pjatakow, Radek, and their friends, and heard, what they said and how they said it, I was forced to accept the evidence of my senses, and my doubts melted away as naturally as salt dissolves in water.’³⁵ It is worth noting that other observers at the Moscow propaganda trials also based the certainty of their opinions on the personal impression of consensus in the proceedings. Martin Andersen Nexø, a member of the Danish Communist Party, in an official statement of January 1937, emphasized more than once the fact that he had had ‘the possibility’ to have a personal impression of the trials against the anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre of Pjatakow-Sokolnikow-Radek and their accomplices.³⁶ This was a good thing because, ‘Having been able to participate at the trials’,³⁷ he was able to offer to the proletariat of western Europe a picture of the trials that would make them think. The strength of his belief is based exclusively on his personal experience and, as with Feuchtwanger, Nexø found himself overwhelmed by the unanimity of the people involved in the trial. ‘I have often been present at trials, but never at a trial that went so smoothly and so humanely as this. At no time did you have the impression that the judges were the superiors and the accused the underlings. More than anything, you saw men who, in the name of society, helped others who had abandoned the right path to understand their errors.’³⁸ The Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer had exactly the same impression of the Moscow trials. Fischer had followed the Radek trial as a spectator, just like Feuchtwanger. Looking back on it, his confidence in the rectitude of the trial seemed even to himself to be incomprehensible, however; but behind his shamefilled self-condemnation is the key to an explanation of the phenomenon of his intellectual self-deception: ‘If today I read what I wrote then, I can’t begin to imagine that I believed in so much madness [. . .] I was overwhelmed by the terrible power of appearances, by the suggestion of words when enunciated—words which die on the printed page and which cannot be dissected and analysed.’³⁹ As with Feuchtwanger and Andersen Nexø, so with Fischer we find the charismatic attraction of the shared experience and the general agreement considered genuine—all of which, when reinforced by the accused themselves, gave an aura of justice to the most ridiculous charges. It was no accident that the

174

Martin Sabrow

confession and not the presentation of evidence constituted the fulcrum of the Stalinist persecutions in the Soviet Union. Just like Feuchtwanger, other foreign correspondents had the impression that so many charges could not have been invented and that ‘such a reasonable and thoughtful man [Stalin; M.S.] could never have committed the monstrous stupidity of putting on, with the help of so many accomplices, such an enormous comedy’.⁴⁰ Thus, it was the consensus in the court room which provoked the consensus in the hall set aside for spectators and which, together with abstract rationality and the concrete possibility of being present personally on such an occasion, immunized the watchers against any criticism or objection. This consensus, based on reason and reinforced by direct experience, went well beyond the Moscow court room. It made the closed system of the communist project of the Soviet Union of the 1930s appear so attractive that it allowed non-communist Western intellectuals to subscribe without reserve to affirmations of its validity.⁴¹ II My thesis is that a key to the understanding of the strong grip that the socialist system of the Soviet kind maintained through much of the twentieth century, despite its economic inadequacy and its limits of political approval, can be found in this ‘principle of consensus’ that encouraged the bourgeois writer Lion Feuchtwanger to agree with the Moscow propaganda trials. From here onwards, therefore, the system will be examined from a very different point of view, both in temporal and in spatial senses—that is through the example of that part of the area of Soviet influence in which the Soviet ascendency was most threatened by the competitive Western model: the GDR. To link the Great Terror of the 1930s in the Soviet Union and the bureaucratic strategies of consolidation of power of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East Germany may seem forced, but it should be noted that for more than forty years people in the GDR also experienced an omnipresent apparent consensus. A regular cult of consensus characterized the official image of the regime of the SED. This is true not only for the Stalinist period of the SED, in which the infamous Minister of Justice Hilde Benjamin, inspired by reading the speeches of Wyschinski, encouraged people ‘to consider judicial procedures a form of criticism and self-criticism’.⁴² The innumerable marches, the demonstrative battles of the propagandistic political culture, the never-ending declarations of loyalty and the mass acclamations all had the same scope—that of confirming the impression of a unanimity of consensus among the population. Evidence of the desire for a total fusion between government and population can be seen in the mania of the regime for priding itself on having received 99 per cent and more of the votes in the sham elections. This ‘passion for unanimity’ (Carl Friedrich) was so powerful that the internal opposition to Wolfgang Harich in the party (as can be seen

Consent in the Communist GDR

175

from the recently published biography by Gustav Just) thought it right, in 1957, to send its ‘platform’ of intentions concerning the fall of Ulbricht straight to the central committee. It is also extremely significant that, on 16 October 1989, on the occasion of the vote for his removal from the post of secretary general of the SED, even Erich Honecker, up to that point a strong supporter of the line of defending the regime, raised his hand. And even during the revolutionary uprising, the members of the old Politburo of the SED defended themselves by arguing that any concessions to a different political line must be considered a breach of the fundamental principle of unanimity and solidarity. A singular will to consensus dominated other spheres of GDR society as well. That socialism was not able to accept conflict and to benefit from argument is made evident by recent studies, like that on civil law in the GDR. Here we can see that the number of trials in the district tribunal of Wismar fell constantly and that by 1963 not even an eighth of the cases presented in 1950 were being heard. Even a look at the socialist world of work, where conflicts had no legal place, gives the same picture: As the president of the FDGB Warke stated in January 1960, ‘these conflicts are the result of insufficient confidence in the system, of an insufficient class consciousness, and of the failure to recognize that the working class holds power. The leaders of our unions should make sure that these conflicts are solved quickly because they might be used by the enemies of the working class against the working class itself.’⁴³

The force that this sentiment of unity had can perhaps be explained effectively through the example of the methodology of the sciences. The historians of the GDR did not consider the fusion between loyalty to the party and their professional seriousness as surrendering to power or betraying science; rather they defended it, arguing that historical discourse should put above any other principle the solidity of the image of socialism. Thus, in extreme cases, it was even possible to deny the authority of sources, with the agreement of the historians, without this seeming to be a contravention of the professional rules of the scientific community.⁴⁴ We can distinguish two different types of construction of legitimating consensus in the SED state. Above all there was the area of political action, the acceptance of ideology and the knowledge of and personal adhesion to certain values. Then there was the area of social and generational traditions, lifestyles of the collectivity and of behaviour, which could reinforce or weaken belief in the legitimacy of the socialist project. Both are forms themselves contained in a way of thinking, a cultural dimension that is difficult to understand in an analytical manner—what Michel Foucault has called an ‘area of discourse’ and which refers to linguistic instruments, habitual schemes of representation and perception, the hierarchy of internalized values, with which we are accustomed to perceive reality without, in normal circumstances, having to think about it.

176

Martin Sabrow

While the seduction of the socialist idea and the force of propaganda in convincing people have always been at the centre of any critical analysis, and while daily life in GDR society has been the subject of research in terms of oscillation and reticence, adaptation and exploitation, among different generations and at different levels, the question of the role of consensus in the most influential structures of the thought of the GDR has not yet been taken fully into consideration. Yet it is precisely the ‘artificial reality’ of the SED dictatorship which provides specific explanations about the effect, and the limits to the effect, of the power of cohesion in the SED dictatorship. This is because the dictatorial principle of consensus did not explicate its power in an empty space, and its validity did not depend so much on the conscious approval of those involved as on a pre-established sphere of activity, defined above all by two factors: homogeneity and internal compactness—and by clear definition of the country’s external borders. These factors indicate that the consensus about which we are talking did not develop naturally. Its continuous creation and its undoubted force was based on diverse presuppositions, not fixed in 1949, much less in 1945, but which were created definitively only between the late 1950s and the first half of the 1980s. The first condition was provided, obviously, by the uncontested monopoly of power enjoyed by the SED and its channels of information, and therefore by its capacity to repress contrasting opinions, to force them into exile or—as in the case of the church—to marginalize and contain them. The period between the XXth congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 and the end of d´etente at the beginning of 1957 shows clearly just how quickly political, literary and scientific consensus risked disappearing as soon as the dictatorship began to vacillate. In the socialist state, power was rarely lived by the citizens simply as a coercive force. Even the most pitiless campaign of persecution waged against the organ of the splinter ZPKK party was based on the objective of maintaining a consensus. Even the most brutal application of the collectivization of the agrarian economy in the GDR did not take place without the prior signature—allegedly voluntary—of the peasants themselves, who were forced to make the step from ‘I’ to ‘We’ with ‘conviction’.⁴⁵ A second condition for the formation of a global consensus can be seen in the enforcement of social homogeneity and cultural unity. The enforced uniformity of lifestyles in the socialist state, the elimination of differences of salary and status, the fusion of institutions and the disbandment of intermediate organizations—all this created a basic scheme of structural conformity which pushed the masses towards consensus and rendered that consensus visible.⁴⁶ The same is true of the cultural sector. Only after socialist realism had become part of the literary scene could repressive censorship begin to look like helpful criticism and in-depth comment; only after historical sciences had cast aside the fetters of the historical discipline could professional uniformity become

Consent in the Communist GDR

177

one of the guiding principles of historical validity; only after the elimination of the narrative models in competition with the ‘people’s army’ could the communist resistance against Nazism assert the full force of its legitimating power of political consensus. It should be noted, in conclusion, that this third condition contributes to the creation of an ideal-type of the enemy. The omnipresence of consensus, essential for the safety of the government, necessarily corresponded to the omnipresence of an enemy, threatening the working class. The existence of an objective enemy, whose danger was totally independent of its will, made consensus obligatory because it permitted the interpretation of doubts and neutrality as clear dissent and determined the limits beyond which all ‘constructive criticism’ was transformed into hostility and ‘the open exchange of opinion’ became a demonstration of doubts in belief in the whole corpus of Marxism-Leninism. The force represented by the achievement of consensus is very evident in the innumerable cases of conflict, generated in the course of everyday experience in the socialist state in ways which are difficult to imagine for a Western state in the years before 1989. Society in the GDR was not ‘placated’; it was permeated by a constant current described by Mary Fulbrook as the unity of conformity and grumbling which can be interpreted as the expression of a continuous extortion of consent through threats compelling agreement at all levels.⁴⁷ The manner in which conflict and consensus were linked is shown in numerous political debates in which self-criticism was always required from the accused person before he was removed from his administrative position. These debates would stall, however, when—as happened in some cases—the accused was unable to reconcile a personal desire for consensus with the objective impossibility of consensus. An example of this is provided by the economic historian Jurgen Kuczynski, accused of revisionism in 1957–8, who stated in an Autocritica published in Neues Deutschland that it was precisely the need to keep faith with the scientific method which constituted a political duty: ‘The party leaders during the last year and in particular in the 35th plenary assembly have repeated the seriousness and the importance of our task at the ideological level [. . .] In this respect the comrade teacher must also be harsh with himself—in two ways: above all, where he has committed a mistake, he must admit it without any kind of reservation, in the interests of the party, of research, of the teaching of our socialist science and of Marxism-Leninism. With all necessary firmness he must avoid any reticence, any cowardice, in admitting his error. With the same firmness and honesty he must also defend his position in the scientific debate, which can only concern single themes, however, and not the general understanding of Marxism-Leninism or the decisions of the party. To repress his own real opinions in order to avoid trouble, for cowardice or for career reasons, is damaging to the party.’⁴⁸ Ulbricht’s enemies within the party operated along this same line of consensual criticism—like Gustav Just, who, even after forty years, thought it appropriate to send his ‘revisionist platform’ (which asked for nothing less than Ulbricht’s

178

Martin Sabrow

resignation) ‘as a basis for discussion in the central committee, and eventually also in the direction of the party, in order to reach a wide circle of recipients’.⁴⁹ Even so the socialist dictatorship of consensus never succeeded in catering for all the realities of everyday life. It succeeded rather in building a ‘culture of final objectives’ whose self-evident obviousness was in contrast with the falseness of what people were actually living. The artificial reality of the GDR as a consensus dictatorship also envisaged—in addition to emphatic approval, acritical reception, and fervent acceptance of values—a commitment to utilize government requirements in such a way as to derive personal benefit. Even for people who retained some personal autonomy of thought, the changes in linguistic code and the double talk were part of daily life, making it possible to understand how the notorious dissatisfaction with living conditions in the GDR could be reconciled with an almost total electoral consensus in respect of the candidates of the party. Who knows whether Wolfgang Harich, accused of creating a revisionist platform, declared himself in favour of the consensus dictatorship because he was ‘purified’, or whether he was just offering a feigned submission when, in an act of humiliating weakness, he thanked state security for taking the reins of the runaway horse before it could fall—thus saving himself from the death penalty? The system of consensus always defined the limits and the form in which one could express dissent: even complaints made at the council of state of the GDR could be expressed only after having professed one’s personal adhesion to the prevailing line and the current goals of the policies of the SED. Only after this could the ‘packet’ also contain the possibility of going on to make personal requests. Despite the unchanging nature of its mechanisms of consensus and formal unity, the consensus dictatorship was a construction which did undergo changes over time. Broadly, one can recognize three phases. During the 1950s and 1960s a Stalinist and post-Stalinist method dominated in the formation of consensus, in which terror and utopia were present at the same time. Under Honecker the aggressive utopia of total and supra-political consensus was increasingly transformed into consensus procured through administration, the bureaucratic aspects of which can be seen in the official documents of the 1970s—more and more devoid of any real meaning. Behind the fac¸ade, which always retained the same external aspect, was the dying force of a by now purely artificial consensus, which, very probably, cannot be better illustrated than in the grotesque picture of the head of the SED waving the national flag and singing at the passage of the troops of the youth organization on 1 May 1989, not noticing that the soldiers were breaking rank 100 metres beyond the stand, getting back into line behind it so that they could march past the dictator once again. The system of consensus dictatorship in the socialist world was not static. Its dramatic decline in the 1980s is evident in the different sectors of GDR society. The decline is shown, for example, in the wave of indignant letters sent, in April 1987, to the office of the secretary of the central committee, Kurt Hager, after

Consent in the Communist GDR

179

he had declared against the ‘thaw’ and the perestroika. Similarly, the censoring of the Russian magazine Sputnik in November 1988 provoked unexpected mass protest in a society which had been used to limits to freedom of expression for more than fifty years. The falsification of the results of the communal elections of May 1989 very suddenly unmasked a system that had never really shown that it wanted to reflect the will of the electors. In the same way, the revelations about abuse of office and about the privileges of the old elite which appeared during the revolutionary wave of autumn 1989, had an incredibly large resonance because, among other things, they permitted a break with the behavioural mode usual up till then and engendered a shift towards indignation. It was only at the moment of collapse that people realized the capital importance of ‘virtual’ reality and the degree to which it had contributed to the stabilization of the society led by the SED for so many decades. When, on 9 October 1989, the Leipzig expert on youth culture, Walter Friedrich, went to Egon Krenz to convince the directorate of the party to adopt a more flexible approach, he took with him a document testifying to a loss of GDR-identity that had taken place with surprising speed over the preceding weeks. In this ‘growing loss of identification of society with the Democratic Republic’, Friedrich saw the ‘result of certain changes in mass consciousness’ which had led ‘in a short time and in an aggressive way, to the formation of a new mentality’.⁵⁰ Friedrich’s diagnosis is confirmed by the results of a survey carried out among visitors from the West about the political opinions of the citizens of East Germany. Leaving aside the question of whether these surveys overestimated the degree to which the population of the East really did accept the system, the fact remains that ‘up until 1988 very few changes in the political ideas of the citizens of the GDR are noticed. Only from the spring and particularly from the summer of 1989 can we see an unexpected growth of hostility.’⁵¹ In this unexpected growth nothing was more influential than the collapse of a socio-cultural organization based on consensus between people and ruling class, itself based on exclusion and closure to the outside world. The question of the legitimating function of the consensus system has been little considered so far but it may provide a contribution to our understanding of the GDR. Certainly, the most significant mechanisms of acceptance could wear out in the course of a lifetime; the seductions of power were confronted by the embarrassment of impotence; the belief of living in a state better than the others, despite all its shortcomings, was challenged by the continual comparison with the neighbours in the West; ideological certainty was undermined by ideological doubt. But all this was less important than the eventual erosion of the dominant idea of the socialist state of the SED, in which society had formed its identity and its environment through state socialism. The GDR had made the decisive step in passing from an exceptional situation of repression to the artificial normality of an everyday socialist world, not through a perceived or promised identity between people and rulers, but through the stabilization of an

180

Martin Sabrow

order based on consensus, in which the daily round and the dictatorship were not at opposite poles, but two realities which permeated each other and which kept each other alive. If this is so, then the lasting internal stability of the communist dictatorships of the twentieth century were due—among numerous other factors, such as political repression and the purchase of political loyalty—to an enormous mental operation, difficult to comprehend fully: it was the force of a politically generated different world of meaning, homogeneous on the inside and closed to the outside, based on the maintenance of its external borders. The communist worldview was and remained always artificial, to the extent that it was entrusted to the leadership of the Communist Party and to the political repression of alternative Weltanschauung and perceptions of different worlds. But within these limits the communist world of meaning, based on the idea of historical progress and the paradigm of total societal consensus, developed such a persuasive power that even in the terroristic fever of the late 1930s a much-appreciated Western poet like Lion Feuchtwanger could fall victim to its mental attraction.

No t e s 1

Lion Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends (London, 1937), 174. 2 Ibid., 8f. 3 Ibid., 10. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Ibid., 19. 6 Ibid., 29. 7 Ibid., 32. 8 Ibid., 24f. 9 Ibid., 33f. 10 On Feuchtwanger’s position after the Second World War cf. Joseph Pischel, ‘Nachwort’, in Lion Feuchtwanger, Moskau 1937: Ein Reisebericht f¨ur meine Freund (Berlin, 2nd edn. 1993), 133f. 11 Cf. for the frightening cohabitation of terror and dream, the monumental description of Karl Schl¨ogel, Terror und Traum (Moscow, 1937; Munich, 2008). Between August 1936, the year in which we see the beginning of the great wave of terror against the Soviet elite of the party, and May 1937, around 350,000 people were imprisoned, according to current figures. Mass terror, led by the so-called troika and used among large sectors of the population as well as the national minorities, began in 1937—after, therefore, Feuchtwanger’s return from Moscow. Cf. Markus Wehner, ‘Stalinismus und Terror’, in Stefan Plaggenborg (ed.), Stalinismus: neue Forschungen und Konzepte (Berlin, 1998), 365–90. The total number of people imprisoned between January

Consent in the Communist GDR

181

1935 and July 1940 as ‘enemies of the people’ was—according to the report of the commission set up by Khrushchev—19,400,000. Of these, 7 million were killed, while the majority of the others died in the gulag. Cf. Ren´e Ahlberg, ‘Stalinistische Vergangenheitsbew¨altigung: Auseinandersetzung u¨ ber die Zahl der Gulag-Opfer’, Osteuropa 42:11 (1992), 920–37. 12 Besides the hypothesis of Heinrich Mann, already quoted, that Feuchtwanger had been bought by Stalin, one often finds in the literature about the case the hypothesis that Feuchtwanger’s position was motivated by the hope of saving the life of individual prisoners. Cf. David Pike, Deutsche Schriftsteller im Sovjetischen Exil 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 244, 268; Michael Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus und die Renegaten (Stuttgart, 1991), 154. 13 ‘Here Feuchtwanger wants to play the politician and is totally taken by the idea of a dictatorship of reason, shown here in the ‘‘enlightened despot’’ ’, Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus, 152. 14 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 39f. 15 Man` es Sperber, Stufen der praktikablen Unwissenheit, 1981, cited in Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus, 152. 16 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 82. It is not certain that the conversation really took place in the way described by Feuchtwanger. A German emigrant reported that she had heard that a first meeting had been abruptly broken off by Stalin after the initial pleasantries, when Feuchtwanger asked a question about the cult of personality, and that Stalin had been more ready to answer questions in a second meeting. Cf. Pike, Deutsche Schriftsteller, 244f. 17 Cf. Pike, Deutsche Schriftsteller, 241. A not insignificant contribution to the success of Feuchtwanger’s booklet was the uproar created by the passages in the text which did criticize the regime, and after a few weeks the book was sold out. Only a year later the book was withdrawn from bookshops and was not republished either in the Soviet Union or in the GDR. 18 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 13. 19 Ibid., 243. 20 Ibid., 144. 21 Ibid., 144. 22 Ibid., 142. 23 Ibid., 146f. 24 Ibid., 135. 25 Ibid., 146. 26 ‘After a careful examination of the official accounts of the trials I have come to the conclusion that the accused have committed the crimes or the attempted crimes for which they have been tried and condemned. It would be grotesque to think that this account has been falsified from the first to the last line . . . . I can’t see any self-sacrifice, either artificial or extorted; I see confessions.’ Kurt Hiller, Neue Weltb¨uhne 32:40 (1 October 1936), 1272.

182 27 Man` es

Martin Sabrow

Sperber, in Paris, interpreted the trials as a means ‘by which it was possible to make understandable to the people the complex truth of the facts. It was a question of the fact that, in Hiller’s view any kind of opposition constituted a betrayal.’ Henry Jacoby, Davongekommen: 10 Jahre Exil 1936–1946: Prag—Paris—Montauban—New York—Washington: Erlebnisse und Begegnungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 39, cited in Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus, 133. 28 ‘But when traitors who threaten the revolution are discovered, these should disappear quickly and completely in order to preserve the revolution.’ Heinrich Mann, Neue Weltb¨uhne 32:39 (24 September 1936), 1216. 29 Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus, 160. 30 Ernst Bloch, ‘Bucharin Schlusswort’, in E. Bloch, Vom Hasard zu Katastrophe: Politische Aufs¨atze aus den Jahren 1934–1939: Mit einem Nachwort von Oskar Negt (Frankfurt am Main, 1972), 358. 31 Karola Bloch, Aus meinem Leben (Pfullingen, 1981), 126. 32 Arnold Zweig to Lion Feuchtwanger, 29 July 1937, in Lion Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig, Briefwechsel 1933–1938 (Berlin (East), 1984), 163. 33 Arnold Zweig to Marta Feuchtwanger, 4 November 1937, in Feuchtwanger and Zweig, Briefwechsel 1933–1938, 181. 34 Lion Feuchtwanger to Arnold Zweig, 24 February 1957, in Feuchtwanger and Zweig, Briefwechsel 1933–1938, 147. 35 Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 135. 36 Martin Andersen Nexø, ‘Eine neue Barriere gegen den Krieg: Zum Moskauer Prozeß gegen die Trotzkisten’, Das Wort: Literarische Monatsschrift 1:1 (January 1937), 101. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ernst Fischer, Erinnerungen und Reflexionen (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1969), 375. Cf. also, Ernst Fischer, Vernichtet den Trotzkismus (Strasbourg, 1937), and E. Fischer, ‘Die Gest¨andnisse’, Neue Rundschau 6:5 (4 February 1937), 221f. 40 Fischer, Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, 103. 41 The fundamental role of ‘global consensus’ for an understanding of the Stalinist practice of domination is underlined in the postscript to the 1993 edition of Moscow 1937, in which Joseph Pischel writes: ‘The level of consensus that a Bolshevik mass party receives from its members will not be comprehensible to the greater part of the readers’ (128). 42 Hilde Benjamin, ‘A. J. Wyschinski: Gerichtsreden’, Einheit 7 (1952), 699–703. 43 Peter H¨ ubner, Konsens, Konflikt und Kompromiß: Soziale Arbeiterinteressen und Sozialpolitik in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1970 (Berlin, 1995), 209. Cf. also Peter H¨ubner, ‘Arbeitskampf im Konsensgewand? Zum Konfliktverhalten von Arbeitern im ‘‘realen’’ Sozialismus’, in Henrik Bispinck, J¨urgen Danyel, Hans-Hermann Hertle and Hermann Wentker (eds.), Aufst¨ande im Ostblock: Zur Krisengeschichte des realen Sozialismus (Berlin, 2004), 195–213.

Consent in the Communist GDR 44 Thomas

183

Lindenberger, ‘Der ABV als Landwirt: Zur Mitwirkung der Deutschen Volkspolizei bei der Kollektivierung der Landwirtschaft’, in Thomas Lindenberger (ed.), Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Potsdam, 1999), 167–203. Here 189. 45 See, for these conferences: Thomas Lindenberger, ‘Creating State Socialist Governance: The Case of the Deutsche Volkspolizei’, in Konrad H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford, 1999), 125–41. 46 ‘In this sense the conformism of the GDR population was institutionally structured, not necessarily ideologically motivated.’ M. Rainer Lepsius, ‘Die Institutionenordnung als Rahmenbedingung der Sozialgeschichte der DDR’, in Hartmut Kaelble, J¨urgen Kocka and Hartmut Zwahr (eds.), Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Stuttgart, 1994), 17–30. Here 28f. 47 Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR: 1949–1989 (Oxford, 1995), especially 129f. 48 Cited in Jurgen Kuczynski, Frost nach dem Tauwetter (Berlin, 1993), 103f. 49 Gustav Just, Deutsch: Jahrgang 1921 (Potsdam, 2001), 96f. 50 Walter Friedrich to Egon Krenz, 9 October 1989, in Ekkehard Kuhn, Der Tag der Entscheidung: Leipzig, 9. Oktober 1989 (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 93. 51 Anne K¨ ohler, ‘Nationalbewußtsein und Identit¨atsgef¨uhl der B¨urger der DDR unter besonderer Ber¨ucksichtigung der deutschen Frage’, in Enquete-Kommission ‘Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland’, vol. 5.2 (Baden-Baden, 1995), 1636–1675. Here 1664.

11 Demography, Opportunity or Ideological Conversion? Reflections on the Role of the ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’, or ‘1929ers’, in the GDR Mary Fulbrook

The relative balance of coercion, commitment, consent, complicity, compromise, conformity, passive or active resistance and dissent in the two German dictatorships has long been the topic of debate among historians. Simplistic models seeking to make clear distinctions between ‘regime’ and ‘people’, ‘state’ and ‘society’, ‘support’ and ‘opposition’ are clearly inadequate to explore the complex and often ambivalent ways in which people interact with, respond to, and make their way through dictatorial regimes, where they may approve of some policies, be adversely affected by others, and have a variety of conflicting opinions and changing motives as they are caught up in and seek to live their lives through a constantly changing apparatus of mobilization and control. There are clearly many factors affecting the ways people of different political, religious, moral and class backgrounds were affected by and responded to the Nazi and communist dictatorships in twentieth-century Germany. I propose here to raise some questions (but by no means suggest definitive answers) that arise when one considers the question from a generational perspective.¹ In addition to characteristics such as gender and social class, the biological age and social life-stage at which individuals are confronted by major historical events or experiences can have a very strong impact on their behaviour and attitudes. Even a matter of only a couple of years can make a major difference between whether, for example, an adolescent male will be called up to risk his life in military service in war or will remain an observer at a distance alongside his mother and sisters on the home front. ‘Social generations’ are of course as much the constructions of later discourse as they are of common challenges (not necessarily ‘formative experiences’) faced at particular life-stages.² But an understanding of radical, intrusive dictatorships and of times of rapid social and political change in transitions across regimes can be greatly illuminated by considering the diversity

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

185

of experiences and subjective interpretations to be found among members of different age groups at the time. The concept of ‘generation’ in a variety of senses has for some time been recognized as a significant, if strongly contested, category for exploring the genesis of the Third Reich. Particular prominence has been given by some scholars to the alleged consequences of the First World War, with a focus on the actually highly diverse experiences of the ‘Front Generation’ and the slightly younger ‘War Youth Generation’ (those who were too young to have directly experienced combat at the front but who were among the most prominent carriers of the Third Reich).³ I propose here, however, to focus on a rather different case: that of the two very different cohorts of what has often been called the ‘Hitler Youth generation’, which I believe should actually be divided between the ‘First Hitler Youth generation’ (born roughly during and in the early years after the Great War) and the ‘Second Hitler Youth generation’, which I prefer to call the ‘1929ers’, born in the period roughly from the mid-1920s until Hitler’s accession to power; and I shall focus primarily on the latter cohort, which proved particularly significant in the transition from Nazism to communism and from which were drawn those groups who were to be the principal carriers and strongest supporters of the GDR. T H E 1 9 2 9 E R S I N T H E G D R : S O M E PAT T E R N S One of the oddest puzzles for historians of the GDR is the highly prominent, state-sustaining role played in this communist regime by members of the birth cohorts who were socialized primarily under the ideologically very different Nazi dictatorship. These were people born in the later 1920s and early 1930s, who are sometimes known, at least with reference to males, as the ‘Flakhelfergeneration’ (those just old enough to have been called up in the aircraft auxiliary forces in the last year or two of the war). Paradoxically, it was precisely these cohorts—who were consistently exposed to Nazi propaganda and influence throughout what are often thought to be the most impressionable years of compulsory schooling and adolescent socialization—who later appeared to be the most committed communists. Whichever way one looks at the data, those born in the years 1925–32 seem to have been highly supportive of the GDR. A statistical analysis of ‘Who was who in the GDR’ (Wer war Wer in der DDR) reveals their disproportionate presence in the higher reaches of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) hierarchy, the organizations of the state, the key ministries in government, the most important economic enterprises, and the officer level of the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi—though, interestingly, those involved in the Stasi tended to be on average just a couple of years younger than those involved in the institutions of party, state and economy.⁴ A range of possible causes immediately leaps

186

Mary Fulbrook

to mind to explain why, perhaps, a significant small group might have risen to such political prominence, without being at all representative of the wider cohorts from which they were drawn. Perhaps these individuals were all selected in the early post-war years as being young and untainted by complicity in the Nazi regime? Perhaps they were disproportionately drawn from families with appropriate working-class credentials and leftward political leanings? A minority of those growing up opposing the Third Reich would then become the new, contrasting elite in the GDR? If this were the case, then their socialization in the Third Reich could be deemed to be more or less irrelevant, the puzzle solved: after all, such individuals might have been drawn from largely non-political homes, or more likely from families who were actively or passively opposed to Nazism, and indeed there would then be little or no puzzle to solve. One could simply engage in a collective group biography of the leaders of party, state and economy in the GDR without wondering about any patterns of ideological conversion to communism despite the impact of socialization under Nazism. But even if this were true, one would still perhaps need to look for some kind of explanation of the fact that it was precisely these birth cohorts, and not their slightly older or younger compatriots from similar social and political backgrounds, who were and remained so dominant in the affairs of the communist GDR. Oddly, however, further exploration reveals that an approach positing disproportionate support among only a small group of those from non- or anti-Nazi backgrounds does not seem to fit very well when one considers this generation a little further, because the select group of prominent 1929ers appears in its attitudes to have been not strikingly different from, but rather representative of, the wider population of the birth cohorts from which they are drawn. Studies of what might be called ‘ordinary East Germans’ of the same age group show the same surprising disproportionate commitment to the communist project, as compared with those a little older or a little younger, revealed in different ways both in the years shortly before and a decade and a half after the collapse of the GDR in 1989. Thus, for example, the path-breaking oral history work of Lutz Niethammer, Dorothee Wierling and Alexander von Plato carried out in a number of East German industrial centres in 1987 brought up again and again, among members of this age group, a striking loyalty to the East German state. Their belief in the promise and hopes offered by this state appears to have been particularly strong (at least as represented retrospectively) in the early and more idealistic years of the GDR, before the frustrations and stagnation of the Honecker period (1971–89) had set in.⁵ Again, there could be a quick explanation, or indeed even a way of explaining away these findings: after all, Niethammer and his colleagues published interviews with only thirty individuals, of whom only eight were born in the relevant years from 1925 to 1932. This very small sample could thus again be argued to have been highly unrepresentative of the wider age group; and, of course, those individuals whom the West German historians were permitted to

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

187

interview in the still-existing GDR were pre-selected and interviews accompanied by a regime ‘minder’, rendering explicitly critical comments extremely unlikely in the constrained circumstances of this research. There is nevertheless a striking ring of authenticity about these life-histories which makes the reader predisposed to accept at least the participants’ professed belief in the versions of their own lives which they chose to present to the West German researchers. Surprising corroboration of the view that the ‘prominent 1929ers’ of Wer war Wer in der DDR are indeed more broadly representative of their age cohorts comes, however, in some more recent research carried out under less constrained and rather different post-unification conditions—when of course retrospective evaluations may be tinged with a degree of nostalgia or Ostalgie. In the summer of 2005, I carried out a small project in which over 300 questionnaires were distributed to East Germans in several locations: the former ‘socialist new town’ of Eisenh¨uttenstadt, on the German border with Poland; the pleasant old town around a former princely hunting lodge in K¨onigswusterhausen near Berlin; and a number of contrasting districts in East Berlin, from the south-western lakeside suburb of M¨uggelsee through areas of socialist high-rise housing estates in the northern district of Marzahn to older areas near the town centre, including the notorious Lichtenberg area (in which the Normannenstrasse Stasi headquarters was located). In addition, a number of in-depth oral history interviews were carried out with East Germans of different ages.⁶ These explorations of the experiences and attitudes of a random crosssection of the East German population more than fifteen years after unification reveal surprising differences among different birth cohorts with respect to reported attitudes towards and patterns of involvement in the GDR.⁷ Again, those born in the years from 1925 to 1932 stand out as highly distinctive in comparison to those born in the immediately preceding and succeeding years. In particular, as far as commitment to the atheist, Marxist-Leninist state of the GDR is concerned, it is notable that the ‘1929ers’ among the general population were far more likely to have been members of the SED, and far less likely to have retained any form of church membership or professed religious belief, than those just a few years older or a few years younger. If this survey of around 300 people in 2005–6 is taken to be even only roughly reliable as an indicator of generational differences among ‘ordinary East Germans’, then the evident commitment to the ‘project GDR’ among the 500 or so ‘prominent 1929ers’ in Wer war Wer, and among the eight representatives of this generation interviewed by Lutz Niethammer and colleagues, was also characteristic of this age cohort in the wider population. The prominence of the 1929ers, and their disproportionate commitment to the communist GDR remains, then, a particularly puzzling case, and not one which can easily be explained away by reference to a small self-selecting political elite. There are further puzzles, too, when one compares the East German case with the experiences of this cohort in the West. Members of this age group tended to be

188

Mary Fulbrook

highly prominent in many spheres of public life in both German states after 1949. Although the birth dates and labels differ somewhat from one study to another, the prominence of what is sometimes called the ‘Aufbaugeneration’—the generation which ‘built up’ the new states—in different spheres of public life has been receiving increasing attention for both sides of the Iron Curtain.⁸ The highly visible roles of the ‘1929ers’ as carriers of the new states, despite their primary socialization under such very different political and ideological auspices, seem to cry out for interpretation. Explanations of their prominence in the liberal democracy of West Germany are abundant—and, however plausible they may appear for the West at first glance, such explanations rarely hold for the very different circumstances of the communist dictatorship in the East—and vice versa. It is sometimes argued, for example, that having been ‘burnt’ or ‘betrayed’ by one highly ideologically charged ‘totalitarian’ dictatorship, members of a far more broadly (or vaguely) defined ‘Hitler Youth generation’ or ‘sceptical generation’ (Schelsky) became increasingly mistrustful of all political ideologies, and instead became adherents of the pluralism of liberal democracy, opposed to all dictatorial regimes with intrusive worldviews.⁹ When it is pointed out that, ironically, it was precisely these members of the ‘betrayed generation’ who turned out to be the strongest supporters of the communist East, the quite opposite and self-contradictory claim is often made that, having been brought up in a ‘totalitarian’ dictatorship, members of the Hitler Youth generation were predisposed to profess blind obedience to any strong state, however different in ideological colours—an obvious variant on the argument about the equivalence of ‘totalitarian’ dictatorships of both left and right. While clearly mutually incompatible, such explanations are relatively readily bandied around in popular discussions. Clearly, a rather more differentiated and empirically saturated analysis of the characteristics and experiences of this generation is required. Here, I shall first outline some of the ways in which I think we need to be more precise about our descriptions of the cohorts born from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, in contradistinction to earlier and later cohorts. I shall then go on to consider some of the possible explanations for the distinctive roles played by the 1929ers in the GDR, seeking to distinguish between what might be called demographic, structural, and cultural or ideological explanations. Finally, I shall return to the wider question of the ways in which a generational perspective may serve to illuminate patterns of compliance and refusal, complicity and coercion, in the two succeeding dictatorships. T H E T WO ‘ H I T L E R YO U T H G E N E R AT I O N S ’ : D I S T I N C T I V E AG E - R E L AT E D E X PE R I E N C E S O F N A Z I S M Many analyses of the ‘Hitler Youth generation’ tend to look in a fairly undifferentiated manner at a long set of birth cohorts stretching from the later years of

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

189

the First World War through to the early 1930s. My research suggests, however, that there are in fact key differences between those born from the First World War through to the mid-1920s, who may be referred to as the ‘first Hitler Youth generation’, or HJ1, and those born in the later years of the Weimar Republic, the ‘second Hitler Youth generation’ or 1929ers. These differences are not only evident in the material relating to the later activities and the relative prominence of the 1929ers in the GDR, as well as more general support for the communist project referred to above; they are also very striking when one considers evidence relating to the experiences of these two sets of cohorts prior to 1945. And it is arguably in their different age-related experiences of Nazism that at least some of the differences in degrees of antipathy towards, or support for, the later communist project may be rooted. The ‘first Hitler Youth generation’, those born during the First World War through to the mid-1920s, were old enough to have registered the turmoil of the later Weimar years. They knew from firsthand experience what were the ‘problems’ to which a strong leader was held to be the answer; they knew what it was that Germans felt they needed a ‘saviour’ to rescue them from. Thus for example among my oral history interviewees Amalie H. (1922) commented on her experiences in the Depression of her father and elder brother first of all becoming unemployed, and then her family being at risk of losing their home and the smallholding which had just about been keeping the family afloat: We had to buy chicken feed, that was expensive, then we could no longer keep chickens. For a while we just went on, always hoping that things would improve. Until we were so much in debt, that we nearly lost our house and farm. And then there came what was for us a happy time, when Adolf Hitler came to power, and then they could not remove us from our land.¹⁰

Such personal tales could be repeated endlessly: the threat and fear of unemployment were crucial factors in the rapid rise in the NSDAP vote in 1930 and the summer elections of 1932. The point here is not so much to reiterate this familiar fact, but rather to point out that, unlike the 1929ers, members of the HJ1 were old enough to be consciously party to family discussions of such matters. This did not need to be a matter of serious political awareness; the experience of unemployment or poverty or an atmosphere of worry and fear about developments in the family home could suffice as ‘experiential grounding’ for a sense of real change after 1933. These young people consciously registered the changes experienced when Hitler came to power: they had personal experience of the pre-1933 conditions which were in such strong contrast to the economic recovery for which Hitler was to take the credit. Those born in the later Weimar years, by contrast, grew up really only aware of the parameters of life in Hitler’s Germany. They were familiar with all the slogans and were exhaustively exposed to the propaganda with little chance of contrasting these with well-defined alternative points of view (unless, of course, they came from families which, for

190

Mary Fulbrook

political, moral or ‘racial’ reasons were forcibly excluded from and critical of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’—and there were splits between older and younger members of families even when parents were of strongly different political views but not excluded on ‘racial’ grounds). For those living among the conforming majority, the world of Nazi Germany appeared in some respects more ‘normal’ than it did for those just a few years older, with personal experience of other points of view; and yet they also had no direct personal experience of the chaotic conditions which had preceded the supposed ‘return to order’, and hence the alleged need for a ‘F¨uhrer’ was perhaps less fervently felt among the 1929ers than among members of the HJ1 generation (let alone the War Youth generation).¹¹ Members of the earlier HJ1 cohorts were then to become, on all the evidence of opinion reports and incidents of antisemitic violence in the 1930s, and for whatever combination of reasons, the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler’s regime in the peacetime years. Again and again SOPADE and other contemporary reports emphasize this point. Of course there were many who kept their distance from the regime—but the pressure to join in the activities of Nazi organizations (notably of course the Hitler Youth itself ) was, for the HJ1 cohort in the early years of the Nazi regime, less great than it later became for the 1929ers, for most of whom membership from their tenth birthday was compulsory. And the activities of the Nazi youth movement were also at first arguably more anodyne, less overtly militaristic and apparently more in line with the inherited traditions of the youth movements which the Hitler Youth had so recently displaced.¹² But even at the more unpleasant and brutal end of the spectrum of Nazi mobilization of youth, these cohorts appeared to be disproportionately enthusiastic. In the supposedly ‘spontaneous’ incidents of antisemitic violence in the summer of 1935, it was among teenagers that the NSDAP could find willing helpers in acts of physical brutality against individuals. In the infamous Kristallnacht of 1938, while large numbers of Germans for the first time evidenced real shame at the violence that was being carried out in their name, it was again primarily young people who were most visible and active in the scenes of violence against Jews.¹³ The 1929ers, by contrast, were still children during these years. They perhaps witnessed violence, but they were more likely to have been accompanied by a disapproving adult than to have been a participant in such violence themselves, unlike the somewhat older members of the HJ1. One might also look to differential experiences of war between males in these two sets of cohorts. After all, the males among the 1929ers are often also termed the ‘air force auxiliary generation’ (Luftwaffenhelfer or Flakhelfergeneration): those who were thrown into uniform as anti-aircraft helpers at the ages of 16 and 17, or even as young as 15, in the closing stages of the war. Those males among the HJ1 generation who entered military service right at the very start of the war had rather different experiences. In the early years of rapid military successes (and despite the previous foreboding felt by many Germans as war loomed on the horizon in the summer of 1939), large numbers of young Germans who had not

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

191

experienced the First World War but who had been exposed to an unremitting diet of tales of heroism, honour and self-sacrifice in service of the nation, were very keen to be able to participate and to gain military awards and honours. One of my HJ1 interviewees, Carsten K. (1924), recalls that ‘as youngsters we were so crazy, we thought the war would soon be over and we would not have been part of it!’ Seeing members of the class above them return home with war wounds and insignia, Carsten and his class mates almost all joined up voluntarily—which cost Carsten a family row and a cuff on the ear from his father, who in 1940 had very unwillingly to sign the papers for his still only sixteen-year-old son to enter the army. Views of the likely character of military combat had changed considerably for those born just a year or two later, when reports from the Russian front and tales of the conditions (and sometimes also of the atrocities) in the occupied eastern territories were filtering home. For many ordinary soldiers who personally witnessed life in the ghettos of occupied Poland, however fleetingly, sight of the overcrowded masses of half-starved, disease-ridden and ragged members of the incarcerated Jewish communities generally only served to reinforce the racial prejudices, caricatures and stereotypes on which they had been brought up in the old Reich.¹⁴ Similarly, the ‘racial fight’ against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was particularly ideologically loaded, with personal experience of the ‘primitivity’ of life in eastern Europe and what Goebbels had denounced as the ‘Soviet paradise’ generally serving to strengthen anti-communist feelings among ordinary soldiers. For the 1929ers, however, called up only as the war was drawing to a close, and serving generally rather closer to home—on average, at least in their initial six months or so of service, young air force auxiliaries were only asked to serve at a maximum distance of 50 kilometres from their homes—the experience was not one to reinforce Nazi ideological prejudices. Naked fear of loss of their own lives as the bombing raids and enemy troops closed in on the heartlands of the Reich, and subordination to people whose authority was to some extent ambiguous (particularly at the very end of the war), was accompanied by an apparent lack of hard-heartedness with respect to maltreatment of slave labour and concentration camp inmates, whose condition seems to have shocked a higher proportion of these teenagers in army uniform than it did those slightly older.¹⁵ It would take much more thorough research on age-related (and gendered) experiences of war to develop these reflections further. But whether or not the experiences of the Nazi period were as distinctive with respect to a sharp generational break between those born before and after the mid-1920s as I have suggested, the generational divides after 1945 were certainly massive, and also require further exploration—since ‘generations’ are constructed as much by the later contexts in which earlier experiences are seen as relevant as they are by the initial experiences themselves. Conditions after 1945 were at least as significant in bringing these cohorts to prominence as were their experiences under Nazism.

192

Mary Fulbrook

D E AT H , D I V I S I O N A N D P O L I T I C A L D E M O G R A PH Y The early years after the war are, in most oral history accounts by East Germans old enough to have lived through and remembered this period, perceived retrospectively as the ‘worst years’ of their lives—oddly, often even worse than the actual wartime years. (The only other period which vies for comparable status of ‘worst period’ is that of the years immediately following unification in 1990, among East Germans of working age who had their first experience of unemployment and existential worries about their future at this time.)¹⁶ Looking at contemporary developments, it is not hard to see why. Fear of what might occur when the Russians finally invaded was already very widespread in the later months of the war, and mass flight in front of the advancing Red Army preceded the later expulsions of Germans from their homes east of the new post-war Oder–Neisse border with Poland. Indeed, the joke was prevalent in the last weeks of the war that one might as well enjoy the war now, for the peace would be infinitely worse.¹⁷ The suicide rate went up dramatically in the weeks immediately before and after the end of hostilities in Germany, as those severely compromised by their place in the Nazi regime feared reprisals, and others, traumatized by the mass rapes of German women and girls by Russian soldiers, felt the only ‘honourable’ way out was to take one’s own life. For those who by contrast sought to survive among the rubble of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, experiences of robbery, brutality and fear were everyday occurrences alongside constant hunger, physical discomfort, grief, bereavement and anxiety about missing, maimed or imprisoned loved ones. In the space of just a few years, in some cases only months, many Germans very belatedly came to realize that what they had thought was a secure world in which Germans were superior and assured of final victory had fallen apart, with Hitler’s overweening ambitions for the ‘master race’ revealed as destructive delusions. Whether or not they had ever believed in the F¨uhrer, the vast majority of surviving Germans after the war were severely disorientated, and often both physically and emotionally scarred, by what the Nazi regime had done to them. And for those who had been victims of the Nazi regime, whether on ‘racial’ or political grounds, the situation—despite a genuine sense of liberation, rather than defeat—was in many respects infinitely worse. They had lost not merely possessions, homes, livelihoods, years of their lives, but also virtually their entire families, communities and friendship groups. After the traumas of death camps, torture and slave labour, physically and emotionally broken, it was much harder to try to ‘pick up the pieces’ or embark on a new life. The terror and traumas of the early occupation period, when many cities were in ruins, transport was severely disrupted or non-existent, refugees and expellees vied for scarce medical attention, food and shelter, wounded soldiers sought

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

193

to return home or families worried about those still missing or imprisoned, gradually subsided as some semblance of at least organizational ‘normality’ under post-war conditions of occupation set in. Food proved to be a continuing problem, with mass hunger, near-famine conditions, and continuing rationing and a flourishing black market in the following years. Added to this were the constraints and uncertainties of a volatile political situation, in which it became increasingly clear that the early post-war pretence of party pluralism was giving way to ever greater communist control, under the guise of the Socialist Unity Party or SED. Formed out of a forcible merger between the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party in 1946, the SED was increasingly dominated by the Moscow faction of the communists, and from 1948 became a Stalinist ‘Party of a New Type’. With the Marshall Plan and currency reform in the Western zones in 1948, and the formal foundation of the GDR in response to the foundation of the Western Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, alternative potential futures for post-war Germany were progressively reduced. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s rejection in 1952 of the ‘Stalin Notes’ proposing reunification of a neutral Germany, the East German strengthening of the inner-German border with a 5-kilometre exclusion zone in May 1952, and the forcible suppression of the 1953 June Uprising with Western failure to intervene in support of the demonstrators, all served to underline the foundation of a fortified, repressive communist state in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and subsequent GDR. Given all this, what made anyone become a supporter of the new communist state? How did the age-related experiences of various generations differ during this early period? To what extent were earlier experiences of the Nazi period relevant to the ways in which members of different cohorts progressed through these crucial transitional years? If the differences between the 1929ers and those born a few years before them are partly rooted in experiences of Nazism, an added and truly significant factor explaining the later disproportionate prominence of the 1929ers becomes very clear when one considers differential birth rates in the early twentieth century and comparative survival rates in the Second World War. Low birth rates during and in the years immediately following the First World War were compounded by high mortality rates of precisely these birth cohorts in the Second World War. There were simply far fewer adult males aged between 30 and 40 in the mid-1950s than there were females, or younger or older males. The demographic tree was thus extremely lopsided. Mirroring as it does the distribution of age cohorts represented in Wer war Wer, this goes a long way to explaining the high visibility of the 1929ers compared to preceding cohorts—though it does little or nothing to explain their prominence in contrast to those born a few years later. Nor does it explain the disproportionate levels of political commitment of this cohort among the wider population, in contrast to both older and younger cohorts.

194

Mary Fulbrook

Additionally, of course, the 1929ers were far less likely to have been tainted by positions of responsibility in the Third Reich than were those a few years older. But the real differences in this respect only begin to set in when one makes a comparison, not between the 1929ers and those just a few years older (HJ1), but rather with those twenty or so years older, what might have been the generation of the parents of the 1929ers. For it was among the cohorts born in the first decade of the twentieth century, the ‘War Youth generation’ (Kreigsjugendgeneration), that disproportionate numbers of the key ‘carriers’ of the Third Reich were drawn, as well as those hordes of careerists and opportunists who experienced a rapid upward social mobility through the ranks of party and party-state. Whatever their later professions of innocence, of having only outwardly conformed, of having retained an inner distance from the regime, while being too fearful or opportunistic to step out of line, it was this War Youth generation who had made themselves available for mobilization in middle ranks of the state and civilian administration in the 1930s and early 1940s, and who had, by virtue of the roles they played as cogs in the Nazi system, made the functioning of the murderous regime possible. In the Western Federal Republic of Germany many of these people made very successful careers with rapid promotions through the ranks of the new civil service and democratic political system, as well as sustaining positions in a still capitalist economy. In the Soviet zone and GDR, by contrast, while former Nazis certainly still were able to make successful careers, arguably to a greater extent than has been appreciated until recently, at least in the key areas of civilian administration and economic control, the more radical transformation to a new socio-economic and political system brought with it a concomitant more radical pattern of denazification and appointment of untrained but also politically untainted young people. The 1929ers were the natural beneficiaries of the social revolution in the GDR. One could thus, for example, point to programmes such as the ‘new teacher’ (Neulehrer) fast-track training of young people to become teachers—sometimes in the space of only six weeks or so—in order to place non-Nazis in front of schoolchildren with the greatest possible speed. One could also point to the ways in which ordinary workers rapidly took on positions of authority and responsibility in the newly state-controlled factories or VEBs, whose former owners and managers had been ousted or sidelined in the processes of denazification and nationalization. One such example is Wolfgang Jeschke, interviewed by Lutz Niethammer in the 1987 oral history project, who experienced an extraordinarily rapid rise with both responsibility for training apprentices in the factory and a place in local politics; his biography is typical of many.¹⁸ Thus the unprecedented wealth of new opportunities for very rapid promotion for those who were on the brink of young adulthood at the time of foundation of the GDR could go a considerable way to explaining their prominence throughout its history. But this alone still does not go quite far enough, for a number of reasons. First of all, the early transformations were highly volatile. We should not take the

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

195

shifting of the patterns in the kaleidoscope in the first post-war years as finally settling the fixed social mosaic of the later decades. Many former Nazis, for example, were able to return to their old jobs in education or industry following relatively short periods out of grace. Similarly, many young people were far from happy with the new opportunities offered to them in the East compared to those in the West. If the brute facts of mortality in war had winnowed out the generations to some degree, the political demography of the post-war years seems to have provided the opportunity for political and economic selections. It is instructive in this connection to look at the—not entirely reliable—refugee statistics in the 1950s, before the border to West Berlin was closed in 1961 (see Tables 11.1 and 11.2). In the period 1953 to 1960, people aged between 21 and 30 formed 20.6% of the total number of refugees from East to West, a full 50% more than their percentage in the West German population at that time (13%).¹⁹ A similar disproportionate number of refugees is found among those slightly younger, too: people aged 14 to 20 constituted 21.1% of the total refugee statistics, compared to 11.5% of the total West German population at the time. Thus young people aged 14 to 29 during these years made up a total of slightly over two-fifths (41.7%) of those fleeing the GDR, as compared with a total of just under a quarter of the West German population they were joining (24.5%). In the period 1955 to 1959, the percentage of the population of the GDR aged under 25 was 36.5%, as compared to 37.2% in western Germany; but more than half (50.3%) of the refugee population in these years was aged Table 11.1. Age profiles in percentages, 1955–9 Age groups

Soviet zone and East Berlin

Refugees

13.2 28.4 21.9 36.5

5.4 18.4 25.9 50.3

65 and above 45–65 25–45 Under 25

Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) 10.5 26.7 25.6 37.2

Table 11.2. Age profiles of refugees from East Berlin and GDR, 1953–60, and in the Federal Republic of Germany, in percentages Age in years Under 14 14–20 21–29 30–39 40–49 50–64 65+ Total

Refugees from SBZ/GDR

FRG population

15.9 21.1 20.6 12.5 11.1 12.2 6.6 100

19.9 11.5 13.0 13.0 13.6 18.7 10.2 100

196

Mary Fulbrook

under 25. The predominantly young refugees from the East thus made some small but not entirely insignificant contribution to the rejuvenation of the West German demographic structure. The breakdown by average ages over a period of years is interesting for the light shed on perceptions of opportunities among young people in the GDR in the 1950s, but it is not quite precise enough for the kind of generational analysis I am attempting here. If we look at the figures another way, it means that for those fleeing in 1953, the group of 21–29-year-olds encompasses the birth cohorts of 1924 to 1932 (‘1929ers’), while for those fleeing in 1960, the by now 21–29year-olds are the birth cohorts of 1931 to 1939 (i.e. largely the people born in the Third Reich, not the 1929ers). This generational group is of course also partially included in the figures for the 14–20-year-olds (who were the cohorts of 1933–1939 in 1953 and 1940–1946 by 1960). The 30–39-year-olds would have been, in 1953, the cohorts of 1914–1923 (HJ1) and in 1960 the cohorts of 1921–1930 (HJ1 and 1929ers). They formed 12.5% of total refugees, and 13% of the total population of the GDR at this time; their flight was therefore entirely ‘average’, as expected in view of their percentage of the population. Putting these figures together, it would seem that, while young people generally formed a higher than average percentage of refugees from East to West in the 1950s, it is likely that the ranks fleeing westwards were particularly swollen by those born in the Third Reich, as compared to preceding cohorts. In other words: this confirms the view that those born in the period after Hitler came to power were far more disaffected with the new communist regime than were those just a few years older. But at the same time, those in the older cohorts who saw better prospects in the West also took the opportunity to flee, thus perhaps further concentrating the pool of those willing to try to make a new life in the GDR, with whatever compromises that might involve. It is very difficult to be more precise on the basis of these figures, but clearly the escape route westwards was an important one reducing the proportions of committed anti-communists remaining in the GDR. It was also very closely related to social policies which affected some social groups more adversely than others. The ‘founding fathers’ of the GDR were largely members of the classic ‘Front Generation’, those who had been adults at the time of the First World War, with a small and dedicated group drawn from the War Youth generation of younger communists, including Erich Honecker, in their wake. In their selection mechanisms for vacant positions of responsibility with some political relevance—even if only at the level of the factory, school or local government—they appear to have jumped over the Nazi carrier generations (more in some areas than others, and always with exceptions), preferring the young and untainted. Those of these younger cohorts who were of the appropriate social backgrounds (preferably peasant or working class) and/or politically willing to go along with the new system and conform to its outward constraints and demands (whether or not they were positively committed to the new regime) thus had greatly

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

197

enhanced opportunities for rapid upward mobility. Given the post-war labour shortages, policies to allow women to combine motherhood and career were also particularly important. Opportunities for further education and training, paid for by the state, were massively important not only for women in the 1950s, but also often for young males returning from periods as prisoners of war, who had experienced disrupted schooling as teenagers in the closing stages of the war and were now able to catch up as young adults. These who did not fall into the preferred social and political categories still had, until 1961, the possibility of escape to the West—a possibility that was foreclosed to later cohorts of young East Germans. While the history of the flight westwards of different social groups needs to be explored in greater detail, it is striking that, for example, members of the landed upper classes (both higher and lower aristocracy) were very early in their escape westwards, often abandoning their ancestral homes and rescuing their most precious possessions well before the official expropriation in the land reform of autumn 1945. Other social groups who were disadvantaged by communist socio-economic reforms took longer to displace the family futures: doctors, for example, often sent their children to pursue university studies in the West during the 1950s while staying on in the GDR where they were themselves treated to relatively high salaries at this time. The differential birth and mortality rates in the two world wars, and the enhanced opportunities arising from the combination of political considerations, socio-economic revolution and westward emigration patterns, may go some way to explaining both the prominence of the 1929ers in comparison to previous generational groups, and also the tendency of many of them to be positive supporters of the GDR in later years—although this is a more complex point to which we shall return in a moment. But they do little to explain the differences between the 1929ers and those who were just a few years younger, products of the ‘baby boom’ of those born into the Third Reich, and who were still only children at its end. They too were untainted by participation in the structures of power of Nazi Germany; and, given the relatively high turnover of functionaries as well as constant labour shortages of the early years, one would have thought that at least the cohorts born in the 1930s would have ended up with a similar profile to those of the 1929ers. But they did not. On all analyses—whether at the level of Wer war Wer, or in the broader survey of attitudes among East Germans, or in oral history interviews—they appear to have been far less committed politically and ideologically to the new regime, and far more likely to have retained their religious beliefs and practices in the atheist state of the GDR. In so far as these cohorts did gain mention in Wer war Wer they were far more likely to have acquired a degree of fame for their activities as theologians, writers, musicians or in other areas which may be broadly subsumed under the heading of ‘culture’, than as functionaries in the apparatus of party, state, economy and security service. Something very different psychologically and emotionally appears to have been going on among these ‘Children of the Third Reich’ than among the

198

Mary Fulbrook

1929ers. Here, we need to look not merely at the actual structural opportunities offered to the succeeding cohorts, but also at the ways in which these were subjectively perceived, experienced and later remembered, or at least selectively reconstructed and given significance and meaning under later circumstances. And we need to do this not purely as an exercise in the analysis of ‘collective memories’ or ‘discourse’, but with a view to age-specific life-stage experiences. O P P O RT U N I T I E S , E X PE R I E N C E S A N D I N T E R P R E TAT I O N S One person’s ‘opportunity’ is another person’s nightmare. Rising up from the shop-floor to a position of management, with some political functions alongside a degree of responsibility for economic productivity, and associated timeconsuming engagement in the social and educational activities of the workers’ collective, is not everyone’s idea of ‘upward mobility’. Some highly qualified East Germans who remained in and even committed to the GDR indeed chose quite consciously to remain at a lower level in their workplace than they might have done, in order precisely not to have to join the SED or be prevented from contacts with close relatives who had fled to the West.²⁰ Clearly, there is a filter of perception, expectations and aspirations, through which any notion of structural opportunities has to be sieved. The consequences of political demography and socio-economic transformation are as much cultural and psychological as they are structural. To seek to make a distinction between different levels of explanation is not to override the question of their inevitable interrelationships: the levels of cultural meanings and individual understandings are as important as the wider currents of history in which people are formed and in which they seek to make the best lives they can, under often exceedingly difficult circumstances. What then of the question of ‘conversion’ experiences? What emerges if one looks for evidence of people who had been socialized under Nazism being transformed into committed communists in some way? The officially fostered literary trope is certainly one of a dramatic moment of conversion through contact with an older, inspirational representative of the workers’ movement. The fostering of the Th¨almann cult in the ‘anti-fascist state’, with ubiquitous Th¨almann statues, school and street-names, cultic centres (particularly in the former concentration camp and memorial centre of Buchenwald, where Th¨almann had been martyred by the Nazis), and associated mass youth movement of the Ernst-Th¨almann pioneers, was designed to universalize the possibility of conversion experiences for those not fortunate enough to have met an inspirational proselytizer in person. The evidence for everyday conversions—or rather, the lack of such experiences—is however generally rather more mundane. Given the less anguished mode of discourse about the Nazi past in the GDR than in the West, with its Angst-ridden culture of public shame, East German 1929ers

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

199

appear to have had fewer reservations about talking about their participation in the Nazi system than did their West German counterparts. (The most recent case of a belated revelation in the West is of course that of G¨unter Grass, who perhaps exemplifies the extremes of some aspects of the West German obsession with ‘overcoming the past’.) Analysis of the ways in which ordinary East Germans tell their life stories suggests that, unlike many West Germans, they did not feel the need to demonstrate that they had ‘always been against Nazism’ (immer dagegen) or to profess an alleged innocence which they had, in any event, been granted officially by the GDR’s official view of the character of fascism as rooted in ‘imperialist monopoly capitalism’, the products of Junkers and big capitalists rather than the responsibility of ordinary workers and peasants.²¹ But nor do they seem to have corroborated the pattern of hoped-for ideological conversions. Instead, what we have in most accounts, both on the evidence of diary entries and letters at the time, and in later ‘ego-documents’ such as memoirs and oral history interviews, is a pattern of what can best be described as a ‘muddling through’ of the early post-war years, and in a significant majority of cases a pattern of shifting political allegiances on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds. G¨unther E., for example, describes the way in which he sought to get out of American imprisonment at the end of the war.²² Discovering that there were severe restrictions on those wishing to be released who would have to cross interzonal boundaries to reach the Soviet zone of occupation, he changed his address to that of a friend in the West. He then used this as a temporary halting station on his way back to his family who were in the Soviet zone. Similar stories are told again and again of ways in which people sought to cross the zonal boundaries and reconvene with their relatives. The next priorities were food and employment, and again, both contemporary records and later accounts reiterate the pattern of day-to-day compromise, often later emplotted as tales of outwitting those in authority, getting around restrictions by some quick-witted thinking, heroic survival against all the odds in a very difficult set of circumstances: emplotment of the ‘self as hero’, rather than of the ‘Germans as victims’.²³ As in the ego-documents of the Nazi era, a strong sense of inner distance is generally conveyed between the consciously acting self, on the one hand, and outward behaviour in response to the constraints and demands of the political situation on the other. Outward conformity is temporary, conditional, instrumental, rather than evidence of any new inner commitment to the regime. What we have here—as in the Third Reich—is evidence of what I would call ‘cultural and structural availability for mobilization’ rather than ‘action resulting from individual motives’.²⁴ What motives come into play are generally those of personal and familial survival, above all else. However, over the course of time those who stayed and played the game appear to have been affected in several ways by active participation in the emergent communist system. For one thing, once sucked into the system, they were caught up in its demands. Being sent on weekend or longer political training courses in

200

Mary Fulbrook

the GDR, even on year-long training courses to the Party School in Moscow, inevitably brought with it not only the opportunity to expand one’s horizons and explore other views, but also the necessary training in learning and repeating the relevant party lines—or learning what the consequences would be if one did not. Habits of party discipline and self-discipline could be imparted in a more or less avuncular manner to young people by their older mentors, while there was the hope that the next generation would be the inspirational carriers and transmitters of the Party cause, the great hope for the future, if treated appropriately at an impressionable age. At least some of those who had been ordered around in the Hitler Youth and the army, and who were keen to get ahead in the new system, managed to internalize these lessons; others, a little older, may have found this more difficult.²⁵ There was also, to a degree which is arguably underestimated by historians, a sense of genuine excitement and enthusiasm for the building up of a new Germany: the obvious enthusiasm of young people marching and singing in the ‘First Youth Meeting in Germany’ (1. Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend) in Berlin in May 1950 was not merely orchestrated by the apparatchiks. The emphasis on world peace was one which was heartfelt by many at this point, amidst the ruins a mere five years after the end of the war.²⁶ But the question of ideological conversion is perhaps best seen in terms of learning to live according to the rules of the new system, which increasingly fostered a habit of thinking about one’s life not in the patterns typical in the West—an individual making personal ‘choices’—but rather in the more collectivist, ‘top-down’ approach characteristic of political and religious movements across the spectrum of belief systems, in terms of the self as a small cog being mobilized from above in service of a greater cause. Thus one could be available for ‘being moved’ physically, from one location to another to carry out new party duties; or, politically and socially, from one duty to another. To opt out, once in, brought with it very heavy penalties both for oneself and for one’s relatives.²⁷ Not everything in life is a matter of work or politics. It is important also to remember that lives are not entirely made up of what historians seek to select out as significant developments. The notion of ‘private lives’ is somewhat misleading—family structures, notions of romantic love or arranged marriages or pragmatic partnerships, decisions over numbers of children, availability of types of childcare, varieties of housing and so on are inevitably and always shaped by specific historical circumstances and traditions. But, given this caveat, there is an important point to be made about the ways in which people’s intimate lives and relationships develop within certain circumstances, and yet are generally subjectively experienced as running on separate tracks, in some sense disassociated from wider historical developments, unless the latter adversely impinge in such a way as to be inescapably connected (as in times of war). Of particular significance in the current context is the question of experiences of family life, and the high value attached by a majority of East Germans to the possibility of combining fulfilling family lives with a degree of satisfaction in work. The norms which

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

201

constrained behaviour in the system which developed in the GDR were, over a period of time, gradually accepted as ‘normal’, if uncomfortable; and people were strongly aware of the likely penalties for transgression of the norms. This was increasingly true, in changing ways, over the entire period of the GDR’s history, until, in 1989, under radically altered external conditions people slowly acquired the courage to mount collective challenges to SED authority and ultimately to bring it down. Widespread conformity arose as a result of a complex, pragmatic combination of responses to the GDR. There were many aspects of GDR society that a majority of East Germans later regretted losing, particularly what they saw as a very strong sense of community and togetherness, as well as the capacity to combine fulfilment in family life with satisfaction in work and a sense of basic, if always modest, economic security, despite the obvious restrictions on the fundamental human rights of freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of speech. What, then, explains the 1929ers’ apparently more positive commitment to the communist project in comparison with the largely pragmatic, ambivalent, multifaceted and often grumbling conformity of the slightly younger cohorts born during the Third Reich? After all, these cohorts were, in demographic terms, even more numerous than the 1929ers, products as they were of the ‘mini baby boom’ of the later 1930s, and, even if subjected to bombing raids on the home front, entirely spared from the risk of mortality in active combat. Moreover, the opportunities available for upward social mobility in the post-war years of labour shortage were no less for those just a few years younger than they were for the 1929ers, given the constant haemorrhaging of skilled labour to the West and the educational and professional support for those from disadvantaged backgrounds which was such a prime theme of educational policies in the 1950s, when those born in the peace-time years of the Third Reich came to young adulthood. Institutions such as the Arbeiter- und Bauern-Fakult¨aten, policies to support women, and so on, were no less relevant to someone born in the mid-1930s than to a slightly older compatriot born in the later 1920s. And the alleged ‘stagnation’ and ‘blockages’ faced by young people in the 1970s and 1980s did not yet affect the generation who were ‘children of the Third Reich’.²⁸ Here perhaps the question of the coincidence of biological age, social life-stage and broader historical developments may help to provide at least a partial and preliminary clue. Best times and worst times are asymmetrical. ‘Worst times’ are generally those of existential threat, whenever in one’s life these may occur. Thus, as mentioned, the early post-war years are remembered as the ‘worst times’ in their lives by arguably the majority of Germans who lived through this period, irrespective of age: whether one is four, fourteen, forty or eighty years old, hunger is hunger and may lead to the diseases of malnutrition, even starvation; fear and worry and bereavement are all painful, at whatever age. But curiously, ‘best times’ do tend to be very much more (though never entirely) age-specific. My questionnaires

202

Mary Fulbrook

reveal that, again and again, the ‘best times’ are seen as the times of youth, periods of forming close romantic relationships, finding a partner, the birth of children, good times with a young family—if the economic conditions are secure. (And actually there is a very strong tendency for people to engage in birth control in periods of high economic uncertainty: for example, the birth rate in eastern Germany halved in the two years following unification in 1990.) The coincidence of social life-stage and historical conditions is perhaps what is crucial for explaining the differences in attitudes towards the GDR between the 1929ers and those coming both before and after them. The months and early years after the war were periods of mass trauma. Rapes of women, robberies, near or actual starvation, political constraints and fear about the future were widespread experiences, often compounded by class- or milieuspecific phenomena: the expropriation of large estates, of factory owners, the continued squeezing of private enterprise, the recasting of professional positions, all made this a period of major upheaval and uncertainty. But for those who were young adults at the time, and available for mobilization in service of the new cause, the relative normalization of the conditions of daily life in the 1950s coincided, in their private lives, with what was often explicitly seen as the ‘making of new lives’. Thus relationships were formed, partners found, children born. The sense of working together for a better future (as in some of the tales of the early, pioneering days in the socialist new town of Stalinstadt, later renamed Eisenh¨uttenstadt) was experientially rooted in a sense of making new lives, both literally and metaphorically, in the small circle of the family.²⁹ And the joys and pleasures of partnership and parenthood lent a rosier emotional glow to the conditions in which these developments took place. In narrated life histories, the heroism of battling through in the transitional weeks and months of war’s end and uncertain peace was followed by the happier tones of a sense of a return to health and well-being, both physical and emotional, in the 1950s. Although there was in this decade no ‘normalization’ in the GDR comparable to that associated with the ‘economic miracle’ in the West, there were, in the private accounts of at least the 1929ers’ generation, some echoes of this experience.³⁰ It is these deeply felt, personal life-stage related experiences which perhaps best explain the continuing sense among members of this generation that the GDR ‘gave them new life chances’. In return, they sustained a high degree of commitment to the wider project of GDR society—accompanied, in the later Honecker years, by a growing sense of frustration at the economic decline and political mismanagement of the state in which they had made their lives. C O N C LU S I O N S Explanations of the peculiarities of the 1929ers, or the transition of the ‘second Hitler Youth generation’ to becoming staunch supporters of the GDR, will

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

203

necessarily need a complex, multi-faceted approach, taking into account both the distinctive, life-stage related experiences of this generation before and after 1945, and the interpretive frameworks through which they later sought to ‘make sense’ of their lives. Perhaps those 1929ers who subsequently became committed to the GDR were the cohorts who were only partially convinced of or emotionally bound to Nazism in the first place.³¹ As young people, the 1929ers arguably had a distinctive pattern of exposure to Nazism, without the prior experiences that predisposed the First Hitler Youth generation and the War Youth generation that they ‘needed a F¨uhrer’ to lead them out of the chaos of the Weimar years, and yet with the personal direct exposure to warfare, as teenagers or young adults, that was partially spared to later cohorts. The 1929ers thus had not personally experienced the prior problems to which Hitler was the supposed ‘solution’; and they experienced the most brutal outcomes of this ‘solution’ without, perhaps, going through the processes of emotional hardening, ideological drenching and brutalization in warfare to which cohorts only a few years older were exposed (although the differential impact of participation in different theatres and periods of war requires far more detailed exploration, as do gendered and class differences in experience). On balance, however, one might conclude that, despite socialization under Nazi auspices, the 1929ers did not develop as full or emotively laden inner commitment to the F¨uhrer state as did their older compatriots. There was concomitantly less by way of ideological and experiential baggage to be shaken off after the war, in terms of their own inner states, quite irrespective of external political considerations about degrees to which people were politically tainted. After 1945, these cohorts were the indubitably ‘untainted’. It is at this point that significance of age and life-stage becomes most relevant for seizing new opportunities in a radically new polity. At the same time, structural sieving mechanisms operated. These were in part ‘negative’: political and social exclusions, as well as the disproportionate westwards emigration of the most disaffected and disadvantaged in the new system. They were also ‘positive’, or at least proactive: once an individual had become caught up in a particular set of tracks, and was on a path of politically fostered or politically relevant upward mobility, there were psychological, social, economic and political ways of keeping the individual within a system of norms and on predefined tracks from which it was difficult or problematic to escape. Weber’s notion of the need to conform with the expectations of the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism without inner Puritan convictions arguably had its counterpart in the constraints of living in a communist system without ideological conversion. Finally, significance must be attached to the relationships between age-related life-stages with respect to the post-war reconstruction of private lives and family formation. The SED policies of fostering women, giving new life chances to previously under-privileged groups, and offering educational opportunities to

204

Mary Fulbrook

those who had never previously had such aspirations or expectations, paid off in terms of varying degrees of life-long loyalty and commitment. Such experiences had, however, to be mapped onto or incorporated within the interpretive frameworks of what was held to be authentic ‘autobiographical memory’ to be emotionally compelling. To say all this is not to posit the view that the GDR was in any way carried on a wave of popular support, let alone mass enthusiasm. It was and remained a dictatorship founded on force and sustained in the era of Cold War competition only by the effective incarceration of a largely unwilling population behind the Wall. But it does go some small way to illuminate the extraordinary, generationally distinct patterns of political commitment and disaffection, and casts some light on contemporary patterns of nostalgia for the world East Germans have lost. The turning-point of 1989–90 of course brought with it new opportunities, but also mass unemployment and existential fears among many East Germans—and it coincided with early retirement for many 1929ers. Unification with the West was seen as offering new possibilities for travel for those with the means, and new chances to explore and develop—but it was also effectively the symbolization of a dashing of a lifetime’s work for economic security and peace, and the denunciation of the GDR version of happiness as the combination of fulfilment in personal lives as well as at work—which for this generation, above all, seemed to have been the epitome of their aspirations. Unification coincided with old age, with all the attendant emotional and physical challenges. While few East Germans today would want the GDR back, one has to understand why, for the 1929ers, there was too much of their own lives bound up in the society they helped to make, however unwillingly at times, to want to renounce its legacies entirely.

No t e s 1 This

chapter expresses some ideas and findings which are more extensively explored in a book on German generations under Nazism and communism (Oxford, 2010). I am extremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting this research through the grant of a three-year Major Research Fellowship. 2 My approach to generations differs in these respects from the ‘classic’ definition of Karl Mannheim, whom I do not follow here. 3 For some sense of these debates, see for example, Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten (Hamburg, 2002); Richard Bessel, ‘The ‘‘Front Generation’’ and the Politics of Weimar Germany’, in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge, 1995), 121–36. 4 See my analysis in ‘Generationen und Kohorten in der DDR: Protagonisten und Widersacher des DDR-Systems aus der Perspektive biographischer Daten’, in Annegret Sch¨ule, Thomas Ahbe and Rainer Gries (eds.), Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicher Perspektive: Eine Inventur (Leipzig, 2005).

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR 5 Lutz

205

Niethammer, Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigene Erfahrung (Berlin, 1991). 6 I am very grateful to Silvia Dallinger for carrying out the bulk of the questionnaire administration and oral history interviews, to Esther von Richthofen and Angela Brock for additional research assistance, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting this research, which formed part of a wider project based at UCL on ‘The ‘‘Normalisation of Rule’’? State and Society in the GDR, 1961–79’. 7 A preliminary analysis of these findings may be found in my article on ‘ ‘‘Normalisation’’ in Retrospect: East German Perspectives on their Own Lives’, in M. Fulbrook (ed.), Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’? (New York and Oxford, 2009). 8 Among a large and still growing literature, see for example Alexander von Plato, ‘The Hitler Youth Generation and its Role in the Two Post-war German States’, in Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict, 210–26; Christina von Hodenberg, ‘Politische ¨ Das Beispiel der ‘‘45er’’ in der Generationen und massenmediale Offentlichkeit: Bundesrepublik’, in Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (eds.), Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg, 2005), 266–94. 9 See the very early analysis, which is rather vague on the precise years groups under study, in Helmut Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation (D¨usseldorf and Cologne, 1957). 10 Interview with Amalie H., 2005. All interviewees’ names have been changed, to protect anonymity. I have tended to give the older interviewees first names at or near the start of the alphabet, and younger ones names towards the end of the alphabet. Translations are my own. 11 These remarks, which are partially based on a reading of unpublished autobiographical essays, obviously require far more by way of discussion of the available evidence than can be included here. See also Rolf Sch¨orken, Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich: Die Entstehung eines politischen Bewußtseins (Stuttgart, 1985), 13–17. 12 See generally Michael Kater, The Hitler Youth (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). 13 See for example Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (SOPADE) 1934–1940 (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), vol. 1.2, May–June 1934, 117–18; Bernd St¨over, Berichte u¨ ber die Lage in Deutschland: Die Meldungen der Gruppe Neu Beginnen aus dem Dritten Reich 1933–1936 (Bonn, 1996), 65–6; David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution under Nazism (Oxford, 1992), 86. See also my fuller discussion of this in ‘Changing States, Changing Selves: Violence and Social Generations in the Transition from Nazism to Communism’, in M. Fulbrook (ed.), Un-Civilising Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Culture and Society: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias (Amsterdam, 2007). 14 See for example the excerpts from soldiers’ letters home in Walter Manoschek (ed.), ‘Es gibt nur eines f¨ur das Judentum: Vernichtung’: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939–1944 (Hamburg, 1995). 15 See for example the letter of a young Luftwaffenhelfer (air force auxiliary) who had only recently been confirmed and was the only one in this collection to register any explicit moral scruples or concerns about the incompatibility of Christian teachings and Nazi racist practices, in Manoschek, ‘Es gibt nur eines f¨ur das Judentum: Vernichtung’, 80.

206 16 For

Mary Fulbrook

further details see my chapter in Fulbrook (ed.), Power and Society in the GDR. for example Ursula von Kardorff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen 1942 bis 1945, ed. Peter Hartl (Munich, 1994). 18 Niethammer et al., Volkseigene Erfahrung, 450–77. 19 Figures and tables taken from Volker Ackermann, Der ‘echte’ Fl¨ uchtling: Deutsche Vertriebene und Fl¨uchtlinge aus der DDR 1945–1961, Studien zur Migrationsforschung Hrsg. Klaus Bade, 1 (Osnabr¨uck, 1995), 292–3. 20 For example, Arist E., interviewed for Behind the Wall: ‘Perfectly Normal Lives’ in the GDR? (MacayaFilm, 2007). Again, I would like to express my gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for generously sponsoring the production of this film, which includes a number of representative interviews with East Germans, related to the ‘Normalisation of Rule’ research project. 21 There is a significant literature on patterns of life-story telling which cannot be entered into here. There are clearly also inverse correlations between the degrees of real complicity in the system of terror and the level of ‘forgetting’ the details in later life: while those who had suffered were often plagued by nightmarish memories they would have liked to suppress, those who later stood accused of having caused suffering frequently evaded being brought to trial by virtue of extraordinarily widespread ‘selective amnesia’ among the network of colleagues in civilian administration and the apparatus of terror, as witness after witness appeared to have been away on leave, on business, occupied elsewhere, and allegedly had never seen—let alone actually done—anything at all. 22 Interview with G¨ unter E. (1928), summer 2005. See also Niethammer et al., Volkseigene Erfahrung. 23 There are also comparable variations with respect to the very different experiences of groups of Jewish survivors; for example, the differences in stories emphasizing Jewish ‘victimhood’, or ‘strength and resistance’ during the Third Reich. These questions cannot be considered further in this context. 24 This is a key theoretical distinction which I am developing at more length in the book to which this research relates. 25 As suggested, for example, by the remarks on her husband made by Amalie H. (born 1922), interviewed in 2005. Her husband, a former SPD member, was for a few years in the early GDR a member of the SED and participated in party training schools and ideological work, but both found this difficult to square with what they perceived as the realities of the situation. 26 Cf. again the interview with G¨ unther E., 2005. 27 See for example the discussion of his own career in Manfred Uschner, Die zweite Etage: Funktionsweise eines Machtapparates (Berlin, 1995). 28 For a discussion of those issues relating to later ‘stagnation’ and ‘blockage’, see for example, Ralph Jessen, ‘Mobility and Blockage in the 1970s’, in Konrad Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience (Oxford and New York, 1999), 341–60. It is still an open question as to whether the undoubted stagnation of the class structure, and the associated ‘mobility blockages’, really had the emotional impact posited by 17 See

The ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’ in the GDR

207

Western researchers, who may think of ‘careers’ in very different terms than East Germans thought of ‘work’. This question requires further, anthropologically sensitive, exploration. 29 See for example the interview extracts in Dagmar Semmelmann, ‘Neue Heimat Stalinstadt: Eine Collage aus Interviews’, in Evemarie Badst¨ubner (ed.), Befremdlich anders: Leben in der DDR (Berlin, 2000). 30 On normalization in post-war West Germany and western Europe, see for example: Hanna Schissler, ‘ ‘‘Normalization’’ as Project: Some thoughts on Gender Relations in West Germany during the 1950s’ and Lutz Niethammer, ‘ ‘‘Normalization’’ in the West: Traces of Memory Leading Back into the 1950s’, both in Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton, 2001), 237–65 and 359–75; also Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (eds.), Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003). 31 See for a suggestive discussion Rolf Sch¨ orken, Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich: Die Entstehung eines politischen Bewußtseins (Stuttgart, 1985), 23ff. The evidence in this book is however not very conclusive for a number of methodological reasons.

12 Tacit Minimal Consensus: The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship Thomas Lindenberger

T H E G D R — A C O L D WA R I M P O S I T I O N Among the communist dictatorships newly erected under Soviet auspices after 1945 the GDR stood out because of a double claim to be exceptional. To begin with, it was a polity which could never claim to represent the one and only nation state of the people inhabiting it. On the contrary, it was the product of the partition of a nation and its society and their splitting up into two states competing for the legitimate right to represent the German nation, or what had remained of it, after the self-inflicted catastrophe of genocide and the Second World War.¹ At the same time, the late SED state could ‘claim’ to have come closest to realizing the blueprint of a socialist people’s state² according ˇ to Marxist-Leninist dogma, probably sharing this lead position with the CSSR [Czechoslovakia]. It had the strongest economy, providing its citizens with the highest level of affluence among the states of the Comecon. But at the same time it was the least sovereign in terms of national autonomy, hosting a foreign army of 500,000 and serving as the strategic glacis area in the worst-case scenarios of its power centre, the Soviet Union. In the case of the GDR, it was not just non-war and thereby the survival of the people inhabiting the country which was safeguarded by atomic deterrence, but the very existence of the country itself. The unpopularity of communist rulers in any country set aside, it was this predicament which rendered the legitimacy of the East German dictatorship precarious in an exceptional way. Although the polity ruled by the SED seemed to consolidate itself after the construction of the Berlin Wall and in particular during the era of d´etente, it should not be forgotten that this could take place only on the basis of systematic and arbitrary application of physical violence denying guarantees of legal procedure and fair trial. Inside the GDR, this repressive state violence was basically concentrated at two sites. At the border zone to the West and in a

The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship

209

system of detention institutions (regular prisons and halfway houses, but also extra-judiciary work camps for youth), where the sparse and always precarious rights of a GDR citizen were respected the least by administrators of state authority. Both sites of state violence were to some extent ‘extraterritorial’ to East German everyday life, which could, therefore, acquire an air of relative peacefulness, modest affluence and calculability (to avoid the misleading term of ‘normality’)—at least with hindsight and in comparison with the ‘Cold Civil War’ atmosphere during the era of power acquisition in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Far from ‘believing’ in the promises and justifications of their rulers, most GDR citizens had learned over the decades to make the best of the given situation, that is playing to the rules of this conflict-avoiding arrangement within their living world while being well aware of the limits imposed on it by the aforementioned institutions of repression and physical state violence.³ S TAG E D C O N S E N S U S A N D T H E ( I R ) R E L EVA N C E OF DISSIDENCE AND OPPOSITION The communist project was based on the values of egalitarian rationalism combined with a highly exclusive avant-garde role of the Communist Party as the only possible way to realize it in practice. To moderate this obvious and fundamental incoherence of communist ideology, constant producing and reaffirming of consensus between rulers and ruled in an ostentatious way became a core element of communist self-legitimation and practice of domination. Staged pseudo-elections, the confession-like rituals of critique and self-critique, carefully orchestrated public debates about the programme of the party, demonstrations and festivals solemnly staging and thereby ‘proving’ the indissoluble unity of leaders and masses, but also the successful self-imposition of ideological limits on discussions in contexts of professional search for truth among intellectuals—seen from the party’s point of view, all these ritualistic practices reconfirmed again and again its own historic mission, its ultimate monopoly of truth, and the futility of attempts by ‘negative’ and ‘unclear’ elements to question the very sense and directionality of the communist project. Seen from the perspective of the ruled or from a standpoint outside of communist ideology, it was evident that these practices of staging and reaffirming consensus could not be taken at face value. Even the communist leaders themselves could not trust them as a sole source of loyalty, which is one of the reasons they invested so many resources in secret policing, aimed both at liquidating conscious resistance against their claims on power and truth and also at gathering knowledge about attitudes and opinions remaining inarticulate in the realm of staged consensus. On the other hand, historical enquiry must not dismiss these rituals as hollow manifestations of fictitious claims, since their material

210

Thomas Lindenberger

reality, though dependent on the threat of coercive violence, left its marks on the minds and experience of all participants involved, believers or not.⁴ Read against the grain, practices of staged consensus disclose behind-the-scenes stories of inclusion and exclusion, careful arrangements about limited licence and compromises, always motivated by the paramount goal on the part of the party to avoid at all costs spontaneity and heterogeneity, even if these could have at times supported the tenets of the party line. In the Eastern bloc, the nature and importance of continuous ideological dissent or dissidence and eventual emergence of oppositional politics against the Communist Party state varied considerably from nation to nation, depending on specific historical circumstances. In the case of the late GDR it can be assumed that it was relatively weak and decidedly much less anti-socialist in comparison to the two classical homesteads of anti-totalitarian resistance, namely Poland and Hungary, which were to some extent similar to the GDR in terms of socioeconomic structure and a pre-communist experience with modern state-building. One of the salient features of the East German dictatorship consisted in the continuous rift between the working class and the large layer of the academically trained service class. As a consequence of the lack of belief in the legitimacy of communism which had become evident during the popular uprising in June 1953, workers traded their practical loyalty to the communist leadership against an ever more elaborated system of material gratifications and a substantial say in shop-floor negotiations.⁵ By contrast, intellectuals, and in particular those who had emerged from the rank of workers and thus experienced the ‘truth’ of communist ideology as an individual career success, tended to accept the legitimacy claims of the communist project and confined the reach of their objections and criticisms to the improvement and reform of ‘real socialism’, rather than to its overthrow. In both these sections of the population, however, West Germany served as an external reference point to substantiate their own stance. Workers measured the successes and failures of the state socialist welfare state by the relative distance to West Germany’s level of affluence. Intellectuals, by contrast, accepted the claim of the Communist Party and thereby of the GDR as a whole to represent Germany’s anti-fascist legacy while rejecting the West German state as representing a stronghold of former Nazis and their most important supporters.⁶ In consequence, dissent from communist ideology and outright opposition to its rule followed a temporally different logic in the GDR in comparison with other cases in the bloc. Whereas workers learned very early on to limit their collective action to ‘unpolitical’ shop-floor bargaining, instances of mini-strikes and consumer protest included, and to leave it at that,⁷ the new, GDR-bred generations of intellectuals, captured by the myth of anti-fascism and upward social mobility, remained loyal to the socialist project and thereby the existence of the GDR, even when questioning its actual realization. It was after 1968 that this divergence became particularly marked. While Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia,

The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship

211

KOR in Poland and critical intellectuals such as Gy¨orgy Konrad and Agnes Heller in Hungary began to question the very sense of the division of Europe and the communist project, the vast majority of East German critical intellectuals continued to agonize about the reform of real socialism from within on the basis of the existence of two Germanies. T H E S E D S TAT E — A D I C TATO R S H I P B A S E D ON CONSENSUS? Since intellectuals were more inclined to have recourse to ideological arguments in order to articulate their critical stance within the socialist project than were workers who relied on occasional grumbling and their limited, but all-in-all relatively effective shop-floor powers, political repression as well as elaborate consensus strategies by the SED focused much more on certain groups of oppositional intellectuals, artists and youth subcultures than on the adult working population at large. To assess the general relevance of ruling by consensus only by referring to this sensitive area of power relations presents one major drawback. It would be to judge the whole of the SED dictatorship by looking at two—admittedly very important—antagonists: the party state and its repressive organs on the one side, the small groups of dissidents and oppositional groups on the other.⁸ But taken as social groups, they represent no more than minorities within the totality of GDR society. The fact that reaching ideological consensus between the party and intellectuals was a widespread practice within relevant professional cultures and in particular within the party itself must not be projected on to the reproduction of the party’s authority in society as a whole. It is for this reason that I cannot follow Martin Sabrow’s proposal to term the special nature of SED rule in the main as ‘consensus dictatorship’ (Konsensdiktatur).⁹ His thesis is derived principally from his seminal study on the East German historians and their interaction with SED power. It captures convincingly the communists’ firm belief in an ideal of establishing authoritative ‘truth’ through consensus-formation—something which could actually develop a binding force within the universe of the mainly sympathetic intellectuals.¹⁰ I think, however, that we would be left with an incomplete picture were we to transfer this notion to society as a whole, in particular because the same term is used, for much more convincing reasons, with regard to the relation between society and its responsibility for the Nazi dictatorship. M A P PI N G I T E M S O F TAC I T C O N S E N S U S To see the SED state as ‘consensus dictatorship’ makes sense only so far as it refers to ideological conflicts and their consensus-oriented treatment within the

212

Thomas Lindenberger

communities of the ideologically engaged (preferably academics, functionaries, artists, writers). While paying due attention to their contribution to the stabilization of the dictatorship (as well as to its destabilization in its final crisis), our enquiry should also focus on those areas where conflict and dissidence could not be handled in the mode of ideological battles because one side of the interaction, namely large parts of the working population, did not subscribe to the basic state ideology to the same extent as did the intellectuals. This view also assumes that in the absence of a majority believing in the legitimacy of the regime, the latter’s authority was not based just on the arbitrary application and threat of state violence, but also on a set of ‘unpolitical’ beliefs and norms shared by both sides of the interaction. From the point of view of the long-term development of the GDR we can, however, identify several issues which were suited for consensual interpretations of reality between the regime and a large part of the population without having to be negotiated in principle. I designate them as items of tacit consensus. They will be enumerated in order of their decreasing capacity to realize cohesion and of their need to be made explicit. Peace Regime and population were sincere about their determination to avoid war in the middle of Europe. The popular masses protesting in June 1953 knew very well that no one would risk the return of international warfare for the sake of a free unified Germany, and for the same reason, there were no lasting protests against the definite partition of the country after the building of the Berlin Wall. It is well known that the GDR population enthusiastically supported Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik precisely as a conflict-avoiding strategy of ‘change through rapprochement’ while anti-communists in other East European countries would also highlight its compromising aspect of collaboration with illegitimate dictators. The degree of possible convergence on this issue between regime and population became particularly evident during the missile crisis in the early 1980s, when the SED state had to concede some minimal leeway to the emerging autonomous peace movement around the Christian churches, even allowing a peace rally throughout the whole country dedicated to the recently deceased Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme in late summer of 1982. And it was also not by chance that widespread protests of parents against the further extension of military instruction in the school curriculum were met with partial concessions on behalf of the party in 1984. Prosperity—or a State Socialist Version of Pursuit of Happiness Although legitimated officially as part of a Grand Design of societal development for future generations, it was common sense that reconstruction and economic growth was meant to be for the sake of everyone’s future and that everyone contributing to the GDR’s economy should be entitled to share the fruits of his effort during his lifetime. Implicit negotiating about this socialist version of the ‘pursuit of

The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship

213

happiness’ began in late Stalinism, when the attempt to propel industrialization and quicken economic growth through a regime of austerity and political terror was effectively stalled by industrial unrest and rebellion, in the GDR and in the ˇ CSSR already in 1953, in Poland and Hungary in 1956 at the latest.¹¹ It was Erich Honecker who, later, having demoted Walter Ulbricht in order to put an end to his potentially destabilizing modernization policies, based his (relative) popularity on the promise: ‘How we work today, we will eat today,’ replacing the unpopular ‘How we work today, we (or our children) will eat tomorrow.’ It was a decidedly socialist notion of the pursuit of happiness in so far as both the regime and the population subscribed to its egalitarian realization, leaving comparatively little room for structural inequalities in income and above all in private property, while providing a broad base for relatively equal access to the basic avenues of consumption and public services. This had two practical consequences. The economic planning authorities had to implement a policy of consumer culture a` la GDR, claiming superiority over its West German competitor. But because it failed in the long run, this endeavour undermined the party’s aspirations to foster an independent notion of a satisfying, ‘lived’, GDR identity, which would not be predicated on the standards set by the official class enemy. In order to realize advanced consumerism at all, the insertion of the GDR into world market relations under capitalist hegemony (permitted in particular by the preferential terms of trade with West Germany) had to become a matter of ordinary administration. But both the acceptance of consumerism, socialist or not, and the orientation towards world market relations, were based on the implicit and increasingly explicit assumption that West Germany had to serve as the natural yardstick and as the gateway for the GDR’s own economic advancement. Work The idea of prosperity was also socialist in so far as the individual could partake in it only via integration in work collectives which were formed following the model of workshop teams in industry. ‘Real’ work was therefore usually understood as physical work in the producing sector, whose ‘brigades’ and ‘collectives’ also provided the all-encompassing framework for sociability. The flip-side of this collectivist work ethos can be seen not only in instances of the decrying of individual achievement orientation as ‘careerism’, but also in the punitive discrimination and exclusion of all individuals labelled as ‘workshy’ or ‘asocial’. As in all communist dictatorships, the GDR also criminalized individuals who made their living outside regular work relations, whether this involved illegal behaviour or not. The basic norm underlying this practice—‘he who wants to eat, has to work (in a decent way)’—was widely shared by the regime and the population.¹² Individual Security Concomitant with the war-avoiding outlook on international politics, individual security such as that provided by an omnipresent welfare state was held in high regard by both the regime and the population. Although the

214

Thomas Lindenberger

Soviet Union served as the model for the bright future in official statements, it was clear that the real yardstick in this regard were the West European welfare states such as West Germany, Sweden or pre-Thatcherite Great Britain and that ruling out the risk of mass unemployment was regarded as a decisive argument in favour of the GDR’s economic and social system. Family Life It was fully accepted by the regime that apart from the workplace as the central site of sociability, the small, two-generation family around a heterosexual partnership provided the legitimate area of individual satisfaction and its projection into the future. Notwithstanding official ideology, this implied a de facto legitimacy of a respected private sphere. The housing construction programmes embodied this element of consensus in a particularly evident way. After some experimenting in the era of late Stalinism with high quality apartment house building which could only serve as an incentive for top achievers among the workforce, it was the economically designed apartment in the prefabricated tenement building which came to symbolize the site of privacy of ‘normal’ GDR citizens (apart from their weekend datschas).¹³ It is not by chance, therefore, that the celebratory handing-over of the 500,000th, millionth, etc. apartment in the housing construction programme to its new inhabitants counted among the favourite occasions on which to reiterate the close unity between the party and the population. Women’s Work ‘Work’ and ‘family’ values combined with the notion of fulltime work for women, including mothers of toddlers, as a standard expectation shared both by the regime and by large parts of the population. Promoted by the party from the 1950s in order to mobilize the reserves of female labour, female work was at the same time emphatically supported by women as a way of female emancipation and self-realization, as argued by the classics of the socialist workers’ movement. Although one can also ascribe this policy to the party’s aim of gaining control over the totality of the adult population by inserting women into the universe of state-controlled gainful employment, its acceptance by women and men as a basic precondition of social life can hardly be overestimated. The concomitant infrastructure of childcare institutions from cr`eches to all-day kindergartens and schools to holiday camps with the state youth organization became part and parcel of a pervasive work-and-family oriented lifestyle. At the same time this item could serve as an obvious indicator of difference from West Germany, where social and public life were constructed around the model of the male-breadwinner/housewife well into the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁴ Of all consensual items in our list, gainful female employment and the acceptance of public childcare institutions turned out to be the most persistent items after unification. In East Germany, the levels both of ‘female inclination to gainful employment’ (weibliche Erwerbsneigung) and of the communal infrastructure permitting it are significantly higher than in West Germany even today.

The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship

215

Public Order and Security Alongside the general orientation towards conformist behaviour and decency as promoted within and around the social universe of the workshop, orderliness in public spaces as an integral part of stable and accountable living conditions was considered very important. This was an attitude the regime could count on when offering ‘unpolitical’ protection of security to the extent that it could recruit a large number of GDR citizens for voluntary assistance to executive organs such as the regular police (Volkspolizei), the fire brigades, the civil defence units and so on. The unquestioned prevalence of such ‘secondary virtues’ as ‘public order’, cleanliness and decency enabled the regime to follow a tough line with all manifestations of deliberate non-conformist behaviour, in particular in respect of youth and alternative subcultures, which were criminalized as ‘rowdies’ and ‘asocials’.¹⁵ This enumeration of items of unspectacular and thereby more or less tacit consensus does not claim to be either complete or very original. But given the fixation on arbitrary repression on the one hand and acts of conscious resistance on the other, prevalent in much of the literature which tries to explain the functioning of the late communist dictatorships, it is necessary to insist on such ‘banal’ factors if we want to understand the relative stability and functionality of communist rule in countries such as the GDR. These items referred to basic values on which the party and most people could agree without necessarily invoking ‘socialism’. By and in themselves they are more or less unspecific with regard to any particular political system. Societal consensus on such values were a generic feature of industrial societies in the middle of the twentieth century, the age often characterized as ‘Fordist’, when, for the first time in history, welfare and affluence during their lifetime came within reach of the large majority—in the West, and with some delay, also in the East. It was, however, exactly the unspecific ubiquity of these values which would render them highly problematic for the Communist Party dictatorship. Once the material basis for their realization began to deteriorate dramatically, and once the Soviet Union resigned from its role as guarantor of communist rule in the region, these aspirations and expectations could easily be projected towards the Western system and its holders of power. ‘ U S ’ A N D ‘ T H E M ’ : I N S TA N C E S O F C O N S E N S U S W I T H A H I D D E N S U BT E X T Besides the set of items referring to basic norms of collective and individual existence without being specifically ‘communist’, there was another set of values representing the ‘humanistic’ ideals and claims of the Marxist-Leninist worldview which were propagated at length and in fatiguing monotony by the state socialist propaganda machine. In their essential meaning, values such as ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘internationalism’—even ‘Friendship with the Soviet

216

Thomas Lindenberger

Union’—would be accepted by most GDR citizens thanks to their banal generality. It is important to note, however, that these vocally propagated slogans also contained hidden messages regarding the possible common understanding between the regime and the population about the identity of the collective ‘own’. The most obvious case in this regard is ‘anti-fascism’: the way in which it was communicated by the SED implied that every GDR citizen had ended up on the ‘good’ side of history, and was therefore exculpated from possible earlier commitments on the ‘wrong’ side, the responsibility for Nazism having been ascribed to the West German competitor. ‘Us’ were thereby only anti-fascists, ‘them’ by definition ‘fascists’ or at least ‘imperialists’ and ‘militarists’—a welcome justification for not asking unsettling questions about the former involvement of ‘ordinary’ East Germans in Nazi crimes. One side-effect of this way of (not) handling the recent past was represented by the unexpected tide of neo-Nazi youth groups in the 1980s.¹⁶ Another value of paramount importance for the self-understanding of the SED was ‘internationalism’ or ‘international solidarity’. One should always read this term with the emphasis on its second half: ‘inter-nationalism’. The basic notion of ‘nation’ and the legitimacy of—of course ‘progressive’—nationalism was never questioned and remained unchanged, even when the SED began to experiment with notions of a ‘socialist nation’ in Germany in order to avoid the concept of a ‘German nation’ altogether. The conceptual prevalence of ‘nation’, also evident in the GDR’s diplomatic efforts to gain international recognition, barred any relativizing of its ontological primacy. This became evident in xenophobic attitudes prevalent in the population at large, but also observable in the regime’s treatment of foreigners in conflict situations. The SED continuously staged rituals of ‘internationalist solidarity’ but would treat any initiatives of rank-and-file internationalism and solidarity with the third world with suspicion. International black pop culture was revered as anti-imperialist, but when applying for a permit to marry a black partner from Cuba or Mozambique, GDR citizens could expect to get the application form for expatriation together with the permit—a matter on which there was a de facto consensus between the socialist state and the majority of its citizens.¹⁷ The highly ritualized ‘Society for German–Soviet Friendship’ represents, however, a particularly paradoxical case of consensus with a hidden subtext. On the one side it was obvious that for the overwhelming majority of its 6.4 million members (1988), this was a purely ‘official’ and ‘formal’ commitment, largely motivated by the necessity to document the required minimal amount of ‘societal engagement’. At the same time, the actual presence of the Soviet Union inside the GDR in the form of some 500,000 Red Army troops was relegated to the fringes of the public realm, thanks to gated garrisons and little visibility in the media. This was done partly in order to rule out conflicts between this de facto occupation power and the population, but also in order to isolate the Soviet troops from any contact with the considerably higher standard of living of their

The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship

217

‘brother nation’. Of course the technical and economic superiority of the GDR over the Soviet Union was a well-known fact as were the political reasons for not speaking about it in public in the GDR.¹⁸ This implicit and inarticulate subtext of the ritualized friendship discourse was shattered, however, at the moment when its precondition, namely the Soviet Union’s claims to its own infallibility as the model for communism, was given up by the Soviet Union itself. ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’ crushed the parameters which had permitted four decades of feigned friendship declarations, to be replaced rather paradoxically by a sincere interest in the Soviet Union. For instance, thousands of GDR citizens protested in 1987 against the banning of Sputnik, a reader’s digest of Soviet press articles issued in German. ‘Learning from the Soviet Union!’ now indicated open dissent.¹⁹ These areas of tacit and sub-textual consensus were all covering up the basic fact that the state’s claim to represent, in its early years, ‘the’ nation of Germany in its true and progressive essence and then, subsequently, a ‘socialist nation’ of its own (just happening to be German), was never wholeheartedly accepted. There were moments when GDR citizens displayed something like an accepted separate identity and manifested their ‘GDRness’ for instance during the Olympic Games²⁰ or in celebrating the legendary victory over the West German soccer team during the 1974 World Cup.²¹ But such articulations of an accepted GDR identity remained precarious. GDR gold medals were recognized as underlining the achievement of their own polity and thereby served as an element of consensus with the state, but this did not increase enthusiasm for the communist cause. ‘ P O P U L A R ’ A N D ‘ P U B L I C ’ O PI N I O N S ? Finally we have to face the question of how and where ‘popular’ and/or ‘public’ opinions figure within this precarious mixture of consensual items, partly explicit, partly implicit, and always surrounded by taboos, tight media control and severely restricted freedom in the articulation of deviating opinions as such. Explicit opinions, that is statements on concrete issues, and not just indirect expressions of opinion through non-verbal behaviour, could only exist in legitimate form when articulated individually, restricted to local issues and on occasions defined by the party. The most common form was through petitions addressed to all kinds of authorities within the party and state structure, most of them dealing with the perennial lack of housing, consumer items and travel permits, together with a broad range of other grievances. These petitions often ‘talked politics’ by invoking ‘socialism’, but this has to be read as merely proving the petitioners’ mastery of the official political language and nothing else. Evaluating petitions in a systematic fashion was a basic routine of all party and state institutions in order to reduce the impediments to substantial public communication.²² This was complemented by extensive information-gathering

218

Thomas Lindenberger

by state organs, in particular the Ministry for State Security, but also by mass organizations such as the trade unions, and by the party itself.²³ By contrast, systematic and anonymous opinion polls remained a rarity in East Germany with the notable (and of course unpublished) exception of the polls conducted by the Leipzig institute for youth research.²⁴ Thus the regime found several ways to get to know ‘opinions’ among GDR citizens, but only through the channels it had created and which it controlled itself. Opinions came in as raw material, separated and individually. Uncontrolled connection between them was abhorred by the party as creating oppositional ‘platforms’. It was, therefore, the party which had to do the evaluation work, which under other political conditions can be achieved through public spheres with their specific mechanisms. The longer the regime existed and the more it was addressed by the citizens making their claims in an increasingly self-conscious but utterly ‘correct’ manner, the more the regime felt the need to find out about people’s ‘real’ opinion through informal ways, and in the end, the more it was overburdened by managing the flow of information it had encouraged and instigated with its own information-gathering policies.²⁵ These official and unofficial, highly fragmented, and tightly controlled channels inside the GDR allowed for a seismographic surveillance and control of manifestations of ‘popular opinions’ which, however, could never gain the expressive quality of a public opinion as it is generally associated with the existence ¨ of public spheres (Offentlichkeit) with a normative loading. In an indirect and partial way, some of the issues and agendas of the ‘grumble society’ (Andrew Port) were also represented and articulated through the mere presence and accessibility of West German radio and television, but the practical relevance of this rudimentary Ersatz¨offentlichkeit should not be overestimated. As recent studies on media usage behaviour have shown, most East Germans combined domestic and Western media according to the practical needs of everyday life, and turned to favouring Western programmes only in times of increased political activity when the reliability of information about politics moved to the centre of their interest.²⁶ C O N C LU S I O N : A D I C TATO R S H I P B A S E D O N TAC I T MINIMAL CONSENSUS To sum up this list of actually existing items, one can speak of a relevant area of consensus between the communist regime and the population, but in the form of a tacit minimal consensus lacking an expressive and autonomous representation and a positive symbolization. The very notion of minimal consensus in the conventional sense, that is the explicitly acknowledged coexistence of elements of consensus and dissent, remained

The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship

219

incompatible with the identity-based and holistic build-up of the socialist state ideology. An open minimal consensus policy would have implied room for legitimate plurality within the realm of domination. That this could happen within state socialist dictatorships was shown in their late phases by the ‘people’s republics’ of Poland and Hungary. Here, the transition to democracy began in the 1980s with a protracted process of negotiation among representatives of an increasingly pluralized political sphere. SED leaders did everything to forestall such a scenario in their own backyard. By contrast, potential plurality—alternatives to the existing state of affairs—was shown to reside outside the GDR’s own idyll of real socialism: as an example to deter pluralism one could point to the negative consequences of deviation from orthodoxy in the East (Hungary and the counter-revolution; Czechoslovakia and the restoration of capitalism allegedly imminent in 1968; Poland and the chaos allegedly created by Solidarno´sc´ and the reactionary church). In an all-embracing, positive sense, one could point to the West, where the enduring crisis of late capitalism led to a continuous strengthening of pluralist ‘progressive forces’ (peace movement, trade unions, ecological movements) with whom one could sympathize from a safe distance. There was, however, one, completely and thoroughly negative, highly visible, symbol of the GDR’s tacit minimal consensus: the Wall. It had been accepted grudgingly by the GDR population because they did not want to risk an atomic war. Everyone knew that the Wall was the way in which the GDR could gain stability and some affluence, both values on whose acceptance the regime could count as long as the world was divided up between the two hemispheres. Things changed dramatically when this precondition eroded. The first truly negotiated public consensus between the GDR leadership and GDR population emerged in the weeks after Honecker’s demotion on 18 October 1989. Already for weeks the issue of freedom of travel had become a key issue both for the demonstrating masses and for the new Wende-oriented Politburo. New regulations abandoning the policy of extreme restrictions on travel were expected by the first week of November. It was to become possible to apply for ‘permanent exit and private travel’ to the West ‘without presenting [the heretofore necessary] requirements’ such as permits and invitations, and this would be put into effect ‘immediately, without delay’ (‘sofort, unverz¨uglich’). The evening press conference on 9 November, during which a somewhat disoriented spokesman of the Politburo, G¨unter Schabowski, announced this most recent decision of the GDR government, was broadcast live to all GDR households. However, what this somewhat unclear declaration meant in concrete was left open to interpretation and therefore negotiation. GDR citizens, alerted and electrified in their homes, started to negotiate—‘immediately, without delay’—by taking to the streets. Within hours, an overwhelming, literally path-breaking, consensus was reached when thousands of Berliners at the

220

Thomas Lindenberger

checkpoints of the inner-city border persuaded a recalcitrant leadership to accept their interpretation of Schabowski’s press communication: ‘The Wall is open.’²⁷

No t e s 1

Cf. Christoph Kleßmann (ed.), The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-War German History (Oxford and New York, 2001); in particular, idem, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., 1–5. Always a classic, idem, Die doppelte Staatsgr¨undung: Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1955 (Bonn, 1986); idem, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte 1955–1970 (Bonn, 1988). For an exhaustive overview on GDR historiography see Rainer Eppelmann et al. (eds.), Bilanz und Perspektiven der DDR-Forschung (Paderborn et al., 2003). 2 Cf. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven and London, 2005). 3 Thomas Lindenberger, ‘SED-Herrschaft als soziale Praxis, Herrschaft und ‘‘EigenSinn’’: Problemstellung und Begriffe’, in Jens Gieseke (ed.), Staatssicherheit und Gesellschaft: Studien zum Herrschaftsalltag in der DDR (G¨ottingen, 2007), 23–47. 4 See the seminal study on the Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union by Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda f¨ur die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Cologne, 2006). 5 See the classic study by Peter H¨ ubner, Konsens, Konflikt und Kompromiss: soziale Arbeiterinteressen und Sozialpolitik in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1970 (Cologne, 1995). For a microhistorical study on shop-floor relations in East Germany see the seminal study by Sandrine Kott, Le communisme au quotidien: Les entreprises d’Etat dans la soci´et´e est-allemande (Paris, 2001). 6 Cf. Sigrid Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft: Zum Paradox von Stabilit¨ at und Revolution in der DDR 1945–1989 (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). 7 Cf. the rich study by Andrew Port, based on the mining town of Saalfeld; Andrew Port, Conflict and stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge, 2007). 8 This is also one of the flaws in the world-renowned, Oscar-winning film The Lives of the Others; for a critical assessment see my ‘Stasiploitation—Why Not? The Scriptwriter’s Historical Creativity in The Lives of the Others’, German Studies Review 31:3 (2008), 557–66, and the contributions by Mary Beth Stein, Jens Gieseke, Manfred Wilke and Cheryl Dueck, ibid. 9 Martin Sabrow in this volume. 10 Martin Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses: Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR 1949–1969 (Cologne, 2001). 11 Cf. Muriel Blaive, Une d´estalinisation manqu´ee: Tch´ecoslovaquie 1956 (Brussels, 2005). 12 Thomas Lindenberger, ‘ ‘‘Asociality’’ and Modernity: The GDR as a Welfare Dictatorship’, in Katherine Pence, Paul Betts (eds.), Socialist Modern: East German Everyday

The Always Precarious East German Dictatorship

221

Culture and Politics. Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany (Ann Arbor, 2008), 211–233. 13 Cf. Jay Rowell, Le totalitarisme au concret: les politiques du logement en RDA (Paris, 2006). 14 See Thomas Lindenberger, ‘Everyday History: New Approaches to the History of the Post-War Germanies’, in Kleßmann (ed.), Divided Past, 43–67. 15 See Thomas Lindenberger, Volkspolizei: Herrschaftspraxis und o ¨ffentliche Ordnung im SED-Staat, 1952–1968 (Cologne, 2003), ch. 9; Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000). 16 Patrice G. Poutrus, ‘Alles unter Kontrolle? Zur Bedeutung der BStU-Quellen f¨ ur die zeithistorische Migrationsforschung’, in Gieseke (ed.), Staatssicherheit, 318–38, esp. 333–8; Heinrich Sippel and Walter S¨uß, Staatssicherheit und Rechtsextremismus (Bochum, 1994). 17 Cf. the studies in Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, Patrice G. Poutrus (eds.), Fremde und Fremd-Sein in der DDR, Zu den historischen Ursachen der Fremdenfeindlichkeit in Ostdeutschland (Berlin, 2003); Jan Behrends, Patrice Poutrus, ‘Xenophobia in the former GDR—explorations and explanation from a historical perspective’, in Wojciech Burszta et al. (eds.), Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms in State-Endowed and Stateless Nations. Vol 1: Europe (Pozna´n, 2005), 155–170; Poutrus, ‘Alles unter Kontrolle?’ 18 See Silke Satjukow, Besatzer: Die ‘Russen’ in Deutschland 1945–1994 (G¨ ottingen, 2008). 19 Martin Sabrow, ‘Die Wiedergeburt des klassischen Skandals: Offentliche ¨ Emp¨orung in der sp¨aten DDR’, in Sabrow (ed.), Skandal und Diktatur: Formen o¨ffentlicher Emp¨orung im NS-Staat und in der DDR (G¨ottingen, 2004), 231–60, esp. 244–57. 20 Cf. Uta A. Balbier, Kalter Krieg auf der Aschenbahn: der deutsch–deutsche Sport 1950–1972: Eine politische Geschichte (Paderborn, 2007). 21 Christoph Kleßmann, ‘Das Sparwasser-Tor 1974: Sieg u ¨ ber den Klassenfeind, Ende der ‘‘Alleinvertretung’’, Zufallstreffer oder was sonst’, in Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg: Nachrichten aus der Forschungsstelle f¨ur Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH) 2006 (Hamburg, 2007), 13–30. 22 Judd Stziel, ‘Shopping, Sewing, Networking, Complaining: Consumer Culture and the Relationship between State and Society in the GDR’, in Pence and Betts (eds.), Socialist Modern, 253–86. 23 See contributions by Jens Gieseke, Siegfried Suckut, Frank Joestl and Ralph Jessen, in Gieseke (ed.), Staatssicherheit. 24 Evelyn Brislinger, Brigitte Hausstein and Eberhard Riedel (eds.), Jugend im Osten: sozialwissenschaftliche Daten und Kontextwissen aus der DDR sowie den neuen Bundesl¨andern (1969 bis 1995) (Berlin, 1997). 25 See also Jens Gieseke, Mielke-Konzern: Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945–1990 (Stuttgart and Munich, 2001), ch. 5. 26 On this issue, see the vast research of Michael Meyen, among others, Michael Meyen, Denver Clan und Neues Deutschland: Mediennutzung in der DDR (Berlin, 2003);

222

Thomas Lindenberger

Michael Meyen and Ute Nawratil, ‘The Viewers: Television and Everyday Life in East Germany’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24:3 (2004), 355–64. 27 Hans-Hermann Hertle, ‘The Fall of the Wall: The Unintended Self-Dissolution of East Germany’s Ruling Regime’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin 12 (Winter/Spring 2001), 131–40, 136.

Select Bibliography The literature on many of the regimes dealt with in this book is already vast and much of it is obviously in the language of the country to which it refers. This brief bibliography limits itself to proposing a few titles in English that deal more or less directly with the question of popular opinion in the various regimes. Further references can, of course, be found in the endnotes to the chapters. Two general works which may serve as a useful introduction to the argument are: Borejsza, Jerzy W. and Klaus Ziemer (eds.), Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes in Europe: Legacies and Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford, 2006). L¨udtke, Alf (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995). RU S S I A , S OV I E T U N I O N David-Fox, Michael, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, 1997). Davies, Sarah, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1933–1941 (Cambridge, 1997). Engel, Barbara A. and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, 1997). Filtzer, Donald, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002). Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992). Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999). Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton and Oxford, 2005). Fitzpatrick, Sheila (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000). Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Michael Geyer (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism: Nazism and Stalinism Compared (Cambridge, 2009). Halfin, Igal, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000). Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh, 2007). Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Holquist, Peter, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

224

Select Bibliography

Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995). Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1929–1939 (Ithaca, 2001). Morrissey, Susan, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (New York, 1998). Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997). Plamper, Jan, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Ithaca, 2009). Rossman, Jeffrey J., Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York, 1989). Siegelbaum, Lewis H. and Andrei Sokolov, Stalinism as a Way of Life (New Haven, 2000). Steinberg, Mark, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia (Ithaca, 2002). Viola, Lynne, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York and Oxford, 1987). Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1996). Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2002). Yurchak, Alexei, Everything was Forever, until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006). NAZI GERMANY Bankier, David, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford, 1992). Bankier, David (ed.), Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941 (New York, Oxford and Jerusalem, 2000). Bessel, Richard (ed.), Life in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987). Caplan, Jane (ed.), Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason (Cambridge, 1995). Gellately, Robert, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1990). Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001). Goldhagen, Daniel J., Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York, 1996). Harvey, Elizabeth, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford, 1993). Herbert, Ulrich, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1997). Herf, Jeffrey, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Johnson, Eric A., Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 1999). Kater, Michael, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders (Oxford, 1983). Kershaw, Ian, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933–45 (Oxford, 1983).

Select Bibliography

225

The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987). Koonz, Claudia, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (London, 1987). Mason, Tim, Social Policy in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1993). Peukert, Detlev, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, 1982). Pine, Lisa, Nazi Family Policy 1933–45 (Oxford and New York, 1997). Stephenson, Jill, Women in Nazi Germany (London, 2001). Hitler’s Home Front: W¨urttemberg under the Nazis (London, 2006). POLAND 1945 – 89 Bernhard, Michael and Henryk Szlajfer (eds.), From the Polish Underground: Selections from ‘Krytyka’ 1978–1993 (Pennsylvania, 1995). Brandys, Kazimierz, A Warsaw Diary 1978–81 (London, 1984). Garton-Ash, Timothy, We the People: The Revolutions of 1989 (New York, 1993). The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (rev. edn London, 1999). Gross, Jan T., Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988). Hayden, J., Poles Apart: Solidarity and the New Poland (Blackrock, 1994). Kenney, Padraic, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists 1945–50 (Ithaca and London, 1997). Mason, David, Public Opinion and Political Change in Poland 1980–1982 (Cambridge, 1985). Taras, Ray, Ideology in a Socialist State: Poland 1956–1983 (Cambridge, 1984). Poland: Socialist State, Rebellious Nation (London, 1986). FAS C IS T ITALY Bosworth, Richard, Mussolini’s Italy (London, 2005). De Grazia, Victoria, The Culture of Consent (Cambridge, 1981). How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Los Angeles, 1992). Dunnage, Jonathan, Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History (London, 2002). Forgacs, David (ed.), Rethinking Italian Fascism (London, 1986). Gentile, Emilio, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Koon, T. H., Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy (Chapel Hill, 1985). Morgan, Philip, The Fall of Mussolini (Oxford, 2007). Passerini, Luisa, Fascism in Popular Memory (Cambridge, 1987). Quine, Maria S., Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism (Basingstoke, 2002). Stille, Alexander, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism (New York, 1993). Willson, Perry, The Clockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford, 1993). Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali (London, 2002).

226

Select Bibliography GDR: EAST GERMANY

Allinson, Mark, Politics and Popular Opinion in East Germany 1945–68 (Manchester, 2000). Childs, David, The Fall of the GDR (Harlow, 2001). Fulbrook, Mary, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR 1949–1989 (Oxford, 1995). The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven and London, 2005). (ed.), Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’? (New York and Oxford, 2009). Garton-Ash, Timothy, The File: A Personal History (London, 1997). Jarausch, Konrad H. (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford, 1999). and Michael Geyer (eds.), Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). Klessmann, Christoph (ed.), The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-War German History (Oxford and New York, 2001). Major, Patrick and Jonathan Osmond (eds.), The Workers’ and Peasants’ State: Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester, 2002). Port, Andrew, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge, 2007). Pritchard, Gareth, The Making of the GDR 1945–53: From Antifascism to Stalinism (Manchester, 2000). Roseman, Mark (ed.), Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge, 1995). Ross, Corey, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London, 2002). Woods, Roger, Opposition in the GDR under Honecker 1971–1985 (London, 1986).

Index

Adenauer, Konrad 85, 193 Afinogenov, Alexander 22 Alexopoulos, Golfo 22 Alltagsgeschichte 4–5 and Bavaria Project 34 and disconnection from ideology 55 and meaning of 5 Andersen, Nexø Martin 173 Arendt, Hannah 55, 76 n4 Assorodobraj, Nina 154 Badoglio, Pietro 140 Bailes, Kendall 28 n14 Bakhtin, Mikhail 67 Bavaria Project 33–4 Becker, Jean-Jacques 70 Beier, Helen 26 Benjamin, Hilde 174 Berlin Wall 219, 220 Berlusconi, Silvio 13 n3 Bierut, Boleslaw 152, 163 blackmail, and regimes’ power of 9 Bloch, Ernst 170, 172 Bourdieu, Pierre 73 Brandenberger, David 22–3 Brandt, Willy 212 Brecht, Bertolt 170, 172 Brezhnev, Leonid 71 Broszat, Martin 33–4 Campolo, Michele 130 Charter 77 210 Christian church, and Nazi Germany 108 Protestants 39, 82, 111–12 Roman Catholics 39, 111, 112 Cicero 150 civil society, and totalitarian regimes 24 Clark, Katerina 19 Cold War, and interpretation of totalitarianism 1–2, 3–4 Conquest, Robert 66 conscience, and problems of 6 corruption: and Italian fascism 130–1 and totalitarian regimes 10 Czechoslovakia 151, 208, 210, 219

Dabrowska, Maria 160, 164 Davies, Sarah 20, 23, 67–8, 69, 70 De Felice, Renzo 4, 123–4 De Grazia, Victoria 124 Dygat, Stanislaw 156 East Germany, see German Democratic Republic Eichmann, Adolf 85 Eigen Sinn 5 Evans, Richard 36 Fainsod, Merle 76 n6 Federal Republic of Germany: and coming to terms with Nazi period 198–9 and Hitler Youth Generation, prominence of 187–8 and War Youth generation 194 see also German Democratic Republic; Germany Feltri, Clodo 131, 132 Feuchtwanger, Lion 180 and blindness to nature of Soviet Union 170 and criticism of Soviet Union 169 and explanations of support for Soviet Union 170–1 and intellectual vanity 171 and meeting Stalin 168, 171 and Moscow 1937 168 and perception of consensus in Soviet Union 169–70 and praise for Soviet Union 168 and propaganda trials in Soviet Union: confidence in 173 justification of 170–3 nature of confessions 172 and role of reason in Soviet Union 169–70 and tour of Soviet Union 168 and Waiting Room trilogy 168–9 Filtzer, Donald 23 Fischer, Ernst 173 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 10, 68, 76 n11 Foucault, Michel 69, 175 French Revolution 17 Friedrich, Carl 174

228

Index

Friedrich, Walter 179 Fulbrook, Mary 10, 177 Galen, Clemens von 41 Garlicki, Andrzej 156 Gellately, Robert 35–6, 37 general will 17 generations: and concept of 185 and generational change 10 and impact of social and political events 184–5 see also German Democratic Republic, Hitler Youth Generation Gentile, Emilio 124, 125 German Democratic Republic (GDR): and Berlin Wall 219, 220 and ‘Children of the Third Reich’ 197–8 and consensus dictatorship 211–12 collapse of 179 conditions for formation of 176–7 consensual criticism 177–8 construction of 175 continuous extortion of 177 cult of consensus 174–5 decline of 178–9 impact on historical methodology 175 legitimating function 179–80 limits of dissent 178 phases of 178 role of 176 and creation of ideal-type enemy 177 and cultural unity 176–7 and denazification 194 and detention institutions 209 and dissidence 210–11 and dual reality 9, 178 and economic development 212–13 and exceptional nature of regime 208 and experiences of immediate post-war years 192–3 and foundation of 193 and freedom of travel 219–20 and Front generation 196 and generational change 10 and Hitler Youth Generation 185–8 acceptance of norms of behaviour 200–1 age-related experiences of Nazism 189–91 commitment to communism 186–7, 201–2 conversion experiences 198–9, 200 demographic factors explaining prominence 193 differences between age cohorts 188–9

enthusiasm of 200 explaining prominence of 186–7, 188, 197, 202–4 first Hitler Youth generation 189, 190–1 imposition of party discipline 199–200 life-stage related experiences 202, 203–4 ‘making new lives’ 202 nature of opportunities 198 opportunities for 194, 196–7, 201 political pragmatism 199, 200 political prominence of 185–6 role of 185 second Hitler Youth generation 189–90 socialization under Nazism 185, 203 studies of 186–7 war experiences 190–1 westward emigration 195–6, 197, 203 and information-gathering by state organs 217–18 and intellectuals 210–11 ideological consensus 211 and legitimacy of 208, 210 and national identity 217 and petitions to authorities 217 and political repression 211 and public consensus 219–20 and public/popular opinion 217–18 and repressive state violence 208–9 and secret police 209 and social homogeneity 176 and sovereign weakness 208 and staged consensus 209–10 and sub-textual consensus 215–16 anti-fascism 216 friendship with Soviet Union 216–17 internationalism 216 nationalism 216 and tacit consensus 212, 215 childcare institutions 214 family life 214 individual security 213–14 peace 212 prosperity 212–13 public order and security 215 women’s work 214 work 213 and tacit minimal consensus 218–19 and unacceptability of conflict 175 and uncontested power of Socialist Unity Party 176 and War Youth generation 194 and West Germany as reference standard 210, 213, 214 see also Federal Republic of Germany; Germany

Index Germany: and coming to terms with Nazi period 4 see also Federal Republic of Germany; German Democratic Republic; Nazi Germany Gide, Andr´e 168, 171 Globke, Hans 85 Goebbels, Joseph 82, 97, 191 Goldhagen, Daniel 35 Gomulka, Wladyslaw 161 Göring, Hermann 82 Graham, Loren 28 n14 Grass, Günter 199 Graziosi, Andrea 67 Gribaudi, Maurizio 124 Grynszpan, Hershel 92 Habermas, J 2 Hagen, Mark von 68 Hager, Kurt 178–9 Halberstam, Michael 61 n11 Halfin, Igal 21 Hanfmann, Eugenia 26 Hanson, Stephen 62 n23 Harich, Wolfgang 174, 178 Harvard Interview Project 17, 65 and Soviet Union 25–6 Havel, Vaclav 10 Hellbeck, Jochen 6, 7, 10, 11, 21, 22, 25 Heller, Agnes 211 Herf, Jeffrey 46 n25 Hesse, Carla 76 n10 Heydrich, Reinhard 82, 97, 98 Hiller, Kurt 172 Hitler, Adolf 37, 95 and approval of leadership 39, 40 and decline in popularity 41 and Kristallnacht 97 and Nuremberg Laws 91 and reintroduction of military service 40 and reports on popular opinion 82 and tasks of Nazi Party 108 Holquist, Peter 68, 72 Honecker, Erich 175, 178, 186, 196, 213, 219 ideology: and Alltagsgeschichte 55 and appeal to individuals 55 and disappearance from scholarly vocabulary 54–5 and individual production of 21, 55–6 and individuals as ideological agents 56–7 and internalization of 7, 51 and nature of 55 and popular opinion 6–7 and world-view 57

229

individual: and agency within totalitarian regimes 5 and dual reality 8, 9 Soviet Union 25–6 and first-person narratives 52–3 as ideological agent 56–7 and ideology 56 appeal of 55 production of 21, 55–6 and internalization of ideology 7, 51 and public/private spheres 5–6 and rationalization 56, 57 and reflexive self 7 and transformation of self 7–8 Stalinist Russia 20–1, 51, 54, 58 Inkeles, Alex 17, 65 Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) 33 Italian fascism, and popular opinion: and absence of war guilt 4 and attitudes towards Mussolini 139–40 and dual reality 9, 139 and economic hardship 141 and fascist militia (MVSN) 133 and foreign policy 140–1 and gap between objectives and outcomes 140 and historiography of: culturalist school 125 debate over consensus for 4, 123–4 fascist ideology 124 good Italian/bad fascist distinction 122–3 as political issue 124, 125–6 social history 124 women’s history 124 and lack of allegiance to fascist values 139 and legitimation 127 and local contact with fascism 128 and local origins of fascism 128 and loss of appeal of fascism’s novelty 138–9 and loss of credibility 140 and mass demonstrations 127 and mixed response 126 and poor second-level leadership 10, 129–30 and popular consensus for 4, 11 limited nature of 142 and post-war distancing from 122 and propaganda 127 loss of trust in 140 and provincial fascist federations 128 corruption 130–1 disaffection 134–6 discontent with 131–2 low esteem 130

230

Index

Italian fascism, and popular opinion: (cont.) poor leadership 129–30 popular political apathy 134 rebellion 132 reprisals 133 use of violence 132–3 youth disaffection 136–7 and reaction to Ethiopian war 134–5 and regime’s stick and carrot approach 126–7 and sources for: reliability of 137–8 reports to central authorities 128–9 and sympathy with Britain and France 141 and transformation of self 7–8 and urban lower middle/working class 138 in wartime 141–2 and weakness of fascist message 9, 141, 142 Jameson, Fredric 67 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 154 Jastrzab, Mariusz 155 Jeschke, Wolfgang 194 Jews: and ‘Jewish Question’ in Nazi Germany 40–1, 81 consensus on 84 criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96 criticism of methods 40 functional purpose of persecution 44 indifference 83–4 popular anti-Jewish actions 85–90, 92–6 support for aims 40 support for deportation 41 and Kristallnacht: criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96 as expansion of existing violence 97–8 negative reactions to 98 prior popular anti-Jewish actions 92–6 rural reaction to 114 youth involvement in 190 and Nuremberg Laws: historical significance of 85 influence of popular opinion 90–1 objectives of 91 popular pressure for 85–90, 97 popular reaction to 91–2 promulgation of 84 provisions of 84–5 SA pressure for action 86 and support for Soviet regime 22, 23, 30 n 33 Johnson, Eric A 45 n10 jokes: and Nazi Germany 34

and Poland 163 and Soviet Union 24, 71 Just, Gustav 175, 177–8 Kantorowicz, Alfred 70 Kapuscinski, Ryszard 150 KARTA centre 161, 162 Kershaw, Ian 9, 84, 98, 107, 140 Khrushchev, Nikita 72 Kiesielewski, Stefan 160 Kirov, Sergei 170 Klemperer, Victor 11, 70, 78 n33 Koestler, Arthur 2 Konrad, György 211 Kotkin, Stephen 7, 20, 25, 68 Krenz, Egon 179 Kruczek, Wladyslaw 151 Kuczynski, Jurgen 177 Kula, Marcin 2, 6 Kulka, Otto Dov 5 Lammers, Hans Heinrich 82 Lazarsfeld, Paul 72 League of Nations 141 legitimation, and totalitarian regimes 8 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich Uljanov 66, 163, 170 Ley, Robert 107 Libera, Antoni 161 Lindenberger, Thomas 6, 9 Lipski, Jan Josef 156 Lösener, Bernhard 85 Löwenthal, Leo 72 Lüdtke, Alf 5 Lyttelton, Adrian 123 Machcewicz, Pawel 155 Magnitogorsk 21, 68 Manteuffel, Tadeusz 163 Marcuse, Ludwig 170 Martin, Terry 20, 22 Modzelewski, Karol 152 Murr, Wilhelm 111 Mussolini, Benito: and criticism of 132 and organization of mass rallies 2 and personal attachment to 9 and poor attendance at broadcast speeches of 134, 135 and popular attitudes towards 139–40 Muti, Ettore 130 Nazi Germany, and popular opinion: and age-related experiences of Nazism 189–91 and attacks on communists and socialists 41

Index and awareness of government policy 116 and characteristics of 107 and Christian church 108 Protestants 39, 82, 111–12 Roman Catholics 39, 111, 112 and comparison with Stalinist Russia 23 and consensus of approval 35–6 decline at war’s end 41–2, 43 electoral support 37 manufactured consensus 37, 40, 44 underlying consensus 37–8, 40, 42–3 as culturally conditioned 108 and differentiated nature of 39 and difficulties in gauging 38, 110 and dual reality 9 and electoral support 37 and ‘everyday’ sphere 43, 44 and ‘exceptional’ sphere 43–4 and experiences of immediate post-war years 192–3 and factors shaping 108 and final phase of war 41, 43 intensified terror 41–2, 44 and heterogenous views 83 and historiography of 33–7, 83 Alltagsgeschichte 34 Bavaria Project 33–4 coercion 33, 36–7 consensus of approval 35–6 consent 34 dissent 34 manufactured consensus 37 and ‘Jewish Question’ 40–1, 81 consensus on 84 criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96 criticism of methods 40 functional purpose of persecution 44 indifference 83–4 popular anti-Jewish actions 85–90, 92–6 support for aims 40 support for deportation 41 and Kristallnacht: criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96 as expansion of existing violence 96, 97–8 negative reactions to 98 pretext for 92 prior popular anti-Jewish actions 92–6 rural reaction to 114 youth involvement in 190 and moulding of 107, 108 and ‘national community’ 43–4 and Nazi agencies’ reports on 38, 81, 107, 110 agencies involved 81–2 attempts to discontinue 82 availability of 84

231

criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96 influence of 83, 97 popular anti-Jewish actions 85–90, 92–6 purpose of 82 regime’s interest in 83 reliability of 82–3, 97 and Nazi Party, tasks of 108 and Nuremberg Laws: historical significance of 85 influence of popular opinion 90–1 objectives of 91 popular pressure for 85–90, 97 popular reaction to 91–2 promulgation of 84 provisions of 84–5 SA pressure for action 86 and persecution of minorities 41 and propaganda 39, 43, 44 and reintroduction of military service 40 and revision of interpretations of 4 and ‘Sopade’ (Social Democratic organization) reports on 38, 39, 40 and study of 4 and transformation of self 8 and treatment of mentally sick 41, 112 see also Württemberg Niethammer, Lutz 5, 186, 187, 194 opportunism, and totalitarian regimes 10 Orwell, George 2, 27 n6 Ostpolitik 212 Palach, Jan 151 Palme, Olaf 212 Passerini, Luisa 124 personal identity, and transformation of self 7–8 Stalinist Russia 20–1, 51, 54, 58 Pjatakow, Yuri 173 Plamper, Jan 6, 12 Plato, Alexander von 186 Podlubnyi, Stepan 21, 22 Poland, and sources for popular opinion: cabaret and music 159 clandestine organizations 159 complaint books 158 court records 159 destruction of 157–8 diaries and memoirs 160, 161 difficulties in analyzing 155 documentation of people’s opinions 153 ecclesiastical archive 159 ethical problems in using 155–6, 160–1 everyday behaviour as protest 152–3 family documents 161 formation of opinions 150

232

Index

Poland, and sources (cont.) funerals 152 gossip 163 graffiti 163 interpretation of contemporary documents and speeches 153–4 jokes 163 lack of 154 letter writing 157 letters 157 limitations of 163–4 literary works 161 material produced during political crises 162 non-verbal expression of attitudes 150, 151–2 official complaint channels 156–7 officials’ meetings with citizens 158 opinion polls 149–50 oral history 161 private letters 160 public diaries 158 religious practices 151 richness of 154 semi-autonomous institutions 158–9 Solidarity archives 162 stylistic conventions 155, 157 Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) 154 Polish Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) 211 political choice, and totalitarian regimes 6 political religion 8 Popieluszko, Jerzy 152 popular opinion in totalitarian regimes: and access to resources 9–10 and bottom-up approaches to 4–5 centrality of individual 5 and changes over time 10 and compared with public opinion 2, 24, 65 and comparison of regimes 12 and definitional difficulties 2, 17 and difficulties in studying 2 and dual reality 8, 9 Soviet Union 25–6 and existence of 2–3 and formation of popular attitudes 6 elimination of alternative worldviews 7 internalization of ideology 7, 51 reflexive self 7 and ideology 6–7 and importance of studying 3 contemporary relevance 3 overcoming Cold War stereotypes 3–4 and local leadership 10 and political problems in studying 10–11 and public/private spheres 3, 5–6 and regime monitoring of 3, 5, 11

and regime success/failure 3 and rejection of binary consent/dissent distinction 6 and scholarly neglect of 1 Cold War rhetoric 1–2 and shared values 8–9 and sources for 11–12 first-person documents 21, 52–3 police reports 51 and top-down approaches to 4 Port, Andrew 218 poststructuralism 68 Przemyk, Grzegorz 152 public opinion: and compared with popular opinion 2, 24, 65 and official generation of 2 Radek, Karl 173 Rath, Ernst vom 92, 97 rationalization, and ideology 56, 57 Reagan, Ronald 1 reflexive self 7 and Ustrialov 50 context of thinking 53 religion: and Nazi Germany 39 and Poland 151 and Soviet Union 19 see also Christian church R´ev, Istv´an 72 Rommel, Erwin 115 Rosenthal, Walter 95 Rothfels, Hans 85 Ruzikowski, Tadeusz 155 Rykov, Alexei 71 Sabrow, Martin 211 Schabowski, Günter 219–20 Schacht, Hjalmar 91 Schaff, Adam 149 Schelsky, Helmut 188 Scott, James C 20 Siwiec, Ryszard 151 Slezkine, Yuri 22, 30 n33 Smolensk Archive 64, 65, 66 Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD): and monitoring of 110 and ‘Sopade’ reports on popular opinion 38, 39, 40 socialist realism 22 and dual reality 25 Socialist Unity Party (East Germany) 174, 176, 193 see also German Democratic Republic society, and totalitarian regimes 4

Index Sokolnikov, Grigory Yakovlevich 173 Solidarity movement 162, 219 Soviet Union, and popular opinion: and ambiguities of 26 and analytical categories 20 and binary division of 17, 64–5, 66, 67, 69, 73 resistance to approach 74 and class opinions 17, 20 and collective mentalities 20 and collectivization 18, 23–4 and comparison with Nazi Germany 23 and dialectical thinking 58 and discrimination victims 21–2, 53–4 and dual reality 8–9, 25–6 and educated elites 19 and existence of 24–5 appearance of concept 72–3 and flight from autonomy 53–4 and future research: conceptual history 72–3 multidimensional approach 73–4, 75 source criticism 69–72 and historiography of: Chicago school 68, 69 Columbia school 68–9 comparative approach 68–9, 72 post-revisionist scholarship 20, 21, 67–9, 74 poststructuralist approach 68, 74 revisionist scholarship 18–19, 65, 66, 74 totalitarian school 64–6, 74 and identification with collective 50–1, 53–4 and ideology 55 individual as ideological agent 56–7 rationalization 56, 57 world-view 57 and intellectuals 22, 23 and Jewish support for regime 22, 23, 30 n33 and labour attitudes 23 and Magnitogorsk 21 and national/ethnic groups 22–3 and nature of 17 and NKVD: surveillance of returnees 50 surveillance reports 51–2 and peasantry 18, 23 and popular agency 65 and projection of liberal views 54 and propaganda trials 170, 171–4 and public discourse 20 and public opinion 65

233

and questioning of existence of 17 and religious belief 19 and resistance 20, 67 significance for state 71 and scientific world 22 and socialist subjectivity 54 and sources for: binary division of 73 citizens’ letters 19 complaint books 72–3 contextualization of 71 first-person documents 21, 52–3 focus on negative opinion 20 Harvard Interview Project 17, 25–6, 65 interpretation 64 lack of 17, 19 NKVD reports 51–2 opening of Soviet archives 19, 20, 50, 64, 66 police reports 19 self-reflective materials 50–1 Smolensk Archive 64, 65, 66 source criticism 69–72 svodki (secret police surveys) 19–20, 67–72, 73–4 and Soviet literature 22 and Soviet progress 57–8 and transformation of self 7, 8, 20–1, 51, 54, 58 and upwardly mobile 18–19 and urban population 23 and urban youth 19, 21 and violent environment 58 see also Ustrialov, Nikolai Sperber, Man`es 172 Sproll, Johannes Baptista 111 spy networks, and monitoring of popular opinion 3, 11 Stalin, Joseph 4, 22–3, 53–4, 56–9, 71, 74–5, 154, 174, 193 and Conquest’s interpretation of 66 and meeting with Feuchtwanger 168, 171 Starace, Achille 129, 132, 133, 135 Steinert, Marlis 101 n18 Stephenson, Jill 10 Streicher, Julius 95 Syria 79 n38 Szpotanski, Janusz 161 Tasca, Angelo 142 n2 Thälmann, Ernst 198 Third Reich, see Nazi Germany Tomskii, Michail 71 Torda, Giovanni 143 n17

234

Index

totalitarianism: and access to resources 9–10 and bottom-up approaches to 4–5 centrality of individual 5 and civil society 24 and Cold War interpretation of 1–2, 3–4 top-down approach 4 and corruption 10 and defining borders 7 and dual reality 8, 9 Soviet Union 25–6 and evolution and decline of regimes 10 and gap between objectives and outcomes 8 and generational change 10 and ideology 6–7 internalization of 7, 51 and legitimation 8 and the New Man 5 and political problems in studying 10–11 and public/private spheres 3, 5–6 and rejection of binary consent/dissent distinction 6 and shared values 8–9 and stability of communist dictatorships 180 Trotsky, Leon 170 Turowicz, Jerzy 159 Tyrmand, Leopold 151 Ulbricht, Walter 175, 177–8, 213 Union of Fighters for Liberty and Democracy 158–9 Ustrialov, Nikolai: and arrest of 59–60 and desire for integration 59 and dialectical thinking 58, 59 and diary of 49 last entry 59 official interpretation of 60 and execution of 60 and reflexive self 50 context of thinking 53 and rethinks political convictions 49 and returns to Soviet Union 49 and Soviet progress 49–50 and state suspicion of 50, 58–9 and transformation of self 57 Voice of America 72 Wachtel, Nathan 149 Wagner, Adolf 91

Weber, Max 9, 43, 203 Wedeen, Lisa 79 n38 welfare dictatorship 9 Wierling, Dorothee 186 women, and German Democratic Republic 214 Wurm, Theophil 111 Württemberg: and alienation of population 112 and attitudes towards central/local government 116 and barriers to Nazi norms and values 109–11 and Christian church: Protestants 111–12 role of 117 Roman Catholics 111, 112 and commodity shortages 114 and conscription: of horses 114 of men 113 and discrimination against countryside 113 and divided community/regime loyalties 109–10 and economic hardship 112 and foreign labour 113, 115 and historical memory 109 and impact of war casualties 114–15 and labour shortage 112, 113, 114 and lack of awareness of government policy 116–17 and mobilization of Volkssturm (home guard) 115–16 and perceptions of Nazi Party 109 undervalued by 112–13 and pessimism over war 115 and priorities of inhabitants 110 and reaction to euthanasia of mentally ill 112 and reaction to Kristallnacht 114 and resentment amongst rural population 113 and spontaneity of popular opinion 117 Wyschinski, Andrei 172, 174 Wyszynski, Stefan 151 Yurchak, Alexei 25 Zaremba, Marcin 155, 156 Zinov’ev, Grigori 71 Zola, Emile 172 Zweig, Arnold 172–3