Abstract
Anti-fascism is, in a sense, a continental European idea and not a British one. The urgency of the fascist threat was never felt as keenly in Britain as on the continental mainland between the wars, and the instrumentalised ideology of anti-fascism as it informed the post-war communist republics was of course not experienced by the British people, even if pride in defeating Hitler became central to post-1945 British national identity. Thus, without overlooking the very real commitment to anti-fascism made by many in Britain — as Nigel Copsey points out, ‘far more people supported the anti-fascist cause than ever supported fascist organisations’2 — I want here to advance the argument that towards the end of the 1930s anti-fascist exiles contributed a theoretical seriousness, if not necessarily a practical pugnacity, to interwar anti-fascism in Britain. The British manifestation of what David Kettler refers to as ‘the legacy of Antifascism as total ideology’ was certainly driven, as Dave Renton reminds us, by the activities of anti-fascists (as opposed to those who were not fascist but did nothing to combat fascism), but the writings of these exiles, I submit here, were also forms of anti-fascist activity and ones that made no little contribution to bringing about an urgent realisation of what fascism meant.3 Furthermore, ‘anti-fascist culture’, as Enzo Traverso notes, was ‘to a very great extent, a culture of exile’.4 Its proponents were people who knew whereof they spoke and urgently felt a need to transmit their views to as wide an audience as possible in the hope of persuading the supposedly stolid and cynical British to take seriously what, from the editorial office of the Times, looked rather too ridiculous to warrant much attention other than to be praised occasionally for having supposedly saved Italy (and later, Germany) from left-wing militancy.
The democracies… lead their people not to defeat but to collapse without fighting. In a word, it is not war but peace which seals the doom of liberal civilization.
Aurel Kolnai (1939)1
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Notes
Aurel Kolnai, ‘Must Democracy Use Force? Part I: Pacifism Means Suicide’, The Nation, 148, 4 (21 January 1939), 87.
Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 2.
See also Nigel Copsey and David Renton (eds.), British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Dave Renton, ‘A Provisional History of Anti-Fascism in Britain: The Forties’, paper given to Northern Marxist Historians Group, 18 September 1996, online at: http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/old/old2.html (accessed 2 October 2012).
See also, for a case study, Neil Barrett, ‘The Anti-Fascist Movement in South-East Lancashire, 1933–1940: The Divergent Experiences of Manchester and Nelson’, in Tim Kirk and Anthony McElligott (eds.), Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 48–62. My claims here are not meant to suggest that British writers had no insights into the nature of fascism, only that the émigrés’ analyses were, overall, more penetrating and urgent.
Compare Andrzej Olechnowicz’s comments on my views in ‘Labour Theorises Fascism: A.D. Lindsay and Harold Laski’, in Nigel Copsey and Andrzej Olechnowicz (eds.), Varieties of Anti-Fascism: Britain in the Inter-War Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 202–23.
See also Anson Rabinbach, ‘Paris, Capital of Anti-Fascism’, in Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn and Elliot Neaman (eds.), The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 182–209.
See, for example, Francis L. Carsten, ‘German Refugees in Great Britain 1933–1945: A Survey’, in Gerhard Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain: Refugees from Hitler’s Germany (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1984), 11;
Ludwig Eiber, ‘Verschwiegene Bündnispartner: Die Union deutscher sozialistischer Organisationen in Großbritannien und die britische Nachrichtendienste’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 15 (1997), 68.
The best evidence of the relative unimportance of Britain as a destination for the exiles is the four pages devoted to Britain out of the nearly 900 that make up Jean-Michel Palmier’s, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso, 2006), 149–53.
For example, Herbert Loebl, ‘Das Refugee Industries Committee: Eine wenig bekannte britische Hilfsorganisation’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 8 (1990), 220–41; Hirschfeld (ed.), Exile in Great Britain;
Daniel Snowman, The Hitler Emigrés: The Cultural Impact of Refugees from Nazism (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002);
Marion Berghahn, Continental Britons: German-Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany, rev edn (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006).
Werner Röder, ‘The Political Exiles: Their Policies and Their Contribution to PostWar Reconstruction’, in Herbert Strauss and Werner Röder (eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945, Volume II Part 1: A-K. The Arts, Sciences, and Literature (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1983), xxvii–xl;
Andreas Klugescheid, ‘“His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”: Der Kampf deutschjüdischer Emigranten in den britischen Streitkräften 1939–1945’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 19 (2001), 106–27;
Helga Grebing, ‘Was wird aus Deutschland nach dem Krieg? Perspektiven linkssozialistischer Emigration für den Neuaufbau Deutschlands nach dem Zusammenbruch der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur’, Exilforschung: Ein internationales Jahrbuch, 3 (1985), 43–58;
Jan Foitzik, ‘Revolution und Demokratie: Zu den sofort-und Übergangsplanungen des sozialdemokratischen Exils für Deutschland 1943–1945’, Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 24, 3 (1988), 308–42;
Isabelle Tombs, ‘Socialists Debate Their History from the First World War to the Third Reich: German Exiles and the British Labour Party’, in Stefan Berger, Peter Lambert and Peter Schuman (eds.), Historikerdialoge: Geschichte, Mythos und Gedächtnis im deutsch-britischen kulturellen Austausch 1750– 2000 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 361–81;
Marjorie Lamberti, ‘German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on “What Should Be Done with Germany after Hitler,” 1941–1945’, Central European History, 40 (2007), 279–305.
Fox, ‘Nazi Germany and German Emigration’, 61–70. Among their most relevant publications, see Ernst Toller, I Was a German (London: John Lane, 1934);
Otto Lehmann Russbüldt, Germany’s Air Force (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1935);
Gerhart Seger, A Nation Terrorised (Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co., 1935);
Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1943).
See also Charmian Brinson, ‘The Gestapo and the German Political Exiles in Britain during the 1930s: The Case of Hans Wesemann — and Others’, German Life and Letters, 51, 1 (1998), 43–64;
James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, Nazi Refugee Turned Spy: The Life of Hans Wesemann, 1895–1971 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 32–35;
Andrea Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust (London: Continuum, 2000), on Seger’s internment in Oranienburg;
Anson Rabinbach, ‘Staging Antifascism: The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror’, New German Critique, 103 (2008), 97–126.
Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), 156, 119.
Luigi Sturzo, ‘Fascism and Nazism’, Quarterly Review, 261 (1933), 162–76.
George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arthur Baker, 1936). Seldes was an American radical journalist.
See also R.J.B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), Chapter 2.
George Orwell, ‘Review of The Totalitarian Enemy’, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 40. Carsten too described Borkenau as ‘the eminent anti-Nazi publicist and writer’; ‘German Refugees in Britain’, 22.
Franz Borkenau, Austria and After (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 15.
Franz Borkenau, The New German Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 11. Further references in the text.
Franz Borkenau, ‘The German Problem’, Dublin Review, 209 (October 1941), 196.
Victor Gollancz, ‘The Most Important Book the Club Has Issued’, Left News, 25 (May 1938), 790–91.
On Personalism see John Hellman, ‘From the Söhlbergkreis to Vichy’s Elite Schools: The Rise of the Personalists’, in Zeev Sternhell (ed.), The Intellectual Revolt Against Liberal Democracy 1870–1945 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1996), 252–65.
Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 518. Further references in the text.
Francis Dunlop, The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 137.
Aurel Kolnai, ‘Die Credo der neuen Barbaren’, Oesterreichische Volkswirt, 24 (3 September 1932), 1174.
Aurel Kolnai, The Pivotal Principles of NS Ideology (handwritten ms, 1939), 3. University of St. Andrews, Archives.
On Haffner in the context of the German exiles in Britain see Werner Röder, Die deutschen sozialistischen Exilgruppen in Großbritannien 1940–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Widerstandes gegen den Nationalsozialismus, rev. edn (Bonn-Bad Godesberg: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1973), 132–34.
For other appraisals of Germany Jekyll and Hyde, see Jörg Thunecke, ‘“Characterology”, Not “Ideology”: Sebastian Haffner’s Refutation of Daniel Goldhagen in Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (1940)’, in Ian Wallace (ed.), German-Speaking Exiles in Great Britain [=Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, 1 (1999)], 75–93;
Nick Hubble, ‘Franz Borkenau, Sebastian Haffner and George Orwell: Depoliticisation and Cultural Exchange’, in Edward Timms and Jon Hughes (eds.), Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation: Refugees from National Socialism in the English-Speaking World (Vienna: Springer, 2003), 109–27.
Sebastian Haffner, Germany Jekyll and Hyde: An Eyewitness Analysis of Nazi Germany (London: Libris, 2005), 5. Further references in the text. [Orig. London: Secker and Warburg, 1940.]
Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39, 2 (2004), 242.
Jonathan Petropoulos, ‘The Nazi Kleptocracy: Reflections on Avarice and the Holocaust’, and Frank Bajohr, ‘Cliques, Corruption, and Organised Self-Pity: The Nazi Movement and the Property of the Jews’, both in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, vol. VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 29–38 and 39–49. On the Frankfurt School, especially Friedrich Pollock’s view of Nazism as a ‘racket’,
see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996 [1973]), 156–57.
Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: The Harvill Press, 1996).
Traverso, ‘Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism’, 6. See Andrzej Olechnowicz, ‘Liberal Anti-Fascism in the 1930s: The Case of Sir Ernest Barker’, Albion, 36, 4 (2004), 636–60,
for an example from Britain, and Peter Monteath, ‘A Day to Remember: East Germany’s Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Fascism’, German History, 26, 2 (2008), 195–218, for the ways in which the GDR’s official ceremony has been taken over and developed by grassroots movements since the demise of the regime.
See also George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 100–12, for an interesting consideration of this point.
See Jeffrey C. Isaac, ‘Critics of Totalitarianism’, in Terence Ball and Richard Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192, for broader context.
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Stone, D. (2013). Anti-Fascist Europe Comes to Britain: Theorising Fascism as a Contribution to Defeating It. In: The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029539_6
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