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Soviet revolution, indeed of much of recent history, had originally
come from the Soviet Union. I added that Lenin was probably one
of the few political leaders of Europe who had been free of anti–
Semitism, and that Stalin's anti-Semitism was but one more differ–
ence between him and Lenin. Churchill's remark in 1920 that the
Bolshevik revolution was nothing but the rabble of East European
ghettos took them aback.
Time and again the Chinese wondered at the lack of Jewish
resistance to persecution. I tried to explain the degradation of perse–
cution, the many steps leading up to the Holocaust, the hope on the
part of the victims that the horror would stop somewhere. But why
no analogues of the ghetto uprising in Warsaw? I suggested that in
most instances the Jews, starved and harried, were too isolated and
weak to offer physical resistance. But why the Holocaust itself, they
wondered. I tried to give historical explanations, but in the end I
called it a terrible madness that had swept over people, a madness
that transcended any rational cause and that set loose a train of
actions which injured the very interests of the depraved perpetra–
tors. Perhaps Marxism-Leninism could not reckon with such a mad–
ness, with an eruption of the irrational and the violent such as our
century had witnessed before-though never before on such a scale.
Finally I heard myself exclaim in a kind of uncertain, defiant ques–
tion: Did you yourselves not just go through such a madness? I nei–
ther expected nor received an answer to a challenge that up till then
had always been implied, not explicit. I added that Marxism-Lenin–
ism, with its amalgam of historical analysis and political paranoia,
could not and had not coped with these eruptions.
In all my lectures and conversations I was struck by a combina–
tion of lingering dogmatism and liberated curiosity. My listeners
seemed disturbed, for example, by my depiction of Bismarck as a
partial modernizer, as someone who had continued the Prussian tra–
dition of "revolution from above"-a concept in itself hard to rec–
oncile with Marxist analysis. They were astounded by my conten–
tion that in his first two wars Bismarck showed great moderation in
victory, a quality that he rarely showed his domestic enemies, cer–
tainly not after 1871. They were puzzled by Bismarck's creation of a
Rechtsstaat
and by his social legislation-after his attempted suppres–
sion of German socialism. Finally it all boiled down to the question
of what one's ultimate judgment of Bismarck was: as one senior his–
torian confessed, he was confused, because in socialist countries
