Hektor wrote: ↑Sat Jun 20, 2026 1:46 pm
SanityCheck wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2024 11:56 pm...
Marxists and their heirs are almost entirely uninterested in the Holocaust. The significance of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is blown out of all proportion in Macdonald and anti-woke polemics, but one thing is certain:
the reflections in Adorno's work on the Holocaust did not really feed into anything else, other than providing the one soundbite, which is relevant only to debates in literature and cultural studies about representation, not to history. Only a handful of Marxists have ever reflected in a sustained way on the Holocaust, most being entirely heterodox within those traditions, and largely marginalised compared to the anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist default norm on the far left. The groupuscules from the 1960s onwards whose veterans and the people they influenced were split on just about everything, one can find a few who refused the anti-Zionist turn, but this did not necessarily translate into a greater interest in the Holocaust as well. Much of the polarisation revolved around Jewish roots with a split between anti-Zionist Jews remaining on the far left (but usually turning into Johnny One Note obsessives) and socialist-sympathising Jews distancing themselves from the far left. And this split was all over the news in 2023-2024 with campus protests and the rhetoric of settler colonialism and decolonisation. Despite the fact that Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire as much as Jean-Paul Sartre and W.E.B. Du Bois routinely offered significant reflections on the close kinship of antisemitism and anti-African racism in the mid-20th Century.
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I find your commentary rather astonishing.
- The 'Frankfurt School Critical Theory' is
the most significant philosophical school of thought of the 20th century.
No, it really isn't.
- Theodor Adorno's "Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?" is the blue-print for destroying any meaningful cultural conservatism first in Germany and then in any other Western Country.
Utter twaddle.
- The Nazi-whip works due to Holocaust Narrative being the foundation of present Western thought. Marxists and their front-people frequently used the NAZI tag to 'discredit' or bash any meaningful opposition to them.
No, everyone across the political spectrum except neo-Nazis will fling around 'Nazi' as an insult when it suits them. A lot of the time, invoking the Nazis or Hitler has nothing to do with the Holocaust, since comparisons are made about foreign policy (aggression and expansionism), dictatorship, repression, censorship, demagoguery and populism, political cults and much else.
The Third Reich was undeniably one of the most legally and formally racist societies and states in modern history, well before WWII, but there are plenty of other analogies to be drawn from US history - slavery and Jim Crow - and European colonialism, with apartheid South Africa providing a running sore long after most African countries, including those with settler populations, had achieved independence. If someone wished to (re)institute a formal legal racist regime, then they can expect to be compared to the Nazis, Jim Crow, apartheid and much else, in a revolving rotation.
The Holocaust is not the "foundation of present Western thought". This is a very poor reading of the last 80+ years of history as a whole, of the history of thought in that time, and of why there was a delayed surge of interest in the Holocaust snowballing 30-40 years after the event.
- The Holocaust Narrative was initially primarily pushed by Marxists and their heirs.
This is spectacularly vague. You've not defined 'the Holocaust narrative', you've not specified *when* you are talking about or *where* you are talking about. In pretty much every scenario, you're in any case wrong, before we even get to who is to be considered a 'Marxist'.
The use of 'narrative' is deeply confusing here. Sometimes you guys seem to think this applies solely to the gassing sequence, sometimes it's about the extermination of the Jews, sometimes it's broader and includes other Nazi atrocities which weren't targeted at Jews. Sometimes there seems to be a hint of metanarrative or interpretation, which then ignores how such interpretations are multiple, so there's no singular 'Holocaust narrative'.
'Pushed' is also conspiratorially vague, and thus analytically unhelpful. That goes back to when, where and what.
The 'initially' is also amusing since the term Holocaust did not catch on until towards the end of the first thirty years of the postwar era. Jewish histories called the Nazi persecution and murder of European Jews the 'catastrophe', Khurbn in Yiddish and Shoah in Hebrew - which was then translated as Holocaust. But Jewish histories sure as hell were not Marxist. And they also covered the entire era from 1933 to 1945.
Raul Hilberg was one of several Jewish scholars who wrote such a history, first published in 1961. He wasn't a Marxist. He was supervised by the Frankfurt School political scientist Franz Neumann for most of his PhD, but the primary influence was in considering bureaucracy, not anything explicitly Marxist. Hilberg didn't then 'push' his work in a dramatic way, he published it with a small press in 1961, his reputation took time to grow.
The other pioneering historians and publicists in the first thirty years after 1945 were also not Marxists, nor were the driving forces behind the 1940s investigations and trials or the renewed wave of trials from 1958 onwards. There were certainly New Deal Democrats among US Nuremberg prosecutors but that doesn't make them Marxist in any meaningful sense. British Army JAG officers were certainly not Marxist, nor was the Labour Party as a whole if one points to Nuremberg prosecutors. The key Polish prosecutors like Jan Sehn were prewar bourgeois lawyers. Fritz Bauer was a longstanding SPD member before 1933 and after 1945, but the SPD was a conventional post-Marxist social democratic party by the 1950s, explicitly so after the Bad Godesberg program of 1959. Israeli investigators, prosecutors and judges for the Eichmann trial - quite clearly the biggest 'Holocaust event' of the first thirty years after the war - were not Marxist.
You can find a few exceptions like Hermann Langbein, but these tended to be expelled from their parties or become independent after the 1956 Khrushchev secret speech, and Langbein was not a driving force in the first postwar decade; his significance emerged only after he was made an ex-communist. And one can hardly see any meaningful influence of conventional Marxism in his activism or writings.
The situation looks even worse when the academics and journalists writing about Hitler or other big Nazis and the Third Reich in general are considered. They all discussed the Final Solution at least briefly: Alan Bullock, Martin Shirer, Joachim Fest, Heinz Höhne, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, many others.
Heinz Höhne's The Order of the Death's Head (originally 1967) included a chapter on the Final Solution - alongside many other chapters on all aspects of the SS, including the Waffen-SS - so that would be a typical example of a 'Holocaust narrative', embedded in another narrative of the history of the SS as a whole. And one of the first outlines of the Holocaust I read as a teenager. Hohne was a 1945 veteran of the Panzerkorps Großdeutschland who studied journalism after the war and wrote for Der Spiegel, in an era when mainstream West German politics and media was decidedly anti-communist.
Actual Marxists in the west were sometimes doing labour history of the Third Reich, like Timothy Mason and West German historians. But that was when Catholic and Protestant historians were busily documenting the churches under the Nazis, quite a boom field. The historians of the churches were more likely to encounter the persecution of the Jews than, frankly, the labour historians.
Marxist historians in the English speaking world were interested in earlier eras or in labour history. E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class appeared in 1963, he was very much part of the post-1956 New Left. At most their journals like New Left Review might cover debates about how to define fascism (Poulantzas in the 1970s). I'm not sure NLR discussed the Holocaust much until about 1997 when it published Norman Finkelstein's takedown of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. I don't think it's had much to say about it since then, either.
Other Marxists had much bigger fish to fry - they might have mentioned WWII or related themes in something like Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism (1972), and Mandel was a survivor of Dora-Mittelbau. Trying to understand the postwar economic order and geopolitical order - how 'imperialist' it was - took up a lot of Marxist attention, as it did after the 1970s economic crisis, deindustrialisation and transition to post-Fordism. Plus, Vietnam.
But please, continue to advocate the theory that the 'Holocaust narrative' was 'pushed' by 'Marxists'; see if you can persuade your forum mates or Germar Rudolf to adopt this line and how far it gets you in the real world. Bonus points for wasting time on the 'Cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory. It's a good thing if you guys stay clueless.
