The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

  The pan-movements’ hostility to the party system acquired practical significance when, after the first World War, the party system ceased to be a working device and the class system of European society broke down under the weight of growing masses entirely declassed by events. What came to the fore then were no longer mere pan-movements but their totalitarian successors, which in a few years determined the politics of all other parties to such a degree that they became either anti-Fascist or anti-Bolshevik or both.101 By this negative approach seemingly forced upon them from the outside, the older parties showed clearly that they too were no longer able to function as representatives of specific class interests but had become mere defenders of the status quo. The speed with which the German and Austrian Pan-Germans rallied to Nazism has a parallel in the much slower and more complicated course through which Pan-Slavs finally found out that the liquidation of Lenin’s Russian Revolution had been thorough enough to make it possible for them to support Stalin wholeheartedly. That Bolshevism and Nazism at the height of their power outgrew mere tribal nationalism and had little use for those who were still actually convinced of it in principle, rather than as mere propaganda material, was neither the Pan-Germans’ nor the Pan-Slavs’ fault and hardly checked their enthusiasm.

  The decay of the Continental party system went hand in hand with a decline of the prestige of the nation-state. National homogeneity was severely disturbed by migrations and France, the nation par excellence, became in a matter of years utterly dependent on foreign labor; a restrictive immigration policy, inadequate to new needs, was still truly “national,” but made it all the more obvious that the nation-state was no longer capable of facing the major political issues of the time.102 Even more serious was the ill-fated effort of the peace treaties of 1919 to introduce national state organizations into Eastern and Southern Europe where the state people frequently had only a relative majority and were outnumbered by the combined “minorities.” This new situation would have been sufficient in itself to undermine seriously the class basis of the party system; everywhere parties were now organized along national lines as though the liquidation of the Dual Monarchy had served only to enable a host of similar experiments to start on a dwarfed scale.103 In other countries, where the nation-state and the class basis of its parties were not touched by migrations and heterogeneity of population, inflation and unemployment caused a similar breakdown; and it is obvious that the more rigid the country’s class system, the more class-conscious its people had been, the more dramatic and dangerous was this breakdown.

  This was the situation between the two wars when every movement had a greater chance than any party because the movement attacked the institution of the state and did not appeal to classes. Fascism and Nazism always boasted that their hatred was directed not against individual classes, but the class system as such, which they denounced as an invention of Marxism. Even more significant was the fact that the Communists also, notwithstanding their Marxist ideology, had to abandon the rigidity of their class appeal when, after 1935, under the pretext of enlarging their mass base, they formed Popular Fronts everywhere and began to appeal to the same growing masses outside all class strata which up to then had been the natural prey to Fascist movements. None of the old parties was prepared to receive these masses, nor did they gauge correctly the growing importance of their numbers and the growing political influence of their leaders. This error in judgment by the older parties can be explained by the fact that their secure position in Parliament and safe representation in the offices and institutions of the state made them feel much closer to the sources of power than to the masses; they thought the state would remain forever the undisputed master of all instruments of violence, and that the army, that supreme institution of the nation-state, would remain the decisive element in all domestic crises. They therefore felt free to ridicule the numerous paramilitary formations which had sprung up without any officially recognized help. For the weaker the party system grew under the pressure of movements outside of Parliament and classes, the more rapidly all former antagonism of the parties to the state disappeared. The parties, laboring under the illusion of a “state above parties,” misinterpreted this harmony as a source of strength, as a wondrous relationship to something of a higher order. But the state was as threatened as the party system by the pressure of revolutionary movements, and it could no longer afford to keep its lofty and necessarily unpopular position above internal domestic strife. The army had long since ceased to be a reliable bulwark against revolutionary unrest, not because it was in sympathy with the revolution but because it had lost its position. Twice in modern times, and both times in France, the nation par excellence, the army had already proved its essential unwillingness or incapacity to help those in power or to seize power by itself: in 1850, when it permitted the mob of the “Society of December 10” to carry Napoleon III to power,104 and again at the end of the nineteenth century, during the Dreyfus Affair, when nothing would have been easier than the establishment of a military dictatorship. The neutrality of the army, its willingness to serve every master, eventually left the state in a position of “mediation between the organized party interests. It was no longer above but between the classes of society.”105 In other words, the state and the parties together defended the status quo without realizing that this very alliance served as much as anything else to change the status quo.

  The breakdown of the European party system occurred in a spectacular way with Hitler’s rise to power. It is now often conveniently forgotten that at the moment of the outbreak of the second World War, the majority of European countries had already adopted some form of dictatorship and discarded the party system, and that this revolutionary change in government had been effected in most countries without revolutionary upheaval. Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power. After all, it did not make much difference if a few thousand almost unarmed people staged a march on Rome and took over the government in Italy, or whether in Poland (in 1934) a so-called “partyless bloc,” with a program of support for a semifascist government and a membership drawn from the nobility and the poorest peasantry, workers and businessmen, Catholics and orthodox Jews, legally won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament.106

  In France, Hitler’s rise to power, accompanied by a growth of Communism and Fascism, quickly cancelled the other parties’ original relationships to each other and changed time-honored party lines overnight. The French Right, up to then strongly anti-German and pro-war, after 1933 became the vanguard of pacifism and understanding with Germany. The Left switched with equal speed from pacifism at any price to a firm stand against Germany and was soon accused of being a party of warmongers by the same parties which only a few years before had denounced its pacifism as national treachery.107 The years that followed Hitler’s rise to power proved even more disastrous to the integrity of the French party system. In the Munich crisis each party, from Right to Left, split internally on the only relevant political issue: who was for, who was against war with Germany.108 Each party harbored a peace faction and a war faction; none of them could remain united on major political decisions and none stood the test of Fascism and Nazism without splitting into anti-Fascist on one side, Nazi fellow-travelers on the other. That Hitler could choose freely from all parties for the erection of puppet regimes was the consequence of this pre-war situation, and not of an especially shrewd Nazi maneuver. There was not a single party in Europe that did not produce collaborators.

  Against the disintegration of the older parties stood the clear-cut unity of the Fascist and Communist movements everywhere—the former, outside of Germany and Italy, loyally advocating peace even at the price of foreign domination, and the latter for a long while preaching war even at the price of national ruin. The point, however, is not so much that the extreme Right everywhere had abandoned its traditional nationalism in favor of Hitler’s Europe and that th
e extreme Left had forgotten its traditional pacifism in favor of old nationalist slogans, but rather that both movements could count on the loyalty of a membership and leadership which would not be disturbed by a sudden switch in policy. This was dramatically exposed in the German-Russian nonaggression pact, when the Nazis had to drop their chief slogan against Bolshevism and the Communists had to return to a pacifism which they always had denounced as petty-bourgeois. Such sudden turns did not hurt them in the least. It is still well remembered how strong the Communists remained after their second volte-face less than two years later when the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany, and this in spite of the fact that both political lines had involved the rank and file in serious and dangerous political activities which demanded real sacrifices and constant action.

  Different in appearance but much more violent in reality was the break-down of the party system in pre-Hitler Germany. This came into the open during the last presidential elections in 1932 when entirely new and complicated forms of mass propaganda were adopted by all parties.

  The choice of candidates was itself peculiar. While it was a matter of course that the two movements, which stood outside of and fought the parliamentary system from opposite sides, would present their own candidates (Hitler for the Nazis, and Thalmann for the Communists), it was rather surprising to see that all other parties could suddenly agree upon one candidate. That this candidate happened to be old Hindenburg who enjoyed the matchless popularity which, since the time of MacMahon, awaits the defeated general at home, was not just a joke; it showed how much the old parties wanted merely to identify themselves with the old-time state, the state above the parties whose most potent symbol had been the national army, to what an extent, in other words, they had already given up the party system itself. For in the face of the movements, the differences between the parties had indeed become quite meaningless; the existence of all of them was at stake and consequently they banded together and hoped to maintain a status quo that guaranteed their existence. Hindenburg became the symbol of the nation-state and the party system, while Hitler and Thalmann competed with each other to become the true symbol of the people.

  As significant as the choice of candidates were the electoral posters. None of them praised its candidate for his own merits; the posters for Hindenburg claimed merely that “a vote for Thalmann is a vote for Hitler”—warning the workers not to waste their votes on a candidate sure to be beaten (Thalmann) and thus put Hitler in the saddle. This was how the Social Democrats reconciled themselves to Hindenburg., who was not even mentioned. The parties of the Right played the same game and emphasized that “a vote for Hitler is a vote for Thalmann.” Both, in addition, alluded quite clearly to the instances in which the Nazis and Communists had made common cause, in order to convince all loyal party members, whether Right or Left, that the preservation of the status quo demanded Hindenburg.

  In contrast to the propaganda for Hindenburg that appealed to those who wanted the status quo at any price—and in 1932 that meant unemployment for almost half the German people—the candidates of the movements had to reckon with those who wanted change at any price (even at the price of destruction of all legal institutions), and these were at least as numerous as the ever-growing millions of unemployed and their families. The Nazis therefore did not wince at the absurdity that “a vote for Thalmann is a vote for Hindenburg,” the Communists did not hesitate to reply that “a vote for Hitler is a vote for Hindenburg,” both threatening their voters with the menace of the status quo in exactly the same way their opponents had threatened their members with the specter of the revolution.

  Behind the curious uniformity of method used by the supporters of all the candidates lay the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened—afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis, or afraid of the status quo. In this general fear all class divisions disappeared from the political scene; while the party alliance for the defense of the status quo blurred the older class structure maintained in the separate parties, the rank and file of the movements was completely heterogeneous and as dynamic and fluctuating as unemployment itself.109 While within the framework of the national institutions the parliamentary Left had joined the parliamentary Right, the two movements were busy organizing together the famous transportation strike on the streets of Berlin in November, 1932.

  When one considers the extraordinarily rapid decline of the Continental party system, one should bear in mind the very short life span of the whole institution. It existed nowhere before the nineteenth century, and in most European countries the formation of political parties took place only after 1848, so that its reign as an unchallenged institution in national politics lasted hardly four decades. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, all the significant political developments in France, as well as in Austria-Hungary, already took place outside of and in opposition to parliamentary parties, while everywhere smaller imperialist “parties above parties” challenged the institution for the sake of popular support for an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy.

  While the imperialist leagues set themselves above parties for the sake of identification with the nation-state, the pan-movements attacked these same parties as part and parcel of a general system which included the nation-state; they were not so much “above parties” as “above the state” for the sake of a direct identification with the people. The totalitarian movements eventually were led to discard the people also, whom, however, following closely in the footsteps of the pan-movements they used for propaganda purposes. The “totalitarian state” is a state in appearance only, and the movement no longer truly identifies itself even with the needs of the people. The Movement by now is above state and people, ready to sacrifice both for the sake of its ideology: “The Movement ...is State as well as People, and neither the present state ...nor the present German people can even be conceived without the Movement.”110

  Nothing proves better the irreparable decay of the party system than the great efforts after this war to revive it on the Continent, their pitiful results, the enhanced appeal of movements after the defeat of Nazism, and the obvious threat of Bolshevism to national independence. The result of all efforts to restore the status quo has been only the restoration of a political situation in which the destructive movements are the only “parties” that function properly. Their leadership has maintained authority under the most trying circumstances and in spite of constantly changing party lines. In order to gauge correctly the chances for survival of the European nation-state, it would be wise not to pay too much attention to nationalist slogans which the movements occasionally adopt for purposes of hiding their true intentions, but rather to consider that by now everybody knows that they are regional branches of international organizations, that the rank and file is not disturbed in the least when it becomes obvious that their policy serves foreign-policy interests of another and even hostile power, and that denunciations of their leaders as fifth columnists, traitors to the country, etc., do not impress their members to any considerable degree. In contrast to the old parties, the movements have survived the last war and are today the only “parties” which have remained alive and meaningful to their adherents.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man

  IT IS ALMOST impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion. Yet this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done. Inflation destroyed
the whole class of small property owners beyond hope for recovery or new formation, something which no monetary crisis had ever done so radically before. Unemployment, when it came, reached fabulous proportions, was no longer restricted to the working class but seized with insignificant exceptions whole nations. Civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.

  Before totalitarian politics consciously attacked and partially destroyed the very structure of European civilization, the explosion of 1914 and its severe consequences of instability had sufficiently shattered the façade of Europe’s political system to lay bare its hidden frame. Such visible exposures were the sufferings of more and more groups of people to whom suddenly the rules of the world around them had ceased to apply. It was precisely the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to an otherwise sane and normal rule, and which filled with equal cynicism victims and observers of an apparently unjust and abnormal fate. Both mistook this cynicism for growing wisdom in the ways of the world, while actually they were more baffled and therefore became more stupid than they ever had been before. Hatred, certainly not lacking in the pre-war world, began to play a central role in public affairs everywhere, so that the political scene in the deceptively quiet years of the twenties assumed the sordid and weird atmosphere of a Strindbergian family quarrel. Nothing perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state of affairs—neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpredictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward anything under the sun.