Ralf Dahrendorf
TOTALITARIANISM REVISITED
Other centuries were probably no better than this mur–
derous , horrific one which is slowly drawing to its close. There was
the "calamitous fourteenth century" whose "distant mirror" Barbara
Tuchman held up for us moderns. There was the first Thirty Years
War of the seventeenth century which the contemporary German
author , Grimmelshausen, tried to make bearable by the black
humor of his novel,
Adventuresome Simplicius Simplicissimus.
The age of
revolutions may look glorious in retrospect, but it was an age of fear
and worry and random death to those who lived through it. A long
series of wars followed, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian
War, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War among them. And yet
there was no other time which fell so far short of what it might have
been than our own . Never before were there greater opportunities
for prosperity and civilization than in the twentieth century, and
thus never before such a dramatic relapse into barbarism and
misery .
The heart of the story is what Fritz Stern calls the Second
Thirty Years War. It began in that innocent summer of 1914 when
~
in a matter of weeks a little local Austrian difficulty turned into the
apparent inevitability of a world war. Before the war ended , Lenin
had undertaken his fateful journey to the Finland Station in
Petersburg and set up the regime of the Bolsheviki . Five years later,
in the middle of economic turmoil everywhere, Mussolini marched
on Rome and made the notorious "fascicles" the symbol of a sinister
new movement. Another seven years later, the Great Crash impov–
erished Americans and spread mass unemployment in Europe. In
1933, Hitler came to power in Germany . In 1936, the Spanish Civil
War began. From then on , every year marks another fateful step
towards the Holocaust of Europe's Jews and, in the end , of large
parts of Europe .
To me, the most frightening aspect of this history is (to quote
Fritz Stern once again) the extent to which the march of evil held
out temptations to many.
It
was not just the Austrians who were
Editor's Note: This essay was first presented as the inaugural Manes Sperber
Memorial Lecture at the U niversity of H aifa, on March 28, 1988.
