Fascism: Was there something there? | nd-aktuell.de

After the end of the Second World War, it quickly became clear that the front line between Soviet troops on the one hand and American-Anglo-French troops on the other would become a border between a bureaucratic planned economy and a capitalist, credit-controlled reconstruction society. The denazification and “re-education” that began after the war in West Germany by the Western Allied occupying powers was a half-hearted attempt to democratically re-educate the population without restricting the pre-democratic state of the economy (i.e. private control of social means of production).

The Western occupying powers imposed production restrictions, dismantled numerous companies and took over German patents, but (including in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia) blocked all initiatives to socialize key industries, even if the corresponding constitutional articles and implementing laws had already been legitimized by referendums.

However, this happened in the Soviet zone, where the USSR made much greater demands for reparations and imposed the model of a bureaucratic planned economy. In both cases (under the sign of the “Cold War”) internal opposition remained frowned upon, while the “authoritarian” mentality practiced for generations was made available for senseless reconstruction. The majority of the population, which had become a community of robbery and murder under Nazi rule, fled, driven by fear, into a collective non-existence after the course of the war had shown that the project of conquering a master-man Germany between the Atlantic and the Urals was an illusion. The desire to be true in the era of the “Third Reich”. Not only were the regime’s mass crimes before and during the Second World War initiated by Hitler and his paladins denied, but also the enthusiastic approval and active participation of the majority of the population in the implementation of fascist domestic and foreign policy. In the supposed “zero hour” of 1945, twelve years of life stories were devalued, rewritten or “cancelled”.

The history of this practical German show of strength undoubtedly included the nationalistically “decisive” debates about “war guilt” and “stab in the back” (legend), the silence about those who died in the World War and about the victims of counter-revolution and class justice during the Weimar Republic. But the “traumatic” regime change of 1945 triggered a much more profound “disorder of memory,” namely not just a revision, but an attempt to erase individual and collective memory. In the “zero hour” there was a clear majority of Holocaust deniers in Germany – apart from surviving resistance members and concentration camp prisoners.

Of course, such attempts at deletion are ultimately doomed to failure. According to Freud’s theory, in the case of (fear-related) repression, “factual ideas” are separated from the “word ideas” associated with them (through which they come to consciousness in the first place). The energetic-affective “cathexis” of a frowned-upon idea is used to create “counter-cathexis” or shifted to less risky object representations. However, the “impulsion” of the repressed, the impending failure of his excommunication, requires increasingly complex counter-occupations over time. First, however, the attempt to escape one’s own horror story by ignoring it is incorporated into the arsenal of “emotional inheritances” and bequeathed to subsequent generations, and so “tradition” also weighs on this one – like all other “dead generations” – ” like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx).

The Nazi leaders and ideologues were not only fanatically determined to spread the illusion of the superiority of their “race” by exterminating many millions of people – whom they declared to be “inferior” and whose living space they claimed for “their equal” – through their atrocities not to authenticate them, but at the same time to be careful to erase the traces of their mass crimes (and with these traces the memory of their crimes). Both the “euthanasia” program (the murder of around 70,000 disabled and sick people) since the fall of 1939, the so-called “Aktion T4”, and the follow-up project of the murder of European Jews were declared a “Secret Reich Matter”. The infamous “Wannsee Conference”, which was aimed at organizing the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (which has been described as the “Holocaust” since 1979), took place in January 1942 – six months after the Nazi Wehrmacht’s attack on the Soviet Union mass shootings and gassings of Jews, commissars, partisans and prisoners of war.

At the same time, planning began for the SS “Sonderaktion 1005”, whose task (under the direction of the organizer of the Babyn Yar massacre, Paul Blobel) was to bury hundreds of thousands of corpses in the mass graves of the execution sites in 1942-44 To exhume and burn extermination camps (especially in Ukraine and Poland). In the spring of 1945, the population, which had long hoped for the “final victory,” followed suit: in millions of households, National Socialist literature and swastika flags, personal documents and propaganda records, photo albums and films, uniforms and pictures of Hitler went up in flames, Medals and party badges were buried (or sewn into doll heads). There were hardly any Jewish survivors left in the city or country, but none of the eight and a half million party members wanted to be responsible or to have known anything about their fate. When the first Allied tanks and jeeps drove through the streets, suddenly no one raised their arm in the Hitler salute, as they had in the previous twelve years.

Loss of reality was the result of this collective flight into oblivion, and not even the anti-authoritarian student and school student protest movement of 1968 was able to sustainably correct the majority’s disturbed relationship to the German past. Once defense mechanisms such as fearful “denial” become habitual, they outlast many generational and regime changes, not only the short but also the “long waves” of the economy. As a result, many people avoided anything that was reminiscent of the “dark” twelve years; and this is becoming more and more, since not only historians of the past (who dig it up), but also repeaters of the past, ethnic ideologues and murderous fellows who represent it, appear on the scene (like the “National Socialist Underground” or the synagogue and kebab shop attacker Stephan Balliet in Halle in 2019).

Habitual forgetting not only limits one’s understanding of the world and society, but also ruins one’s affective ability to respond: it becomes disproportionate or fails altogether. Emotions are silent regarding the danger posed by nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons, but are in turmoil when it comes to Covid vaccinations; Individual attacks by fascist assassins (in Halle or Hanau) are repeatedly called “unbelievable,” isolated in this way and then quickly forgotten; The fact that they form a long series, i.e. indicate a “tendency,” is beyond perception.

The innocently forgetful people in the theater of the present are incapable of recognizing the otherwise forgetful people on the political stage, who, as compulsive repeaters, replay the fear and misery of the “Third Reich” to them (and ask them to take part in another great Danse Macabre). recognize what they are: revenants, reincarnations of the propagandists and thugs of a hundred years ago. The unsuspecting revenants also include the 16 percent of young first-time voters who recently copied the behavior of their great-grandparents at the end of the first republic. Back then they didn’t know what they were doing when they voted for the NSDAP in the hope that Hitler could show them a way out of the labyrinth of crisis; But this path led them straight to Auschwitz and Stalingrad.

For technical reasons, the fourth part of this series will not be released until Tuesday, October 8th. Helmut Dahmer is a social philosopher and lives in Vienna. From 1974 to 2002 he was professor of sociology in Darmstadt.