Nazism

While leadership scholars increasingly acknowledge the influence of followers in the leadership process, less attention has been paid to their role in the destructive leadership process. Specifically, the current debate lacks a broad-based understanding of different susceptible follower types that synthesizes related research across academic domains. Expanding on Padilla, Hogan, and Kaiser's (2007) toxic triangle model of destructive leadership, we integrate research and theory across various academic literatures to derive a cohesive taxonomy of vulnerable followers that we call the susceptible circle. We describe the core characteristics of each follower type, drawing on Barbuto's (2000) theory of follower compliance to highlight the psychological processes that motivate each follower to comply with destructive leaders. We then conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for future research.

Over the past two decades, the concept of militant democracy-the use of legal restrictions on political expression and participation to curb extremist actors in democratic regimes-has again captured the attention of comparative constitutional lawyers and political scientists. In comparative constitutional law, the old neutral model of liberal democracy, according to which all political views are entitled to the same rights of expression and association, has given way to a general consensus that restrictions on basic rights designed to preserve democracy are legitimate. At the same time, legal scholars attribute the considerable cross-national variation in the formal design and use of such restrictions to the particular historical background of each country. In political science, a large body of work now examines specific militant restrictions on extremist actors. Although this scholarship consists mainly of descriptive analyses , it has begun to advance causal hypotheses explaining variation in important militant democracy policies. Taken together, these developments point to the fact that militant restrictions constitute an important facet of modern democracy and that at the same time, notwithstanding recent advances, our understanding of the phenomenon is still marked by significant gaps, making the legal and empirical analysis of militant democracy an important emerging research program both in comparative constitutional law and political science. This article reconstructs the debate on the concept since its origins in the 1930s and suggests directions for further research in both fields. 207 Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2013.9:207-226.

Background Hans Asperger (1906–1980) first designated a group of children with distinct psychological characteristics as ‘autistic psychopaths’ in 1938, several years before Leo Kanner’s famous 1943 paper on autism. In 1944, Asperger published a comprehensive study on the topic (submitted to Vienna University in 1942 as his postdoctoral thesis), which would only find international acknowledgement in the 1980s. From then on, the eponym ‘Asperger’s syndrome’ increasingly gained currency in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the conceptualization of the condition. At the time, the fact that Asperger had spent pivotal years of his career in Nazi Vienna caused some controversy regarding his potential ties to National Socialism and its race hygiene policies. Documentary evidence was scarce, however, and over time a narrative of Asperger as an active opponent of National Socialism took hold. The main goal of this paper is to re-evaluate this narrative, which is based to a large...

The large postwar archaeological excavations at Ptuj Castle in Yugoslavia were responsible for what seemed at the time to be one of the most intriguing discoveries in Eastern Europe. Excavated after the German occupation, the archaeologists and anthropologists had a mission to prove the existence of early medieval Slavic settlement of the disputed border areas in response to the Germanization policy and its supporting archaeological theories during World War II. Conscious of their role, archaeologists and anthropologists argued for the Slavic nature of artefacts and skeletons against the former German claims. Thus, the excavated structure, the robber trenches of a tower, notoriously (mis)interpreted as an 'old Slavic sanctuary', can only be understood in its postwar state-and nation-building context. Working with the same artefacts, archaeological research techniques under the veil of Fascism, Nazism and Communism were strikingly similar, but the interpretations of results were diametrically opposed. As has been pointed out, archaeology and anthropology served the prevailing political ideology. Political transitions, mixed with opportunistic behavior and personal animosities among archaeologists, influenced archaeological analyses and interpretations. Many archaeologists and anthropologists compensated for their midwar activities by closely following the postwar nationalist agenda. This generally happened without any direct pressure from above.

"""The concern with space and, more fundamentally, the formulation of a larger, guiding spatial theory, was central to achieving Nazi objectives during the Third Reich. We disclose critical elements of that theory, focusing on two contributions: the first by the jurist and international legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and the second by the geographer Walter Christaller (1893–1969). Applying the perverted biopolitical logic of National Socialism required the military accomplishment and bureaucratic management of two interrelated spatial processes: deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deterritorialization involved moving non-Germanized Germans (mainly Jews and Slavs) off conquered Eastern lands to create an “empty space” that was then “reterritorialized” by the settlement of “legitimate” Germans (although often not German citizens). Although many
German academics were involved in designing and implementing these spatial strategies, we single out two. Carl Schmitt provided a politico-judicial justification for reterritorialization involving the geographical expansion of the Third Reich: Großraum (greater space). Conceived four months before Germany’s Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland that triggered World War II, Großraum provided the (literal) grounds for Nazi reterritorialization. Walter Christaller brought his peculiar spatial imaginary of formal geometry and place-based rural romanticism in planning the “empty space” of the East after non-Germanized inhabitants were removed. His central place theory re-created the Nazis’ territorial conquests in the geographical likeness of the German homeland. """

Rewilding has become a hot topic in nature conservation. Ambitious schemes are afoot to rewild continental Europe and North America. Hopes are being invested in the political, economic, and therapeutic potentials of future wilds. Popular and scientific enthusiasms for the wild are frequently ahistorical and apolitical, however. This article begins to address this problem. It offers one genealogy of rewilding, focusing on a history of Heck cattle and their deployment in European rewilding projects. These animals were back-bred by two German zoologists in the 1930s, with Nazi patronage, for release as hunting prey in the annexed territories of Eastern Europe. Some cattle survived the war and their offspring have become prominent, alongside new back-breeding initiatives, in contemporary efforts to rewild a unifying Europe. Cattle now figure as cosmopolitan ecological engineers, whose grazing will create functional, wild landscapes. This genealogy examines what and where is understood to be wild and who is authorized to make such decisions in this story. Drawing cautiously on this extreme example, it examines historic rewilding as a form of reactionary modernism. It critically traces the emergence, persistence, and transformation of various ontologies, geographies, and epistemologies of wildness in Europe to position contemporary rewilding as a mode of ecomodernism. When compared, rewilding under Nazi rule and in the contemporary European Union are found to be different in every relevant problematic respect. Reflecting on differing conceptions of what it means to be modern helps specify a multiplicity of rewildings past and present. The article concludes with a set of criteria for discriminating among rewildings to inform the emergence and analysis of this conservation paradigm.

This article offers a new reading of Carl Schmitt and his Nazi engagement by
chronologically examining the changing uses of Roman law in his Weimar
and Nazi thought. I argue that Schmitt’s different ways of narrating the
modern reception of Roman law disclose, first, the Nazification of his
thought in the spring of 1933, and second, the partial and apologetic de-
Nazification of his thinking in the 1940s. While Schmitt’s Weimar-era
works are defined by a positive use of Roman imagery, ranging from
Schmitt’s support to the Catholic Church to his endorsement of Benito
Mussolini’s ‘total state’ in Italy, Schmitt’s Nazi writings from 1933 to 1936
describe the reception of Roman law as an anti-German virus that must
be overcome by the Nazi movement. This shift mirrors Schmitt’s
transformation from an authoritarian thinker sympathetic to Italian
Fascism into a devoted Nazi. However, once Schmitt begins to see that
Germany will lose World War II, he recalibrates his position. While
Schmitt’s earlier Nazi writings offered a negative estimation of the
historical school of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, in his 1943/44 book on
European legal science, Schmitt portrays Savigny as the paradigmatic
European, whose work opens the path for a renewed legal science.

This paper forms a response to Manfred Gailus' call for 'micro-histories' to examine the heterogenous nature of religious response, and to his notion of the first year of Nazi rule as a 'Protestant experience' (1933 als protestantisches Erlebnis). It considers the Protestant response in Württemberg in 1933 through a detailed analysis of a theologically conservative Protestant newspaper and a pastors' prayer circle.
While considering perceptions of the period prior to 1933 (as a time of 'godlessness' and 'the abyss') it argues that to comprehend the enthusiasm for the Nazi state and 'moral-spiritual revival' in 1933 one has to also understand the pre-existing myth of a spiritual 'awakening' as a part of the supposed 'spirit of 1914' - a 'Church spirit of 1914' as it were. It concludes that by the end of 1933 many of these Protestant pastors found themselves bound in a 'clash of conservatisms' (of their conservative nationalism as against their conservative Christian faith).

This article focuses on the pivotal role the notion of Lebensraum played within the Nazi spatial mindscape. Tracing the complex and contradictory genealogies of Lebensraum, we note how geographers’ engagement with Geopolitik has only made modest reference to the role Lebensraum played in shaping the biopolitical and genocidal machinery implemented by Hitlerism and its followers. Moreover, most of this literature highlights a clear discontinuity between the Lebensraum concept formulated by German academic geographers and the Nazis respectively. Rather than emphasizing the divide between German Geopolitik and Nazi biopolitics, we claim that the Third Reich incorporated Lebensraum by merging its duplicitous meaning, as living/vital space and as life-world. Equality important were both Nazi ‘functionalist’ understandings of Lebensraum as well as its ontological merging of Lebens and Raum in which the racialised German nation is conceived as a spatial organism whose expansion is the essential expression of life. As such, we approach the Nazi Lebensraum grand imagery as a truly geo-bio-political dispositif, in which life and space matched with no gap, no residues. The attempted realisation of this perfect coincidence, we argue, contributed in a crucial way to produce spaces of eviction and displacement and, ultimately, genocide, and annihilation.

Anarchist criminology has produced a strong critique of the system of criminal law, but has only recently started to theorize practical alternatives. The alternatives that it offers have been largely rooted in pacifism through the practice of restorative justice and deescalation of conflict. These models are generally effective so long as the individuals involved are committed to the process being applied. Ethnographic study of the anti-fascist movement in the United States demonstrates a potential model of anarchist response to threats of community and public safety in prefigurative subcultural spaces. The confrontational and violent tactics employed by militant anti-fascists serve as a form of policing based on anarchist principles of spontaneity, direct democracy, and direct action; and can serve as a starting point for theorizing proactive anarchist actions against individuals who threaten public safety and order.

While the strategies of political actors and institutions have been largely analyzed with reference to cases of democratic breakdown, democratic survival has often been viewed as a consequence of socio-economic and cultural preconditions. The analysis of successful reactions to strong extremist challenges in three cases of democratic survival (Czechoslovakia, Finland and Belgium in the inter-war period) against the background of two cases of breakdown in the same historical context (Italy and the Weimar Republic) is a useful complement to this view. The analysis of the selected cases shows how a stable coalition of democratic forces can effectively protect the democratic system from dangerous extremist attacks by pursuing both repressive and inclusive strategies

The main sources of this article are letters from ‘ordinary people’ to Soviet leaders. Counterbalancing current theories about trust and distrust, it analyses correspondence between people and state to explore for the first time the phenomenon of ‘forced trust’ as a central feature of Communist modernity. Forced trust represents a paradox that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet state: an illiberal system was promoting a liberal subject who was forced to trust in the state and the party but, at the same time, experienced his/her limited autonomy by generating personal meanings, interests and needs as a part of life under the dictatorship.

The annual Eranos conference in Ascona, Switzerland, contributed immensely to discourse about religion and spirituality from its inception in 1933. These gatherings, which revolved largely around the psychologist Carl Jung, investigated religious consciousness by way of spiritual “symbols” or “archetypes.” Such images were generally treated as timeless, autonomous phenomena that penetrate beyond historical particularities and social forms into the transcendent depths of the mystical Self. Discourse at Eranos thus portrayed the essence of religion as decontextualized and deethicized. The present article demonstrates that the German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber was already sensitive to the sociopolitical dangers of this approach when he lectured at Eranos in 1934. The essay that emerged out of those lectures, “Sinnbildliche und sakramentale Existenz im Judentum (Symbolic and Sacramental Existence in Judaism),” is widely read as a classic of Buber’s writings on Hasidism. And yet, the historical details surrounding Buber’s Eranos lectures, especially as evidenced in the unpublished letters between him and the conference organizer, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, as well as the stenographer’s typescript of Buber’s live orations, shed remarkable new light on the well-known essay. “Sinnbildliche und sakramentale Existenz” was, in fact, composed largely as a polemic against Jung and his followers at Eranos, a number of whom were aligned with National Socialism and other fascist movements. In an act of scholarly resistance, Buber challenged widespread perspectives at Eranos regarding symbolism, Gnosticism, and the nature of religion. In so doing, he anticipated later critiques of Eranos that took shape in the 1990s.

This article explores the politics of performing Wagner outdoors, focusing on the Waldoper in Sopot, Poland, and its operations under the Third Reich. Festival literature suggests that the Reich combined climatic deterministic logic with established open-air theatrical practice to implicate experiencing Wagnerian sounds outdoors as inculcating völkisch character in Poles, positioning the festival within the Reich’s imperial mission. However, this vision from ‘on high’ was undermined by bureaucratic disorganization and inefficiency, much like other Nazi artistic projects. The article concludes with a discussion of the post-war afterlives of the Waldoper and its attendant mythologies.

Like Weimar Germany, contemporary Russia is home to fascist actors and widespread nationalism. But unlike interwar Germany, the party system in post-Soviet Russia is heavily manipulated and civil society remains underdeveloped. This means that fascists have not had a chance to use elections or to penetrate civil society in order to build up political support. The continuing presence of a resolutely authoritarian, yet non-fascist “national leader” (Vladimir Putin) keeps the country from becoming a liberal democracy but it also, for now, makes it less likely that the regime will become fascist.

One of Michele Sarfatti’s greatest accomplishments has been to challenge the notion that there was a fundamental difference between the biological racism predominant in Nazi Germany and the ‘cultural racism’ of Fascist Italy. I examine how this dichotomy took shape and the meaning it acquired over time. My basic argument is that this division is the result of dialogue between Italian and German population experts during the interwar period, and that making a sharp distinction between a ‘German’ and an ‘Italian’ style of racism helped them to construct their own identities. In other words, the debate on racism was a vehicle for defining what it meant to be a ‘true’ Nazi or Fascist. In this way, differences in racist ideology can be understood as a product of struggles over meaning. Ultimately, my aim is to de-essentialize the meaning of race in research on both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

This paper deals with aspects of the work of Elias: how he dealt with the rise of
Nazism and the Holocaust, and how they fit into the general context of his theory
of 'civilizing processes'. In response to critics such as Bauman and Burkitt, we seek
to clarify what Elias argued in his theory; and to show how, particularly in his book
on The Germans (1996) [revised edition, Studies on the Germans, Collected Works, vol. 11, 2013], Elias was able, using this theory, to shed light on the origins and growth of Nazism and its consequences for Germany and the world at large.

Full reference: ‘On the balance between ‘civilizing’ and ‘decivilizing’ trends in the social development of western Europe: Elias on Germany, Nazism and the holocaust’. British Journal of Sociology 49 (3) 1998: 339–57.
Also in Portuguese translation:
‘Balanço das tendências ‘civilizadoras’ e ‘descivilizadoras’ no desenvolvimento social da Europa Ocidental: os escritos de Norbert Elias sobre a Alemanha, or Nazismo et o Holocausto’. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 45, Maio 1996, pp. 73–111.

Edited draft [only-do not cite this version] of Introduction to upcoming special edition of Thesis Eleven on Philosophy and the Far Right.  After an introduction beginning with the January 6, 2021 events on the Capitol and reflecting on the political history of philosophy as a social practice, the article presents preliminary sketches towards an interdisciplinary inquiry concerning the relationships between philosophy and the Far Right (FR).  This main section of the article includes an attempt to delineate twenty argument types or topoi used by non-FR philosophers who have attempted to draw premises from philosophers involved in or invoked by the historical FR, without accepting FR political conclusions (with due thanks to Ishay Landa, Darius Khor, William H.F. Altman, Ron Beiner and Adam Knowles).  We propose a scoping map (figure 1) of the roles that political science, sociology, metaphilosophy, intellectual history and political history would need to play to access different adumbrations of the phenomena at issue, if the 'maze-way' relationships between philosophy and the Far Right are to be comprehended. Before a synopsis of the articles to be included in the special edition, the article closes with the suggestion that any full inquiry on these subjects will ask philosophers to examine the material, institutional, reputational, and other forms of capital that shape our thinking and writing, and the way that these intra-institutional political data intersect with the wider political field.  We also acknowledge that such an interdisciplinary inquiry is likely to involve challenges of different kinds, although Pierre Bourdieu's hyperbolic "burn this book" (1989) probably remains somewhat too strong.

Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction has received a fair amount of scholarly attention since its publication in 2006, particularly among historians. What has received much less attention, however, are the many theoretical insights to be gleaned from Tooze’s history of the inner-workings of the Nazi war economy in the lead-up to the Second World War. This is particularly true of the numerous theoretical subjects and
themes covered by Tooze of direct relevance to Marxist theories and understandings of Nazism. From his analysis of the relationship between Nazi economic policies and
Hitler’s geopolitical objectives to the relations between capital and state to the specificitie of Nazism as a distinct ideological and cultural apparatus to the role of the Nazi regime in triggering the 1939 cataclysm – in all these ways, Tooze’s work speaks to a number of core issues at the heart of Marxist debates on Nazism, fascism, and the causes of the Second World War. This introduction outlines a number of these themes and more in Tooze’s work, contextualising them within extant Marxist debates on Nazism, before then going on to highlight some of the main arguments and criticisms
advanced in the symposium.

From the moment that Nazi Germany launched its attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, a pandemonium of violence seized many areas of Eastern Europe. The crimes of the Einsatzgruppen and of Wehrmacht troops are well-documented. The brutality, however, of the pogroms in 1941, their frequency and geographic scope, the level of local participation in the acts, the vehemence with which they were carried out and the almost ritualistic ‘carnivalesque’ qualities of the spectacle, all point to deeper, more complex agencies at work. This paper explores the notion of ‘licence’ as the primary facilitator of genocidal violence in the eastern territories immediately after the launch of Operation Barbarossa. It argues that this ‘licence’ should be understood as a crucial facilitator of already formed (if latent or contained) violent eliminationist predispositions and intentions. This in turn helped demolish political, social and moral impediments to violent behaviour and catalysed a veritable ‘carnival’ of elimination against particular ‘others’, in which ‘ordinary’ people joined much more for ideological, cultural and/or rational reasons than because of blind conformity or coercion.

An important empirical basis for the interpretations of Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford in The Authoritarian Personality (TAP) were questionnaires and in-depth interviews conducted by William R. Morrow with prisoners at California’s San Quentin prison. A reconstruction of the historical approach exposes serious methodological shortcomings, some of which Morrow openly addressed in memoranda, revealing that the supposedly particularly authoritarian attitude of the prisoners was due, among other things, to their submission to the psychiatric authority in the authoritarian situation of the prison and due to the conditions of a hierarchical prisoner society. In TAP, the empirically inadequate survey was interpreted primarily in the context of psychoanalytic literature on crime at that time, in particular Robert Lindner’s Rebel Without A Cause, whose theory of pseudo rebellion permeated TAP. Focusing on the shortcomings of TAP, this article argues, enables its inspiring insights to be appreciated.

Abstract Today's Swedish folk music community skews generally to the political Left, thanks largely to the 1970s countercultural folk revival. Previous to that revival, however, the concept of ‘folk music’ in Sweden had been shaped by predominantly conservative nationalist forces. Revivalists of the 1970s redefined the genre in their own terms. However, they allowed its core repertoire to remain regulated according to pre-revival standards, according to which modern international influence was anathema. As a consequence, the recently reinvigorated Swedish extreme Right has been able to stake a claim to folk music as part of its anti-immigrant agenda. In this article I analyze the ensuing debates between right- and left-wing claimants on Swedish folk music. I suggest that in failing to reinvest the cultural capital of ‘Swedish folk music’ in alternative forms during the 1970s revival when it had the opportunity, the Left has put itself at a possibly insurmountable disadvantage in those debates.

Hitler’s Children (Chanoch Ze’evi, 2011) is the first Israeli
documentary dedicated to the topic of descendants of Nazis. This
article analyzes the director’s cinematic and ethical choices in
mediating a notably painful subject for Israeli audiences. It claims
that the director’s emphasis on reconciliation and his focus on
descendants who acknowledge and express remorse for their
parents’ roles in the Holocaust set a cinematic tenor of confession
and guilt. The similar perspectives shared by the five descendants
interviewed for the film marginalize the conflictual and complex
responses of descendants of perpetrators which have been
revealed during studies on the familial legacy of Nazi criminals


.

Between 1938 and 1943, Fascist intellectuals debated the problem of how to create a racial policy that would encompass the Japanese within the Aryan doctrine. This article demonstrates how internal divisions in the Fascist party over racial issues generated alternative versions of pro-Japanese propaganda, which influenced the racial thinking of the Italian far-right even long after the SecondWorldWar. I show how Italian racial theories developed to underpin the alliance with Japan were transnational in scope, as they involved both German and Italian scholars in a common effort to lobby state racial policies. Specifically, I consider George Montandon and Julius Evola as two transnational actors engaged in building a case for the inclusion of the Japanese in the family of Aryan races, speaking either from a ‘biological’ or ‘spiritual’ perspective. While by the end of the Second World War the ‘biological’ thesis for the inclusion of the Japanese race had evaporated, the ‘spiritual’ thesis would continue to influence a generation of Italian far-right militants, especially during the ‘Years of Lead’. To make sense of
this legacy, I suggest that the foundational myth of Italian Fascism, based on the spiritual heritage of the multiethnic Roman empire, responded to the neofascist quest for transnational affiliations against Western materialism.

Focusing on many previously untranslated articles in popular national magazines and newspapers, as well as works by prominent racial theorists, this chapter traces how outrage was systematically fomented against Jews in Nazi-era Germany, creating perceived imperatives for drastic discriminatory measures. Rather than locate the core of Nazi antisemitism in historical or psychological factors, this study approaches antisemitism using the theoretical framework of risk communication. The heuristics of risk perception reveal an array of rhetorical tactics that fomented visceral aversion impervious to logical refutation. Portrayals of Jews as embodying maximal and uncontrollable risk, political, academic, and mass media discourse converged on the theme of Jews as posing unacceptable dangers that required progressively more drastic measures to control. The principles of risk communication, especially the means of inflaming outrage, could furnish useful interpretive frames for analyzing current antisemitism and other types of repressive discourse.

Representations of Germany's National Socialist past have clustered around two modes of representation in American and, more broadly, English-language popular culture: comedy and horror--with some overlap. For a past that was singularly unfunny, the comedic trope is arguably harder to understand and increasingly more popular. Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and Nazism have been mobilized since the 1930s in comedies, and since the 1940s in productions characterized by horror, gore, and, concurrently, sex. Such alternating images (even within the same cultural production, like Quentin Tarantino's acclaimed 2009 film Inglourious Basterds) have driven much of the current lay understanding of Nazi history and have shaped historical memory regarding one of the darkest and most morally challenging chapters in human history. Humor has long been viewed as predicated on subversion, or violation of norms, rules, taboos, or expectations; however, humor involving Nazis has also been uncritical and trite.

This article examines photographs illustrating the German war effort
in Finnish Lapland during the Second World War. We will analyze
the German photographic representation of Lapland from the perspective
of how the Germans portrayed and experienced this northern
land, with a focus on Fahrbahn Lappland (Lapland’s Roadway), a
coffee-table book by the German photojournalist Mabre (Max
Martin Brehm). It affords interesting insights into German perceptions
of and engagements with the Far North of the European
world. The photographs in Fahrbahn reflect a sense of dislocation on
the one hand and an attempt to neutralize the physically and mentally
threatening northern wilderness on the other. In addition to
capturing the “spirit” of the German experience of Lapland through
his photographs, Mabre’s work resonates with a dystopian tradition
of representing the North of Europe dating back to the early modern
period and beyond. It presents Lapland as a “blank slate” by distancing
the locals from the view and showing the region as a
virtually unoccupied periphery on the fringe of the modern world.
This can perhaps be understood as making “mental groundwork”
for the anticipated Nazi German rule in the North of Europe after
the war.

The image of Plato captured in Raphael’s School of Athens as the champion of contemplative life has been celebrated for centuries. Such a description of Plato, however, would probably be surprising for most readers who are used to a very different Plato. For many current readers, Plato is a political philosopher. The contrast could not be sharper. The goal of this paper is to reconstruct the origins of the political interpretation of Plato’s thought. Prior to Popper, this interpretation was first developed into a mainstream presentation by some important Hellenists in Germany (such as Wilamowitz and Jaeger) in the first 30 years of the twentieth century, and it quickly became dominant outside the universitiies. One interesting example of the attempts to popularize Plato’s political thought is that of K. Hildebrandt, a member of the George Kreis, who sought to harmonize Plato and Nietzsche in order to derive a new politics of the German state.

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the philosophical problem of just and unjust memory. There is a general consensus about commemorating fallen soldiers and killed civilians. But, unfortunately, our human memory of such victims is often incomplete. Some victims are remembered, others are not – maybe very few even want to remember the latter. It turns out that in our world, not only wars may be just or unjust, but also the memory of their victims. In this context, a serious problem is the unequal memory of crimes perpetrated by Nazism and Communism in the last century, denying several dozen million victims of the latter totalitarian system their due place in the collective awareness of mankind. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of the ethical analysis of wars and totalitarian regimes should be the moral obligation to commemorate all victims in a just way.

Prominent writers have faulted Styron for making the protagonist of his novel Sophie's Choice a Christian.  Their argument goes like this: the Nazis targeted Jews.  Therefore, Styron implicitly de-Judifies the Holocaust by making a Christian the primary victim in the novel.  I argue that this argument only makes sense if we see Sophie exclusively as a victim.  However, if we understand that Sophie is not a Christian victim but a Christian anti-Semite (perpetrator), and that it was her version of Christian anti-Semitism that in part made Hitler and the Nazis possible, then the critiques of Styron's novel would make no sense.  The idea in this essay is more fully developed in the final chapter of my book The Modernist God State.  That chapter is titled: "William Styron's Sophie's Choice: Locating the Christian Theology of the Nazis' Genocidal Anti-Semitism."