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.

Robert Gerwarth, Stephan Malinowski

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.

Following the (not entirely dissimilar) controversy about the violent legacy of Communism and its relationship to Nazi atrocities, which was triggered by publications such as Ernst Nolte’s “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” Francois Furet’s Le passe´ d’une illusion, and Stephane Courtois’s Livre noir du communisme,4 the current “colonial turn” in historiography is posing yet another challenge to the Holocaust’s long-standing “narrative monopoly” on extreme mass violence. Convinced that the idea of the Holocaust’s “uniqueness” or “singularity” has too long overshadowed “lesser,” “marginal,” or
“incomplete” genocides in various colonial contexts (from Australia, Asia, and Africa to Latin and North America), scholars such as Enzo Traverso, Sven Lindquist, Dirk Moses, Mark Levene, and Dan Stone have recently offered challenging reinterpretations of colonial genocides and their repercussions on the western World.

Most importantly, Moses and others have linked the colonial genocides of the “racial century (1850–1950)” and the Holocaust to a single modernization process of accelerating violence that culminated in Auschwitz. Rejecting the idea that the roots of fascism can be found in German history
alone, they argue that rather than “taking a ‘special path’ to modernity or standing apart sui generis from the other European powers, Germany is the exemplar of an experience they all underwent in varying degrees of intensity. It is the country where the process occurred most radically.”

The “new” school of genocide studies draws heavily on ideas that were first formulated within the context of the highly politicized French decolonization debate; prominent intellectual critics of colonialism such as Aime´ Ce´saire, Octave Mannoni, and Frantz Fanon pointed to the enduring psychological deformation of the “colonial masters” and interpreted fascism as European colonialism turned inward. As Aime´ Ce´saire famously remarked in his Discours sur le colonialisme (1950), the white Christian bourgeois could not forgive Hitler for unleashing colonial violence within Europe and for treating the White Man in a manner previously reserved for Indians, Africans, and Arabs.

Even before Ce´saire, the African-American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The World and Africa (1947) that “there was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women, or ghastly blasphemy of children—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folks in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.” In short, colonialism, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously argued, was a “boomerang” that returned to Europe in the form of fascism….

R. Gerwarth, & S. Malinowski, (2009). Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz. Central European History, 42(02), 279. <doi:10.1017/s0008938909000314 >

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