Robert Gerwarth

Hannah Arendt's Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923*

On May 25, 1919, the conservative Austrian newspaper Innsbrucker Nachrichten observed that the end of the Great War had not made Europe a more peaceful place. Under the headline “War in Peace,” the paper pointed to the extraordinarily high levels of ethnic and revolutionary violence that had recently erupted across the collapsed European land empires.1 Indeed, if anything, the cessation of hostilities on the western front on November 11, 1918, was the exception rather than the rule. The war had finished a year earlier on the eastern front, as the Bolsheviks extricated Russia from the conflict. Yet despite this, violence continued there and spread to the Central powers as they were defeated in the fall of 1918. Ethnic strife, pogroms, revolutions, counterrevolutions, wars of independence, civil conflict, invasions, and interstate wars went on until 1923. One or more of these kinds of violence affected Russia, the Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. Ireland experienced a war of independence and civil war in the same period.2

Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe

Introduction Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth 1. Europe in the world Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses and Klaus Weinhauer 2. War James McMillan 3. Genocide and ethnic cleansing Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses 4. Revolution and counterrevolution Martin Conway and Robert Gerwarth 5. Terrorism and the state Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Klaus Weinhauer.

The continuum of violence

This chapter focuses on war finance in the two principal allies of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, the two financial powerhouses of the Entente, Great Britain and France, and two neutral countries, the United States and the Netherlands. It discusses the impact of mobilisation on national finances, financing the industrial war effort, demobilisation and impossible return to the pre-war financial order, and the financial legacy of the Great War. Mobilisation for war transformed the peacetime financial systems of the European powers. Financial demobilisation in Germany through inflation and stabilisation put an end to war finance, made reconstruction easier and reduced debt. Financial demobilisation following the Great War led to uncertain and therefore temporary stabilization of social policy and the political system itself. The weakness of parliamentary governments, and the attractiveness of totalitarian alternatives, arose in part out of the exigencies and consequences of war finance.

The Great War and Paramilitarism in Europe, 1917 23

In this comparative conclusion, the authors consider some of the most influential trends in the historiography of political and paramilitary violence, with particular reference to the relationship between wartime and post-war violence. The heuristic value of the ‘aftershocks’ metaphor is considered, as are the advantages (and potential pitfalls) of the contributors’ transnational approach. Finally, the authors suggest an agenda for future research on paramilitary violence, which looks at the phenomenon in a global perspective. The contributions to this special issue raise two broader, connected questions: first, the causes of the violence (and in particular the paramilitary violence) that was such a distinctive feature of the post-war period in certain regions of Europe following the Great War and, second, the legacies of that same violence. The key in both cases is the analytical framework that best accounts for the violence and enables its significance to be measured.

The limits of demobilization: Global perspectives on the aftermath of the great war

One hundred years ago, the European powers plunged into a soon-to-be global conflict that has been aptly described as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth-century. Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the wider world experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, this verdict seems more than justified: estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and 10 million dead combatants and between five and six million killed civilians – excluding the hundreds of thousands of men who were permanently disfigured or mentally traumatized. The body of scholarship devoted to this first ‘total war’ in history is appropriately large, but its coverage uneven: while the political events and diplomatic entanglements that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, the developments on the Western Front or the Paris Peace Treaties have received sustained attention ever since the end of that war, Eastern European and global historians have only more recently begun to explore the full economic, political and cultural consequences of the First World War. Even less attention – with the exception of Germany and

Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe: Revolution and counter-revolution

Introduction This chapter is a more complicated task to write than would have been the case twenty or thirty years ago. In the age that we can perhaps now define as the ‘classic’ era in the historiography of the European twentieth century from the 1960s to the 1980s, the interconnection of revolutionary causes (of left and right) and violence seemed relatively uncomplicated. Revolutionary causes – perceived as secular, millenarian and intransigent – engaged in violence as a consequence of the radicalism of their rhetoric, dreams and ambitions and the intensity of the struggle that their actions generated for political power. Nowadays, however, matters no longer seem so straightforward. Much of the literature on revolutionary movements over the last twenty years has watered down the centrality of ideological dynamics within revolution and complicated such dynamics with a heightened recognition that much which might appear political in fact had other causes. Ethnic antipathies, the impact of imperialist projects both within and beyond Europe and what one might term the psycho-underground of masculinities and local community conflicts now seem at least as important, if not more so, as politico-ideological dynamics in explaining the surges of revolutionary violence that took place across Europe during the twentieth century. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to think afresh about the interconnectedness of violence and revolutionary movements (of the left and right) during Europes long twentieth century. In doing so, three complexities immediately arise. First, there is the challenge of chronological scope.

Europeanization through Violence? War Experiences and the Making of Modern Europe

Unlike the more ambivalent transnational concepts of ‘Americanization’ and ‘Globalization’, the increasingly popular term ‘Europeanization’ is generally used to describe unambiguously positive processes of political, socio-economic and cultural integration within the institutional framework of the European Union.1 Peaceful forms of cross-cultural encounters, shared values, free trade, transnational exchanges of ideas, a culture of compromise, and increasing inter-state cooperation are, or so it seems, at the heart of what we commonly perceive as ‘Europeanization’; a transnational process that culminated in the EU, a realm of peace and prosperity in which the demons of a nationalist past have become history.2

The Axis: Germany, Japan and Italy on the road to war

In a famous speech in Milan’s cathedral square in November 1936, the leader of Fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini, used a metaphor first invented by Hungary’s former Prime Minister, Gyula Gömbös, to describe the newly intensified German-Italian relations: an ‘axis’ had been forged between Berlin and Rome, he insisted, with a reference to the Treaty of Friendship signed between the two powers on 25 October 1936, ‘around which all those European states which are animated by a desire for collaboration and peace can revolve’. In Italian and German propaganda, the ‘axis’ was celebrated as the joining of forces between two long suppressed but now re-emerging empires, with shared histories and superior cultures, as well as common foes who sought to prevent them from assuming their rightful place among the world’s great powers. For the West, the axis promised anything but ‘peace’. Instead, it raised the spectre of a combined threat to European collective security by two expansionist powers under the leadership of dangerous dictators. The threat became global when, within weeks of the formation of the Axis, Hitler entered into a further pact with Japan that was soon to be known as the Anti-Comintern Pact. Despite Hitler’s racial prejudices against the Japanese as an Asian people allegedly incapable of ‘creating culture’, he viewed the country as having similar geopolitical (and predominantly anti-Soviet) interests. On 27 November 1936, Hitler formally approved the

Control and Chaos: Paramilitary Violence and the Dissolution of the Habsburg Empire

This essay analyses the emergence of paramilitary violence as a new form of control regime in two of the collapsed Habsburg Empire’s successor states, Austria and Hungary. It is argued that both societies witnessed the emergence of a sizeable violent subculture of the political right, a subculture that was shaped and radicalized by the successive traumatizing experiences of war, defeat, revolution, state collapse, and territorial disintegration. Physical violence was most marked in those border areas of limited statehood where different ethnic groups with long-standing mutual antipathies suddenly witnessed a redrawing of borders. Members of the male wartime generation active in this transnational subculture fed on a doctrine of hypernationalism and apocalyptic fantasies as they sought to reassert their control over a society which they perceived to be in the midst of total collapse. Fears of a permanent loss of control over formerly subordinate social groups and ethnic rivals went hand-in-hand with a growing determination to avenge their perceived humiliations at the hands of external and internal enemies. Action, not ideas, was the defining characteristic of these groups. They were driven forward not by a revolutionary vision but by a common rhetoric of the reestablishment of “order” and an interlocking series of social and ethnic antipathies. In the absence of a functioning state, paramilitaries of different political convictions sought to fulfill the control functions of the collapsed Habsburg authorities. Their violence was thus at least in part an act of self-empowerment at a time when the social elites of the Habsburg Empire were more powerless than they had been for centuries.