Totalitarian Regimes

POPULAR OPINION IN TOTALITARIAN REGIMES

This page intentionally left blank

Popular Opinion inTotalitarian Regimes:

Fascism, Nazism,Communism

Edited by

PAUL CORNER

1

1Great 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 YorkAuckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong KarachiKuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices inArgentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France GreeceGuatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal SingaporeSouth Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Pressin the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United Statesby Oxford University Press Inc., New York

The Several Contributors 2009

The moral rights of the authors have been assertedDatabase 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 reproductionoutside 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 coverand you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataData available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataPopular 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—SovietUnion—History. 6. National socialism—History. 7. Europe—Politics and government—20th

century. I. Corner, Paul.JC480.P68 2009

303.3′809409041—dc222009022965

Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, IndiaPrinted in Great Britain

on acid-free paper byMPG 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 Charterhouseof Pontignano (University of Siena) in June 2006. There were just twelveparticipants, very literally from all round the world. We spent two and a halfdays in the beautiful surroundings of the monastery enjoying wide-ranging andlargely unstructured discussion. In the end we agreed that the whole eventhad been very productive and merited a joint volume. My first thanks mustgo, therefore, to Andrea Machetti and his staff at the Certosa for feeding us,making us comfortable while we talked, and helping us survive the remarkablyunseasonable cold weather.

The workshop was very much a collaborative venture and I have a debtof gratitude to a large number of people. My thanks are obviously dueto all who made the often very great effort to take part. In particular Iam grateful to Richard Bosworth, Ian Kershaw, and Jochen Hellbeck forsuggesting other names to me at the outset. For the same reason I alsohave to thank some of those who in the end could not make it, espe-cially Robert Gellately and Alf Ludtke. For a wide variety of motives notall the participants have contributed chapters: nonetheless I wish to thankMarco Palla, Istvan Rev, Richard Bosworth and Jan Culik for their contri-butions to our discussions. And not all the contributors present here werepresent in Pontignano. Subsequently Otto Dov Kulka generously agreed toshare the results of his recent research on popular opinion in Nazi Ger-many and Marcin Kula has provided a chapter on the state of research inPoland. Among others, Temma Kaplan helped me more than she probablyrealizes, and I benefited greatly from the advice of Marta Petrusewicz, whonot only illuminated me on ‘People’s Poland’ but was of invaluable assis-tance in identifying possible contributors from what we used to call EasternEurope.

The workshop was financed through research grants from the Italian Ministryof the University (PRIN 2005) and from the University of Siena (PAR 2005).Neither grant would have been obtained without the help of the universityResearch Office and my thanks go to Roberta Pellegrini and Roberto Ricci fortheir guidance in making applications. This is also an opportunity to thankthe Administrative Director of my department in Siena, who looked afterthe financial side of the operation. Without Marina Borgogni’s extraordinarycompetence we would not have gone very far.

vi Acknowledgements

Finally I should like to thank Christopher Wheeler and Matthew Cotton atOxford University Press for their constant courtesy and attention—and the threeanonymous readers of the original manuscript for their many useful commentsand criticisms.

PCSienaDecember 2008

Contents

Notes on the Contributors ixAbbreviations x

1. Introduction 1Paul Corner

PART 1. TWO OVERVIEWS

2. Popular Opinion in Russia Under Pre-war Stalinism 17Sheila Fitzpatrick

3. Consensus, Coercion and Popular Opinion in the Third Reich:Some Reflections 33Ian Kershaw

PART 2. THE FIRST DICTATORSHIPS

4. Liberation from Autonomy: Mapping Self-Understandings inStalin’s Time 49Jochen Hellbeck

5. Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion in Stalinism 64Jan Plamper

6. Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany as a Factor in the Policy of the‘Solution of the Jewish Question’: The Nuremberg Laws and theReichskristallnacht 81Otto Dov Kulka

7. Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany: Mobilization, Experience,Perceptions: The View from the Wurttemberg Countryside 107Jill Stephenson

8. Fascist Italy in the 1930s: Popular Opinion in the Provinces 122Paul Corner

PART 3. DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1945

9. Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived of Voice 149Marcin Kula

viii Contents

10. Consent in the Communist GDR or How to Interpret LionFeuchtwanger’s Blindness in Moscow 1937 168Martin Sabrow

11. Demography, Opportunity or Ideological Conversion? Reflectionson the Role of the ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’, or ‘1929ers’,in the GDR 184Mary Fulbrook

12. Tacit Minimal Consensus: The Always Precarious East GermanDictatorship 208Thomas Lindenberger

Select Bibiliography 223Index 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 ModernRussian 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 theUniversity 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 EuropeanHistory and Public Spheres in Vienna, Austria, and teaches Modern History at PotsdamUniversity, Germany.

J P is a Dilthey Fellow in the ‘History of Emotions’ group at the Max PlanckInstitute for Human Development, Berlin.

M S is Director of the Zentrum fur 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), post-1954

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 (includ-ing 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 xi

RNS Reichsnahrstand (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 ofHistorico-Political Documentation

USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

VEB Volkseigener Betrieb (state-controlled factory)

VfZ Vierteljahreshefte fur Zeitgeschichte

YVS Yad Vashem Studies


1Introduction

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 andresist Stalinism? Was there really a mass consensus for fascism among Italians? Didthe immense torchlight rallies of the 1930s represent a genuinely spontaneousexpression of enthusiasm of the German people for Nazism? And does Ostalgiereflect a real sense of loss among former East Germans, still convinced of thesuperiority of the ‘workers’ and peasants’’ state?

These are just some of the questions this volume seeks to answer. Rathersurprisingly they are questions which, in the main, have not received theattention they deserve. Totalitarian regimes of one sort or another have beenone of the distinguishing features of the twentieth century, yet a thoroughanalysis of popular opinion in these regimes—its characteristics, its changesover time—has been lacking until relatively recently. It is not difficult to findan explanation for this; at least in part the questions were not asked simplybecause we thought we already knew the answers. The rhetoric of the ColdWar provided us with ready-made schemes that left little room for furtherinvestigation. For a long period before 1989—a period stretching back to the1950s but reaching as far as Reagan’s invention of the ‘Evil Empire’—thereseemed to be few doubts about what totalitarianism was like. The conventionalwisdom on these regimes explained everything in terms of terror and coercionon the one side and propaganda on the other. This view was heavily conditionedby observation of the workings of the post-1945 communist bloc. If we knewthat communists did not actually eat babies, our picture of life beyond the IronCurtain was nonetheless highly coloured by images of secret police, the showtrial and the gulag. If people supported these regimes, it was said, it was becausethey were either too terrified to oppose tyranny or brainwashed by propagandainto thinking that the regime was always justified in its actions. Either way theywere seen essentially as victims of various repressive mechanisms. This was theposition that saw its heyday during the Cold War, when Nazism, fascism, andcommunism were very rapidly assimilated to each other by the political scientistsof 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 ofleft and right into the same category and associating all with the images providedby George Orwell’s 1984 or Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

But the study of popular opinion under totalitarianism has also been slow totake off for other reasons. The first is that it is intrinsically very difficult. In a sensethe very idea of popular opinion in totalitarian regimes seems like a contradictionin terms. Repressive regimes of the type witnessed in Europe after both Firstand Second World Wars destroyed the public sphere very effectively and leftlittle or no room for civil society to express openly any kind of spontaneousopinion. As everyone knows, the mechanisms of repression were designed to dojust that. At a purely formal level the people thought what the regime told themto think. There is, therefore, at the outset, an enormous problem of sourceswhich permit the historian to go beyond this formal level; and there is the furtherproblem of the interpretation of the sources that are found. How do you interpretactions and words written and spoken in the context of and conditioned by(theoretically) total control? How do you interpret passivity and silence? The endof the Cold War and the collapse of communism in Europe has greatly enhancedthe 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—theproblem of its use and its interpretation remains. Marcin Kula’s chapter in thisvolume addresses the question very directly, gently teasing out many of themethodological problems relating to sources and to their interpretation in respectof communist Poland and pointing to some possible solutions. In many respectsthey are solutions that can be applied very readily elsewhere.

There is also a second and related problem that has deterred the study ofpopular opinion. This is the problem of definition. What constitutes popularopinion? 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 topublic opinion because the latter has suggestions of pluralistic debate within thepublic sphere of civil society—a concept hardly appropriate to the circumstancesof totalitarian states, where a public sphere of free debate and discussion, at least inthe sense proposed by Habermas, clearly did not exist.¹ Such ‘public’ opinion asthere was in totalitarian societies was almost entirely generated by official sourcesand used for internal political purposes or to strengthen the hand of governmentsin their foreign policies. Mussolini, for example, in 1935 organized mass ralliesin all the principal cities of Italy with the declared intention of showing the worldthat the Italians backed his aggression towards Ethiopia. This was official ‘public’opinion, but research suggests that it was far from being popular opinion, whichpolice and Fascist Party reports from many areas indicated going in a very differentdirection from that intended by Mussolini. Thus, despite official assertions to thecontrary, it would seem that a popular opinion did exist in some form. It maybe 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 individualby 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 whichdenied the autonomy of the individual in respect of society, some kind ofprivate space continued to exist, permitting the formation of something that canlegitimately be called popular opinion. This was of course recognized by theregimes themselves, which, having suppressed all the channels that permittedgenuine and spontaneous communication between regime and citizens, thenbecame frightened by the silence and set up spy networks in order to find outwhat the people were really thinking. The extent of these spy networks (one onlyhas to think of the Stasi in East Germany) is an indication of the importancethat the regimes themselves gave to the monitoring of popular opinion—animportance related not only to the ever-present need to suppress dissent but alsoto the search for legitimacy in the eyes of the people which all regimes aimed toachieve.

But, if popular opinion was important for the regimes themselves, is its studyimportant to us? A general answer might be that hundreds of millions of peoplelived for decades under totalitarian regimes and that their history cannot simplybe airbrushed out of the picture because they assume no role in our conventionalview of such regimes. More specifically, however, despite the inherent difficultiesin defining and identifying popular opinion, from the point of view of thehistorian or the political scientist the issue of popular opinion in totalitarianregimes is important because it relates to the fundamental workings of theregimes in question. Popular opinion may be one of the key factors in explainingthe success or failure of any regime; indeed it is difficult to say anything usefulabout questions related to the stability, longevity, legitimacy and impact of theseregimes without attempting an assessment of popular opinion. But there is afurther element worthy of note. In our contemporary society characterized by thedominance of the media, constant communication, and perpetual publicity, inwhich political manipulation of the masses has become the norm, the experienceof the individual within totalitarian societies assumes a particular importance.The degree to which such regimes succeeded in invading and colonizing theprivate sphere (while at the same time rendering ineffective the classical publicsphere) has a wider relevance than that of the regimes themselves, just as,conversely, the degree to which the individual was able to resist such pressuresand conserve a private space is also very significant. Indeed, the totalitarianexperience 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 usto overcome the Cold War stereotype of totalitarianism, all heavy coercion andpropaganda when related to the people, essentially a picture inhabited only byperpetrators and victims. With the passing of time the unsatisfactory nature of thissimplistic ‘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 extentpermitted) the study of those societies with a view to understanding how they heldtogether and what it was like to live in them. In the case of Soviet studies it hasbecome possible to examine in detail the ways in which the communist messagewas transmitted by Stalin to the people during the 1920s and 1930s and to assessthe people’s reaction to this message. As far as Nazi Germany is concerned theprocess of revision of accepted interpretations of Nazism had begun well beforethe fall of the Berlin Wall. Historians had turned their attentions away from themonolithic view of the Nazi state and towards the tensions existing within NaziGermany, to the centrifugal forces of the polycentric state, and to the question ofpopular opinion under Nazism.² The issue of popular attitudes towards Nazismwas, of course, a central problem in the attempt of Germans to come to termswith their past. Intimately linked to questions of national identity and to thelegitimacy of the post-war German state, the ‘past which does not pass’ assumeda critical place in debates on the Nazi experience which took place from themid-1980s onwards and gathered a new urgency after German Unification. Itbecame extremely important to attempt to understand what ‘ordinary’ peopleknew 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 theknowledge they had. The responsibility of the Germans as a nation for warcrimes was very much bound up with the replies which emerged from this typeof enquiry. And even in Italy, where any sense of guilt in respect of fascism orof responsibility for the atrocities committed by fascist forces in Libya, Ethiopia,Greece and Jugoslavia was (and still is³) largely absent among Italians, the debateabout consensus for fascism that developed in the mid-1970s around the workof Renzo De Felice suggested the beginnings of a more articulated approach tothe study of the fascist experience, even though this approach rapidly becamebogged down in the ideological quagmire of contemporary Italian politics.⁴

The ‘Cold War’ interpretation of totalitarianism was always essentially ‘top-down’ in its approach, analysing government and institutions and inferring fromthese (when any inference was attempted) the probable sentiments of the people.In some cases it seemed almost that the regimes represented a state withouta society. Society was passive, dormant, totally repressed by the mechanismsof domination; the people were present in the picture only as a part of state-organized ritual, apparently regimented and acquiescent. This volume hopes insome small measure to help to right the balance and give the people more thanjust a walk-on, flag-waving role. The point of departure of almost all of theessays presented here is the ‘bottom-up’ approach, accepting the framework ofthe dictatorial state but seeking to understand how people, in the course of theirday-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 fullywith the requirements of the regime. Several of the contributions here presentmake reference to the methodology of Alltagsgeschichte—usually translated as the

Introduction 5

history of everyday life—developed by Lutz Niethammer and Alf Ludtke duringthe course of the 1980s and 1990s.⁵ The term itself risks being misunderstood; itsounds very much like social history with the politics left out; in fact, it representsa particular form of the ‘bottom-up’ approach, which starts from the realities ofeveryday life and then moves on to the consideration of the interaction betweeneveryday life and the domination exercised by the regime, looking in particularat forms of adjustment and modes of self-defence devised by people in the courseof their daily activities. How they adjusted, how that adjustment helped formsome kind of popular opinion, inevitably had an impact on the workings of thesystem and was not, therefore, without significance. As already noted, totalitarianregimes were, in fact, notoriously attentive to the public mood; indeed, much ofthis volume is based on documentation provided by government agencies whichwere set up to monitor and assess the characteristics of that mood.

The ‘bottom-up’ approach necessarily places the individual rather than theregime at the centre of the picture. This implies that, even in the highly coerciveregimes 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 within this book is, in fact, that of the extent and the nature of this space availablefor individual agency within the context of totalitarian domination. In whatways did people react and adjust? Was this reaction always defensive or did italso embrace some more positive aspects as far as the regime was concerned?Almost all the early totalitarian regimes aimed at the formation of the NewMan (the New Soviet Man, the New Fascist Man) and posited, therefore, akind 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 withthe requirements of the regime? Were individuals both formed and self-formingunder totalitarianism? To what extent is it possible to employ the use of EigenSinn, that rather untranslatable concept relating to individual space, personaldignity, alternative cultures—all the areas in which the individual interacts withauthority 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 thesame general category of totalitarianism. For example, not all the essays hereare couched in terms of individual resistance to the requirements of authority.Indeed, Otto Dov Kulka inverts the equation when writing about the ‘pressuresfrom below’ that helped form Nazi policy towards the Jews. But the questionsposed above inevitably raise a further issue—that, already touched on, of therelationship between the public and the private spheres. This was a key issue for alltotalitarian states, which, within the logic of totalitarian ideology, formally deniedthe existence of the private, in the liberal individual sense. As a consequenceeverything became ‘public’, judged by the extent to which it pertained to thegoals and objectives of the national community. Such a position had obvious

6 Paul Corner

implications for ordinary people. Individuals were compelled to relate to thestate in some way; yet, as is evident from many of the essays here, this processof relating to the state was often lived with great difficulty in as far as, whilethe tension between the individual and the collectivity was supposed to beresolved in favour of the latter, individuals often discovered that, willingly ornot, their private lives and their private thoughts conflicted with the demandsof the regime. Where the regime presumed to preach the truth, this conflictcould create serious problems of conscience. At the very least, the dividing linebetween the private and the public frequently became extremely uncertain, aspeople struggled between the competing forces of duty and conscience.

All the contributions to this volume reflect a fundamental point of agree-ment—that the binary distinction ‘consent/dissent’ is far too simple and neatto be used in the context of totalitarian regimes. Marcin Kula argues that ‘themanichean question of whether people were ‘‘for’’ or ‘‘against’’ the solutionsprovided by the regime’ has, in fact, little sense; Thomas Lindenberger protestsagainst historians’ ‘fixation’ with repression and resistance; and Jan Plamper evenentitles his chapter on Stalinism ‘Beyond Binaries’. A picture drawn with ‘truebelievers’ on the one side and totally committed opponents on the other leaves alot of people out; in the words of Lindenberger again, it risks being a story of twominorities. In a sense it is precisely the people in the middle, those who wouldbe left out of such a history who are the subjects of this volume. Their attitudeswere 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 declaredobjectives of the regime; the first might provoke violent criticism, the second findstrong approval. And attitudes would, of course, vary over time; here we are oftentalking about decades, during which time circumstances changed dramatically.But it is not only the rigidity of the binary division that invites criticism. Withsome justification certain of the contributors decry the tendency of analysts oftotalitarianism to project the liberal, democratic model of political choice on to thecircumstances of these regimes. The idea that the pretensions of totalitarianismwere always experienced as an incursion on the free choice of the individual ‘self ’would seem inappropriate to some cases (particularly the examples cited in thechapter by Jochen Hellbeck) because the individuals in question did not in anycase identify with liberal, individualistic, political culture; in others because theculture 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 wayto vote.

Popular attitudes were formed, of course, on the basis of personal experienceof dictatorship and also on the basis of available information. This inevitablyintroduces the question of ideology and the related issue of propaganda. Intotalitarian states the received wisdom was that provided by the regime andall regimes attempted in some way to define reality for their citizens, limiting

Introduction 7

access to information which contrasted with that definition and attempting tocreate a popular worldview coherent with the objectives of the regime itself. Theelimination of alternative worldviews was always a feature of totalitarian regimes;people were not invited to look beyond what the regime provided, nor werethey 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 thisvolume examine in greater detail the processes by which the individual receivesand assimilates the regime’s worldview, often transforming it through a processof personal ‘internalization’. Jochen Hellbeck goes so far as to assert that ideologyonly exists when assimilated, and therefore to some extent transformed, by theindividual; in this sense ‘internalization’ is much more than simply taking onboard a set of fixed ‘external’ ideas. It is a transformation of those ideas and, atthe same time, a transformation of self. The ‘reflexive self ’ becomes central tothe 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 alignhis or her thinking with the tenets of the regime—or, at any rate, to be able tobehave as if this were so.⁶ One is reminded here of Stephen Kotkin’s workers ofMagnitogorsk who learn to ‘speak Bolshevik’ because that is the way in whichthey can best integrate themselves with the revolutionary community.⁷ BothHellbeck and Kotkin would clearly argue, on the basis of this insistence onthe centrality to the Soviet experience of personal transformation, that popularopinion was very much more than simple reaction to ideas and events.

Not all the contributors to this volume would subscribe to this position, notbecause of rooted antagonism to the concept of the reflexive self in relation tototalitarianism, but because different regimes made different requirements oftheir subjects and the kind of approach proposed by Hellbeck would seem tobe inappropriate to individual experience in other regimes. It could be argued,for instance, that, in comparison with Soviet communism, Italian fascismattributed relatively little real importance to the question of the transformationof the individual self, reserving its immediate attention for more externalmanifestations of support. Certainly, the realization of the New Fascist Manrequired the anthropological change at which fascism aimed, but, in its day-to-day practices, fascism’s imperative was more an external militarization of Italiansociety than a concern for the creation of a fascist self. Individual fascists mighttry to transform themselves, and undoubtedly some did, but those who did notwere unlikely to suffer the same kind of exposure, humiliation and punishment asthe Soviet citizens who failed to transform their pre-communist souls. Withoutreturning to the out-dated idea that fascism had no ideology, it seems reasonableto suggest that fascism, despite the efforts of the fascist School of Mysticism,⁸was more about action and behaviour than about modes of thought, althoughclearly 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 berealized primarily through education and was seen as being a task concerningthe formation of the next generation. In this sense, as in many others, fascismwas always recruiting for the future. Similarly, as emerges from Ian Kershaw’schapter in this volume, Nazi Germany laid very much less emphasis than theSoviets on the transformation of the individual or even, for that matter, thetransformation of society. For Nazism, the ‘true’ German already existed, albeitin circumstances which prevented his or her authentic expression; the task ofNazism was precisely that of changing those circumstances in order that thequalities of the true German could make themselves fully felt.

Support or lack of support for totalitarian regimes was not exclusively depen-dent 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 originshad passed, totalitarian regimes had to seek some form of legitimation throughresults; at least to some extent they had to be seen to be working. A comparisonof popular opinion between regimes suggests that this was not as easy as it mighthave seemed. Although regimes controlled access to information and thereforein many cases both lauded their own achievements and prevented effective andrealistic comparison with what was going on outside the borders of the state (theGDR was a notable exception to this last aspect and paid the price), they didhave to try to measure up to the promises which they themselves made in orderto justify their retention of power. What is apparent from many of the chapterspresented here is that in all of the regimes in question, a gap developed betweenpromises, objectives, and their realization. Given the utopian objectives of manyregimes, this was hardly surprising. The gap, however, forced people to inhabita dual reality—that created by the propaganda machine of the regime whichsought to define the reality in which people lived and that of their everydayexperiences, often in sharp contrast with the propaganda. The degree to whichthey were able to live a dual reality depended, very naturally, on the force of theoriginal 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 invokedin order to provide an explanation of how people got over the divide betweenpromise and reality. Rather surprisingly, perhaps, the concept is hardly used at allin this volume; contributors seem to prefer more pragmatic, less transcendental,explanations of popular attitudes, undoubtedly reflecting the fact that the objectof study is ordinary people and not intellectual ideologues. For example, manycontributors note that in most of the regimes in question there were some sharedvalues—values and objectives proclaimed by the regime to which the peoplethemselves subscribed and to which the regime could always make appeal, evenif patently not respecting those values. Thus, in the Soviet experience of the1930s, it would seem that the harsh and very obvious injustices of the Stalinistregime 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 phenomenonthat Ian Kershaw points when he invokes Max Weber’s distinction between the‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’ to explain Germans’ continuing attachment toNazism, even in the face of the many evident negative aspects of the regime.And, as Thomas Lindenberger makes clear, East Germans could on the wholeidentify with appeals to anti-fascism, the virtues of work and the family, andpromises of international peace made by the government. Conversely I arguein my chapter that the message of Italian fascism was essentially weak (andbecame progressively weaker during the 1930s)—a weakness that prevented anyrecourse on the part of much of the population to a dual reality which mighthave permitted them to accept economic hardship, rigid social control, andblatant corruption in the name of a greater objective. If there was a hint of dualreality in Italy, it was related to the figure of Mussolini himself, but this was anessentially personal attachment (sometimes passionately personal) and was ofteninvoked, indeed, against the day-to-day experience of fascism. Notwithstandingthe elaborate inventions of the Fascist School of Mysticism, the credible ‘highertruth’, the pursuable ‘extraordinary’, seems to have been strangely absent as apopular guiding principle.

The other side of dual reality, that of everyday life, was constituted by whatthe regime could provide in concrete terms; totalitarianism had to come upwith the goods if it was not to go ahead interminably with promises of ‘jamtomorrow’. Nazi Germany famously solved the problem through rapid economicrecovery and full employment, but other regimes were less successful. Theevidence suggests that, while optimism and sacrifices made in the name of thefuture 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 populationwas control of resources and the capacity to allocate (often scarce) resourcesaccording to political criteria. This capacity gave regimes an enormous powerof blackmail over the population, a power very evident in the realm of welfareand social security, where benefits could be conceded or withheld on the basis ofpolitical obedience. The rather paradoxical relationship between social provisionthrough the state and political repression by the state has suggested the term‘welfare dictatorship’ to one prominent scholar of the subject, in this case relatedto the experience of East Germany, but elements of the same phenomenonare present in almost all the regimes in question.⁹ The provision of resourcesobviously conditioned popular opinion very greatly, inducing forms of voluntaryor involuntary complicity with the regime. Those who opposed the regime mightbe induced to limit their opposition for fear of loss of state benefits of onesort 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 resourcesit could offer. For example, embracing the opportunities for sport or other leisureactivities did not mean that one necessarily embraced the political objectivesof 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 oneof 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 ofseeing how attitudes and opinions change over time. The parabola of communismis shown very clearly by the contrast between Hellbeck’s Soviet citizens, seeking inthe 1920s and 1930s after that truth that would lead to personal transformation,and Vaclav Havel’s image of the Prague greengrocer in the 1970s, consciouslyand 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 hereshow the similar signs of evolution and decline, moving from (a sometimes verylimited) dynamism to stagnation and entropy.¹¹ In this last respect, a furtherconstant of these regimes is that of corruption and opportunism; the highlydiscretionary (ab)use of power is almost always present. This may in part berelated to the fact that one of the characteristic features of many of the regimes isthat, as time passed, the second-level leadership was of increasingly poor quality,reflecting practices of recruitment and also motivation for holding office. FascistItaly, for example, seems to have had great difficulty in finding competent andhonest local administrators during the later part of the regime. This was partiallya consequence of tensions existing between local political imperatives and thoseof the centralizing government—a feature of most regimes. Frequently it wasalso related to generational change—or, on occasions, as in the Italian case, tothe lack of it. As Mary Fulbrook demonstrates in this volume, the importanceof generational change is to be related not only to turnover and substitutionbut also to the precise life experiences of the dominant groups within thenew generation. In the case of the GDR the difference between generationalcohorts, some with direct experience only of Nazism, some with slightly longerexperience, seems to have been decisive in determining their contribution to thenew socialist state after the Second World War. The personnel of totalitariancontrol is also an important factor, therefore. A point made by Jill Stephensonin her contribution—and one I also make—is that the quality of local leaderswas often a key determinant in the formation of popular opinion in respect ofthe regime.

A number of chapters allude to the political problems inherent in the study ofpopular opinion. Sheila Fitzpatrick hints at the way in which, during the 1970s,the highly innovative ‘revisionist’ research she and others were carrying out onthe Soviet Union—a Soviet Union seen for the first time ‘from below’—wasinterpreted in some quarters as being an attempt to justify the Soviet regimeand whitewash the many horrors of Soviet communism. A similar accusationhas been levelled at some of the scholars of the East German regime, who havealso tried to understand what kept people and power together for so long inthe GDR during the post-war decades. Quite clearly none of the people writinghere would attempt to deny or to justify the terrible sufferings caused by thesystem 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 tocomprehend the workings of totalitarian regimes must include some effort tounderstand how people lived in these regimes. If this leads to the identificationof sometimes positive attitudes to the regimes on the part of the people, this inno way justifies those regimes; if anything it simply underlines the nature of theproblem in indicating the complexity of the relationship between authority andthe individual. What is at issue is the identification of structures of dominationand the understanding of the many ways these structures were experienced atground level. From the historical point of view, finding elements of consensusfor communism can explain a great deal about how the regimes functioned andwhy many were able to last so long. It may also say a great deal about theirlegacy.

The accusation of justification would seem to be much better aimed at theItalian 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 havealluded above—that there was, in reality, a mass popular consensus for fascismand that most Italians, far from being victims, were very enthusiastic participantsin the fascist ventennio. While this challenge represented a welcome invitation torethink the politically convenient orthodoxies of politics in the Italian Republic,the thesis of mass consensus has also been distorted and employed in somequarters to exonerate the regime, the argument being (put very simply) that ifmost Italians agreed with fascism, it could not have been so bad after all. Herejustification—through the identification of popular support—is very apparent.In reality, as I seek to argue in my chapter on Italian popular opinion, neither thepremise of this argument nor the conclusion would seem to be valid. Nonethelessthe distortion of the consensus thesis makes it more rather than less importantto discover the extent to which people did find aspects of fascism which madethem 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 sourceswhich can be used to establish what popular opinion really was at the time arelimited and, in many cases, unreliable. Opinion polls were in their infancy andunknown in many of the earlier dictatorships examined here. Private first-persondiaries represent wonderful sources, but those (like the diary of Victor Klemperer)that speak directly of political events and experiences are rare (the Soviet caseillustrated by Hellbeck is very clearly an exception). Much use is made in almostall the studies presented here of reports that the regime itself initiated throughthe use of spies and informers or through the regular reports of the police to theministerial and party authorities. As already suggested, all regimes were extremelysensitive to popular opinion and made great efforts to understand what was goingon and to monitor changes in the public mood; as a consequence archives areoften full of very detailed accounts of conversations overheard at the bus stopor 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 peoplehad any idea that they were being controlled, they would say what they wereexpected to say (unless, as happened not infrequently, to judge by police reports,they were drunk and had abandoned caution). Talk reserved for the ‘kitchentable’ rarely found its way into official reports. In much the same way informersmight be tempted to say things that the authorities found interesting in orderto justify their position and their payment. Thus exaggeration and inventionmight creep into the confidential reports. It is, in fact, only through experiencethat it is possible to judge the level of veracity of this kind of information andpolice reports remain sources to be used with a measure of caution. Jan Plamper’sdiscussion 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 realnature of popular opinion. Memory changes over time to adjust to new realitiesand, on occasions, to protect the private conscience. Amnesia—sometimesvoluntary—often steps in. In relation to dictatorship most people tend tocast themselves as victims rather than perpetrators; guilt is inevitably attachedto someone else. Thus the accounts that emerge are highly personalized andfrequently distorted by time. On the other hand there can be the risk ofidealization. The old emigre Russians who play chess on the Boardwalk atBrighton Beach in New York and reminisce in glowing terms about life in ‘theUnion’ would seem to have lost their bearings at some point after contact withthe USA.¹² And a not dissimilar phenomenon is visible with the nostalgia forEast Germany, even present among young people who never knew the regime,clearly more about identity and present difficulties than about the realities of lifeunder the SED. As with the police reports referred to above, the interview withthe ‘survivor’ is often to be used with caution.

In conclusion something must be said about the uses of comparison. Does theattempt to compare such different regimes, in power in societies with undoubtedgreat differences between them, have any sense? Any well-informed reader ofthis introduction will no doubt have already expressed on several occasionsthe sentiment, ‘But that is not true of X dictatorship’. Precisely. The pointof comparing regimes which are different in so many ways, as is inevitablewith political systems of both left and right that span a period of more thanseventy years, is to make distinctions, to note the differences, because it is thesethat permit us to recognize what is specific to each regime—which in turnhelps us also to recognize where it is possible to generalize. The examination ofpopular opinion has proved to be a very good way of making this comparison.Popular opinion is the point at which structures of dictatorship and dominationintersect with ordinary people. Far from being a very limited aspect of thestudy of totalitarianism, therefore, popular opinion represents a key area forunderstanding how totalitarian regimes work in practice, viewed both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. The essays that follow all, in their different ways, addressthis subject.

Introduction 13

Notes

1See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiryinto a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). The original German isfrom 1962.

2Exemplary in this sense is the work of Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and PoliticalDissent in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1983). Kershaw’s contribution to this volumeprovides an overview of the evolution of approaches to popular opinion in NaziGermany since his study of Bavaria appeared.

3Berlusconi’s famous declaration that, unlike Stalin, ‘Mussolini never killed anyone’,made to The Spectator in 2004, is a case in point.

4The polemics were centred around the third volume of Renzo De Felice’s massivebiography of Mussolini which claimed, against the prevailing view of Italians asessentially victims of fascism, that there had been a substantial degree of popularsupport for the dictator. See R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 2 (Turin, 1974). Thedebate is examined in greater detail in my chapter in this volume.

5For a good introduction to this methodology see Alf Ludtke (ed.), The History ofEveryday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experience and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995).

6These ideas are further developed in Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writinga Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

7See the influential (but also much contested) work of Stephen Kotkin, MagneticMountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).

8It is perhaps significant that the School was created only in 1930.9See Konrad Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural Historyof the GDR (New York, 1999). The term ‘welfare dictatorship’ is employed by Jarauschhimself.

10Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, reproduced in id., Open Letters (London,1991), 125–214.

11Interesting insights into this type of evolution are provided in Robert O. Paxton, TheAnatomy of Fascism (New York, 2004).

12Sheila Fitzpatrick throws light on this phenomenon in her chapter included in thisvolume.


PART 1

TWO OVERVIEWS


2Popular Opinion in Russia Under Pre-war

Stalinism

Sheila Fitzpatrick

What is popular opinion? One approach would assume that it corresponds tosome some kind of general will, in other words, something unitary. That’s theway people thought about it in the French Revolution. By contrast, orthodoxMarxists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere dismissed the idea that therewas a single ‘people’ (narod ), hence a single popular opinion; instead, therewas necessarily an array of class opinions (bourgeois, proletarian, kulak, poorpeasant, etc.). However, the apparent breadth of the array often concealed abinary: proletarian/bourgeois, good/bad;¹ and so it was with opinion²—meaningessentially 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 onlycomparatively recently. This is because Western historians did not have accessto any real data, and Soviet historians, who had limited access, generally didnot write about it because it was too sensitive a topic.³ For scholars writingin the 1950s and 1960s, the only way to get opinion data was to generate itthemselves by questioning emigres about their opinions in retrospect, which iswhat was done (with great effect) by the post-war Harvard Interview Project,whose subjects were refugees from the Soviet Union in Germany and New Yorkin the early 1950s.⁴ Many scholars at this time undoubtedly assumed that therewas no public opinion in the Soviet Union because under a totalitarian regime,there could be no public. Thus, the pioneering 1950 study by Alex Inkelestreats ‘public opinion’ as an artefact of propaganda, with only a cursory bowto the findings of his own Harvard project data that, in light of the deviantopinions of his refugee interviewees, propaganda was perhaps not as efficient atforming public opinion as might be supposed.⁵ Yet, even within the frameworkof thought that denied the possibility of real popular opinion, Western observerswere always on the lookout for negative, dissident attitudes: like the Soviet secretpolice, they hoped to discover the rare Winston Smiths who had managed toliberate themselves from Newspeak.⁶

18 Sheila Fitzpatrick

The first attempt to approach the topic of popular opinion was made in the1970s by ‘revisionists’, critics of the totalitarian model approach, many of whomwere social historians with an instinctive ‘bottom-up’ approach, in contrast tothe ‘top-down’ approach of the political scientists who dominated Sovietologyin the 1950s and 1960s. The revisionists framed the issue as an investigation of‘social support’ for the regime. As social support presumably generated positiveopinions, this was an implicit reversal of the more familiar interest (on the part ofthe NKVD/KGB as well as of Western scholars during the Cold War) in negativeopinion; and the revisionists’ apparent privileging of the positive provoked alot of criticism. Nevertheless, the revisionists’ working premises were those thatcame naturally to social historians: first, that all societies have a history (even ifthe totalitarian model, with its atomized and passive population suggested thecontrary), and second, that political regimes generally satisfy some social interestsand rarely survive by force alone.

The focus of revisionist scholarship was on the inter-war period, and themain objects of investigation in the 1970s were workers, peasants and youngpeople who were upwardly mobile from the peasantry and urban working class,often via formal affirmative action programmes. With the classified sections ofSoviet archives closed, and assuming that public statements could not be takenat face value, no direct evidence of support/popular opinion was available, soit was a matter of inference from behaviour and the scholar’s own assessmentof interest and cost/benefit. Revisionist labour historians found substantialworking-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 the1930s virtually non-existent.⁷ This was a tribute to the scholars’ respect fordata, as at least some of them had probably originally hoped to find evidenceof lasting working-class support for the Bolsheviks’ ‘proletarian dictatorship’.With regard to peasants, revisionist scholars, including the Marxists amongthem, tended to be very sceptical about Bolshevik claims that the regimewas supported by the ‘poor peasantry’ and opposed by ‘kulaks’ (prosperouspeasants), concluding that this kind of class division of the peasantry wasartificial and the categories largely meaningless.⁸ Collectivization was seen asa regime policy that the peasantry as a whole strongly disliked,⁹ and almostthe only discussion of social support in this connection was a pioneering studyof urban workers’ (not peasants’) support via volunteer participation in thecollectivization drive.¹⁰

The argument that large-scale upward mobility into a new Soviet elite generatedsocial support from the beneficiaries (known to contemporaries as vydvizhentsy,literally, promoted people)¹¹ was accepted within the revisionist group rathergrudgingly, as the Marxist labour historians tended to be uneasy with the ideathat workers might put individual opportunity ahead of class consciousness.Outside the revisionist group, a different objection was raised, namely that tospeak 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 tojustify the Soviet regime.

Urban youth was considered by revisionists to be a likely source of socialsupport for the Soviet regime, but for some reason almost no serious work wasdone on it. As for the educated elites, social support was identified as comingfrom the young militants of Cultural Revolution (the so-called ‘communistintelligentsia’) at the end of the 1920s,¹² as well as from upwardly mobile,Soviet-trained engineers,¹³ but revisionist scholarship rarely challenged the thenreigning assumption that the ‘old Russian intelligentsia’ had always kept theBolsheviks at arms’ length, resisting attempts to coopt them, and staunchlydefending freedom of thought and professional autonomy.¹⁴ This reticence wasin line with the spirit of literary scholarship of the 1970s, which with the notableexception of Katerina Clark’s work¹⁵ still considered ‘orthodox’ Soviet literatureto be out of bounds, assuming that interesting artistic works produced duringthe Soviet period would necessarily be implicitly or explicitly anti-Soviet.

For a long time, we had virtually no evidentiary basis on which to talkabout popular opinion, except for the Harvard Project. Memoirs were few andfar between, and moreover subject to heavy censorship.¹⁶ Neither publishedstatements of endorsement of the regime and its policies nor official allegationsabout anti-regime opinion in such venues as show trials could be taken atface value. The revisionists could only deduce opinion from actions: thosewho volunteered for collectivization were assumed to share the Soviet valuesthat underlay the programme; those who benefited from proletarian affirmativeaction programmes were assumed to be grateful.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, formerly secret archivesopened, disclosing various possible types of evidence: for the inter-war period,surveys (svodki) of ‘the mood of the population’ made by the secret police;¹⁷citizens’ letters to authority (including some statements of opinion on publicmatters along with petitions, complaints, and denunciations), which were oftensummarized for their ‘popular opinion’ input and sent upwards to the partyleaders;¹⁸ formal public discussions (narodnye obsuzhdeniia) on issues of theday, such as abortion and the new Constitution, as well as police reports onwhat people were saying informally outside the formal meetings, and similarreports 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 religiousbelief was unacceptable for a communist or ‘conscious’ Soviet citizen, this was atricky question indeed, but 57 per cent answered it affirmatively.¹⁹

The first reaction of social historians was to greet the svodki with joy as anequivalent of the Stimmungsberichte in Nazi Germany, the closest thing we werelikely to get to a Gallup poll in Soviet circumstances, though some objectedto using police reports as a basis for assessing opinion.²⁰ Svodki, along withcitizens’ letters, were the main source base for the major archive-based study of


popular opinion, Sarah Davies’s Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia.²¹ The initialassumption was that when the secret police presented a report on the moodof the (general) population, that was literally what they meant. More recently,Terry Martin’s (not yet published) work on information circulation in the SovietUnion, based on extensive work on svodki, has called that into question, raisingthe possibility that the ‘opinion’ on which local secret-police officers reported wasoften that of persons under suspicion (na uchete) rather than a broader samplingof the general population. Martin also concludes that by the end of the 1920s thepolitical leaders had mainly lost interest in the information from svodki, beingless interested in opinion in general than in warnings about where active unrestwas likely to flare up.²²

As already noted, svodki tended to focus on negative opinion, and this was trueof the whole category of ‘secret’ archival material that opened up at the beginningof the 1990s because of the close connection between the secrecy classificationand negativity. Information on repression, strikes, revolts, and all kinds of actionsassociated with resistance became available on a large scale for the first time.This generated a substantial literature on resistance, mainly focused on peasantsand influenced theoretically by James C. Scott’s work.²³ It was social historianswho were primarily drawn to resistance studies, with the result that revisionistsnow found themselves pursuing ‘negative’ opinion with the same energy theyhad earlier pursued ‘positive’. But the ‘positive’ had not dropped out of thehistoriography. Paradoxically, however, it became the purview of a group ofyoung scholars, many of them cultural historians, who self-consciously opposedthemselves 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 theSoviet secret police) analysed opinion (‘mood’) in terms of different social andclass groups as well as by geographical location and ethnicity: the usual categorieswere 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 orgroup is generally more meaningful than analysis of national populations as awhole. The problem with this is that thinking is done by individuals, not groupsor classes, whose existence as coherent entities in the real world—as distinctfrom the mind of the analyst—may always be disputed. In the mid-1990s,Stephen Kotkin introduced a new approach to the subject when he focusedon public discourse (not differentiated by class or group), implicitly treatingpopular opinion as a unitary thing.²⁵ From Kotkin’s perspective, the SovietUnion in the 1930s was full of people trying to ‘learn Bolshevik’ together—thatis, learn and simultaneously create the codes of ‘Stalinist civilization’. Strippedof class consciousness—or rather, stripping themselves of their former habitsof thinking as peasants, Bashkirs, Old Believers, or inhabitants of the village of


M in N province—Kotkin’s subjects, newly arrived residents of the industrialcity of Magnitogorsk, built from nothing in the middle of the steppe in the1930s, were in the process of fashioning themselves as Soviet citizens. Thoughthe rich empirical data came from Magnitogorsk, a place without traditionwhere everyone came from somewhere else, Kotkin’s reading of ‘Stalinism as acivilization’ (that is, as a cultural system) was clearly intended to apply to Sovietsociety as a whole.

The template of ‘Stalinism as a civilization’ has since been adapted by youngerscholars such as Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin to focus specifically on ‘Stalinistsubjectivity’, which amounts to a Foucauldian version of Weltanschauung.²⁶ Theyunderstand ideology not as something imposed from above on a society but assomething produced by the society; and what they are trying to show is howthe process of production works in specific individuals (not groups). This meansthat first-person documents (diaries, memoirs, autobiographical statements ofvarious 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 the1930s and trying (as his diary describes) to squeeze the kulak elements fromhis soul and turn himself into a true Soviet person.²⁷ While post-revisionistscholarship uses different terminology, there is a sense in which it, too, addressesthe revisionists’ ‘social support’ issue, for those Soviet citizens who are earnestlythinking themselves into a positive relationship with ‘the Soviet project’ (what anearlier generation of scholars would have called the Soviet regime and its goals)can surely be understood as providing support for the regime. The approachdiffers 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, moreglobal (not limited to a particular group or class).

If the global claims may be doubted (‘speaking Bolshevik’ was probably nota major preoccupation on the kolkhoz or for the 57 per cent of self-declaredbelievers in the population), they are very plausible for at least two overlappinggroups of the population: urban youth and victims of social stigmatization.(Hellbeck’s Stepan Podlubnyi belonged to both of them.) Young people in townsprovided much of the enthusiasm and adventurous spirit that (despite and alongwith terror) marked the 1930s. It was they who responded to calls to volunteerfor various causes like collectivization and pioneering the Far East, and who,judging by memoir and other evidence, were inclined to think of the Sovietproject as their own. Victims of stigmatization are, on the face of it, a much lesslikely group of Soviet supporters; indeed it is misleading to call them a groupin this context, since any sense of commonality they may have possessed had tobe suppressed in the service of becoming Soviet. Nevertheless, there is evidencethat some of the most passionate, sometimes almost hysterical, support for theSoviet cause came from people whose families had been dekulakized or whohad experienced other forms of discrimination. Such people were often young,embracing Soviet values even as they were renouncing or separated from their


stigmatized parents. Golfo Alexopoulos’s study of petitions from disenfranchisedpersons shows how eloquently those who were victims of discrimination couldwrite about their attachment to Soviet values. Of course, eloquence is no proofof sincerity, and the disenfranchised had good practical reasons for wanting torecover their civil rights. But we find a similar combination of identification withSoviet values and experience of class discrimination not only in contemporarysources like the Podlubnyi diary but also in interviews with elderly womenconducted in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. It appears that inmany individuals the experience of discrimination produced a particularly intenseand anxious form of Soviet patriotism, expressive of a longing to belong to thecommunity on the part of those who knew what it meant to be outcast.²⁸

Other lines of scholarly enquiry have illuminated particular branches andaspects of ‘popular opinion’ in the Stalin period. Literary scholarship has beentransformed over the past twenty years by the acceptance of ‘Soviet literature’as an object of study and a new focus on ‘socialist realism’ as somethingmore than a means of political control of writers.²⁹ The new British-basedfield of Russian cultural studies rejects a simple ‘top-down’ approach to Sovietculture and contests the assumption that dissident literary texts are the onlyones 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 hasgiven way to an almost ethnographic interest in the scientific world and theway it interacted with the political one. Instead of dealing with an alien‘Soviet regime’ as antagonists or outsiders, the scientists are assumed to be partof it.³¹ Analyses like Jochen Hellbeck’s of the diary of the writer AlexanderAfinogenov³² have shown how passionately many intellectuals embraced theregime in the 1930s, and the same point is made with regard to Jewishintellectuals (a substantial presence in the Soviet Russian intelligentsia) in YuriSlezkine’s work.³³

Scholars have become much more interested in ethnic and national questionssince the collapse of the Soviet regime, and their researches have revealed aspectrum of attitudes among particular ethnic/national groups at different times.Some of this scholarship addresses the question about nationalities (meaningnon-Russians) that was the focal point of nationalities scholarship during theCold War, namely resistance to Moscow and attempts to evade its dominationand protect the national tradition. But it has become increasingly clear toscholars that Soviet Moscow was in its own way a protector and even creator ofnations.³⁴ Terry Martin has written about affirmative action policies on behalfof ‘backward’ national minorities (the national counterpart to the class-basedaffirmative action mentioned above).³⁵ Yuri Slezkine has shown the importanceof Jewish support for and identification with the Revolution and Soviet regimein the inter-war period.³⁶ David Brandenberger has investigated the policyshift of the mid-1930s toward increasing tolerance (encouragement) of Russian


national sentiment, characterizing it as ‘an ideological ‘‘Big Deal’’ of sorts’,meaning a regime concession to a popular demand made in implicit exchangefor loyalty.³⁷

Any summary of the major advances in our knowledge of popular opinion onthe Stalin period over the past decade, and its changes over time, must be highlysubjective. For me, the most striking single contribution has been Slezkine’son Jewish support for the Soviet project—a topic that was previously more orless taboo for scholars because of Nazi propagandists’ obsession with ‘JewishBolshevism’—which shows the quasi-official anti-Semitism of the late Stalinperiod to be a real breakpoint for Soviet Jews, especially Jewish intellectuals,not (as suggested by earlier scholarship) simply more of the same old historyof persecution. Another significant advance has been the gradual dismantlingof the (self-)image of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia as a group of heroicdissidents throughout the Stalin period and the concomitant recognition thatthe intelligentsia was in fact an elite and comparatively privileged group. Asintelligentsia opinion comes to seem more positive, however, peasant opinion isincreasingly confirmed as highly negative throughout the Stalin period, as well itmight have been, given the circumstances of collectivization and the subsequentbrutally high rate of agricultural procurements and taxation. Even the SecondWorld War, in general clearly a rallying point for patriotic popular opinion,³⁸left peasants largely unaffected—except perhaps for those who managed to usemilitary service as a way of avoiding return to the kolkhoz.

The urban population seems in general to have been better disposed than therural towards the Soviet regime, despite the abrupt fall in living standards atthe end of the 1920s; and my reading of the attitudes expressed in Leningradworkers’ letters to authority in the 1930s is that a residual identification withthe Revolution and Soviet regime remained, at least in the Leningrad workingclass.³⁹ But Sarah Davies is surely right in emphasizing the outrage of workers atthe 1938 and 1940 labour laws, which may well have been a real turning-pointin labour attitudes.⁴⁰ Certainly Filtzer’s study of labour in the post-war periodsuggests that very little worker identification with the regime survived, at leastfor the younger generation inducted into manual labour in the 1940s, amongthe depressed and often alienated blue-collar workers of the early 1950s.⁴¹

In a comparative perspective, the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union wassurely much less popular among its own broad population than the Nazi one inGermany.⁴² This may partly be because Nazi terror was much more predictablein its objects: if you did not fall into one of the stigmatized categories, youhad no particular reason for fear. But I suspect that an even more importantreason was that living standards improved under the Nazis, whereas under theStalinist regime they dropped sharply at the end of the 1920s and did not recoveruntil the 1950s. There was no attitudinal equivalent in the Nazi period to thesolid alienation of Soviet peasants (still more than half the total population inthe pre-war period) as a result of the unpopular and in many ways disastrous


experiment of collectivization. In assessing popular opinion, one also has to takeaccount of the fact that those who found themselves outside the Soviet Unionat the end of the Second World War generally didn’t want to return, and thatthis seems to have applied across the board, regardless of class, nationality or lifeexperience in the Soviet Union.⁴³

CONCLUDING COMPLICATIONS

The account of popular attitudes I have given so far assumes that, whateverthe limitations of our knowledge in practice, the question of whether Sovietcitizens 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 definiteidentifications of individual attitudes, place them on a continuum from negativeto positive, and on this basis make statements about the degree of satisfaction ofthe population as a whole and of its component parts (groups, classes). But thereare difficulties with this assumption that must be addressed.

The first question is whether, in substituting ‘popular opinion’ for the termwe 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 onecannot have public opinion without a public, that is, something capable of beinga ‘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 downthe cafes and coffee houses in which opinion is formed,⁴⁵ suppress voluntaryorganizations not directly controlled by the state, restrict professional autonomy,censor publication, and punish people for anti-regime talk, they eliminate civilsociety and public opinion (the argument goes), leaving only an artificial ‘popularopinion’ that is a reflection of regime propaganda.

Demonstrably, however, people in the Soviet Union had opinions that were notreflections of regime propaganda. These opinions, moreover, were not conceivedand guarded in solitude. They were part of everyday sociability—exchanged withfriends and strangers at work, in trains, at markets, in the kitchens of communalapartments and dormitories, or standing in queues. They even displayed anothercharacteristic of a Habermasian public sphere, namely conscious separation fromthe sphere of the state.⁴⁶ The jokes that were ubiquitous in Soviet societyexpressed a collective subaltern mood or opinion, often framed for humorouseffect as a dialectical inversion of a familiar official cliche, and were diligentlygathered by the secret police for exactly this reason.⁴⁷ The police also monitoredthe 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 ofWestern ‘bourgeois’ type, and this public has its opinion, even if that opinion is


elaborated and exchanged not in a coffee house but over a bottle of vodka splitthree ways between strangers in a stairwell.

The second problem is the assumption that individuals have a single, staticopinion (or, in the secret police’s terminology, ‘mood’) rather than a shiftingrange or repertoire of opinions (moods), some of them mutually contradictory.This would be a questionable assumption in any context, but particularly theSoviet one, in which many observers have identified duality as a key componentof popular thinking. There are a number of different versions of the dualityargument. One is the duality of present and future—the claim that the lineamentsof the (better) future can be discerned through the (imperfect) present—whichis central to socialist realism. Scholars are increasingly treating socialist realismnot just as ‘official Soviet dogma’ but as a popular habit of thought as well.⁴⁸This means that a Soviet citizen thinking in this way might be perfectly awareof the imperfections of the present without questioning the premise that Sovietsociety was in the process of ‘building socialism’; in other words, his opinionabout Soviet society might be negative (with regard to the present) and positive(with regard to the future) at the same time. Russian-speaking foreigners willrecognize remnants of this way of thought surviving into the late Soviet periodin the popular habit of giving almost any question about Soviet society a doubleanswer: first ‘in principle’ and then ‘in practice’ (as in ‘V printsipe, this is whereyou buy tape-recorders; v praktike, none are on sale’).

Another kind of duality popular with Western scholars in the post-Stalinperiod—as well as in dissident circles of the Soviet intelligentsia—was thatbetween public and private utterance. In this framework, Soviet citizens wereseen as invariably saying one thing in public and the other in private, the firstopinion being positive about the Soviet regime, the second negative; and itwas usually taken for granted that only the second opinion was sincere.⁴⁹ Thishas recently been disputed with regard to the late Soviet period by a youngRussian-born anthropologist, Alexei Yurchak, who argues that the existenceof an ‘official’ Soviet language, whose use on public occasions was obligatoryand which was widely mocked in private by the younger generation, did notmean that the mockers’ attitude to Soviet values was necessarily hostile ordismissive.⁵⁰ It has also been disputed for the Stalin period by Stephen Kotkin(who considers the question of ‘true’ belief to be unknowable, but understandsSoviet citizens to be involved in a collective project of mastering ‘Soviet’ waysof thinking⁵¹) and historians of ‘Stalinist subjectivity’ like Jochen Hellbeck.Yet, even accepting the validity of these arguments, we are still left with aconsensus that Stalinist citizens knew two ways of thinking, only one of whichwas ‘Soviet’.⁵²

Harvard Project interviewers saw duality from yet another angle: they wereinterviewing a population of post-war refugees who, by definition, had rejectedthe Soviet Union but still praised many of its features. The leaders of the HarvardProject concluded that Soviet citizens generally liked the system, especially its


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 theobservation that they had a strong sense of the punitive aspects of the regimeand would expect to be punished.⁵⁴ Two of the Project’s psychologists, EugeniaHanfmann and Helen Beier, reflected further on this phenomenon in theirin-depth analysis of six Russian refugees. Although the group included threewho had joined the Vlasov Army during the war to fight the Soviet Army underGerman protection, and might therefore be presumed to be particularly hostile tothe Soviet regime, they found that all but one member reported past attachmentto Soviet values and, even more surprisingly, none seemed strongly hostile to theSoviet Union, even when being interviewed as refugees by Americans in 1950(that is, during the Cold War), and two were definitely sympathetic.⁵⁵ To besure, the refugees spoke of events in their Soviet pasts (arrests, purges, failureof Soviet authorities to provide support in time of need) that had disillusionedthem. But most responded as if their opinion of the Soviet Union, as well astheir decisions to leave the country, were largely the product of the circumstancesof the moment, particularly the fact that, as former POWs in most cases, theywere bound to be under constant suspicion if they went back. One intervieweeseemed to speak for the majority of the group when he said that he ‘would nothave hesitated to return to the Soviet Union if he could have been certain of hissafety’.⁵⁶ To their perplexed interviewers, it seemed that they were simultaneouslypro- 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 wemay be tempted to make about popular opinion in the Stalin period. Differentopinions, which may seem mutually contradictory, can coexist over long periodsin the one individual, let alone in a social group.⁵⁷ This is particularly true whena binary convention prevails (as it has done among Western Sovietologists, aswell 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 groupopinion, we will be on safer ground. But even that does not do justice to thepeculiar ambiguities of popular opinion in the world’s ‘first socialist society’—orat least the first to have made negation a structuring principle of subalterndiscourse and turned the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic into a popular art form.

Notes

1This is a basic argument in Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousnessand Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000), esp. 12–16.

2Called ‘mood’ (nastroenie) in Soviet bureaucratic language.


3A rare exception was the 1938 survey of attitudes of young peasants, published inthe 1970s along with a more recent survey as Sotsial’nyi oblik kolkhoznoi molodezhipo materialam sotsiologicheskikh obsledovanii 1938 i 1969 gg., ed. V. E. Poletaev et al.(Moscow, 1976).

4The two general volumes generated by the Harvard Interview Project were RaymondA. 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 ina Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Other specialized studies by Projectmembers are listed as appendices in both general volumes.

5Alex 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 ‘CriticalLetters to the Editors of the Soviet Press: Social Characteristics and Interrelations ofCritics and the Criticized’, ASR 18 (1953)), as was Fainsod (Merle Fainsod, Smolenskunder Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), ch. 2 (‘The Right of Petition—Lettersto the Press and Party Headquarters’)), but neither scholar conceptualized them ashaving anything to do with popular opinion.

6See George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (London, 1950), which contains anappendix 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-viewand mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English socialism], but to makeall other modes of thought impossible’.

7On workers’ support for the Bolsheviks in 1917, see Diane Koenker, Moscow Workersand the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981) and S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolutionin the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge, 1983). For a revisionist position on theearly post-Soviet years, see William G. Rosenberg, ‘Workers’ Control on the Railroadsand Some Suggestions concerning Social Aspects of Labor Politics in the RussianRevolution’, Journal of Modern History 49:2 (1977), 1181–1219, and idem, ‘RussianLabor 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 stronglycriticized by Vladimir Brovkin, who argued that workers were not eternally frozeninto 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: SocialistOpposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca, 1987)). There wascomparatively 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 (Urbanaand Chicago, 1987). As for the Stalin period, the model for an approach emphasizingBolshevik mistreatment of workers and betrayal of the promises of the ‘proletarianrevolution’ was set by the Menshevik Solomon M. Schwarz in his Labor in the SovietUnion (New York, 1951) and confirmed with a more abundant research base byDonald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization (Armonk, NY, 1986).

8Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, trans.Irene Nove (London, 1968), esp. 41–80. Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class: PoliticalSociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia, 1910–1925 (Oxford, 1972).


9Lewin, Russian Peasants, parts 2 and 3.10Lynne 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 1970sdiscussions of (absent) peasant support for collectivization, I wrote an article in the1990s proposing that, while there were supporters of the Soviet regime in the villagesin the 1920s—many of them young Red Army veterans from the Civil War—suchpeople tended to leave the villages quickly once employment opportunities openedup in the towns (which happened on an unprecedented scale as a result of theindustrialization drive, coincident in time with collectivization). The article has sofar appeared only in Russian (‘Vopros sotsial’noi podderzhki kollektivizatsii’ [Thequestion of social support for collectivization], in Otechestvennaia istoriia XX Veka,ekonomicheskaia, politicheskaia i sotsialnaia zhizn’: V pamiati V.Z. Drobizheva, ed. EfimPivovar (Moscow, 2004)), but should be published shortly in Russian History.

11Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union (Cambridge,1979).

12Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington,1978).

13See Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility and idem, ‘Stalin and the Making of aNew Elite’ (1978), reprinted in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture inRevolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992).

14For example, Loren Graham, a scholar sympathetic to revisionism when it emergedin the early 1970s, made the ‘revisionist’ point that the Soviet government was abig 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 theearly relationship of the Academy and the new regime in terms of the autonomybattle: see Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party1927–1932 (Princeton, 1967), esp. pp. viii, 200, 208–9. Graham’s pupil KendallBailes, studying the engineering profession, wrote cautiously of a ‘fragile’ workingrelationship between the technical intelligentsia and the regime, in which ‘the forcesof 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 suggestionof partnership or overt recognition of what revisionists called ‘social support’ for theregime on the engineers’ part. See Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society underLenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton,1978), esp. 410, 413, 422.

15Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981).16On 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 SocialHistory in the 1930s, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola (Armonk, NY, 1990),233–54.

17The bulk of the svodki remain inaccessible in the still-closed KGB archives, but somerich deposits have been found, e.g. in the Leningrad party archive, and in Ukrainianarchives.


18For a typology of this source, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens’ (1996),reprinted in Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-CenturyRussia (Princeton and Oxford, 2005), 155–81.

19For 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,

20For this criticism, see Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation andDissent in Stalinist Russia’, Kritika 1:1 (2000), esp. 76–9.

21Sarah 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 maintypes of newly available ‘popular opinion’ data on the 1930s.

22Based on a reading of draft chapters from Terry Martin’s book-in-progress, PolicingSoviet Politics: An Informational Interpretation of Stalinism, 1921–1954.

23James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence inSoutheast Asia (New Haven, 1976) and idem, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Formsof 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 animportant theme in Davies, Popular Opinion.

24Sluzhashchie or state employees was a Soviet statistical category separate from theworkers, despite the fact that a strict Marxist analysis should have treated them as awhite-collar branch of the proletariat.

25Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).26The programmatic statement is I. Halfin and J. Hellbeck, ‘Rethinking the Stal-

inist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s ‘‘Magnetic Mountain’’ and the State of Sovi-et Historical Studies’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44 (1996). Relevantworks are Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial(Cambridge, Mass., 2003) and Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writ-ing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). The Russian scholar OlegKharkhordin, also influenced by Foucault, worked separately on similar lines in hisbook The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley,1999).

27Hellbeck edited Podlubnyi’s diary for German publication as Tagebuch aus Moskau1931–1939 (Munich, 1996) with a long introduction which is published separatelyas ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9’, in SheilaFitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), 77–116. Hellbeck’srecent book, Revolution on my Mind, offers a detailed analysis of four diaries, includingPodlubnyi’s.

28See Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State,1926–1936 (Ithaca, 2003); Barbara A. Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck,


A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, 1997);Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, ch. 6.

29See e.g. Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and SocialistRealism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca, 1997); Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the StateReader: 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 SovietLiterary Culture (Stanford, 2001).

30Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd(Oxford, 1998).

31See 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.

32Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 285–345.33Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton and Oxford, 2004), esp. 222–42.

After showing the size of that presence in various professions, Slezkine concludesthat ‘there is no doubt that the Jews had a much higher proportion of elitemembers than any other ethnic group in the USSR. In absolute terms, theywere second to the Russians, but if one divides the elite into groups whosemembers came from the same region, shared a similar social and cultural back-ground, and recognized each other as having a common past and related par-ents, it seems certain that Jews would have constituted the largest singlecomponent of the new Soviet elite, especially (or rather, most visibly) its culturalcontingent . . .’ (236).

34For this argument, see Yuri Slezkine, ‘The Soviet Union as a Communal Apartment, orHow a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism;and Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in theSoviet Union, 1929–1939 (Ithaca, 2001).

35Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, esp. 17–18 and 125–81.36Slezkine, Jewish Century, esp. 216–54.37David Brandenberger, ‘Soviet Social Mentalite and Russocentrism on the Eve of

War, 1936–1941’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 48:3 (2000), 406. His bookNational Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern RussianNational Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002) also deals with the issue ofRussian nationalism, but more in a context of mobilization (i.e. top-down) than ofpopular sentiment (bottom-up).

38See Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of theBolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001).

39This 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 aspecial claim on the regime’s attention, as well as invoking the spectre of betrayaland deception. Davies, however, focuses only on the theme of betrayal and deception(Popular Opinion, 43–8 and 133–8).

40Davies, Popular Opinion, 43–8.


41Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of theStalinist System after World War II (Cambridge, 2002).

42Alf Ludtke 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 Nazismand Stalinism’, which explores these themes. See Beyond Totalitarianism: Nazismand Stalinism Compared, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer (Cambridge,2009).

43The ambiguities of refugees’ attitudes to the Soviet Union discovered by the post-warHarvard Interview Project are discussed above, 25–26.

44Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry intoa Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.,1989), 2.

45This actually happened in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s, thoughas a probably unintentional by-product of the abolition of urban private enter-prise.

46See Sarah Davies, ‘ ‘‘Us’’ against ‘‘Them’’: Social Identity in Soviet Russia, 1934–41’,in Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism, 47–70.

47On Soviet jokes, see W. Chamberlain, ‘The ‘‘Anecdote’’: Unrationed Soviet Humour’,Russian Review 16:3 (1957), 27–37, and Robert Thurston, ‘Social Dimensions ofStalinist Rule: Humor and Terror in the USSR, 1935–1941’, Journal of Social History24:3 (1991), 541–62. For a comparative dimension, see F. K. M. Hillenbrand,Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (London, 1995).

48See, for example, the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 94:3 (1995), ed. ThomasLahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko: ‘Socialist Realism Without Shores’, and Sheila Fitz-patrick, ‘Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilegeand Taste’, in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in RevolutionaryRussia (Ithaca, 1994), 238–56. Another duality from the sphere of cultural studiesis 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).

49A pioneering study by an emigre sociologist was Vladimir Shlapentokh’s Public andPrivate Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York,1989).

50Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, until it was No More: The Last Soviet Gen-eration (Princeton, 2006). For his critique of Western assumptions about ‘binarysocialism’, see 4–8.

51Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, esp. 228–9.52This 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 inthe 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 thepossibility that many Soviet citizens who never made a permanent dissident choice


were capable of switching back and forth according to their immediate circumstancesand company.

53Bauer et al., How the Soviet System Works, 133–7.54Ibid., 116: ‘The mass of the Soviet population appears to suffer rather uniformly from

the fear of punitive action by the regime . . .’.55Eugenia Hanfmann and Helen Beier, Six Russian Men—Lives in Turmoil (North

Quincy, Mass., 1976). The lone interviewee who expressed no past attachment wasNikolai, a deserter from the Soviet occupation army in Germany in 1948, who also,however, expressed no strong anti-Soviet feelings.

56Alexei, the most homesick and pro-Soviet of the respondents (Hanfmann and Beier,Six Russian Men, 63).

57In Kotkin’s useful formulation (Magnetic Mountain, 228), ‘elements of ‘‘belief ’’ and‘‘disbelief ’’ appear to have coexisted within everyone . . . Even in the case of thecategory 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 certainwell-defined but not inviolate limits . . .’.

3Consensus, 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 inearnest until the 1970s. When it did, the issues of consensus and coercion were acentral theme, and any assessment of those was inevitably related to the findingsof the early work which was starting to be undertaken at that time into popularattitudes towards the Nazi regime and patterns of behaviour among ordinaryGermans.

Before the 1970s, little empirical research had been carried out into theseissues. The general tenor of interpretation tended to place the emphasis upona population reduced to helpless passivity by the repression and terror of atotalitarian state. The corollary was that backing for the regime, apart from died-in-the-wool Nazi fanatics, was chiefly a propaganda product. That is, peoplewere bamboozled into support for the regime through relentless propagandaand the demonic personality of a pied-piper. It was a heavily ‘top-down’ viewof 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 theprevailing form of interpretation. If people were helpless in face of the weightof repression in a terroristic police-state, or were blinded by indoctrination andmanipulative propaganda, blame and responsibility for what happened could beclearly delineated and squarely attached to Hitler, a clique of his henchmen, anda minority of wild-eyed enthusiasts, somehow detachable from German societyas a whole.

A breakthrough in challenging the early, persistent stereotypes was unquestion-ably the ‘Bavaria Project’, which began in 1973 under the aegis of the renownedInstitut fur 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 between1977 and 1983.¹ It was commissioned to carry out research into ‘Resistance andPersecution in Bavaria during the Nazi Era’. This could have been a fairly pre-dictable, historiographically somewhat sterile, enterprise. Instead, Broszat pressedfor an extended definition of ‘resistance’, which allowed for the inclusion of amultitude of forms of minor deviance from the conformist behaviour expectedby 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 beunnoticed in a democracy (such as telling political jokes, listening to foreignbroadcasts, or dancing to jazz) could be viewed as opposition and punished. The‘German’ greeting was the symbol of the forced compliance that representednational unity. So even saying ‘Guten Tag ’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler’ was taken as asign of disaffection.²

Under Broszat’s direction, the project turned into a major exploration of avast array of forms of political nonconformity—or ‘dissent’, as I preferred to callit.³ But if the project focused on dissent, consent was never far away. In fact, itbecame ever clearer that dissent towards certain aspects of the Nazi regime and itsideology was perfectly compatible with consent in other areas. Approval of andcomplicity in components of regime policy often went hand in hand with partialrejection 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 abush-fire in the next few years. The uncovering of the history of the Naziera ‘from below’ caught the imagination, and not just of professional histo-rians. History workshops sprang up in many places in Germany. The social(and local) history of the Hitler dictatorship shaped new perspectives. Andshifts in interpretation started to impose themselves. The more research intograss-roots behaviour during the Third Reich was carried out, the more itseemed that ‘everyday’ forms of complicity, approval and willing cooperationmanifested 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 toAuschwitz were umbilically connected. From now on, therefore, the emphasisshifted gradually but inexorably from the resistance–opposition–dissent spec-trum to that of approval–complicity–consensus. But the links between thetwo also became apparent. Instead of a sharp black–white delineation of pro-and 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 theimplication in this formulation that the regime stood somehow ‘over’ soci-ety, and pointed to the impossibility of drawing such a sharp line betweenthe two.

Consensus, Coercion and the Third Reich 35

All this was connected with another historiographical development. Strangethough it might now seem, the centrality of the Holocaust had not been mirroredin historical writing before the 1980s. Increasingly thereafter this deficiency wasmore than adequately remedied. The attention switched, too, from the pre-war period, which had remained the central chronological focus of researchduring the 1960s and 1970s, to the wartime experience of Nazism. With this,research started, often for the first time, systematically to explore aspects of theregime’s criminality in areas beyond the murder of the Jews, such as the grievousmaltreatment of foreign workers compelled to labour in German factories, orthe conscious policies of starvation which led to the deaths of vast numbers ofSoviet prisoners-of-war. Ordinary German soldiers, serving in the Wehrmacht,were now shown to have been implicated in some of the worst crimes ofthe regime.⁴ A sharp division between an ‘unblemished’ Wehrmacht and thecriminal SS, a division sustained by post-war memoirs of former leading generals,could no longer be upheld. The unfolding of the ‘Final Solution’ posed noexception to this. The time was ripe, therefore, for the claim made in DanielGoldhagen’s bestselling book in the mid-1990s, that ordinary Germans had been‘Hitler’s willing executioners’.⁵ The early generalization of a society repressed intosubmission had been replaced by a society of perpetrators willing to collaboratein the most inhumane policies ever known. Coercion had given way to consensusas a general understanding of the way ordinary people thought and behavedduring the Third Reich.

Goldhagen’s book came under heavy fire from historians for its undifferen-tiated, broad-brush claims about German society’s approval for the genocidalthrust of anti-Jewish policy. But in popular consciousness, not least in Germanyitself, there is no doubt that Goldhagen struck a chord. Moreover, the sense thatthe Nazi regime could reckon with the support of the vast majority of Germanswas represented inside as well as outside the academy. The shift from the earlieremphasis upon opposition to the later stress on consensus found its apogee inRobert 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 thisstudy, on the basis of surviving Gestapo files kept in Wurzburg and relating tothe region of Lower Franconia, that police enforcement of Nazi racial policywas frequently made possible by the denunciations of ordinary citizens. He fellshort of implying collective guilt for the German population. But in BackingHitler, just over a decade later, this implication seems inescapable. On thevery first page, he claims that despite ‘pockets of negative opinion, rejectionof Nazism, and even examples of resistance, the great majority of the Germanpeople soon became devoted to Hitler and they supported him to the bitter endin 1945’.⁸ The wide-ranging consensus embraced, in this interpretation, eventhe terror apparatus itself, which enjoyed extensive popular support, not leastsince, 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 assertionthat the German people in their overwhelming majority had backed Hitler to theend 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 relyupon—could in fact only operate through—the active support of ordinaryGermans, keen to denounce their fellow citizens in the interests of conformityand racial solidarity. The old ‘top-down’ view of a repressed and terrorizedpopulation 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, manipulatedfrom below.⁹

Gellately’s interpretation did not stand in isolation.¹⁰ But it was the mostforthright statement of the view that the Third Reich was a consensual regimefrom beginning to end. Unsurprisingly, given such a bold assertion, a backlashsoon 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 thetotalitarianism theorem had taken place. Whereas, in the latter stages of the ColdWar, totalitarianism as an explanatory concept had fallen into much disrepute,the revelations about the Stasi state and equivalent moving stories about thesuffering of ordinary citizens at the hands of the organs of the Soviet police andsecurity forces restored it to the centre-ground of interpretation. The tone wasswitching back, even before Gellately’s book appeared, to a renewed emphasisupon the repression of the police state. In some ways, the reaction to Gellately’sbook has been to shift that emphasis still further, when applied to the ThirdReich. Summarizing much recent work, Richard Evans has commented, withregard to Gellately’s arguments: ‘To speak of a self-policing society understatesthe element of top-down terror and intimidation in the functioning of theThird Reich’, where ‘increasingly brutal and violent conditions loomed overeveryone’.¹¹ So the pendulum, which began in the 1970s to swing from coercionto consensus, and reached its farthest point in this direction with the appearanceof 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 questionof what might be said to constitute ‘consensus’ in a highly repressive policestate. The term is, in fact, difficult enough to define in a democracy, wheregovernments (or the main party in a coalition government) are often backedby only a minority of the electorate. But in a democracy, people at least havea choice. They can openly voice their opinions in a variety of media (whichcan be tested in opinion surveys). And they can reject a government at the nextelection. In Nazi Germany, the only elections were periodic plebiscites, withoutoppositional parties, with entirely one-sided propaganda, with no safeguards onsecrecy, where some votes were patently falsified, and where a negative voteattracted sanctions. From the outset there was no possibility of unseating Hitler’sregime from below. Social and political controls functioned at all levels. The


Gestapo was only the tip of the iceberg in this respect. The Nazi Party had apresence through its functionaries even in tenement blocks to ensure outwardforms of compliance. Even mild criticism of the leadership was punished. Anyexpression of dissenting opinion was potentially hazardous. The least form ofsubversive activity had to reckon with draconian reprisals. Opponents of theregime did well to keep quiet. Nothing suggests that the third or so of voters whostill supported the left-wing parties before the Nazi takeover became overnightconverts to the new regime. For most, it was a matter of battening down thehatches, keeping heads down, avoiding trouble with the new overlords, and goingthrough the motions of outward accommodation to the demands of the regime.Consensus here was for the most part coerced. Beyond all this, opinion wasconstantly manipulated by a relentless barrage of propaganda. In the absence of afree press, no public formation of oppositional opinion could be constructed. Ina crowd screaming ‘Heil Hitler’ with upraised arms, it took courage not to joinin. Yet the very greeting was a sign of outward acceptance of the regime and itsleader.

These well-known and self-evident restrictions of a ‘closed’ society controlledby repression make it difficult to speak of anything other than a manufacturedconsensus, 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 andeffectiveness.

I I

Until 1933, it is of course possible to measure support for the NSDAP’smanifesto for national renewal through the Party’s performance in pluralisticelections. At its height in free elections, in July 1932, it was supported by37.4% of voters. In March 1933, when Hitler was already Reich Chancellorand 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 ofthe Left (SPD and KPD). The remaining quarter or so of the electorate, beyondNazi voters, it is fair to suggest, supported at least some of what the Nazis stoodfor. There was an overlap in values and extensive agreement, for instance onthe 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 acceptstrong authoritarian leadership. Hitler and his regime were easily able to exploitthis platform for widened support over the coming years. There was, in otherwords, a basis for the rapid extension of Nazi support. This could be called anunderlying consensus. The term does not mean that there was blanket approvalfor 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 ofthe Third Reich. But it does indicate backing for a good deal of what the regimerepresented, and put into political practice, at least in the ‘good years’ until themiddle of the war. Even several years after the war, around half of West Germanshad positive memories of the pre-war years.¹² Without this backing, much ofwhat transpired in the Third Reich seems barely explicable. It does, however,raise the question of how it is possible to gauge approval in conditions whereexpression of oppositional opinion was dangerous and where ‘public’ opinionwas solely that of the regime. Once pluralistic elections ceased in March 1933,this can only be done impressionistically, and through drawing on sources whichare extraordinarily difficult to evaluate.

This material largely comprises the reports on ‘the situation’ or the ‘mood of thepeople’ compiled by a variety of Nazi authorities, supplemented for the pre-waryears by regular reports produced by the exiled Social Democratic organizationbased in Prague, then later in Paris (now calling itself the ‘Sopade’). Interpretationof both sets of reports is fraught with difficulties. But generalizations aboutattitudes 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 thedistrict office, which in turn compiled a report for the head of the districtadministration (or, in towns and cities, the mayor). A further report went up thechain to the head of the regional administration, and from there to the ministryof the interior. Separate, parallel, reporting was carried out, for instance, byfunctionaries of the Nazi Party at all levels, by the local and regional offices ofthe Propaganda Ministry, by the judicial administration, by the Gestapo, and bythe Security Service (the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst). Consecutive, unbroken seriesof reports covering the whole period of the dictatorship are available for onlya few scattered localities and at regional level only exist intact for Bavaria. Thecentral digests of SD reports started in 1938 and became frequent during thewar, then ceased in the summer of 1944 (because some Nazi leaders thoughtthem too defeatist in tone), though reports from some localities are extant downto April 1945. Naturally, the reports were heavily coloured in different degreesby pro-regime bias. And they scarcely presented a scientific sample of opinion. Atthe grass-roots level, hearsay formed the basis of most reports. Conversations wereoverheard in pubs, on trams, or in the workplace and elsewhere. What was saidoften represented desired opinion, such as positive comments about the Fuhrer’slatest speech. The farther up the ladder the reports were produced, the morebland, by and large, they became. Lower down, relatively unsophisticated mindscould sometimes record critical opinion in a way which would be siphoned outhigher up. Given the weighting of the reports as a whole, it can generally be saidthat a good dose of scepticism is justified when they cite pro-regime comments.The negative remarks or behavioural patterns recorded, on the other hand, oftenspeak for themselves.


The ‘Sopade’ reports have an opposite bias.¹⁴ These reports were based uponinformation smuggled out of Germany by members of the illegal opposition.This information was collated by ‘Border Secretaries’ situated in a number ofplaces just beyond the German frontier. The reports of the ‘Border Secretaries’were sent to headquarters in Prague, where they were assembled into monthlydigests called ‘Germany Reports’, then reproduced and distributed, for instance,to sympathizers abroad. The main focus was on opposition in factories andworkplaces, but the reports also embraced wider issues such as popular reactionsto foreign policy, attacks on the Christian Churches and the persecution of theJews. The self-evident tendency here was to exaggerate the scale and significanceof opposition. That being so, comments about the penetration of Nazism, thepopularity of Hitler, the jubilation about foreign-policy triumphs and so on,carry weight.

Taken in their entirety, critical assessment of these contrasting types ofreports allows patterns and fluctuations of opinion to be impressionisticallydiscerned. What comes across strongly is the differentiated nature of this opinion.Certain aspects of regime policy attracted vehement criticism. Prominent amongthese were the attritional attacks on the Christian Churches. To speak ofconsensus behind the regime in this area would be impossible. There is nodoubt, for instance, that the vast majority of Catholics—a third or so of thepopulation—bitterly resented the assault on Catholic institutions, traditions andobservances that reached its height between 1935 and 1937. But the same criticsof the regime in this particular issue could and did applaud the remilitarizationof the Rhineland, the Anschluss, and other ‘triumphs’ of an assertive foreignpolicy—once, that is, the threat of war had dissipated—and praised Hitler forhis statesmanship. This type of ideological schizophrenia was even more markedin the case of Franconian Protestants, who openly (and successfully) protestedat the deposition of the Lutheran bishops of Bavaria and Wurttemberg in 1934while remaining most fervent Nazi supporters in a region which was a hotbed ofvicious antisemitism.

The grievances and discontents of daily life—for example, among farmersover agricultural policy, among industrial workers over low wages and pressurizedworking conditions, and among a variety of middle-class groups over myriadsectoral interests—are omnipresent in the reports. The Party functionaries,who were the visible face of Nazism in localities, often bore the brunt of theantagonism and ill-feeling. Hitler, on the other hand, represented the ‘sunny’ sideof the regime, remained largely exempt (at least in the form of expression) fromthe criticism, and was widely admired for the ‘achievements’ which propagandaattributed almost exclusively to him personally. Specific animosities were, it isplain, perfectly compatible with wide-ranging consent to key facets of Nazi ruleand approval of Hitler’s leadership.

The consent cannot, however, be separated from the constant shaping throughpropaganda and the equally ever-present threat of recriminations for expressions

40 Ian Kershaw

of political nonconformity. That is, whatever consensus existed was both manu-factured and coerced. This does not mean that it did not exist. A ‘Sopade’ report,following Hitler’s announcement in March 1935 that general military servicewas being reintroduced in contravention of the prohibitions of the VersaillesTreaty, commented that the euphoria outdid that of August 1914. ‘Peoplecan be compelled to sing’, the report ran, ‘but not forced to sing with suchenthusiasm. . . . 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 largeswathes of popular approval for its policies and the ideas behind them. Anunderlying 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 onthe persecution of the Jews poses significant difficulties.¹⁶ All the indications are,nevertheless, that the regime was successful between 1933 and 1941 in deepeningthe awareness both of a ‘Jewish Question’ and of the desirability of finding a‘solution’. Given the unyielding demonization of Jews by propaganda and thehazards in venturing any positive or friendly remarks seen to be supportive ofthe number-one ideological enemy, this was scarcely surprising. It is necessary,however, to distinguish between methods and goals (which were never preciselydefined).

The methods used by the Nazis were often criticized, even when the aimof ‘removing’ the Jews from Germany was apparently supported. At the verybeginning of the Third Reich, in April 1933, for example, many people ignoredthe 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 economicadvantages of the low prices in department stores. Economic benefit was thereason, 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 saidnothing about the underlying attitude towards Jews.

The open violence inflicted on Jews was also widely criticized. Again, themotives were not necessarily human sympathy. Often the disturbance of lawand order was what angered people. The pogroms of November 1938, dubbed‘Reichskristallnacht ’, provided further evidence of these reactions. The vandalismby Party hordes, the destruction of property and waste of economic resourceswere all strongly criticized—and deep into Party circles. Many felt that whathad happened was a disgrace in a ‘cultured people’. Signs of sympathy onhuman grounds were less evident, although Jewish eyewitness accounts provideevidence that it was not altogether lacking. But for all this criticism, there islittle to suggest that a society free of Jews was an unpopular idea. Supportfor the Nazi aim coexisted with disapproval of the methods deployed inreaching it.


In wartime conditions, doubtless influenced by the greatly amplified anti-Jewish propaganda in 1940–1, there is every indication that animosity towardsthe Jews sharpened considerably. SD reports suggested wide support for theintroduction of the Yellow Star in September 1941, and for the deportationswhich 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 anyaccuracy. The reports themselves mention some negative comment, attributedmainly to ‘church circles’. In the circumstances, it seems obvious that the mostvociferous comments recorded in the reports were inevitably going to be those ofsupporters of the deportations. Most people were rightly fearful of speaking outtoo loudly if they disagreed with what was happening. Accepting that there wasincreased support for regime policy towards Jews, there is simply no way of mea-suring the levels of opinion, or of knowing what the many who did not speak outin favour of the deportations were truly thinking and wanting. Whether there wasa 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 repressivephase of the regime in 1933–4 were certainly popular outside the subculturesinvolved. It is hard to imagine that the same was not true of the persecutionof widening categories of ‘deviants’, ‘a-socials’, ‘criminal types’, gypsies andhomosexuals, where the Nazis could easily play upon pre-existing prejudice.The limits of consensus were, however, reached when the mentally sick becametargeted in the ‘euthanasia action’ of 1941. Public protest was, it is true, largelyconfined to Bishop Galen’s famous sermon in August that year. However, whenrumours of what was taking place seeped out, widespread unease and disquietamong the population were evident.¹⁹ Negative opinion could scarcely findexpression. But it evidently existed. The halting of the main ‘action’ (thoughthe killing of the mentally ill continued in the concentration camps) itselfindicated the Nazi leadership’s awareness that they had to tread warily withpublic attitudes in this matter. No obvious consensus underpinned the murderof ‘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. Thesigns are that Hitler himself was becoming less popular, even before the disasterof Stalingrad brought clear indications that people for the first time were nowholding him personally responsible for the mounting catastrophe.²⁰ In the lastphase of the war, between 1943 and 1945, the reports are full of criticism ofmore or less every facet of the regime. In this phase, the terror which the regimehad exported now boomeranged back on to the German people themselves. Itis broadly true to say that terror before the war had been selective (though withever widening targets) and that those not belonging to targeted sectors of thepopulation 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 realand never far from the surface in this society. In any case, the extent both ofrepression 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 direstconsequences, irrespective of social class or status. The intensified terror andextreme repression, as the regime lashed out ever more wildly in its death agonies,are themselves an indicator of sharply dwindling support. To suggest that theconsensus ‘broadly held’ even though some citizens ‘had had enough’²¹ conveys amisleading impression of the state of opinion as the Third Reich lurched towardsGotterdammerung and offers only the faintest of nods towards the widespreadlonging by this stage to see the back of the Hitler regime.²² That the regimewas able to hold out to the bitter end, until Hitler was dead in his bunker andGermany 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 proportionof Germans still genuinely supporting the Hitler regime in its last weeks. Perhaps10 per cent or so might be a reasonable ‘guesstimate’. But whatever the figuremight have been, the crucial fact was that it was a minority still holding powerand prepared to use it ruthlessly, since it had nothing to lose. Most of the rest bythis 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.

I I I

Acquaintance with the mass of opinion reports surviving from the Nazi state,complex and difficult though these sources are, allows little scope for sweepinggeneralizations about attitudes and behaviour of the German people during theThird Reich. There is too much evidence of daily dissent and even manifestationsof limited opposition and protest—limited in significance, certainly, but note-worthy just the same—to support notions of a society terrorized by a totalitarianstate into meek submission and automaton-like obedience and compliance. Theopposite generalization, of a consensus holding to the end, of a society whichnever seriously deviated from its backing for Hitler and the regime, seems equallyflawed. A survey of the reports on popular opinion suggests a more nuancedinterpretation.

Outside those social groups excluded from the ‘national community’—sup-porters of the banned left-wing parties, persecuted minorities (in prime place,Jews), and other ‘outcasts’—it does seem reasonable to suggest an underlyingconsensus behind the regime which did not start seriously to collapse before themiddle of the war. This was rooted in the deep antipathies towards Weimardemocracy and the visceral hatred of socialism in wide sections of the population.Brutal repression of perceived internal enemies was seen as a reasonable pricefor the economic recovery and national revitalization that took place in the


early years of the Third Reich. And an almost all-pervasive sense of nationalresentment (greatly bolstered, of course, by propaganda) at the humiliating lossof Germany’s great-power status since the end of the First World War providedthe backcloth to the greatest area of consensus, that produced by Hitler’s foreign-policy triumphs in the 1930s. By 1938, however, worries that Hitler was leadingGermany into another war were widespread and mounting. These dissipatedduring the victorious first phase of the war. But once the corner was turned inthe winter of 1941–2, and the prospect of a glorious final victory evaporatedonce and for all, to be replaced by mounting disasters, the underlying consensusitself started to give way before largely collapsing between 1943 and 1945.

This ‘underlying consensus’ existed at the intersection of the social expectationsof national ‘salvation’ which accompanied Hitler’s rise to power, and theconstantly propagated utopian vistas of the regime’s long-term goals of adominant, prosperous and united Germany. The representative figure of thisfuture vision was Hitler, and the expectations placed in ‘heroic’ leadership, andconstantly pumped-up by a propaganda machine in overdrive when it came tothe manufacture of the Fuhrer cult, meant the personalization of this consensusin the Leader’s ‘great achievements’. Beneath this veneer of consensus, however,the everyday realities of the Third Reich revealed a society which belied thepropaganda image of a united ‘national community’. The ways in which Nazismimpinged upon everyday life were divisive rather than unifying. Areas of consentmight be discerned; a general consensus cannot. Propaganda slogans aboutputting the community before the individual, and sacrifice today for prosperityand happiness tomorrow, had a hollow ring for the millions low down the socialladder who saw their own working conditions deteriorate while the rampantcorruption and arrogance of power above them were all too evident.

The disappointments and disillusionment of daily life could, however, findcompensation—though not on a lasting basis—by the affective integration ofa ‘national community’ united behind the goals invested in the almost deified‘Fuhrer’, who, to utilize concepts of Max Weber, stood outside and beyond thesphere of the ‘everyday’ (‘das Alltagliche’) and represented another, ‘exceptional’(‘das Außeralltagliche’), sphere.²³ This was the functional reality of ‘charismaticdomination’. As long as Hitler stood for the building of a great and powerfulGermany, extending her borders through a series of successful coups attainedwithout bloodshed, then war with unheard-of military triumphs and withminimal losses, the superficial consensus layered on the daily disenchantmentsand grievances could hold. But the euphoria of the ‘triumphs’ soon subsidedagain into the greyness of everday existence. Such euphoria could be repeatedas 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 irredeemablefailure and irreversible misfortune set in.

The ‘exceptional’ sphere with its focus on the ‘vision’ embodied by Hitlernaturally incorporated the ‘struggle’ to defeat and destroy the perceived enemies

44 Ian Kershaw

of a ‘national community’, a notion which gained definition only through thoseexcluded from it. A functional purpose of the persecution of the Jews was tochannel pent-up aggression towards ideological targets which, in reality, hadno connection with the grievances of everyday life. Many Germans had noactual contact with Jews. This did not prevent propaganda portraying Jews asGermany’s enemies gaining ground, with corresponding approval of a futureGermany without any Jewish presence. By 1941, antisemitism’s main role wasno longer to mobilize the masses, but to justify and prepare the population forthe steps that were leading to the ‘final solution’. The torrent of anti-Jewishpropaganda, nevertheless, far from abating, actually intensified thereafter in theattempt to reinforce acceptance of the regime’s paranoid view that destroyingthe Jews was an essential part of Germany’s war effort, and also to spread asense of complicity in the final showdown with the arch-enemy which, it wasmore than hinted, was now under way.²⁵ The impact was to remind peoplethat terrible things had been carried out in Germany’s name and make themfearful of whatever punishment and retribution might follow at the end ofthe war.

Before the rapid downward spiral of support between the ‘Stalingrad’ winterof 1942–3 and the end of the war, what consensus there was could, then, belocated in the ‘exceptional’ sphere of the regime. In contrast, the ‘everyday’ sphereencompassed conflict, division, dissension and discord reflective of lingering andpersistent pluralisms beneath the trumpeted unity of the national ‘communityof fate’. That dissent and opposition could never be translated into popularrevolt was the consequence of the high level of terroristic repression carriedout by the desperate agencies of the dying regime, which, at the grass-rootslevel, could depend upon assistance from the dwindling minority of Nazifiedfanatics. The accompanying all-pervasive intimidation did the rest. With the endof the war obviously approaching, quiescence, not suicidal opposition, was anobvious strategy for most. But that the regime was able until the middle of thewar to unleash such dynamism and energy, invested in the pursuit of national‘salvation’, is barely explicable without acknowledging the success in mobilizingsociety—or at least large sections of it—behind ‘visionary’ goals which entailedwar and genocide. Consensus and coercion were inextricably entwined in themanufactured support for the regime’s ideological goals.

Notes

1Martin Broszat et al. (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols. (Munich and Vienna,1977–93).

2For an excellent analysis of the symbolism of the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, seeTilman Allert, Der deutsche Gruß: Geschichte einer unheilvollen Geste (Frankfurtam Main, 2005).


3I defined my usage in Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in theThird Reich: Bavaria 1933–45 (Oxford, 1983), 2–4; and ‘ ‘‘Widerstand ohne Volk?’’Dissens und Widerstand im Dritten Reich’, in Jurgen Schmadeke and Peter Steinbach(eds.), Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1985), 779–98.

4A key stage in making a wider public aware of what specialists in the field had longsince taken for granted was the major ‘Wehrmacht Exhibition’ which began to tourmain German cities in 1995, entitled ‘Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht1941 bis 1944’ (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht between 1941 and1944).

5Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York, 1996).6Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford,2001).

7Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945(Oxford, 1990).

8Gellately, Backing Hitler, 1.9Ibid., 199–203.

10The detailed study by Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and OrdinaryGermans (New York, 1999), reached conclusions which, regarding the persecutionof 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 theleading organs of Nazi terror, such as the Gestapo, and to overestimate the culpabilityof ordinary German citizens’.

11Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (London, 2005), 114, 117. Evans haseven more strongly criticized the emphasis upon consensus and underlined the ‘top-down’ terroristic nature of the regime in his British Academy Raleigh Lecture of2006.

12Ulrich Herbert, ‘Good Times, Bad Times: Memories of the Third Reich’, in RichardBessel (ed.), Life in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), 97.

13Published editions of such reports include: Heinz Boberach (ed.), Meldungen aus demReich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938–1945, 17 vols.(Herrsching, 1984); Martin Broszat, Elke Frohlich and Falk Wiesemann (eds.),Bayern in der NS-Zeit: Soziale Lage und politisches Verhalten der Bevolkerung imSpiegel 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 (Boppardam Rhein, 1967) (for Koblenz-Trier); Robert Thevoz et al. (eds.), Pommern 1934/35im Spiegel von Gestapo-Lageberichten und -Sachakten (Cologne and Berlin, 1974);Jorg Schadt (ed.), Verfolgung und Widerstand unter dem Nationalsozialismus in Baden(Stuttgart, 1976); Thomas Klein (ed.), Die Lageberichte der Geheimen Staatspolizeiuber 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 andEberhard Jackel (eds.), Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945(Dusseldorf, 2004).

46 Ian Kershaw

14The ‘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-volumereproduction 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 Stover, Volksgemeinschaft im Dritten Reich: DieKonsensbereitschaft der Deutschen aus der Sicht sozialistischer Exilberichte (Dusseldorf,1993).

15Deutschland-Berichte, 2.279.16See, for important assessments, David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution:

Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford, 1992); Peter Longerich, ‘‘Davon haben wirnichts 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 Depthsof German Antisemitism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941(New York, Oxford and Jerusalem, 2000), 271–81. The superb edition of relevantreports edited by Kulka and Jackel (see note 13) makes the sources available butcannot solve the problems of interpretation.

17See Kershaw, Popular Opinion, 240–4.18Kulka and Jackel (eds.), Die Juden, 456–9, 470–2, 476–9, 485–6 (quotation, 486).19For the damaging effects on public morale in Wurttemberg, where one of the

killing asylums, Grafeneck, was situated, see Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front:Wurttemberg under the Nazis (London, 2006), 126–34.

20Some indicators of this, not drawn from the reports on ‘mood’, can be seen in Gotz Aly(ed.), Volkes Stimme: Skepsis und Fuhrervertrauen im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurtam Main, 2006).

21Gellately, Backing Hitler, 3, 226.22It 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.

23See Weber’s comments on the specifically ‘exceptional’ nature (‘spezifisch außer-alltaglichen Charakters’) of ‘charismatic domination’ and the threat of ‘routinization’(‘Veralltaglichung ’) in Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß der verstehen-den Soziologie, Studienausgabe (Tubingen, 1985), 142–8, 661–2.

24Helmut Heiber (ed.), Lagebesprechungen im Fuhrerhauptquartier 1942–1945 (Berlin,1962), 284.

25Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and theHolocaust (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 183, points out that over half of the wartimeantisemitic lead stories in the main Nazi newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, werepublished in the single year of 1943, when the numbers of Jews living in Germanyhad fallen drastically and while the ‘final solution’ was in full swing.

PART 2

THE FIRST DICTATORSHIPS


4Liberation from Autonomy: MappingSelf-Understandings in Stalin’s Time

Jochen Hellbeck

In May 1935, Nikolai Ustrialov, a 44-year-old law professor who had lived forthe past decade and a half in Harbin, crossed the border into Soviet Russia toreturn to his homeland from which he had emigrated after the defeat of theWhite movement in 1920. Formerly a provincial leader of the liberal Kadet Party,Ustrialov rethought his political convictions in the years of emigration. For atime he propounded a programme of ‘national Bolshevism’, which approvinglyread the Soviet policies of the NEP period as a turn away from misguidedcommunist principles and a rebirth of the Russian imperial state. The sweep ofStalin’s industrialization programme in the late 1920s and early 1930s promptedUstrialov once more to reconsider his views, as he began to sing odes tothe socialist construction campaign. Along with most other Russians living inHarbin, Ustrialov worked for the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway. Atsome point he was awarded Soviet citizenship, for by 1929, in the wake of theSoviet–Chinese conflict, the Soviet state allowed only naturalized citizens to workfor its railway. When the Soviet Union sold the Chinese Eastern Railway to theJapanese-controlled state of Manchukuo in March 1935, a total of 25,000 formerrailway workers and employees, including Ustrialov and his family, boarded theManchurian railroad one last time to return to the Soviet Union.¹

The diary in which Ustrialov documented his journey and his subsequentlife in the Soviet Union resonated with a striking historical consciousness. Ashe pointed out, the year of his return marked a historical threshold in the lifeof the Soviet Union at large. Walking through the streets of Moscow whilean international youth festival was being held, he observed the ‘cohorts andlegions of youth, the wonderful early autumn sun, the sounds of orchestrasscreaming from the loudspeakers, sounds filled with bravura and fighting spirit,resounding in a major key. . . . An existential pathos. Yes, it is so clear thatour 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 anew 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 exemplarsof the new socialist man. There was also a strong self-reflexive component in hisobservations, for Ustrialov’s ability to recognize the contours of the new socialistworld was proof to him that he himself possessed the purity of thought requiredof a true Soviet citizen.² In the diary he constantly tested his inner dispositiontoward the Soviet system: was he truly inspired by the enthusiasm and beliefthat characterized the ideal Soviet citizen, and thus in a position ‘to earn aSoviet biography’—regardless of the fact that his passport certified his Sovietcredentials? The task was difficult, perhaps even impossible. Ustrialov sensed howdifferent he was from the parading youth in their white athletic outfits whom heenviously observed from a distance. Their vigour and exuberance only reinforcedhis 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 andconstant NKVD surveillance. The security police had instructions to investigatethe social and political past of every returning individual. They were believed tobe foreign spies, working under instructions of the Japanese state. As early as in1936 several harbintsy had been arrested and a public campaign was under wayexposing them as Japanese agents. Under these circumstances it was exceedinglydifficult for Ustrialov to begin a new life. His applications to teach law wereturned down (for some time he was able to work as Professor of EconomicGeography in the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineering), as were many ofthe essays that he submitted to the Soviet press (Izvestiia did publish some ofthem, however, and as late as April 1937).⁴ Ustrialov characterized these setbacksin characteristic ways. It was an unbearable thought for him to see himself beingreduced to a mere bystander of history’s march toward completion: ‘I want tobe up to my neck in activity—only not to be superfluous in our time, in ahistorical moment—when the fate of our great country, our great revolution, isbeing decided.’⁵ As time went by, Ustrialov became increasingly frustrated withhis failing efforts at finding integration, and he complained to the diary abouthow he was being treated by Soviet authorities. Yet these complaints only madematters 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 Sovietsociety. He resolved to attack these ‘pessimistic’ moods with redoubled effort.

Among the many personal documents—letters, diaries, autobiographies, mem-oirs, etc.—made available by the opening of the Soviet archives, there is a largecorpus of strikingly self-reflective materials in which the author’s self appears asboth subject and object of reflection. This essay focuses on one of them, thediary of Nikolai Ustrialov. Yet Ustrialov was far from alone in thinking abouthimself in such terms. Other personal records from the same period may notmatch his diaristic observations on the level of their articulation, but they expressa 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 relegatedto the sidelines of history or indeed be crushed by history. Their authors strovetoward an enlarged sense of life, identified with the beauty, vigour and youth ofthe marching collective. Life was measured in terms of emotional and intellectualinclusion in this age. By contrast, the spectre of a life evolving outside thecollective 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 thatfor a long time was not visible to researchers. We can now follow how individualstook up the revolution’s impetus for total transformation as they proceeded tosculpt or remake their own lives. These acts of individual self-fashioning oftenoriginated amidst intense social and political pressures, but in most instances theywere more than political and utilitarian in character. The striving to align one’slife with the revolution and give it meaning and direction held important moral aswell as existential significance. To refer to these scenarios as acts of ‘internalization’of communist ideology is misleading, if this implies that the ideology originatedin the party or other Soviet institutions, external to the individual in question.Ideology, Ustrialov’s diary and other personal narratives show, does not pre-existthe subject: it is only in the act of individual appropriation, as authors reflecton their lives and reframe it through the lens of a ‘worldview’, that ideologycomes to life. The mechanisms by which ideology is embodied, while coming tolife at the same time, complicate our understanding of the relationship betweenauthoritarian regimes and individual citizens, between public and private, andbetween ideological and non-ideological realms—entities often conceived of indualistic terms.

These considerations form the theoretical focus of my essay. They are alsorelevant to the study of popular opinion under totalitarian regimes. As othercontributors to this volume point out, the attempt to understand what people insuch regimes ‘really’ thought has obvious appeal, but in view of the source basisthat it relies on—surveillance reports produced by the security police—carriesa number of dangers. Surveillance reports, often complete with direct quotesfrom individuals overheard by informants, seem to bring us closer to the peoplethan most other available sources; yet their immediacy and atmospheric richnesscan be deceptive. We don’t know whether the people chronicled in the reporttruly spoke the very words attributed to them, or whether their statements weretranslated, in the very process of being recorded by informants, into an idiomthat made more sense for the NKVD and served its operational needs. Moreover,the reports are structured by intellectual assumptions on the part of the politicalpolice 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 ‘negativemoods’ 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 oftemplates that in the communist messianic mind represented temporal road-marks toward the communist future (with ‘petty-bourgeois’ expressing a greaterdistance toward that future than ‘poor peasant’, which in turn ranked behind‘proletarian’).⁸ To use the political fault-lines drawn up in the security policereports would reproduce the ruling communists’ manichean and exclusionarypolitical imagination, and not consider the much broader subjective effects ofthe Soviet revolution. Such an analysis, to return to the example with which Ibegan, would turn a blind eye to the revolutionary ferment animating the diaryof Nikolai Ustrialov who in the secret police files appeared as nothing but adiehard counter-revolutionary and spy, waiting to be exposed. A critical readingof these sources therefore ought to begin with an analysis of the categories anddivisions used by the regime’s surveillance bodies to make sense of social reality.

Studies of popular opinion based on surveillance reports run yet anotherdanger, of producing snapshots of individuals bereft of a biographical trajectory.By replicating the frozen images provided by the reports (‘Worker Petrov wasoverheard as saying . . .’, ‘housewife Elena Ivanovna complained . . .’), they runthe risk of exploding isolated episodes into individuals’ beliefs and commitmentswrit large. Several contributors to this volume respond to the problem by callingfor an understanding of individuals as situative and essentially hybrid subjects,perfectly able to espouse multiple and even contradictory attitudes. This makessense, but is it really a solution? Analytically this proposition represents a stepback, rather than forward, for it leaves us with subjects who appear to actfreely in circumstances which are not mapped out in close detail and have nostructuring effect on the individual. By contrast, a close investigation of first-person records such as the diary of Nikolai Ustrialov illuminates a set of concernsand commitments that combine to form a distinct biographical trajectory. Thisdevelopment is often not free of doubts, struggles and backslidings, and yet whatit reveals in the first place is an imperative to work through them, to rationalizeand reconcile observed problems and contradictions. It is therefore important thatwe redirect our enquiry of who individuals were, from the identification of selectexpressions of opinion—whether overheard by the secret police, collected byemigre organizations (witness the Sopade reports produced by the German SocialDemocratic Party), or culled from personal diaries by researchers themselves—toan understanding of subjectivity as a processual quality. This is especially truein the Soviet revolutionary context, where notions of the ideal personality werepredicated on intense struggle and the striving toward transcendence.

Just as in the case of surveillance reports, an enquiry of first-person narrativeshas little to offer if it reads the views expressed in the document merely asreflectors 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 thataccounted for the creation of the very source and the notions of self representedin it. The emphasis shifts from an analysis of individuals’ subjective worldviews


to the self as a particular problem of the age. To use Ustrialov’s example, ourenquiry moves from an examination of the ‘reliability’ and ‘subjective bias’ ofhis personal record to the reasons that impelled him to represent himself as asubject of history and scrutinize every thought and observation for their historicalmeaning. 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 thecommunist regime was as much producer as product. The commitment towardself-improvement, social activism and self-expression in concert with historylong predated the Russian revolution; it was intensely cultivated and reproducedin the circle culture (kruzhki) of Russia’s liberal and socialist intelligentsia. Infact, to be worthy of the ascription intelligent was to show a disposition as acritically thinking subject of history. This nineteenth-century legacy shaped theself-understanding of revolutionary actors in 1917, and it provided the matrixfor the politics of social identity and individual self-definition, pursued by stateand citizens alike.⁹

Ustrialov’s case illustrates this point well. A reading of his diary notes againstthe ‘ideological language of the Stalinist state’ as the sole frame of referencewould lose sight of a larger continuum of thinking and acting about himself thatextended back in time beyond the years of Stalin’s rule. Writing in the early1920s, Ustrialov recalled how in the days of civil war he had been ‘tormented’ byan ‘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 Historyis 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.’¹⁰The ‘pathos of history’ referred to the act of leading Russian society toward theperfect end of historical time, an act that fell to the vanguard formation of theRussian intelligentsia. It was this intelligentsia legacy which grounded Ustrialov’ssearch for self-realization throughout a prolonged revolutionary moment, fromthe 1910s through the 1930s, and which by the same token supplied the framein 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 therevolution the theme of his personal diary clashes with an assumption widespreadamong historians that Soviet citizens responded to the pressures of the Stalinistregime by withdrawing and concealing their selves. Many historians projectonto the Soviet scene a liberal subjectivity, as they endow Soviet citizens withindividualist strivings and a fundamental desire for individual autonomy.¹¹ Yetthe sources from that period more often speak a different language: of individualslonging to escape from a position of individual autonomy which they frequentlyassociated with a historically outlived, ‘bourgeois’ form of existence, and seekingmeaning, 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 askulaks and their dependents, or ‘former people’ like Ustrialov. Yet the flightfrom autonomy, I would claim, was not confined to distinct social groups. Asespecially diary narratives show, even authors who were not openly stigmatizedby the regime responded with alarm when they began to voice personal thoughtsin a departure from ‘common’ goals and needs. They feared that a desire to stopfighting and be left in peace was evidence of old, ‘bourgeois’ instincts creepingup in them. The state of their consciousness, these authors felt, had the powerof altering their social identity. To this extent the problem of autonomousthought was not bound to firmly delineated stigmatized classes; it had a universalquality.¹²

Not every self-reflective diary from this age, to be sure, shows the workingsof a socialist subjectivity, with its triple valuation of self-expression, collectiveaction and historical purpose, in equal measure, and even fewer reveal the sumof its defining traits. But this disposition mapped the default position for self-definition in the Soviet realm. Some self-narratives, like Ustrialov’s, painted thecontours of this self in sharp relief, others did so more implicitly. It denoted aself-consciousness that is best understood not as something one could possessonce and for all, but as a state of mind that was attained in the very act of criticalself-engagement and the search for transformation, of raising the self above itspetty, parochial concerns onto a higher plane of thought and action in tune withthe revolution and with history. As an ideal form of personhood it was markedlyilliberal in the sense that it lacked a positive evaluation of autonomy and privatevalues.¹³

Remarkably the contours of this ideal of socialist selfhood as well as itsstructuring effects on the self-narratives of people living through the Stalin erahas not been recognized—in part because of missing sources, but in largermeasure because of an insistent liberal bias, the history of projecting liberalviews onto the Soviet scene, and along with this an insistence to see Stalin-era individuals as fully constituted (liberal) subjects who defined themselvesagainst external political and ideological challenges.¹⁴ Highly prominent inthe 1950s and 1960s, ideology later receded from the vocabulary of scholarsof communism and fascism. Its disappearance has a variety of reasons: thedemise of totalitarian theory with its simplistic understanding of ideology asan instrumentalist weapon; the concurrent rise of social science methods in thehistorical profession which assumed a universality of social developments anddenied ideology any shaping role; and lastly social history, which emerged inreaction to intellectual history and its preferences for high culture and top-down narratives of ideological dissemination. The current postmodernist climatein Western academic culture—distrust of overarching narratives, for fear oftheir hegemonizing thrust, and instead the favouring of moral relativism anda protean, situative and performative reading of subjectivity—also makes it


difficult to register systems of power that generated absolute intellectual andemotional commitments.¹⁵

Most markedly the prevailing distrust against ideology is expressed in thedomain of Alltagsgeschichte, a prolific subfield of social history. It is a remarkablefact that Alltagsgeschichte enjoys greatest currency in the context of one of themost self-consciously ideological regimes of the modern age, the Third Reich.The very assumption of an ideological regime seems to prompt the question howpeople ‘really’ lived and how their everyday—a sphere presumed to lie outsidethe reach of ‘party’ or ‘state’ ideology—evolved. Practitioners of Alltagsgeschichtedeliberately disconnect their areas of enquiry from ideological projects of theparty state, they foreground individual actors and the clusters of local meaning(Eigen-Sinn) inhabited by them, and they thus posit a gap in translation whichthe grand homogenizing designs of the state fail to cross.¹⁶ And yet the insistenceon the primacy of everyday life over the realms of ideology runs the risk ofignoring the conceptual underpinnings of life, its definition and purpose, in aspecific period. Such meaning is not universal and not to be culled from universalstrategies of daily survival. I find it difficult to subscribe to the proposition,which at first sight may appear basic and unassailable, that Soviet citizens soughtto live ‘ordinary’ lives.¹⁷ Many of them strove—or were made to strive—forextraordinary lives, and by the same token Stalinism was an extraordinary periodnot just because of the excesses caused by the regime, but because of a largercultural disposition toward the extraordinary. In other words, I believe we musthistoricize the conceptual underpinnings of the meaning of life, of personal life,and of an epoch. In light of such reconceptualization we are bound to cometo very different conclusions about the terms of interaction between the Sovietregime and its citizens.¹⁸

The question to be asked is what ideology offered to individuals in substantiveterms, independently of its instrumentalist uses. Why was it appealing, and whatabout it was appealing? Which parts of the ideological text did an individualappropriate, and what were the effects of this productive encounter betweenideology and the self? Hannah Arendt observes that ideologies ‘always contain inthemselves the logic of their respective ‘‘idea’’ ’. The idea contains in itself a logicalprocess which is spun out by ideology. Arendt seems to suggest that ideology isnot a ready-made, fully articulated text; rather, it unpacks itself, like compressedsoftware, in the process of individual appropriation. Yet Arendt is not interestedin the individual as an active subject. For her ideology itself is the driving force,and in encountering the individual it eliminates subjectivity: ‘ideological thinkingis . . . independent of all [individual] experience’ and represents an ‘emancipationof thought from experienced and experiential reality’.¹⁹

This view underrates individuals’ active and creative participation in theappropriation of ideology, a process which asked them to rework, rather thanabandon, subjective experiences. Ideology worked by impelling individuals toread 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 shapesas the amount of individual subjects it produced. Individuals poured considerablesubjective labour into this process. Raising psychological experience to ideologicalconsciousness was a demanding challenge that kept generating contradictions,experiences of failure, and moments of doubt. But rather than privileging suchmoments as static expressions of self, I suggest that we appreciate the larger, oftendialectical, structures of self-becoming in which they were embedded. Similarly,we should understand strategies of ‘rationalization’, which were very widespreadin personal sources from this period, less as desperate attempts to ‘rationalize away’uncomfortable truths (as modern psychology would have it) than as a constitutivemechanism of ideological appropriation. Rationalization—the ability to detecta rational logic in random acts of state policy, such as sudden arrests of relativesor friends, or one’s own misfortune—was essential for Soviet citizens who weresupposed to believe in scientific laws of development and the rationality of theirexistence. Stalin-era contemporaries were constantly asked to rationalize, to maketheir daily observations fit ideological mandates. The more their observationsparted from the required viewpoint, the more they were expected to struggleto reinhabit the grid. An individual’s ability to rationalize a phenomenon wasthus a characteristic of mental strength and spiritual health. What is more, thesemechanisms were not solely internal processes, meant to restore one’s peace ofmind. Individuals applied this agenda of ‘mastering ideology’ also to their sociallives as workers and citizens, such as when they denounced bosses at work orsigned 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 revolutionaryproject’) itself, which I am using as a reified term and certainly not to referto a bordered, discrete, and essentialized entity. Instead of a one-dimensionaldyad—ideology vs. the self—we should move toward a multidimensionalinvestigation that examines the plasticity of each of these poles, and indeedhighlights the processual character of their interaction, rather than presentingthem as ready-made poles. Returning to the individual, I suggest that we shiftour understanding of ideology from a pre-given, fixed textual corpus, in thesense of ‘Communist Party ideology’, to a ferment working in the individualand producing a great deal of variation, as it interacted with the subjective lifeaspects of a given individual. This perspective restores the individual as an agent,but as an ideological agent. Instead of privileging discourse as the sole historicalagent, I suggest a circular or dialogical notion of ideology and subjectivity. Theindividual operates like a clearinghouse where ideology is unpacked, personalized,and in the process the individual remakes himself into a subject with distinctand meaningful biographical features. And in activating the individual, ideologyitself comes to life. Ideology should therefore be seen as a living and adaptiveforce, it has power only to the extent that it operated in living individuals whoengage their selves and the world as ideological subjects. Much of the logic of


the revolutionary master-narratives of transformation (transformation of socialspace and self-transformation), collectivization (collectivization of individualistproducers and collectivization of the self ), and purification (political purgecampaigns and acts of personal self-improvement) was provided and reproducedby Soviet citizens who kept rationalizing unfathomable state policies and thuswere ideological agents, on a par with the leaders of party and state.

Ideology, thus understood, was a living tissue of meaning that was seriouslyreflected upon. Ideology created tensions, as it often stood in marked contrast toindividuals’ observational truth. The point, however, is not to focus on the pointsof tensions themselves but to see how individuals worked through them: howintolerable they found a condition of a ‘dual soul’, how little appeal a retreat intoprivate life had for them, and how they applied mechanisms of rationalization,often in dialectical form, in attempts to restore harmonious notions of self. Muchof the ideological tension and work in the early Soviet system did not take placebetween the state on the one hand and its citizens (as fully constituted selves) onthe other, but in the ways citizens engaged their own selves.²¹

Ideology and subjectivity however were intertwined in even more intricateways. So far we have discussed only how the subject appropriated ideology thatwas presumably enforced on her/him. Yet there is an anterior dimension tothis interaction. In reading the desire Ustrialov and many of his contemporariesexpressed to live a purposeful and significant life it seems that there was awidespread urge to ideologize one’s life, to turn it into the expression of afirm, internally consistent, totalizing Weltanschauung. This orientation towardmeaning and social inclusion, which also spurred a heightened awareness of one’sbiography, intersected with the communist project of remaking mankind, and theregime was thus able to channel strivings for self-validation and transcendencewhich emerged outside of the ideological boundaries of Bolshevism properlyspeaking.

The concept of the ideological subject, to repeat, does not apply to all empiricalSoviet individuals or to the totality of an individual even if his writings showevidence of such a disposition. What it refers to is a culturally specific frame ofselfhood, of what constitutes a desirable life. For the Soviet inter-war period, andconceivably for much of Europe between the 1920s and 1940s as well, ideology inthe sense of a personal Weltanschauung and a heightened sense of one’s biographywas constitutive of subjectivity. This orientation did not manifest itself at alltimes; Soviet citizens may not have articulated it when they stood in bread linesand cursed the state distribution system of goods, but it appeared (or, moreaccurately: was generated) when they recited their autobiographies or justifiedthemselves in public, and often also when they sat down privately to reflect ontheir lives.²²

Within the larger communist frame, the Stalin era stood out as a particulartime period defined by Stalin’s and other communist leaders’ deliberate decisionto 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 thepresent time as a threshold moment of world history, coupled with an extraor-dinary willingness to resort to violent means in order to cross the imaginedthreshold, generated countless individual projects of self-transformation, whichwere similarly characterized by an unprecedented sense of possibility and neces-sity. These narratives in some sense depended on an environment of violence tocome to fruition.²⁴ And yet, this does not necessarily diminish their experientialrelevance. It is familiar to us from the history of religion that the discovery oftruth 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 ofthe collectivization campaign had abated, and the achievements of the socialistconstruction campaign were in fuller view. The physiognomy of Soviet Russiahad visibly changed. Millions of people from the lower classes were receivingeducation and trappings of outward culture; the modern values of rationalization,discipline and science, relentlessly preached by regime activists, seemed to leavebehind ingrained Russian notions of submission and apathy. Looking backfrom this vantage point onto the first two decades of Soviet power, observerswith a trained dialectical eye could discern the zigzags of Revolution, CivilWar, NEP, and Stalin’s second revolution as lawful developments culminatingin the founding age of socialism. Such dialectical thinking received furthervalidation when applied to the international context. The rise of fascism inGermany in particular confirmed the sense of an imminent final battle, thefinal 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 formulawas so intoxicating because it provided a perspective of personal absolution andintegration into the new society. The pictures of parading youth in Moscowfilled him with a conviction that the revolutionary present marked a newbeginning, ‘a thesis in a new dialectical cycle’. This dialectical upsurge wouldalso put him personally back on track, free him from his erroneous past, spenton the losing side of history, and thrust him forward as a historical subjectwho comprehended and worked with the scientific laws that spiralled historyforward and higher. Dialectics also explained (away) many of ugly and coercivephenomena in Soviet life that remained in plain view for the Manchurianvisitor. In Ustrialov’s dialectical reading, these were vestiges of the old, barbarianpast, bound to disappear as history progressed forward toward the brightfuture.²⁵

As he kept his Moscow diary Ustrialov was aware that he was being watchedand followed with a great deal of suspicion. An entry in his journal eloquentlyevoked the ‘stares of cold ‘‘vigilance’’ and dignified distrust’ that greeted him inSoviet offices, to which he turned in search of work and a livelihood. Insteadof finding integration, he was pushed back into a position of ‘painful isolation’


from society.²⁶ In view of this environment, Ustrialov’s diary can be read as adesperate attempt to prove to Soviet officials, and the NKVD in particular—thathe was fully and genuinely committed to the Soviet cause. Yet the desire forintegration also bore great intellectual and emotional relevance for Ustrialovpersonally. Long before his return to Soviet Russia Ustrialov had kept a diary, theprincipal purpose of which was to think through the pressing questions of his age,which for Ustrialov were synonymous with the pressing questions of his personaldevelopment. A firm believer in the existence of laws of history that shaped thelives of nations, and equally that of any individual, Ustrialov used his diary toalign himself with the course of history. On one level, the intellectual trajectory ofthis erstwhile liberal Kadet who turned to national Bolshevism before embracingStalin’s industrialization campaign, suggested considerable political adaptability;on another, it revealed a great deal of consistency, as Ustrialov always sought tounderstand his age and himself in historical and dialectical terms.²⁷ To thinkdialectically meant to inhabit a dynamic system of thought predicated on notionsof struggle, contradictions and reconciliation. Above all it meant that you had topersonally live and work through the problems of your age.

In February 1937 Ustrialov learned that his teaching position in the MoscowInstitute of Transport Engineering would not be renewed in the fall. In his diaryhe complained that he was unjustly accused as a ‘(socially) alien element’. Buthe felt immediately compelled to invalidate these protesting gestures, for theyindicated that ‘microbes of petit-bourgeois individualism’ were still survivingin him. They only nourished the suspicion that he was not truly one with thesocialist 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 issomething restless and exhausting in the very chaos of one’s thinking. Blackthoughts, like droning flies that circle around you and bite.’ For someone asdialectically conditioned as Ustrialov, these negating thoughts could not standon their own. They called out to be critically engaged and refuted. The entry, aminiature exercise in dialectical thought, proceeded by rationalizing his despairand ending on an optimistic note:

But, on the other hand, isn’t there in the nature of thought something that shines frominside 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 andwears out our cerebral apparatus. ‘The light has triumphed, but the apparatus has finallysurrendered.’ How good it would be not to think!—Naturally that is nonsense. Thatwould be tantamount to saying: ‘How good not to live.’ For—cogito ergo sum. What isthe conclusion? Light, more light! Mehr Licht!²⁹

Ustrialov was arrested on 6 July 1937. In a letter to his wife that he sent fromprison 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 investigatorsthat his political consciousness was beyond doubt. The prosecutors appear tohave read the text differently. An investigating official underlined many criticaland self-critical passages in the diary, as well as references to Soviet politicalfigures and institutions. Ustrialov’s declarations of loyalty remained unmarked.In September 1937 the Military College of the Soviet Supreme Court indictedUstrialov as a Japanese agent who had carried out espionage work against theSoviet Union from 1928 up to the day of his arrest. He was sentenced to deathand executed in October 1937.³⁰

Notes

1Svetlana V. Onegina, ‘The Resettlement of Soviet Citizens from Manchuria in1935–36: A Research Note’, Europe-Asia Studies (September 1995); on Ustrialov’snational Bolshevism, see Michael Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in theUSSR (Boulder, 1987).

2‘I verify myself. Isn’t there a form of anguish, and hence something depraved anddefective in my love for the homeland? Am I not just attached to the birch trees andlindens of Old Russia? . . . I verify my deepest thoughts. And answer with my wholeessence: 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 growingstrength, 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. IrinaKondakova, Istochnik 5–6 (1998), 3–100 (9–10, entry of 19 July 1935; see also 13,entry of 3 September 1935)).

3Ibid., 41 (entry of 5 July 1936); see also 41 (entry of 4–5 March 1936).4Kondakova lists essays by Ustrialov published in Izvestiia on 14 December 1936 (onthe new constitution); 10 February 1937 (on Pushkin); and 6 April 1937 (on Herzen),see ‘ ‘‘Sluzhit’ rodine prikhoditsia kostiami . . .’’ ’, 98–9, notes 329, 341, 384.

5Ibid., 70 (entry of 18 February 1937).6This argument is more fully developed in Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind:Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). The monograph mentionsNikolai Ustrialov and his diary only in passing, however.

7Studies that mine surveillance reports for analyses of popular opinion in StalinistRussia and Nazi Germany, respectively, include: Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion inStalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941 (New York, 1997); DetlevPeukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life(New Haven, 1987), especially 49–66. Richard Cobb’s study of popular protest duringthe French Revolution provides a sensitive reading of how the political needs of thesecurity police shaped the language of their reports. Richard Cobb, The Police and thePeople: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (Oxford, 1970), 49–58.

8Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in RevolutionaryRussia (Pittsburgh, 2000).


9See in particular Susan Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and theMythologies of Radicalism (New York, 1998); Barbara Walker, ‘On Reading SovietMemoirs: A History of the ‘‘Contemporaries’’ Genre as an Institution of RussianIntelligentsia Culture from the 1790’s to the 1970’s’, Russian Review 59 (July 2000),327–52; Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacredin Russia (Ithaca, 2002); Marina Mogil’ner, Mif o podpol’nom cheloveke: Radikal’nyimikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet semioticheskogo analiza (Moscow,1999). The term ecosystem is inspired by Katerina Clark’s notion of ‘ecology ofrevolution’, which connotes an organic and processual understanding of the politicsand the culture of revolution in Russia, understood broadly, from the 1910s to the1930s (Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995),esp. 1–29; see also Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning amongthe Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, 1997), 190–1).

10N. Ustrialov, Pod znakom revoliutsii, 2nd rev. edn. (Harbin, 1927), 87.11When 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 fictionof a non-political, private standpoint as the default position of the individual: ‘Thepossibility of making a distinction between the political and the non-political marksoff a standpoint which the individual can take up outside of the collectively producedstructures of the political community. This metaphysical standpoint or place is thelocus of that self-defining choice, which remakes the community in accordance with thewill or free choice of the individual subject. . . . Without the distinction private–publicwe are not able to think the liberal democratic conception of a community basedon the consent of the individual subject.’ Michael Halberstam, Totalitarianism andthe Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven, 2000); Anna Krylova, ‘The TenaciousLiberal Subject in Soviet Historiography’, Kritika 1:1 (Winter 2000).

12This point is discussed at much greater length in Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind.13I speak of socialist subjectivity, rather than the more often-invoked term Soviet subjec-

tivity, 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 (NewYork, 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 Normsof Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, 2003).

14For a critique of liberal readings of Soviet notions of self, see Krylova, ‘The TenaciousLiberal Subject’.

15In my understanding of ideology in the Soviet context, I do not proceed from anygiven theoretical model, of which there are many. All of the more interesting theoriesof ideology, it seems to me, in one way or another stand in the Marxist traditionof defining ideology as a naturalization of a given reality, rendering it impervious tochange. This perspective could also be applied to the Soviet case, in the sense thatcommunist ideology—the self-representation of the regime—masked the real powerrelationships 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 ideologywhich, in aiming to reproduce the current bourgeois order, sought to operate invisiblybeneath the recesses of the conscious world, communist ideology was deliberateand transformative, and it targeted the conscious mind rather than the politicalunconscious. 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 highestlevel of consciousness. For an excellent discussion of ideology as living tissue, seeEric 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).

16Alf Ludtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences andWays of Life (Princeton, 1995).

17Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times: SovietRussia in the 1930s (New York, 1999).

18In the realm of Sovietology, ideology has recently made a comeback in a series ofstudies which portray ideology as the shaping force of ‘the Soviet project’. These studieshave been attacked by other historians as neo-totalitarian in spirit, and their conceptualcontributions have perhaps been insufficiently acknowledged, but it is true that theyapply a monologic understanding of ideology as a discrete set of ideas, which operatesinexorably 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 WorldWar and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001).

19Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1979), 470.20On 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 Constructionof Soviet Subjectivity’, in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities,ed. Igal Halfin (London, 2002), 287–316 (298).

21Reflecting on cultural memory and ideology in the Soviet context, Michael David-Foxmakes a related suggestion: to view (state) ideology and (personal) memory not incontradistinctive terms, as often is done, but as ‘mutually interactive phenomena’.Michael David-Fox, ‘Cultural Memory in the Century of Upheaval: Big Pictures andSnapshots’, Kritika 2:3 (Summer 2001), 601–13 (612).

22For conceptions of illiberal selfhood across Europe, see Robert Wohl, The Generationof 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis (Cambridge,Mass., 1998); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (New York, 1984).

23Stephen Hanson brilliantly explains the sense of historical acceleration that manyexperienced in the Soviet 1930s as an effect of a fundamentally new concept of timeintroduced by Stalin with the launching of the Five-Year Plans. Stalin sought to harnessSoviet social and economic life to the heightened rhythm of a ‘charismatic-rationaltime’, with the goal of compressing conventional notions of time and catching up withthe advanced bourgeois West. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism andthe Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel Hill, 1997).


24One reason why the intense subjective appeal of the early decades of Soviet rule receivedlittle scholarly attention until recently was that in thinking about the relationshipbetween citizens and the state, scholars tended to project back in time attitudes thatthey personally observed during the final years of the Soviet regime, when detachedmodes of double-speak and cynical engagement of Soviet ideology were rampant (thisapproach especially informs Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of EverydayLife in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)). Yet it is questionable whether we can projectconceptions of self characteristic of the late Soviet regime back onto an era when therevolution was in full swing, in the form of an ideological apparatus with considerablepowers of persuasion, when there existed as yet no sense of closing time—when, inbrief, the existential stakes for Soviet citizens were raised to unprecedented heights. It isan altogether different question, in much need of further elucidation, how the heightsof Stalin-era self-engagement (d)evolved over time into attitudes of critical detachmentand alienation that were instrumental for the disintegration of the Soviet system as awhole. Two brilliant interpretations are Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, until itwas No More: the Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006); Aleksandr Zinoviev, Nasheiiunosti polet: literaturno-sotsiologicheskii ocherk stalinizma (Lausanne, 1983).

25Many other sympathizers of the socialist cause experienced the mid-1930s as a distinctlyHegelian moment when world history was in the making and its principal agent, theWorld Spirit, appeared to reside in Moscow. See Jochen Hellbeck, ‘With Hegel toSalvation: Bukharin’s Other Trial’, Representations 107 (Summer 2009), 56–90.

26‘ ‘‘Sluzhit’ rodine prikhoditsia kostiami . . .’’ ’, 70 (entry of 18 February 1937).27Portions 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 HooverInstitution contain unpublished diary excerpts for the period 1920–35. Several of theessays published in the volume Pod znakom revoliutsii (1925, 2nd edn. 1927) containmultiple references to dialectics.

28‘ ‘‘Sluzhit’ rodine prikhoditsia kostiami . . .’’ ’, 67, 82 (entries of 6 February and 26 May1937).

29Ibid., 85–6.30Ibid., 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 in1935–6, more than 10,000 were arrested during the Great Purges.

5Beyond Binaries: Popular Opinion

in Stalinism

Jan Plamper

The question of how people perceived the Stalinist world they inhabited hasbeen at the centre of Western Soviet Studies from their beginnings in the late1940s.¹,² The ‘Smolensk Archive’—a Party archive of Smolensk administrativedivision covering the years 1917–38, captured by the Germans during theSecond World War and later passed to American hands—contained most ofthe source genres that seemed to offer a glimpse into popular attitudes aboutthe 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 Thesesources included reports (usually to higher-up institutions) on popular moodsgathered by various organizations and informers, and citizen letters (many ofthem complaints and denunciations) to Party leaders, organizations and newsoutlets.⁴ In the opinion of the early interpreters of these sources—the foundingfathers of the so-called ‘totalitarian school’—distortions severely compromisedthe validity of the letters and reports. Distortions arose for various reasons,including fear of repressive measures that not only might fall on the person whospoke but could also extend to the person who recorded, or because the recordersemphasized negative impressions in self-justifying efforts to legitimate their jobs.For example, a secret police officer might blow out of all proportion the wrongshe would later rectify.

How did the first Western interpreters of the sources on popular attitudesconfigure the Soviet subject? Early members of the totalitarian school framed theSoviet subject as one that usually (but not always) said what it thought. What theSoviet subject did, however, was not a major concern for these scholars, since theyconsidered the potential for human action in ‘atomized’ Soviet society minimal.⁵They took one thing for granted: the Soviet subject could not harbour multiple,overlapping and conflicting opinions at the same time. The Soviet citizen whoshed tears over Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 and later in the day told an anti-Stalin joke would have seemed an utter paradox to them.⁶ Thus early totalitarianschool 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 configuredthese 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 totalitarianschool writers. Public opinion in Stalinist Russia was an oxymoron. There was notrue public opinion, only manufactured public opinion, the end-product of Sovietpropaganda. Fittingly, Alex Inkeles’s Public Opinion in Soviet Russia (1950), thefirst volume in Harvard University Press’s Russian Research Center series, carriedthe subtitle A Study in Mass Persuasion. To Inkeles and his collaborators Sovietpublic opinion and propaganda were synonymous. Indeed, the entire purpose ofthe Harvard Interview Project, a major sociological opinion survey of displacedpersons 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 laterbe designated ‘revisionists’) began to challenge the totalitarian school paradigm.In their minds too, authentic popular opinion existed out there, yet it couldnot be gleaned from interviewing Soviet defectors in Cambridge, Massachusetts,but rather from reading the available documents—above all the Smolenskarchive—with different eyes.⁸ Once the Cold War blinkers were removed, theyargued, these sources actually revealed that ordinary people were vocal andexpressed a wide range of views. Indeed, the utterances of average Russians wereproof of massive ‘support from below’ and some popular ‘resistance’.⁹ Thus therevisionists shifted agency from the Party-state to the people.

This discovery of popular agency was of course a reflection of the socialmovements of the 1960s and 1970s and the consequences that the socio-political changes of those decades created for the discipline of history. History’spurpose was to give voice to the people and empower the downtrodden andinvisible—workers, women and peasants. It should be written from bottom-uprather than top-down. This was history-writing as an Exodus narrative: historiansliberated suppressed social groups from captivity.¹⁰ In writing the history of thosewho had none, historians vicariously took part in the socio-political struggles oftheir day. To be sure, this kind of historiography was wrapped in the mantleof ‘objective’ social science as opposed to politicized, ‘subjective’ Cold Wartotalitarian scholarship.¹¹

The revisionists claimed that proponents of the totalitarian school had deniedthe Soviet people its voice and reduced it to accommodating, passive yea-sayers.An antithesis to ‘accommodation’ was born: ‘popular agency’, a term flexibleenough to encompass notions ranging from ‘support from below’ to ‘resistance’.But, like the binary opposition of ‘totalitarianism’ vs. ‘revisionism’, the binaryof ‘accommodation’ vs. ‘popular agency’ missed a great deal of continuity andoverlap. In particular this binary missed the fact that totalitarian scholars hadalways suffered from ‘modal schizophrenia’ when it came to conceptualizingpopular 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 prioriillegitimate and often laughable; by implication, legitimacy—and agency—didrest in the people.¹² Perhaps no case illustrates this ambiguity better than arch-totalitarianist Robert Conquest’s Stalin: on one hand Stalin was a demonic figurewho usurped power after Lenin’s death and brutally forced the revolution fromabove on the unassuming, passive Russian peasantry; on the other hand Stalinwas a psychopath whose illegitimate power could never overcome the massiveresistance it met from below, from the Soviet demos.¹³ Or, on one hand, Stalinwas ‘a vast, dark figure, looming over the century’, while, on the other, ‘One ofhis outstanding characteristics was, in many respects, a profound mediocrity.’¹⁴Modal schizophrenia in fact made the totalitarian paradigm malleable andultimately recyclable, as would become clear during the 1990s.

Revisionists conceived of the Soviet subject in different ways from theirtotalitarian counterparts. When they read through the Smolensk Archive theywere much more ready to believe what people were recorded as having said.Still, like their totalitarian school antipodes, revisionists did not allow for thecoexistence of multiple attitudes in a single subject within short windows oftime. The revisionists too believed that a subject could be either active or passive,resisting or compliant. A subject who was resisting one minute and compliantthe next had no place in their framework. The person who cried on the morningof Stalin’s death and told an anti-Stalin joke in the evening thus was no lessparadoxical for the revisionists than for their totalitarian predecessors.

When the Soviet archives started opening in the late 1980s, and especiallyafter 1991, specialists were astonished by the magnitude of sources on popularsentiments. Had the cohort of young Ph.D. students doing archival researchduring those years paid more attention to the Smolensk Archive and the existinghistoriography, their excitement perhaps would have been more the thrill ofrediscovery rather than discovery. But that was a period of collective archivalinebriation and orgies of document fetishism. The hangover only set in duringthe latter part of the decade. In retrospect, the real discovery about the archivaldocuments that materialized was their variety. Few cared to look closer andbeyond binaries, but to those who did, it became clear that the contents ofa 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 worseningwork conditions during the First Five-Year Plan when it was crucial to the Partyleadership to understand what was happening on the ground outside Moscow;¹⁵sometimes it was generated by local organizations who used it to advance theirown interests in the centre—for example, the case where the report described asituation where things had gone amiss and could only be solved by better staffingor a move to a larger building; sometimes the report belonged to the ongoingsurveillance effort and was produced quite simply because of the tenacity ofbureaucratic practices.


A heated, often acrimonious scholarly debate ensued. This debate touchedon many kinds of popular mood sources but it soon zoomed in on whatcame to be collectively called svodki (singular, svodka). The debate had severalhighpoints, 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 SovietArchival Sources’ organized by Andrea Graziosi (including the resulting specialissue of the journal Cahiers du Monde Russe (1999)).¹⁶ I will concentrateon the Davies book. This study was based on her doctoral research at theLeningrad Party archive (which at that time had been renamed as St Petersburg’sCentral State Archive of Historico-Political Documentation, TsGA IPD). Inthe collections on the communication of Leningrad’s Party leadership (Obkom)with the secret service NKVD she found scores and scores of svodki. Herinterpretation constituted what one might call a form of neo-revisionism or evenhyper-revisionism. Like her revisionist predecessors, Davies saw not a passive,atomized populace, but an active, vocal one. She emphasized, however, resistancemore strongly and more starkly than the original revisionists.¹⁷ Davies founda resisting populace pitted against a repressive state, a condition of ‘Us againstThem’, and, with nods to Mikhail Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson, called thisrelationship a ‘dialogue’.¹⁸ Thus the Soviet Union as a nation of resisters cameinto being.

Yet, as even her fiercest critics were ready to acknowledge, in reality Davieshad uncovered a far greater, and more multifaceted, variety of ‘opinions’ in thesvodki than anyone else had hitherto done.¹⁹ For the first time the fact that svodkirecord multiple, conflicting and overlapping utterances made by a single personover 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 underchapters 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 politicaland epistemological factors that shaped the production of svodki. As one criticput 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’scritics showed how the svodki ‘are more telling about the secret police and itsinterests’. While these critics produced concrete readings of similar sources forearlier periods (more below), they never set out their own interpretations of theStalin-era svodki. For the most part, they used different sources, such as diariesand official autobiographies.²² What is more, their approach suffered from aspecific variant of ‘modal schizophrenia’ too, even though it was of a differentkind from that of the totalitarian school scholars of the 1950s and 1960s. Itassumes 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 tellus something about which categories the regime deemed important to reportin and in what kind of language the reporters did record. Having said that,the entire approach is embedded in the sediment of poststructuralism, whichultimately disposes of the authenticity question. Poststructuralism levels sources,reducing them to text. Seen as text, the svodki might very well be subjected todecontextualized readings that seek truth at the surface.²³

While Davies soon gravitated toward Sheila Fitzpatrick and the ‘Chicagoschool’, her critics were grouped around the opposite pole of Stephen Kotkinand the ‘Columbia school’. Kotkin had not only written Magnetic Mountain:Stalinism as a Civilization (1995), a case study of the Stalin-era metallurgicaltown Magnitogorsk and arguably the most influential work on Stalinist Russia ofthe 1990s, but as an assistant professor at Princeton had taught with Mark vonHagen a legendary graduate seminar at Columbia University, where the studentsread classics on Western Europe alongside classic work on Soviet history andtried to find out how the former could speak to the latter.²⁴

Some of the graduate students who took part in Kotkin’s 1991 Columbiaseminar extended his research interests to their own archival work. Peter Holquistdeserves to be singled out, because his work is directly relevant to the svodkiquestion. During 1991–2, while researching a dissertation on the Revolution andCivil War, in the windfall from the archival revolution, Holquist came on cachesof White svodki that often predated those of the Bolsheviks.²⁵ How could thisarch-Bolshevik, Stalinist invention have existed in White territories during theCivil War as early as 1918? Svodki, Holquist argued, were part of the beginningof surveillance practices that began with the First World War and the largershift to a different, modern, mass-based definition of politics, in which thepopulation’s opinion became an entity of importance—to be created, measured,and ‘sculpted’. This enveloped all political parties, including the Whites. TheBolsheviks were only one part of this larger shift. ‘Victory in the civil warspermitted the Soviet state to pursue surveillance more fully and within its explicitlyMarxist framework. Yet the practices themselves had been elaborated by theimperial state in its total-war manifestation and constituted a common heritagefor all movements of the civil wars’, writes Holquist.²⁶ So while the meta-questionof what the Stalin-era svodki tell us about the regime if they don’t tell us anythingabout the people was never answered, Holquist answered questions of where theycame from, how they emerged, and what they tell us about the regime(s) duringthe First World War, the Civil War, and NEP. Holquist’s strategy soon becamepart of a rubric that included similar approaches, suggesting that the Soviet Unionshould be compared with contemporaneous states and movements. This was adifferent kind of comparing from that done by the totalitarianists. For the latterthere had never been any doubt that the Soviet Union was a priori backwardand deficient. The new comparativists argued that this need not be so, thatonly by viewing comparable phenomena in a single space would commonalities


and differences emerge in sharp relief. This approach—institutionally basedat 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: Columbiacomparativism was historical-genealogical and inspired by Michel Foucault,whereas Chicago comparativism was structural-morphological and inspired bypolitical science. More importantly, members of the Chicago school drewdifferent conclusions from their comparisons. For them the ‘neo-traditionalist’elements seemed to outweigh the modern ones. In the letters, svodki, anddenunciations, they saw elements of distinctly non-modern societies—patronage,clientelism and other elements of patrimonial society—which were far from theWeberian image of modern bureaucracy.²⁸ Nonetheless, there was more overlapbetween 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 1990sthe field of American Soviet Studies once more had a binary—Columbia schoolplural modernity vs. Chicago school neo-traditionalism.

As for making sense of the svodki, the new binary created an interpretivestandstill. The Chicago side continued to privilege resistance and, because itclung to the concept of an autonomous subject, could not accommodate thecoexistence of multiple, conflicting recorded utterances by individuals. TheColumbia side could have accommodated such fragmented individuals becauseit 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 maximfor the pre-Soviet and very early Soviet period, stopping short of Stalinism.

AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH I: SOURCECRITICISM, PRACTICES AND CONCEPTUAL HISTORY

(BEGRIFFSGESCHICHTE )

I believe we would be well served if we extended to the NEP, Stalin and post-Stalin periods the kinds of meta-questions Holquist has posed for the periodof the First World War through Civil War. What kinds of logic governed themaking and circulation of the svodki? What functions did they serve? What doesthis tell us about the regime and its aspirations?²⁹ To put it in old-fashionedterms, we need more source criticism. Such an extension of Holquist’s projectto the Stalin and post-Stalin eras could build on the meticulous groundworkneo-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 haveentered 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 whorecorded the svodki (Informers? If so, recruited how? Party workers? Of whateducational 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, futureresearch on the svodki will benefit from looking for the actual templates intowhich informers recorded what they purportedly heard. Which categories andrubrics were available in a given document? In other words, we would profitfrom looking beyond the ocean of surveillance reports we encounter in thearchives to search for the rare documents that allow us to reconstruct how theywere produced, much like Jean-Jacques Becker uncovered the categories given toFrench school teachers, who were then expected to push ‘public opinion’ duringthe First World War into these state-supplied rubrics.³¹

We know that the anti-Stalinist utterances recorded in the Leningrad svodkithat 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 theseutterances 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 incriminatorypower transfer itself to the person who did the recording? The absence of directparallels between the Hitler and Stalin cults in Informationsberichte, the EastGerman equivalent of svodki, is instructive here.³² Such parallels are so patentlyabsent as to suggest the existence of a deliberate taboo, related to a comparisonthat was deemed too sensitive to be recorded on paper. The population musthave made the analogy, because it was exposed to Western media that madeprecisely this kind of comparison for propaganda purposes. And we know forcertain that such East German intellectuals as Alfred Kantorowicz and ViktorKlemperer noticed the similarity between the two cults.³³ Put simply, we knowfar too little about these questions, and the little we do know has never been puttogether.

Throughout our analysis of the problem we have to build on the post-1991insight 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 oftruth-value. I do not see how we can avoid introducing such a hierarchy oftruth-value (and thus moving away from radically levelling textual approaches).The Ivanovo-Voznesensk province secret police svodka about a 1925 combinespinners’ strike in a textile mill, a document that was instigated at the behestof the centre in Moscow and constituted the most important informationalchannel about this potentially threatening social action in a crucial area of theyoung Soviet Union, can more or less be read at face value.³⁴ The Leningradsvodka about ‘anti-Soviet incidents among Middle School students’ during the1935 purge of ‘Trotskyites’ following the December 1934 Kirov murder cannot.


Seventh-grader Zinov’ev, who was said to have ‘agitated among the students fora demonstrative school lunch boycott’, in fact was suspicious enough before thisalleged action.³⁵ The document characterizes him (in square brackets) as a ‘son ofa servitor to the cult’, that is, a priest’s son.³⁶ Perhaps Zinov’ev ended up withinthe purview of the secret police on the basis of this family background. Perhapshis father was being prosecuted in the 1935 purge and Zinov’ev Junior failedto denounce him. Perhaps the charge was fabricated and adduced as supportingevidence in his father’s case. Perhaps his last name was the actual crux of thematter, as there were many cases of people who were indicted because theyhappened 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 theshow 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’evdemonstrates, our best option still is a maximum of contextualization. Thedate and author of the document may matter. The immediate context in thedocument can be important. The title of the document, its genre, its specificcategory of ‘document production’ (deloproizvodstvo) might play a role.³⁷ Thearchiving practices that assigned it to the archival collection we retrieve it fromcan provide further clues. The many historical contexts we can access throughother sources might be illuminating.

A further issue is the relevance of resistance to various actors, that is, thequestion of resistance not as a thing itself, but as an object of the state. Did itmatter from the perspective of the state? The answer will of course vary accordingto historical moment. The kinds of resistance the regime was willing to toleratein, say, 1937, 1957, 1977 and 1987 differed widely. And what the regime waswilling 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 inmoulding people’s ideologies, in forming new Soviet men and women, whereasduring late real-existing socialism under Brezhnev in the early 1970s the regimeoften contented itself with co-opting the bodies of its citizenry for symbolicpractices. 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 thoseyears telling an anti-Stalin joke was always potentially lethal. Under Brezhnev itdid not matter much if someone told an anti-Brezhnev joke, even if detected. Aslong as people marched duly in the May Day parades and offered their bodiesfor 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 constructionistapproaches that look in official sources for keys to the discursive constitution ofStalinist reality. With another research agenda, one might well read the Ivanovo-Voznesensk province svodka on the 1925 strike or the Leningrad svodka on the

72 Jan Plamper

anti-Soviet actions among schoolchildren as developing categories of collectiveactors—‘spinners in the textile industry’ or ‘sons of servitors to the cult’—thatin turn became self-ascribed and thus constitutive of reality.³⁹ Or one mightsee these documents as textually creating conspiracies in which people actuallybelieved and which thus had concrete, truth-producing effects.

Ultimately these meta-questions will lead to a larger history of concepts andinstitutional history of ‘public opinion’ and ‘popular opinion’ across cultures.What such a Begriffs-cum-institutional history might look like was intimated byIstvan Rev in his paper for the Siena conference upon which the present volumeis based. In his paper Rev sketched out some of the milestones in the tangledpath of American research of ‘popular opinion’. After their emigration fromGermany several members of the Frankfurt School collaborated at ColumbiaUniversity in the study of contemporary American culture. Later some of them,including Leo Lowenthal and Paul Lazarsfeld, moved to the United States Officeof War Information (OWI) and worked on propaganda warfare on both thedomestic and European fronts. Then, after the Second World War, these verypeople moved on to study Eastern European and Soviet public opinion. Inso doing they brought their old categories and methods to bear on their newobject of research. What is more, popular opinion research continued to beinextricably intertwined with attempts to shape this very opinion. Lowenthal’sseven-year tenure as research director for Voice of America serves as a casein point.

As Holquist has shown, the ‘meta’ line of enquiry in the svodki is best taken upin a comparative context. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the authoritarian East andCentral European regimes of the inter-war period, the postwar Eastern EuropeanSoviet satellite states, but also the Western advertisement and polling industriesare natural points of comparison—some of the other essays in this volume goa long way in opening up such comparative vistas. Thus, commonalities anddifferences will emerge. The comparative framework will introduce an importanttime-space vector into the question of the genealogies of which the surveillancepractices the svodki were part. For instance, was Stalinist Russia of the 1930ssimply ‘learning’ and in a case of political mimicry, imitating, its Nazi and fascistcounterparts? Or was it continuing its own version of pan-European practicespioneered during the First World War, as Holquist’s own research suggests? Orwas it inventing entirely new kinds of practices for its own purposes? Probably acombination of all of the above, but the question is an empirical one that oughtto be pursued. And the precise amalgamation has yet to be determined.

As for the Russian equivalents of ‘popular opinion’ or ‘public opinion’, inStalinism neither the term nor the concept existed, as far as I can tell. It onlyappeared under Khrushchev as obshchestvennoe mnenie (public opinion) and,with it, also appeared social science studies and opinion research.⁴⁰ Along withthis research, new outlets for popular opinion were introduced, such as thecomplaint books that were laid out in stores for customers to register their


criticism.⁴¹ The history of obshchestvennoe mnenie as a concept and the historyof the new institutions and institutional practices of obshchestvennoe mnenie haveyet to be written. Those who do write it would do well to remember PierreBourdieu’s insight—true, for democratic societies—that popular opinion is nota reflection of some genuine popular opinion that is out there, but rather anactive entity that shapes the political. Politicians use, for instance, a 51 per centfigure in an opinion poll (often based on small samples and done under dubiouscircumstances) as proof of majority support for their position. The ‘consensuseffect ’, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘creates the idea that a unanimous public opinionexists in order to legitimate a policy, and strengthen the relations of force uponwhich it is based or make it possible’.⁴²

AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH II : TOWARDA MULTIDIMENSIONAL SUBJECT

When it comes to actually making meaning of the svodki we might be well advisedto move away from the autonomous subject. The time to do so actually is quiteopportune. If works during the mid- to late 1990s noted a strong dichotomousdivision of sources in ‘us’ (the people) vs. ‘them’ (the regime) and generally brokethe sources down into binaries of accommodation vs. resistance, affirmation vs.dissent, and consensus vs. coercion,⁴³ in the early 2000s voices that questionedthis binary division of popular opinion grew louder, arguing that ‘resistance canbe highly ambiguous’ and ‘multidimensional’, that its definition ‘is a difficultquestion which evades an easy answer’.⁴⁴ There now seems to be a consensualwillingness to move beyond binaries like resistance vs. accommodation and todestabilize the larger binary of state vs. society in which these other binaries areultimately embedded. Eigen-Sinn and other concepts of German Alltagsgeschichteare widely employed to grasp how individuals ‘colonized’, that is, adapted andreshaped, official discourse.⁴⁵ And identities are, of course, considered multipleand fluid. To be sure, when we get to concrete historical studies, the situation isquite different. Here we see historians falling back into ‘pro’ and ‘con’, ‘positive’vs. ‘negative’ attitudes. On the ground the accommodation vs. resistance binarystill reigns triumphant.

Thus one of the first things to be done is to translate this conceptual willingnessinto concrete historical studies. The autonomous subject is a construct with ahistory of its own rather than a serviceable analytical category. In truth peoplecan think many different things at the same time, say many different things thatcontradict one another over short periods of time, and act in many differentways that contradict one another. Another problem that the revisionist andneo-revisionist research shares is that it tends to overly aggregate individualvoices into groups. According to the svodki ‘textile workers think’, ‘Red Armywomen 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 pointof view, which believes groups to be acting differently from individuals. Theimportant question then becomes how exactly the state constructs its groups.This does not mean that we need to adopt the state’s aggregation of individualvoices into groups.

CONCLUSION

To recapitulate, according to the totalitarian school what was recorded was notnecessarily what people meant, and even if it was, it didn’t matter. The revisionistapproach assumed that what was recorded was what people meant, and itmattered a lot because what people say always matters. These were the days of‘history from below’. The neo-revisionist approach was a hypertrophied versionof the revisionist approach; it introduced new documentation that bolstered theold thesis and shifted the emphasis to resistance. The poststructuralist approachwas that what was recorded did not mean that people actually said, let alonemeant it; and even where it did constitute what they had said and meant, thisdidn’t really matter. What matters is how it was recorded—and this tells ussomething about the regime. My own point has been that what was recordedas having been said sometimes was what people said, sometimes not, and itsometimes was what people meant, sometimes not. In those cases where whatwas recorded as having been said conflicted with something else recorded ashaving been said, this is very much possible and the historian should be opento this kind of heteroglossia and resist pushing it into binaries because of theassumption that there is an underlying autonomous subject.

Ultimately the picture will not be complete without also taking into accountthe issue of memory and the contemporary socio-political relevance of the pop-ular opinion question. Memory and popularity—was Italian fascism ‘popular’among the people?—vary enormously from culture to culture, but they alwaysinfluence the ways in which scholars approach issues of popular opinion. Incontemporary Italy the view of some historians that there was accommodationunder fascism—the ‘consensus’ thesis—legitimates the Mussolini regime postfactum in the eyes of many contemporary Italians and, by extension, also legiti-mates neo-fascist parties in today’s Italy. In Germany the conclusion of historiansthat many Germans willingly followed Hitler does not translate into post factumlegitimacy for the Nazis, nor does it help right-wing parties in the contemporaryFederal Republic. For Stalinism the situation is quite different from the Italianand German cases. The discussion inside the historical discipline about accom-modation/resistance to the Stalin regime has been restricted to Anglo-Americanscholarship. Unlike Italy and Germany, before 1991 historians from the SovietUnion had no part in this discussion, and after 1991 historians from the formerSoviet Union participated only to a very limited extent. Post-Soviet Russia simply


never produced such a debate, therefore how contemporary Russia influenceswhat 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 greatlyinfluenced by contemporary developments. Revisionists, for example, duringthe 1970s and 1980s were influenced by the social movements of their dayand set out to re-empower the Stalinist subject, changing it from the atomized,Cold War totalitarianist image to a powerful agent. The situation of Russianistsstudying popular opinion today has improved considerably. The Cold War, andthus the immediate impact of Cold War culture, is over. What is more, there isno tradition—and this compares favourably with Italianists—of the relevanceof their field of study (popular opinion in the Soviet Union) to contemporaryRussia. When they talk about the question of popular opinion, Russianists havethe luxury of developing specialist language, detached from the contemporarysocio-political field. Their very insularity amounts to a comparative advantage.They should use this advantage wisely, as they push the popular opinion questioninto the post-Stalin years.⁴⁶ They will profit from doing so with a concept ofthe subject not as autonomous and monolithic, but rather as multidimensional.Only such a concept will be able to accommodate the mind-boggling diversityof human thought, utterance and action. Only such a concept will integrate aSoviet subject who pushed his way through the crowds toward the Mausoleumon the morning of 5 March 1953 and cried profusely, told an anti-Stalin joke inthe evening, and went on to live another half-century.

Notes

1I wish to thank Paul Corner, Jacqueline Friedlander, Igal Halfin, Jochen Hellbeckand Peter Holquist for their immensely helpful critical readings of this essay. It wascompleted under the auspices of Historisches Kolleg, Munich, where I had the goodfortune to spend 2007–8 as a fellow.

2I concentrate on English-language scholarship, because the major debates andparadigms regarding popular opinion were Anglo-American. For the most partthese debates ignored existing French, German and Russian scholarship, such asVladlen Izmozik, Glaza i ushi rezhima: gosudarstvennyi politicheskii kontrol’ za nase-leniem Sovetskoi Rossii v 1918–1928 godakh (St Petersburg, 1995); Nicholas Werth,‘Une source inedite: les svodki de la Tcheka-OGPU’, Revue des Etudes Slaves 66:1(1994), 17–27; idem and Gael Moullec, Rapports secrets sovietiques: la societe russedans les documents confidentiels, 1921–1991 (Paris, 1994); Viktor Danilov and AlexisBerelowitch, ‘Les documents des VChK-OGPU-NKVD sur la campagne sovietique,1918–1937’, Cahiers du monde russe 35:3 (July–September 1994), 633–82; idem,Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD, 1918–1939: dokumenty i materialyv 4 tomakh, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1998–2005).

3On the history of the Smolensk Archive see K. A. Dmitrieva et al. (eds.), Vozvrashchenie‘Smolenskogo Archiva’ (Moscow, 2005).

76 Jan Plamper

4For 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.

5Consider Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulations, for example: ‘The truth is thatthe masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitivestructure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check onlythrough membership in a class’ (310); ‘Totalitarian movements are mass organizationsof atomized, isolated individuals’ and ‘Mass atomization in Soviet society was achievedby the skillful use of repeated purges which invariably precede actual group liquidation’(316). Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951).

6Typically, so long as there was variation in ‘the political loyalty or disloyalty of theSoviet populace’, it pertained to generational or national groups. Variation in a singleindividual was out of the question. Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge,Mass., 1953), 490–1 (quote on 490).

7For a succinct introduction to the Harvard Interview Project see Mark Edele, ‘SovietSociety, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered’,Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8:2 (Spring 2007), 352–8.

8For 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 andWorkers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge, 1988); Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism andthe 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 (NewYork, 1987). Daniel Brower pioneered the rediscovery of the Smolensk Archive in the1970s. See Daniel R. Brower, ‘Collectivized Agriculture in Smolensk: The Party, thePeasantry, and the Crisis of 1932’, Russian Review 36:2 (April 1977), 151–66. Alsosee William G. Rosenberg, ‘Smolensk in the 1920s: Party–Worker Relations and the‘‘Vanguard’’ Problem’, Russian Review 36:2 (April 1977), 127–50.

9For the support from below thesis, see Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and SovietPower: A Study of Collectivization, trans. from French (La paysannerie et le pouvoirsovietique, 1928–1930 (Paris, 1966)) by Irene Nove, with the assistance of JohnBiggart (Evanston, 1968); Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values inSoviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobilityin the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979). For the resistance thesis, seeDonald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of ModernSoviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (Armonk, NY, 1986).

10Carla Hesse introduced the—unpublished, to the best of my knowledge—workingdivision of historiography into Genesis (nineteenth-century nationalist), Exodus(1970s left emancipatory), and Job (post-1989 anti-utopian) narratives in a Spring1996 Berkeley graduate seminar, ‘Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Cen-turies’.

11For a major revisionist’s autobiographical reflections on her goal to implementsocial science disciplinary conventions in the field of Soviet history, consider SheilaFitzpatrick: ‘I have often denied being an ideologist or crusader for a cause, but in


fact in the 1970s I was a one-woman crusade to establish the discipline of history inthe study of the Soviet past. The word ‘‘discipline’’ should here be taken in its broadas well as narrow meaning: I thought American Sovietologists needed the discipline(even the punishment?) of data and primary sources to make honest scholars out ofthem.’ Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Cultural Revolution Revisited’, Russian Review 58:2 (April1999), 205.

12Katerina Clark coined the term ‘modal schizophrenia’ to characterize socialist realism.See The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), 37, 39. On artificialbinary constructions of schools in scholarship see, most recently, Michael David-Fox,‘Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian andSoviet History’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 54:4 (2006), 535.

13See Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (London, 1991), 316.14Ibid., xv.15See Jeffrey J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the

Shop Floor (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 178–230.16See Cahiers du Monde Russe 40:1–2 (January–June 1999).17This drew a lot of criticism. For example: ‘Clearly, Davies approaches her sources

with a hierarchy of authenticity, whereby critical attitudes are immediately accorded alevel of truth which is denied to professions of ideological loyalty’, as Jochen Hellbeckreplied to a letter Davies wrote to the editors of Kritika. For Hellbeck’s reply, seeKritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1:2 (Spring 2000), 439–40(quote on 439). For Davies’s letter see ibid., 437–9.

18Sarah Davies, ‘ ‘‘Us against Them’’: Social Identity in Soviet Russia 1934–41’, RussianReview 56:1 (January 1997), 70, 73.

19To Stephen Kotkin, ‘Davies is one of the first historians to explore extensively animportant new document—the summaries on popular mood prepared by the NKVDand party.’ See his otherwise highly critical review in Europe-Asia Studies 50:4 (June1998), 739–42.

20See Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, chs. 10 and 11 respectively.21Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi

(1931–1939)’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44:3 (1996), 344, n. 2. To befair, svodki and surveillance were peripheral to Hellbeck both in this early article andin subsequent publications.

22See, for example, Igal Halfin, ‘From Darkness to Light: Student Communist Auto-biography during NEP’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 45:2 (1997), 210–36;Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge,Mass., 2006).

23This 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 Collectiveand the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999) in Slavic Review59:3 (Summer 2000), 704–5.

78 Jan Plamper

24See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).25The dissertation that emerged was Peter Holquist, ‘A Russian Vendee: The Practice

of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Territory, 1917–1921’, Ph.D. diss., ColumbiaUniversity, 1995.

26Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis,1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 238. Also see idem, ‘ ‘‘Information is theAlpha and Omega of Our Work’’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Con-text’, Journal of Modern History 69:3 (September 1997), 415–50; idem, ‘Anti-SovietSvodki from the Civil War: Surveillance as a Shared Feature of Russian PoliticalCulture’, Russian Review 56:3 (July 1997), 445–50.

27For an early identification of a distinct ‘modernity group’ and a group of ‘neo-traditionalists’ see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Introduction’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.),Stalinism: New Directions (New York, 2000), 11.

28For examples of neo-traditionalist work in studies of the Stalin era see Terry Martin,‘Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism: Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordial-ism’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (New York, 2000), 348–67;Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and SovietNewspapers (Cambridge, Mass., 2004). For a review of neo-traditionalism, see David-Fox, ‘Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism’, 544–9. The neo-traditionalistschool has its roots in the work of Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism:Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley, 1988); Ken Jowitt, ‘Soviet Neo-traditionalism’, Soviet Studies 35:3 (July 1983), 275–97; and idem, New WorldDisorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley, 1992), ch. 4.

29I take it that Terry Martin’s new book-in-progress goes a long way in doing so, butit was unfortunately unavailable to me. For more on this book see the chapter byFitzpatrick in the present volume.

30Andrea Graziosi, ‘The New Soviet Archival Sources: Hypotheses for a CriticalAssessment’, Cahiers du Monde Russe 40:1–2 (January–June 1999), 55 (‘distortionsand biases . . .’), 62 (‘approximate ‘‘the past as it really was’’ ’).

31See Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, trans. Arnold Pomerans(Dover, NH, 1985), 97.

32See my ‘ ‘‘The Hitlers Come and Go . . .,’’ the Fuhrer Stays: Stalin’s Cult in EastGermany’, in Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (eds.), Personality Cults in Stalin-ism—Personenkulte im Stalinismus (Gottingen, 2004), 325–6.

33Klemperer noted in his diary as early as 25 June 1945: ‘I have to start watching thelanguage of the fourth Reich systematically. Sometimes it seems to differ less fromthat 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 allLiving, the most ingenious strategist, etc.’ Quoted in Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundeneFreundschaft: Propaganda fur die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Berlin, 2006),201. On Alfred Kantorowicz see ibid., 199.

34On 14 November 1925 all 2,300 spinners at the Rodniki combine walked outfrom their workplaces to protest low wages. This transpires from an OGPU svodka


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: KapitonKlepikov (1880–1933) and Shop-Floor Opposition to Bolshevik Rule’, Jahrbucherfur Geschichte Osteuropas 44:3 (1996), 381, 2n. Also see idem, Worker Resistance underStalin, 16–17, 250 n. 45.

35TsGA IPD, f. 24, op. 2v, d. 1188, l. 169.36Ibid.37For a move toward a history of deloproizvodstvo see Olga Glagoleva’s very useful

Working with Russian Archival Documents: A Guide to Modern Handwriting, DocumentForms, Language Patterns, and Other Related Topics (Toronto, 1998); and my plea fortaking archival construction and constructedness more seriously, ‘Archival Revolutionor Illusion? Historicizing the Russian Archives and Our Work in Them’, Jahrbucherfur Geschichte Osteuropas 51:1 (2003), 57–69.

38The parallels to Syria under Hafiz al-Asad are numerous. In Syria, the Asad regimeknowingly tolerated significant satire as long as the very university students whoauthored this satire allowed their bodies to be driven to stadiums and carry theposter 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 obeisancethat are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those whoconsume them. Asad’s cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politicsof public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader’. LisaWedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in ContemporarySyria (Chicago, 1999), 6. Incidentally, it is ironic that this Foucault-inspired book isoften adduced by Chicago school neo-traditionalists.

39In this vein see Igal Halfin’s fascinating description of changing social classification inuniversity admission statistics during early NEP, moving from Imperial to hybrid toBolshevik categories, in From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation inRevolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000), 250. Also, see ibid., 278–82; idem, Terror inMy Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); and idem,Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Bolshevik Opposition, 1918–1928 (Pittsburgh,2007).

40The Western application of these terms to the Soviet Union also awaits systematicexploration. This essay has briefly sketched how ‘public opinion’ functioned as anoxymoron in totalitarian school scholarship and was used as an uncritical stock termin revisionist scholarship. It should be mentioned that there has been a post-ColdWar trend towards the diffusion of such concepts as ‘public opinion’ and even ‘publicsphere’ (in the Habermasian sense), which are adapted to Soviet-type societies bymeans of sophisticated theoretical groundwork. See Gabor T. Rittersporn et al. (eds.),Spharen von Offentlichkeit in Gesellschaften sowjetischen Typs: zwischen partei-staatlicherSelbstinszenierung und kirchlichen Gegenwelten / Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies(Frankfurt am Main, 2003).

41On complaint books see Susan E. Reid, ‘In the Name of the People: The ManegeAffair 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 genuineinstrument used to measure the opinions of cultural consumers during the Khrushchevyears. Visitor comment books had been around since the 1920s but under Stalin theyhad turned into a mere representation of power, where their function was to show tothe Soviet regime and the world abroad that Soviet art and theatre were for the peopleand by the people. On visitor comment books, see Jan Plamper, ‘The Stalin Cult inthe 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.

42Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Public Opinion Does Not Exist’, in Armand Mattelart and SethSiegelaub (eds.), Communication and Class Struggle, vol. 1 (New York, 1979), 125(emphasis in original).

43See, for example, Davies, ‘ ‘‘Us against Them’’ ’.44Lynne Viola, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy

of a Devil’s Advocate’, in Lynne Viola (ed.), Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Powerand Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2003), 2, 43, 18. Also see the special (andinaugural) issue ‘Resistance to Authority in Russia and the Soviet Union’, Kritika:Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1:1 (Winter 2000).

45See, most recently, Malte Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest (Hamburg, 2006), 228–38.46Mark 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’, inJuliane Furst (ed.), Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention(London, 2006), 167–91; idem, ‘A ‘‘Generation of Victors?’’ Soviet Second WorldWar Veterans from Demobilization to Organization, 1941–1956’, vol. 3, Ph.D.diss., University of Chicago, 2004, ch. 6. Rosa Magnusdottir has looked into popularopinion regarding America in her ‘Keeping up Appearances: How the Soviet StateFailed to Control Popular Attitudes toward the United States of America, 1945–1959’,Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006.

6Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany as a Factor

in the Policy of the ‘Solution of the JewishQuestion’: The Nuremberg Laws

and the Reichskristallnacht

Otto Dov Kulka

I

This chapter examines two sample cases of the interrelation between radicalexpressions of German popular opinion and the policy of the totalitarian racialistregime of the Third Reich concerning the ‘Jewish Question’.¹ A systematicexamination of this relation became possible following the publication of adigital edition of all available secret Nazi reports on the German population’sattitudes toward the Jews and the anti-Jewish policy of the regime between 1933and 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 whollybelieve in its own monolithic image of state and society as portrayed in the massmedia and projected to the world. Consequently, the regime set up secret internalreporting systems to provide reliable information about the prevailing popularmood 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 so-called ‘political churches’, the conservative opposition, and the Jews—occupiesa significant place.

These reports on the attitudes prevalent in the German population towardthe Nazi regime and its politics were also meant to provide an authentic picturethat would be taken into consideration in deciding policies toward the Jews. Themost important reports, generally called Lageberichte or Stimmungsberichte, wereprovided 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 thesecret political police (Gestapo), the district governors (Regierungsprasidenten),and the local police. Additional reporting was done by the NSDAP partyheadquarters in Munich and by a variety of organizations, such as the SA andorganizations 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 reportswritten ‘for the political leadership of the Reich’ was ‘to fight the enemy withpassion but to be ice cold and objective in the assessment of the situation and itspresentation’.⁵ Similarly, the Gestapo and the district governors had already beenasked in 1934 ‘not to adorn’ the information but to adhere to ‘frank reportingof the mood in the country’.⁶ On the other hand, the sometimes ‘pronouncedpessimistic’ picture the regime received in the wake of this frank reportingprompted Goring and other leaders to complain about the reports. Theirconcern was that the often too realistic picture that the reports painted wouldlead ‘to a deterioration of the mood’ among the Nazi leadership. Subsequently,Goring, in his role as the Prussian prime minister, ordered the discontinuation ofthe reports by the Gestapo and the district governors in Prussia as early as 1936.⁷The 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, thoughthey were constantly subjected to severe criticism and attempts to suspend themby state and party leaders, particularly Goebbels.⁸

We have no evidence of similar criticism or references to the form and contentof the reports on the part of Hitler. However, proof exists that the head ofHitler’s Reich Chancellery, Lammers, received the reports on a regular basis, andthat Hitler himself was either informed about their content or read them. Onseveral 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 confrontedrepresentatives 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 againstthe government and against National Socialism. To prove this he had Minister-PresidentGoring read out a series of reports by the political police [i.e., Gestapo] on sermons andarticles in the church press which contained such utterances.⁹

The reliability of the sources can be examined in several ways: by analysis andcomparison of reports written for a parallel period by different authorities, andof the reports compiled on the local, district, regional and national levels. Thecredibility of the Reich-wide reports, which summarized conclusions that drewon reports from lower instances, can be examined by reference to the concretedescription of the events and cases in local and regional reports. Furthermore, theguidelines 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 instructionsclearly show that the regime was interested in receiving reliable informationregardless of whether it was sympathetic to its views—for in the totalitarianframework of the Third Reich, authentic information of this sort was not availablefrom any overt, public source.

Whatever the final conclusion on the degree of the reports’ reliability, onething is clear: they reveal the picture presented to the regime and thus served itin its deliberations and decisions. In this respect, there is no doubt that this kindof ‘public opinion’ influenced, or could have influenced, the implementation ofthe regime’s anti-Jewish policy in its various stages.

Though research on National-Socialist ideology and policy regarding thepersecution and annihilation of the Jews had already developed both duringand immediately after the war¹¹ and still continues to dominate the researchliterature, research on German society and on the Jews in the Third Reichbegan rather late. One reason for this was that even long after the war, theprevalent image of Nazi Germany was based on the sweeping generalization of amonolithic, regime-devoted population, represented in every illustrated standardwork and encyclopaedia by pictures of enthusiastic masses and multitudes offlags to communicate the idea and reality of ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer.’Another reason was a rather agnostic approach by historians, who maintainedthat research on the German population’s opinion under the totalitarian regimeof the Third Reich was impossible owing to the lack of any reliable sources.¹²

In German historiography of the first post-war decade, silence prevailedregarding the Nazi regime and the fate of the Jews.¹³ This was also true ofGerman society as a whole, where silence and the active denial of knowledgeabout ‘it’ had become the ‘secret national anthem’.¹⁴ The situation changed inthe 1960s with the discovery and first publications of the secret Nazi reports onpopular opinion.¹⁵

The availability of these documents permitted the development of a diverseresearch literature, beginning in the mid-1970s, including a number of studiesdevoted to the Jewish aspect.¹⁶ It is perhaps no accident that the first to conductsuch studies covering the whole period of the Third Reich were non-Germanhistorians.¹⁷

One of the basic findings that has emerged from these sources is that beneath thecover of totalitarian uniformity (Gleichschaltung), social and religious structuresand even political orientations of the previous period were preserved to a certainextent, revealing the population’s heterogeneous views on the government’sideology and policy. The research on German popular opinion and the Jews inthe Third Reich also brought about more variegated results, both on the localand on the national level. In general, the studies came to the conclusion thatamong the population there was a substantial minority of radical anti-Jewishattitudes, a marginal appearance of critical voices, and an overwhelming silentmajority. 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 longerconsidering ‘indifference’ as a neutral attitude.¹⁹ In my later publications, Ihave presented a different conclusion—that of a wide consensus among thepopulation on the Jewish question—and Ian Kershaw has avoided reference tothe term ‘indifference’ in his most recent comprehensive study on Nazi Germanyand the Final Solution.²⁰

Although it was the significant achievement of this research on German societyand the Jews to revise the one-dimensional historiography of persecution andannihilation, these initial studies, based on a more or less fragmentary body ofdocuments, were in a way impressionistic, as Kershaw noted soberly, even forthe pre-war period of the Third Reich.²¹

With the publication of the comprehensive edition of 3,744 documents in theStimmungsberichte edition, of which nearly 1,000 are from the years 1939–45, asystematic re-examination of the various attitudes of the population has becomepossible, and we can no longer speak either of a ‘silence of the documents’ or ofa silence of the majority of the German population.

It seems to be obvious that many of the results of the research precedingthe comprehensive edition of the Stimmungsberichte, including the concept of‘indifference’, must now be re-examined, a task that has already begun inpublications of the last few years.²² The main aspects of the re-examination covernot only the population’s reactions to the regime’s policy but also its active andpassive participation in socially excluding and ostracizing the Jews: their isolationand removal from all spheres of life, their expropriation, their expulsion fromtheir homes, the pressure for their removal from Germany by emigration andlater by deportation, which finally meant the ‘removal of the Jews altogether’.

In what follows, two situations will be re-examined in which the radicalizedanti-Jewish attitudes and actions becoming dominant among the populationpreceded and influenced political decisions of the regime in regard to itspolicy on the ‘Jewish Question’. We shall look at, first, the developmentsleading to the Nuremberg Laws, and, second, the chain of events preceding theReichskristallnacht. Concluding the chapter, we shall touch upon the question ofwhether this approach might yield similar results for the war years and the FinalSolution.

I I

The promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935 institutional-ized the social exclusion of the Jews from German society, based upon a biologicaldefinition. The laws also legalized the exclusion of the Jews from the Germannational community by revoking their German citizenship. The racial definitionof the Jew, as laid out in the first executive order of the Nuremberg Laws, was


the basis of all future ordinances and measures aimed at the ‘removal’ of theJews. The laws were regarded by contemporaries as well as by the authors ofthe first comprehensive works on the fate of the Jews in the Third Reich as ahistorical milestone. They were viewed as a reversion to the Middle Ages, andat the same time as manifesting the ideological quintessence of the racialist Nazidictatorship.²³

The historical significance of the Nuremberg Laws in the postwar publicsphere re-emerged in 1960 with the political campaign against Hans Globke,who wrote the official Nazi commentary on the laws²⁴ and who since 1953 hadserved as director of the Adenauer Federal Chancellery. The campaign reached apeak during the Eichmann trial in 1961, when for the first time the full scale ofthe Holocaust became a central subject of Western public and media awareness,while the GDR media and historians in particular portrayed the NurembergLaws as constituting the instrument and the real origin of the mass murder ofthe Jews, and Globke as the person mainly responsible.²⁵

Precisely at that time, the West German Vierteljahreshefte fur Zeitgeschichtepublished the posthumous memoirs of the former officer for racial affairs in theNazi Ministry of Interior Affairs, Bernhard Losener, who, surprisingly, trivializedthe Nuremberg Laws as a last-minute improvisation by Hitler and some topNazi-Leaders without any legal preparation or ideological content.²⁶ It seemsdifficult to believe that the timing of the publication coincided with the publicdebate on Globke by pure accident. In the short introductory note to Losener’stext, the then editor of the VfZ, H[ans] R[othfels], apologized for the publicationof the document without the usual source-critical comments.²⁷ The promisedcritical edition of the document has not appeared in the VfZ to this day. But sincethen the significance of the Nuremberg Laws has been marginalized in Germanand international historiography. Based on the 1961 publication of Losener’smemoirs, they have been depicted merely as an example of the totalitarian chaosand ‘Planlosigkeit ’ of the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policy.²⁸

This interpretation was first questioned in an article that examined theadministrative and legal preparation of the laws and in particular the significanceand the consideration the decision-makers attached to popular opinion duringthe months preceding the promulgation of the laws.²⁹ This approach was takenfurther in recent years in works by several German historians of a youngergeneration.³⁰

Here, I will analyse the ‘pressure from below’, as reflected in the Stimmungs-berichte, between November 1934 and the Reichsparteitag in 1935, where theNuremberg Laws were promulgated. The question is, whether and to what extentthe ‘pressure from below’ in this period had effects on the political decisionsleading to the introduction of these laws. ‘Pressure from below’ is understoodas all forms of radical initiatives from the population that internalized the ide-ological messages from above and aimed at an increasing radicalization of thepolicies 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 andparts of the population and thus created a radical anti-Jewish atmosphere allover the Reich. To analyse the relation between the ‘pressure from below’ andits effects on the regime’s policies, a textual analysis will here be combined witha quantitative one.³¹

Already in November 1934 the District Office of Alzenau in Bavaria reportedthat ‘[. . .] in many SA circles there is talk that after the Saar plebiscite,³² harshsteps should be taken more generally against the Jews. In this connection, therewas the expression of quite open threats of murder. These statements should notbe taken lightly, since rash actions in this area could result in extremely seriousconsequences for the economy and foreign policy’ (CD484, B53).³³

A report of December 1934 from the Rheinpfalz also expresses the assumptionthat 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 untilthe introduction of the laws in September 1935, as the Gestapo situation report(Lagebericht) from the Government District Munster for May 1935 shows:

As in most other places in the Reich, locally here in the district in recent weeks the JewishProblem has once again become a focus of general concern. [. . .] In broad segmentsof the population, and especially in the ranks of the SA, the dominant view is that thetime 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 thegovernment 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,³⁵and by September 1935 hundreds of violent actions against Jews were initiatedand carried out independently by local activists, with broader elements of thepopulation swept up in this wave. The violence took a large variety of forms andaffected all aspects of everyday life. The most frequent and most violent publicexpressions were anti-Jewish excesses (Einzelaktionen) and mass rallies, a boycottagainst Jewish shops and enterprises, and a variety of actions against so-called racedefilement (Rassenschande). Remarkably, between January and September 1935,more than one in every two reports (389 out of 667) described these radicalizedexpressions of popular opinion—a number that gives a first overall impressionof the scope of this eruption of anti-Jewish violence.

Among the most violent mass demonstrations were those in Munich inMay (CD863, B121), the so-called Kurfurstendamm-Krawalle in Berlin in July(CD1004, B139), and rallies with 30,000 participants in Stettin in August(CD1033) and 25,000 in Osnabruck in August (CD1109, B151). The mood ofearly summer 1935 is pointedly summed up in a report by the Gestapo Berlinfor June:

[. . .] German Volksgenossen apparently regard them [the Jews] as fair game in everyrespect.³⁶ For that reason, in the past month as well, there have been a large number ofoutrageous incidents. The positive aspect of those events, however, is that the population


is clearly having its eyes opened ever wider, and that hostility towards the Jews isrising constantly. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the populationshould 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, butalso of clashes between authorities and population, can be found in the Gestaporeport from Berlin for July 1935:

For months, the Gestapo in Berlin has been observing a constant rise in the wave ofantisemitism. [. . .] First at the beginning of June in Spandau and Pankow there wereseveral demonstrations out in front of Jewish businesses. These rallies were suppressedby taking the Jews temporarily into protective custody, their seizure fully visible to thedemonstrators. But soon the demonstrations increased in size [. . .]. (CD1004, B139)

From here, the report continues with a detailed description of the Kurfursten-damm-Krawalle with their violent boycott and destruction of Jewish ice-creamparlours and shops, and the manhandling of patrons and cinema-goers, amongthem foreign visitors. During these events the accusation of ‘Judenknechte’ ( Jews’lackeys) was hurled at the police by the public, and the report finally concludeswith the topic of ‘race defilement’:

In connection with these incidents, it must be noted that the police, forced to intervenein these cases, found itself in an extremely difficult situation, since most of the public hadlittle understanding of its actions. The officials were greeted by the demonstrators andthe rest of the public with shouts of ‘Jews’ lackeys [. . .]’.

In several cases, the population has taken steps to publicly expose the Jewish race-defilersand their Aryan girlfriends by means of posters [. . .].³⁷ (CD1004, B139)

While the general tendency in the ‘antisemitic movement’ did not change in thefollowing month, the tension between population and authorities increased, asreported by the Gestapo for Berlin:

Everywhere in the population and the Party, people note the lack of a straight and clearline in policy on the Jews. As was already detailed in the last situation report, what isgenerally noticed is that the government and the Party are not working hand in handwhen it comes to the Jewish Question [. . .].

In any event, police force alone will not be able to prevent a repetition of thedemonstrations against the Jews. (CD1089, B146)

A characteristic picture of mass rallies against and pillorying of ‘race-defilers’ isgiven in the Gestapo report for July 1935 from Breslau:

[. . .] After race defilement of Aryan women by Jews has finally been presented to thepublic in a very clear and unambiguous light, the bitter feeling against these criminalshas assumed huge proportions, beyond any limit. There was not any abatement until atotal of 20 Jews and 20 Aryan ‘females’ were taken into protective custody. The publicreacted with loud applause to the internment of these race defilers in the concentrationcamp. Thus, on 30 July 1935, thousands of Volksgenossen gathered in the streets, hopingto 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, prompt-ed even a Gestapo reporter from Bielefeld to speak of a kind of masshysteria:

[. . .] Large segments of the population have been seized by a certain kind of racedefilement psychosis. They seem to sense race defilement everywhere, and in some caseshave called for the state to proceed against race defilement on the basis of events that insome cases occurred many years ago. In these circles of the population, people likewisefail to understand why all those persons whom they named as guilty of race defilementwere 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 massrallies, as can be seen in an August report from Osnabruck on a demonstrationattended by 25,000 people: ‘This anxiety psychosis [of the Jews] is so powerfulthat during a rally of the NSDAP at the Ledenhof in Osnabruck, some of theJews 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 demonstrationsand anti-Jewish violence, as described in special reports by the Gestapo fromAurich (East Frisia) on 27 and 30 July about ‘demonstrations in the Northagainst Jews’ (CD1000, B140). The county commissioner of the small town ofHunfeld (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 Jewsunder attack, if they did not flee, had to be evacuated, as was seen above inOsnabruck:

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 interveneand come to the aid of those inside, some 50 persons, mainly children, and deport themto Frankfurt am Main. Popular indignation was especially violent in Gladenbach, wherethree houses inhabited by Jews were ransacked. People forced their way into the housesand then turned on the water taps, or ripped out the pipes, so that the houses were totallydestroyed by the water [. . .]. (CD1140, B154)³⁹

Across the Reich, the crowds accompanied the violent actions and mass-demonstrations by hanging banners and painting slogans on the windowsof Jewish shops, carrying ideological as well as practical messages such as: ‘ ‘‘Kauftnicht bei Juden,’’ ‘‘Juden und Judenkechte unerwunscht,’’ ‘‘Die Juden sind unserUngluck,’’ ‘‘Ohne Losung der Judenfrage keine Erlosung des deutschen Volkes’’u.a.’ (‘ ‘‘Don’t shop with Jews’’, ‘‘Jews and Jews’ lackeys not wanted’’, ‘‘The Jewsare our misfortune’’, and ‘‘No salvation of the German people without solutionof the Jewish Question’’ ’) (CD627).


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

Table 6.1.

Total number of documents

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

1 Jan.–15 Sept. 1934 228 63 (27%)1 Jan.–15 Sept. 1935 667 389 (58%)

The number of documents that mention anti-Jewish actions during the firstthree quarters of 1935 unequivocally shows the trend toward the radicalizationof hostility in popular opinion—a kind of pressure from below—which had notyet been institutionalized by law.

In addition to the computer-based analysis presented above, an intellectualquantitative text analysis of the reports (see note 39) from July and August1935 in regard to ‘Einzelaktionen’ and ‘Rassenschande’ more than confirmsthese 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 ofsynagogues 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 searchfor ‘Einzelaktionen’ showed that 53 of 127 documents reported such actions,while the intellectual analysis of these texts showed that a total of more than328 cases were involved. Or, to put it the other way round: the total numberof anti-Jewish excesses was higher by at least sixfold than indicated by onlya count of the relevant documents. This is also seen from a comparison ofthe computerized search and the textual analysis regarding ‘race defilement’ inreports between 1 August and 10 September 1935. The computerized searchfound that in this period, 40 of 158 documents reported on ‘Rassenschande’,while the textual analysis showed that these 40 documents actually reportedon at least 185 cases. Some of the 185 cases were unspecific (‘a numberof Jews and their non-racial-aware girls’ CD1034) while other reports, inaddition 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 wherethe exact number of cases exceeds the findings because of the mechanismdescribed here.

As shown above, the violent ‘pressure from below’ and general lawlessnesscaused concern among local authorities responsible for public order and con-fronted them with a difficult situation: on the one hand their duty was tomaintain public order, whereas at the same time they were part of the policy ofthe struggle against the Jew declared by the party and the state. Concern wasalso expressed by some segments of the population, who felt uneasy in the faceof untrammelled public violence and even threatened by it, as a Gestapo reportfrom Aachen for August 1935 shows:

[. . .] The way the Jewish Question is being dealt with in my district has likewise causedgreat displeasure, since given their mentality, the Roman Catholic population initiallysees the Jew as a human being, and only secondarily thinks of evaluating the matter fromthe standpoint of race policy. [. . .] It is thus very welcome that in future there are to beno more individual actions against Jews, especially since here in this district, such actionshave in any case led to the most detrimental consequences in regard to our close foreignneighbours 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 understandingis prominent among the members of the so-called upper and better-educatedclasses. It is especially in these circles that we are often able to discern an almostcomplete loss of the racial primal instinct’ (CD 1224).

The mounting pressure from below as presented in the reports created areality, in which the local and regional authorities acted on their own initiativeby adopting quasi-legal measures, which actually preceded the anti-Jewish lawsof Nuremberg on the Reich-level. The ‘Law for the Protection of German Bloodand Honour’ was preceded by the refusal of local registrars to perform marriagesbetween ‘Aryans’ and ‘Non-Aryans’⁴² and by the daily arrests of men and womenwho were accused of ‘race defilement’. Also the ‘Reich Flag Law’ forbidding Jewsto fly the German state flag and the Swastika was preceded by local initiativesas well as by a Reich-wide directive of the Gestapo.⁴³ Furthermore, the demandof the population for a law depriving the Jews of their Reich citizenship isreported by the SD in August 1935 in connection with the pressure from the‘Volk . . . which according to its national socialist worldview wishes to see Jewsousted 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 fromthe minutes of a high-level meeting convened on 20 August 1935 to discuss thenecessary next steps in regard to the Jewish Question—a meeting that led tothe promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws a few weeks later. Participating wereministers of the Reich government, the heads of the Gestapo and the SD, and


others. The Bavarian interior minister and Gauleiter of Munich, Adolf Wagner,obviously based his conclusion on the reports about popular opinion from thepreceding months:

State Minister Wagner likewise criticized the violent excesses. He explained them bystating that in regard to the Jewish Question, there was a divergence of opinion between thegovernment 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 asspelled out in the Party platform. They thought that the Reich government had to keepthat 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 beenthe chief instigator of the violent anti-Jewish mass demonstrations in Munich.

Among the ministers who spoke along similar lines was the president of theReichsbank and conservative minister of economic affairs, Hjalmar Schacht, whohad already spoken out against the violence and lawlessness in a public speech inKonigsberg on 18 August 1935.⁴⁶ He commented on the detrimental ‘exaggera-tions and violent excesses of antisemitic propaganda. [. . .] The conclusion of hisremarks was that the Party program of the NSDAP should be made reality, butsolely on the basis of legal measures and decrees.’⁴⁷

At this stage, Hitler himself was disinclined to accede to the legislationproposals for various reasons. Thus, he rejected Schacht’s personal interventionon 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 throughthe reports, played a role that cannot be ignored both in the preparations as wellas in the final political decision on the Nuremberg Laws.

The laws were intended to meet two goals alike: the spectacular realization of abasic principle of the revolutionary ideology which the movement had preachedfrom the outset of its political path; and the simultaneous institutionalizationof the revolutionary ideology and its militant manifestations within a controlledlegal framework. This appears to be one of the stages of a complex dialecticalrelationship between government policy and popular opinion in the Third Reich.

The reports on the population’s reactions to the Nuremberg Laws are eloquentfrom 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 generallypeople are shouting with joy: ‘The state is still revolutionary, after all! The points ofthe Party platform have not been forgotten!’ The violence against the Jews has ceasedalmost completely as a result of a strict decree issued by the Interior Ministry and anunmistakable statement on these matters by the Fuhrer.⁴⁹

While the Gestapo of Kassel reports enthusiastic acceptance of the NurembergLaws as realization of the Party programme they had striven for, making violenceno longer necessary, in Aachen the reaction was more qualified. According tothe 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 notgreeted by the population with unanimous approval. [. . .] The only aspectpraised is that this legislation will prevent excesses in antisemitic propaganda andviolence.’⁵⁰

Several other reports mention critical utterances about the laws and the earlierviolence but emphasize the desirable contribution they will make toward the goalof isolating and excluding German Jewry: ‘The Law for the Protection of GermanBlood 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 thanthrough 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 andfinal 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 Lawon the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service and the Law on the Protection ofGerman Blood and German Honour, have finally cleared the air and brought clarity afteryears of struggle between Germandom and Jewry. In future and for all time to come, nointerference is possible in the volkisch affairs and concerns of the German nation, and isforbidden.⁵²

The far-reaching teleological meaning of this significant step of 1935 towardthe ‘removal’ of the Jews is most pointedly expressed in one of the ubiquitousanti-Jewish banners and graffiti paintings ‘from below’: ‘Keine Erlosung desdeutschen Volkes ohne Losung der Judenfrage’.⁵³ The dialectics between pressurefrom below and measures from above are also integral to further decisive stagesin the development and realization of fundamental ideological principles in theThird Reich, in which the solution of the Jewish Question, with its multipleimplications, was of central significance.

I I I

The Reichskristallnacht is perhaps the most thoroughly researched chapter in thepre-war history of German Jewry in the Third Reich. Historiography, as well asJewish and German collective memories, mainly presents the traumatic image ofthe November 1938 pogrom as an event of destruction and devastation in thecourse of one night and one day.⁵⁴ As is well known, the government’s pretext forthe entire action was the dramatic news of 9 November 1938 about the deathof the first secretary of the German embassy in Paris, vom Rath, as the result ofHershel Grynszpan’s assassination attempt two days earlier.

A revealing document that sheds light upon the pre-history of the Reichs-kristallnacht 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,


about a week before Kristallnacht: ‘The attitude of the population to the JewishQuestion was manifested in the very numerous individual actions, especiallyin recent months, which in most instances were promoted by the local Partyorganizations’ (CD2529, B354).

A more graphic account of the nature, scope and circumstances of the eventsin those recent months is given in the monthly Reich-wide SD report forOctober 1938, which was discovered several years ago in the Osobyi-Archive inMoscow:

The intensified anti-Jewish attitude in the population [. . .] had its most powerfulexpression in actions against the Jewish population. In the south and south-west of theReich, this violence at times took on the character of a pogrom [italics my own]. In a numberof towns and localities, the synagogues were destroyed or set on fire, and the windowsof Jewish shops and homes were destroyed. In the Gau Franconia and in Wurttemberg,the Jews in a few localities were in some instances forced by the population to leave theirresidence immediately, taking along only the barest essentials. (CD2529, B353)

As in the previous section, a quantitative, computer-based analysis has beencarried out, followed by an intellectual analysis and a manual examination ofthe texts. The results show that 76 of 161 detailed reports from all parts ofthe Reich report on 117 ‘Einzelaktionen’ [individual actions] against the Jewsbetween 1 March and 8 November 1938. Often only non-quantified informationreferring to ‘numerous events’ is given, without exact numbers, so that the totalnumber is actually considerably higher than 117. A great many of the actionswere those events of destruction and violence that the above-mentioned reportdid 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 thecleansing of whole localities of Jews was extremely widespread during the periodof May to October 1938, a time of brink-of-war tension over the Sudeten crisiswith Czechoslovakia, and even before that in relation to the tension aroundthe Anschluss of Austria in March 1938. The reports also allow an insight intothe mood and reactions of the Jews in this period; the most insightful exampleappears 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 periodalmost exclusively by the situation in foreign affairs. It gave rise to the most sundry andvaried rumours about the possible way in which Jews might be treated in the event ofwar. [. . .] Jews in general had fears of being sent to a concentration camp, or of beingdisposed of in some other manner. (CD2509, B347)⁵⁶

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

94 Otto Dov Kulka

The remarkable radicalization of all forms of anti-Jewish activity by the populationwas triggered by the escalation of the Sudeten crisis following the Czechoslovakianmobilization on 20 May 1938. The fear of imminent war is in general presentedas related to the role ascribed by the population to ‘the Jew’ as the force thatprovokes war against Germany. During the war itself, this link became fatal forthe Jews, particularly in the years after the invasion of the Soviet Union andthe American entry into the war in 1941, when the European conflict became aworld war.⁵⁸

In this context, the anti-Jewish mood found expression even in quite remoteprovincial towns, as reported from the local police office of Sandberg in Bavariaon 27 September 1938: ‘The mood in the population can be best describedas depressed. It (the population) is anticipating a large-scale war. People are incomplete agreement with the need for measures to care for the refugees from theSudetenland, and they also show very great compassion. In general, the ‘‘Jew’’ isheld responsible as the originator of these critical times’ (CD2525).

This accusation reinforced the demand for the complete ‘removal’ of the Jewsdown 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 inthe area were following the mounting tension with a kind of inner joy. From this it couldbe concluded they are indulging in a kind of relish in their anticipation of the comingwar. 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 solutionto the question of the Sudeten Germans was found. [. . .] If a number of illegal meanswere employed in this connection, that is only understandable. [. . .] In any event, itis necessary to press forward with the struggle against the Jews, even if by permissiblemeans, until the last Jew has finally disappeared from our Volksgemeinschaft.⁶⁰

To reach the goal of removal, pogrom-like actions were carried out evenbefore the tensions culminated in the Reichskristallnacht. A cumulative reportby the governor of the Palatine district for October 1938 explicitly underlinesthis connection in reporting on the devastation wreaked on the synagogue inLeimersheim on the night of 9 to 10 October 1938 and other Palatine synagoguesand houses of Jews. After listing a large number of ‘Einzelaktionen’, this extensivereport for October, written on 9 November, the eve of Kristallnacht, sums up bynoting that all reports from the various places that contributed to this regionalcompilation provide the same ‘justification’ for the actions:

The reason for all these events lies once again in the behaviour of the Jews during theperiod of high tension. [. . .] The population wants to see the Jews get out of the villagesand leave, and seeks to avenge itself in this way for the insolent behaviour of the Jewsduring the critical period in September. This justification for the actions of the populationruns through all the reports. (CD2538, B355)

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


reasons for violent anti-Jewish excesses. Aside from these explicit reports, theconnection is implicit in most of the other documents on such incidents.All actions that typify Reichskristallnacht —the destruction and devastation ofsynagogues and Jewish houses, manhandling of Jews and attacks against them,their arrest and expulsion—can already be found with increasing intensity duringthe first ten months of the year.

The unspecified number of cases of synagogues damaged and destroyed was notonly a result of anti-Jewish violence from below as described in 11 documents.⁶¹In two spectacular cases, total destruction was initiated and carried out fromabove: in Munich in June on special order by Hitler, and in Nuremberg inAugust 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 ‘tensof thousands of Volksgenossen were present at the historic hour’.⁶³ Similarly, thebimonthly SD report from Berlin for June and July 1938 spoke about widespreadboycott actions initiated by the party leadership that spiralled into destruction,looting and physical violence against Jews and appear, in retrospect, as rehearsalsfor 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, asinstructed by the Gau Direction. The operation reached its high point on 20/21 June1938, when all the Jewish shops in Berlin and the signs of the Jewish lawyers and doctorswere painted over with the word ‘Jew’ and the Star of David. In the course of theoperation, there was here and there destruction and plundering of Jewish shops, as wellas 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 overGermany (CD2473, B341).

The cases reported from provincial towns and villages range from the devasta-tion of synagogues to full-fledged pogrom-like actions initiated from below. Oneexample of a heavily damaged synagogue is from the district of Main Franconia,where, in Mellrichstadt, the interior of the synagogue was completely destroyed inan action that saw mushrooming public participation: ‘The first attack involveda small number of individuals, and then people from the gathering crowd choseto join in on the destruction’ (CD2513, B350).⁶⁴ In the same district, Jewishfarms were attacked and damaged, a Jew was beaten up and ‘the embittermentof the population found an outlet in similar excesses against the Jews at otherplaces’.⁶⁵ In many places the situation escalated, as for example that describedby 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. TheJew 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 theresidents, saying that in two years they would once again be in power. The followingnight the people dragged these two persons from their beds and, whips in hand, forcedthem 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 examplein a report for May 1938 on a mass gathering in Bad Alzenau that turned into aviolent excess (CD2441, B328).

Under the impression of the Sudeten crisis, the violence against the Jews inthis period of brink-of-war tension preceding the Reichskristallnacht resulted inJews leaving several places or being forced out by the population, making thetowns ‘judenrein’ [free of Jews].

As a result of the murders and atrocities perpetrated against Sudeten Germans inCzechoslovakia a great indignation flared up against the local Jews in the market town ofBechhofen, district office Feuchtwangen, and in Wilhermsdorf, district office Neustadta.d. Aisch. The Jews then left Bechhofen and Wilhermsdorf. These localities are nowcompletely free of Jews, like the entire district of Feuchtwangen.⁶⁶

During the months preceding the Reichskristallnacht, there were of course othervoices in the population as well. Some of them either openly or implicitlycriticized the anti-Jewish violence, while others expressed their apprehension inthe face of the increasing brutality and lawlessness of the pogrom-like actions. Inthe same Reich-wide SD report for October 1938, which describes the extent anddetails of the pogrom-like actions, the reporter also mentions: ‘It was possibleto note that the Catholic population generally disapproved of these actions’(CD2529, B353).

Similar critical voices from different parts of the population had already beennoted earlier in a Reich-wide SD report for April and May 1938. It describes ‘astrengthened anti-Jewish attitude among the population’ on the one hand and‘indirect support for the Jews on the part of strict Catholics and Protestants, andamong farmers’ on the other (CD2434, B324). A local SD report of 15 May1938 from Hanau reports on critical voices emanating in particular from so-called ‘bessere Leute’, a term generally used for the liberal bourgeoisie (CD2435,B325).

However, there is no doubt that this new wave of ‘intensified anti-Jewishattitude in the population’, to quote again the cumulative Reich-wide retro-spective report for October, written a few days before the Reichskristallnacht,‘had its most powerful expression in actions against the Jewish population’ andthat the radical trend regarding the Jewish question was then dominant. Itcan now be concluded that the Reichskristallnacht pogrom was an expansionand a centrally organized escalation from above of the patterns of anti-Jewishviolence that had swept Germany from below during the previous months ofthe year.


As shown, the often minute and identifiable details given in the local andregional reports on the events of this period confirm the reliability of theReich-wide SD reports that were the point of departure for this chapter.⁶⁷ Itwas these reports, summarizing the information provided by lower reportinglevels across the Reich, that were presented to the political leadership and servedit in its decision-making. The decision on the Kristallnacht pogrom itself wasmade at the highest level, and according to recent research, was also motivatedby and aimed at foreign politics.⁶⁸ The pogrom as such remains a milestonein the historical awareness of Germans and Jews, as well as one of the centralissues 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 thenight of 9–10 November 1938, just as the Nuremberg Laws were not Hitler’simprovised initiative on the eve of the Reichsparteitag of 15 September 1935.The pressure from below preceding the Nuremberg Laws almost unavoidablybrought about the institutionalization of the radical demands in the form oflegislation 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 ofmassive violence which, following the decision from above, were readily availableto be expanded and escalated into the Reich-wide pogrom of Kristallnacht, withall its implications and consequences. As such, the population’s attitudes andactions—the radicalized ‘pressure from below’—provided a background for thepolitical leadership’s decisions.

This long-unresearched dimension of violence and destruction from belowpreceding the Reichskristallnacht went hand in hand with the well-researchedradicalization of the Judenpolitik from above. This began in the economicsphere with the escalation of Aryanization in 1937, continued with measures ofadministrative and political terror, such as registration of all Jewish property inApril 1938, and was followed by mass arrests of Jews in June 1938 and the firstmass expulsions from Germany of Jews with Soviet citizenship in February andJews of Polish citizenship in October 1938.⁶⁹

In the course of this radicalization of anti-Jewish politics, the Reichskristall-nacht itself was of course an event of major historical significance. Even thoughno central, uniform order was issued, an unambiguous signal to the party lead-ers—based on a clear decision by Hitler—was given by Goebbels immediatelyafter 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 Novem-ber, in which he directed the Gestapo and the SD to inform immediately thealready ‘active’ Gauleiters and district party leaders of his orders.⁷⁰ The messagethey received was that the police had been instructed to tolerate most formsof violence and not to tame the anti-Jewish excesses but rather to arrest asmany Jewish men as local prisons could hold and later deport them to concen-tration camps.⁷¹ Any orders from above for the pogrom, however, could nothave 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 thepreceding months.⁷²

Even though the SD did not initiate the November pogrom, it was morethan aware of the ‘wrath of the people’ (Volkszorn) as an accelerating factor inthe ‘Solution of the Jewish Question’. This is seen in the SD memorandum ofJanuary 1937 for Heydrich ‘On the Jewish Problem’:

The most effective way to deprive the Jews of a feeling of security is the wrath of thepeople, as manifested in violence. Although this method is illegal, it has a long-lastingeffect, as the ‘Kurfurstendamm riot’ showed. [. . .] Psychologically this is all the morecomprehensible, since the Jew has learned a great deal from the pogroms of recentcenturies and his greatest fear is of a hostile mood which can spontaneously turn againsthim 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 SSjournal Das Schwarze Korps, where a frighteningly precise prediction of all thesubsequent steps leading toward the Final Solution of the Jewish Question waspublished. It envisaged the removal of the Jews from all spheres of the economy,their marking, their ghettoization, and, finally, the unavoidable annihilation ‘byfire and sword’.⁷³ Both the destructive violence of the Reichskristallnacht and thecold rationalistic thinking of the SD, the central drive behind the Judenpolitik,were already then part of the ‘genocidal mentality’ in Nazi Germany, as tellinglyanalysed by Ian Kershaw.⁷⁴

That no further pogroms like the Reichskristallnacht took place in Germanywas probably due to the mainly negative reactions of the German population,even though the dominant thrust of their pragmatic arguments concentratedon criticism of the futile destruction of ‘German property’.⁷⁵ The regime’sradicalized anti-Jewish policy was subsequently channelled into other forms,including the complete removal of the Jews from the German economy⁷⁶ andthe use of Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps as hostages to exercisepressure on the Jews to enforce and accelerate emigration.

The outbreak of the war brought in its wake two different policies—for theReich and for occupied Poland. In Germany, renewed local ‘Einzelaktionen’ ofanti-Jewish violence from below and the ‘old fighters’ demand for large-scaleactions were reported, but the Gestapo ordered all these activities to be nippedin the bud.⁷⁷ In Poland, however, murderous violence against the Jews wasunleashed by the SD-Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht immediately with theinvasion.⁷⁸

Concluding, the complex dialectical interrelation between popular opinion andpolitical decisions in Nazi Germany existed throughout the history of the ThirdReich. As shown here, this relationship played a significant role in the twosituations of 1935 and 1938—although in two different ways.


Regarding the attitudes of the German population during the war years, asimilar examination based upon the Stimmungsberichte can now be undertakenof the situation preceding the decision on the deportation of the Jews fromGermany and during the Final Solution. For this future research, the questionwill not only be what the German population knew about the fate of the Jews, butalso what the majority wanted in regard to the solution of the Jewish Question.⁷⁹

Notes

1I wish to thank my assistants Corinna Kaiser and Irene Aue for their most valuable helpwith the quantitative research for this article.

For a broader scope that includes less radical voices, and even some critical of the regime’santi-Jewish policy, see my articles: ‘ ‘‘Public Opinion’’ in Nazi Germany and the ‘‘JewishQuestion’’ ’, 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 NaziEurope, vol. 1, 115–50; idem and Aron Rodrigue, ‘The German Population and theJews in the Third Reich: Recent Publications and Trends of Research on German Soci-ety 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’, inDavid Bankier (ed.), Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism: German Society andthe Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941 (New York and Oxford, 2000), 271–81.

2Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jackel (eds.), Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–45, Schriften des Bundesarchivs 62 (Dusseldorf, 2004);book and CD-Rom (hereinafter referred to as Stimmungsberichte).

3This 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 desSicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938–1945 (Herrsching, 1984), 16. A recent study on theSD in Saxony arrived at a figure of 2,746 agents and reporters for this region alone.Carsten Schreiber, ‘ ‘‘Eine verschworene Gemeinschaft’’: Regionale Verfolgungsnetz-werke des SD in Sachsen’, in Michael Wildt (ed.), Nachrichtendienst, politische Eliteund Mordeinheit: Der Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsfuhrers SS. Hamburg (Hamburg,2003), 57–85, here 84.

4On the various systems of the reports, their development, and evaluation see Kulka:‘Die Nurnberger Rassengesetze und die deutsche Bevolkerung im Lichte geheimer NS-Lage- und Stimmungsberichte’, Vierteljahreshefte fur Zeitgeschichte (VfZ ) 32 (1984),582–624, here 582–600; David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: PublicOpinion under Nazism (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 4–10.

5Reinhard Heydrich, ‘An die SD-Fuhrer der SS-Oberabschnitte’, Reichsfuhrer SS,Der Chef des Sicherheitshauptamtes, Berlin, 4 September 1937, Bundesarchiv Berlin(BArch) R 58/990, Bl. 23.

6Staatsministerium des Innern, ‘Berichterstattung in politischen Angelegenheiten, 17July 1934’, Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, MA 106669: ‘Besonderer Wert ist darauf

100 Otto Dov Kulka

zu legen, daß im Interesse einer ungeschminkten Unterrichtung der Reichsregierungalle personlichen und sonstigen Rucksichten ausgeschaltet werden und daß uber allepolitisch wesentlichen und fur die Stimmung im Lande maßgeblichen Ereignisse undZustande ruckhaltlos berichtet wird.’

7Facsimile in Stimmungsberichte, 552/3.8See Aryeh L. Unger, ‘The Public Opinion Reports of the Nazi Party’, Public OpinionQuarterly 29 (1965), 565–82; Boberach 1984 (as in n. 3), 36 f.

9See Bishop Wurm’s notes about the reception in the Reich Chancellery on 25 January1934, in Peter Matheson (ed.), The Third Reich and the Christian Churches (GrandRapids, 1981), 43. An example of an indirect reference can be found in Hitler’sspeech to the Reichstag on 15 September 1935 following the promulgation of theNuremberg Laws. The speech clearly reflects the descriptions that were presented bythe reports from across the Reich (see Kulka 1984, as in n. 4, 620f.). On 10 November1938, Hitler refers to the dramatic shifts in public opinion in the critical situationsbefore 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, Hitlerclearly referred to a public rumour when he remarked that ‘it’s good when the horrorprecedes us that we are exterminating Jewry’ (Werner Jochmann (ed.), Adolf Hitler:Monologe im Fuhrer-Hauptquartier 1941–1944: Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims(Hamburg, 1984), 106). Similarly, on 15 May 1942: ‘And it is the same Jew, whoonce stabbed us in the back, over whom our so-called bourgeoisie now sheds tearswhen we ship him off to the East!’ (Andreas Hillgruber (ed.), Henry Picker: HitlersTischgesprache (Munich, 1963), 145).

10See facsimile in Stimmungsberichte, 550f. For internal critical evaluations of the reportsby the SD Main Office and the Main Office’s directives to the report writers at theregional level (Oberabschnitte) cf. Yad Vashem Archives, 0.51 OSO/48.

11Mainly literature by exiled German historians and post-war works by non-Germanhistorians, e.g. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of NationalSocialism (London, 1942); Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to theTheory of Dictatorship (New York, 1941); Leon Poliakov, Breviaire de la haine: le IIIeReich et les Juifs (Paris, 1951); Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attemptto Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 1953); Raoul Hilberg, TheDestruction of European Jews (Chicago and London, 1961).

12‘[. . .] A strict line is to be drawn between Nazism during the so-called period ofstruggle, before accession to power and Nazism after this accession. [. . .] No singleword was spoken or written after 30 January 1933 which gives any direct indication ofthe feeling of the masses.’ Eva Reichmann, Hostages of Civilization: The Social Sourcesof National Socialist Anti-Semitism (London, 1950), 190f.

13See Otto Dov Kulka, ‘Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung uber den Nationalsozialis-mus und die Endlosung’, Historische Zeitschrift 240 (1985), 599–640, here 609–14(revised English edition in Yisrael Gutman (ed.), The Historiography of the HolocaustPeriod ( Jerusalem, 1988)).

14Frank 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


Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich, 2006), 7; and Bernward Dorner, Die Deutschenund der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte (Berlin, 2007),605.

15During the four decades preceding the publication of our Stimmungsberichte, mostof the editions limited themselves to a regional scope or to certain periods of Nazirule, 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.

16For an overview of these studies, see Kulka and Rodrigue 1984 (as in n. 1), and Kulka2000 (ibid.); for an updated research review, see Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 10–21.

17The first such studies on the topic were published in 1975 and 1983 by Israeliand British historians: Kulka 1975 (as in n. 1); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion andPolitical 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 after2004 and already made use of the digital data prepared for the Stimmungsberichteedition: Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14); also Michael Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft alsSelbstermachtigung: Gewalt gegen Juden in der deutschen Provinz 1919 bis 1939(Hamburg, 2007); Dorner 2007 (as in n. 14) as well as Frank Bajohr: ‘The ‘‘FolkCommunity’’ and the Persecution of the Jews: German Society under the NationalSocialist Dictatorship, 1933–1945’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 20:2 (2006),183–206; Bajohr and Pohl 2006 (as in n. 14).

18The first to introduce the theory of indifference into postwar historiography wasMarlis Steinert, though her study touched upon the Jewish Question on only 15 of387 pages in the quoted English edition. She adopted the term ‘indifference’ from theanalysis of methodologically highly problematic statistics in a postwar publication ofthe German psychologist Muller-Claudius and drew an analogy to a study of GabrielA. 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 duringthe Second World War (Athens, Ohio, 1977), 136f., nn. 121, 125.Mommsen and Obst, who in 1988 also based their study uncritically on Muller-Claudius’s ‘statistics’, added to the topos of indifference the concept of ‘repression’:‘[. . .] die Gleichgultigkeit zumal gegen das Schicksal der Juden verknupfte sichmit einer am Ort und Zeitpunkt des Geschehens einsetzenden Verdrangung [. . .].’Hans Mommsen and Dieter Obst, ‘Die Reaktion der deutschen Bevolkerung auf dieVerfolgung der Juden 1933–1943’, in Hans Mommsen and Susanne Willems (eds.),Herschaftsalltag im Dritten Reich: Studien und Texte (Dusseldorf, 1988), 374–421,here 420.

19For his most quoted and often misinterpreted dictum, ‘The road to Auschwitzwas built by hate, but paved with indifference’ (Kershaw 1983, as in n. 17, 277),Kershaw subsequently coined the term ‘moral indifference’: ‘[. . .] apathy and ‘‘moralindifference’’ to the treatment and fate of the Jews was the most widespread attitudeof all. This was not a neutral stance’. (Ian Kershaw, ‘German Popular Opinion andthe ‘‘Jewish Question’’, 1939–1943: Some Further Reflections’, in Arnold Paucker

102 Otto Dov Kulka

(ed.), Die Juden im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933–1943 (Tubingen, 1986),365–86, here 383f.Even earlier, indifference had been described as an ‘abysmal indifference to thefate of the Jews as human beings’ that ‘reached the point of almost completedepersonalization.’ Apparently, for the majority of the German people ‘the means of‘‘removal’’ and the fate of those being ‘‘removed’’—be it segregation within Germanyor emigration, deportation to ghettos and camps or systematic mass murder whoseobjective was the extermination of a whole people—genocide—did not constitutea problem for them.’ (Kulka 1975, 259, here quoted from reprint 1989 (as in n. 1)149f.).

20Cf. Kulka 2000 (as in n. 1); Ian Kershaw on ‘The Dialectic of Radicalisation in NaziAnti-Jewish Policy’ in his article ‘Hitler’s Role in the ‘‘Final Solution’’ ’, YVS 34 (2006),7–43, here 26–31. See also Bajohr: ‘Vom antijudischen Konsens zum schlechtenGewissen: Die deutsche Gesellschaft und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945’, in Bajohrand Pohl 2006 (as in n. 14), 15–79.

21See his statement ‘The development of trends of opinions after 1933 can be reconstruct-ed only in an impressionistic way.’ Ian Kershaw, ‘Alltagliches und Außeralltagliches:Ihre Bedeutung fur die Volksmeinung 1933–1939’, in Detlev Peukert and JurgenReulecke (eds.), Die Reihen fest geschlossen: Alltag im Nationalsozialismus: Vom Endeder Weimarer Republik bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Wuppertal, 1981), 273–92, here274.

22Longerich 2006 and Dorner 2007 (as in n. 14); Bajohr 2006 and Wildt 2007 (as inn. 17).

23See for example G[ustav Otto] Warburg, Six Years of Hitler: The Jews Under the NaziRegime (London, 1939); and the first comprehensive works on the ‘Final Solution’ byPoliakov 1951, Reitlinger 1953 and Hilberg 1961 (as in n. 11).

24Wilhelm Stuckart and Hans Globke, Reichsburgergesetz vom 15. September 1935:Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre vom 15. September1935: Gesetz zum Schutze der Erbgesundheit des deutschen Volkes vom 18. Oktober 1935(Munich, 1936).

25See for example Ausschuß fur Deutsche Einheit (ed.), Globke und die Ausrottung derJuden: Uber die verbrecherische Vergangenheit des Staatssekretars im Amt des Bundeskan-zlers Adenauer (Berlin/GDR, 1960); idem (ed.), Neue Beweise fur Globkes Verbrechengegen die Juden (Berlin/GDR, 1960). These and similar brochures were also pub-lished in other languages, including English, French and Spanish. The publication ofnumerous articles in papers and journals began in the same year.

26Bernhard Losener, ‘Als Rassereferent im Reichsministerium des Innern’, VfZ 9 (1961),264–313.

27Losener himself expressed his wish that the document should be published ‘at anappropriate point in time’. See ibid., 263. This appropriate occasion seems to have beenthe Eichmann Trial, mentioned by Rothfels, which he regarded as an opportunityto improve the image of German ‘Conservative’ Bureaucracy. On Rothfels’ rolein German postwar historiography and the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, see NicolasBerg: Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung


(Gottingen, 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).

28The first links in this chain of trivializing the Nuremberg Laws based on Losener’smemoirs appeared in the publications of the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte in 1962and 1965. These were Hans Mommsen’s documentation ‘Der nationalsozialistischePolizeistaat und die Judenverfolgung vor 1938’, VfZ 10 (1962), 88–94, here p. 76and n. 30, and in the first comprehensive German history of the Holocaust byHelmut Krausnick (then director of the Institute): ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, inHelmut Krausnick and Martin Broszat (eds.), The Anatomy of the SS-State (London,1970), 17–110, here 44f. Since the early 1970s, Losener’s memoirs have beenreferred 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(Dusseldorf, 1972), 126–32; Mommsen and Obst 1988 (as in n. 18), 384–485. Thisapproach was also adopted by the Israeli historian Leni Yahil in her Hebrew-languagecomprehensive history of the Holocaust, HaShoah (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, 1987),100–2, which also appeared in German as Die Shoah: Uberlebenskampf und Vernichtungder europaischen Juden (Munich, 1998); and most recently by the American historianRobert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford,2001), 122.

29Kulka 1984 (as in n. 4), 615–24.30Longerich 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 Losener with his1961 publication, see Cornelia Essner, Die ‘Nurnberger Gesetze’ oder: Die Verwaltungdes Rassenwahns 1933–1945 (Paderborn, 2002), 113–34.

31The analysis for this period is based on local and regional reports, completelypreserved 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 theSD.

32The plebiscite on the political status of the Saarland was held on 12 January 1935.33Since 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 selecteddocuments, the book number is also given (B . . .). The translation is based on theforthcoming English edition of the book (New Haven, 2009/10).

34SA-Standarte 22 Zweibrucken (Rheinpfalz), Report for December 1934 (CD548,B84).

35Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 75f.36‘Deutsche Volksgenossen betrachten sie anscheinend in jeder Hinsicht als Freiwild.’37Even 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 Otto Dov Kulka

38For a detailed description of the violence in the German provinces up to 1939, seeWildt 2007 (as in n. 17).

39District Governor Wiesbaden, Report for August 1935.40This computer-supported research was carried out with the help of the search engine

of the Stimmungsberichte CD-Rom. The search produces the number of documentsin which a certain keyword is found but not the considerably higher number ofoccurrences of that term in the text. The group of documents pre-selected in this waywas then researched by what is professionally called an intellectual analysis that makesuse of traditional means of textual analysis to obtain a comprehensive result.

41Most of the reports are monthly, written during the first ten days of the followingmonth. 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 July1935.

42See CD535, B78; CD762; CD933, B129; CD1048; CD1082 as well as Stimmungs-berichte, 729f.: Mischehen, and 741: Rassenschande.

43See CD868; CD883; CD894; CD1004, B139, as well as the Reich-wide ordinance ofthe Gestapo of 12 February. See also Stimmungsberichte, 683f.: Flaggengesetzgebung.

44CD1082.45Minutes 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 minuteswere actually taken by Losener himself, though in his memoirs (as in n. 26) he doesnot mention this meeting at all. The mentioned fear of a ‘loss in the authority’ ofthe government appears in several preceding reports like in the Cologne Gestaporeport for June 1935: ‘But ultimately what suffers in both instances is the authority ofthe state’ (CD942, B133). For an analysis of another version of the minutes of thismeeting, kept by the Gestapo, see now Wildt 2007 (as in n. 17) 261–4.

46See Documents CD1099, B148; CD1141.47See Kulka 1984 (as in n. 4), 617.48On 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.

49Gestapo Kassel, Report for September 1935 (CD1215).50Gestapo Aachen, Report for September 1935 (CD1202).51Gestapo Koblenz, Report for September 1935 (CD1216).52Gestapo 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).54Hermann Graml, Der 9. November 1938: ‘Reichskristallnacht’ (Bonn, 1955); Walter

H. Pehle (ed.), Der Judenpogrom 1938: Von der ‘Reichskristallnacht’ zum Volkermord(Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 10–117, as well as particular chapters in almost allcomprehensive books on the Third Reich and on Nazi Germany and the Jews. For a


select bibliography see Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 374 n. 1. On German popularopinion and the National Socialist ‘Judenpolitik’ in 1938, see in particular: Kershaw1983 (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 ‘frombelow’, 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 wasfurther developed by Longerich 2006 (as in n. 14), 119–121 and Wildt 2007 (as inn. 17), 312–19.

55While for 1935 only local and regional reports were preserved but no Reich-widereports, the source situation regarding 1938 is different. We now have monthlyReich-wide SD reports at our disposal for the overall picture, but fewer of the moreconcrete and detailed regional and local reports. The local and regional reports fromBavaria, Westphalia and the Palatinate were more or less completely preserved, withsporadic reports from other regions of the Reich. Cf. n. 31.

56The report uses ‘unschadlich gemacht werden’ for ‘being disposed of ’, a term used inGerman in particular for the extermination of pests.

57Another Bavarian document reports on tensions between the German population andthe 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).

58See most recently Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed theWorld 1940–1941 (New York, 2007), ch. 10; Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: NaziPropaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

59Following the ‘Munich Agreement’ of 30 September 1938, the Sudetenland wasoccupied on 1 October.

60NSDAP Hofheim, Report for October 1938 (CD2545).61Thirteen cases are listed with names of the places, while a still larger number is

unspecified.62For Nuremberg see CD2464, B336; for Munich: ‘Ein Schandfleck verschwindet’, Der

Sturmer, 26 June 1938.63District Governor Upper and Central Franconia, Report for August 1938 (CD2498,

B343).64District Governor Main Franconia, Report for September, 10 October 1938.65CD2513, B350.66District Governor Upper and Central Franconia, Report for September 1938

(CD2515, B351).67A 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.

68See Stefan Kley, ‘Hitler and the Pogrom of November 9–10, 1938’, YVS 28 (2000),87–112.

69See Saul Friedlander, 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, here216–22; see also Stimmungsberichte, Zeittafel, 618–23.

70For a detailed reconstruction of that evening and night, see Kley 2000 (as in n. 64).71IMT, PS 3051.72This 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

Friedlander 1997 (as in n. 69), 212ff.74Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (London, 2000), 151ff.75See Kulka 1982, here quoted from reprint 1989 (as in n. 1), 132–8.76Directive on the exclusion of Jews from the German Economy, 12 November 1938

(RGBl. I, 1580).77See the directive of 9 September 1939, by the Gestapo Main Office in Stimmungs-

berichte, 632 and the reports on the suppression of the renewed attempts at anti-Jewishviolence ‘from below’ in CD2972, B458; CD2988, B467; CD2991, B469; CD2993,B471.

78See Jochen Bohler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen 1939(Frankfurt am Main, 2006); Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: NaziGermany and the Jews 1939–1945 (New York, 2007), 26–30.

79See interview on the occasion of the release of the Stimmungsberichte at the Frankfurtbook fair 2004: ‘Man wollte die Juden loswerden’. Tribune-Gesprach mit Eber-hard Jackel und Dov Kulka, Autoren des Buches ‘Die Juden in den geheimenNS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945’, Tribune—Zeitschrift zum Verstandnis desJudentums 43:172 (2004), 202–4.

7Popular Opinion in Nazi Germany:

Mobilization, Experience, Perceptions:The View from the Wurttemberg Countryside

Jill Stephenson

‘Popular opinion’ fascinates historians of dictatorships in which censorship,propaganda, police controls and sanctions prevent the open expression ofcitizens’ views of both public events and their own conditions. In regimes wherethe aim is simply to prevent the expression of views that are alternative oropposed to those of the ruling monarch or oligarchy, the monitoring of ‘popularopinion’ is generally of little interest. In Nazi Germany, however, the regime’saim was actively to mould the views of ‘valuable’ Germans in order to elicitboth enthusiasm for and collaboration with its structures, policies and projects.As different agencies of party and government became aware that they had noclear idea of how successful their efforts were, their response was to establishan increasing number of monitoring agencies to try to find out what ‘valuable’Germans were privately saying and thinking. Robert Ley’s boast that ‘The onlyperson in Germany who still has a private life is a person who’s sleeping’was bombastic rhetoric which scarcely concealed the frustration of dedicatedfunctionaries at their ignorance of what the popular mood actually was.¹ Thegreat irony of this aspiring totalitarian state was, then, that it endeavoured tosuppress spontaneous expressions of popular opinion, but its success in doingso meant that it lacked the barometers of the popular mood—free elections,independent newspapers, opposition political literature, among others—thatafforded political leaders in pluralist polities some insight into the popularreception of both their policies and circumstances beyond their control.

Ian Kershaw has described popular opinion in Nazi Germany as ‘an inchoateground-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 acrossGermany 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 andthe experience derived at least partly from context, from the situations in whichpeople found themselves; that is, popular opinion was culturally conditioned. Itwas therefore not merely a response to the Nazi political system and the policiesformulated by those in control of that system, although such a response did helpto condition it. Popular opinion was, rather, the product of: both lived experienceand the inherited memory of past experience; the expectations and aspirations ofindividuals and social groups; the reception of information delivered selectivelyand manipulated to promote the regime’s views and priorities; the receptionof information delivered by non-regime agents, no doubt also selectively andsimilarly manipulated to influence the way in which national and Land policieswere perceived in relation to the experience and aspirations of a particular groupor community. Chief among these non-regime agents were the clergy of theChristian churches and covert or exiled members of outlawed political parties, inparticular the Social Democrats (SPD) and Communists (KPD). To this extent,there was in fact some orchestration of popular opinion at local level, by thechurches in particular.

The mobilization of both pro-regime activism and a positive popular responseto the regime’s worldview as well as its policies was the task delegated to theNSDAP after Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933. At a conference of Gauleiteron 2 February 1934,

The Fuhrer 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 thenation at large;

3 to support the Government in every way.³

The aim was to supplant previous allegiances and preoccupations and to implantin the popular consciousness a monolithic view that would be sufficientlyextensive to leave no room for alternatives. The ambition of colonizing 100 percent of ‘valuable’ Germans’ consciousness did not seem absurd to party cadreswhose 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, butvotes—especially in these crisis-ridden years—did not necessarily translate intosolid support for it and its policies. Further, the variegated ingrained experience,memories and preconceptions of different social, regional and confessionalsections of the population meant that the party did not have a blank canvas onwhich to work. The baggage of both past and present could pose a barrier tothe reception of the Nazi message, and thus to the formation of a favourableresponse. 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 southGermany the party’s leadership was associated with the government in Berlin,and Berlin was viewed with historic hostility as the seat of Prussian dominance.⁴For rural Wurttembergers in south-west Germany, the party’s organization wasbased in the towns and its functionaries showed little understanding of therhythms and pressures of life in the countryside. This was true both before 1939and, especially, during the war.

The past cast a long shadow over the present in these areas, with recent memo-ries of the Zwangswirtschaft (coercive economy) of the period of the First WorldWar and after revived by Nazi controls on food production and distributionthrough the Marktordnung (market regulation), even before war was unleashedin 1939 and especially during the war.⁵ The Reichsnahrstand (Reich FoodEstate—RNS) was viewed as both ineffective in representing farmers’ interestsand redressing their many grievances and coercive in imposing controls that wereat odds with time-honoured practices such as bartering. Country dwellers hadlong memories, too, including inherited memories of enmity towards Prussia inthe nineteenth century and even older folk memories of the ravages of the ThirtyYears War in the seventeenth century.⁶ The destruction of villages by Swedishtroops in the 1630s was vividly brought to mind in those rural communitieswhere Second World War bombing and, finally, enemy invasion wrought damageof a kind not experienced in the area for three hundred years.⁷

The party’s problem in rural Wurttemberg was that it was perceived bymany as the alien product of an urban political culture. Some members of ruralcommunes did embrace National Socialism, a few out of conviction and more asa pragmatic or opportunist choice, and young people were generally obliged toenrol in the Hitler Youth. But when a choice had to be made between loyalty toNazism or allegiance to the local community, its customs and its relationships,those who chose Nazism could find themselves in a cold and lonely place. InUlm district, in the commune of Neenstetten, the NSDAP local branch leadercomplained that he was treated like an outcast. In Erbach, in the same district, apriest refused to conduct a marriage service because the bride was the daughterof a local Nazi functionary.⁸

Beyond that, rural relationships posed a barrier to penetration by Nazi normsand values. Villages might not normally have been havens of good will andneighbourliness, with petty jealousies and feuds part of their social fabric. In timeof trouble, however, enlightened self-interest brought their members together incooperation. For example, if one farmer’s barn caught fire, neighbours wouldrally round as members of an ad hoc fire brigade. When a member of a villagedied, every household would be represented at the funeral.⁹ Small wonder,then, that in wartime the illegal slaughtering of pigs—which could scarcely beaccomplished in total secrecy—was generally perpetrated by a syndicate of villagemembers, sometimes including a state official or a minor party functionary.¹⁰This 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 indicatedthat, for some, at least, loyalty to the community came first.

Within this regime, where modern management methods were used tomotivate the party faithful and to impose central control over them andtheir activities, there was an increasing obsession with feeling the pulse of the‘racially valuable’ population’s mood. Various agencies assumed this mission inNazi Germany, including particularly the Gestapo (secret state police) and theSicherheitsdienst (Security Service—SD) of the SS, which, from 1938, collected‘Meldungen aus dem Reich’ (‘Reports from the Reich’).¹¹ In some areas, localgovernment officials made regular reports to their regional superiors.¹² The ReichMinister of Justice received from the senior law officers in the Lander —the stateprosecutors and supreme court presidents—monthly reports on legal affairswhich, especially in wartime, increasingly recounted the popular response toevents large and small, as well as the reactions of law officers to governmentpolicies and current events.¹³ The Reich Propaganda Ministry, too, was amongthose requiring periodic reports from its regional officers on the mood of thepeople 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 situationwhere the Nazi regime’s controls that prevented the airing in public of a pluralityof opinion had created a self-imposed barrier that denied it access to informationabout how it was perceived by the population at large. The creation of a plethoraof monitoring agencies was a measure of its anxiety about this. The Gestapohad some success in keeping activists of the banned SPD and KPD undersurveillance, yet this was not without its frustrations. In 1937, the DusseldorfGestapo reported on the KPD: ‘Whereas until 1936 the main propagandaemphasis was on distributing lots of pamphlets, at the beginning of 1936 theyswitched to propaganda by word of mouth setting up bases in factories . . . . Theshifting about of workers within the various factories . . . creates more fertile soilfor the subversion of workers by the KPD.’¹⁶ SPD propaganda, too, was spreadby word of mouth, facilitated by the fact that ‘many former SPD and trade unionofficials are now commercial representatives and travelling salesmen . . . . Despitethe extent of these subversive activities, it has not yet been possible to catcha single one of these persons in the act and bring him to trial.’¹⁷ In urbanstrongholds of the banned left-wing parties, then, a hard core of former activistskept the faith, often at considerable personal risk.

For Wurttemberg’s rural inhabitants, the priorities were distinctive and clear:family, land, community, church. Attitudes towards the Nazi regime dependedon how the direct and indirect effects of Nazi policy affected this tetrad. WhenNazi policies were compatible with it, they had a chance of success. For example,some farmers in Wurttemberg benefited from the RNS’s water supply or fielddrainage schemes which improved their land—if they could pay for them.¹⁸But the Nazi Party’s—and its formations’ and affiliates’—efforts first to recruit


in rural areas and then to cajole members into active participation in themencountered a wall of obstructive social habit, not least in terms of allegianceto the local church. A local clergyman who gave a lead in obstructing theparty’s attempts to reduce clerical influence within a community was highlylikely to succeed, and, in doing so, to orchestrate popular opinion among hisparishioners.

In this regard, the Nazi regime scored an own-goal by expelling the seniorRoman Catholic clergyman in Wurttemberg, the Bishop of Rottenburg, fromhis diocese in 1938 for ‘provocation’ in the form of his refusal to vote inthe plebiscite on the incorporation of Austria into the Reich. In fact, BishopSproll had been openly criticizing the regime on a limited range of issues since1934, holding a well-attended series of open meetings in Rottenburg at whichhe spoke of the threat posed to the church by National Socialism. The Nazipress in Wurttemberg, as well as NSDAP Gauleiter (regional leader) WilhelmMurr, had become increasingly incensed by Sproll’s boldness and the influencethat he manifestly exerted over Wurttemberg’s Catholics. After Nazi thugs hadattacked Sproll’s residence, Murr expelled the bishop from his diocese on thespurious grounds that his presence was a threat to the maintenance of lawand order.¹⁹ Sproll’s absence caused consternation in Catholic circles, as theSD faithfully recorded, and, from this point onwards, Catholic churches inWurttemberg included a prayer for the bishop in every service.²⁰ Murr’s rashnesshad ensured that Catholic opinion remained faithful to the church and itshierarchy, while at the same time reinforcing the defensiveness that was alreadyfelt by Catholics as members of a minority denomination under the rule of ananticlerical regime.

A few Catholics who were Nazi functionaries in Wurttemberg resignedtheir offices because they found that they could not reconcile the increasingdemands of Nazism with their faith. The majority of the small number ofCatholics who remained as party functionaries eventually left their church. Ofthe much larger number of Nazi functionaries who were Evangelical (Protestant)Christians, many, including Gauleiter Murr, sooner or later left their church.²¹The singularly autonomous Evangelical Church in Wurttemberg had already hadits own differences with the regime. The opposition of its leader, Land BishopTheophil Wurm, to Nazi attempts to create a centralized state church led tohis being put under house arrest in 1934 for alleged financial irregularities. Hisspeedy release was the trigger for unrest among church members, including someordinary NSDAP members, and owed much to popular protests demanding it.²²Wurm’s stock among Wurttemberg’s Evangelical population remained high,with seven or eight thousand people attending a celebration of the LutherFestival in which he participated in the public forum of the Stuttgart city hall on20 November 1938.²³ It seems, then, that a combination of resolute leadershipby the leaders of Wurttemberg’s two main denominations and inept lashing outat them by the Wurttemberg NSDAP’s leadership ensured that the prestige and

112 Jill Stephenson

influence of the churches would persist, with ramifications for popular opinionthat became apparent in a multiplicity of ways.

For example, the SD reported in September 1940 that rural Catholics inWurttemberg were being instructed by their priests to treat Polish prisoners-of-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 encouragedtheir congregations to provide Poles in their locality with food, clothing and‘small luxuries’, describing ‘the ‘‘poor Poles’’ [as] an example to German citizensof especial piety’.²⁵ At this time, both churches were locked in a battle withthe Wurttemberg party and state leadership over the latter’s attempt to replacereligious education in schools with ‘ideological instruction’ (Weltanschauungsun-terricht). Both churches instructed parents to insist on religious education, andmany did, even in the face of pressure and threats from local party activists.²⁶ InWesterstetten, in Ulm district, two teachers who had tried to impose ‘ideologicalinstruction’ on the commune’s children were ostracized, being obliged to taketheir meals in a neighbouring commune because no one in Westerstetten wasprepared to provide them with food. This was a village where the NSDAP localbranch 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 Wurttemberg’s Nazi leadership towards bothchurches, and particularly the Catholic Church, that had alienated much of thepopulation. The reports of the Wurttemberg SD from 1938 onwards demonstratethat the other issues that had the greatest impact on popular opinion in thecountryside were the desperate straits to which many family farms had beenreduced by the later 1930s, the effects of both conscription and the unavailabilityof 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 intothe factors affecting the popular mood, in particular the course of the war and itsmounting casualties but also more local issues such as the ‘euthanasia’ of mentallyimpaired persons at Schloss Grafeneck in Munsingen district in Wurttembergduring 1940. Farmers in the vicinity of Grafeneck could see and smell smokecoming from its crematorium.²⁸ The Stuttgart State Prosecutor reported to theReich Minister of Justice that rumours about ‘a mass murder of patients arecirculating like wildfire’, with people refusing to allow relatives to be admittedto hospital or an asylum out of fear that they would be transferred to Grafeneckand killed.²⁹

The increasing precariousness of small-scale family farms owed much to theeconomic upturn after the depression, with reviving industrial concerns acting as amagnet for both hired agricultural labourers and farmers’ sons and daughters. Thelabour shortage was the greatest preoccupation, but the rural population perceivedit as a symptom of attitudes and policies emanating from urban centres—whereNazi leaders were based—whose inhabitants at least implicitly undervalued the


role of agriculture in the national economy and dismissed rural communities as‘backward’. In summer 1939, the SD reported that ‘the impression has beengiven that many measures are applicable only to the conditions of cities and largecommunes, to the disadvantage of the countryside’.³⁰ In wartime, there was agood 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 foran allowance to be paid to the wife of a conscripted farmer, it was not universallyapplied and the amount decreed was set at a level where ‘a farmer’s wife withfour or five children had to make do with between 45 and 60 marks, whereasthe childless wife of a white-collar worker had about 150 to 180 marks at herdisposal’.³¹

Conscription into the armed forces in wartime, which affected rural commu-nities disproportionately heavily, both exacerbated the labour shortage on theland and added new preoccupations which influenced popular opinion. Untilthe invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the casualty lists were relatively limited,although individual families had losses to mourn. Beyond that, the top priorityfor farming families was the maintenance of the family farm as a going concern.The incremental conscription of adult males left many small farms with onlywomen, children and elderly men to try to sustain them. The SD reflectedthe problems encountered, with reports of elderly parents or a family’s womenstruggling 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 thedemobilization of a male family member to prevent the collapse of a farm orrural trade had its effect in reinforcing resentment among the rural population.³²

As a partial replacement for men who had been conscripted, from autumn1939 there was a major influx of foreign labour into Germany, to add to thevoluntary migrants already there. The new foreigners were either prisoners-of-war or coerced civilians; in the first instance, they were Poles, with westernEuropeans and then Soviet citizens following as military victories brought largenumbers of Europeans under German control. The presence of vanquishedforeigners in farming communes had a marked effect on popular opinion. Onthe one hand, families to whom foreign workers were allocated were relieved tohave some compensation for absent family members. Especially where no nativemen remained on a farm, the arrival of a male foreigner was welcomed as anasset, and he was often treated as a member of the farming household. On theother hand, the regime forfeited any gratitude that it might have earned onthis score by issuing and implementing threats against Germans who fraternizedwith foreigners working at close quarters with them. Allowing a Polish workerto eat at the same table as the host farming family was prohibited, but widelypractised.³³ In particular, the pillorying by self-righteous NSDAP functionariesof women who had sexual relations with ‘inferior’ foreigners was shocking to theordinary 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 the1920s, characterized local Nazi bullies when confronted with an ‘enemy’.

Some villagers had already observed this kind of conduct when the SA, inparticular, had harassed Jewish neighbours. In the minority of Wurttemberg com-munes with a Jewish presence, Jewish traders—particularly cattle traders—andtheir ‘Aryan’ customers had been under pressure during the 1930s, with thescurrilous party press, especially the Flammenzeichen, naming traders and theircustomers and publishing photographs of their transactions.³⁵ The banning ofJewish traders by 1938 was soon followed by the atrocities of Kristallnacht,the November pogrom in which remaining Jews and synagogues in villageswere attacked by SA men from towns or villages in the region—but gener-ally not by their own neighbours. As one SA leader said, ‘I can’t do this inOberdorf, because I’ve grown up with these people [Jews], gone to school withthem and seen active service with them on the battlefield’.³⁶ In Buchau, evenNSDAP members expressed their disapproval of the violence perpetrated by SAmen from elsewhere.³⁷ The SD reported the misgivings of a range of ordinaryWurttembergers. Some disapproved of the destruction of valuable resources,while others expressed compassion for fellow human beings. Commenting onthe majority Protestant population, the SD observed that ‘the majority of theclergy 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’’ ’. Wurttemberg’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 theconscription of some farmers’ horses. This was a particularly acute issue becausepossession of a horse was not only a major practical asset on a farm but was alsoan indicator of social status. In addition, a variety of commodities used by themore prosperous or extensive farmers became almost or entirely unobtainable asa result of wartime restrictions; these included chemical fertilizer, weedkiller andfuel oil. There was a shortage of both craftsmen and materials for making repairsto agricultural machinery. Together, these shortages had the effect of depressingthe efficiency and living standards of better-off farmers to the levels of the massof small family farmers. For the latter, the chief grievance was that they couldneither obtain new work shoes nor have their existing shoes mended because ofa shortage of both shoemakers and nails.³⁹

With the farming community struggling to maintain farms in the face of theseobstacles, opinion in the countryside seemed entirely negative, even before theinvasion of the USSR in June 1941. While some families had already lost afather, a brother or a son in combat, from this point onwards the increasinglyheavy rate of casualties was a source of grief for the fallen and acute anxietyfor those still at the front, especially the eastern front. The SD reported in July1941 ‘an increasing deterioration’ in the popular mood, which it attributed tothe ferocity of the campaign in the east and the absence of detailed information


about the army’s fortunes in its progress reports. All of this was said to be causinganxiety among ‘women in all sections of society’.⁴⁰ The depletion of familiesthrough 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 labourwas reducing farming concerns increasingly to subsistence agriculture, which wasdisastrous for the towns. Foreign workers were a prized asset, but their numbersonly partly compensated for the numbers conscripted. Recognizing their scarcityvalue, some foreign workers became assertive, with the result that women whowere dependent on them sometimes became deferential to and even fearfulof them.⁴¹

The absence of news about men who were ‘missing’ on the eastern frontpromoted depression, anxiety, nervousness. This was heightened by a pervasivefear that either the Red Army or the Wehrmacht (armed forces) would resortto the use of poison gas, the horrific memory of which in the First WorldWar remained vivid.⁴² The entry of the United States into the war and Britishresistance to Rommel’s forces in North Africa added to the sense of gloom.The reports of the law officers captured the mood repeatedly, reporting, forexample, that, by the end of 1941, the various fears and discontents had ledto ‘resignation, war weariness and embitterment’, with particular worries aboutthe continuing casualties.⁴³ This was even before the German surrender atStalingrad, the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast and the invasion ofGermany.

The downward spiral of defeats and the progressive worsening of conditions forcivilians depressed the popular mood, with the Stuttgart State Prosecutor report-ing in May 1943 that ‘confidence in victory and trust in the leadership . . . hasnow been noticeably shaken’. By this time, it was said that Wurttemberg’s farmshad been denuded of native adult male labour. At the same time, casualties hadreached First World War totals.⁴⁴ In August 1944, the Stuttgart SD admittedthat ‘even those who up to now have believed unwaveringly . . . have lost faithin the Fuhrer’.⁴⁵ Although the countryside did not experience bombing of theorder of that devastating the towns, by later 1944 a number of villages hadbeen hit, whether deliberately—because of a nearby strategic asset such as arail line—or in error. Sometimes this was the result of the positioning of adecoy airport or other installation in the countryside, to protect the genuinearticle. Where a village was hit, the resentment was redoubled by this apparentfavouring of an urban facility at the expense of a rural community.⁴⁶ To addto that, the mobilizing of the Volkssturm (home guard) from September 1944seemed to many in Wurttemberg a clear reflection of how desperate Germany’splight had become. The SD reported that this news was ‘received negativelyby the overwhelming majority of the population’.⁴⁷ In many rural areas, mensimply failed to turn out when an attempt to rally the Volkssturm was made. InMusberg, in Boblingen district, it was said that ‘the Volkssturm was, in terms oforganization, 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-dateand defective.⁴⁸

The end of the war came late to Wurttemberg, in April 1945. The ruralpopulation simply wanted it to be over. The prolonged resistance by generalsobedient to Hitler’s will that they should fight to the last village and the lasthouse, in a cause that was patently lost, was more than matched by some NSDAPfanatics who forced villagers to mount pitifully ineffective resistance to theinvader, on pain of death. This was no idle threat, and individuals—includingcommunity leaders and local NSDAP functionaries—who tried to obstruct suchdoomed resistance were shot or hanged.⁴⁹ This signalled the final stage of theNazi regime’s descent into brutality against even those citizens whom its officersregarded as ‘valuable’.

These experiences and perceptions informed Wurttemberg peasants’ attitudesto the central government in Berlin and to their more local Land government inStuttgart. This does not mean that the rural population was intimately acquaintedwith the conduct of government in either of these locations, or that its memberswere well-informed about the flood of decrees that emanated from both. Thereappears to be an assumption, among well-educated historians and others, thatGermans were aware not only of the broad contours of government policy buteven of much of its detail. The facilities of the multimedia age have seducedpeople into imagining that ‘ordinary Germans’ were as well-informed as earlytwenty-first-century citizens in developed democracies who are politically aware.In Nazi Germany, modern facilities such as cinema and radio, as well as thepress, were used extensively by the regime to propagate its point of view, withall rivals denied access to these media.⁵⁰ Urban Germans, who had easy accessto these facilities, could be well-informed about the government’s stance on thesubjects on which it endeavoured to engage the German public. Whether theyall were thus well-informed is another matter.

In wartime, particularly, political leaders and law officers in Stuttgart lamentedthe Wurttemberg rural population’s failure to observe regulations regarding theproduction and distribution of foodstuffs or the treatment of forced foreignlabourers.⁵¹ It evidently did not occur to political leaders and law officers inStuttgart that those in rural communes remote from the centre of power might notbe aware of regulations that were published in the press or broadcast over the air.Local Nazi functionaries were expected to keep their constituents informed aboutgovernment requirements and to maintain morale, but they were increasingly thinon the ground in wartime. Further, the deficiencies within Gau Wurttemberg-Hohenzollern’s party organization, which predated 1933, were evident in peace-time and were exacerbated by conscription. In wartime particularly, it becameevident that many of those in rural areas lacked either the ability or the will to mas-ter 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 themselvesof it. One self-righteous supporter of the regime claimed, in 1943, that in the


countryside ‘National Socialist radio propaganda is relatively seldom listened to,particularly in Catholic areas’.⁵³ In wartime, some elected not to listen to it toavoid news that would deepen their despair, while the lack of genuine informationprovided by German radio stations, in particular, was a grievance that drovepeople to listen to illegal enemy radio. Some in Wurttemberg relied on Swiss radiofor information, crediting its broadcasts with ‘extraordinary objectivity’.⁵⁴ Otherslistened to Radio Moscow, not because they were ‘Bolshevist sympathizers’ butbecause they had received anonymous messages promising that informationabout German soldiers ‘missing’ on the eastern front would be provided onRadio Moscow.⁵⁵ In this way, the absence of information from German sourceshad an influence on popular opinion, compounding the distrust of officialdomthat already existed.

Rural inhabitants, by contrast, might well not have access to these newmedia. It was a common complaint among urban female evacuees that thesouthern villages to which they were allocated lacked a cafe and a cinema.⁵⁶ InWurttemberg, the cheap radio receiver, the Volksempfanger, was made widelyavailable, but the SD reported in April 1939 that half of those that had been soldwere defective.⁵⁷ In November 1941, the SD was still considering whether torequire the installation of ‘community radio’ loudspeakers in all of Wurttemberg’scommunes. It was seen as an obstacle that, among the multifarious demandson them in wartime, mayors had to raise the funds for this from within theirown communes and were responsible for organizing the installation of theloudspeakers themselves.⁵⁸

Popular opinion therefore was indeed ‘spontaneous’ in the sense of notbeing moulded by the regime, although the regime’s actions and sanctionscertainly had an effect on it—generally an adverse effect. This can be adjudgeda failure on the part of the NSDAP, within whose remit the generation ofpopular support for the government and its policies lay. Some aspects of popularopinion were, however, less spontaneous because they were orchestrated by amember of a community or group, rather than by an officer of the regime. Anattitude of popular opposition to the regime’s anticlerical policies was consistentwith many communities’ habit of regarding the church as both a devotionaland a social centre. This attitude was often encouraged by a local clergyman.For example, priests gave a lead to young people by reviving banned churchyouth groups, repeatedly if necessary.⁵⁹ In the last days of the war, seniormembers of a commune—in some cases, a mayor—might encourage villagersto defy the regime’s orders to mount physical resistance to the approachingenemy. These examples may perhaps seem to have passed the point wherepopular opinion has given way to action. Yet the actions involved occurrednot under duress but because of an essential collective sympathy with themon the part of the community or group—a sympathy deriving from commonexperience and perceptions which can reasonably be characterized as ‘popularopinion’.

118 Jill Stephenson

Notes

1Quoted 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 whenanybody 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.

2Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria,1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983), 4.

3Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919–1945: A DocumentaryReader, vol. 2: State, Economy and Society 1933–1939 (Exeter, 1984), document 157,p. 234.

4Michael Kissener and Joachim Scholtyseck, ‘Nationalsozialismus in der Provinz’,in Michael Kissener and Joachim Scholtyseck (eds.), Die Fuhrer der Provinz: NS-Biographien aus Baden und Wurttemberg (Constance, 1997), 21, 23, 25. On Bavaria,see Kershaw, Popular Opinion, 18, 36, 47.

5Avraham Barkai, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy, trans. Ruth Hadass-Vaschitz (Oxford and New York, 1990), 145. The Zwangswirtschaft was eitherimplicitly or explicitly referred to in complaints about the new system. See, forexample, Kershaw, Popular Opinion, 46.

6On Wurttemberg and Prussia, see Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor:Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill,NC, 1997), 16–17, 20–3, 33.

7Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (hereafter HStAS), J170: Bu1 (Aalen), Gemeinde Zip-plingen; Bu3 (Boblingen), Gemeinde Holzgerlingen; Bu4 (Crailsheim), GemeindeOberspeltach; Bu10 (Leonberg), Gemeinde Heimsheim; Bu78 (Tubingen), GemeindeEntringen. See also Albert Ilien and Utz Jeggle, Leben auf dem Dorf: zur Sozialgeschichtedes Dorfes und Sozialpsychologie seiner Bewohner (Opladen, 1978), 37–8.

8Christine Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der wurttembergischen NSDAP: Funktion,Sozialprofil und Lebenswege einer regionalen NS-Elite, 1920–1960 (Munich, 1998), 76.See also Thomas Schnabel, Wurttemberg zwischen Weimar und Bonn, 1928–1945/46(Stuttgart, 1986), 418.

9Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, K110 (StAL), Bu48, ‘Betr.: Allgemeine Stimmung undLage’, 1 September 1941, 15.

10Jill Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front: Wurttemberg under the Nazis (London, 2006),211–15.

11For Wurttemberg, these are found in the Staatsarchiv Ludwigsburg, K110 files. Inaddition to archival resources, there are two published collections of these, both editedby Heinz Boberach: the single-volume Meldungen aus dem Reich (Munich, 1968); andMeldungen aus dem Reich (Herrsching, 1984), in 17 volumes. There is also HeinzBoberach (ed.), Berichte des SD und der Gestapo uber Kirchen und Kirchenvolk inDeutschland, 1934–1944 (Mainz, 1971).


12For Bavaria, these can be found in Martin Broszat, Elke Frohlich, Falk Wiesemannand Anton Grossmann (eds.), Bayern in der NS-Zeit, vols. 1–4 (Munich and Vienna,1977–81).

13These are found in the Bundesarchiv (BA), R22 files. For Wurttemberg, the files areR22/3387 and R22/4209.

14These are found in the BA, R55 files.15These are found in the BA, NS6, Partei-Kanzlei files, ‘Auszuge aus Berichten der

Gaue u.a. Dienststellen’. They are available on microfilm, e.g. in the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum archive (USHMM).

16Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 2, document 459, p. 592.17Ibid., document 457, pp. 590–1.18Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 52–3, 203.19Paul Sauer, Wurttemberg in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Ulm, 1975), 203–4;

Joachim Scholtyseck, ‘‘‘Der Mann aus dem Volk’’: Wilhelm Murr, Gauleiter undReichsstatthalter in Wurttemberg-Hohenzollern’, in Kissener and Scholtyseck (eds.),Die Fuhrer der Provinz, 492–3; Jorg Thierfelder, ‘Die Kirchen’, in Otto Borst (ed.),Das Dritte Reich in Baden und Wurttemberg (Stuttgart, 1988), 83; Paul Sauer, WilhelmMurr: Hitlers Staathalter in Wurttemberg (Tubingen, 1998), 89–91.

20StAL, Bu44, ‘Lagebericht des 4. Vierteljahres 1938’, 1 February 1939, 3.21Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der wurttembergischen NSDAP, 47, 67–8, 140, 151,

168–9.22Schnabel, Wurttemberg zwischen Weimar und Bonn, 411–14.23StAL, Bu44, p. 4; Kurt Leipner (ed.), Chronik der Stadt Stuttgart, 1933–1945

(Stuttgart, 1982), 551.24StAL, Bu38: ‘Betr.: Kirchenbesuch von Kriegsgefangenen und polnischen Zivil-

arbeitskraften’, 4 September 1940; ‘Betr.: Vergehen von Geistlichen gegen dasHeimtuckegesetz’, 5 September 1940.

25StAL, Bu37, ‘Betr.: Verhalten der Geistlichen gegenuber polnischen Kriegsgefan-genen’, 9 February 1940.

26Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 249–54.27HStAS, J170, Bu18 (Ulm), ‘Betreff: Geschichtliche Darstellung der letzten Kriegstage’,

Westerstetten, 20 September 1948.28Gerhard Schafer, Landesbischof D. Wurm und der nationalsozialistische Staat, 1940–

1945 (Stuttgart, 1968), 119.29Quoted in Ernst Klee (ed.), Dokumente zur ‘Euthanasie’ (Frankfurt am Main, 1985),

211–12.30StAL, Bu46, ‘Lagebericht des 2. Vierteljahres 1939’, 1 July 1939, 37–8.31Ibid., Bu37, ‘Rundschreiben Nr 49—Betr. Pauschwirtschaftsbeihilfe fur einberufene

Bauern und Landwirte’, 22 April 1940; Birthe Kundrus, Kriegerfrauen: Familienpolitik

120 Jill Stephenson

und Geschlechterverhaltnisse im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg, 1995), 261,271. The quotation is from 271.

32Boberach, 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 Schonhagen, Tubingenunterm Hakenkreuz: eine Universitatsstadt in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart,1991), 317.

33Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 270–3, 276–9.34Arbogast, Herrschaftsinstanzen der wurttembergischen NSDAP, 63–4.35Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 138–9.36Paul Sauer, Die judischen Gemeinden in Wurttemberg und Hohenzollern: Denkmale,

Geschichte, Schicksale (Stuttgart, 1966), 48, 50, 54, 57–8, 81, 90, 131, 145. Thequotation is from Felix Sutschek, ‘Die judische Landgemeinde Oberdorf am Ipf inder Zeit des Nationalsozialismus’, in Michael Kissener (ed.), Widerstand gegen dieJudenverfolgung (Constance, 1996), 146.

37Paul Kopf, ‘Buchau am Federsee in nationalsozialistischer Zeit: die Ereignisse derJahre 1934 bis 1938’, in Geschichtsverein der Diozese Rottenburg-Stuttgart (ed.),Kirche im Nationalsozialismus (Sigmaringen, 1984), 288–90.

38StAL, K110, Bu44, 4.39HStAS, J170: Bu18, Turkheim, 1; Bu10 (Leonberg), Munchingen, n.d.; Gunter

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.

40StAL, Bu47, ‘Betr.: Allgemeine Stimmung und Lage’, 15 July 1941, 1, 8.41BA, R22/3387, Der Generalstaatsanwalt an den Herrn Reichsminister der Justiz, Nr

3130—Ia—2, 31 May 1943; R55/601, ‘Tatigkeitsbericht (Stichtag: 4 September1944)’, 7.

42HStAS, J170, Bu3 (Boblingen), ‘Geschichte der letzten Kriegstage des ZweitenWeltkriegs in Musberg’, 18 October 1948; StAL, Bu55, RSHA, ‘Meldungen aus denSD-(Leit)-Abschnittsbereichen’, 30 July 1943, 13921.

43BA, R22/3387, Der Generalstaatsanwalt an den Herrn Reichsminister der Justiz, Nr420b—35, 1 December 1941.

44Ibid., 31 May 1943.45Quoted in Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich

(Oxford, 1987), 220.46Leipner, Chronik der Stadt Stuttgart, 780, 783.47StAL, Bu59, ‘Betrifft: Stimmen zum Erlass des Fuhrers uber die Bildung des Deutschen

Volkssturmes’, 8 November 1944, 1–2.48Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 316–18; HStAS, J170, Bu3, Boblingen.49Thomas Schnabel, ‘ ‘‘Die Leute wollten nicht einer verlorenen Sache ihre Heimat

opfern’’ ’, in Landeszentrale fur politische Bildung Baden-Wurttemberg und vom


Haus der Geschichte Baden-Wurttemberg durch Thomas Schnabel/Angelika Hauser-Hauswirth (Ulm, 1994), 170–2; Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 326–9.

50On the media and their uses, see David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics andPropaganda (London and New York, 1993).

51Stephenson, Hitler’s Home Front, 174, 282.52Ibid., 10–11, 85–8, 96–7, 105–7.53HStAS, E397, Bu37, ‘Betr.: Schwarzhandel auf dem Lande’, 5 December 1943.54Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich (1968), 13 July 1944, 438; StAL, Bu55: 30 July

1943, 14105; 8 July 1943, 14062.55USHMM, NS6/414, Partei-Kanzlei, II B 4, ‘Auszuge aus Berichten der Gaue u.a.

Dienststellen Zeitraum 21.2.–27.2.43’, 6.56HStAS, J170, Bu18, ‘Betrifft: Geschichtliche Darstellung der letzten Kriegstage in der

Gemeinde Oppingen Kreis Ulm-Do’, 5 October 1948; StAL, K110, Bu48, 43–8.57Ibid., Bu45, ‘Lagebericht des 1. Vierteljahres 1939’, 1 April 1939, 22.58Ibid., Bu40, Rundschreiben Nr 119/41, ‘Betr.: Einfuhrung des Gemeinderundfunks’,

12 November 1941.59Ibid.: Bu45, pp. 5–6; Bu37, ‘Betr.: Jugendarbeit beider Konfessionen’, 29 April 1940.

See also Franz Josef Heyen (ed.), Nationalsozialismus im Alltag: Quellen zur Geschichtedes Nationalsozialismus vornehmlich im Raum Mainz—Koblenz—Trier (Boppard,1967), 258–9.

8Fascist 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 howordinary Italians had related to fascism was rarely posed. In 1945, followingmilitary defeat and German occupation, Italian politicians attempted to rescuethe country’s reputation in the eyes of the victorious powers by stressing theanti-fascist tradition within Italy and exalting the role of the Italian Resistancein the years 1943–5. Every effort was made to distance Italy from its fascistpast and from its disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. As a result there wasno Italian Nuremberg; trials of fascist military leaders—war criminals—weredelayed and then suppressed (with the connivance of the Allies) and few politicalleaders were ever condemned.¹ Perhaps understandably, in the frenzy of postwarreconstruction there was little desire to delve into the past. For more than twodecades after the war, fascism received little detailed attention from historiansand the books that did address the phenomenon tended to limit their attentionsto a chronicle of events with little pretence at providing any critical analysisof the successes and failures of the movement.² To some extent, it could besaid that fascism disappeared—conveniently for many—into a black hole. Onpublic occasions the regime would be deplored and it would always be statedvery emphatically that there should be no return to fascism, but there was no realdesire to ask deeper questions relating to popular attitudes towards the regime.Nobody seemed to want to find out who had been fascist and why. Emphasison the centrality of the Resistance in the formation of the new Republic carriedwith it the strong, if unstated, message that most Italians had been anti-fascistand 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 sentimentunnecessary.

Fascist Italy in the 1930s: the Provinces 123

Generational change and the complex ideological challenges of 1968 helped togenerate a new curiosity in Italy’s fascist past. In the early 1970s—and with theincreasing availability of documents on the fascist period—new studies beganto appear. For the first time local studies of the origins and development ofthe movement were produced, shedding fresh light on the social compositionof provincial fascism and answering at least some of the questions about fascistmotivations. Foreign scholars contributed much to this new wave. A majoradvance was represented by the appearance, in 1974, of Adrian Lyttelton’s TheSeizure of Power, which provided a detailed and analytical survey of the fascistmovement in its early years.³ Significantly, most of this new research—indeedalmost all—examined the fascism of the first half of the 1920s, tending to see theestablishment 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 repressivestate 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 movementitself and the early workings of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF). Institutionalquestions relating to the functioning of the fascist state and the way it transformedthe structure of the liberal state it replaced also attracted the attention of a fewscholars.⁴ Essentially this was history ‘from above’. The question of popularreactions to the movement was dealt with either through analyses of the earlyphase of open conflict between fascist and anti-fascist forces, through studies ofthe social composition of the early movement or through usually brief and oftenessentially celebratory analyses of the desperate and sometimes heroic resistanceto fascism and the fascist squads offered by groups of communist, socialist andCatholic anti-fascist activists. To some extent this was a literature which served toreinforce the stereotype of ‘good Italians’, ‘bad fascists’, in which the populationin general was victim of an evil minority.

The shock to this rather comforting vision of the fascist past, in which mostItalians had apparently been innocent and oppressed onlookers, was providedby Renzo De Felice’s assertion—made in 1974 in the fourth volume of hismassive 4,000-page biography of Mussolini⁵—that there had in fact been a massconsensus for fascism among Italians. De Felice’s statement was related to theyears between 1929 and 1934 and was justified not by specific research intopopular attitudes but by his finding little obvious and open opposition to theregime in the archival documents related to those years. The methodology wasunsophisticated—it rested on a simple consent/dissent binary—but the conclu-sion was, for the time, heresy on a grand scale. It not only upset the self-image ofthe Italian—anti-fascist and victim of the regime; it also by implication invited arevision of the accepted view of fascism, supposedly always the object of popularhostility. Mass consensus, if true, posed some fundamental (and very awkward)questions. Were—orribile dictu— the ‘good Italians’ in fact the same people asthe ‘bad fascists’? Alternatively (if the Italians were to preserve the positive imageof 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 butextremely sensitive political issues. The Italian left, still growing in strengthin the 1970s, had built much of its reputation in the post-war period on itsanti-fascism and its relationship with the Resistance and was very reluctant togive any credibility to De Felice’s thesis. Even making due allowances for falseconsciousness, it was axiomatic that ‘the people’ could not have been supportersof fascism. Nonetheless the revisionist cat was out of the bag. For more thana decade after the furore engendered by the appearance of the mass consensusthesis, the historiography of fascism tended to reflect political divisions, DeFelice being rather unjustly assimilated to the right while the left continued tocontest the consensus thesis. Surprisingly, there were few attempts to test thethesis empirically, such debate as there was being largely confined to the realmsof theoretical discussion about the meaning of ‘consensus’ in dictatorial regimes.

With the passage of time many historians began to feel that there should bemore to life than simply arguing about De Felice and began to look for a way outof the impasse. A growing interest in social history during the later 1970s led tosome attempts to study fascism from new angles. Victoria De Grazia tried to assessthe social impact of fascist leisure organizations; Luisa Passerini and MaurizioGribaudi used oral history techniques to examine popular memories of fascism inTurin. The rapid development of women’s history had a similar effect, providingsome excellent studies of women’s experience of the movement.⁶ If the overallresults were often fragmentary—something difficult to avoid in a country soregionally diverse as is Italy—the new initiatives did suggest a much greater flex-ibility in the approach to the question of popular attitudes than that provided bythe 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 1990swith the work of Emilio Gentile on the ideology of the movement. In fact Gentilehad been arguing from the late 1970s the case for an original and coherent fascistideology, but the full significance of his novel approach seemed to be appreciatedonly much later. Relating the development of fascist ideology firmly to its contextin the crisis of European liberal and positivist thought in the years before 1914and 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 wenton in the heads of the fascist ‘true believers’. His emphasis on the efficacy ofthe fascist ‘political religion’ in winning converts to the movement opened newavenues to interpretation. Because of its inevitable reproduction of themes offascist rhetoric of hope, joy and new beginnings—of an imagined rather thana real Italy—some of the work appeared to put a positive gloss on fascism andwas criticized for this, even though Gentile was always careful to say that hewas talking about a very restricted minority of largely intellectual Italians andthat 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 theargument over the consent/dissent binary, more or less at a standstill, towards


one related to people’s perceptions and understanding of fascism. And this couldbe 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 invitedquestions about the existence of a ‘fascist culture’ which might have permeatedsociety to a greater extent than many were prepared to recognize.

Gentile’s approach found many indirect supporters during the 1990s withthe flowering of what has become known as the ‘culturalist school’ of fasciststudies—a largely non-Italian school, much influenced by media studies, whichfocused its attention on language, theatre, art and architecture under fascism inorder to argue that the regime had a specific, original and—above all—modernculture that generated a strong element of popular consensus for aspects of theregime. 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 offascism as class domination.⁷ If, at times, some of the literature makes it appearthat culture and symbolic power is all that is in play (repression and social controlrarely make an appearance), the ‘culturalist turn’ has undoubtedly revealed newavenues to the study of fascism and offered explanations of fascist success morein line with the ways in which fascism tried to present itself in positive mannerto the population. Along with the work of Gentile, these studies help to explainsome of the sources of what the fascists called their ‘faith’—their belief thatfascism 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 saidthat few of the studies manage to demonstrate the extent to which this newfascist 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 littleattention.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 hasnot been, and is not still, heavily influenced by the political context in whichit has been written. If there is now very clearly a new generation of youngerhistorians less influenced by ideological considerations, Italy has still a long wayto go to escape the shadow of its past. In a country that has notoriously failed tocome to terms in any satisfactory way with its fascist experience, often oscillatingunhappily between nostalgia and amnesia, old battles are still being foughtthrough the pages of the history books. It is no accident that in recent yearsItaly 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 hadlittle to say about fascism itself. Even so, the space for a dispassionate assessmentof how ordinary Italians related to fascism seems at times hardly to have grownany larger. Like fascism itself, the historiography of fascism often appears stillto be dominated by factionalism; interpretations still tend to divide on currentideological 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 ideologicalcoherence of the movement and the many aspects of cultural and politicalnovelty demonstrated by the regime, the economic and social modernization ofthe interwar years, and the consensus apparently shown by popular participation.The left, while conceding much more to this picture than was once the case, stillhighlights the violence of fascism, the rigid social control and heavy repressionof dissent, and the disastrous foreign policy of the duce.

In reality the study of totalitarian regimes suggests that the two positions arenot antithetical but, at least in some respects, complementary. For totalitariandictatorships, violence and repression on the one hand and participation and‘enforced’ consensus on the other were two sides of the same coin. It is notnecessary to deny one in order to assert the other. As a consequence, it is highlylikely that—coming closer to Italy—in any assessment of popular opinionduring the twenty years of fascist rule, one will find a mixed response to theregime from ordinary people, reflecting these two faces of fascism; that is, onewill find people who were at the same time resentful of violence and repression,but much better disposed towards many of the innovations of fascism, includingwelfare, 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, ofcourse, condition their reaction to the regime. The landless agricultural labourersof the Po Valley who had borne the brunt of the attacks of the fascist squads inthe early 1920s and had seen their wages reduced dramatically thereafter werelikely to be diffident towards other aspects of the regime, even in later years.Most of the available evidence supports this supposition. Conversely, the officeworkers of Rome (a category greatly expanded by fascism during the course ofthe ventennio) who had not been on the receiving end of fascist violence (it wasmore likely that they had been perpetrators than victims), had secure jobs ina regime which respected hierarchy inside and outside of the office and whichworshipped the state (their employer), were clearly going to constitute one of thecategories most dedicated to the regime.

Most ordinary people probably fell between these two extremes—aware offascist arrogance and brutality but also aware of the changes that fascism waseffecting in many areas that touched their everyday life. They did not necessarilyembrace the dictatorial and expansionist politics of fascism, but certainly theywere alive to the possibilities opened up by the regime for personal and familybenefit. They knew equally well that the fascists controlled everything (exceptthe 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, producingunavoidable collaboration and often inadvertent complicity with the regime—thetype 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


bargain; it was as if the fascists were saying, ‘If you behave, the regime will lookafter you.’ People were not only ordered to obey but were also, implicitly, invitedto expect something from the fascists in return. Legitimation, therefore, not onlydepended 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 thepoint of view of fascism it was imperative that the regime should work, or at anyrate should seem to be working in the interests of the ordinary Italian; otherwisethat implicit bargain would begin to break down. If it did break down, then theenforced consensus would not hold and popular reaction would be unpredictable.At the very least, given that alternatives to fascism were not available, an effectwas 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 offascist Italy during the 1930s was that of dynamism and efficiency; Italy—thanksto Mussolini—was not only catching up with its international competitors,in many respects it was overtaking them. International attention accorded toMussolini seemed to confirm this. The message to Italians was that the nation wason the move. Government newsreels showed perfectly organized massed crowdscheering and smiling as the duce harangued them from some balcony or openedyet another provincial fascist headquarters. It seemed that fascism was a perpetualsuccess 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 wasnew and attractive to many people who had lived very confined lives up to thatpoint. Trips to the sea, cheap railway tickets to permit visits to fascist exhibitions,new sporting and leisure facilities, a new, if limited, welfare programme—thesewere all tools the regime used and there can be no doubt that it used them to greateffect. When necessary, fascism could organize mass rallies with participation onan unprecedented scale. Foreign observers were frequently impressed, althoughnot all were convinced. Not for nothing did the Times correspondent in Romerefer to the Italians as ‘a population of prisoners, condemned to enthusiasm’.¹⁰Yet nobody could deny that well choreographed mass demonstrations seemed totestify to the existence of a highly efficient political machine.

What the cheering crowds were thinking is more difficult to assess. As withother totalitarian regimes, there was an official cult of consensus. In the bigevents people were required to behave as if they believed in the regime, oftenon pain of punishment.¹¹ Informers’ reports on mass rallies often suggested themood was less radiant than the newsreels portrayed. The fascist officials whocomplained that the coercive measures used to bring people to the piazza madeit 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 aboutregimentation and participation. Free will was hardly the issue; mass popularparticipation in rallies and demonstrations, by its very existence, communicateda message to those who participated. However briefly, in the public square peoplecould 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 muchof the visual and literary production of fascism, had somehow to be translatedfrom the exceptional event in such a way as to make constant contact withpeople’s everyday experience. Popular opinion would be formed around thisprocess of translation. Here the role of the fascist Party, and of other localfascist organizations, was fundamental. It was local contact with fascism thatdetermined most people’s attitudes to the regime.

Central to this local contact were the provincial fascist federations. Thesewere a key element in the top-down capillary network which spread from thecentre to the peripheries of Italy and had responsibility for organizing andregimenting the solid local support on which the fascist movement depended.However, in the country of the hundred cities, each with its own identity andhistory, 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 thefascist movement had developed in the early 1920s as a series of local reactionsto socialism, often linked to very local issues and subversive of the authorityof the state; only after initial provincial victories did the movement begin tothink about taking over the capital. Yet, long after the March on Rome andthe establishment of a fascist government, local interests and local prioritiesfrequently remained uppermost in the minds of many fascists, often frustratingthe centralizing impulses of the government in Rome. The functioning of theprovincial federations frequently reflected these tensions. Beneath the publicimage of efficiency and energy, provincial fascism was often anything but stableand dynamic. As was to be expected in the Italian context, popular opinionreacted primarily to the local experience of fascism rather than to many of thebroader national and international dimensions. What happened in the provincialfascist federations was, therefore, of great consequence in conditioning the wayordinary people adjusted to fascism and what they thought of the regime.

I I

One way of assessing the success of local fascist organizations is through thereports fascist informers made to the central authorities. Both Fascist Party (PNF)and police used informers extensively and many of their reports relate to theworkings of the provincial federations. As in all totalitarian regimes, the fascistauthorities placed a high value on accurate surveillance, evidently doubting thetruth of their own repeated assertions of plebiscitary public approval. Thesereports 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 alsofound their way to the desks of Rome ministries. All these sources have their


different limitations, as we shall see below, but, read together and with therequired caution, they provide a picture very different from that which fascismwould have wanted to project about itself and they say a great deal about howsome people, at least, were relating to the regime.

As told by provincial reports, the story of the provincial federations duringthe 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 aregime of calm and stability.¹² One fundamental problem, which had come tothe fore in the late 1920s and which was to have a critical impact on popularopinion in the 1930s, was the lack of competent fascists able to undertake tasksof provincial organization and leadership. Many of the original pre-March-on-Rome fascists had, of course, fallen victim to the internal party squabbles of the1920s; a few had moved to Rome to more important jobs. Both the anonymousfiduciari (police and party informers) and the prefects persistently recounted thatgood men were in short supply and that those local fascists who were in commandwere not up to the job. For example, in Padua in 1931 it was reported that therewere problems because of the ‘difficulty of finding people who are able and readyto accept responsibility’ while, in the same province in 1932, it was stated that thefederale was hampered in his work by the fact ‘of not having a sufficient numberof able people available to whom he can entrust jobs involving direction. Thatdepends . . . on the absenteeism of local people . . .’¹³The prefect of Ferrara wrote,in 1934, that ‘among such a mass of people [in the province] there are very fewwho show themselves to be suitable for public office, particularly from the pointof view of their intellectual capacity’.¹⁴ A later report, this time from the prefectof Piacenza, provided a perfect illustration of the problem (he was attempting toexplain why things were going so badly in his province during 1937):

The solution to the problem of the rejuvenation of office holders . . . depends onthe preparation of cadres, which is in large measure beyond the competence and thepossibilities of the Prefecture, being principally the job of other organizations. This sectoris characterized by the most depressing squalor. In the course of the last fifteen yearsthere has been no sign at all of the emergence of people able to take on jobs of a certainimportance. All the people now used in the public administration belong to the categoryof those brought in from outside, not of those formed by Fascism.¹⁵

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

130 Paul Corner

organization of young fascists) were drafted into service in the party organizationsduring the course of the later 1930s and there was to some degree the formationof a new group of young professional politicians, the quality of these people doesnot seem to have been high.¹⁷ Many attracted criticism for lack of experience orlack of imagination; some for both.

The problems related to the quality of local leaders, to recruitment, and togenerational change speak volumes about popular attitudes towards fascism. Themature tended to keep their distance and tried to avoid any involvement withadministration; the young, unless they wanted a career, did likewise. Crucial tothese attitudes was the fact that in many places, by the early 1930s, provincialfascist leaders were held in very low regard and people did not want to beassociated with them. This was a direct result of the behaviour of the localleaders. 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 Perugiais a den of thieves’ and went on to detail, with chapter and verse, the prisonrecords, 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 in1934 complained about the fact that the public officials had all set themselves upvery well; ‘all the citizens have noticed that there is not one of them who—thanksto the position held—has not procured a life of ease and comfort’.¹⁸ In ReggioCalabria it was alleged that, ‘the Bosses go round by car, they couldn’t give adamn about anything and the only thing they know how to do is to extort moneywith threats’; the Federation itself was generally known as ‘the Federation of theblood-suckers’.¹⁹ Another letter of 1940, signed by four fascists, went further,comparing the fascio unfavourably to the mafia: ‘Here, once upon a time, theunderworld was controlled by Michele Campolo [a noted mafia chief ]; nowit’s worse because there is an organization of no-goods [the fascio] favoured andprotected by the law. The police station and the prefecture are two sewers, thecarabinieri even worse: they only help those who pay them . . . .’²⁰ Forced todefend himself from these allegations, the federale wrote that, on taking up office,he had had arrested ‘three employees of the Federation involved in barefacedrobbery’ and that he had found a situation in which ‘nepotism [and] the mostbarefaced favouritism’ was the order of the day.²¹

These were not isolated incidents. Letters and reports to the party headquartersin Rome are packed with suggestions that local officials were filling their pock-ets and distributing contracts for public works and fascist-sponsored buildingprojects to friends and family. A group of ‘elderly fascists’ in Naples wrote tothe new PNF secretary Ettore Muti in late 1939, complaining that the partyhad consigned the city to ‘federali who love luxury too much and who have awell-padded wallet where their heart should be, to councillors who only think


about themselves and look to enrich themselves and their relations . . . .’²² Ayear later an anonymous writer from Pomigliano d’Arco (Naples) accused theSegretario federale of selling jobs to desperate unemployed workers, ‘L[ire]. 500for a manual worker, L. 1500 for a building worker, price to be arranged forapprentice mechanics, etc. (besides gifts and other things)’²³ The federale ofModena, Feltri, was replaced in 1940 after a series of scandals involving mixingmarble dust in the flour to make it weigh more (his cousin was the principal millowner of the province), selling ‘red’ petrol reserved for agricultural uses illegallyto others (he was the manager of the local AGIP petrol agency), and givingcontracts for building work to his brother-in-law.²⁴

Such allegations suggest very strongly that, like many of the fascist leaders whorose to national prominence, fascist officials at a local level regularly used theirpositions for personal advantage. Money was not the only point at issue. Besidescomplaints about shady business deals, accusations that powerful fascists usedtheir authority to obtain sexual favours were far from uncommon.²⁵ Popularopinion inevitably reacted to this, as is clear from the reports of the policespies. These show that, whatever the truth of the particular accusations—andmany were no doubt generated by jealousies, rivalries and other private con-siderations—the belief that the provincial fascist authorities were corrupt andself-serving was generalized at popular level. Certainly, in the absence of openpolitical differences under the dictatorship, the repeated struggles between localfigures were fought almost entirely on the basis of attempts to destroy thereputation of the rival—a process that ensured that the fascist dirty washing wascontinuously being aired in public. The intimate language of local fascism wasthe 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. Whatseems to have been a fairly generalized perception that fascist officials in theprovinces were principally interested in furthering their own interests and thoseof their immediate circle was bound to produce cynicism and hostility on thepart of those who remained outside the privileged circle. For some—for theindustrial workers of Reggio Emilia or Padua, for example—the behaviour ofthe gerarchi (local fascist bosses) was no surprise; even though many of themput on the black shirt and took the fascist card because they needed work, theyretained their former socialist allegiances.²⁶ But for many others—those perhapswho had initially suspended judgement on fascism or even supported it—thedisappointment was evident; any residual confidence in the regime evaporated.For much of the 1930s, in fact, reports from the provinces continually underlinethe failure of the regime to attract genuine popular support as factionalismand corruption took their toll. Some recounted a disastrous flight from themovement.

In many communes [of Reggio Calabria] . . . we note that, for a certain period, almosteverybody 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 whichcontrolled the area. The consequences [were] easy to imagine. Total decadence in theorganization, 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 contributionhad fled.²⁷

As a consequence, the report continued ‘The fasci have been abandoned, closednow 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 surroundingthe federale of Piacenza, the police spy concluded, ‘Profound squalor and themost crass indifference are nowadays . . . the most striking aspects of the situationin Piacenza, which reminds you seriously of something that is dead’.²⁹ A fascistfrom Vicenza wrote, at the end of 1938, that ‘I have to tell you that the Partyis gradually becoming a dead weight . . . The things that are especially criticizedand provoke bad feeling are the nepotism and the system of raccomandazioni.’³⁰The same situation existed in Modena where the Prefect told the Party Secretarythat the accusations levelled at federale Feltri were ruining the local party: ‘Theyhave generated a total loss of confidence. Bread with flour containing marbledust, oil, petrol, local bosses, fascism—all one big minestrone of people andfacts, presented on every kitchen table, damaging to certain people but aboveall damaging to the Party.’³¹ Mussolini did not escape criticism. In Naples, in1938 a group of disgruntled fascists wrote, ‘Everywhere, in homes in suburbsand even in the convents they swear at and curse our Duce, and if it goes onlike this the people will rebel . . . it’s not right that the people suffer because of afederale who doesn’t know how to be a federale . . . it’s not right that because ofauthorities 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. AtPomigliano d’Arco near Naples in 1940 there were riots among the workers; theanonymous report on the events related the problems to the way in which thefederale was selling jobs to the unemployed: ‘the principal reason for the workerdiscontent 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, hostileas it often was to the regime in its provincial manifestation, could not reallymake itself felt in any concrete way. People were afraid to react against injusticeand exploitation; they were all too aware that there were spies everywhere.‘People keep quiet because they are frightened’, wrote one police spy.³⁴ And theyhad reason to be frightened; violence never ceased to be a constituent part offascism. Even before squadrismo was given its official second wind in the late1930s, federali made no secret of the fact that they used violent methods againstopponents; indeed some were clearly proud of the fact. The fascist leader ofReggio Emilia wrote to Starace in 1934 stating that a presumed ‘subversive’ had


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 notpossible to prove anything, would be ‘dealt with in our usual fashion’ within thefour walls of the fascist headquarters.³⁵ A signed letter from a fascist in Padua toStarace in late 1935 recounted that ‘someone was beaten up because he asked fora foreign newspaper’.³⁶ In the same town in 1937, during a ceremonial marchof the soldiers returning from the African campaign, ‘two old men were beatenup because, without realizing it, they did not take their hats off as the columnpassed by’.³⁷ Similar reports are common.

The perpetrators of violence were frequently members of the fascist mili-tia—the MVSN. Set up in 1923 in the attempt to channel the violence andintemperance of the blackshirt squads into a formal and disciplined militaryorganization, the militia seems to have distinguished itself throughout the ven-tennio for indiscipline and petty abuses of authority. People were unsure aboutwhat the precise powers of the militi really were, a fact which opened the door toinvention. Prefects were continually compelled to report on situations in whichformer blackshirts had taken advantage of their militia uniforms to demandmoney from people, pretend privileged treatment (non-payment of bills wasa favourite) or threaten reprisals for any hint of opposition. Allegations, oftensubstantiated by subsequent investigation, spoke of gratuitous violence, theft,extortion, confidence tricks and occasional cases of murder and rape. Much ofthis illegal activity reflected the unhappy situation of parallel competenciesof state and party. Militia abuses sprang from a presumed right on the partof those who had ‘made the revolution’ in 1922 to continue to commandand to refuse recognition to the ultimate authority of the state. In report afterreport prefects were forced to point out that the activities of the militia wereextremely vexatious for the local population, always terribly aware that the fascistmilitiamen considered themselves beyond the law and acted in the expectationof impunity.

But, if it is clear that the open violence of fascism did not finish with theMarch on Rome but continued throughout the twenty years of the regime,people probably feared the fascist cudgels less than other forms of reprisal. Againfrom Padua, a document of April 1938 revealed that ‘all employers are obligedto denounce [to the authorities] those employees who refuse to join the Party’.³⁸It was not difficult to imagine why. In both Naples and Reggio Calabria reportsindicated that people could not speak out because they feared for their jobs; byattracting attention to themselves they risked the withdrawal of the fascist unioncard 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 offood parcels by the fascist authorities, he was unwise enough to ask an elderlywoman what she thought of the produce distributed. ‘She had the courage to tellthe truth about both the quantity and the quality, both deficient.’ The next daythe woman had her welfare permit taken away.³⁹

134 Paul Corner

As will be evident, the impression that emerges from a study of the localfederations in the 1930s and early 1940s is anything but that of a perfectly oiledmachine, efficiently carrying out at a local level the orders of central government,creating and cultivating consensus and directing the new generation towards thefuture fascist paradise of the New Italy. What does become apparent, rather, ispopular apathy in respect of the Party. Certainly there were many aspects offascism that working people might welcome. Limited welfare provisions, newlabour laws and welcome, if much criticized, leisure activities were undoubtedlyappreciated 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 ofthe political and ideological message of fascism. Responsibility for this lay withthe workings of the Party and the behaviour of fascist officials. The publicimage of the local fascist leaders—and of the local militia—was such thatpeople found little to stimulate and much to repel them. In the absence of anyprospect of change, or the existence of any alternative, a widespread reactionseems to have been simply to turn off. Indifference to public affairs—a kindof depoliticization—became common. This did not immediately threaten thesurvival of the regime, which had the means to ensure control. Yet, for aregime which had proposed anthropological transformation through popularparticipation and aimed at the moulding of people into the form of the NewFascist Man, it was a disaster.⁴⁰

It was as a consequence of apathy that the provincial federations lost contactwith the people they controlled. Thus in Padua, which went through a seriouscrisis in early 1931, a special commissioner noted among the population, ‘Gen-eral apathy about public affairs . . . Little enthusiasm in their ‘‘faith’’ . . . Totaldisorganization.’⁴¹ Intervention from Rome and a prompt rotation of officialswould often restore the situation, at least for the time it took for factions toreorganize and re-emerge. This did occur in Padua, but by 1934 it was againreported that ‘The organizations live a meagre existence and carry on withoutany enthusiasm; the best people, who don’t have interests to look after, keep theirdistance 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 ofthe duce and a police informer spoke of the ‘worrying phenomenon of apathyand absenteeism among the population’, noting in the city ‘a spiritual climate ofMuslim fatalism, cold, diffident and hostile’.⁴³

In the later 1930s, the reports of public disillusion rose. Economic hardshipand high levels of unemployment in many places increased the expectationsplaced in local officials and made the corruption, inefficiency and factionalismof the provincial federations all the more intolerable. Even at the time of theEthiopian war, popular attention seemed to be directed more towards localquestions, in particular unemployment and high prices, than to those of Empire;the most common reference to the conflict relates to the problems of choosingthose who were to go to work in Africa (as civilian labourers) from among


the mass of unemployed. The undoubted enthusiasm for the Italian victoryseems to have been dissipated very rapidly as the contrast between the promisedrewards of victory and the realities of its costs became evident. From Naples inSeptember 1936 (just three months after the victory celebrations) it was saidthat ‘people talk a lot about hunger, unemployment, the unjust distribution ofwelfare. The population . . . attacks the institutions and the leaders openly.’⁴⁴ Areport from Modena for the same month complained that ‘the population of theprovince of Modena, and particularly that of the town, showed up in very limitednumbers in the public squares to listen to a broadcast of the speech of the ducefrom 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 loudspeakersinstalled in the two fruit and vegetable markets . . . spoke to the wind as usual.’⁴⁶Again from Padua a local notable wrote to Starace to tell him that ‘The masses areexasperated because of misery . . . and everyone blames the present situation inthe province on the local leaders.’⁴⁷ And soldiers who returned from Africa to faceunemployment constituted a common difficulty of the later years of the 1930s,in Naples the soldiers arguing that the priorities of fascism’s imperial civilizingmission should be inverted: ‘First redeem the Neapolitans, then the blacks.’⁴⁸The 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 warthe reports of disaffection became ever more common. People could see theimplications of Empire and were aware that war was looming; the prospect offighting alongside the Nazis was almost universally unpopular. Indeed, manyforesaw that a German victory could only be disastrous for Italy in the long run.⁴⁹In addition unemployment remained high and the complaints about shortagesand rising prices increased continually. A generalized atmosphere of depressionseems to have pertained. Thus a fiduciario in Padua wrote in 1937 about the arrivalhome of a group of soldiers from Africa, ‘The company marched through the cityamid general indifference’, while a month later he reported that ‘The ceremonyto commemorate 23 March [1919; the founding of the fascist movement] tookplace amidst general indifference, without enthusiasm. The procession seemedlike a funeral.’⁵⁰ A note from Vicenza in 1938 spoke very significantly of afascism that had exhausted its energies. ‘The general impression is that the peopleare tired, that they are afraid of wars and economic collapse . . . the fascists aretired of the formalities of uniforms, of the perpetual parades, which they lookon as an imposition.’⁵¹ From Padua on 21 April 1938 came the news that ‘Thedemonstrations in Padua took place as usual amidst general indifference.’⁵² InPiacenza it was observed that, in late 1939, ‘the critical spirit against the regimeis more alive than ever’ and that ‘in recent times the PNF badge has disappearedfrom the buttonhole of many members’,⁵³ while by November 1939, ‘in theranks of the old blackshirts or of the squads there is little enthusiasm. Peoplecriticize and arguments break out which are certainly not good for the prestigeof 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 diffusesense of unease and of coldness, and, in certain areas, of real hostility and lack ofconfidence in the present leaders.’⁵⁵ In a later report he spoke of ‘the completeabsenteeism of the population’.⁵⁶ Similarly in April 1940 an informer in Trentodeplored the fact that the various local commemorations of the foundation offascism had been marked by ‘total absenteeism’ and ‘absolute indifference’ onthe part of both fascists and population.

Things were no better in the South. In Reggio Calabria in 1940 a fascistinspector concluded that ‘The mass of the inhabitants [are] a long way awayfrom the Party.’⁵⁷ The view from Rome provided by one informer in January1940 summed it all up: ‘Unfortunately in the periphery . . . the misdeeds of thisor that local boss have an enormous influence on the moral unease which weighson the fascist masses.’⁵⁸

It is interesting to note that this disaffection even involved many among theyoung—those who might have been most influenced by fascist indoctrination atschool and university.The GUF may have had its successes in generating a highlyindoctrinated elite among students, but these successes seem to have been farfrom generalized among young people.⁵⁹ While it is undoubtedly true that manyyoung people appreciated the new opportunities provided by the regime—forsport, for holidays, and for other leisure time activities—the utilization of thepossibilities offered by fascism did not necessarily induce any attachment to theformal rituals of the Party. The ‘totalitarian thrust’ of fascism in the second halfof the 1930s, with the anti-bourgeois campaign and the racial laws, seems tohave done little to stimulate a new dynamism. An informer complained that thestudent demonstrations organized in Vicenza, Venezia and Padua in late 1938against the French ‘were characterized more by the usual stupid student spirit(in the best of the hypotheses) than by the recognition of our cause againstFrance’.⁶⁰ In late 1940 it was reported from Reggio Emilia that ‘the GIL [thefascist youth organization] . . . has hit rock-bottom’,⁶¹ while a Pro-Memoria ofthe same period related that:

In the province of Modena and especially in the city there is a worrying situation withregard to the Party. [There is] a total division between everything that is the life of theParty and the life of the city and the province. The gerarchi work without producingresults, and cannot find any—or almost any—support among the masses. Even themass of young people from Modena live at a distance from the Party. They are full ofscepticism and couldn’t care less.⁶²

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


If anything, matters in Piacenza seem to have been even worse. An official reporton ‘Pre-military instruction’ of May 1940 informed Rome that

The instruction takes place amid complete political and moral disorientation on thepart of both the Comando Federale and that of the pre-military recruits . . . the lack ofdiscipline of the recruits is shown by the fact that they turn up every Saturday simplybecause they are threatened with disciplinary measures or because of the belief that if theydo not they would be denounced to the Military Authorities for habitual and unjustifiedabsence.

The young people show themselves to be without enthusiasm and unprepared for theduties and the obligations which the pre-military course imposes, unaware even of themoral reasons which are at the base of the organization of the military preparation ofthe Gioventu del Littorio.⁶⁵

So much, it would seem, for a generation of New Fascist Men.

II I

The picture as presented in these reports is pretty damning. But can the sourcesbe believed? Anonymous letters of complaint and denunciation are, of course, themost suspect, even if the authors frequently explain—very apologetically—thatit is more than their life is worth to sign with their name. Sometimes thecomplaints they make do result in official investigations, which may or maynot verify the accusations, but which can at least be followed through thedocumentation. Federali would tend to put a favourable gloss on their activities,for obvious reasons; for the same reasons, they would tend to denounce otherfascists considered competitors for local power. Similarly the prefect might try tomagnify his own activity at the expense of the federale; here professional rivalriescan often be detected. Both these sources need to be treated with caution, butfrequently they reveal far more than the authors intended. After all, the reportscould be subject to verification by inspectors and other third parties. The positionin 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 tothe regime, then that is what they were likely to talk about. This objection hassome weight, but it does overlook two points. The first is that identification ofopposition 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 ofthe past in most areas. A surprisingly large number of reports contain a strongelement of fairly neutral monitoring of provincial situations which does not seemdeliberately 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 ofthe local federations. Many reports suggest an individual performing what heconsiders his fascist duty and clearly come from committed fascists,⁶⁶ concernedby 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 negativeopinion. On many occasions informers sent in reports that were very favourableto the regime, particularly in moments when they knew that the regime was veryanxious to have public support. For example, after the mass national rallies heldon 2 October 1935 to demonstrate to the world that the Italian people was behindMussolini in his African adventure, informers were careful in many (though notall) cities to write feverishly enthusiastic comments for the consumption of thecentral authorities.⁶⁷

The second is that the kind of adverse criticism of the regime we have seenabove is often related generally to the population and not to specific incidents orpersons; it describes mood—and changes of public mood—rather than directopposition. The reports utilized here are very rarely related to specific persons,under surveillance, as are some of the Soviet svodki. There would seem to belittle reason for informers to exaggerate the negative aspects of public mood; byso doing they did nothing to increase their standing with their superiors andrisked provoking a furious response from them (as sometimes happened, whenthe 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 newsknew 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 theecstatically favourable reports all the obligatory rhetorical phrases of the regimeare put to work and it is possible to sense exaggeration and servility, with theothers 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 gener-alized to the whole population. It is very rare to find references to the thoughts andfeelings of intellectuals or of the professional middle classes—groups undoubt-edly in large part favourable to the regime. The reports cited above seem to berelated in the main to the urban lower middle class and working class and, veryoften, to artisans and craftsmen. Essentially they are reports of what informersclaim 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 fairlyobvious reasons relating to the practice of information-gathering.⁶⁹ That said,there seems little reason for doubting that the fascist regime was facing a verysevere crisis of confidence among the more popular urban classes in the secondhalf of the 1930s. In part this was related to material difficulties; many basicfoodstuffs were in short supply, a black market was developing, rents and taxeswere increasing, and, despite wage increases across the board, salaries had failedto keep up with prices. In these areas, fascism was not keeping its side of thebargain. But the informers note something else, equally serious for the regime.The novelty of fascism had long since worn off. If some people had reactedinitially in a positive way to the liturgy of fascism, to its theatricality and to itssymbols, they were now tired of the obligation to participate in fascist activities,tired of (expensive and uncomfortable) uniforms, weary of endless rhetorical


speeches, fed up with overbearing and dishonest local fascist bosses—and theywere not hopeful but fearful for the future.

Outside of certain groups of committed ‘believers’ (some of the GUF studentswere among these), there is very little suggestion of continuing allegiance tofascist ‘values’ or of the existence of anything that might be called a reactionto difficulties determined by a conscious ‘internalization’ of fascist ideology. Tojudge by their reported comments, people do not seem to have preserved aview 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 nonethelessstill worth supporting because of the promise of its ultimate triumph. Fascismmay well have had a coherent ideology, as many now insist, but the degree towhich that ideology had penetrated among popular classes must be doubted (atleast as far as is suggested by the informers’ reports). For many people, whatevervirtues fascism might have had as an idea were continually being denied by thebehaviour of real fascists. The comment, ‘This is not what fascism was supposedto be’ is sometimes heard from old blackshirts, usually those left on one side bythe course of events, but it is certainly not a general theme of complaint. Insteadit 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 elementof dual reality. As is well known, people often made a clear distinction betweenthe duce and fascism, invoking the first against the second.⁷¹ It is undoubtedthat, in certain quarters, admiration for Mussolini verged on adoration, attimes suggesting a strange symbiosis of fascist and Catholic mentalities inthe production of a kind of political demi-god. Very often fascist ‘faith’ wasintimately linked to the figure of Mussolini—charismatic superman consideredto 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, inthe world. As in other dictatorial regimes, the cult of the leader was carefullyorganized in such a way as to associate the duce with what seemed positive aboutthe regime—family values, apparent modernization, a strong sense of direction,and, for a period, proclaimed international political success—and to dissociatehim from the day-to-day squalor of many of the provincial federations. Indeedthe bad reputation enjoyed by provincial fascist leaders may well have workedto Mussolini’s personal advantage. For these reasons and undoubtedly for lackof any credible alternative, loyalty to Mussolini appears to have held up muchlonger at popular level than any loyalty to the regime, at least to judge fromthe informers’ reports. Belief in the wisdom of the duce provided reassurance,essential at a time when observed reality suggested that things were not reallygoing 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 termedmussolinismo, frequently distinguished from fascism itself. Indeed, there wereeven 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 timehad come for fascism to be wound up. Yet even with mussolinismo there are clearsigns that, towards the end of the 1930s, a precociously ageing Mussolini waslosing his hold on the public imagination. During the summer of 1939, whenthe fascist leader disappeared from public view for a couple of months, rumourswere rife that he was ill, that he was paralysed, that he had been wounded in anattempt on his life, that (prophetically) he had been dismissed by the King andreplaced by Marshall Badoglio, or more straightforwardly, that he was just deadand the news was being withheld. What is surprising about these rumours is thatthey provoked curiosity and some excitement but very little public dismay.

Waning popular support would seem to testify to a fundamental problemwhich fascism had been unable to resolve. This was a very obvious, and veryobviously increasing, gap between declared objectives and their realization. Notbeing transcendental in nature, the ‘political religion’ of fascism was subject toverification in this world, not the next, and Italians were clearly losing faith infascism’s ability to provide the promised better future. The examples cited aboveindicate 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 fascistpropaganda, people still shied away from the prospect of conflict and expressedgrave 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. Itis equally surprising to find so many reports in 1938–40 of people exchanginginformation on the basis of what they had heard (illegally) on foreign radiostations. As one informer noted, many Italians no longer trusted the officialsources of news and information; they recognized the bombast and falsity offascist propaganda programmes. This loss of credibility among sections of thepopulation indicates a basic failure on the part of the regime to ‘define reality’ inits own terms; other realities continued to exist, providing an often unwelcomepoint of comparison with the ‘realizations’ of fascism. In this respect, it is tobe noted that, as a country highly dependent on international tourism andone 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 isolatethe population from other realities. If totalitarian dictatorship requires closedborders 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 IanKershaw does in relation to Hitler and the Germans, of a distinction betweenthe ‘big’ and ‘extraordinary’ ideas of Mussolini and the ‘ordinary’ problems ofeveryday life, the first sufficiently strong and sufficiently shared by the populationto make up for all the deficiencies of the second. Certainly, even at a popularlevel, Italians do seem on the whole to have agreed with Mussolini when hedeclared that Italy should assume her ‘rightful’ position in the Mediterranean andthat 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


invariably followed by the consideration that changes in Italy’s position shouldonly be achieved through peaceful means and, very frequently, by disparagingremarks 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 thesituation; as we have seen, people returned immediately to the problems ofeveryday life, in fact made more serious by the high cost of the war.

The impression persists, therefore, that Mussolini’s ‘big’ ideas were too farremoved from daily reality for them to have a strong hold on large segments ofthe population. Germans made a direct link between their improving materialconditions 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 popularlevel, of this kind of linkage in Italy—something which would suggest that, in thefinal analysis, the fascist message was weak when put to the test. The aspirationstowards national greatness were useful for internal mobilization—the various‘battles’ of fascism around the revaluation of the lira, land reclamation, grainproduction, and the elimination of malaria—but seem to have lost much of theircapacity for mobilization when applied to issues of foreign policy, particularlywhen Germany, France and Britain were involved. People understood very wellthat Africa was one thing, Europe another. And if there were doubts about thereal improvement in Italy’s international standing, there were none when it cameto the question of standard of living. A large number of the informers’ reportsin the later 1930s speak of the day-to-day difficulties of the population—of theworsening 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 justsurviving from one day to the next and that fascist welfare was doing little morethan distributing misery. In this context the sabre-rattling of Mussolini on theinternational scene had little relevance; he was applauded for keeping the peace,not for promising war. Few thought sanctions, imposed on Italy by the League ofNations after the aggression against Ethiopia, justified, yet there is hardly a singlereference in the informers’ reports to people who considered that the difficultiesof everyday life were caused by these sanctions. The sentiment seems to havebeen rather that, although the sanctions were unjustified and hypocritical, Italywas nonetheless beginning to get out of her depth. Despite the anti-Englishcampaign mounted by fascism, right up to the Italian entry to the Second WorldWar in June 1940 (and, indeed, in some cases, beyond) popular sympathies laywith Britain and France—the democracies—rather than with Germany.

Any conclusions on this theme of popular attitudes to fascism must still betentative and cautious, but it would appear that the ‘consensus thesis’ shouldbe heavily qualified, at least for the closing peacetime years of the regime.Popular opinion may have been, as always, ambivalent about many things, butthe tendency does seem to have been very decidedly towards doubt, scepticismand 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 thatfascism managed to impose itself on popular attitudes much less successfullythan either National Socialism or Soviet communism. Although circumstanceshad obviously changed radically by September 1943, the relatively small numberof Italians who followed Mussolini to Salo gives support to the view that therewas never more than a limited and very fragile consensus at popular level for thefascist values proclaimed by the ideologues. In part this was probably due to thefact that the fascist regime was initially imposed (and maintained, to a certaindegree, throughout the ventennio) with violence. Its source of legitimacy wasalways 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 sooften 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. Thecentral message of national aggrandisement found only limited support, largelybecause most Italians’ priorities remained linked, as always, to the family, to thelocality, and, in many cases, to the church. Fascism was most successful when itworked in parallel with those priorities, as is evident from the Concordat withthe church; when it worked in other directions—and foreign policy was one ofthese—it became less relevant and was, as a consequence, much less successful.People certainly adjusted to fascism—they had no choice if they wanted tocontinue to live normal lives—but they retained their previous priorities inwhich local matters were often considered in the end to be more important thannational issues. Thus it was a matter of great importance that it was precisely atthe local level that fascism frequently failed to live up to its proclaimed imageand that it was at the local level that its leaders often covered themselves withopprobrium. It was as a consequence of this that popular confidence in theregime waned dramatically during the course of the 1930s, giving way to popular‘disgust’⁷³ with fascist politics and foreboding about the military implications ofEmpire and the direction Mussolini was taking.

Notes

1Michele Battini, Peccati di memoria: La mancata Norimberga italiana (Rome, 2003);Filippo Focardi, La guerra della memoria: la resistenza nel dibattito politico italiano dal1945 ad oggi (Rome and Bari, 2005).

2For a long time historians continued to cling to Angelo Tasca’s maxim: ‘for me, todefine fascism is above all to write its history’.

3Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919–29 (rev. edn. Lon-don, 2004).

4Alberto Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (Turin, 1965).


5Renzo De Felice, Mussolini (Turin, 1965–97). The biography, which turned in factinto a kind of history of fascism, was completed posthumously after the author’s deathin 1996.

6Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent (Cambridge, 1981), and, eadem, HowFascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Los Angeles, 1992); Perry Willson, TheClockwork Factory: Women and Work in Fascist Italy (Oxford, 1993) and, eadem,Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: The Massaie Rurali (London, 2002); LuisaPasserini, Torino operaia e fascismo (Rome and Bari, 1984), and, eadem, Fascism inPopular Memory (Cambridge, 1987); Maurizio Gribaudi, Mondo operaio e mito operaio(Turin, 1987).

7Two examples of this tendency are Simonetta Falaschi-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle andthe 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).

8A partial exception to this statement might be considered to be the study of SimonaColarizi, 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.

9For a more detailed treatment of these aspects see my ‘Italian Fascism: WhateverHappened to Dictatorship?’ Journal of Modern History 74 (2002), 325–51.

10Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Ministero degli Interni (MI), Direzione Generaledi Pubblica Sicurezza (DGPS), Polizia Politica (1927–44), b. 219, 12 September 1935.

11Even in Italy today the myth of the spontaneous fascist rally persists. In fact rallies werecarefully prepared weeks ahead of the event. People enrolled in all the different fascistorganizations would be given a numbered card of convocation which they would handin to officials at the entrance to the piazza, thus permitting the authorities to identifythose 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 throughthe ‘public transcript’ of the movement itself. It is remarkable that newsreels, forexample, prepared by organizations founded and funded by fascism, run by fascists,intended to be used for propaganda purposes by the fascist authorities, are still oftenseen as presenting an authentic picture of popular sentiment towards the regime.

12For a detailed account of the provincial federations in this period, see Salvatore Lupo,Il Fascismo: La politica in un regime totalitario (Rome, 2000).

13ACS, 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’.

14ACS, MI, Direzione Generale Amministrazione Civile, Affari Generali e Riservati, b.150, 18 June 1934, quoted in Roberto Parisini, Dal regime corporativo alla RepubblicaSociale: Agricoltura e Fascismo a Ferrara 1928–1945 (Ferrara, 2005), 22.

15ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, Prefect Montani to Minister of Interior, 1 May 1937.16ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, 3 June 1937.17See, 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 characteristicthat would distinguish him from ordinary young people either for education or forability’. The only serious study of the effective contribution of a second generation offascist leaders fully confirms these conclusions; Marco Palla, ‘ ‘‘Fascisti di professione’’:il caso toscano’, in Luigi Ganapini (ed.), Cultura e societa negli anni del Fascismo(Milan, 1987), 31–49. Luca La Rovere, Storia dei GUF (Turin, 2003), presents amore positive view of fascist youth and argues that a new ruling group never really hadtime to assert itself.

18ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, Volanti to Starace, 21 July 1934.19ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, letter signed ‘Alcuni Malcapitati’ to Starace,

23 March 1938.20ACS, ibid., letter signed by four fascists, 21 April 1940.21ACS, ibid., Cassini to Mussolini, 24 May 1940.22ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, 13 December 1939.23ACS, ibid., 18 July 1940.24ACS, 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 1935.26ACS, 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, asthey themselves say, still think and feel like socialists’.

27ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, Pro-memoria Situazione Politica dellaProvincia di Reggio Calabria, undated but 1931.

28ACS, ibid.29ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, 13 September 1937.30ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, ‘Vicenza: Spirito Pubblico’, 21 December 1938.31ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, Prefect Passerini to Starace, 24 July 1938.32ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, ‘fascisti anziani’ to Muti, 13 December 1939.33ACS, ibid., 18 July 1940.34ACS, 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’.

35ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 18, Reggio Emilia, 13 September 1934, underlining in originaltext.

36ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11. Padua, Baseggio to Starace, 21 October 1935.37ACS, ibid., 18 May 1937.38ACS, ibid., informer’s report to Starace, 23 April 1938. Obligatory enrolment in the

PNF for public sector workers was introduced in 1938.39ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 17 February 1937.


40Mussolini’s biographer, Renzo De Felice, notes this process. ‘Beneath the appearance ofan extreme politicization of the masses, an ever more marked and real depoliticizationof society . . . led to an ever more accentuated separation from, and an ever increasingdisdain 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.

41ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, ‘PNF Padova. Rapporto sulla situazione fascista inPadova’, 27 March 1931.

42ACS, ibid., Padua, 11 March 1934.43ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, 20 March 1934.44ACS, ibid., 1 September 1936.45ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, 15 September 1936.46ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 20 March 1937.47ACS, 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 HIMmake a bad impression’.

48ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 9, Naples, letter from ‘a large number of soldiers returning fromAfrica’, August 1941.

49‘An industrialist said to me this morning that he did not think that Mussolini couldagree with Hitler to fight a war of extermination, which would destroy everything thathas been done in these 17 years of fascism. . . . the public is puzzled, disappointed, filledwith anxiety’, ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 18, Reggio Emilia, ‘Reggio Emilia’, 18 October1939.

50ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 17 February 1937 and 25 March 1937.51ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, ‘Vicenza: Spirito Pubblico’, 21 December 1938.52ACS, ibid., 23 April 1938.53ACS, PNF, SPEP, Piacenza, 18 October 1939.54ACS, 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’ reportsto any reaction to the laws at provincial level.

55ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, report of fascist inspectors, undated but January1940.

56ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, ‘Situazione politica della provincia di Modena’,16 January 1940.

57ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, 27 May 1940.58ACS, MI, DGPS, Polizia Politica (1927–44), p. 219, 12 January 1940.59See S. Duranti, Lo spirito gregario: I gruppi universitari fascisti tra politica e propaganda

(1930–1940) (Rome, 2008).60ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 11, Padua, 21 December 1938.61ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 18, Reggio Emilia, Relazione 12 December 1940, signed Mancini.62ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 8, Modena, Pro-memoria, undated, but either 1939 or 1940.

146 Paul Corner

63ACS, MI, DGPS, Polizia Politica, Materia (1927–44), p. 219, 1 May 1940.64ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 17, Reggio Calabria, Quarantotto to Muti, 27 May 1940.65ACS, PNF, SPEP, b. 14, Piacenza, 1 May 1940.66The 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 numberwritten in the margin by the receiving body. Thus it is possible to identify certaininformers as usually very critical of the regime, others as being generally moreoptimistic. Those who tend to report criticisms are in the clear majority. On this seeA. M. Imbriani, Gli italiani e il duce (Naples, 1992).

67The texts of some of the reports are so similar that one suspects a prompt from someadministrative quarter before the demonstrations.

68On this question see Ian Kershaw in this volume, who agrees that negative reportingis likely to be nearer the truth than is favourable comment. But see also Hellbeck’sdoubts about this ‘hierarchy of authenticity’ in note 17 to Jan Plamper’s chapter inthis volume.

69Research carried out by students at the University of Siena suggests a fairly rigid divisionof opinion in the rural areas surrounding Siena, at least as far as the memory of fascismis concerned. Independent farmers—even small farmers—have favourable memoriesof the regime; people in dependent positions, including the poorer sharecroppers, haveunfavourable memories.

70Passerini, who quotes a woman interviewed as saying, ‘Fascism was over there; we werehere’; Torino operaia, 159.

71Many of the letters sent to Mussolini by ordinary Italians begged his intervention inorder to right injustices suffered at the hands of fascist officials. The general assumptionof 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 requiredadjustment, in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany).

72It was shortage of coffee around Easter 1939 that created genuine alarm for publicorder among the authorities in Rome. According to some accounts, even the employeesin the ministries—the backbone of the regime—were threatening ‘revolution’ as theymet together in coffee-less bars and exchanged grievances.

73The word used in the context of the late 1930s by Renzo De Felice to describe popularsentiment (see note 40).

PART 3

DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1945


9Poland: The Silence of Those Deprived

of Voice¹

Marcin Kula

Some years ago Nathan Wachtel wrote a book in which he attempted toreconstruct the view the Peruvian Indians had of their world destroyed by theEuropean conquest.² We ought to write a similar book on the view of the worldheld by people who experienced the communist system. The importance of thesubject and the need for research in this area is evident; it is, after all, one of themost 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 asit would not be true that people were ‘for’ or ‘against’ on every question. Inreality they could be ‘in favour, but against’.³ And they could be against in theirthought, but in fact collaborate fully with the establishment in both words anddeeds.

We are in a better position than Wachtel. Certainly there are more documentsabout those of us who have lived and worked during the era of communismthan 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 fewreservations.

The communist system did not produce the kind of materials which usuallypermit the historian in democratic countries to study the ideas people hold. As iswell 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, norwas there any construction of monuments according to the mood of the particularpolitical groupings. Opinion polls were introduced only after 1956. Initially theauthorities looked on them unfavourably and their use encountered a great dealof resistance. The first centre for opinion polls had to limit itself to assessing thereactions of people to radio programmes and was able to overcome this limitationonly through the determination of a group of enthusiasts. It was at this time thatAdam Schaff launched a debate on the ‘mania’ for ‘enquiries’—the very termindicates 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 whatcitizens thought better than the sociologists. Fundamentally the regime sufferedfrom a strong schizophrenia on this point—on one hand wishing to believethat the people were with it, and on the other being intimately convinced thatthe reality was just the opposite. In any case, the authorities preferred not toask anybody, and to avoid any situation in which popular opinion was publiclyshown on the basis of representative sample groups.⁴

In studying the opinions of the proverbial ‘Mr Smith’ it is very difficult toidentify an area of reflection. In fact, unlike the usual view, the world undercommunism did not divide into ‘society’ on one side and ‘power’ on the other.Rather there existed a continuum. Even members of the Political Bureau mightfind themselves thinking and speaking with the pronoun ‘them’, even if it was notclear 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 secretservices? Even members of the Political Bureau found themselves at times in therole 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 housesby the Mazuri lakes.⁵ Conversely, it is not possible to rule out a priori that thearticles that appeared in the Trybuna Ludu reflected not only the ideas of thedirectorate of the Polish United Workers’ Party (communist), but also a part ofthe ‘working people of the towns and the countryside’.⁶

In a regime of denial of rights, in which the potential word is obliged toremain silent, the study of human opinion on certain questions is without senseprecisely because such opinions are just not formulated. People who are notphilosophers form positions about questions they have to face immediately. Theybegin to think only at the moment in which an alternative emerges and theythen develop their ideas in discussion. All this was absent under communism inmany situations.

In fact, very often it is not appropriate to ask the Manichaean questionwhether people were ‘for’ or ‘against’ the solutions provided by the regime.Where an alternative was absent the formation of opinion was much morecomplex. Although discontented, people often did not imagine the possibility ofother solutions with the consequences that would then have followed from theirtaking up positions.

In a regime in which rights are denied, people express themselves not only withwords and, very obviously, not only with writings. Sometimes, as has been knownsince the time of Cicero, silence can be very eloquent (cum tacent, clamant).In regimes of authentic terror, silence reigns. (Kapuscinski: ‘What silence risesfrom countries where the prisons are full.’⁷) The silent and inscrutable face ofthe Indian, described in many reportages of Latin America, was not a reflectionof any particular stupidity, as the Europeans believed, but of the experience ofcontact 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 thesources, 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 flightfrom a certain area of open reflection.

In a regime in which rights are denied even the smallest actions, difficult toidentify today, can constitute a strong statement. The yellow socks that LeopoldTyrmand⁸ wore as a sign of protest have by now become proverbial. When,in Czechoslovakia just before the Prague Spring, I saw groups of young menwith long hair, I had no doubt that this was a way in which they wanted todemonstrate their distance from the regime: listening to a certain kind of music,drinking Coca-Cola or chewing gum underlined Western leanings. It would bepossible to draw up a long list of these non-verbal modes of expression of attitudesto the regime, including nudism in the GDR. Sometimes these modes couldbe amusing. It would appear that one Polish biologist obstinately repopulatedthe Polish Kampinos forests⁹ with beavers because the dams they built workedagainst what was, in his way of thinking, the deleterious forest clearance schemeof the communists. This was his way of fighting to save the forests from thecommunists, and it had a clear ideological motivation. I am not competent tojudge whether it was a scientifically sensible action or not.

These modes of expression I mention present difficulties for the historian giventheir limited documentation and the lack of precision in the expression itself.After all, not everyone who dressed as a ‘beatnik’ was an aware and convincedanti-communist and not every nudist on the East German beaches was fightingagainst the regime.

However, on other occasions, the wordless declarations could be radical intheir drama, as with the protest suicides of Ryszard Siwiec in September 1968in Warsaw¹⁰ and Jan Palach in January of 1969 in Prague. They could also bedrastically unambiguous: at the beginning of 1971, during a meeting of Łodztextile workers with the President of the Union Council, Władysław Kruczek,one of the workers turned her back, pulled her skirt up and showed her barebehind.¹¹ What mode of expression could be more eloquent than this, in asituation in which you can’t say anything?

In a regime of denial of rights, participation in religious practices became apowerful means of expression of political ideas. People would sing, ‘Make usa free country, O Lord . . .’ The primate Wyszynski was considered a kind ofinterrex. During the celebrations of the Millennium of Poland (1966) the churchmade some very clear statements about the rulers.

Commemorative plaques in churches were very expressive, sometimes even thewritings on gravestones, even if these were checked, and were naturally subjectto self-censorship. Some churches became particularly important elements ina discourse of stone and gesture against the regime; for example the churchof St Charles Borromeo and the cemetery of Pow ¸azki in Warsaw. Sometimesthe Easter tombs carried messages that were not only religious in content.

152 Marcin Kula

Obituaries, although obviously censored, in certain periods revealed a great dealabout people’s thoughts and feelings.

In a regime of denial of rights certain kinds of behaviour required by theauthorities could paradoxically take on a meaning of protest. Allow me to quotea small personal memory from the time in which I was a doctoral student atthe 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 inorder to annoy our own ‘red guards’. On that delicate borderline, on which itis difficult to catch somebody in the wrong, there could be much more seriousdemonstrations. In memoirs coming from one of the gulags there is a descriptionof the day of Stalin’s death: the prisoners, told of the death of the Leader duringa roll call, remained still. At that point the commander shouted, ‘Take off yourberets!’ The prisoners carried out the order, except that the berets were hurledinto the air. Without wishing to compare with this, we recount among ourselvesthat, after 1968, in the May Day parade, the University of Warsaw studentswould shout ‘Karol, Karol, Karol . . . Marx’. It is difficult to find out if this kindof 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 aprinting error, of certain anti-regime articles, and the uproar they provoked. Themistakes of the censor were always noted straightaway by a large number ofreaders.

Last but not least, certain actions, strikes and demonstrations against theauthorities, some types of behaviour by the farmers, demonstrations at gravesand during funerals, some funerals of open protest (for example that of fatherPopiełuszko or of Grzegorz Przemyk¹²), attempts to construct monumentsagainst the wishes of the authorities (Katyn)—these were all very strong formsof expression in which words, even if pronounced, were a secondary aspect.Paradoxically, the communist regime reinforced the expressive impact of suchactions. What in any other system would have been a direct protest againstparticular persons or decisions, or a strike against an entrepreneur with aneconomic objective, here had a strong probability of becoming an anti-regimeaction, independently of the conscious intentions of the participants. At thesame time it is necessary to remember that even strikes were not necessarilyanti-communist in nature. Strikes in the communist period were much morefrequent than we thought at the time, but often broke out for very prosaicreasons. And protest behaviour during funerals could create some problems ofinterpretation. After all Boleslaw Bierut was given the last farewell in Poland asone of ‘ours’ assassinated in Moscow (‘he went in a fur coat, he came back in awooden one’). One anti-communist observer couldn’t believe what he saw.¹³

Sometimes everyday behaviour, like working badly, stealing, drinking, couldreflect the ideas and the attitudes of the people. But even these are difficult to


interpret for the historian, given that laziness and theft are not necessarily areaction to communism.

The ideas people did formulate expressis verbis were spoken on variousoccasions. It is possible to find documentation about this in many differentkinds of material, above all in the very normal routine materials produced inthe course of the everyday workings of the state. Even the most controlled pressallows us, not without difficulty, to observe human attitudes and reactions. Eventhe most hypocritical literature can be realistic, above all in trivial matters andinsignificant descriptions. Even the most hypocritical of assemblies, the minutesof which were often kept, reflected many of the real thoughts of people. Thesame is true of the records of the union organization, in fact without any realautonomy. It is necessary to remember that, in ‘People’s Poland’, until around1949 and then again after 1956 it was possible to say quite a lot; ‘a lot’, it mustbe understood, for a country of the Soviet bloc: freedom was not extended toall subjects, many of which could be dealt with only by allusion. Despite allthe opposition of the regime, even on the occasions of the two referendums (of1946 and 1987) and of two elections (of 1947 and 1957) something of thereal 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 anunderstanding of the effective opinions of society in given moments.

It is not without importance that, in conformity with its ideology, the systemhad 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 officialmeetings in order to be able to learn a great deal about the issues that upset thepeople. Obviously it is always necessary to bear in mind that those proceedingsdo not reflect either the totality of the ideas held by the public on any givenquestion or the ideas of all those concerned. It is also necessary to take intoaccount the specific ways in which the speeches were formulated and noted. Theideas expressed on official occasions followed an established stylistic conventionand in the main touched on limited aspects of the problems discussed. Theconventional formula was: ‘Our system is excellent, everything is going for thebest in the best of worlds, it is only necessary to do something about issue x,’ orelse, ‘Our way is right, it is only necessary to improve the supplies of basic goodsfor the population.’ This stylistic convention creates many difficulties today inthe understanding of texts. For example, can a history student today understandwhat his current professor actually meant when, at the time, he said somethinglike: ‘The general laws shown by Marxism are very important, but we mustcontinually base our research on the analysis of the sources generated in theepoch we are examining. This is totally in conformity with the theory and thepraxis of Marxism . . .’?

A sizeable part of the contents passed by the censor was expressed in allusionsand accents difficult to understand today. Even I, going through some of my oldarticles 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 fornot having spoken of the Polish–Russian war of 1920, but rather of the declineof the revolutionary situation in Europe in that period—while for us it wasobvious what we were really talking about.

A separate problem, not to be overlooked, is the lack of part of the archivematerial and the chaos that exists in the archives (it is a paradox that the archivefiles may have been better kept in the Stalin era than in the subsequent communistperiod, when the cadres no longer felt terrorized to keep the documents, etc.). Itis also necessary to remember that it is difficult to get from the document, in itsoriginal form, to its real meaning. Not only speeches but also minutes had theirstylistic code; the secretaries were often of mediocre education and, besides, theywere careful that minutes were not excessively detailed. A serried front on thisscore, very strong in the later communist period, generated a quantity of minutes,diffused throughout the institutions (beginning with Faculty Board and goingright up to the Political Bureau), which are not interesting for the historian.

But despite all the reservations and the difficulties expressed here, the richnessof the information and expressive force of the people contained in materialrelating to ordinary administration can be surprising. To give an example, in thedocumentation of the Polish United Workers’ Party section of the ‘Pafawag’¹⁴which I have looked at with my students, we have found a mine of informationon the moods and attitudes of the workers, including declarations of a surprisingsincerity made by those workers who decided to leave the party.¹⁵

A distinct category of material (but not necessarily distinct from the pointof view of the archive) is that of the documents generated by the deliberateattempts of the authorities to test out ideas and social feelings. The regime wasvery interested in knowing what people were thinking. I remember that when mymother, Nina Assorodobraj, was organizing one of the first sociological enquiriesin the context of her research project on historical awareness in Poland, thematter 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 whatpeople were thinking did evolve. After the introduction of martial law in 1981they began to use more modern methods of polling public opinion. This wasdone in good faith, as far as we can tell, and seriously, to the extent that thedirection of the new institute (the Centre for the Study of Social Opinion) wasentrusted to an official near to General Jaruzelski. For much of the communistperiod, though, research was carried out with much more rudimentary methods.It was based on police reports; on party cells; on party inspectors sent oninspection visits; on the summaries made by party speakers about the questionsthey were asked during their talks and meetings; on the letters sent to the CentralCommittee by citizens; and on the reports the newspapers made about the letterssent to them for publication. In short, the apparatus of power grasped at anythingthat was available.


The analysis of this type of material is difficult and has to be carried out withcaution. In the main it is material that does not lend itself to generalization. Theintellectual level of the writers did not permit them to provide a comprehensivepicture, and, for the functionaries of the party, it was much safer to talk aboutisolated cases than it was to risk generalization. Moreover, even these reportsare formulated in a coded style. Excepting the ‘moments of truth’ which arrivedin political crises, every secretary who wrote a report had on the one hand toposition himself in such a way that he could not be accused of writing withoutcritical and auto-critical sense, and on the other hand to avoid putting his headin the noose by laying himself open to accusations of defeatism and of havingpermitted the deterioration of his area. Even the police reports, usually moresensitive to negative aspects, observe a stylistic convention. When, in a volumewhich publishes the reports on March 1968, we read one which first presents ablack picture—from the point of view of the regime—of the demonstrationsand of the clashes between police and students and then goes on to talk aboutthe way in which some policemen were approached by people who gave themflowers, thanking them for standing up to bands of crazy youths who evidentlywere too well off, we do not know where the truth lies.¹⁶ Despite the feelingsthat reading this kind of text gives rise to, we cannot exclude that some peoplereally 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 supposethat this had an impact on the content of the reports.

All these reservations notwithstanding, the type of source indicated aboverepresents a reservoir of material, often the only one existing. Without a studyof the reports of the inspectors sent by the Central Committee to the provincesin the 1940s and 1950s, we would know less about the reality of that period.¹⁷Without the research carried out, as soon as it was possible, in the police archivesby Paweł Machcewicz, we should know a lot less about the events surroundingthe revolt of Poznan in 1956.¹⁸ Without the police reports, already mentioned,published by Marcin Zaremba, we should know less about the events of March1968. Without the analyses of the summaries of the speech-makers sent bythe party to various areas of the province of Warsaw carried out by MariuszJastrz ¸ab for the Stalinist period and by Tadeusz Ruzikowski for the period of thecommemoration of the millennium of Poland, we would know less about howordinary people looked at a lot of things.¹⁹

The use of material produced by the political system and, above all, by its policeconcerning the thoughts of the people gives rise to sizeable ethical dilemmas. Thehistorian often has the impression of spying on people in private situations andof reading opinions not intended for him. As long as it is a question of a group ofpeople or of people who in reality are effectively anonymous it is easy to calm theconscience 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 toidentify concrete flesh-and-blood figures behind the authors of the letters, thequestion did not present any further difficulty.²⁰ Their use is also made easier bythe fact that the institutional continuity of the police who produced that materialhas been broken.

The situation becomes more difficult when the protagonists of the policereports are either public figures or even people the historian knows personally. Itmust be remembered that a part of police information came from sources thatwere morally dubious: illegal wire-tapping, control of mail, or other illegal andmorally objectionable activities. To leave out the names of public figures doesnot represent a solution because it reduces radically the value of the material,without taking into account that it would probably lead to rumours about theidentity 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 foundsome notes removed by the secret service from the pockets of Jan Jozef Lipski, aknown oppositionist. We discussed whether it was right to publish those notes,not only because of their private character, sometimes unpleasant towards thirdparties, but above all because of the deplorable way in which the text had foundits 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 Garlickiof the recordings of telephone conversations of Stanisław Dygat made in 1971.The contents, sometimes defamatory in respect of a lot of people, shockedmany, even though similar ideas certainly come up in private conversations atany 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 ethicallyobjectionable operations, even if historically interesting.²²

Further materials that offer a view of the ideas and attitudes of ordinary peopleare those provided by the small ‘windows’ that the system itself left open for theirexpression. In a certain respect these constituted official channels of complaint.For ideological reasons the regime wanted to demonstrate how near it was tosociety. The rulers wanted (very humanly) to feel contact with the masses, tohave a contact with people beyond the wall of their own functionaries. Theyrealized that the lines of communication of the regime worked badly and, in theirown way, wanted to make them more efficient, for which they needed to knowwhat was not working. And also they wanted to create a safety valve for populardiscontent.

For all these reasons the rulers developed direct channels of contact withthe ordinary people. These were constituted by large numbers of ‘cells ofcommunication’ with the citizens within the state institutions and the party.On the ground floor of the Central Committee was a reception room for thecomplaints of the citizens. In a certain period every minister was supposed tohave fixed visiting hours, during which the citizens could come to him with their


problems directly from the street. In the main newspaper offices units of contactwith the readers were set up, essentially points for postal contact.²³

The relationship of the authorities with the ‘official complaint channels’ wasambivalent. They were satisfied when the number of letters sent to the CentralCommittee went down, reading this as a sign of a better functioning of the officesof the state. At the same time they were happy to receive the letters, seeing it as aproof that people had confidence in them.

The people wrote massively to the newspapers, to the radio and to theauthorities. Sometimes they even sent letters to the party secretaries in the flowersoffered 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 democraticcountries 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 andthe carrying out of material tasks was often difficult, among the papers of themany different institutions it is possible to find a quantity of letters far moreeloquent than those sent to the institutions in more efficient countries. In nocountry with a market economy are there so many letters addressed to housebuilders and to the organizations that control them as were sent to organizationsof building co-ops in the ‘People’s Poland’. And there are no letters to buildingentrepreneurs in the West that reflect in such a clear manner the life of thepostulant as those written in communist Poland to the building co-ops and therelevant authorities.

These letters are clearly a difficult source for the historian, because they arealso written in a kind of stylistic code. They were written, after all, to deal withconcrete problems—for example to accelerate the assignment of a house. Onone hand, therefore, they betray a strong tendency to declare an excessive love forthe authorities, and on the other to exaggerate the gravity of the situation of theirauthors. On many occasions, however, they were surprisingly sincere and alwaysreflect a piece of life. We recognized this with interest, reading, for example,the remonstrances of voters for the electoral abuses of 1947, the denunciationssent to the Central Committee about functionaries of the party apparatus, theprotests of the citizens against collectivization or the letters addressed to theCentral Union of building co-ops.²⁴ We have had the same impression workingon the letters written by the readers of the magazine Po prostu in the period of theturning-point of October 1956, preserved and made available by what is littleshort of a miracle, or on those, equally miraculously preserved, written by youngpeople to the newspaper Swiat Mlodych in 1980–1.²⁵

Unfortunately sources like those mentioned above, although fundamental fromthe point of view of the present-day interests of historians, are being destroyed inlarge part. Much of the material, for example the letters to newspapers, is today theproperty of newspapers, which are no longer state institutions. The proprietorsof 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, thestate archive service destroys material in the context of the process of gettingrid of papers. The rules governing this process were established some time agoand no longer correspond to the contemporary interests of historians. Accordingto the rules at the moment, fundamental documents, including the originals ofpapers republished many times, are counted as important, and not the lettersof ‘Mr Smith’. Of these the archive conserves only a (‘representative’) samplefor general questions, in the conviction that nobody will ever be interested in aspecific ‘Smith’. The lack of space in the archives and of money for conservationencourages this kind of selection, with great damage for historiography, and inparticular for the efforts of historians to break down the silence of people onceleft without a voice—people who were ‘spoken for’.

The communist system created other lesser ‘windows’ to let people expresstheir opinions. There were the officially organized meetings between deputies,councillors and population, the ‘surgeries’ of the deputies, or the books ofcomplaints in shops and the counters that took the verbal complaints of citizensabout the way commerce was organized. Since it was in the interests of partysections and of the state to demonstrate the ‘contacts with the population’,all meetings were documented, while the books of complaints were entrustedto those responsible for control who were careful to reply to all protests. Thecomplaints made to the organs of inspection could provoke an avalanche ofletters. Very little is left of all this. The books of complaints and demands, ifthey still exist, are in the main now private property, and it is very unlikelythat a private shop would conserve such relics. Recently it took the passionateinvolvement of a journalist to save some of these books from the pulper.²⁶

A kind of ‘window’ where, within certain limits, people could express them-selves with relative freedom were the diaries written for various competitions. The‘People’s Poland’ had revived the tradition of promoting the keeping of diariesby ordinary people, something that had been developed by Polish sociologistsbetween the two wars. There were a large number of competitions. The originaltexts were collected by the Diary Society, which published a journal PolishDiaries. These original texts are useful for today’s historian in as far as only aselection were published at the time, and only, in the main, after passing theinternal editorial censor and then the general censor, as with everything else. Itis highly probable that authors censored their original texts themselves and thatsome of them wrote aiming at the prize; even so, the original remains a bettersource than the printed version.

A further opportunity of expression, even if limited, was offered by theorganizations which, despite everything, retained some level of autonomy. Thiswas the case of the association of authors, for example. Their archives havefrequently survived.²⁷ In this respect, the Union of Fighters for Liberty andDemocracy (ZBoWiD) was an extremely interesting organization, channellingthe thoughts and words of war veterans, many of whom were anything but


representatives of traditions dear to the communists. It is to be feared that thearchives of these organizations, over which, with the change of regime, the statehas lost direct control (fortunately!), may be destroyed or thrown away withoutany thought for the needs of research.

One ‘window’ through which it was possible to express unorthodox opinionsrelatively freely (within the limits of the system) was through the cabaret and insome respects through the musical group or, for example, in the rock festivalsof Jarocin. In different periods the authorities, with greater or lesser resistance,permitted their existence, considering these enclaves of liberty to be a kind ofsafety valve. After all, their public was made up of a very small percentage of thepopulation. 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 thatmany of the texts have been preserved, but sometimes it is anything but easy tounderstand today why they seemed then to look like dissent. Besides, it is hard toshare the feelings of the crowd at that time, and in a cabaret this is as importantas the texts and the performance.

A very specific stage, from which ordinary people unknowingly gave anidea of their lives and even at times, in a more or less explicit manner, oftheir convictions, was that of the courts and the para-judicial institutions. Thematerial these produced is an extremely interesting source for historians, even ifvery difficult to use. It is, naturally, in large part determined by the particularsituation of those speaking. Unfortunately, in this case as well, there are gaps inthe papers that are a real scandal. To give an example, the initial presumption thatno one would be interested in ‘Mr Smith’ when he was called before the infamousSpecial Commission for the Fight against Abuses and Economic Damage hasmeant that the whole collection of papers relating to this case has been severelydepleted.

In the archives of the repressive institutions, and not only there, one canfind the written texts of several clandestine organizations or of those generatedby illegal initiatives and confiscated during the disbanding of those initiatives.These papers were often used as evidence in trials. Sometimes the documents areserious, but at other times they are so ingenuous as to invite tenderness, as withthe case of the conspiratorial endeavours of young schoolchildren or scouts.²⁸They 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 unevenlyfor analysing the relations between the communist state and the church, willbecome central for a knowledge of the ideas and the attitudes of ordinarypeople. The journal Tygodnik Powszechny, even if tolerated (sometimes veryreluctantly!) by the regime, contributed to this kind of historical source producedoutside the system, although controlled by it. Particularly important, it wouldseem, is the private archive of Jerzy Turowicz, for many years the editor of theweekly.

160 Marcin Kula

It was also ‘outside the system’ that people exchanged letters. This source hasits limits because of the obvious caution of the writers—this varied accordingto the period—and the fact that many issues concerning social life appear onlyexceptionally in the private papers. It is also a source that survives badly. Fewfamilies preserve letters, and if they do, it is only until the next house move. It isnot easy to collect such material, although sometimes one comes across surprisingcollections.

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 anexample that came to my hands by chance—the letter of a young woman studentwho describes to her father the clashes of March 1968 in Warsaw does not offerany new information, it does nonetheless emanate an authenticity such as topermit one to feel the emotions even of those students who were not politicallycommitted in those years.

A tradition of world historiography in general and also of Polish historiog-raphy 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 ‘SolidarityFrance–Poland’ Association, to a collection of letters that French people andPoles wrote to each other after the introduction of martial law in Poland. Thesubject of the correspondence was the aid being sent to Poland by Frenchfamilies.²⁹

Another type of source that developed outside the system and sometimesagainst it was the diaries and the memoirs people kept locked away in theirdrawers. The production of such texts in regimes of compulsory silence has along tradition in Poland. In the ‘People’s Poland’ these were produced aboveall by men of culture, but obviously not only by them. Some of these writingsappeared when there was a ‘thaw’,³⁰ others were published secretly or in theWest.³¹ Now many have been published and made public.³²

The use of diaries and memoirs—and particularly their publication—oftenposes ethical problems. In the historical arena there are different positions inrespect of this. In the case of the very interesting diaries of Maria Dabrowska³³ itwas decided to respect the wishes of the author and wait in order to publish themin their entirety.³⁴ In that of the notable diaries of Stefan Kisielewski the editorsdecided to publish the original integral text on the grounds that an author whosetexts had been so mutilated by the censor during his life should not have tosuffer 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 inhis cutting way, certainly not always justified. Personally, I left out some nameswhen I edited for publication certain notes of my father, intended for the lockeddrawer.³⁶ I couldn’t decide to reveal them: when I knew that my father wouldnot have wanted it; when I was not certain that he would have wanted it; andwhen it would have harmed the named person on a personal (not professional)


level. Also in cases where I was afraid that, by leaving the name in, I was in factsettling my own accounts with someone at the expense of the author. I am fullyaware, however, that, in leaving out some family names, I have taken away animportant element from the historical source, all the more so because I could notreally define the reasons for my choice, in the end very subjective.

A few literary works were written outside of and despite the system, sometimesfinishing in the locked drawer, sometimes enjoying unofficial distribution. Somewere published in the West and came from there to Poland.³⁷ The most famousof these—The Silent and the Rowdy, or the Dance of the President —by JanuszSzpotanski, was in a way given prominence by Gomułka himself when he talkedabout the book and its author in the worst possible terms during the partyreunion on 19 March 1968.

In the case of literary works the difficulty for the historian is not the use ofthe sources, which doesn’t present a problem, but that of measuring how far theauthor expressed the convictions of ordinary people and how far the works werediffused in society. A similar consideration is probably valid for certain paintings,sculptures and films not permitted to be shown. The same question can be putrelative to a particular source that has developed ex post: today’s literary fictionabout the years of communism. The rules of the profession would seem to dictatethat 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 morelike a memoir. The question then arises about the extent to which the mostcharacteristic novel of this type, Madame by Antoni Libera,³⁸ reflects his personalexperience, conditioned by his subsequent life and his present convictions, andhow far it is the experience of a generation. In more general terms, how far itrepresents his present judgement on communism and how far it is a source aboutthe latter. In my opinion, at least the descriptions of small scenes and realities dorepresent a source.

Finally, the same question can be asked of the numerous recent publicationsof memoirs of opposition fighters, of prisoners, of people deported. Historiansneed to approach them with a strong critical spirit, but in the main they shouldbe considered precious texts for our purposes.

Among the sources of ideas and attitudes formed outside the system wemust also consider collections of family documents and objects, just as we mustlook at the phenomenon of the conservation of the oral tradition. Professionalhistorians rarely use this kind of material; oral history is used in Poland primarilyby ethnologists.³⁹ The KARTA centre has had the great merit of collectingpapers and other family materials from house to house. As the promoter ofa series of competitions for schoolchildren called ‘History Nearby’, the centrehas pushed young people to look at these reserves of family informationand to turn to old people to ask them to tell them their memories. Theworks that have grown out of these competitions are preserved in the KARTAcentre.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 ofthe fall of communism (including the elections of 1989) and the phase of thedismantling of the regime. Periods of regime change have always thrown lighthistorically 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 bythe political police and by the party authorities. But like all revolutions, the crisisalso generated a large number of statements, texts and publications, producedoutside the system, that reflected people’s ideas beyond the immediate crisis.These written texts, the printed materials that appeared during the major crisisof 1980–81, had a preliminary phase in the literature of the ‘second circuit’ thatpreceded that period and their continuation in the clandestine publishing of theyears following the introduction of martial law. During 1980–1 and in the yearsof martial law a large number of diaries and memoirs appeared, generated by thesensation that people were living an extraordinary period of history.

The texts produced in the circumstances described above were often collectedat the time of the events which had given origin to them. Similar clandestinecollections have their precedents in Poland, an example being those producedin the period of Nazi occupation. Some of the collections were publishedin the West.⁴¹ The production of the ‘second circuit’ was saved by somelibraries in Poland, by some Western centres and by private individuals. Theclandestine Association ‘Archives of Solidarnosc’ was set up in 1983 withthe intention of preserving and possibly publishing the documents of theSolidarnosc movement. The editorial series ‘Archives of Solidarnosc’, begunin conditions of illegality, continues today, and the Association is attemptingto reorder the material it holds and to make it readily accessible. Both thismaterial and the minutes, already published, of the meetings of the directionof the workers’ union Solidarnosc,⁴² constitute a very important source for theobservation of the ideas, the positions and the public actions of the people.⁴³The KARTA centre, already mentioned, has great merits in collecting materialthrown up by the crisis of the communist system in Poland; it holds perhapsthe 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 politicalcrises have not been preserved. In 1968, for example, the Warsaw universitystudents 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 doleances, as the books were in fact calledat the time.

In different periods of the PRL, and with differing intensity, people hadrecourse to the ‘weak’ weapons to express their opinions about the reality aroundthem; this included scratching out the eyes on the photographs and the portraits


of the leaders and covering the walls with writing, including lavatory walls. Therehave been several attempts by Polish historiography to use this kind of source,⁴⁴but it is a difficult one. The information on these writings can only be found inpolice records. We cannot know how much of the writing was recorded. Nor isit easy to judge the full significance of the writings because it required very littleto 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 ofthe men’s lavatories at the Institute of History of Warsaw University. The thendirector, professor Tadeusz Manteuffel, worried about possible consequences,had the walls repainted and put up notices which read, broadly, ‘Keeping thisplace clean is a sign of the civility of man’. Three days passed quietly, but onthe 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? Orboth? The intentions of the writings in the tourist lavatories on the famous‘Lenin itinerary’ (‘It has been ascertained that Lenin shat here’) or the scratchingaway of the red stars from the notices along the itinerary after 1956 were muchclearer.

These considerations related to writings can be applied generally to the mostdiffused form of expression people used under communism—the joke. Theanalysis is more complex because some were put in circulation by the authoritiesthemselves. As in the case of writings we are not in a position to be able to assesswhere the jokes circulated and how much. Now it is often difficult to establishtheir chronology and the geography of their movements within the socialistbloc. 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 hasbeen 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 thatgenerated them.⁴⁵ But as far as the role of gossip in social life is concerned, manyaspects are probably simply impossible to study.

To sum up: the study of the attitudes and ideas of people in the communistsystem is difficult, but there is some possibility of doing it. One thing isclear, unfortunately: excluding the totally exceptional cases in which we havecomparable sources for the same period dealing with individual social groupsin the different regions of Poland, or better, excluding the exceptional casesof availability of complete sources, standardized and sequential, we are nevergoing to get to the kind of results usually provided by sociologists—that ispercentage tables of distribution of opinion, accompanied by information aboutprobable margins of error. We may be able to show what opinions were currentand operative in society. We may perhaps be able to describe their typology,say something about their variability, but not define with any precision theirfrequency 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 isa mirror of his own opinions.

One last point. The difficulties we have encountered in this area are inno way exceptional for historians’ work. In much the same way, specialistsof other epochs try, for example, to study the ideas and attitudes of thepeasant class which, for long centuries, did not leave obvious and systematicevidence of its thinking. After reading memoirs of emigrants published bythe Institute of Social Economy, not particularly remote historically speaking,Maria Dabrowska wrote with enthusiasm: ‘Today, in the Memoirs, for all thosewho have ears to hear a Great Unknown has spoken: the peasant.’⁴⁶ We canconsole ourselves that despite everything we are in a better situation thanshe was.

Notes

1This 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 editorwishes to thank the journal for permission to reprint.

2N. Wachtel, La vision des vaincus: Les indiens du Perou devant la Conquete espagnole:1530–1570 (Paris, 1971).

3It was Lech Wał ¸esa who, in a totally different context, once said: ‘I am in favour, butagainst.’

4N. Krasko, Instytucjonalizacja socjologii w Polsce: 1920–1970 (Warsaw, 1996);P. Kwiatkowski, ‘Pocz ¸atki badan opinii publicznej w Polsce (1956–1964)’, inIdee a urz ¸adzanie swiata społecznego: Ksi ¸ega jubileuszowa dla Jerzego Szackiego, ed.E. Nowicka and M. Chałubinski (Warsaw, 1999), 171–82; Narodziny badan opiniipublicznej w Polsce, ‘Kultura i społeczenstwo’, 4 (1999) [special issue]; A. Sulek, ‘JakGomulka postanowił powiedziec prawd ¸e (Badania opinii w Polsce)’, Gazeta Wybor-cza, 27.02.1998; idem, ‘Jak Stefan Nowak studentow sondował’, Gazeta Wyborcza,2.03.1998; Z dziejow Polskiego Towarzystwa Socjologicznego: Materiały i wspomnienia,vol. 1, ed. E. Tarkowska (Warsaw, 1997), photocopied typescript.

5M. F. Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1958–1962 (Warsaw, 1998) (and the subsequentvolumes).

6The formula used in the constitution of 1952.7R. Kapuscinski, ‘Chrystus z karabinem na ramieniu’, in idem, Kirgiz schodzi z konia(Warsaw, 1988), 178.

8A well known Polish writer (1920–85). After 1966 he lived outside Poland.9Dense forests near to Warsaw.

10In protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.11Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1969–1971 (2001), 361.12A young boy murdered by the police in 1983.


13A. Kijowski, Dziennik 1955–1969, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Błonski (Krakow, 1998), 92.14A railway carriage factory at Wrocław.15D. Jagodzinska-Sasson et al., PZPR w fabryce: Studium wrocławskiego ‘‘Pafawagu’’ w

pocz ¸atku lat pi ¸ecdziesi ¸atych, research directed by Marcin Kula, (Warsaw, 2001).16Marzec 1968: Trzydziesci lat pozniej, vol. 2: Dzien po dniu w raportach SB oraz Wydziału

Organizacyjnego KC PZPR: Aneks zrodłowy, ed. M. Zaremba (Warsaw, 1998).17W. Grochala, T. K ¸edziora, M. Kielak, J. Kodym, M. Kula, T. Markiewicz and

D. Smolen, ‘Missi Dominici nowych czasow’, Zeszyty Historyczne 113 (1995), 3–39.18P. Machcewicz, Polski rok 1956 (Warsaw, 1993).19M. Jastrz ¸ab, Mozolna budowa absurdu: Działalnosc Wydziału Propagandy Warsza-

wskiego Komitetu Wojewodzkiego PZPR w latach 1949–1953 (Warsaw, 1999);T. Ruzikowski, ‘Obchody milenijne w Warszawie i wojewodztwie warszawskimw 1966 roku’, in M. Brodala, A. Lisiecka and T. Ruzikowski, Przebudowac człowieka:Komunistyczne wysiłki zmiany mentalnosci, studies edited by M. Kula (Warsaw, 2001),261–373.

20J. Kochanowski, ‘Lubelskie czarne gabinety: Sprawozdania cenzury wojennej z 1944r’, in Polska 1944/45–1989: Studia i materiały, vol. 4 (Warsaw, 1998); P. Sowinski,Komunistyczne Swi ¸eto: Obchody 1 Maja w latach 1948–1954 (Warsaw, 2000).

21‘Zapiski opozycjonisty: Fragmenty skonfiskowanego dziennika Jana Jozefa Lipskiego’,ed. G. Sołtysiak, Przegl ¸ad Tygodniowy, 18.09.1996.

22A. Garlicki, ‘Słuchanie tworcow’, Polityka, 13.12.1993; polemica: J. Zakowski, ‘Stron-niczy przegl ¸ad prasy’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 15.11.1993; T. Konwicki, ‘Tłok w łazience’,Gazeta Wyborcza, 16.11.1993.

23The solutions cited here were obviously not the specific inventions of Polish com-munists. In the worst years in Moscow there was a special letterbox for letters toStalin on the wall of the Kremlin. On the Polish solution cf. D. Jarosz, ‘Akta BiuraListow i Inspekcji KC PZPR jako Zrodło do badania rzeczywistosci społecznej wlatach 1950–56’, in Polska 1944/45–1989: Studia i materiały, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1997),191–216.

24A. Dzierzgowska et al., Supliki do najwyzszej władzy, research directed by M. Kula(Warsaw, 1996); D. Jarosz, ‘ ‘‘Fakty, ktore podajecie, s ¸a niedopuszczalne’’: Suplikichłopskie z czasow kolektywizacji (1949–1955)’, Regiony 1 (1992), 2–70; K. Madej,‘Boj o dom’, Wi ¸eY 3 (1999), 146–59; idem, Społdzielczosc mieszkaniowa: Władze PRLwobec niezaleznej inicjatywy społecznej (1961–1965) (Warsaw, 2003).

25A. Leszczynski, Sprawy do załatwienia: Listy do ‘‘Po prostu’’ 1955–1957 (Warsaw,2000); K. Kosinski, Nastolatki ‘81: Swiadomosc młodziezy w epoce ‘‘Solidarnosci’’(Warsaw, 2002).

26G. Sroczynski, ‘Biblioteka skarg i wnioskow’, Karta 32 (2001), 108–33.27D. Jarosz, ‘Działalnosc Podstawowej Organizacji Partyjnej PZPR przy Zarz ¸adzie

Głownym Zwi ¸azku Literatow Polskich w latach 1949–1953 (w swietle akt własnych)’,Mazowieckie Studia Humanistyczne 1 (1999), 5–45.

28I wish to thank Krzysztof Kosinski for giving me access to certain of these texts.

166 Marcin Kula

29M. Kula, Niespodziewani przyjaciele czyli rzecz o zwykłej, ludzkiej solidarnosci, prefaceby J. Le Goff, postscript by K. Sachs (Warsaw, 1995).

30See W. Kula, ‘Gusła’, in idem, Rozwazania o historii (Warsaw, 1958); republished inidem, Wokoł historii (Warsaw 1988), 366–407. Rozwazania o historii is also publishedin a Spanish translation (Mexico, 1984) and in Italian (Venice, 1990).

31See L. Tyrmand, Dziennik 1954 (London, 1980).32See A. Kijowski, Dziennik 1955–1969, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Błonski (Krakow,

1998); idem, Dziennik 1970–1977, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Błonski (Krakow,1998); idem, Dziennik 1978–1985, ed. K. Kijowska and J. Błonski (Krakow, 1999);Z. Mycielski, Dziennik 1950–1959, ed. Z. Mycielska-Golik (Warsaw, 2000); idem,Dziennik 1960–1969, ed. Z. Mycielska-Golik (Warsaw, 2001).

33A well-known Polish writer (1889–1965).34M. D ¸abrowska, Dzienniki powojenne: 1945–1965, ed. T. Drewnowski, vols. 1–4

(Warsaw, 1996).35S. Kisielewski, Dzienniki (Warsaw, 1996).36W. Kula, Rozdziałki, ed. Nina Assorodobraj-Kula and Marcin Kula (Warsaw, 1996).37Vedi K. Orłos, Cudowna melina (Paris, 1973). Cf. idem, Historia ‘‘Cudownej meliny’’;

Cudowna melina (Białystok, 1990).38A. Libera, Madame (Krakow, 1998).39A rare exception among historians: Z. Woycicka, ‘Od Weepers do Wieprza: Dzieje

jednej wioski byłego wojewodztwa olsztynskiego w latach 1945–1956’, thesis preparedunder the direction of Prof. W. Borodziej at the Historical Institute of the Universityof Warsaw in 2000–1, manuscript.

40K. Lipski, ‘Jaka PRL ? Obraz Polski Ludowej w oczach uczestnikow konkursuOsorodka Karta ‘‘Historia bliska’’ w latach 1997–1999’, thesis prepared under thedirection of M. Kula at the Historical Institute of the University of Warsaw in2000–1, manuscript.

41See Wydarzenia marcowe 1968 (Paris, 1969).42Komisja Krajowa NSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedzenie 3–4 listopada 1981, ed. T. Tabako

and M. Włostowski, introduction by A. Paczkowski (Warsaw, 1999); Komisja Kra-jowa NSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedzenie w dniach 22–23.X.1981 (Warsaw, 1987);Komisja Krajowa NSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedzenie w dniach 11–12 grudnia 1981,(Warsaw, 1986); Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedze-nie w dniach 31.III–1.IV.1981 (Warsaw, 1987); Krajowa Komisja PorozumiewawczaNSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedzenie 9–10 kwietnia 1981, ed. T. Tabako, introductionby A. Paczkowski, revision by B. Kopka (Warsaw, 1996); Krajowa Komisja Porozu-miewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedzenie w dniu 23 kwietnia 1981, ed. T. Tabakoand M. Włostowski, introduction by A. Paczkowski (Warsaw, 1995); Krajowa KomisjaPorozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedzenie w dniu 4 czerwca 1981 (Warsaw,1995); Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza NSZZ ‘‘Solidarnosc’’: Posiedzenie w dniach2–3 wrzesnia 1981 (Warsaw, 1988).

43Cf. among others the study based on the volumes of the minutes of the ses-sions of the National Commission of ‘Solidarnosc’: N. Boratyn et al., ‘Czynniki


okreslaj ¸ace dynamik ¸e ruchu Solidarnosoc w latach 1980–1981’, in Solidarnosc wruchu: 1980–1981, research directed by M. Kula (Warsaw, 2000), 7–150.

44B. Brzostek, Robotnicy Warszawy: Konflikty codzienne (1950–1954) (Warsaw, 2002);Ł. Kaminski, ‘Historia jednego strajku’, Biuletyn Instytutu Pami ¸eci Narodowej 6 (2001);W. Marchlewski, ‘ ‘‘Ten Uniwersytet to agentura Moskwy’’, czyli rzecz o napisach wtoaletach Biblioteki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego’, Krytyka 30 (1988), 190–4 (ibid.,194–6, comment by P. Łukasiewicz).

45D. Jarosz and M. Pasztor, W krzywym zwierciadle: Polityka władz komunistycznych wPolsce w swietle plotek i pogłosek z lat 1949–1956 (Warsaw, 1995).

46M. Dabrowska in her introduction to Pami ¸etniki emigrantow: Ameryka Południowa(Warsaw, 1939), xii.

10Consent in the Communist GDR or Howto 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 exilein France in Sanary sur Mer, the writer and poet Lion Feuchtwanger had hadample opportunity to feel the pulse of the Stalinist regime. For two months hehad travelled through a country dominated by terror, in which anyone could bedenounced from one day to the next, and in which the wave of persecutions hadalready taken the lives of millions of people—in the torture chambers of thecellars of the NKVD, in the gulag, or by way of the firing squad. Feuchtwangerhad not left for Moscow unprepared. He had read Andre Gide’s Retour del’URSS, published only a little before, which was an account of his impressionsof Moscow life under Stalinism. And, while in Moscow, the German poet hadlooked into the eyes of power itself, having had a private conversation withStalin lasting several hours. He had taken part in the second propaganda trial inMoscow and had been present at the ghastly hearings of the alleged Trotskyiteplot against the elite of the Communist Party. And yet, on his return, he wrotean account of his journey—Moscow 1937 —in which he praised the SovietUnion as an achievement ‘to which a man can say, ‘‘Yes,’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ with allhis heart’.¹

The man who wrote these words was not a fanatic, nor a communist, andhe had certainly not become one while in Moscow. He was not forced to makethese declarations. He had left for Moscow as a representative of a literary circleof the Popular Front with a great deal of sympathy for communism but ‘mixedwith doubts’² and with the firm intention ‘to arrive at a fair and well-balancedjudgement’.³ In no way can he be portrayed as someone ingenuous with respectto 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 NationalSocialists in Germany, his own expulsion, even describing in the smallest detailthe substitution of the ‘Jewish’ street names in the roads of Grunewald, the areawhere he lived in Berlin. Nor is the picture Feuchtwanger paints of the SovietUnion in any way uncritical; it is stinging about the ‘bureaucratism’ that makeslife unbearable in Moscow and about the ‘psychosis of the parasite’ among thepopulation, and it is very critical of the control the state exercises over art. Theauthor 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 toremain impartial and prevent the annoyances of the moment from influencingme unduly in one direction or the other’.⁴

The phenomenon of the confidence shown by Feuchtwanger in Moscow1937 is so difficult to understand because neither ideological conviction, norpolitical pressures, nor material corruption constitute a sufficient explanation.The secret of this confidence rests rather in the fascination of a widespreadand tangible consensus that the author claimed to feel everywhere in thelife of the Soviet Union. The account of his journey shows the change inthe 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 ableto 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.⁵Then, however, he seemed to be able to see that the ‘Soviet patriotism’ withwhich he was constantly confronted was effectively based on a ‘consensusomnium’, and the critical distance of the intellectual crumbled in the face of thepride of the interlocutors—a pride that ‘springs from so deep a contentmentwith the Soviet world, . . . that one cannot listen without feeling the sameelation’.⁶

What made Feuchtwanger so blind that he did not see the totalitarian realitybehind the ideological facade? His strange and imperturbable admiration for theSoviet regime was obviously directly connected to the fundamental attitude ofmonolithic agreement that he observed wherever he turned during his journey toMoscow. He found it at every turn, remarking that ‘everywhere in the countrythe people talk of their ‘‘happy life’’ ’ and describing the ‘feeling of strengthand happiness which emanates from the Soviet youth’ as ‘certainly infectious’.⁷But Feuchtwanger found the deepest reason for thinking that the close linkbetween Stalin and his people was absolutely indissoluble outside empiricalexperience—in the power of reason. It was this that meant that the consensus ofthe 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 thefew 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 havenever 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 andscientific distance become one. Upon reason rests the socialist economic plan,which guarantees everyone a worthwhile task in every moment, and upon it reststhe assumed certainty of Soviet citizens that their prosperity is not a conjuncture,but the result of reasoned planning. The actual temple of consensus-based reasonis, for the traveller, the capital of the Soviet Union itself: ‘Mathematics andreason, the hall-marks of the Soviet Union, are especially evident in the elaborateplan for the reconstruction of Moscow.’⁹

Thus the culture of consensus and the power of reason became for the poetin Moscow two faces of the same medal, the value of which could be seenin the much greater test to which the Soviet Union subjected its sympathizersduring the 1930s: the participation, as an observer, in the trials held in theclean-up campaign against the closest collaborators of Lenin in the restructuringof Russia, in a Bolshevik direction, after 1917. A separate chapter of the accountof Feuchtwanger’s journey to Moscow deals with ‘The Explicable and theInexplicable in the Trotskyist Trials’. Even at a distance of more than seventyyears the uninhibited certainty with which the author abandons the scruples hehad held on leaving for Moscow is shocking. His readiness to identify with theStalinist accusers and with their claque seated on the spectators’ benches reflectsthe 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 hisinhuman apology for Stalin’s propaganda trials, which in the space of a few yearsbrought to the dock all the members of Lenin’s Politburo with the exception ofTrotsky and, obviously, Stalin himself.¹⁰ The evidence remains of the amazingblindness of a political commentator who was unable to report on the reality ofoppression, on the fear of denunciation and the mass terror which, precisely in theperiod in which Feuchtwanger visited Moscow, caused thousands of victims.¹¹In reality his appeal for approval and understanding to be shown towards theSoviet state generated incomprehension and disbelief above all among Europeanemigrants. With the exception of Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch everyone tooktheir distance from the account, and the position adopted by Feuchtwanger infavour of Stalinism became a stain that would accompany him to the end of hislife, 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 canbe countered by the fact that he remained constant in his support of theSoviet Union in his private correspondence. Ludwig Marcuse did not interpretFeuchtwanger’s blindness as an intentional lie, but rather as intellectual nostalgiafor the great powers. In the specialist literature, the ‘idealized image’ of the


Moscow trials given by Feuchtwanger is often interpreted as a profession of faithin the power of reason, in which both passion and political strategy are united.¹³And in fact every page of the account of his journey testifies to a faith in progressthat has quasi-religious aspects—something which led him to ignore the manyweaknesses of the Soviet Union and to see it only as a land of unassailablecertainty in the future: ‘What most thrills the onlooker is the knowledge that thismodel is no mere plaything, no fanciful Utopia of a Western architect, but that ineight years it will be a reality,’ notes Feuchtwanger in respect of a gigantic modelwhich represented how Moscow would be in 1945.¹⁴ Moreover, his ‘practicableunknowing’¹⁵ has to be seen in the context of an era in which, to the writer, inexile, declared stateless, there seemed to be nothing beyond the choice betweenStalin and Hitler.

Certainly, intellectual vanity could have influenced Feuchtwanger’s attitude,impressed by a meeting with power, a meeting in which intellect and power wereengaged at the same level. It is no accident that he underlines in his account thathe is the first Western writer to have gone beyond the barrier of the conventionaldialogue in his conversation with the dictator: ‘Bit by bit [. . .] he became morecordial, and soon I realized that I could talk freely to this man. I spoke openly andhe accepted an open dialogue.’¹⁶ Thus the writer, expelled from Germany andnow in the Soviet Union, became a person of great political importance and ofwide influence. His readiness to neutralize Gide’s closure in respect of Stalin fromboth political and literary points of view was widely appreciated and resulted inhis reply selling no fewer than 200,000 copies in Russia.¹⁷

But, in conclusion, all these motives are insufficient. There remain someareas of incomprehension that are not possible to explain—even consideringhis need to be believed or other traditional criteria. Neither passion nor vanity,nor even the pragmatic decision to accept the lesser evil in the obligatorychoice between Hitler and Stalin, succeed in explaining fully exactly howan intellectual of world standing such as Feuchtwanger could put all hisown moral credit on one side of the scales to the extent of describing thedeadly abstruseness of the Moscow propaganda trials as realistic. In the pathosof his need for justification—‘Therefore I am bearing witness’¹⁸—one candiscern a kind of claim to being incontestable: what is written possesses theabsolute quality of an irrefutable experience. This experience is the intelligentcompromise between the actors of Soviet society engaged in one of its mostdifficult operations: that is, in the confrontation between accusers and accusedin the second Moscow trial of January 1937, at which Feuchtwanger assisted asa 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 andhad to bend to the evidence before him of those who said with a smile, ‘You haveseen 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 theatmosphere was not that of battle without quarter, but rather of a collectiveattempt to solve a problem. There were no barriers to separate the court from thepublic, an amazed Feuchtwanger noted, and he tried to dissuade his readers fromthe idea ‘that there was anything manufactured, artificial, or even awe-inspiringor emotional about these proceedings’.²¹

His argument was based on the one irrefutable item of proof that theartificial reality of the Soviet world could offer him: the ‘most impressive featurerepresented by the confessions’, with their ‘precision and coherence’.²² None ofthe accused had made a simple confession, none had simply offered a roughdraft. It was exactly this manner of finding the right way of expressing themselveswhich gave the confessions an air of unassailable authenticity, one which didnot 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; thesecond with a soldier’s uprightness; the third overcoming himself, not withoutan 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 Itis 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 eyesof a faithful Soviet communist. ‘If that was lying or prearranged, then I don’tknow what truth is’²⁴—with this passionate declaration Feuchtwanger, like anew Emile Zola, put at stake all his reputation as a poet, as a victim of politicalpersecution, as the citizen of a better Germany, to testify about a Soviet societybased on the acceptance of its citizens, which, even in the court rooms and inthe discussion of crimes carrying the death penalty, maintained the consensus ofits members. ‘The detachment and bluntness with which these men, just beforetheir as-good-as-certain death, illustrated and explained their conduct and theirguilt was unreal and uncanny.’²⁵

Feuchtwanger was not the only independent observer in those years who madepropaganda for Stalin. Numerous intellectuals did the same and attempted tojustify the propaganda trials in various ways—perhaps impressed by the officialrecords of the trials²⁶ or by arguments connected to popular pedagogy²⁷ and byan acceptance of the right of the revolution to defend itself.²⁸ Not infrequently,however, behind these justifications lay hidden doubts and uncertainties. ManesSperber and Kurt Hiller subsequently revised their favourable judgements. BertoltBrecht 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 accusedin the Moscow trials to be ‘political criminals and parasites of the first order’,³⁰was—according to the testimony of his wife—deeply upset and indignant atthe trials.³¹ Not so Feuchtwanger, who even in his private correspondence didnot show signs of any ‘double opinion’, remaining faithful to his apologia ofStalinism and resisting all objections. Even in the face of the opposition of Arnold


Zweig, someone very close to him, who ‘leafed through Moscow 1937 shakinghis head’³² because ‘there are principles and truths at stake about which we onceagreed and which now you [. . .] consider outdated’,³³ he insisted in his ideathat ‘I say yes to everything I saw there, very decisively, and the objections, bothgeneral 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 somelong-held abstract idea which convinced him of the credibility of the accusationsbut, on the contrary, his extreme proximity as eyewitness in the court. It wasthe immediate impression provided by the self-accusations and by the unanimityof the court that created the substance of his judgement, unassailable by anycritic. ‘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, Iwas forced to accept the evidence of my senses, and my doubts melted away asnaturally as salt dissolves in water.’³⁵ It is worth noting that other observers atthe Moscow propaganda trials also based the certainty of their opinions on thepersonal impression of consensus in the proceedings. Martin Andersen Nexø,a member of the Danish Communist Party, in an official statement of January1937, emphasized more than once the fact that he had had ‘the possibility’ tohave a personal impression of the trials against the anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centreof Pjatakow-Sokolnikow-Radek and their accomplices.³⁶ This was a good thingbecause, ‘Having been able to participate at the trials’,³⁷ he was able to offerto the proletariat of western Europe a picture of the trials that would makethem think.

The strength of his belief is based exclusively on his personal experience and,as with Feuchtwanger, Nexø found himself overwhelmed by the unanimity ofthe people involved in the trial. ‘I have often been present at trials, but never ata trial that went so smoothly and so humanely as this. At no time did you havethe 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 otherswho had abandoned the right path to understand their errors.’³⁸

The Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer had exactly the same impression of theMoscow trials. Fischer had followed the Radek trial as a spectator, just likeFeuchtwanger. Looking back on it, his confidence in the rectitude of the trialseemed even to himself to be incomprehensible, however; but behind his shame-filled self-condemnation is the key to an explanation of the phenomenon ofhis intellectual self-deception: ‘If today I read what I wrote then, I can’t beginto imagine that I believed in so much madness [. . .] I was overwhelmed bythe terrible power of appearances, by the suggestion of words when enunciat-ed—words which die on the printed page and which cannot be dissected andanalysed.’³⁹ As with Feuchtwanger and Andersen Nexø, so with Fischer we findthe charismatic attraction of the shared experience and the general agreementconsidered 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 theStalinist persecutions in the Soviet Union. Just like Feuchtwanger, other foreigncorrespondents had the impression that so many charges could not have beeninvented and that ‘such a reasonable and thoughtful man [Stalin; M.S.] couldnever have committed the monstrous stupidity of putting on, with the help of somany accomplices, such an enormous comedy’.⁴⁰

Thus, it was the consensus in the court room which provoked the consensusin the hall set aside for spectators and which, together with abstract rationalityand the concrete possibility of being present personally on such an occasion,immunized the watchers against any criticism or objection. This consensus, basedon reason and reinforced by direct experience, went well beyond the Moscowcourt room. It made the closed system of the communist project of the SovietUnion of the 1930s appear so attractive that it allowed non-communist Westernintellectuals to subscribe without reserve to affirmations of its validity.⁴¹

I I

My thesis is that a key to the understanding of the strong grip that the socialistsystem of the Soviet kind maintained through much of the twentieth century,despite its economic inadequacy and its limits of political approval, can befound in this ‘principle of consensus’ that encouraged the bourgeois writer LionFeuchtwanger to agree with the Moscow propaganda trials. From here onwards,therefore, the system will be examined from a very different point of view, bothin temporal and in spatial senses—that is through the example of that part ofthe area of Soviet influence in which the Soviet ascendency was most threatenedby the competitive Western model: the GDR.

To link the Great Terror of the 1930s in the Soviet Union and the bureaucraticstrategies of consolidation of power of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in EastGermany may seem forced, but it should be noted that for more than fortyyears people in the GDR also experienced an omnipresent apparent consensus.A regular cult of consensus characterized the official image of the regime of theSED. This is true not only for the Stalinist period of the SED, in which theinfamous Minister of Justice Hilde Benjamin, inspired by reading the speeches ofWyschinski, encouraged people ‘to consider judicial procedures a form of criti-cism and self-criticism’.⁴² The innumerable marches, the demonstrative battles ofthe propagandistic political culture, the never-ending declarations of loyalty andthe mass acclamations all had the same scope—that of confirming the impressionof a unanimity of consensus among the population. Evidence of the desire for atotal fusion between government and population can be seen in the mania of theregime for priding itself on having received 99 per cent and more of the votes inthe sham elections. This ‘passion for unanimity’ (Carl Friedrich) was so powerfulthat the internal opposition to Wolfgang Harich in the party (as can be seen


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 tothe 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 generalof the SED, even Erich Honecker, up to that point a strong supporter of theline of defending the regime, raised his hand. And even during the revolutionaryuprising, the members of the old Politburo of the SED defended themselves byarguing that any concessions to a different political line must be considered abreach 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 ismade evident by recent studies, like that on civil law in the GDR. Here we cansee that the number of trials in the district tribunal of Wismar fell constantlyand that by 1963 not even an eighth of the cases presented in 1950 were beingheard. Even a look at the socialist world of work, where conflicts had no legalplace, gives the same picture:

As the president of the FDGB Warke stated in January 1960, ‘these conflicts are theresult of insufficient confidence in the system, of an insufficient class consciousness, andof the failure to recognize that the working class holds power. The leaders of our unionsshould make sure that these conflicts are solved quickly because they might be used bythe enemies of the working class against the working class itself.’⁴³

The force that this sentiment of unity had can perhaps be explained effectivelythrough the example of the methodology of the sciences. The historians ofthe GDR did not consider the fusion between loyalty to the party and theirprofessional seriousness as surrendering to power or betraying science; rather theydefended it, arguing that historical discourse should put above any other principlethe solidity of the image of socialism. Thus, in extreme cases, it was even possibleto deny the authority of sources, with the agreement of the historians, withoutthis seeming to be a contravention of the professional rules of the scientificcommunity.⁴⁴

We can distinguish two different types of construction of legitimating con-sensus in the SED state. Above all there was the area of political action, theacceptance of ideology and the knowledge of and personal adhesion to certainvalues. Then there was the area of social and generational traditions, lifestylesof the collectivity and of behaviour, which could reinforce or weaken belief inthe legitimacy of the socialist project. Both are forms themselves contained ina way of thinking, a cultural dimension that is difficult to understand in ananalytical manner—what Michel Foucault has called an ‘area of discourse’ andwhich refers to linguistic instruments, habitual schemes of representation andperception, the hierarchy of internalized values, with which we are accus-tomed to perceive reality without, in normal circumstances, having to thinkabout it.

176 Martin Sabrow

While the seduction of the socialist idea and the force of propaganda inconvincing people have always been at the centre of any critical analysis,and while daily life in GDR society has been the subject of research interms of oscillation and reticence, adaptation and exploitation, among differentgenerations and at different levels, the question of the role of consensus in themost influential structures of the thought of the GDR has not yet been takenfully into consideration.

Yet it is precisely the ‘artificial reality’ of the SED dictatorship which providesspecific explanations about the effect, and the limits to the effect, of the powerof cohesion in the SED dictatorship. This is because the dictatorial principleof consensus did not explicate its power in an empty space, and its validitydid not depend so much on the conscious approval of those involved as on apre-established sphere of activity, defined above all by two factors: homogeneityand internal compactness—and by clear definition of the country’s externalborders. These factors indicate that the consensus about which we are talkingdid not develop naturally. Its continuous creation and its undoubted force wasbased on diverse presuppositions, not fixed in 1949, much less in 1945, butwhich were created definitively only between the late 1950s and the first half ofthe 1980s.

The first condition was provided, obviously, by the uncontested monopoly ofpower enjoyed by the SED and its channels of information, and therefore byits capacity to repress contrasting opinions, to force them into exile or—as inthe case of the church—to marginalize and contain them. The period betweenthe XXth congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 and the end ofdetente at the beginning of 1957 shows clearly just how quickly political, literaryand scientific consensus risked disappearing as soon as the dictatorship began tovacillate. In the socialist state, power was rarely lived by the citizens simply as acoercive force. Even the most pitiless campaign of persecution waged against theorgan of the splinter ZPKK party was based on the objective of maintaining aconsensus. Even the most brutal application of the collectivization of the agrarianeconomy in the GDR did not take place without the prior signature—allegedlyvoluntary—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 seenin the enforcement of social homogeneity and cultural unity. The enforceduniformity of lifestyles in the socialist state, the elimination of differences ofsalary and status, the fusion of institutions and the disbandment of intermediateorganizations—all this created a basic scheme of structural conformity whichpushed the masses towards consensus and rendered that consensus visible.⁴⁶The same is true of the cultural sector. Only after socialist realism had becomepart of the literary scene could repressive censorship begin to look like helpfulcriticism and in-depth comment; only after historical sciences had cast asidethe fetters of the historical discipline could professional uniformity become


one of the guiding principles of historical validity; only after the eliminationof the narrative models in competition with the ‘people’s army’ could thecommunist resistance against Nazism assert the full force of its legitimatingpower of political consensus. It should be noted, in conclusion, that thisthird condition contributes to the creation of an ideal-type of the enemy. Theomnipresence of consensus, essential for the safety of the government, necessarilycorresponded to the omnipresence of an enemy, threatening the working class.The existence of an objective enemy, whose danger was totally independent ofits will, made consensus obligatory because it permitted the interpretation ofdoubts and neutrality as clear dissent and determined the limits beyond whichall ‘constructive criticism’ was transformed into hostility and ‘the open exchangeof opinion’ became a demonstration of doubts in belief in the whole corpus ofMarxism-Leninism.

The force represented by the achievement of consensus is very evident in theinnumerable cases of conflict, generated in the course of everyday experience inthe socialist state in ways which are difficult to imagine for a Western state in theyears before 1989. Society in the GDR was not ‘placated’; it was permeated bya constant current described by Mary Fulbrook as the unity of conformity andgrumbling which can be interpreted as the expression of a continuous extortionof consent through threats compelling agreement at all levels.⁴⁷ The manner inwhich conflict and consensus were linked is shown in numerous political debatesin which self-criticism was always required from the accused person before he wasremoved from his administrative position. These debates would stall, however,when—as happened in some cases—the accused was unable to reconcile apersonal 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 inNeues Deutschland that it was precisely the need to keep faith with the scientificmethod which constituted a political duty: ‘The party leaders during the lastyear and in particular in the 35th plenary assembly have repeated the seriousnessand the importance of our task at the ideological level [. . .] In this respect thecomrade teacher must also be harsh with himself—in two ways: above all, wherehe has committed a mistake, he must admit it without any kind of reservation, inthe interests of the party, of research, of the teaching of our socialist science andof Marxism-Leninism. With all necessary firmness he must avoid any reticence,any cowardice, in admitting his error. With the same firmness and honesty hemust also defend his position in the scientific debate, which can only concernsingle themes, however, and not the general understanding of Marxism-Leninismor the decisions of the party. To repress his own real opinions in order to avoidtrouble, for cowardice or for career reasons, is damaging to the party.’⁴⁸

Ulbricht’s enemies within the party operated along this same line of consensualcriticism—like Gustav Just, who, even after forty years, thought it appropriateto 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 eventuallyalso in the direction of the party, in order to reach a wide circle of recipients’.⁴⁹Even so the socialist dictatorship of consensus never succeeded in cateringfor all the realities of everyday life. It succeeded rather in building a ‘cultureof final objectives’ whose self-evident obviousness was in contrast with thefalseness of what people were actually living. The artificial reality of the GDRas a consensus dictatorship also envisaged—in addition to emphatic approval,acritical reception, and fervent acceptance of values—a commitment to utilizegovernment requirements in such a way as to derive personal benefit.

Even for people who retained some personal autonomy of thought, the changesin linguistic code and the double talk were part of daily life, making it possibleto understand how the notorious dissatisfaction with living conditions in theGDR could be reconciled with an almost total electoral consensus in respectof the candidates of the party. Who knows whether Wolfgang Harich, accusedof creating a revisionist platform, declared himself in favour of the consensusdictatorship because he was ‘purified’, or whether he was just offering a feignedsubmission when, in an act of humiliating weakness, he thanked state security fortaking the reins of the runaway horse before it could fall—thus saving himselffrom the death penalty? The system of consensus always defined the limits andthe form in which one could express dissent: even complaints made at the councilof state of the GDR could be expressed only after having professed one’s personaladhesion 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 makepersonal requests.

Despite the unchanging nature of its mechanisms of consensus and formalunity, the consensus dictatorship was a construction which did undergo changesover time. Broadly, one can recognize three phases. During the 1950s and 1960sa Stalinist and post-Stalinist method dominated in the formation of consensus,in which terror and utopia were present at the same time. Under Honeckerthe aggressive utopia of total and supra-political consensus was increasinglytransformed into consensus procured through administration, the bureaucraticaspects of which can be seen in the official documents of the 1970s—more andmore devoid of any real meaning. Behind the facade, which always retained thesame external aspect, was the dying force of a by now purely artificial consensus,which, very probably, cannot be better illustrated than in the grotesque pictureof the head of the SED waving the national flag and singing at the passage of thetroops of the youth organization on 1 May 1989, not noticing that the soldierswere breaking rank 100 metres beyond the stand, getting back into line behindit so that they could march past the dictator once again.

The system of consensus dictatorship in the socialist world was not static. Itsdramatic 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 April1987, to the office of the secretary of the central committee, Kurt Hager, after


he had declared against the ‘thaw’ and the perestroika. Similarly, the censoringof the Russian magazine Sputnik in November 1988 provoked unexpected massprotest in a society which had been used to limits to freedom of expression formore than fifty years. The falsification of the results of the communal electionsof May 1989 very suddenly unmasked a system that had never really shown thatit wanted to reflect the will of the electors. In the same way, the revelations aboutabuse of office and about the privileges of the old elite which appeared during therevolutionary wave of autumn 1989, had an incredibly large resonance because,among other things, they permitted a break with the behavioural mode usual uptill then and engendered a shift towards indignation.

It was only at the moment of collapse that people realized the capitalimportance of ‘virtual’ reality and the degree to which it had contributed tothe stabilization of the society led by the SED for so many decades. When, on9 October 1989, the Leipzig expert on youth culture, Walter Friedrich, wentto Egon Krenz to convince the directorate of the party to adopt a more flexibleapproach, he took with him a document testifying to a loss of GDR-identity thathad taken place with surprising speed over the preceding weeks. In this ‘growingloss of identification of society with the Democratic Republic’, Friedrich saw the‘result of certain changes in mass consciousness’ which had led ‘in a short timeand 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 amongvisitors from the West about the political opinions of the citizens of EastGermany. Leaving aside the question of whether these surveys overestimatedthe 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 ideasof the citizens of the GDR are noticed. Only from the spring and particularlyfrom the summer of 1989 can we see an unexpected growth of hostility.’⁵¹In this unexpected growth nothing was more influential than the collapse of asocio-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 beenlittle considered so far but it may provide a contribution to our understandingof the GDR. Certainly, the most significant mechanisms of acceptance couldwear out in the course of a lifetime; the seductions of power were confronted bythe embarrassment of impotence; the belief of living in a state better than theothers, despite all its shortcomings, was challenged by the continual comparisonwith the neighbours in the West; ideological certainty was undermined byideological doubt. But all this was less important than the eventual erosion ofthe dominant idea of the socialist state of the SED, in which society had formedits identity and its environment through state socialism. The GDR had madethe decisive step in passing from an exceptional situation of repression to theartificial normality of an everyday socialist world, not through a perceived orpromised 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 werenot at opposite poles, but two realities which permeated each other and whichkept each other alive.

If this is so, then the lasting internal stability of the communist dictatorshipsof the twentieth century were due—among numerous other factors, such aspolitical repression and the purchase of political loyalty—to an enormousmental operation, difficult to comprehend fully: it was the force of a politicallygenerated different world of meaning, homogeneous on the inside and closed tothe outside, based on the maintenance of its external borders. The communistworldview was and remained always artificial, to the extent that it was entrustedto the leadership of the Communist Party and to the political repression ofalternative Weltanschauung and perceptions of different worlds. But within theselimits the communist world of meaning, based on the idea of historical progressand the paradigm of total societal consensus, developed such a persuasive powerthat even in the terroristic fever of the late 1930s a much-appreciated Westernpoet like Lion Feuchtwanger could fall victim to its mental attraction.

Notes

1Lion Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends (London,1937), 174.

2Ibid., 8f.3Ibid., 10.4Ibid., 10.5Ibid., 19.6Ibid., 29.7Ibid., 32.8Ibid., 24f.9Ibid., 33f.

10On Feuchtwanger’s position after the Second World War cf. Joseph Pischel, ‘Nach-wort’, in Lion Feuchtwanger, Moskau 1937: Ein Reisebericht fur meine Freund (Berlin,2nd edn. 1993), 133f.

11Cf. for the frightening cohabitation of terror and dream, the monumental descriptionof Karl Schlogel, Terror und Traum (Moscow, 1937; Munich, 2008). Between August1936, the year in which we see the beginning of the great wave of terror against theSoviet 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 amonglarge sectors of the population as well as the national minorities, began in 1937—after,therefore, Feuchtwanger’s return from Moscow. Cf. Markus Wehner, ‘Stalinismusund Terror’, in Stefan Plaggenborg (ed.), Stalinismus: neue Forschungen und Konzepte(Berlin, 1998), 365–90. The total number of people imprisoned between January


1935 and July 1940 as ‘enemies of the people’ was—according to the report of thecommission set up by Khrushchev—19,400,000. Of these, 7 million were killed,while the majority of the others died in the gulag. Cf. Rene Ahlberg, ‘StalinistischeVergangenheitsbewaltigung: Auseinandersetzung uber die Zahl der Gulag-Opfer’,Osteuropa 42:11 (1992), 920–37.

12Besides the hypothesis of Heinrich Mann, already quoted, that Feuchtwanger had beenbought by Stalin, one often finds in the literature about the case the hypothesis thatFeuchtwanger’s position was motivated by the hope of saving the life of individualprisoners. Cf. David Pike, Deutsche Schriftsteller im Sovjetischen Exil 1933–1945(Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 244, 268; Michael Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus und dieRenegaten (Stuttgart, 1991), 154.

13‘Here Feuchtwanger wants to play the politician and is totally taken by the idea ofa dictatorship of reason, shown here in the ‘‘enlightened despot’’ ’, Rohrwasser, DerStalinismus, 152.

14Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 39f.15Manes Sperber, Stufen der praktikablen Unwissenheit, 1981, cited in Rohrwasser, Der

Stalinismus, 152.16Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 82. It is not certain that the conversation really took

place in the way described by Feuchtwanger. A German emigrant reported that shehad heard that a first meeting had been abruptly broken off by Stalin after the initialpleasantries, when Feuchtwanger asked a question about the cult of personality, andthat Stalin had been more ready to answer questions in a second meeting. Cf. Pike,Deutsche Schriftsteller, 244f.

17Cf. Pike, Deutsche Schriftsteller, 241. A not insignificant contribution to the success ofFeuchtwanger’s booklet was the uproar created by the passages in the text which didcriticize the regime, and after a few weeks the book was sold out. Only a year later thebook was withdrawn from bookshops and was not republished either in the SovietUnion or in the GDR.

18Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 13.19Ibid., 243.20Ibid., 144.21Ibid., 144.22Ibid., 142.23Ibid., 146f.24Ibid., 135.25Ibid., 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 forwhich they have been tried and condemned. It would be grotesque to think that thisaccount 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 Weltbuhne 32:40(1 October 1936), 1272.

182 Martin Sabrow

27Manes Sperber, in Paris, interpreted the trials as a means ‘by which it was possible tomake understandable to the people the complex truth of the facts. It was a question ofthe fact that, in Hiller’s view any kind of opposition constituted a betrayal.’ Henry Jaco-by, Davongekommen: 10 Jahre Exil 1936–1946: Prag—Paris—Montauban—NewYork—Washington: Erlebnisse und Begegnungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1982), 39, citedin Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus, 133.

28‘But when traitors who threaten the revolution are discovered, these should disappearquickly and completely in order to preserve the revolution.’ Heinrich Mann, NeueWeltbuhne 32:39 (24 September 1936), 1216.

29Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus, 160.30Ernst Bloch, ‘Bucharin Schlusswort’, in E. Bloch, Vom Hasard zu Katastrophe: Politische

Aufsatze aus den Jahren 1934–1939: Mit einem Nachwort von Oskar Negt (Frankfurtam Main, 1972), 358.

31Karola Bloch, Aus meinem Leben (Pfullingen, 1981), 126.32Arnold Zweig to Lion Feuchtwanger, 29 July 1937, in Lion Feuchtwanger and Arnold

Zweig, Briefwechsel 1933–1938 (Berlin (East), 1984), 163.33Arnold Zweig to Marta Feuchtwanger, 4 November 1937, in Feuchtwanger and

Zweig, Briefwechsel 1933–1938, 181.34Lion Feuchtwanger to Arnold Zweig, 24 February 1957, in Feuchtwanger and Zweig,

Briefwechsel 1933–1938, 147.35Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937, 135.36Martin Andersen Nexø, ‘Eine neue Barriere gegen den Krieg: Zum Moskauer Prozeß

gegen die Trotzkisten’, Das Wort: Literarische Monatsschrift 1:1 (January 1937),101.

37Ibid.38Ibid.39Ernst Fischer, Erinnerungen und Reflexionen (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1969), 375. Cf.

also, Ernst Fischer, Vernichtet den Trotzkismus (Strasbourg, 1937), and E. Fischer,‘Die Gestandnisse’, Neue Rundschau 6:5 (4 February 1937), 221f.

40Fischer, Erinnerungen und Reflexionen, 103.41The fundamental role of ‘global consensus’ for an understanding of the Stalinist

practice of domination is underlined in the postscript to the 1993 edition of Moscow1937, in which Joseph Pischel writes: ‘The level of consensus that a Bolshevik massparty receives from its members will not be comprehensible to the greater part of thereaders’ (128).

42Hilde Benjamin, ‘A. J. Wyschinski: Gerichtsreden’, Einheit 7 (1952), 699–703.43Peter Hubner, Konsens, Konflikt und Kompromiß: Soziale Arbeiterinteressen und

Sozialpolitik in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1970 (Berlin, 1995), 209. Cf. also Peter Hubner,‘Arbeitskampf im Konsensgewand? Zum Konfliktverhalten von Arbeitern im ‘‘realen’’Sozialismus’, in Henrik Bispinck, Jurgen Danyel, Hans-Hermann Hertle and Her-mann Wentker (eds.), Aufstande im Ostblock: Zur Krisengeschichte des realen Sozialismus(Berlin, 2004), 195–213.


44Thomas Lindenberger, ‘Der ABV als Landwirt: Zur Mitwirkung der DeutschenVolkspolizei bei der Kollektivierung der Landwirtschaft’, in Thomas Lindenberger(ed.), Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte derDDR (Potsdam, 1999), 167–203. Here 189.

45See, for these conferences: Thomas Lindenberger, ‘Creating State Socialist Governance:The Case of the Deutsche Volkspolizei’, in Konrad H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorshipas 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 Institutionenordnungals Rahmenbedingung der Sozialgeschichte der DDR’, in Hartmut Kaelble, JurgenKocka and Hartmut Zwahr (eds.), Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Stuttgart, 1994), 17–30.Here 28f.

47Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR: 1949–1989 (Oxford,1995), especially 129f.

48Cited in Jurgen Kuczynski, Frost nach dem Tauwetter (Berlin, 1993), 103f.49Gustav Just, Deutsch: Jahrgang 1921 (Potsdam, 2001), 96f.50Walter Friedrich to Egon Krenz, 9 October 1989, in Ekkehard Kuhn, Der Tag der

Entscheidung: Leipzig, 9. Oktober 1989 (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1992), 93.51Anne Kohler, ‘Nationalbewußtsein und Identitatsgefuhl der Burger der DDR unter

besonderer Berucksichtigung der deutschen Frage’, in Enquete-Kommission ‘Aufar-beitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland’, vol. 5.2(Baden-Baden, 1995), 1636–1675. Here 1664.

11Demography, Opportunity or Ideological

Conversion? Reflections on the Roleof the ‘Second Hitler Youth Generation’,

or ‘1929ers’, in the GDR

Mary Fulbrook

The relative balance of coercion, commitment, consent, complicity, compro-mise, conformity, passive or active resistance and dissent in the two Germandictatorships has long been the topic of debate among historians. Simplisticmodels seeking to make clear distinctions between ‘regime’ and ‘people’, ‘state’and ‘society’, ‘support’ and ‘opposition’ are clearly inadequate to explore thecomplex and often ambivalent ways in which people interact with, respond to,and make their way through dictatorial regimes, where they may approve ofsome policies, be adversely affected by others, and have a variety of conflictingopinions and changing motives as they are caught up in and seek to live theirlives 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 theNazi and communist dictatorships in twentieth-century Germany. I proposehere to raise some questions (but by no means suggest definitive answers) thatarise when one considers the question from a generational perspective.¹ Inaddition to characteristics such as gender and social class, the biological age andsocial life-stage at which individuals are confronted by major historical events orexperiences can have a very strong impact on their behaviour and attitudes. Evena 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 militaryservice in war or will remain an observer at a distance alongside his motherand sisters on the home front. ‘Social generations’ are of course as much theconstructions of later discourse as they are of common challenges (not necessarily‘formative experiences’) faced at particular life-stages.² But an understanding ofradical, intrusive dictatorships and of times of rapid social and political change intransitions 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 ofdifferent age groups at the time.

The concept of ‘generation’ in a variety of senses has for some time beenrecognized as a significant, if strongly contested, category for exploring thegenesis of the Third Reich. Particular prominence has been given by somescholars to the alleged consequences of the First World War, with a focus onthe actually highly diverse experiences of the ‘Front Generation’ and the slightlyyounger ‘War Youth Generation’ (those who were too young to have directlyexperienced combat at the front but who were among the most prominentcarriers of the Third Reich).³ I propose here, however, to focus on a ratherdifferent case: that of the two very different cohorts of what has often beencalled the ‘Hitler Youth generation’, which I believe should actually be dividedbetween the ‘First Hitler Youth generation’ (born roughly during and in the earlyyears after the Great War) and the ‘Second Hitler Youth generation’, which Iprefer to call the ‘1929ers’, born in the period roughly from the mid-1920s untilHitler’s accession to power; and I shall focus primarily on the latter cohort, whichproved particularly significant in the transition from Nazism to communism andfrom which were drawn those groups who were to be the principal carriers andstrongest supporters of the GDR.

THE 1929ERS IN THE GDR: SOME PATTERNS

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 birthcohorts who were socialized primarily under the ideologically very different Nazidictatorship. These were people born in the later 1920s and early 1930s, who aresometimes 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 thelast year or two of the war). Paradoxically, it was precisely these cohorts—whowere consistently exposed to Nazi propaganda and influence throughout whatare often thought to be the most impressionable years of compulsory schoolingand adolescent socialization—who later appeared to be the most committedcommunists.

Whichever way one looks at the data, those born in the years 1925–32 seemto have been highly supportive of the GDR. A statistical analysis of ‘Who waswho in the GDR’ (Wer war Wer in der DDR) reveals their disproportionatepresence in the higher reaches of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) hierarchy, theorganizations of the state, the key ministries in government, the most importanteconomic enterprises, and the officer level of the Ministry for State Security,or Stasi—though, interestingly, those involved in the Stasi tended to be onaverage just a couple of years younger than those involved in the institutionsof 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 risento such political prominence, without being at all representative of the widercohorts from which they were drawn. Perhaps these individuals were all selectedin the early post-war years as being young and untainted by complicity in theNazi regime? Perhaps they were disproportionately drawn from families withappropriate working-class credentials and leftward political leanings? A minorityof 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 theThird Reich could be deemed to be more or less irrelevant, the puzzle solved: afterall, 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 simplyengage in a collective group biography of the leaders of party, state and economyin the GDR without wondering about any patterns of ideological conversion tocommunism despite the impact of socialization under Nazism. But even if thiswere true, one would still perhaps need to look for some kind of explanationof the fact that it was precisely these birth cohorts, and not their slightly olderor younger compatriots from similar social and political backgrounds, who wereand remained so dominant in the affairs of the communist GDR.

Oddly, however, further exploration reveals that an approach positing dispro-portionate support among only a small group of those from non- or anti-Nazibackgrounds does not seem to fit very well when one considers this generationa little further, because the select group of prominent 1929ers appears in itsattitudes to have been not strikingly different from, but rather representative of,the wider population of the birth cohorts from which they are drawn. Studiesof what might be called ‘ordinary East Germans’ of the same age group showthe same surprising disproportionate commitment to the communist project, ascompared with those a little older or a little younger, revealed in different waysboth in the years shortly before and a decade and a half after the collapse of theGDR 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 EastGerman industrial centres in 1987 brought up again and again, among membersof this age group, a striking loyalty to the East German state. Their belief inthe promise and hopes offered by this state appears to have been particularlystrong (at least as represented retrospectively) in the early and more idealisticyears 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 evena way of explaining away these findings: after all, Niethammer and his colleaguespublished interviews with only thirty individuals, of whom only eight were bornin the relevant years from 1925 to 1932. This very small sample could thus againbe argued to have been highly unrepresentative of the wider age group; and, ofcourse, those individuals whom the West German historians were permitted to


interview in the still-existing GDR were pre-selected and interviews accompaniedby a regime ‘minder’, rendering explicitly critical comments extremely unlikelyin the constrained circumstances of this research. There is nevertheless a strikingring of authenticity about these life-histories which makes the reader predisposedto accept at least the participants’ professed belief in the versions of their ownlives which they chose to present to the West German researchers.

Surprising corroboration of the view that the ‘prominent 1929ers’ of Werwar Wer in der DDR are indeed more broadly representative of their agecohorts comes, however, in some more recent research carried out underless constrained and rather different post-unification conditions—when ofcourse retrospective evaluations may be tinged with a degree of nostalgia orOstalgie. In the summer of 2005, I carried out a small project in which over300 questionnaires were distributed to East Germans in several locations: theformer ‘socialist new town’ of Eisenhuttenstadt, on the German border withPoland; the pleasant old town around a former princely hunting lodge inKonigswusterhausen near Berlin; and a number of contrasting districts in EastBerlin, from the south-western lakeside suburb of Muggelsee through areas ofsocialist high-rise housing estates in the northern district of Marzahn to olderareas near the town centre, including the notorious Lichtenberg area (in whichthe Normannenstrasse Stasi headquarters was located). In addition, a number ofin-depth oral history interviews were carried out with East Germans of differentages.⁶ These explorations of the experiences and attitudes of a random cross-section of the East German population more than fifteen years after unificationreveal surprising differences among different birth cohorts with respect to reportedattitudes towards and patterns of involvement in the GDR.⁷ Again, those bornin the years from 1925 to 1932 stand out as highly distinctive in comparison tothose born in the immediately preceding and succeeding years. In particular, asfar 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 likelyto have been members of the SED, and far less likely to have retained any formof church membership or professed religious belief, than those just a few yearsolder or a few years younger. If this survey of around 300 people in 2005–6 istaken to be even only roughly reliable as an indicator of generational differencesamong ‘ordinary East Germans’, then the evident commitment to the ‘projectGDR’ among the 500 or so ‘prominent 1929ers’ in Wer war Wer, and amongthe eight representatives of this generation interviewed by Lutz Niethammer andcolleagues, was also characteristic of this age cohort in the wider population.

The prominence of the 1929ers, and their disproportionate commitment tothe communist GDR remains, then, a particularly puzzling case, and not onewhich can easily be explained away by reference to a small self-selecting politicalelite.

There are further puzzles, too, when one compares the East German case withthe 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, theprominence of what is sometimes called the ‘Aufbaugeneration’—the generationwhich ‘built up’ the new states—in different spheres of public life has beenreceiving increasing attention for both sides of the Iron Curtain.⁸ The highlyvisible roles of the ‘1929ers’ as carriers of the new states, despite their primarysocialization under such very different political and ideological auspices, seemto cry out for interpretation. Explanations of their prominence in the liberaldemocracy of West Germany are abundant—and, however plausible they mayappear for the West at first glance, such explanations rarely hold for the verydifferent circumstances of the communist dictatorship in the East—and viceversa. It is sometimes argued, for example, that having been ‘burnt’ or ‘betrayed’by one highly ideologically charged ‘totalitarian’ dictatorship, members of afar more broadly (or vaguely) defined ‘Hitler Youth generation’ or ‘scepticalgeneration’ (Schelsky) became increasingly mistrustful of all political ideologies,and instead became adherents of the pluralism of liberal democracy, opposedto all dictatorial regimes with intrusive worldviews.⁹ When it is pointed outthat, ironically, it was precisely these members of the ‘betrayed generation’ whoturned out to be the strongest supporters of the communist East, the quiteopposite and self-contradictory claim is often made that, having been broughtup in a ‘totalitarian’ dictatorship, members of the Hitler Youth generation werepredisposed to profess blind obedience to any strong state, however different inideological colours—an obvious variant on the argument about the equivalenceof ‘totalitarian’ dictatorships of both left and right. While clearly mutuallyincompatible, such explanations are relatively readily bandied around in populardiscussions. Clearly, a rather more differentiated and empirically saturated analysisof 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 bemore precise about our descriptions of the cohorts born from the mid-1920s tothe early 1930s, in contradistinction to earlier and later cohorts. I shall then goon to consider some of the possible explanations for the distinctive roles playedby the 1929ers in the GDR, seeking to distinguish between what might be calleddemographic, structural, and cultural or ideological explanations. Finally, I shallreturn to the wider question of the ways in which a generational perspective mayserve to illuminate patterns of compliance and refusal, complicity and coercion,in the two succeeding dictatorships.

THE TWO ‘HITLER YOUTH GENERATIONS’ :DISTINCTIVE AGE-RELATED EXPERIENCES OF NAZISM

Many analyses of the ‘Hitler Youth generation’ tend to look in a fairly undiffer-entiated manner at a long set of birth cohorts stretching from the later years of


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 WorldWar through to the mid-1920s, who may be referred to as the ‘first Hitler Youthgeneration’, or HJ1, and those born in the later years of the Weimar Republic,the ‘second Hitler Youth generation’ or 1929ers. These differences are not onlyevident in the material relating to the later activities and the relative prominenceof the 1929ers in the GDR, as well as more general support for the communistproject referred to above; they are also very striking when one considers evidencerelating to the experiences of these two sets of cohorts prior to 1945. Andit is arguably in their different age-related experiences of Nazism that at leastsome of the differences in degrees of antipathy towards, or support for, the latercommunist project may be rooted.

The ‘first Hitler Youth generation’, those born during the First World Warthrough to the mid-1920s, were old enough to have registered the turmoil ofthe 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 whatit was that Germans felt they needed a ‘saviour’ to rescue them from. Thusfor example among my oral history interviewees Amalie H. (1922) commentedon her experiences in the Depression of her father and elder brother first of allbecoming unemployed, and then her family being at risk of losing their homeand 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 somuch in debt, that we nearly lost our house and farm. And then there came what was forus a happy time, when Adolf Hitler came to power, and then they could not remove usfrom our land.¹⁰

Such personal tales could be repeated endlessly: the threat and fear ofunemployment were crucial factors in the rapid rise in the NSDAP vote in 1930and the summer elections of 1932. The point here is not so much to reiteratethis familiar fact, but rather to point out that, unlike the 1929ers, members ofthe HJ1 were old enough to be consciously party to family discussions of suchmatters. This did not need to be a matter of serious political awareness; theexperience of unemployment or poverty or an atmosphere of worry and fear aboutdevelopments in the family home could suffice as ‘experiential grounding’ for asense of real change after 1933. These young people consciously registered thechanges experienced when Hitler came to power: they had personal experienceof the pre-1933 conditions which were in such strong contrast to the economicrecovery for which Hitler was to take the credit. Those born in the later Weimaryears, by contrast, grew up really only aware of the parameters of life in Hitler’sGermany. They were familiar with all the slogans and were exhaustively exposedto the propaganda with little chance of contrasting these with well-definedalternative 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 membersof families even when parents were of strongly different political views but notexcluded on ‘racial’ grounds). For those living among the conforming majority,the world of Nazi Germany appeared in some respects more ‘normal’ than it didfor 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 conditionswhich had preceded the supposed ‘return to order’, and hence the alleged needfor a ‘Fuhrer’ was perhaps less fervently felt among the 1929ers than amongmembers of the HJ1 generation (let alone the War Youth generation).¹¹

Members of the earlier HJ1 cohorts were then to become, on all the evidenceof opinion reports and incidents of antisemitic violence in the 1930s, and forwhatever combination of reasons, the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler’sregime in the peacetime years. Again and again SOPADE and other contemporaryreports emphasize this point. Of course there were many who kept their distancefrom 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 earlyyears of the Nazi regime, less great than it later became for the 1929ers, formost of whom membership from their tenth birthday was compulsory. And theactivities of the Nazi youth movement were also at first arguably more anodyne,less overtly militaristic and apparently more in line with the inherited traditionsof the youth movements which the Hitler Youth had so recently displaced.¹² Buteven at the more unpleasant and brutal end of the spectrum of Nazi mobilizationof youth, these cohorts appeared to be disproportionately enthusiastic. In thesupposedly ‘spontaneous’ incidents of antisemitic violence in the summer of1935, it was among teenagers that the NSDAP could find willing helpers in actsof physical brutality against individuals. In the infamous Kristallnacht of 1938,while large numbers of Germans for the first time evidenced real shame at theviolence that was being carried out in their name, it was again primarily youngpeople who were most visible and active in the scenes of violence against Jews.¹³The 1929ers, by contrast, were still children during these years. They perhapswitnessed violence, but they were more likely to have been accompanied by adisapproving 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 thesetwo sets of cohorts. After all, the males among the 1929ers are often also termedthe ‘air force auxiliary generation’ (Luftwaffenhelfer or Flakhelfergeneration): thosewho 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 theHJ1 generation who entered military service right at the very start of the war hadrather different experiences. In the early years of rapid military successes (anddespite the previous foreboding felt by many Germans as war loomed on thehorizon in the summer of 1939), large numbers of young Germans who had not


experienced the First World War but who had been exposed to an unremittingdiet of tales of heroism, honour and self-sacrifice in service of the nation, werevery keen to be able to participate and to gain military awards and honours. Oneof my HJ1 interviewees, Carsten K. (1924), recalls that ‘as youngsters we were socrazy, we thought the war would soon be over and we would not have been partof it!’ Seeing members of the class above them return home with war wounds andinsignia, Carsten and his class mates almost all joined up voluntarily—whichcost Carsten a family row and a cuff on the ear from his father, who in 1940 hadvery unwillingly to sign the papers for his still only sixteen-year-old son to enterthe army.

Views of the likely character of military combat had changed considerably forthose born just a year or two later, when reports from the Russian front andtales of the conditions (and sometimes also of the atrocities) in the occupiedeastern territories were filtering home. For many ordinary soldiers who personallywitnessed life in the ghettos of occupied Poland, however fleetingly, sight ofthe overcrowded masses of half-starved, disease-ridden and ragged members ofthe incarcerated Jewish communities generally only served to reinforce the racialprejudices, caricatures and stereotypes on which they had been brought up inthe old Reich.¹⁴ Similarly, the ‘racial fight’ against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ wasparticularly ideologically loaded, with personal experience of the ‘primitivity’ oflife 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, andserving generally rather closer to home—on average, at least in their initial sixmonths or so of service, young air force auxiliaries were only asked to serve ata maximum distance of 50 kilometres from their homes—the experience wasnot one to reinforce Nazi ideological prejudices. Naked fear of loss of theirown lives as the bombing raids and enemy troops closed in on the heartlandsof the Reich, and subordination to people whose authority was to some extentambiguous (particularly at the very end of the war), was accompanied by anapparent lack of hard-heartedness with respect to maltreatment of slave labourand concentration camp inmates, whose condition seems to have shockeda higher proportion of these teenagers in army uniform than it did thoseslightly 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 notthe experiences of the Nazi period were as distinctive with respect to a sharpgenerational break between those born before and after the mid-1920s as I havesuggested, the generational divides after 1945 were certainly massive, and alsorequire further exploration—since ‘generations’ are constructed as much by thelater contexts in which earlier experiences are seen as relevant as they are by theinitial experiences themselves. Conditions after 1945 were at least as significantin bringing these cohorts to prominence as were their experiences under Nazism.

192 Mary Fulbrook

DEATH, DIVISION AND POLITICAL DEMOGRAPHY

The early years after the war are, in most oral history accounts by East Germansold enough to have lived through and remembered this period, perceivedretrospectively as the ‘worst years’ of their lives—oddly, often even worse thanthe actual wartime years. (The only other period which vies for comparablestatus of ‘worst period’ is that of the years immediately following unification in1990, among East Germans of working age who had their first experience ofunemployment and existential worries about their future at this time.)¹⁶ Lookingat contemporary developments, it is not hard to see why. Fear of what mightoccur when the Russians finally invaded was already very widespread in thelater months of the war, and mass flight in front of the advancing Red Armypreceded the later expulsions of Germans from their homes east of the newpost-war Oder–Neisse border with Poland. Indeed, the joke was prevalent inthe last weeks of the war that one might as well enjoy the war now, for thepeace would be infinitely worse.¹⁷ The suicide rate went up dramatically in theweeks immediately before and after the end of hostilities in Germany, as thoseseverely compromised by their place in the Nazi regime feared reprisals, andothers, traumatized by the mass rapes of German women and girls by Russiansoldiers, felt the only ‘honourable’ way out was to take one’s own life. Forthose who by contrast sought to survive among the rubble of Hitler’s ThousandYear Reich, experiences of robbery, brutality and fear were everyday occurrencesalongside constant hunger, physical discomfort, grief, bereavement and anxietyabout 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 thatwhat they had thought was a secure world in which Germans were superior andassured of final victory had fallen apart, with Hitler’s overweening ambitions forthe ‘master race’ revealed as destructive delusions. Whether or not they had everbelieved in the Fuhrer, the vast majority of surviving Germans after the war wereseverely disorientated, and often both physically and emotionally scarred, bywhat the Nazi regime had done to them. And for those who had been victims ofthe Nazi regime, whether on ‘racial’ or political grounds, the situation—despitea genuine sense of liberation, rather than defeat—was in many respects infinitelyworse. They had lost not merely possessions, homes, livelihoods, years of theirlives, but also virtually their entire families, communities and friendship groups.After the traumas of death camps, torture and slave labour, physically andemotionally broken, it was much harder to try to ‘pick up the pieces’ or embarkon a new life.

The terror and traumas of the early occupation period, when many cities werein ruins, transport was severely disrupted or non-existent, refugees and expelleesvied for scarce medical attention, food and shelter, wounded soldiers sought


to return home or families worried about those still missing or imprisoned,gradually subsided as some semblance of at least organizational ‘normality’ underpost-war conditions of occupation set in. Food proved to be a continuingproblem, with mass hunger, near-famine conditions, and continuing rationingand a flourishing black market in the following years. Added to this werethe constraints and uncertainties of a volatile political situation, in which itbecame increasingly clear that the early post-war pretence of party pluralism wasgiving way to ever greater communist control, under the guise of the SocialistUnity Party or SED. Formed out of a forcible merger between the GermanCommunist Party and the Social Democratic Party in 1946, the SED wasincreasingly dominated by the Moscow faction of the communists, and from1948 became a Stalinist ‘Party of a New Type’. With the Marshall Plan andcurrency reform in the Western zones in 1948, and the formal foundation of theGDR in response to the foundation of the Western Federal Republic of Germanyin 1949, alternative potential futures for post-war Germany were progressivelyreduced. West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s rejection in 1952 of the‘Stalin Notes’ proposing reunification of a neutral Germany, the East Germanstrengthening of the inner-German border with a 5-kilometre exclusion zone inMay 1952, and the forcible suppression of the 1953 June Uprising with Westernfailure to intervene in support of the demonstrators, all served to underlinethe foundation of a fortified, repressive communist state in the Soviet Zone ofOccupation and subsequent GDR.

Given all this, what made anyone become a supporter of the new communiststate? How did the age-related experiences of various generations differ duringthis early period? To what extent were earlier experiences of the Nazi periodrelevant to the ways in which members of different cohorts progressed throughthese crucial transitional years?

If the differences between the 1929ers and those born a few years before themare partly rooted in experiences of Nazism, an added and truly significant factorexplaining the later disproportionate prominence of the 1929ers becomes veryclear when one considers differential birth rates in the early twentieth centuryand comparative survival rates in the Second World War. Low birth rates duringand in the years immediately following the First World War were compoundedby high mortality rates of precisely these birth cohorts in the Second WorldWar. There were simply far fewer adult males aged between 30 and 40 in themid-1950s than there were females, or younger or older males. The demographictree was thus extremely lopsided. Mirroring as it does the distribution of agecohorts represented in Wer war Wer, this goes a long way to explaining the highvisibility of the 1929ers compared to preceding cohorts—though it does littleor nothing to explain their prominence in contrast to those born a few yearslater. Nor does it explain the disproportionate levels of political commitment ofthis cohort among the wider population, in contrast to both older and youngercohorts.

194 Mary Fulbrook

Additionally, of course, the 1929ers were far less likely to have been tainted bypositions 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 acomparison, not between the 1929ers and those just a few years older (HJ1), butrather with those twenty or so years older, what might have been the generation ofthe parents of the 1929ers. For it was among the cohorts born in the first decade ofthe twentieth century, the ‘War Youth generation’ (Kreigsjugendgeneration), thatdisproportionate numbers of the key ‘carriers’ of the Third Reich were drawn,as well as those hordes of careerists and opportunists who experienced a rapidupward social mobility through the ranks of party and party-state. Whatevertheir later professions of innocence, of having only outwardly conformed, ofhaving retained an inner distance from the regime, while being too fearful oropportunistic to step out of line, it was this War Youth generation who had madethemselves available for mobilization in middle ranks of the state and civilianadministration in the 1930s and early 1940s, and who had, by virtue of the rolesthey played as cogs in the Nazi system, made the functioning of the murderousregime possible. In the Western Federal Republic of Germany many of thesepeople made very successful careers with rapid promotions through the ranksof the new civil service and democratic political system, as well as sustainingpositions 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 toa greater extent than has been appreciated until recently, at least in the key areasof civilian administration and economic control, the more radical transformationto a new socio-economic and political system brought with it a concomitantmore radical pattern of denazification and appointment of untrained but alsopolitically untainted young people. The 1929ers were the natural beneficiaries ofthe 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—sometimesin the space of only six weeks or so—in order to place non-Nazis in front ofschoolchildren with the greatest possible speed. One could also point to the waysin which ordinary workers rapidly took on positions of authority and responsi-bility in the newly state-controlled factories or VEBs, whose former owners andmanagers had been ousted or sidelined in the processes of denazification andnationalization. One such example is Wolfgang Jeschke, interviewed by LutzNiethammer in the 1987 oral history project, who experienced an extraordinarilyrapid rise with both responsibility for training apprentices in the factory and aplace in local politics; his biography is typical of many.¹⁸ Thus the unprecedentedwealth of new opportunities for very rapid promotion for those who were onthe brink of young adulthood at the time of foundation of the GDR could go aconsiderable way to explaining their prominence throughout its history.

But this alone still does not go quite far enough, for a number of reasons. Firstof all, the early transformations were highly volatile. We should not take the


shifting of the patterns in the kaleidoscope in the first post-war years as finallysettling the fixed social mosaic of the later decades. Many former Nazis, forexample, were able to return to their old jobs in education or industry followingrelatively short periods out of grace. Similarly, many young people were far fromhappy with the new opportunities offered to them in the East compared tothose in the West. If the brute facts of mortality in war had winnowed out thegenerations to some degree, the political demography of the post-war years seemsto have provided the opportunity for political and economic selections.

It is instructive in this connection to look at the—not entirely reli-able—refugee statistics in the 1950s, before the border to West Berlin wasclosed in 1961 (see Tables 11.1 and 11.2). In the period 1953 to 1960, peopleaged between 21 and 30 formed 20.6% of the total number of refugees from Eastto West, a full 50% more than their percentage in the West German populationat that time (13%).¹⁹ A similar disproportionate number of refugees is foundamong those slightly younger, too: people aged 14 to 20 constituted 21.1% of thetotal refugee statistics, compared to 11.5% of the total West German populationat the time. Thus young people aged 14 to 29 during these years made up a totalof slightly over two-fifths (41.7%) of those fleeing the GDR, as compared witha 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 theGDR 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 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)

65 and above 13.2 5.4 10.545–65 28.4 18.4 26.725–45 21.9 25.9 25.6Under 25 36.5 50.3 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 Refugees from SBZ/GDR FRG population

Under 14 15.9 19.914–20 21.1 11.521–29 20.6 13.030–39 12.5 13.040–49 11.1 13.650–64 12.2 18.765+ 6.6 10.2Total 100 100

196 Mary Fulbrook

under 25. The predominantly young refugees from the East thus made somesmall but not entirely insignificant contribution to the rejuvenation of the WestGerman demographic structure.

The breakdown by average ages over a period of years is interesting for thelight shed on perceptions of opportunities among young people in the GDR inthe 1950s, but it is not quite precise enough for the kind of generational analysis Iam attempting here. If we look at the figures another way, it means that for thosefleeing in 1953, the group of 21–29-year-olds encompasses the birth cohorts of1924 to 1932 (‘1929ers’), while for those fleeing in 1960, the by now 21–29-year-olds are the birth cohorts of 1931 to 1939 (i.e. largely the people born inthe Third Reich, not the 1929ers). This generational group is of course alsopartially included in the figures for the 14–20-year-olds (who were the cohortsof 1933–1939 in 1953 and 1940–1946 by 1960). The 30–39-year-olds wouldhave been, in 1953, the cohorts of 1914–1923 (HJ1) and in 1960 the cohortsof 1921–1930 (HJ1 and 1929ers). They formed 12.5% of total refugees, and13% of the total population of the GDR at this time; their flight was thereforeentirely ‘average’, as expected in view of their percentage of the population.

Putting these figures together, it would seem that, while young people generallyformed a higher than average percentage of refugees from East to West in the1950s, it is likely that the ranks fleeing westwards were particularly swollen bythose born in the Third Reich, as compared to preceding cohorts. In otherwords: this confirms the view that those born in the period after Hitler cameto power were far more disaffected with the new communist regime than werethose just a few years older. But at the same time, those in the older cohorts whosaw better prospects in the West also took the opportunity to flee, thus perhapsfurther concentrating the pool of those willing to try to make a new life in theGDR, with whatever compromises that might involve. It is very difficult to bemore precise on the basis of these figures, but clearly the escape route westwardswas an important one reducing the proportions of committed anti-communistsremaining in the GDR. It was also very closely related to social policies whichaffected some social groups more adversely than others.

The ‘founding fathers’ of the GDR were largely members of the classic ‘FrontGeneration’, those who had been adults at the time of the First World War, witha small and dedicated group drawn from the War Youth generation of youngercommunists, including Erich Honecker, in their wake. In their selection mecha-nisms for vacant positions of responsibility with some political relevance—evenif only at the level of the factory, school or local government—they appearto have jumped over the Nazi carrier generations (more in some areas thanothers, and always with exceptions), preferring the young and untainted. Thoseof these younger cohorts who were of the appropriate social backgrounds (prefer-ably peasant or working class) and/or politically willing to go along with thenew system and conform to its outward constraints and demands (whetheror not they were positively committed to the new regime) thus had greatly


enhanced opportunities for rapid upward mobility. Given the post-war labourshortages, policies to allow women to combine motherhood and career were alsoparticularly important. Opportunities for further education and training, paidfor by the state, were massively important not only for women in the 1950s, butalso often for young males returning from periods as prisoners of war, who hadexperienced disrupted schooling as teenagers in the closing stages of the war andwere now able to catch up as young adults.

These who did not fall into the preferred social and political categories stillhad, until 1961, the possibility of escape to the West—a possibility that wasforeclosed to later cohorts of young East Germans. While the history of the flightwestwards of different social groups needs to be explored in greater detail, it isstriking that, for example, members of the landed upper classes (both higher andlower aristocracy) were very early in their escape westwards, often abandoningtheir ancestral homes and rescuing their most precious possessions well before theofficial expropriation in the land reform of autumn 1945. Other social groupswho were disadvantaged by communist socio-economic reforms took longer todisplace the family futures: doctors, for example, often sent their children topursue university studies in the West during the 1950s while staying on in theGDR where they were themselves treated to relatively high salaries at this time.

The differential birth and mortality rates in the two world wars, and theenhanced opportunities arising from the combination of political considerations,socio-economic revolution and westward emigration patterns, may go some wayto explaining both the prominence of the 1929ers in comparison to previousgenerational groups, and also the tendency of many of them to be positivesupporters of the GDR in later years—although this is a more complex point towhich we shall return in a moment. But they do little to explain the differencesbetween 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 childrenat its end. They too were untainted by participation in the structures of powerof Nazi Germany; and, given the relatively high turnover of functionaries as wellas constant labour shortages of the early years, one would have thought that atleast the cohorts born in the 1930s would have ended up with a similar profile tothose of the 1929ers. But they did not. On all analyses—whether at the level ofWer war Wer, or in the broader survey of attitudes among East Germans, or inoral history interviews—they appear to have been far less committed politicallyand ideologically to the new regime, and far more likely to have retained theirreligious beliefs and practices in the atheist state of the GDR. In so far as thesecohorts did gain mention in Wer war Wer they were far more likely to haveacquired a degree of fame for their activities as theologians, writers, musicians orin other areas which may be broadly subsumed under the heading of ‘culture’,than as functionaries in the apparatus of party, state, economy and securityservice. Something very different psychologically and emotionally appears tohave 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 opportunitiesoffered to the succeeding cohorts, but also at the ways in which these weresubjectively perceived, experienced and later remembered, or at least selectivelyreconstructed and given significance and meaning under later circumstances.And we need to do this not purely as an exercise in the analysis of ‘collectivememories’ or ‘discourse’, but with a view to age-specific life-stage experiences.

OPPORTUNITIES, EXPERIENCESAND INTERPRETATIONS

One person’s ‘opportunity’ is another person’s nightmare. Rising up from theshop-floor to a position of management, with some political functions alongsidea degree of responsibility for economic productivity, and associated time-consuming engagement in the social and educational activities of the workers’collective, is not everyone’s idea of ‘upward mobility’. Some highly qualifiedEast Germans who remained in and even committed to the GDR indeed chosequite consciously to remain at a lower level in their workplace than they mighthave done, in order precisely not to have to join the SED or be prevented fromcontacts with close relatives who had fled to the West.²⁰ Clearly, there is a filter ofperception, expectations and aspirations, through which any notion of structuralopportunities has to be sieved. The consequences of political demography andsocio-economic transformation are as much cultural and psychological as they arestructural. To seek to make a distinction between different levels of explanationis not to override the question of their inevitable interrelationships: the levels ofcultural meanings and individual understandings are as important as the widercurrents of history in which people are formed and in which they seek to makethe best lives they can, under often exceedingly difficult circumstances.

What then of the question of ‘conversion’ experiences? What emerges ifone looks for evidence of people who had been socialized under Nazismbeing transformed into committed communists in some way? The officiallyfostered literary trope is certainly one of a dramatic moment of conversionthrough contact with an older, inspirational representative of the workers’movement. The fostering of the Thalmann cult in the ‘anti-fascist state’, withubiquitous Thalmann statues, school and street-names, cultic centres (particularlyin the former concentration camp and memorial centre of Buchenwald, whereThalmann had been martyred by the Nazis), and associated mass youth movementof the Ernst-Thalmann pioneers, was designed to universalize the possibility ofconversion experiences for those not fortunate enough to have met an inspirationalproselytizer in person. The evidence for everyday conversions—or rather, thelack of such experiences—is however generally rather more mundane. Giventhe less anguished mode of discourse about the Nazi past in the GDR than inthe West, with its Angst-ridden culture of public shame, East German 1929ers


appear to have had fewer reservations about talking about their participation inthe Nazi system than did their West German counterparts. (The most recent caseof a belated revelation in the West is of course that of Gunter Grass, who perhapsexemplifies the extremes of some aspects of the West German obsession with‘overcoming the past’.) Analysis of the ways in which ordinary East Germanstell their life stories suggests that, unlike many West Germans, they did notfeel the need to demonstrate that they had ‘always been against Nazism’ (immerdagegen) or to profess an alleged innocence which they had, in any event, beengranted officially by the GDR’s official view of the character of fascism as rootedin ‘imperialist monopoly capitalism’, the products of Junkers and big capitalistsrather than the responsibility of ordinary workers and peasants.²¹ But nor dothey seem to have corroborated the pattern of hoped-for ideological conversions.

Instead, what we have in most accounts, both on the evidence of diary entriesand letters at the time, and in later ‘ego-documents’ such as memoirs and oralhistory interviews, is a pattern of what can best be described as a ‘muddlingthrough’ of the early post-war years, and in a significant majority of cases a patternof shifting political allegiances on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds.Gunther E., for example, describes the way in which he sought to get out ofAmerican imprisonment at the end of the war.²² Discovering that there weresevere restrictions on those wishing to be released who would have to cross inter-zonal boundaries to reach the Soviet zone of occupation, he changed his addressto that of a friend in the West. He then used this as a temporary halting stationon his way back to his family who were in the Soviet zone. Similar stories are toldagain and again of ways in which people sought to cross the zonal boundaries andreconvene with their relatives. The next priorities were food and employment,and again, both contemporary records and later accounts reiterate the patternof day-to-day compromise, often later emplotted as tales of outwitting thosein authority, getting around restrictions by some quick-witted thinking, heroicsurvival against all the odds in a very difficult set of circumstances: emplotmentof 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 distanceis generally conveyed between the consciously acting self, on the one hand,and outward behaviour in response to the constraints and demands of thepolitical 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 resultingfrom individual motives’.²⁴ What motives come into play are generally those ofpersonal and familial survival, above all else.

However, over the course of time those who stayed and played the game appearto have been affected in several ways by active participation in the emergentcommunist system. For one thing, once sucked into the system, they were caughtup 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 andexplore other views, but also the necessary training in learning and repeating therelevant 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 lessavuncular manner to young people by their older mentors, while there was thehope that the next generation would be the inspirational carriers and transmittersof the Party cause, the great hope for the future, if treated appropriately at animpressionable age. At least some of those who had been ordered around in theHitler 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 thismore difficult.²⁵ There was also, to a degree which is arguably underestimated byhistorians, a sense of genuine excitement and enthusiasm for the building up of anew Germany: the obvious enthusiasm of young people marching and singing inthe ‘First Youth Meeting in Germany’ (1. Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend ) in Berlinin May 1950 was not merely orchestrated by the apparatchiks. The emphasis onworld peace was one which was heartfelt by many at this point, amidst the ruinsa mere five years after the end of the war.²⁶

But the question of ideological conversion is perhaps best seen in terms oflearning to live according to the rules of the new system, which increasinglyfostered a habit of thinking about one’s life not in the patterns typical in theWest—an individual making personal ‘choices’—but rather in the more collec-tivist, ‘top-down’ approach characteristic of political and religious movementsacross the spectrum of belief systems, in terms of the self as a small cog beingmobilized from above in service of a greater cause. Thus one could be availablefor ‘being moved’ physically, from one location to another to carry out new partyduties; or, politically and socially, from one duty to another. To opt out, oncein, 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 alsoto remember that lives are not entirely made up of what historians seek toselect out as significant developments. The notion of ‘private lives’ is somewhatmisleading—family structures, notions of romantic love or arranged marriagesor pragmatic partnerships, decisions over numbers of children, availability oftypes of childcare, varieties of housing and so on are inevitably and always shapedby specific historical circumstances and traditions. But, given this caveat, thereis an important point to be made about the ways in which people’s intimatelives and relationships develop within certain circumstances, and yet are generallysubjectively experienced as running on separate tracks, in some sense disassociatedfrom wider historical developments, unless the latter adversely impinge in such away as to be inescapably connected (as in times of war). Of particular significancein the current context is the question of experiences of family life, and the highvalue attached by a majority of East Germans to the possibility of combiningfulfilling family lives with a degree of satisfaction in work. The norms which


constrained behaviour in the system which developed in the GDR were, overa period of time, gradually accepted as ‘normal’, if uncomfortable; and peoplewere strongly aware of the likely penalties for transgression of the norms.

This was increasingly true, in changing ways, over the entire period of theGDR’s history, until, in 1989, under radically altered external conditions peopleslowly acquired the courage to mount collective challenges to SED authorityand ultimately to bring it down. Widespread conformity arose as a resultof a complex, pragmatic combination of responses to the GDR. There weremany aspects of GDR society that a majority of East Germans later regrettedlosing, particularly what they saw as a very strong sense of community andtogetherness, as well as the capacity to combine fulfilment in family life withsatisfaction in work and a sense of basic, if always modest, economic security,despite the obvious restrictions on the fundamental human rights of freedom ofmovement, freedom of association and freedom of speech. What, then, explainsthe 1929ers’ apparently more positive commitment to the communist projectin comparison with the largely pragmatic, ambivalent, multifaceted and oftengrumbling conformity of the slightly younger cohorts born during the ThirdReich? After all, these cohorts were, in demographic terms, even more numerousthan the 1929ers, products as they were of the ‘mini baby boom’ of the later1930s, and, even if subjected to bombing raids on the home front, entirelyspared from the risk of mortality in active combat. Moreover, the opportunitiesavailable for upward social mobility in the post-war years of labour shortage wereno less for those just a few years younger than they were for the 1929ers, giventhe constant haemorrhaging of skilled labour to the West and the educationaland professional support for those from disadvantaged backgrounds which wassuch a prime theme of educational policies in the 1950s, when those born in thepeace-time years of the Third Reich came to young adulthood. Institutions suchas the Arbeiter- und Bauern-Fakultaten, policies to support women, and so on,were no less relevant to someone born in the mid-1930s than to a slightly oldercompatriot 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 generationwho were ‘children of the Third Reich’.²⁸

Here perhaps the question of the coincidence of biological age, social life-stageand broader historical developments may help to provide at least a partial andpreliminary clue.

Best times and worst times are asymmetrical. ‘Worst times’ are generally thoseof 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 byarguably the majority of Germans who lived through this period, irrespective ofage: whether one is four, fourteen, forty or eighty years old, hunger is hungerand may lead to the diseases of malnutrition, even starvation; fear and worry andbereavement are all painful, at whatever age. But curiously, ‘best times’ do tendto 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 birthof children, good times with a young family—if the economic conditions aresecure. (And actually there is a very strong tendency for people to engage in birthcontrol in periods of high economic uncertainty: for example, the birth rate ineastern Germany halved in the two years following unification in 1990.) Thecoincidence of social life-stage and historical conditions is perhaps what is crucialfor explaining the differences in attitudes towards the GDR between the 1929ersand those coming both before and after them.

The months and early years after the war were periods of mass trauma. Rapesof women, robberies, near or actual starvation, political constraints and fear aboutthe future were widespread experiences, often compounded by class- or milieu-specific phenomena: the expropriation of large estates, of factory owners, thecontinued squeezing of private enterprise, the recasting of professional positions,all made this a period of major upheaval and uncertainty. But for those whowere young adults at the time, and available for mobilization in service of thenew cause, the relative normalization of the conditions of daily life in the 1950scoincided, in their private lives, with what was often explicitly seen as the ‘makingof 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 ofthe early, pioneering days in the socialist new town of Stalinstadt, later renamedEisenhuttenstadt) was experientially rooted in a sense of making new lives, bothliterally and metaphorically, in the small circle of the family.²⁹ And the joysand pleasures of partnership and parenthood lent a rosier emotional glow to theconditions in which these developments took place. In narrated life histories, theheroism of battling through in the transitional weeks and months of war’s endand uncertain peace was followed by the happier tones of a sense of a return tohealth and well-being, both physical and emotional, in the 1950s. Although therewas in this decade no ‘normalization’ in the GDR comparable to that associatedwith the ‘economic miracle’ in the West, there were, in the private accountsof at least the 1929ers’ generation, some echoes of this experience.³⁰ It is thesedeeply felt, personal life-stage related experiences which perhaps best explainthe continuing sense among members of this generation that the GDR ‘gavethem new life chances’. In return, they sustained a high degree of commitmentto the wider project of GDR society—accompanied, in the later Honeckeryears, by a growing sense of frustration at the economic decline and politicalmismanagement of the state in which they had made their lives.

CONCLUSIONS

Explanations of the peculiarities of the 1929ers, or the transition of the ‘secondHitler Youth generation’ to becoming staunch supporters of the GDR, will


necessarily need a complex, multi-faceted approach, taking into account boththe distinctive, life-stage related experiences of this generation before and after1945, and the interpretive frameworks through which they later sought to ‘makesense’ of their lives.

Perhaps those 1929ers who subsequently became committed to the GDRwere the cohorts who were only partially convinced of or emotionally boundto Nazism in the first place.³¹ As young people, the 1929ers arguably had adistinctive pattern of exposure to Nazism, without the prior experiences thatpredisposed the First Hitler Youth generation and the War Youth generationthat they ‘needed a Fuhrer’ 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 personallyexperienced the prior problems to which Hitler was the supposed ‘solution’; andthey experienced the most brutal outcomes of this ‘solution’ without, perhaps,going through the processes of emotional hardening, ideological drenchingand brutalization in warfare to which cohorts only a few years older wereexposed (although the differential impact of participation in different theatresand periods of war requires far more detailed exploration, as do gendered andclass differences in experience). On balance, however, one might conclude that,despite socialization under Nazi auspices, the 1929ers did not develop as fullor emotively laden inner commitment to the Fuhrer state as did their oldercompatriots. There was concomitantly less by way of ideological and experientialbaggage to be shaken off after the war, in terms of their own inner states, quiteirrespective of external political considerations about degrees to which peoplewere politically tainted.

After 1945, these cohorts were the indubitably ‘untainted’. It is at thispoint that significance of age and life-stage becomes most relevant for seizingnew opportunities in a radically new polity. At the same time, structuralsieving mechanisms operated. These were in part ‘negative’: political and socialexclusions, as well as the disproportionate westwards emigration of the mostdisaffected and disadvantaged in the new system. They were also ‘positive’, orat least proactive: once an individual had become caught up in a particularset of tracks, and was on a path of politically fostered or politically relevantupward mobility, there were psychological, social, economic and political waysof keeping the individual within a system of norms and on predefined tracksfrom which it was difficult or problematic to escape. Weber’s notion of the needto conform with the expectations of the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism without innerPuritan convictions arguably had its counterpart in the constraints of living in acommunist system without ideological conversion.

Finally, significance must be attached to the relationships between age-relatedlife-stages with respect to the post-war reconstruction of private lives and familyformation. The SED policies of fostering women, giving new life chances topreviously under-privileged groups, and offering educational opportunities to

204 Mary Fulbrook

those who had never previously had such aspirations or expectations, paid off interms of varying degrees of life-long loyalty and commitment. Such experienceshad, however, to be mapped onto or incorporated within the interpretiveframeworks of what was held to be authentic ‘autobiographical memory’ to beemotionally compelling.

To say all this is not to posit the view that the GDR was in any way carriedon a wave of popular support, let alone mass enthusiasm. It was and remained adictatorship founded on force and sustained in the era of Cold War competitiononly by the effective incarceration of a largely unwilling population behind theWall. But it does go some small way to illuminate the extraordinary, generationallydistinct patterns of political commitment and disaffection, and casts some lighton contemporary patterns of nostalgia for the world East Germans have lost.The turning-point of 1989–90 of course brought with it new opportunities, butalso mass unemployment and existential fears among many East Germans—andit coincided with early retirement for many 1929ers. Unification with the Westwas seen as offering new possibilities for travel for those with the means, and newchances to explore and develop—but it was also effectively the symbolizationof a dashing of a lifetime’s work for economic security and peace, and thedenunciation of the GDR version of happiness as the combination of fulfilmentin personal lives as well as at work—which for this generation, above all, seemedto have been the epitome of their aspirations. Unification coincided with old age,with all the attendant emotional and physical challenges. While few East Germanstoday 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 tomake, however unwillingly at times, to want to renounce its legacies entirely.

Notes

1This chapter expresses some ideas and findings which are more extensively explored ina book on German generations under Nazism and communism (Oxford, 2010). I amextremely grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting this research through thegrant of a three-year Major Research Fellowship.

2My approach to generations differs in these respects from the ‘classic’ definition of KarlMannheim, whom I do not follow here.

3For some sense of these debates, see for example, Michael Wildt, Generation desUnbedingten (Hamburg, 2002); Richard Bessel, ‘The ‘‘Front Generation’’ and thePolitics of Weimar Germany’, in Mark Roseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict: YouthRevolt and Generation Formation in Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge, 1995), 121–36.

4See my analysis in ‘Generationen und Kohorten in der DDR: Protagonisten undWidersacher des DDR-Systems aus der Perspektive biographischer Daten’, in AnnegretSchule, Thomas Ahbe and Rainer Gries (eds.), Die DDR aus generationengeschichtlicherPerspektive: Eine Inventur (Leipzig, 2005).


5Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato and Dorothee Wierling, Die volkseigeneErfahrung (Berlin, 1991).

6I am very grateful to Silvia Dallinger for carrying out the bulk of the questionnaireadministration and oral history interviews, to Esther von Richthofen and Angela Brockfor additional research assistance, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Councilfor 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’.

7A 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 Yorkand Oxford, 2009).

8Among 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’, inRoseman (ed.), Generations in Conflict, 210–26; Christina von Hodenberg, ‘PolitischeGenerationen und massenmediale Offentlichkeit: Das Beispiel der ‘‘45er’’ in derBundesrepublik’, in Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (eds.), Generationen: Zur Relevanzeines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg, 2005), 266–94.

9See the very early analysis, which is rather vague on the precise years groups understudy, in Helmut Schelsky, Die skeptische Generation (Dusseldorf and Cologne, 1957).

10Interview with Amalie H., 2005. All interviewees’ names have been changed, to protectanonymity. I have tended to give the older interviewees first names at or near the startof the alphabet, and younger ones names towards the end of the alphabet. Translationsare my own.

11These remarks, which are partially based on a reading of unpublished autobiographicalessays, obviously require far more by way of discussion of the available evidence thancan be included here. See also Rolf Schorken, Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich: DieEntstehung eines politischen Bewußtseins (Stuttgart, 1985), 13–17.

12See generally Michael Kater, The Hitler Youth (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).13See for example Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands

(SOPADE) 1934–1940 (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), vol. 1.2, May–June 1934,117–18; Bernd Stover, Berichte uber die Lage in Deutschland: Die Meldungen derGruppe Neu Beginnen aus dem Dritten Reich 1933–1936 (Bonn, 1996), 65–6; DavidBankier, The Germans and the Final Solution under Nazism (Oxford, 1992), 86. Seealso my fuller discussion of this in ‘Changing States, Changing Selves: Violence andSocial 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).

14See for example the excerpts from soldiers’ letters home in Walter Manoschek (ed.), ‘Esgibt nur eines fur das Judentum: Vernichtung’: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen1939–1944 (Hamburg, 1995).

15See for example the letter of a young Luftwaffenhelfer (air force auxiliary) who had onlyrecently been confirmed and was the only one in this collection to register any explicitmoral scruples or concerns about the incompatibility of Christian teachings and Naziracist practices, in Manoschek, ‘Es gibt nur eines fur das Judentum: Vernichtung ’, 80.

206 Mary Fulbrook

16For further details see my chapter in Fulbrook (ed.), Power and Society in the GDR.17See for example Ursula von Kardorff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen 1942 bis 1945, ed. Peter

Hartl (Munich, 1994).18Niethammer et al., Volkseigene Erfahrung, 450–77.19Figures and tables taken from Volker Ackermann, Der ‘echte’ Fluchtling: Deutsche

Vertriebene und Fluchtlinge aus der DDR 1945–1961, Studien zur MigrationsforschungHrsg. Klaus Bade, 1 (Osnabruck, 1995), 292–3.

20For example, Arist E., interviewed for Behind the Wall: ‘Perfectly Normal Lives’ in theGDR? (MacayaFilm, 2007). Again, I would like to express my gratitude to the Artsand Humanities Research Council for generously sponsoring the production of thisfilm, which includes a number of representative interviews with East Germans, relatedto the ‘Normalisation of Rule’ research project.

21There is a significant literature on patterns of life-story telling which cannot beentered into here. There are clearly also inverse correlations between the degrees ofreal complicity in the system of terror and the level of ‘forgetting’ the details in laterlife: while those who had suffered were often plagued by nightmarish memories theywould have liked to suppress, those who later stood accused of having caused sufferingfrequently evaded being brought to trial by virtue of extraordinarily widespread‘selective amnesia’ among the network of colleagues in civilian administration andthe 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 actuallydone—anything at all.

22Interview with Gunter E. (1928), summer 2005. See also Niethammer et al., VolkseigeneErfahrung.

23There are also comparable variations with respect to the very different experiences ofgroups of Jewish survivors; for example, the differences in stories emphasizing Jewish‘victimhood’, or ‘strength and resistance’ during the Third Reich. These questionscannot be considered further in this context.

24This is a key theoretical distinction which I am developing at more length in the bookto which this research relates.

25As suggested, for example, by the remarks on her husband made by Amalie H. (born1922), interviewed in 2005. Her husband, a former SPD member, was for a few yearsin the early GDR a member of the SED and participated in party training schools andideological work, but both found this difficult to square with what they perceived asthe realities of the situation.

26Cf. again the interview with Gunther E., 2005.27See for example the discussion of his own career in Manfred Uschner, Die zweite Etage:

Funktionsweise eines Machtapparates (Berlin, 1995).28For 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 stillan open question as to whether the undoubted stagnation of the class structure,and the associated ‘mobility blockages’, really had the emotional impact posited by


Western researchers, who may think of ‘careers’ in very different terms than EastGermans thought of ‘work’. This question requires further, anthropologically sensitive,exploration.

29See for example the interview extracts in Dagmar Semmelmann, ‘Neue HeimatStalinstadt: Eine Collage aus Interviews’, in Evemarie Badstubner (ed.), Befremdlichanders: Leben in der DDR (Berlin, 2000).

30On normalization in post-war West Germany and western Europe, see for example:Hanna Schissler, ‘ ‘‘Normalization’’ as Project: Some thoughts on Gender Relationsin West Germany during the 1950s’ and Lutz Niethammer, ‘ ‘‘Normalization’’ inthe 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 afterDeath: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s(Cambridge, 2003).

31See for a suggestive discussion Rolf Schorken, Luftwaffenhelfer und Drittes Reich: DieEntstehung eines politischen Bewußtseins (Stuttgart, 1985), 23ff. The evidence in thisbook is however not very conclusive for a number of methodological reasons.

12Tacit Minimal Consensus: The AlwaysPrecarious East German Dictatorship

Thomas Lindenberger

THE GDR — A COLD WAR IMPOSITION

Among the communist dictatorships newly erected under Soviet auspices after1945 the GDR stood out because of a double claim to be exceptional. To beginwith, it was a polity which could never claim to represent the one and onlynation state of the people inhabiting it. On the contrary, it was the productof the partition of a nation and its society and their splitting up into twostates competing for the legitimate right to represent the German nation, orwhat had remained of it, after the self-inflicted catastrophe of genocide and theSecond World War.¹ At the same time, the late SED state could ‘claim’ to havecome closest to realizing the blueprint of a socialist people’s state² accordingto Marxist-Leninist dogma, probably sharing this lead position with the CSSR[Czechoslovakia]. It had the strongest economy, providing its citizens with thehighest level of affluence among the states of the Comecon. But at the same timeit was the least sovereign in terms of national autonomy, hosting a foreign armyof 500,000 and serving as the strategic glacis area in the worst-case scenariosof its power centre, the Soviet Union. In the case of the GDR, it was not justnon-war and thereby the survival of the people inhabiting the country whichwas safeguarded by atomic deterrence, but the very existence of the countryitself. The unpopularity of communist rulers in any country set aside, it wasthis predicament which rendered the legitimacy of the East German dictatorshipprecarious in an exceptional way.

Although the polity ruled by the SED seemed to consolidate itself after theconstruction of the Berlin Wall and in particular during the era of detente,it should not be forgotten that this could take place only on the basis ofsystematic and arbitrary application of physical violence denying guarantees oflegal procedure and fair trial. Inside the GDR, this repressive state violence wasbasically 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 alsoextra-judiciary work camps for youth), where the sparse and always precariousrights of a GDR citizen were respected the least by administrators of stateauthority. Both sites of state violence were to some extent ‘extraterritorial’ toEast German everyday life, which could, therefore, acquire an air of relativepeacefulness, modest affluence and calculability (to avoid the misleading termof ‘normality’)—at least with hindsight and in comparison with the ‘ColdCivil War’ atmosphere during the era of power acquisition in the late 1940sand early 1950s. Far from ‘believing’ in the promises and justifications oftheir rulers, most GDR citizens had learned over the decades to make thebest of the given situation, that is playing to the rules of this conflict-avoidingarrangement within their living world while being well aware of the limitsimposed on it by the aforementioned institutions of repression and physical stateviolence.³

STAGED CONSENSUS AND THE (IR)RELEVANCEOF DISSIDENCE AND OPPOSITION

The communist project was based on the values of egalitarian rationalismcombined with a highly exclusive avant-garde role of the Communist Partyas the only possible way to realize it in practice. To moderate this obviousand fundamental incoherence of communist ideology, constant producing andreaffirming of consensus between rulers and ruled in an ostentatious way becamea core element of communist self-legitimation and practice of domination. Stagedpseudo-elections, the confession-like rituals of critique and self-critique, carefullyorchestrated public debates about the programme of the party, demonstrationsand festivals solemnly staging and thereby ‘proving’ the indissoluble unity ofleaders and masses, but also the successful self-imposition of ideological limits ondiscussions in contexts of professional search for truth among intellectuals—seenfrom the party’s point of view, all these ritualistic practices reconfirmed again andagain its own historic mission, its ultimate monopoly of truth, and the futilityof attempts by ‘negative’ and ‘unclear’ elements to question the very sense anddirectionality of the communist project.

Seen from the perspective of the ruled or from a standpoint outside ofcommunist ideology, it was evident that these practices of staging and reaffirmingconsensus could not be taken at face value. Even the communist leaders themselvescould not trust them as a sole source of loyalty, which is one of the reasonsthey invested so many resources in secret policing, aimed both at liquidatingconscious resistance against their claims on power and truth and also at gatheringknowledge about attitudes and opinions remaining inarticulate in the realmof staged consensus. On the other hand, historical enquiry must not dismissthese rituals as hollow manifestations of fictitious claims, since their material

210 Thomas Lindenberger

reality, though dependent on the threat of coercive violence, left its markson the minds and experience of all participants involved, believers or not.⁴Read against the grain, practices of staged consensus disclose behind-the-scenesstories of inclusion and exclusion, careful arrangements about limited licence andcompromises, always motivated by the paramount goal on the part of the partyto avoid at all costs spontaneity and heterogeneity, even if these could have attimes supported the tenets of the party line.

In the Eastern bloc, the nature and importance of continuous ideologicaldissent or dissidence and eventual emergence of oppositional politics against theCommunist Party state varied considerably from nation to nation, depending onspecific historical circumstances. In the case of the late GDR it can be assumedthat it was relatively weak and decidedly much less anti-socialist in comparisonto the two classical homesteads of anti-totalitarian resistance, namely Poland andHungary, which were to some extent similar to the GDR in terms of socio-economic structure and a pre-communist experience with modern state-building.One of the salient features of the East German dictatorship consisted in thecontinuous rift between the working class and the large layer of the academicallytrained service class. As a consequence of the lack of belief in the legitimacy ofcommunism which had become evident during the popular uprising in June1953, workers traded their practical loyalty to the communist leadership againstan ever more elaborated system of material gratifications and a substantial sayin shop-floor negotiations.⁵ By contrast, intellectuals, and in particular thosewho had emerged from the rank of workers and thus experienced the ‘truth’of communist ideology as an individual career success, tended to accept thelegitimacy claims of the communist project and confined the reach of theirobjections 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 ownstance. Workers measured the successes and failures of the state socialist welfarestate by the relative distance to West Germany’s level of affluence. Intellectuals,by contrast, accepted the claim of the Communist Party and thereby of theGDR as a whole to represent Germany’s anti-fascist legacy while rejecting theWest German state as representing a stronghold of former Nazis and their mostimportant supporters.⁶

In consequence, dissent from communist ideology and outright opposition toits rule followed a temporally different logic in the GDR in comparison withother cases in the bloc. Whereas workers learned very early on to limit theircollective action to ‘unpolitical’ shop-floor bargaining, instances of mini-strikesand consumer protest included, and to leave it at that,⁷ the new, GDR-bredgenerations of intellectuals, captured by the myth of anti-fascism and upwardsocial mobility, remained loyal to the socialist project and thereby the existence ofthe GDR, even when questioning its actual realization. It was after 1968 that thisdivergence became particularly marked. While Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia,


KOR in Poland and critical intellectuals such as Gyorgy Konrad and AgnesHeller in Hungary began to question the very sense of the division of Europe andthe communist project, the vast majority of East German critical intellectualscontinued to agonize about the reform of real socialism from within on the basisof the existence of two Germanies.

THE SED STATE — A DICTATORSHIP BASEDON CONSENSUS?

Since intellectuals were more inclined to have recourse to ideological argumentsin order to articulate their critical stance within the socialist project than wereworkers who relied on occasional grumbling and their limited, but all-in-allrelatively effective shop-floor powers, political repression as well as elaborateconsensus strategies by the SED focused much more on certain groups ofoppositional intellectuals, artists and youth subcultures than on the adult workingpopulation at large. To assess the general relevance of ruling by consensusonly by referring to this sensitive area of power relations presents one majordrawback. It would be to judge the whole of the SED dictatorship by looking attwo—admittedly very important—antagonists: the party state and its repressiveorgans on the one side, the small groups of dissidents and oppositional groupson the other.⁸ But taken as social groups, they represent no more than minoritieswithin the totality of GDR society. The fact that reaching ideological consensusbetween the party and intellectuals was a widespread practice within relevantprofessional cultures and in particular within the party itself must not be projectedon 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 toterm the special nature of SED rule in the main as ‘consensus dictatorship’(Konsensdiktatur).⁹ His thesis is derived principally from his seminal study onthe East German historians and their interaction with SED power. It capturesconvincingly the communists’ firm belief in an ideal of establishing authoritative‘truth’ through consensus-formation—something which could actually developa binding force within the universe of the mainly sympathetic intellectuals.¹⁰ Ithink, however, that we would be left with an incomplete picture were we totransfer this notion to society as a whole, in particular because the same termis used, for much more convincing reasons, with regard to the relation betweensociety and its responsibility for the Nazi dictatorship.

MAPPING ITEMS OF TACIT CONSENSUS

To see the SED state as ‘consensus dictatorship’ makes sense only so far as itrefers to ideological conflicts and their consensus-oriented treatment within the


communities of the ideologically engaged (preferably academics, functionaries,artists, writers). While paying due attention to their contribution to the stabi-lization of the dictatorship (as well as to its destabilization in its final crisis), ourenquiry should also focus on those areas where conflict and dissidence could notbe 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 basicstate ideology to the same extent as did the intellectuals. This view also assumesthat in the absence of a majority believing in the legitimacy of the regime, thelatter’s authority was not based just on the arbitrary application and threat ofstate violence, but also on a set of ‘unpolitical’ beliefs and norms shared by bothsides 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 interpretationsof reality between the regime and a large part of the population without havingto be negotiated in principle. I designate them as items of tacit consensus. Theywill be enumerated in order of their decreasing capacity to realize cohesion andof their need to be made explicit.

Peace Regime and population were sincere about their determination to avoidwar in the middle of Europe. The popular masses protesting in June 1953knew very well that no one would risk the return of international warfare forthe sake of a free unified Germany, and for the same reason, there were nolasting protests against the definite partition of the country after the buildingof the Berlin Wall. It is well known that the GDR population enthusiasticallysupported Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik precisely as a conflict-avoiding strategy of‘change through rapprochement’ while anti-communists in other East Europeancountries would also highlight its compromising aspect of collaboration withillegitimate dictators. The degree of possible convergence on this issue betweenregime and population became particularly evident during the missile crisis inthe early 1980s, when the SED state had to concede some minimal leeway tothe emerging autonomous peace movement around the Christian churches, evenallowing a peace rally throughout the whole country dedicated to the recentlydeceased Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme in late summer of 1982. And itwas also not by chance that widespread protests of parents against the furtherextension of military instruction in the school curriculum were met with partialconcessions on behalf of the party in 1984.

Prosperity—or a State Socialist Version of Pursuit of Happiness Although legiti-mated officially as part of a Grand Design of societal development for futuregenerations, it was common sense that reconstruction and economic growth wasmeant to be for the sake of everyone’s future and that everyone contributing tothe GDR’s economy should be entitled to share the fruits of his effort duringhis lifetime. Implicit negotiating about this socialist version of the ‘pursuit of


happiness’ began in late Stalinism, when the attempt to propel industrializationand quicken economic growth through a regime of austerity and political terrorwas effectively stalled by industrial unrest and rebellion, in the GDR and in theCSSR already in 1953, in Poland and Hungary in 1956 at the latest.¹¹ It wasErich Honecker who, later, having demoted Walter Ulbricht in order to put anend to his potentially destabilizing modernization policies, based his (relative)popularity on the promise: ‘How we work today, we will eat today,’ replacing theunpopular ‘How we work today, we (or our children) will eat tomorrow.’ It was adecidedly socialist notion of the pursuit of happiness in so far as both the regimeand the population subscribed to its egalitarian realization, leaving comparativelylittle room for structural inequalities in income and above all in private property,while providing a broad base for relatively equal access to the basic avenuesof consumption and public services. This had two practical consequences. Theeconomic planning authorities had to implement a policy of consumer culturea la GDR, claiming superiority over its West German competitor. But becauseit failed in the long run, this endeavour undermined the party’s aspirations tofoster an independent notion of a satisfying, ‘lived’, GDR identity, which wouldnot be predicated on the standards set by the official class enemy. In order torealize advanced consumerism at all, the insertion of the GDR into world marketrelations under capitalist hegemony (permitted in particular by the preferen-tial terms of trade with West Germany) had to become a matter of ordinaryadministration. But both the acceptance of consumerism, socialist or not, andthe orientation towards world market relations, were based on the implicit andincreasingly explicit assumption that West Germany had to serve as the naturalyardstick 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 couldpartake in it only via integration in work collectives which were formed followingthe model of workshop teams in industry. ‘Real’ work was therefore usuallyunderstood as physical work in the producing sector, whose ‘brigades’ and‘collectives’ also provided the all-encompassing framework for sociability. Theflip-side of this collectivist work ethos can be seen not only in instances ofthe decrying of individual achievement orientation as ‘careerism’, but also inthe punitive discrimination and exclusion of all individuals labelled as ‘work-shy’ or ‘asocial’. As in all communist dictatorships, the GDR also criminalizedindividuals who made their living outside regular work relations, whether thisinvolved illegal behaviour or not. The basic norm underlying this practice—‘hewho wants to eat, has to work (in a decent way)’—was widely shared by theregime and the population.¹²

Individual Security Concomitant with the war-avoiding outlook on internationalpolitics, individual security such as that provided by an omnipresent welfare statewas held in high regard by both the regime and the population. Although the


Soviet Union served as the model for the bright future in official statements, itwas clear that the real yardstick in this regard were the West European welfarestates such as West Germany, Sweden or pre-Thatcherite Great Britain and thatruling out the risk of mass unemployment was regarded as a decisive argumentin favour of the GDR’s economic and social system.

Family Life It was fully accepted by the regime that apart from the workplaceas the central site of sociability, the small, two-generation family around aheterosexual partnership provided the legitimate area of individual satisfactionand its projection into the future. Notwithstanding official ideology, this implieda de facto legitimacy of a respected private sphere. The housing constructionprogrammes embodied this element of consensus in a particularly evident way.After some experimenting in the era of late Stalinism with high quality apartmenthouse building which could only serve as an incentive for top achievers amongthe workforce, it was the economically designed apartment in the prefabricatedtenement building which came to symbolize the site of privacy of ‘normal’ GDRcitizens (apart from their weekend datschas).¹³ It is not by chance, therefore,that the celebratory handing-over of the 500,000th, millionth, etc. apartment inthe housing construction programme to its new inhabitants counted among thefavourite occasions on which to reiterate the close unity between the party andthe population.

Women’s Work ‘Work’ and ‘family’ values combined with the notion of full-time work for women, including mothers of toddlers, as a standard expectationshared both by the regime and by large parts of the population. Promoted bythe 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 offemale emancipation and self-realization, as argued by the classics of the socialistworkers’ movement. Although one can also ascribe this policy to the party’s aim ofgaining control over the totality of the adult population by inserting women intothe universe of state-controlled gainful employment, its acceptance by womenand men as a basic precondition of social life can hardly be overestimated.The concomitant infrastructure of childcare institutions from creches to all-daykindergartens and schools to holiday camps with the state youth organizationbecame part and parcel of a pervasive work-and-family oriented lifestyle. At thesame time this item could serve as an obvious indicator of difference from WestGermany, where social and public life were constructed around the model of themale-breadwinner/housewife well into the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁴ Of all consensualitems in our list, gainful female employment and the acceptance of publicchildcare 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 aresignificantly higher than in West Germany even today.


Public Order and Security Alongside the general orientation towards conformistbehaviour and decency as promoted within and around the social universe of theworkshop, orderliness in public spaces as an integral part of stable and accountableliving conditions was considered very important. This was an attitude the regimecould count on when offering ‘unpolitical’ protection of security to the extentthat it could recruit a large number of GDR citizens for voluntary assistance toexecutive organs such as the regular police (Volkspolizei), the fire brigades, thecivil defence units and so on. The unquestioned prevalence of such ‘secondaryvirtues’ as ‘public order’, cleanliness and decency enabled the regime to followa tough line with all manifestations of deliberate non-conformist behaviour, inparticular in respect of youth and alternative subcultures, which were criminalizedas ‘rowdies’ and ‘asocials’.¹⁵

This enumeration of items of unspectacular and thereby more or less tacitconsensus does not claim to be either complete or very original. But given thefixation on arbitrary repression on the one hand and acts of conscious resistanceon the other, prevalent in much of the literature which tries to explain thefunctioning of the late communist dictatorships, it is necessary to insist on such‘banal’ factors if we want to understand the relative stability and functionalityof communist rule in countries such as the GDR. These items referred to basicvalues on which the party and most people could agree without necessarilyinvoking ‘socialism’. By and in themselves they are more or less unspecific withregard to any particular political system. Societal consensus on such values were ageneric feature of industrial societies in the middle of the twentieth century, theage often characterized as ‘Fordist’, when, for the first time in history, welfare andaffluence during their lifetime came within reach of the large majority—in theWest, and with some delay, also in the East. It was, however, exactly the unspecificubiquity of these values which would render them highly problematic for theCommunist Party dictatorship. Once the material basis for their realization beganto deteriorate dramatically, and once the Soviet Union resigned from its role asguarantor of communist rule in the region, these aspirations and expectationscould easily be projected towards the Western system and its holders of power.

‘US’ AND ‘ THEM’: INSTANCES OF CONSENSUSWITH A HIDDEN SUBTEXT

Besides the set of items referring to basic norms of collective and individu-al existence without being specifically ‘communist’, there was another set ofvalues representing the ‘humanistic’ ideals and claims of the Marxist-Leninistworldview which were propagated at length and in fatiguing monotony bythe state socialist propaganda machine. In their essential meaning, valuessuch as ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘internationalism’—even ‘Friendship with the Soviet


Union’—would be accepted by most GDR citizens thanks to their banal gen-erality. It is important to note, however, that these vocally propagated slogansalso contained hidden messages regarding the possible common understandingbetween 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 wascommunicated by the SED implied that every GDR citizen had ended up onthe ‘good’ side of history, and was therefore exculpated from possible earliercommitments on the ‘wrong’ side, the responsibility for Nazism having beenascribed to the West German competitor. ‘Us’ were thereby only anti-fascists,‘them’ by definition ‘fascists’ or at least ‘imperialists’ and ‘militarists’—a welcomejustification for not asking unsettling questions about the former involvementof ‘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-Naziyouth groups in the 1980s.¹⁶

Another value of paramount importance for the self-understanding of theSED was ‘internationalism’ or ‘international solidarity’. One should always readthis term with the emphasis on its second half: ‘inter-nationalism’. The basicnotion of ‘nation’ and the legitimacy of—of course ‘progressive’—nationalismwas never questioned and remained unchanged, even when the SED began toexperiment with notions of a ‘socialist nation’ in Germany in order to avoid theconcept 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 inxenophobic attitudes prevalent in the population at large, but also observable inthe regime’s treatment of foreigners in conflict situations. The SED continuouslystaged rituals of ‘internationalist solidarity’ but would treat any initiatives ofrank-and-file internationalism and solidarity with the third world with suspicion.International black pop culture was revered as anti-imperialist, but when applyingfor a permit to marry a black partner from Cuba or Mozambique, GDR citizenscould expect to get the application form for expatriation together with thepermit—a matter on which there was a de facto consensus between the socialiststate 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. Onthe one side it was obvious that for the overwhelming majority of its 6.4 millionmembers (1988), this was a purely ‘official’ and ‘formal’ commitment, largelymotivated by the necessity to document the required minimal amount of ‘societalengagement’. At the same time, the actual presence of the Soviet Union insidethe GDR in the form of some 500,000 Red Army troops was relegated to thefringes of the public realm, thanks to gated garrisons and little visibility in themedia. This was done partly in order to rule out conflicts between this de factooccupation power and the population, but also in order to isolate the Soviettroops from any contact with the considerably higher standard of living of their


‘brother nation’. Of course the technical and economic superiority of the GDRover the Soviet Union was a well-known fact as were the political reasons for notspeaking about it in public in the GDR.¹⁸ This implicit and inarticulate subtext ofthe ritualized friendship discourse was shattered, however, at the moment whenits precondition, namely the Soviet Union’s claims to its own infallibility as themodel for communism, was given up by the Soviet Union itself. ‘Perestroika’ and‘Glasnost’ crushed the parameters which had permitted four decades of feignedfriendship declarations, to be replaced rather paradoxically by a sincere interestin the Soviet Union. For instance, thousands of GDR citizens protested in 1987against the banning of Sputnik, a reader’s digest of Soviet press articles issued inGerman. ‘Learning from the Soviet Union!’ now indicated open dissent.¹⁹

These areas of tacit and sub-textual consensus were all covering up thebasic fact that the state’s claim to represent, in its early years, ‘the’ nation ofGermany in its true and progressive essence and then, subsequently, a ‘socialistnation’ of its own (just happening to be German), was never wholeheartedlyaccepted. There were moments when GDR citizens displayed something like anaccepted separate identity and manifested their ‘GDRness’ for instance duringthe Olympic Games²⁰ or in celebrating the legendary victory over the WestGerman soccer team during the 1974 World Cup.²¹ But such articulations of anaccepted GDR identity remained precarious. GDR gold medals were recognizedas underlining the achievement of their own polity and thereby served as anelement of consensus with the state, but this did not increase enthusiasm for thecommunist cause.

‘POPULAR’ AND ‘PUBLIC’ OPINIONS?

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 severelyrestricted freedom in the articulation of deviating opinions as such.

Explicit opinions, that is statements on concrete issues, and not just indi-rect expressions of opinion through non-verbal behaviour, could only exist inlegitimate form when articulated individually, restricted to local issues and onoccasions defined by the party. The most common form was through petitionsaddressed to all kinds of authorities within the party and state structure, mostof them dealing with the perennial lack of housing, consumer items and trav-el permits, together with a broad range of other grievances. These petitionsoften ‘talked politics’ by invoking ‘socialism’, but this has to be read as merelyproving the petitioners’ mastery of the official political language and nothingelse. Evaluating petitions in a systematic fashion was a basic routine of all partyand state institutions in order to reduce the impediments to substantial publiccommunication.²² This was complemented by extensive information-gathering


by state organs, in particular the Ministry for State Security, but also by massorganizations such as the trade unions, and by the party itself.²³ By contrast,systematic and anonymous opinion polls remained a rarity in East Germany withthe notable (and of course unpublished) exception of the polls conducted by theLeipzig institute for youth research.²⁴

Thus the regime found several ways to get to know ‘opinions’ amongGDR citizens, but only through the channels it had created and which itcontrolled itself. Opinions came in as raw material, separated and individually.Uncontrolled connection between them was abhorred by the party as creatingoppositional ‘platforms’. It was, therefore, the party which had to do theevaluation work, which under other political conditions can be achieved throughpublic spheres with their specific mechanisms. The longer the regime existedand the more it was addressed by the citizens making their claims in anincreasingly self-conscious but utterly ‘correct’ manner, the more the regimefelt 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 ofinformation it had encouraged and instigated with its own information-gatheringpolicies.²⁵

These official and unofficial, highly fragmented, and tightly controlled chan-nels inside the GDR allowed for a seismographic surveillance and control ofmanifestations of ‘popular opinions’ which, however, could never gain the expres-sive quality of a public opinion as it is generally associated with the existenceof public spheres (Offentlichkeit) with a normative loading. In an indirect andpartial way, some of the issues and agendas of the ‘grumble society’ (AndrewPort) were also represented and articulated through the mere presence and acces-sibility of West German radio and television, but the practical relevance of thisrudimentary Ersatzoffentlichkeit should not be overestimated. As recent studieson media usage behaviour have shown, most East Germans combined domesticand Western media according to the practical needs of everyday life, and turnedto favouring Western programmes only in times of increased political activitywhen the reliability of information about politics moved to the centre of theirinterest.²⁶

CONCLUSION: A DICTATORSHIP BASED ON TACITMINIMAL CONSENSUS

To sum up this list of actually existing items, one can speak of a relevant area ofconsensus between the communist regime and the population, but in the formof a tacit minimal consensus lacking an expressive and autonomous representationand a positive symbolization.

The very notion of minimal consensus in the conventional sense, that is theexplicitly acknowledged coexistence of elements of consensus and dissent, remained


incompatible with the identity-based and holistic build-up of the socialist stateideology. An open minimal consensus policy would have implied room forlegitimate plurality within the realm of domination. That this could happenwithin state socialist dictatorships was shown in their late phases by the ‘people’srepublics’ of Poland and Hungary. Here, the transition to democracy beganin the 1980s with a protracted process of negotiation among representativesof an increasingly pluralized political sphere. SED leaders did everything toforestall such a scenario in their own backyard. By contrast, potential plural-ity—alternatives to the existing state of affairs—was shown to reside outsidethe GDR’s own idyll of real socialism: as an example to deter pluralism onecould point to the negative consequences of deviation from orthodoxy in theEast (Hungary and the counter-revolution; Czechoslovakia and the restorationof capitalism allegedly imminent in 1968; Poland and the chaos allegedly createdby Solidarnosc and the reactionary church). In an all-embracing, positive sense,one could point to the West, where the enduring crisis of late capitalism ledto a continuous strengthening of pluralist ‘progressive forces’ (peace movement,trade unions, ecological movements) with whom one could sympathize from asafe distance.

There was, however, one, completely and thoroughly negative, highly vis-ible, symbol of the GDR’s tacit minimal consensus: the Wall. It had beenaccepted grudgingly by the GDR population because they did not want torisk an atomic war. Everyone knew that the Wall was the way in which theGDR could gain stability and some affluence, both values on whose accep-tance the regime could count as long as the world was divided up betweenthe two hemispheres. Things changed dramatically when this preconditioneroded.

The first truly negotiated public consensus between the GDR leadershipand GDR population emerged in the weeks after Honecker’s demotion on18 October 1989. Already for weeks the issue of freedom of travel had becomea key issue both for the demonstrating masses and for the new Wende-orientedPolitburo. New regulations abandoning the policy of extreme restrictions ontravel were expected by the first week of November. It was to become possibleto apply for ‘permanent exit and private travel’ to the West ‘without presenting[the heretofore necessary] requirements’ such as permits and invitations, andthis would be put into effect ‘immediately, without delay’ (‘sofort, unverzuglich’).The evening press conference on 9 November, during which a somewhatdisoriented spokesman of the Politburo, Gunter Schabowski, announced thismost recent decision of the GDR government, was broadcast live to all GDRhouseholds. However, what this somewhat unclear declaration meant in concretewas left open to interpretation and therefore negotiation. GDR citizens, alertedand electrified in their homes, started to negotiate—‘immediately, withoutdelay’—by taking to the streets. Within hours, an overwhelming, literallypath-breaking, consensus was reached when thousands of Berliners at the


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

Notes

1Cf. 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 Staatsgrundung: 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 Eppelmannet al. (eds.), Bilanz und Perspektiven der DDR-Forschung (Paderborn et al., 2003).

2Cf. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker(New Haven and London, 2005).

3Thomas Lindenberger, ‘SED-Herrschaft als soziale Praxis, Herrschaft und ‘‘Eigen-Sinn’’: Problemstellung und Begriffe’, in Jens Gieseke (ed.), Staatssicherheit undGesellschaft: Studien zum Herrschaftsalltag in der DDR (Gottingen, 2007),23–47.

4See the seminal study on the Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union by JanC. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda fur die Sowjetunion in Polen undin der DDR (Cologne, 2006).

5See the classic study by Peter Hubner, Konsens, Konflikt und Kompromiss: sozialeArbeiterinteressen und Sozialpolitik in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1970 (Cologne, 1995). Fora microhistorical study on shop-floor relations in East Germany see the seminal studyby Sandrine Kott, Le communisme au quotidien: Les entreprises d’Etat dans la societeest-allemande (Paris, 2001).

6Cf. Sigrid Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft: Zum Paradox von Stabilitatund Revolution in der DDR 1945–1989 (Frankfurt am Main, 1993).

7Cf. the rich study by Andrew Port, based on the mining town of Saalfeld; AndrewPort, Conflict and stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge, 2007).

8This is also one of the flaws in the world-renowned, Oscar-winning film The Lives of theOthers; for a critical assessment see my ‘Stasiploitation—Why Not? The Scriptwriter’sHistorical 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 Wilkeand Cheryl Dueck, ibid.

9Martin Sabrow in this volume.10Martin Sabrow, Das Diktat des Konsenses: Geschichtswissenschaft in der DDR 1949–1969

(Cologne, 2001).11Cf. Muriel Blaive, Une destalinisation manquee: Tchecoslovaquie 1956 (Brussels, 2005).12Thomas Lindenberger, ‘ ‘‘Asociality’’ and Modernity: The GDR as a Welfare Dicta-

torship’, in Katherine Pence, Paul Betts (eds.), Socialist Modern: East German Everyday


Culture and Politics. Social history, popular culture, and politics in Germany (Ann Arbor,2008), 211–233.

13Cf. Jay Rowell, Le totalitarisme au concret: les politiques du logement en RDA (Paris,2006).

14See Thomas Lindenberger, ‘Everyday History: New Approaches to the History of thePost-War Germanies’, in Kleßmann (ed.), Divided Past, 43–67.

15See Thomas Lindenberger, Volkspolizei: Herrschaftspraxis und offentliche Ordnung imSED-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).

16Patrice G. Poutrus, ‘Alles unter Kontrolle? Zur Bedeutung der BStU-Quellen furdie zeithistorische Migrationsforschung’, in Gieseke (ed.), Staatssicherheit, 318–38,esp. 333–8; Heinrich Sippel and Walter Suß, Staatssicherheit und Rechtsextremismus(Bochum, 1994).

17Cf. the studies in Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, Patrice G. Poutrus(eds.), Fremde und Fremd-Sein in der DDR, Zu den historischen Ursachen der Frem-denfeindlichkeit in Ostdeutschland (Berlin, 2003); Jan Behrends, Patrice Poutrus,‘Xenophobia in the former GDR—explorations and explanation from a histori-cal perspective’, in Wojciech Burszta et al. (eds.), Nationalisms Across the Globe: AnOverview of Nationalisms in State-Endowed and Stateless Nations. Vol 1: Europe (Poznan,2005), 155–170; Poutrus, ‘Alles unter Kontrolle?’

18See Silke Satjukow, Besatzer: Die ‘Russen’ in Deutschland 1945–1994 (Gottingen,2008).

19Martin Sabrow, ‘Die Wiedergeburt des klassischen Skandals: Offentliche Emporungin der spaten DDR’, in Sabrow (ed.), Skandal und Diktatur: Formen offentlicherEmporung im NS-Staat und in der DDR (Gottingen, 2004), 231–60, esp. 244–57.

20Cf. Uta A. Balbier, Kalter Krieg auf der Aschenbahn: der deutsch–deutsche Sport1950–1972: Eine politische Geschichte (Paderborn, 2007).

21Christoph Kleßmann, ‘Das Sparwasser-Tor 1974: Sieg uber den Klassenfeind, Endeder ‘‘Alleinvertretung’’, Zufallstreffer oder was sonst’, in Zeitgeschichte in Ham-burg: Nachrichten aus der Forschungsstelle fur Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH) 2006(Hamburg, 2007), 13–30.

22Judd Stziel, ‘Shopping, Sewing, Networking, Complaining: Consumer Culture andthe Relationship between State and Society in the GDR’, in Pence and Betts (eds.),Socialist Modern, 253–86.

23See contributions by Jens Gieseke, Siegfried Suckut, Frank Joestl and Ralph Jessen, inGieseke (ed.), Staatssicherheit.

24Evelyn Brislinger, Brigitte Hausstein and Eberhard Riedel (eds.), Jugend im Osten:sozialwissenschaftliche Daten und Kontextwissen aus der DDR sowie den neuen Bun-deslandern (1969 bis 1995) (Berlin, 1997).

25See also Jens Gieseke, Mielke-Konzern: Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945–1990 (Stuttgartand Munich, 2001), ch. 5.

26On this issue, see the vast research of Michael Meyen, among others, Michael Meyen,Denver Clan und Neues Deutschland: Mediennutzung in der DDR (Berlin, 2003);


Michael Meyen and Ute Nawratil, ‘The Viewers: Television and Everyday Life in EastGermany’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24:3 (2004), 355–64.

27Hans-Hermann Hertle, ‘The Fall of the Wall: The Unintended Self-Dissolution ofEast 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 ofit is obviously in the language of the country to which it refers. This brief bibliographylimits itself to proposing a few titles in English that deal more or less directly with thequestion of popular opinion in the various regimes. Further references can, of course, befound in the endnotes to the chapters. Two general works which may serve as a usefulintroduction to the argument are:

Borejsza, Jerzy W. and Klaus Ziemer (eds.), Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes inEurope: Legacies and Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford, 2006).

Ludtke, Alf (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences andWays of Life (Princeton, 1995).

RUSSIA, SOVIET UNION

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 theStalinist 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 (Princetonand 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 thePersecution 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: Wurttemberg under the Nazis (London, 2006).

POLAND 1945 – 89

Bernhard, Michael and Henryk Szlajfer (eds.), From the Polish Underground: Selectionsfrom ‘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).

FASCIST 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 (Manch-ester, 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 andLondon, 2005).

(ed.), Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’? (NewYork 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 (Prince-

ton, 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 (Cam-

bridge, 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, 193Afinogenov, Alexander 22Alexopoulos, Golfo 22Alltagsgeschichte 4–5

and Bavaria Project 34and disconnection from ideology 55and meaning of 5

Andersen, Nexø Martin 173Arendt, Hannah 55, 76 n4Assorodobraj, Nina 154

Badoglio, Pietro 140Bailes, Kendall 28 n14Bakhtin, Mikhail 67Bavaria Project 33–4Becker, Jean-Jacques 70Beier, Helen 26Benjamin, Hilde 174Berlin Wall 219, 220Berlusconi, Silvio 13 n3Bierut, Boleslaw 152, 163blackmail, and regimes’ power of 9Bloch, Ernst 170, 172Bourdieu, Pierre 73Brandenberger, David 22–3Brandt, Willy 212Brecht, Bertolt 170, 172Brezhnev, Leonid 71Broszat, Martin 33–4

Campolo, Michele 130Charter 77 210Christian church, and Nazi Germany 108

Protestants 39, 82, 111–12Roman Catholics 39, 111, 112

Cicero 150civil society, and totalitarian regimes 24Clark, Katerina 19Cold War, and interpretation of

totalitarianism 1–2, 3–4Conquest, Robert 66conscience, and problems of 6corruption:

and Italian fascism 130–1and totalitarian regimes 10

Czechoslovakia 151, 208, 210, 219

Dabrowska, Maria 160, 164Davies, Sarah 20, 23, 67–8, 69, 70De Felice, Renzo 4, 123–4De Grazia, Victoria 124Dygat, Stanislaw 156

East Germany, see German DemocraticRepublic

Eichmann, Adolf 85Eigen Sinn 5Evans, Richard 36

Fainsod, Merle 76 n6Federal Republic of Germany:

and coming to terms with Naziperiod 198–9

and Hitler Youth Generation, prominenceof 187–8

and War Youth generation 194see also German Democratic Republic;

GermanyFeltri, Clodo 131, 132Feuchtwanger, Lion 180

and blindness to nature of Soviet Union 170and criticism of Soviet Union 169and explanations of support for Soviet

Union 170–1and intellectual vanity 171and meeting Stalin 168, 171and Moscow 1937 168and perception of consensus in Soviet

Union 169–70and praise for Soviet Union 168and propaganda trials in Soviet Union:

confidence in 173justification of 170–3nature of confessions 172

and role of reason in Soviet Union 169–70and tour of Soviet Union 168and Waiting Room trilogy 168–9

Filtzer, Donald 23Fischer, Ernst 173Fitzpatrick, Sheila 10, 68, 76 n11Foucault, Michel 69, 175French Revolution 17Friedrich, Carl 174

228 Index

Friedrich, Walter 179Fulbrook, Mary 10, 177

Galen, Clemens von 41Garlicki, Andrzej 156Gellately, Robert 35–6, 37general will 17generations:

and concept of 185and generational change 10and impact of social and political

events 184–5see also German Democratic Republic, Hitler

Youth GenerationGentile, Emilio 124, 125German Democratic Republic (GDR):

and Berlin Wall 219, 220and ‘Children of the Third Reich’ 197–8and consensus dictatorship 211–12

collapse of 179conditions for formation of 176–7consensual criticism 177–8construction of 175continuous extortion of 177cult of consensus 174–5decline of 178–9impact on historical methodology 175legitimating function 179–80limits of dissent 178phases of 178role of 176

and creation of ideal-type enemy 177and cultural unity 176–7and denazification 194and detention institutions 209and dissidence 210–11and dual reality 9, 178and economic development 212–13and exceptional nature of regime 208and experiences of immediate post-war

years 192–3and foundation of 193and freedom of travel 219–20and Front generation 196and generational change 10and Hitler Youth Generation 185–8

acceptance of norms of behaviour 200–1age-related experiences of

Nazism 189–91commitment to communism 186–7,

201–2conversion experiences 198–9, 200demographic factors explaining

prominence 193differences between age cohorts 188–9

enthusiasm of 200explaining prominence of 186–7, 188,

197, 202–4first Hitler Youth generation 189, 190–1imposition of party discipline 199–200life-stage related experiences 202, 203–4‘making new lives’ 202nature of opportunities 198opportunities for 194, 196–7, 201political pragmatism 199, 200political prominence of 185–6role of 185second Hitler Youth generation 189–90socialization under Nazism 185, 203studies of 186–7war experiences 190–1westward emigration 195–6, 197, 203

and information-gathering by stateorgans 217–18

and intellectuals 210–11ideological consensus 211

and legitimacy of 208, 210and national identity 217and petitions to authorities 217and political repression 211and public consensus 219–20and public/popular opinion 217–18and repressive state violence 208–9and secret police 209and social homogeneity 176and sovereign weakness 208and staged consensus 209–10and sub-textual consensus 215–16

anti-fascism 216friendship with Soviet Union 216–17internationalism 216nationalism 216

and tacit consensus 212, 215childcare institutions 214family life 214individual security 213–14peace 212prosperity 212–13public order and security 215women’s work 214work 213

and tacit minimal consensus 218–19and unacceptability of conflict 175and uncontested power of Socialist Unity

Party 176and War Youth generation 194and West Germany as reference

standard 210, 213, 214see also Federal Republic of Germany;

Germany

Index 229

Germany:and coming to terms with Nazi period 4see also Federal Republic of Germany;

German Democratic Republic; NaziGermany

Gide, Andre 168, 171Globke, Hans 85Goebbels, Joseph 82, 97, 191Goldhagen, Daniel 35Gomulka, Wladyslaw 161Göring, Hermann 82Graham, Loren 28 n14Grass, Günter 199Graziosi, Andrea 67Gribaudi, Maurizio 124Grynszpan, Hershel 92

Habermas, J 2Hagen, Mark von 68Hager, Kurt 178–9Halberstam, Michael 61 n11Halfin, Igal 21Hanfmann, Eugenia 26Hanson, Stephen 62 n23Harich, Wolfgang 174, 178Harvard Interview Project 17, 65

and Soviet Union 25–6Havel, Vaclav 10Hellbeck, Jochen 6, 7, 10, 11, 21, 22, 25Heller, Agnes 211Herf, Jeffrey 46 n25Hesse, Carla 76 n10Heydrich, Reinhard 82, 97, 98Hiller, Kurt 172Hitler, Adolf 37, 95

and approval of leadership 39, 40and decline in popularity 41and Kristallnacht 97and Nuremberg Laws 91and reintroduction of military service 40and reports on popular opinion 82and tasks of Nazi Party 108

Holquist, Peter 68, 72Honecker, Erich 175, 178, 186, 196, 213, 219

ideology:and Alltagsgeschichte 55and appeal to individuals 55and disappearance from scholarly

vocabulary 54–5and individual production of 21, 55–6and individuals as ideological agents 56–7and internalization of 7, 51and nature of 55and popular opinion 6–7and world-view 57

individual:and agency within totalitarian regimes 5and dual reality 8, 9

Soviet Union 25–6and first-person narratives 52–3as ideological agent 56–7and ideology 56

appeal of 55production of 21, 55–6

and internalization of ideology 7, 51and public/private spheres 5–6and rationalization 56, 57and reflexive self 7and transformation of self 7–8

Stalinist Russia 20–1, 51, 54, 58Inkeles, Alex 17, 65Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute of

Contemporary History) 33Italian fascism, and popular opinion:

and absence of war guilt 4and attitudes towards Mussolini 139–40and dual reality 9, 139and economic hardship 141and fascist militia (MVSN) 133and foreign policy 140–1and gap between objectives and

outcomes 140and historiography of:

culturalist school 125debate over consensus for 4, 123–4fascist ideology 124good Italian/bad fascist

distinction 122–3as political issue 124, 125–6social history 124women’s history 124

and lack of allegiance to fascist values 139and legitimation 127and local contact with fascism 128and local origins of fascism 128and loss of appeal of fascism’s

novelty 138–9and loss of credibility 140and mass demonstrations 127and mixed response 126and poor second-level leadership 10,

129–30and popular consensus for 4, 11

limited nature of 142and post-war distancing from 122and propaganda 127

loss of trust in 140and provincial fascist federations 128

corruption 130–1disaffection 134–6discontent with 131–2low esteem 130

230 Index

Italian fascism, and popular opinion: (cont.)poor leadership 129–30popular political apathy 134rebellion 132reprisals 133use of violence 132–3youth disaffection 136–7

and reaction to Ethiopian war 134–5and regime’s stick and carrot

approach 126–7and sources for:

reliability of 137–8reports to central authorities 128–9

and sympathy with Britain and France 141and transformation of self 7–8and urban lower middle/working class 138in wartime 141–2and weakness of fascist message 9, 141, 142

Jameson, Fredric 67Jaruzelski, Wojciech 154Jastrzab, Mariusz 155Jeschke, Wolfgang 194Jews:

and ‘Jewish Question’ in NaziGermany 40–1, 81

consensus on 84criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96criticism of methods 40functional purpose of persecution 44indifference 83–4popular anti-Jewish actions 85–90,

92–6support for aims 40support for deportation 41

and Kristallnacht:criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96as expansion of existing violence 97–8negative reactions to 98prior popular anti-Jewish actions 92–6rural reaction to 114youth involvement in 190

and Nuremberg Laws:historical significance of 85influence of popular opinion 90–1objectives of 91popular pressure for 85–90, 97popular reaction to 91–2promulgation of 84provisions of 84–5SA pressure for action 86

and support for Soviet regime 22, 23, 30 n33

Johnson, Eric A 45 n10jokes:

and Nazi Germany 34

and Poland 163and Soviet Union 24, 71

Just, Gustav 175, 177–8

Kantorowicz, Alfred 70Kapuscinski, Ryszard 150KARTA centre 161, 162Kershaw, Ian 9, 84, 98, 107, 140Khrushchev, Nikita 72Kiesielewski, Stefan 160Kirov, Sergei 170Klemperer, Victor 11, 70, 78 n33Koestler, Arthur 2Konrad, György 211Kotkin, Stephen 7, 20, 25, 68Krenz, Egon 179Kruczek, Wladyslaw 151Kuczynski, Jurgen 177Kula, Marcin 2, 6Kulka, Otto Dov 5

Lammers, Hans Heinrich 82Lazarsfeld, Paul 72League of Nations 141legitimation, and totalitarian regimes 8Lenin, Vladimir Ilich Uljanov 66, 163, 170Ley, Robert 107Libera, Antoni 161Lindenberger, Thomas 6, 9Lipski, Jan Josef 156Lösener, Bernhard 85Löwenthal, Leo 72Lüdtke, Alf 5Lyttelton, Adrian 123

Machcewicz, Pawel 155Magnitogorsk 21, 68Manteuffel, Tadeusz 163Marcuse, Ludwig 170Martin, Terry 20, 22Modzelewski, Karol 152Murr, Wilhelm 111Mussolini, Benito:

and criticism of 132and organization of mass rallies 2and personal attachment to 9and poor attendance at broadcast speeches

of 134, 135and popular attitudes towards 139–40

Muti, Ettore 130

Nazi Germany, and popular opinion:and age-related experiences of

Nazism 189–91and attacks on communists and socialists 41

Index 231

and awareness of government policy 116and characteristics of 107and Christian church 108

Protestants 39, 82, 111–12Roman Catholics 39, 111, 112

and comparison with Stalinist Russia 23and consensus of approval 35–6

decline at war’s end 41–2, 43electoral support 37manufactured consensus 37, 40, 44underlying consensus 37–8, 40, 42–3

as culturally conditioned 108and differentiated nature of 39and difficulties in gauging 38, 110and dual reality 9and electoral support 37and ‘everyday’ sphere 43, 44and ‘exceptional’ sphere 43–4and experiences of immediate post-war

years 192–3and factors shaping 108and final phase of war 41, 43

intensified terror 41–2, 44and heterogenous views 83and historiography of 33–7, 83

Alltagsgeschichte 34Bavaria Project 33–4coercion 33, 36–7consensus of approval 35–6consent 34dissent 34manufactured consensus 37

and ‘Jewish Question’ 40–1, 81consensus on 84criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96criticism of methods 40functional purpose of persecution 44indifference 83–4popular anti-Jewish actions 85–90, 92–6support for aims 40support for deportation 41

and Kristallnacht:criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96as expansion of existing violence 96,

97–8negative reactions to 98pretext for 92prior popular anti-Jewish actions 92–6rural reaction to 114youth involvement in 190

and moulding of 107, 108and ‘national community’ 43–4and Nazi agencies’ reports on 38, 81, 107,

110agencies involved 81–2attempts to discontinue 82availability of 84

criticism of anti-Jewish violence 96influence of 83, 97popular anti-Jewish actions 85–90, 92–6purpose of 82regime’s interest in 83reliability of 82–3, 97

and Nazi Party, tasks of 108and Nuremberg Laws:

historical significance of 85influence of popular opinion 90–1objectives of 91popular pressure for 85–90, 97popular reaction to 91–2promulgation of 84provisions of 84–5SA pressure for action 86

and persecution of minorities 41and propaganda 39, 43, 44and reintroduction of military service 40and revision of interpretations of 4and ‘Sopade’ (Social Democratic

organization) reports on 38, 39, 40and study of 4and transformation of self 8and treatment of mentally sick 41, 112see also Württemberg

Niethammer, Lutz 5, 186, 187, 194

opportunism, and totalitarian regimes 10Orwell, George 2, 27 n6Ostpolitik 212

Palach, Jan 151Palme, Olaf 212Passerini, Luisa 124personal identity, and transformation of

self 7–8Stalinist Russia 20–1, 51, 54, 58

Pjatakow, Yuri 173Plamper, Jan 6, 12Plato, Alexander von 186Podlubnyi, Stepan 21, 22Poland, and sources for popular opinion:

cabaret and music 159clandestine organizations 159complaint books 158court records 159destruction of 157–8diaries and memoirs 160, 161difficulties in analyzing 155documentation of people’s opinions 153ecclesiastical archive 159ethical problems in using 155–6, 160–1everyday behaviour as protest 152–3family documents 161formation of opinions 150

232 Index

Poland, and sources (cont.)funerals 152gossip 163graffiti 163interpretation of contemporary documents

and speeches 153–4jokes 163lack of 154letter writing 157letters 157limitations of 163–4literary works 161material produced during political

crises 162non-verbal expression of attitudes 150,

151–2official complaint channels 156–7officials’ meetings with citizens 158opinion polls 149–50oral history 161private letters 160public diaries 158religious practices 151richness of 154semi-autonomous institutions 158–9Solidarity archives 162stylistic conventions 155, 157

Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) 154Polish Workers’ Defence Committee

(KOR) 211political choice, and totalitarian regimes 6political religion 8Popieluszko, Jerzy 152popular opinion in totalitarian regimes:

and access to resources 9–10and bottom-up approaches to 4–5

centrality of individual 5and changes over time 10and compared with public opinion 2, 24, 65and comparison of regimes 12and definitional difficulties 2, 17and difficulties in studying 2and dual reality 8, 9

Soviet Union 25–6and existence of 2–3and formation of popular attitudes 6

elimination of alternative worldviews 7internalization of ideology 7, 51reflexive self 7

and ideology 6–7and importance of studying 3

contemporary relevance 3overcoming Cold War stereotypes 3–4

and local leadership 10and political problems in studying 10–11and public/private spheres 3, 5–6and regime monitoring of 3, 5, 11

and regime success/failure 3and rejection of binary consent/dissent

distinction 6and scholarly neglect of 1

Cold War rhetoric 1–2and shared values 8–9and sources for 11–12

first-person documents 21, 52–3police reports 51

and top-down approaches to 4Port, Andrew 218poststructuralism 68Przemyk, Grzegorz 152public opinion:

and compared with popular opinion 2, 24,65

and official generation of 2

Radek, Karl 173Rath, Ernst vom 92, 97rationalization, and ideology 56, 57Reagan, Ronald 1reflexive self 7

and Ustrialov 50context of thinking 53

religion:and Nazi Germany 39and Poland 151and Soviet Union 19see also Christian church

Rev, Istvan 72Rommel, Erwin 115Rosenthal, Walter 95Rothfels, Hans 85Ruzikowski, Tadeusz 155Rykov, Alexei 71

Sabrow, Martin 211Schabowski, Günter 219–20Schacht, Hjalmar 91Schaff, Adam 149Schelsky, Helmut 188Scott, James C 20Siwiec, Ryszard 151Slezkine, Yuri 22, 30 n33Smolensk Archive 64, 65, 66Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD):

and monitoring of 110and ‘Sopade’ reports on popular opinion 38,

39, 40socialist realism 22

and dual reality 25Socialist Unity Party (East Germany) 174,

176, 193see also German Democratic Republic

society, and totalitarian regimes 4

Index 233

Sokolnikov, Grigory Yakovlevich 173Solidarity movement 162, 219Soviet Union, and popular opinion:

and ambiguities of 26and analytical categories 20and binary division of 17, 64–5, 66, 67, 69,

73resistance to approach 74

and class opinions 17, 20and collective mentalities 20and collectivization 18, 23–4and comparison with Nazi Germany 23and dialectical thinking 58and discrimination victims 21–2, 53–4and dual reality 8–9, 25–6and educated elites 19and existence of 24–5

appearance of concept 72–3and flight from autonomy 53–4and future research:

conceptual history 72–3multidimensional approach 73–4, 75source criticism 69–72

and historiography of:Chicago school 68, 69Columbia school 68–9comparative approach 68–9, 72post-revisionist scholarship 20, 21, 67–9,

74poststructuralist approach 68, 74revisionist scholarship 18–19, 65, 66, 74totalitarian school 64–6, 74

and identification with collective 50–1,53–4

and ideology 55individual as ideological agent 56–7rationalization 56, 57world-view 57

and intellectuals 22, 23and Jewish support for regime 22, 23, 30

n33and labour attitudes 23and Magnitogorsk 21and national/ethnic groups 22–3and nature of 17and NKVD:

surveillance of returnees 50surveillance reports 51–2

and peasantry 18, 23and popular agency 65and projection of liberal views 54and propaganda trials 170, 171–4and public discourse 20and public opinion 65

and questioning of existence of 17and religious belief 19and resistance 20, 67

significance for state 71and scientific world 22and socialist subjectivity 54and sources for:

binary division of 73citizens’ letters 19complaint books 72–3contextualization of 71first-person documents 21, 52–3focus on negative opinion 20Harvard Interview Project 17, 25–6, 65interpretation 64lack of 17, 19NKVD reports 51–2opening of Soviet archives 19, 20, 50, 64,

66police reports 19self-reflective materials 50–1Smolensk Archive 64, 65, 66source criticism 69–72svodki (secret police surveys) 19–20,

67–72, 73–4and Soviet literature 22and Soviet progress 57–8and transformation of self 7, 8, 20–1, 51,

54, 58and upwardly mobile 18–19and urban population 23and urban youth 19, 21and violent environment 58see also Ustrialov, Nikolai

Sperber, Manes 172Sproll, Johannes Baptista 111spy networks, and monitoring of popular

opinion 3, 11Stalin, Joseph 4, 22–3, 53–4, 56–9, 71,

74–5, 154, 174, 193and Conquest’s interpretation of 66and meeting with Feuchtwanger 168, 171

Starace, Achille 129, 132, 133, 135Steinert, Marlis 101 n18Stephenson, Jill 10Streicher, Julius 95Syria 79 n38Szpotanski, Janusz 161

Tasca, Angelo 142 n2Thälmann, Ernst 198Third Reich, see Nazi GermanyTomskii, Michail 71Torda, Giovanni 143 n17

234 Index

totalitarianism:and access to resources 9–10and bottom-up approaches to 4–5

centrality of individual 5and civil society 24and Cold War interpretation of 1–2, 3–4

top-down approach 4and corruption 10and defining borders 7and dual reality 8, 9

Soviet Union 25–6and evolution and decline of regimes 10and gap between objectives and outcomes 8and generational change 10and ideology 6–7

internalization of 7, 51and legitimation 8and the New Man 5and political problems in studying 10–11and public/private spheres 3, 5–6and rejection of binary consent/dissent

distinction 6and shared values 8–9and stability of communist

dictatorships 180Trotsky, Leon 170Turowicz, Jerzy 159Tyrmand, Leopold 151

Ulbricht, Walter 175, 177–8, 213Union of Fighters for Liberty and

Democracy 158–9Ustrialov, Nikolai:

and arrest of 59–60and desire for integration 59and dialectical thinking 58, 59and diary of 49

last entry 59official interpretation of 60

and execution of 60and reflexive self 50

context of thinking 53and rethinks political convictions 49and returns to Soviet Union 49and Soviet progress 49–50and state suspicion of 50, 58–9and transformation of self 57

Voice of America 72

Wachtel, Nathan 149Wagner, Adolf 91

Weber, Max 9, 43, 203Wedeen, Lisa 79 n38welfare dictatorship 9Wierling, Dorothee 186women, and German Democratic

Republic 214Wurm, Theophil 111Württemberg:

and alienation of population 112and attitudes towards central/local

government 116and barriers to Nazi norms and

values 109–11and Christian church:

Protestants 111–12role of 117Roman Catholics 111, 112

and commodity shortages 114and conscription:

of horses 114of men 113

and discrimination against countryside 113and divided community/regime

loyalties 109–10and economic hardship 112and foreign labour 113, 115and historical memory 109and impact of war casualties 114–15and labour shortage 112, 113, 114and lack of awareness of government

policy 116–17and mobilization of Volkssturm (home

guard) 115–16and perceptions of Nazi Party 109

undervalued by 112–13and pessimism over war 115and priorities of inhabitants 110and reaction to euthanasia of mentally

ill 112and reaction to Kristallnacht 114and resentment amongst rural

population 113and spontaneity of popular opinion 117

Wyschinski, Andrei 172, 174Wyszynski, Stefan 151

Yurchak, Alexei 25

Zaremba, Marcin 155, 156Zinov’ev, Grigori 71Zola, Emile 172Zweig, Arnold 172–3