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verted to Catholicism. He died in 1954, and Arendt wrote a mOVIng
memoir, reprinted in
Men in Dark Times.
Reviewing Gurian's
Bolshevism
in
Partisan Review
in 1953, Arendt called it the "best analytical history of
Bolshevism." Gurian was very knowledgeable about Russian literature
and history. He followed Soviet and emigre publications and wrote
about Russian affairs throughout his life. A deeply conservative thinker, a
pupil of Max Scheler and Carl Schmitt, he was among the pioneers of
the comparative study of "Red" and "Brown" Bolshevism. But he
would not quite equate them. He conceded the "divergent contents" of
National Socialist and Bolshevik doctrines but maintained that these
were less important than the totalitarian structures the regimes had in
common.
These arguments involved Gurian in certain difficulties. Was it really
possible to "take over and imitate Bolshevik methods without accepting
the contents of Marxism-Leninism?" Could one maintain at one and the
same time that Nazism and Bolshevism were nihilist
a/'/d
that they were
secular religions, and, at least in the case of Bolshevism, that ideology
was of great importance? How great is the attraction of a nihilist reli–
gion?
At the distance of four decades and with the benefit of hindsight, it
is easy to point to the weaknesses of such interpretations. Hitlerism and
Stalinism were unprecedented phenomena, and it was difficult to gen–
eralize. Events were changing rapidly; it would have been a near miracle
if contemporaries had presented instant explanations that were correct in
all essential points. Arendt, for instance, wrote in 1948 that without
concentration camps, without the undefined fear they inspire and the
very well-defined training they offered in totalitarian domination, a to–
talitarian state could neither inspire fanaticism nor maintain a whole
people in complete apathy
(Partisan Review
7, 1948). Yet there were no
such camps in China, in Eastern Europe, or in Italy. Furthermore, the
number of inmates in the German concentration camps in the winter of
1936-1937 was less than ten thousand, but the German regime was never–
theless totalitarian.
Ernst Nolte, the German philosopher of international fame, has al–
ways been primarily interested in fascist ideology rather than in the reality
of Nazism. For over thirty years, he has given vent to a great many ideas
about the war guilt of the Allies, about the Jews and Zionism, about
"transcendence," about the fascist epoch being over. He has surveyed the
interpretations of fascism over the ages and has written on fascist parties
which did not come to power. However, he acquired fame not for these
valuable insights but for the treatises in which he tried to demonstrate
