The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

  Outstanding among these conflicts was the continuously rising state hostility of the German nationality, which accelerated after the foundation of the Reich and discovered the usefulness of antisemitic slogans after the financial crash of 1873. The social situation at that moment was practically the same as in Germany, but the social propaganda to catch the middle-class vote immediately indulged in a much more violent attack on the state, and a much more outspoken confession of nonloyalty to the country. Moreover, the German Liberal Party, under the leadership of Schoenerer, was from the beginning a lower middle-class party without connections or restraints from the side of the nobility, and with a decidedly left-wing outlook. It never achieved a real mass basis, but it was remarkably successful in the universities during the eighties where it organized the first closely knit students’ organization on the basis of open antisemitism. Schoenerer’s anti-semitism, at first almost exclusively directed against the Rothschilds, won him the sympathies of the labor movement, which regarded him as a true radical gone astray.46 His main advantage was that he could base his anti-semitic propaganda on demonstrable facts: as a member of the Austrian Reichsrat he had fought for nationalization of the Austrian railroads, the major part of which had been in the hands of the Rothschilds since 1836 due to a state license which expired in 1886. Schoenerer succeeded in gathering 40,000 signatures against its renewal, and in placing the Jewish question in the limelight of public interest. The close connection between the Rothschilds and the financial interests of the monarchy became very obvious when the government tried to extend the license under conditions which were patently to the disadvantage of the state as well as the public. Schoenerer’s agitation in this matter became the actual beginning of an articulate antisemitic movement in Austria.47 The point is that this movement, in contrast to the German Stoeckcr agitation, was initiated and led by a man who was sincere beyond doubt, and therefore did not stop at the use of antisemitism as a propaganda weapon, but developed quickly that Pan-German ideology which was to influence Nazism more deeply than any other German brand of antisemitism.

  Though victorious in the long run, the Schoenerer movement was temporarily defeated by a second antisemitic party, the Christian-Socials under the leadership of Lueger. While Schoenerer had attacked the Catholic Church and its considerable influence on Austrian politics almost as much as he had the Jews, the Christian-Socials were a Catholic party who tried from the outset to ally themselves with those reactionary conservative forces which had proved so helpful in Germany and France. Since they made more social concessions, they were more successful than in Germany or in France. They, together with the Social Democrats, survived the downfall of the monarchy and became the most influential group in postwar Austria. But long before the establishment of an Austrian Republic, when, in the nineties, Lueger had won the Mayoralty of Vienna by an antisemitic campaign, the Christian-Socials already adopted that typically equivocal attitude toward the Jews in the nation-state—hostility to the intelligentsia and friendliness toward the Jewish business class. It was by no means an accident that, after a bitter and bloody contest for power with the socialist workers’ movement, they took over the state machinery when Austria, reduced to its German nationality, was established as a nation-state. They turned out to be the only party which was prepared for exactly this role and, even under the old monarchy, had won popularity because of their nationalism. Since the Hapsburgs were a German house and had granted their German subjects a certain predominance, the Christian-Socials never attacked the monarchy. Their function was rather to win large parts of the German nationality for the support of an essentially unpopular government. Their antisemitism remained without consequence; the decades when Lueger ruled Vienna were actually a kind of golden age for the Jews. No matter how far their propaganda occasionally went in order to get votes, they never could have proclaimed with Schoenerer and the Pan-Germanists that “they regarded anti-semitism as the mainstay of our national ideology, as the most essential expression of genuine popular conviction and thus as the major national achievement of the century.”48 And although they were as much under the influence of clerical circles as was the antisemitic movement in France, they were of necessity much more restrained in their attacks on the Jews because they did not attack the monarchy as the antisemites in France attacked the Third Republic.

  The successes and failures of the two Austrian antisemitic parties show the scant relevance of social conflicts to the long-range issues of the time. Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon. Indeed, the backbone of Schoenerer’s movement was in those German-speaking provinces without any Jewish population at all, where competition with Jews or hatred of Jewish bankers never existed. The survival of the Pan-Germanist movement and its violent antisemitism in these provinces, while it subsided in the urban centers, was merely due to the fact that these provinces were never reached to the same extent by the universal prosperity of the pre-war period which reconciled the urban population with the government.

  The complete lack of loyalty to their own country and its government, for which the Pan-Germanists substituted an open loyalty to Bismarck’s Reich, and the resulting concept of nationhood as something independent of state and territory, led the Schoenerer group to a veritable imperialist ideology in which lies the clue to its temporary weakness and its final strength. It is also the reason why the Pan-German party in Germany (the Alldeutschen), which never overstepped the limits of ordinary chauvinism, remained so extremely suspicious and reluctant to take the outstretched hands of their Austrian Germanist brothers. This Austrian movement aimed at more than rise to power as a party, more than the possession of the state machinery. It wanted a revolutionary reorganization of Central Europe in which the Germans of Austria, together with and strengthened by the Germans of Germany, would become the ruling people, in which all other peoples of the area would be kept in the same kind of semiservitude as the Slavonic nationalities in Austria. Because of this close affinity to imperialism and the fundamental change it brought to the concept of nationhood, we shall have to postpone the discussion of the Austrian Pan-Germanist movement. It is no longer, at least in its consequences, a mere nineteenth-century preparatory movement; it belongs, more than any other brand of anti-semitism, to the course of events of our own century.

  The exact opposite is true of French antisemitism. The Dreyfus Affair brings into the open all other elements of nineteenth-century antisemitism in its mere ideological and political aspects; it is the culmination of the antisemitism which grew out of the special conditions of the nation-state. Yet its violent form foreshadowed future developments, so that the main actors of the Affair sometimes seem to be staging a huge dress rehearsal for a performance that had to be put off for more than three decades. It drew together all the open or subterranean, political or social sources which had brought the Jewish question into a predominant position in the nineteenth century; its premature outburst, on the other hand, kept it within the framework of a typical nineteenth-century ideology which, although it survived all French governments and political crises, never quite fitted into twentieth-century political conditions. When, after the 1940 defeat, French anti-semitism got its supreme chance under the Vichy government, it had a definitely antiquated and, for major purposes, rather useless character, which German Nazi writers never forgot to point out.49 It had no influence on the formation of Nazism and remains more significant in itself than as an active historical factor in the final catastrophe.

  The principal reason for these wholesome limitations was that France’s antisemitic parties, though violent on the domestic scene, had no supranational aspirations. They belonged after all to the oldest and most fully developed nation-state in Europe. None of the antisemites ever tried seriously to organize a “party above parties” or to seize the state as a party and for no other purpose but party interests. The few attempted coups d’état which might be c
redited to the alliance between antisemites and higher army officers were ridiculously inadequate and obviously contrived.50 In 1898 some nineteen members of Parliament were elected through antisemitic campaigns, but this was a peak which was never reached again and from which the decline was rapid.

  It is true, on the other hand, that this was the earliest instance of the success of antisemitism as a catalytic agent for all other political issues. This can be attributed to the lack of authority of the Third Republic, which had been voted in with a very slight majority. In the eyes of the masses, the state had lost its prestige along with the monarchy, and attacks on the state were no longer a sacrilege. The early outburst of violence in France bears a striking resemblance to similar agitation in the Austrian and German Republics after the first World War. The Nazi dictatorship has been so frequently connected with so-called “state-worship” that even historians have become somewhat blind to the truism that the Nazis took advantage of the complete breakdown of state worship, originally prompted by the worship of a prince who sits on the throne by the grace of God, and which hardly ever occurs in a Republic. In France, fifty years before Central European countries were affected by this universal loss of reverence, state worship had suffered many defeats. It was much easier to attack the Jews and the government together there than in Central Europe where the Jews were attacked in order to attack the government.

  French antisemitism, moreover, is as much older than its European counterparts as is French emancipation of the Jews, which dates back to the end of the eighteenth century. The representatives of the Age of Enlightenment who prepared the French Revolution despised the Jews as a matter of course; they saw in them the backward remnants of the Dark Ages, and they hated them as the financial agents of the aristocracy. The only articulate friends of the Jews in France were conservative writers who denounced anti-Jewish attitudes as “one of the favorite theses of the eighteenth century.”51 For the more liberal or radical writer it had become almost a tradition to warn against the Jews as barbarians who still lived in the patriarchal form of government and recognized no other state.52 During and after the French Revolution, the French clergy and French aristocrats added their voices to the general anti-Jewish sentiment, though for other and more material reasons. They accused the revolutionary government of having ordered the sale of clerical property to pay “the Jews and merchants to whom the government is indebted.”53 These old arguments, somehow kept alive through the never-ending struggle between Church and State in France, supported the general violence and embitterment which had been touched off by other and more modern forces at the end of the century.

  Mainly because of the strong clerical support of antisemitism, the French socialist movement finally decided to take a stand against antisemitic propaganda in the Dreyfus Affair. Until then, however, nineteenth-century French leftist movements had been outspoken in their antipathy to the Jews. They simply followed the tradition of eighteenth-century enlightenment which was the source of French liberalism and radicalism, and they considered anti-Jewish attitudes an integral part of anticlericalism. These sentiments on the left were strengthened first by the fact that the Alsatian Jews continued to live from lending money to peasants, a practice which had already prompted Napoleon’s decree of 1808. After conditions had changed in Alsace, leftist antisemitism found a new source of strength in the financial policies of the house of Rothschild, which played a large part in the financing of the Bourbons, maintained close connections with Louis Philippe, and flourished under Napoleon III.

  Behind these obvious and rather superficial incentives to anti-Jewish attitudes there was a deeper cause, which was crucial to the whole structure of the specifically French brand of radicalism, and which almost succeeded in turning the whole French leftist movement against the Jews. Bankers were much stronger in the French economy than in other capitalist countries, and France’s industrial development, after a brief rise during the reign of Napoleon III, lagged so far behind other nations that pre-capitalist socialist tendencies continued to exert considerable influence. The lower middle classes which in Germany and Austria became antisemitic only during the seventies and eighties, when they were already so desperate that they could be used for reactionary politics as well as for the new mob policies, had been antisemitic in France some fifty years earlier, when, with the help of the working class, they carried the revolution of 1848 to a brief victory. In the forties, when Toussenel published his Les Juifs, Rois de l’Epoque, the most important book in a veritable flood of pamphlets against the Rothschilds, it was enthusiastically received by the entire left-wing press, which at the time was the organ of the revolutionary lower middle classes. Their sentiments, as expressed by Toussenel, though less articulate and less sophisticated, were not very different from those of the young Marx, and Toussenel’s attack on the Rothschilds was only a less gifted and more elaborate variation of the letters from Paris which Boerne had written fifteen years before.54 These Jews, too, mistook the Jewish banker for a central figure in the capitalist system, an error which has exerted a certain influence on the municipal and lower government bureaucracy in France up to our own time.55

  However this outburst of popular anti-Jewish feeling, nourished by an economic conflict between Jewish bankers and their desperate clientele, lasted no longer as an important factor in politics than similar outbursts with purely economic or social causes. The twenty years of Napoleon Ill’s rule over a French Empire were an age of prosperity and security for French Jewry much like the two decades before the outbreak of the first World War in Germany and Austria.

  The only brand of French antisemitism which actually remained strong, and outlasted social antisemitism as well as the contemptuous attitudes of anticlerical intellectuals, was tied up with a general xenophobia. Especially after the first World War, foreign Jews became the stereotypes for all foreigners. A differentiation between native Jews and those who “invaded” the country from the East has been made in all Western and Central European countries. Polish and Russian Jews were treated exactly the same way in Germany and Austria as Rumanian and German Jews were treated in France, just as Jews from Posen in Germany or from Galicia in Austria were regarded with the same snobbish contempt as Jews from Alsace were in France. But only in France did this differentiation at. me such importance on the domestic scene. And this is probably due to the fact that the Rothschilds, who more than anywhere else were the butt of anti-Jewish attacks, had immigrated into France from Germany, so that up to the outbreak of the second World War it became natural to suspect the Jews of sympathies with the national enemy.

  Nationalistic antisemitism, harmless when compared with modern movements, was never a monopoly of reactionaries and chauvinists in France. On this point, the writer Jean Giraudoux, the propaganda minister in Daladier’s war cabinet, was in complete agreement56 with Petain and the Vichy government, which also, no matter how hard it tried to please the Germans, could not break through the limitations of this outmoded antipathy for Jews. The failure was all the more conspicuous since the French had produced an outstanding antisemite who realized the full range and possibilities of the new weapon. That this man should be a prominent novelist is characteristic of conditions in France, where antisemitism in general had never fallen into the same social and intellectual disrepute as in other European countries.

  Louis Ferdinand Céline had a simple thesis, ingenious and containing exactly the ideological imagination that the more rational French anti-semitism had lacked. He claimed that the Jews had prevented the evolution of Europe into a political entity, had caused all European wars since 843, and had plotted the ruin of both France and Germany by inciting their mutual hostility. Céline proposed this fantastic explanation of history in his Ecole des Cadavres, written at the time of the Munich pact and published during the first months of the war. An earlier pamphlet on the subject, Bagatelle pour un Massacre (1938), although it did not include the new key to European history, was already remarkably modern in its a
pproach; it avoided all restricting differentiations between native and foreign Jews, between good and bad ones, and did not bother with elaborate legislative proposals (a particular characteristic of French antisemitism), but went straight to the core of the matter and demanded the massacre of all Jews.

  Céline’s first book was very favorably received by France’s leading intellectuals, who were half pleased by the attack on the Jews and half convinced that it was nothing more than an interesting new literary fancy.57 For exactly the same reasons French home-grown Fascists did not take Céline seriously, despite the fact that the Nazis always knew he was the only true antisemite in France. The inherent good sense of French politicians and their deep-rooted respectability prevented their accepting a charlatan and crackpot. The result was that even the Germans, who knew better, had to continue to use such inadequate supporters as Doriot, a follower of Mussolini, and Pétain, an old French chauvinist with no comprehension whatever of modern problems, in their vain efforts to persuade the French people that extermination of the Jews would be a cure for everything under the sun. The way this situation developed during the years of French official, and even unofficial, readiness to co-operate with Nazi Germany, clearly indicates how ineffective nineteenth-century antisemitism was to the new political purposes of the twentieth, even in a country where it had reached its fullest development and had survived all other changes in public opinion. It did not matter that able nineteenth-century journalists like Edouard Drumont, and even great contemporary writers like Georges Bernanos, contributed to a cause that was much more adequately served by crackpots and charlatans.