Call it “The Devil Wears Galliano.” Wintour reckons that the British designer’s work “combines erudition and creativity, darkness and light, the past, the present, the future all smashing together in a brilliant way.” Less brilliant was Galliano’s tirade in a Paris cafe in 2011, when cameras captured him screaming at a woman, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mother, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” Witnesses reported that he also called the woman a “fucking ugly Jewish bitch.” He claims to have no memory of the incident due to substance abuse.

Wintour insists that Galliano “isn’t defined by a moment” and says that “John Galliano: Horizons” won’t “shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him. The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”           

Wintour is garlanding Galliano with a rare honor. Only two other living designers have been feted by the Met with solo shows: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. 

Wintour has met with Jewish machers such as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Rabbi Rick Jacobs about the choice of Galliano, who gave it their blessing, citing Galliano’s apologies and contrition. In the wake of the dark incident in the City of Light, he was fired as director of Dior and criminally convicted in a French court. However, he was quickly tapped by esoteric French label Maison Martin Margiela, where he completed a highly successful decade-long run in 2024. He has now taken the reins at mass-market retailer Zara, where he will “re-author” designs from the brand’s archives. 

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Galliano’s genius glowed early. A school collection inspired by post-revolutionary France, “Les Incroyables,” was snapped up by London’s legendary Browns boutique. A 1994 collection inspired by the murdered Romanovs, “Princess Lucretia,” was hailed by Diane von Furstenberg as a “watershed moment in modern fashion history.” Galliano’s bias-cut gowns ruled red carpets in the 1990s and his runways reached for historical phantasmagoria. No Brit had ever led a French couture house until he took over Givenchy in 1995. A year later, he was at Dior, giving the haute a surrealist flair. 

Take the Dior Saddle Bag, introduced in 1999 by Dior under Galliano’s direction. The asymmetrical item was popularized by Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. It simultaneously conjures posh stables; a low-slung, hip-hop aesthetic; and the melting drip of one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks. Knockoffs became a Canal Street staple, and Wintour’s Vogue christened it a “pop culture phenomenon.”

Galliano’s sins, however, are hardly limited to that one outburst in Paris. His biographer, Dana Thomas, contends that honoring him is a “terrible idea” and that “his infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration.” And beyond the judgment of Galliano’s character — by all accounts, it’s troubled —  lies a more difficult reckoning with fashion’s fascination with cruelty and fanaticism, which all too often has lain behind the glittering surfaces. 

Eighty years before Galliano’s outburst, also in Paris, fashion and fascism were sewn together in Coco Chanel’s atelier. Chanel was just one of many auteurs and geniuses to collaborate with the Nazis and freeze out Jews — Martin Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party until the end, and failed to protect his mentor Edmund Husserl from being fired under anti-Jewish laws. During the war, the French designer — inventor of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5, the best-selling perfume of all time — had a Nazi lover and was in the formal employ of German military intelligence. Chanel also appealed to Aryanization laws to attempt to wrest control of her perfume company from two Jewish partners, proving that allegiance to beauty provides no inoculation against brutality. She received her own Met show in 2005. 

Even worse was Hugo Boss, a German citizen and clothing manufacturer who joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and whose company mass-produced the black uniforms of the SS, the brown uniforms of the SA, and the mixed brown and black ones for the Hitler Youth — made in part by forced labor. The company apologized in 2011 for using the labor of 140 French and 40 Polish prisoners. Boss’s imprisoned workers would have sewn the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” symbol onto the garments intended for concentration camp guards, though Boss was not responsible for the design. After the war he was found to have been an “activist, supporter and beneficiary” of the Third Reich. On appeal, though, he was ruled to have been merely a “fellow traveler” of the regime.  

In a 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag coined the phrase “beauty freak” to describe Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag means it as something of a compliment — that in movies like Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl was acting not as a “horrid propagandist” but instead as an almost autistic auteur in search of the perfect shot. Fascist art, Sontag writes, “glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.”

Sontag reasoned that “most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did,” as if the fashion could be detached from the fascism. In truth, Riefenstahl was hardly ambiguous. In 1937, she gushed that “Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.” One of her films used extras sourced from a concentration camp. They were sent to Auschwitz when the movie wrapped. 

A half-century ago, Sontag predicted that a “revival of Nazi art, following the revivals of Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Art Deco, is most unlikely. The painting and sculpture are not just sententious; they are astonishingly meager as art. But precisely these qualities invite people to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of pop art.” A harder question is presented when the art is rich but the artist is rancid.  

Galliano, then, appears to belong to the tribe of beauty freaks and antisemitic art monsters that includes Riefenstahl, Chanel, and Kanye West, not to mention composer Richard Wagner, poet Ezra Pound, and Voltaire  — and, some might say, Sontag herself, who in an infamous piece appeared to justify the 9/11 attacks as “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”

The raising up of Galliano comes three years after Karl Lagerfeld, who once declared that “no one wants to see curvy women,” was honored at the 2023 Gala. Fashion, it seems, has few untainted heroes to choose from. That honor, though, was posthumous. It also came before the Costume Institute took over prime real estate at the Met. In May, it ascended from the basement to the Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to the Great Hall — the former location of the museum gift shop. 

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In honoring Galliano, Wintour is taking something of a gamble with an event that has become a gilded goose. The Costume Institute has become crucial to the Met’s bottom line. Last year’s Gala brought in $31 million. The museum’s most popular show in history was the Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies,” in 2018, which was seen by 1.7 million people. That edged out 1978’s “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which was viewed by 1.4 million visitors.

The Met contends that “rather than presenting a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption, the gallery will examine how memory, experience, cultural values, and historical circumstances continually reshape the reception of a designer’s work.” It could be, though, that the old parabola of grace and redemption, as hoary as it is, remains the best shape to map the choice to honor Galliano, who was raised in a devout Catholic family and whose work often bears the imprint of the Church’s couture. 

The Met originally intended to honor Galliano in 2024, but postponed the plan in the wake of the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. Those sensitivities appear to have dulled in the years since, even as antisemitism against Jews in New York continues to rise. The New York Police Department reports that antisemitic incidents increased by more than 8% this year, and that more than half of all hate crimes are perpetrated against Jews, who constitute just 10% of the population. Antisemitism is a fashion that is very much back in style. 

In a 2023 documentary, John Galliano: High & Low, Wintour explains that “it isn’t often that you meet a great designer. But when you saw what John was doing, you realized that he was one of them.” Perhaps it is as simple as that — the rules are different for the great and glittering, even if their sins and prejudices are no less ugly than ours. Or perhaps a line ought to be drawn when it comes to the world’s oldest hatred.

Sontag concluded that “Riefenstahl’s current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful — as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer — do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst.” Wintour, a lioness in winter, is set to test again if the beautiful ought to bleach the baleful. 

“There must have been about 10 apartments and there were 600 people,” he tells me. “And the situation looked so bad that a number of old people climbed up onto the roof and jumped off.” 

When not chewing the fat with me in the pub, John spends his time speaking in schools for the Holocaust Memorial Trust. Lest we forget. 

Of the remaining 200,000 or so Holocaust survivors, most are in their late eighties, which means that these vanishing witnesses to Nazi evil may all be gone within a decade. That is why, a few years back, John took part in Testimony 360, an innovative project to create a digital record of his experience. Thanks to some sophisticated AI and virtual-reality technology, future students will be able to interact with a virtual John, ask him questions, and learn from his testimony.

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But the use of AI in Holocaust remembrance is becoming increasingly controversial as fake images circulate around the internet. Such is the level of alarm that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has issued a warning to schools, concerned that memes are being used “for political or ideological purposes, including denial and distortion”. Holocaust memory, they say, is under attack and false narratives are on the rise at a time of significant jeopardy for the Jewish community. 

For the time being, those with a keen eye and some knowledge of historical events can still tell the difference between fake images and real ones. There were only a handful of real photos taken within Auschwitz, and so images of children hiding under floorboards or playing violins ought to be treated with great caution. Fake ones are all too obvious, clearly designed to tug at the heartstrings, and often contain small mistakes. But as AI improves such giveaways will be ironed out. Inevitably, it will become harder to tell the difference.  

For some, the fictionalization of the Holocaust — in literature for example — is a useful way of introducing the young to the reality of the horrors of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis — take The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, for example. It offers an accessible way into a historical reality that is too dreadful for children to absorb in its entirety. But even this can be controversial. As Imre Kertész, another Budapest-born Holocaust survivor, said in Who owns Auschwitz?: fictionalization can mean that “survivors watch helplessly as their only real possessions are done away with: authentic experiences”.

Whatever we conclude on this tricky question, bot-promoted deepfakes are different; it’s not clear that these images are a fiction at all. And so, as fabricated content floods social media, the truth becomes harder to recognize and easier to dismiss. Suddenly, a whole new world of Holocaust suspicion opens up. The fear is that certain forms of Holocaust remembrance could even be conscripted into Holocaust denial. 

In church, we know how technology can complicate memory. Wedding videographers promise to preserve a perfect record of that special day. Yet many couples find that, over time, this vivid recording crowds out any organic memories of the day, leaving only what the videographer saw. Ten years on, wedding couples admit they can’t actually remember those little details that made the day so real to them. Recorded “memories” can easily supplant real ones. 

In handing over responsibility to the videographer, you also relinquish control over how the day is curated and, potentially, remembered. AI imagery can do the same with history: creatively and powerfully interpreting historical events through particular perspectives, until interpretation muscles out the truth. 

Memory is the lifeblood of Jewish togetherness. Jews speak of the deceased as being “of blessed memory”. Passover is an act of collective liturgical memory, remembering the liberation from Egyptian bondage. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy” exhorts the book of Exodus. The Hebrew Bible is full of instructions to remember what God has done. In the UK, we mark Holocaust Memorial Day today, the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In Israel, remembrance takes place on Yom HaShoah in April or May (27th Nissan, to be precise), the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The different dates register different emphases: one the liberation of passive Jews by others, the other the heroism of Jews who resisted the Nazi regime. But memory is the common thread. And threats to it are rightly regarded as existential. 

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This is particularly salient today, amid the continued fallout from the October 7 massacre. Even though the Holocaust is the only historical event that is compulsory within the KS3 history curriculum, schools are becoming increasingly nervous about commemorating it. Only this month, a visit by a Jewish MP to a school in Bristol was canceled following protests by local pro-Palestinian groups. And over the past few years, the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has halved. 

There are some, Simon Jenkins for example, who argue that we should do less remembering and more forgetting. It is an unusual take for a historian. He warns us not to “drink from the rancid well of grievance”, and that “almost all the conflicts in the world are caused by too much remembering: refreshing religious divisions, tribal feuds, border conflicts, humiliations and expulsions”. I take the point but I don’t agree. Memory makes us who and what we are. It creates shared identity. That’s why so many of us fear dementia. To lose our memory is to forget who we are. 

There used to be graffiti on the towpath near our pub. Six million lies, it read. The graffiti has been washed away. But the lie has not. Memory, then, is both a reminder and a warning of what we are capable. Memory is what renews our conviction: never again.

Spengler argued that the dominant civilization in the West was on the inexorable downward part of its cycle, and heading for dissolution. I doubt he would have thanked me for punning so egregiously on his magnum opus — and yet, this week, I found myself remembering that work in the context of the contemporary decline, of a different West: Kanye.

West, whose recent torrent of barely-coherent livestream and interview rants attests to an increasingly erratic public persona and possible mental health issues, prompted shock and disgust when he released a new song titled “Heil Hitler”. Launched to coincide with VE Day, it was promptly denounced across the political spectrum as “classic 1930s style antisemitism”, “fascist art”, and “a crude, adolescent chant of racial slurs and fascist glorification masquerading as music”.

So what would Spengler make of this musical work? Would he be Heil Hitlering with Kanye? Some historians draw a line from Romanticism, through Spengler, to the Nazis, notably via the idea that ethnocultural groups share the kind of mystical national consciousness George Mosse called “Völkish moods”. And it’s true that Spengler has since reappeared at intervals, as a touchstone for the Right.

But despite his Romantic literary roots, Spengler himself thought Hitler was “an idiot”, and called the Nazis an “organization of the unemployed by the workshy”. So I doubt he would have seen much of moral or political worth in a hip-hop tune with the chorus line “Nigga, heil Hitler”. And yet his analysis is useful when considering Kanye — offering both short-term reassurance as to what it represents, and also, as you might expect, a longer-term prognosis that is far from happy.

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Spengler died in 1936, but much of his contemporary success and subsequent influence rested on predicting the decline into “Caesarism” that, he thought, would accompany this end-stage “Winter” phase he believed Western civilization to have entered. When the publication of Decline was followed, in short order, by the era of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, Spengler was hailed as a prophet — only to fall out of fashion again as the 20th century wore on and the forces of liberal democracy re-asserted themselves.

Interest in his work tends to revive in periods of turmoil and economic downturn, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the end of the End of History has been accompanied by something of a Spengler revival. But if there’s a sense in which Spengler helps us understand Kanye’s musical development, it’s less in diagnosing his latest single as ominous harbinger of incipient fascism in America. He did predict that “Caesarism” would come in waves, and would doubtless have expected the authoritarians of the early twentieth century to be only the first of these. But even so, Spengler helps us here mainly by revealing that “Heil Hitler” doesn’t have much directly to do with authoritarianism at all. Rather, it sets Kanye’s work in the context of two cultural currents, in both of which Spengler is implicated: first, a Romantic tradition of anti-modernist, usually masculine-coded rebellion; and second the endemic path towards general brutalization that Spengler saw as inherent in end-stage civilization: a brutalization he thought would, in time, give way to a “new primitivism”.

Modernity, in his view, was not the perfection of Western civilization, but the beginning of its “Winter” and herald of its inexorable collapse. The Romantic tradition from which he wrote has been with us more or less since the beginning of this era, in reaction to its character. It’s less a coherent programme than a sensibility: a revolt against everything cold, clean, procedural, and rationalistic that comes with the secular, technological, disenchanting modern worldview.

At its core, though, Romanticism always seeks what is deeper, higher, and more soulful, emphasizing the role of feeling. Goethe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early instance of such intense emotionality; on publication the book triggered copycat suicides. Half a century later, the same reckless and sometimes self-destructive intensity made Romantic poet Lord Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and — another century on — prompted Julius Evola, a Romantic contemporary of Spengler’s and father of the modern esoteric far Right, to call for “revolt against the modern world”.

Today this kind of revolt has, itself, become commodified by the modern world against which it rebelled — and nowhere is this more apparent than in the music industry. Most forms of transgression are mere grist to its mill of transgression-as-product: audiences seem only mildly titillated by (for example) Satanic metal bands or drill artists who boast in music of murders, drug deals and other criminal activities.

In this jaded environment, it’s remarkable in a narrow sense that West has managed to find a way to be genuinely shocking. Jewish groups and allies are rightly furious and distressed. And yet the song itself is more driven by inchoate fury than Nazism as such. West says so in the song: “I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out”. This is, he says, the fault of a vague “they”, who have taken his kids off him and closed his bank account: “With all of the money and fame I still don’t get to see my children”.

So now he wants people to understand his depth of emotion: “Niggas see my Twitter but they don’t see how I be feeling.” And the only way to express his fury is through the only remaining taboo with real shock power. “I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain.” In context, then, “Heil Hitler” is less coherent ideology than ultimate swear-word: the adult equivalent of a pre-schooler saying “pee pee poo poo”, to get a reaction from his mum.

In other words, the song is pure, distilled essence of male rebellion, in direct continuity with a centuries-old Romantic tradition but today most palpably felt in the noisome underbelly of the internet. Here, especially since GamerGate, a “dissident Right” subculture (aided by a side order of Nietzsche, Evola, and Spengler among others) helped propel Donald Trump into power. “Heil Hitler” is this subculture in musical form, voicing a masculinist backlash whose ripples spread well beyond West’s individual circumstances.

And there’s also a second sense in which the song invites a Spenglerian reading. Writing a century ago, Spengler forecast a future of drab, universal uniformity, in which national differences are largely abolished and life concentrated into “megalopolis” world-cities. In this brutalizing environment, competing peoples would spend their days in repetitive tasks, assuaged by vulgar diversions — until a new primitivism emerged that would eventually drive the collapse of this dying civilization. In Spengler’s vivid formulation: “Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.”

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Spengler envisaged an end-point where, “The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will”. It’s reasonable to surmise that those cheering on the Trumpian backlash from the depths of the “dissident” internet would understand themselves as aligned with the re-assertion of a martial over a managerial spirit. But what if the internet Nazism as an expression of rage does not, in fact, signal the return of martial spirit? What if it’s just another spasm of brutalization and dissolution, en route to the bottom of the cycle?

If this were so, it would be reasonable to expect any political victory applauded by a dissident caucus not to be followed by much in the way of substantial policy change. And indeed, since Trump’s victory, the so-called “dissident Right” has grown increasingly marginal within the emerging government coalition. The anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo explained why, distinguishing between those effective as critics and gadflies, and those with the temperament for building and cooperation in an institutional environment. “In my opinion”, Rufo said, “we are lacking some of this capacity.” When he made this point on X, one of the first responses promptly illustrated it for him, replying: “I’m kind of like fuck your institutional environment”. It’s a sentiment very much in keeping with “Nigga, heil Hitler”: one of pure opposition.

The clear inference is that what we’re looking at is not some notional revival of institutional Right-wing martial spirit, fascist or otherwise. On the contrary, it’s another iteration of Young Wertheresque emotionality, largely devoid of any clear object or organizational capacity. Kanye West has ironically reversed Hitler’s cultural achievement: not appropriating Romantic tropes for Nazism, so much as appropriating Nazi ones for Romanticism.

The result isn’t a philosophical ideology. It’s undirected rage. The good news, then, is that “Nigga, heil Hitler” probably isn’t an omen of approaching military authoritarianism. The bad news is that the longer-term prognosis this suggests is not much better: just one lurch after another, down the path of moral ugliness and brutalization that Spengler saw as characteristic of civilizational “Winter”.

Spengler might also point out that none of this is to rule out another spate of Caesarism. It’s just to say those singing along to Kanye’s tune are unlikely to be the first to enlist in his army. Put simply: they’re too ornery. “I felt crushed by the system, so I became an online Nazi” has been one of the internet’s drumbeats at least since GamerGate. It took the decline of Ye West to set it to music.

This parallel — more “1933” than “1968” — has circulated widely in the months since 7 October. At the end of 2023, Niall Ferguson wrote a punchy essay on the “treason of the intellectuals”, contending that while American academia “has gone in the opposite political direction” to Germany in the Thirties, it has “ended up in much the same place”. It may be wise to cool down the rhetoric: Columbia in 2024 is very far indeed from Heidelberg in 1933. Still, the history of the universities under Nazism, and of historians under Nazism in particular, gives us good reason to be wary of the politicisation of higher education. Jonathan Haidt recently argued that “universities must choose one telos: truth or social justice”. And it is strange but instructive to recall that the Nazi universities emphatically chose “social justice” (as they would see it) over “truth”.

On 18 January 1934, almost a year after Hitler came to power, a historian named Ulrich Kahrstedt delivered a speech urging his colleagues at the University of Göttingen to do their bit for Germany’s “new culture”. His speech contained all the lurid images that one would expect. The Treaty of Versailles had been an intolerable humiliation; ethnic Germans over the border in Poland were routinely “hunted down and killed”. He reserved particular contempt for those in his faculty who seemed to care more about the plight of their Jewish colleagues than the misfortunes of their own race — those who shed more tears over the “daughter of the cattle dealer Levi not being accepted as a student” than over the “scores of German women who killed themselves after being violated by Negroes”.

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Hitler, according to Kahrstedt, had come to rescue the Germans from this pitiable state, and in that task the universities had an important part to play. Kahrstedt’s audience was then well-primed for the climax of his speech:

“We reject international science, we reject the international republic of letters, we reject research for research’s sake. Here, medicine is taught and learned not to increase the number of known bacteria, but rather to keep Germans healthy and strong. Here, history is taught and learned not to say ‘how it actually was’, but to let the Germans learn from how it actually was. Here, the natural sciences are taught and learned not to discover abstract laws, but to help the Germans to sharpen their tools in the competition between peoples.”

These two neat rhetorical triads were then fittingly capped off with a third: “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

Not everyone was pleased with Kahrstedt’s performance. Two bigwigs of Göttingen’s history faculty, Karl Brandi and Percy Ernst Schramm, came under fire in his speech for having recently mingled with the enemy at a conference in Poland. Schramm had already aroused some suspicion for — to use a more modern vintage — “sharing a platform” with Jewish authors throughout the Twenties and early Thirties, and for supporting Hindenburg against Hitler in the presidential election of 1932. Though he embraced Hitler in 1933, proselytising the Nazi movement to Americans during a visiting professorship at Princeton, it seemed to have been too little, too late.

Brandi and Schramm may have objected to Kahrstedt’s speech, but their students in the audience lapped it up. Schramm, the Nazi students’ association declared, ought to be ousted from his professorship because he does not support a “view of history that corresponds to National Socialist thinking”. Wishing to reassert their honour, Brandi and Schramm challenged Kahrstedt to a duel — this sort of thing was, surprisingly, still not an uncommon occurrence in German academia at the time — but Kahrstedt demurred, and the matter was eventually resolved by the University’s rector. When Schramm joined the SA promptly thereafter, this may have been to cover his back further and to prove his Nazi bona fides to his colleagues and students.

Academics in Nazi Germany, after all, had to live in fear of both. “What has become of proud Heidelberg University,” the historian Otto Brandt wrote to his old teacher Hermann Oncken in 1934. “It is not the rector who is in charge but a wild student leader, in whose antechamber professors wait for more than an hour until they are generously admitted”. Oncken, as it happened, had reason to fear the strength of Nazi ideology within the universities. His opposition to the regime, however cautiously expressed, made him a hate-figure in the Nazi press, and he was forced to retire in 1935.

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Oncken’s opposition marked him out among German historians. Schramm was much more typical. In 1937, the professor, a patrician Anglophile, found himself in Westminster Abbey for the coronation of George VI. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, privately asked him the question that every Englishman would ask their German friends in the long run-up to the Second World War — “Are you a Nazi?” — Schramm replied:

“With regard to rearmament, I am a 200 percent Nazi. With regard to the industrial peace, the consolidation of the peasantry, Kraft durch Freude, 100 percent Nazi. But racial theory, the Germanic cult, education policy, the Nazi worldview — I am a 100 percent opponent. I am not a member of the Party and must ask myself every night to what extent I agree with the Party’s aims and to what extent I reject them. The answer is different every night. This is not only my fate, but that of the German intelligentsia in general.”

Not all historians, of course, were as conflicted as Schramm — and some rejoiced in Hitler’s successes precisely because they seemed to herald a return to past glory. Otto Westphal, in an article called “Bismarck und Hitler”, described how the latter had surpassed the former in resolving the problems that had long bedevilled Germany. The medievalist Hermann Heimpel was satisfied that Hitler had learned the right lessons from Germany’s Middle Ages: the need for “unity, the rule of the Führer, pure statehood internally, a Westward mission externally”. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Hermann Aubin waxed lyrical that “history has merged with the present in a magnificent arc”. For such men, to make political declarations like these had become the entire point of history.

Others, who had once enjoyed reputations of the highest scholarly propriety, were only too eager to render their services when the regime came calling. The elderly Albert Brackmann once had been committed to scientific rigour in history, but it appealed to his vanity that his research should contribute to the “struggle for the reconstruction of Europe” under Hitler’s leadership. He devoted his retirement from university life to finding ever more elaborate arguments in the distant past for Nazi eastward expansion, and to give some veneer of scholarly respectability for Germany’s wartime imperial plunder; for his trouble, the Führer awarded him the Adlerschild in 1941.

Some others dispensed even with the pretence of scientific scholarship, producing work that was little more than political propaganda, barely distinguishable from the eccentric rants of Alfred Rosenberg. This was encouraged by the Nazis’ sustained assault on the very notion of scientific scholarship in history, on the notion that historical inquiry ought to be based upon evidence and reason. The most fanatical Nazi historians believed neither in the possibility nor the desirability of history divorced from contemporary politics.

Hitler himself subscribed to such a position: on the very first page of Mein Kampf he describes how history was his favourite subject at school because it aroused his political passions. And of course Kahrstedt, in his speech on 18 January 1934, violently rejected the notion that the historian’s task is simply to find out “how it actually was” — here citing the 19th-century Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke — arguing instead that historians ought to devote their work wholly to contemporary political ends. We find something even more strikingly “postmodern” in the declaration of Moritz Edelmann, the editor of the Nazi historical journal Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (“Past and Present”), that history should “liberate itself from the dependence on the written source” in service of present needs.

The experience of the German universities in the Thirties should therefore disabuse us of various popular ideas. Students do not have a special affinity for social justice: their protests and obsessions do not need to be revered as though they contain moral truths inaccessible to others. Education in the humanities does not really instil “empathy” or “good citizenship”, whatever some of its advocates like to say. And if, finally, there is anything to be learned from this dark chapter in the history of scholarship, it surely is this: we cannot allow politics to supplant truth as the university’s highest end.

Since Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford in 1987, elite universities have progressively gutted core liberal studies programmes that introduced students to the vital civilisational inheritance of knowledge and wisdom rooted in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. For the past two decades, they’ve judged applicants for admission as much by their devotion to community service and activism as by their academic potential. Activist students, in turn, began to demand that universities advance any number of causes under the umbrella of social justice.

The ideological invasion of the Ivory Tower has had predictably bad results. Much of higher education today effectively consists of giving students a handful of Post-it notes and teaching them how to apply them to the images that are projected onto their smartphones. People of colour who are evidently miserable and poor, such as the Palestinians of Gaza, are labelled “victims”, whose innocence is not only assumed but unchallengeable on campus. White, well-off, educated people, especially if they have a strong national identity, are identified as “colonisers” and “oppressors”. Should we really be shocked that students who’ve been taught this crude intellectual game, one that unfolds in the immediate present with no depth of breadth of understanding, would welcome the chance to celebrate Hamas’s demonstration that “decolonisation” is not just “an abstract academic theory” but a “tangible event”?

Bret Stephens has written that Americans are on the road to a second Kristallnacht. This is not a figure of speech. Since the Hamas pogrom of October 7, Jews have been attacked on the streets of American cities, and Jewish-owned stores are vandalised every day. To their shame, universities have been on the cutting edge of this intellectually-fuelled explosion of antisemitism, as they were in Nazi Germany.

Americans have taken notice. The US Department of Education recently opened investigations of possible discrimination based on ancestry or ethnicity at more than a half-dozen institutions. Summoned by Congress to explain why they have allowed antisemitism to fester on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT all refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment. Would these university leaders say the same about calls for the genocide of Palestinians, gays, or African Americans? The question answers itself. Even the Biden administration, which has aggressively pushed social justice imperatives, felt compelled to condemn their evasions.

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The president and chairman of the board of trustees of Penn resigned in the aftermath of the congressional hearing, and many are calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign as well. These blood-sacrifices make for good theatre, but don’t address the problem. Lopping off the head of a rotten fish does little good: the foul thing still stinks to high heaven. The deeper problem is that the intellectual formation of large numbers of faculty and administrators at American universities supports acts of violence so appalling that to call them barbaric would be an insult to barbarians.

The genocidal logic of Post-it note ideology was recently made clear at Hillcrest High School in Queens. Students discovered that a teacher had attended a rally in support of Israel. As one told the New York Post: “A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.” (“Exposure” has been a primary weapon of nihilists and revolutionaries for almost two centuries.) “School administrators and the NYPD… got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door,” the paper reported. Students waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Free Palestine!” rampaged for hours, vandalising bathrooms and other property.

Here’s the kicker: the students called the teacher they tried to hunt down a “cracker ass bitch”. The kids may be ignorant, but they are not stupid. They’ve somehow learned that social justice licences the expression of hateful attitudes, including racism and misogyny as well as antisemitism. Did the mob pursue their quarry because she is a female teacher, or a Jew, or because she is a “cracker”? It doesn’t matter: an oppressor is an oppressor. A document on intersectionality distributed by the sociology department at my old university explained that oppressors include those who are “white”, “European”, “credentialed”, “upper and upper-middle class”, “anglophones”, and “pale”. Most Jews in the United States tick all these boxes. How could they not be oppressors, if they fit the profile?

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The civilisational threat posed by this ideological activism in American higher education recalls the invaluable intellectual support German academics gave Nazism during the Third Reich. Theologians worked to fashion a new myth of Jesus as a forerunner of Nazism, presenting him as a spirited Christian warrior who strove heroically to destroy Judaism. They purged all Jewish content from a revised publication of the New Testament, depicted Nazi ideology as the fulfilment of the original Christianity of Jesus, and elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ. Today, few academics would see Christ as an Aryan. Yet many embrace identity politics and the religion of humanity with a distinctly religious fervour.

The German theologians were not alone. The philosopher Martin Heidegger played a leading role in clothing the Nazi Party with academic respectability. In “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, a speech he gave when he assumed the Rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger aggressively positioned the academy at the forefront of Hitlerism. His speech anticipated many of the attitudes now popular on American campuses. He decried what he called Germany’s “moribund semblance of a culture”, and he called for the expulsion of academic freedom from the university. He also characterised the revolutionary work of students and professors as a “battle” — music to the ears of academic social justice warriors.

Most important, Heidegger applauded the mobilisation of students under the Führerprinzip, the suspension of written law on the basis that the word of Adolph Hitler is the law for Germans. History repeats itself, except that the Führer — the “driver” — is now social justice. After 2020, critical race theory became mandatory in law schools, and many universities are now arguably ignoring the law for ideological reasons. Hamas is a federally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), and federal law makes it a crime to provide “material support or resources” to an FTO. Yet students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has over 200 active chapters on American campuses, has emphatically claimed to be “a PART of this [Hamas] movement”.

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Many state laws also forbid support for terrorism. If SJP receives any financial or logistical support from a university — a share of student activity fees, photocopying, or anything else — that university is arguably involved in criminal activity based on federal law. These are ample grounds for excluding them from campus. Yet only three private schools, Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington, have so far suspended SJP, and Florida, the only state that has tried to do so, recently backed down in the face of a lawsuit.

The Nazis engaged in what was called Gleichschaltung, political equalisation or coordination. A Schaltung is a circuit. Gleichschaltung in an organisation makes it possible to run a charge through it as efficiently as possible. It turns an institution into a conduit of ideological power. This, too, harmonises with the functional reality of much of American higher education.

The rot in higher education is far too deep to be fixed by resignations, lawsuits, and congressional hearings. Nothing less than a systematic and widespread effort at something like de-Nazification will do. Short of such drastic measures, I fear, the American university will continue to be an activist institution that advances a totalising ideology. And it will drag society down with it.

The concepts of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” didn’t actually come into being until the late 19th century. As soon as they did, people who were homoerotically inclined were compelled to consider the meaning of their desires, where earlier generations might have simply acted on them. For the followers of Der Eigene, who were predominately men, homosexuality was best understood not as an identity — as we now understand it — but as a form of refined taste, and an extension of male friendship. In a kind of “manifesto” for the journal, its founder Adolf Brand wrote that he strove for, “beside the sense of female beauty, also the sense for male beauty, and by again setting friend-love beside woman-love as having completely equal rights”.

As with later gay liberation movements, the first gay rights groups were motivated more by shared enemies than affinities. In Germany at the time, many widely different groups were united in campaigns to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalised sodomy. But homosexuals differed greatly in their conceptualisation of homoerotic desire. The intellectual strand most opposed to the ideas of Der Eigene, followed the physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee who pioneered the idea that homosexuality (and transsexuality) were an innate condition traceable to biological cause. Gay people, in Hirschfeld’s view, were a “third sex” whose hermaphroditic nature gave rise to unique differences in attitude and behaviour. While these ideas have evolved greatly over time, we can hear echoes of Hirschfeld in the supposedly progressive scientific obsession with biologically classifying those who are sexually diverse, leading to the questionable notion of “gay genes”.

For the homosexuals who wrote and contributed to Der Eigene, which included many prominent men of the day — including political journalist Kurt Hiller and the novelist Thomas Mann — all this talk of an inherent hermaphroditic soul was ahistorical and wrongheaded. From Greek antiquity to European aristocracy, they argued, sexual acts between men could be seen as a natural extension of passionate male friendship. To describe this worldview, artist and scholar Elisar von Kupffer coined the term “Lieblingminne” in Der Eigene, combining the virtues of Freundesliebe, love of friends, with Minne, chivalric love.

Many German homosexuals were inspired by von Kupffer’s collections of homoerotic literature, which highlighted that same-sex desires had been felt by many historically-significant figures, from Zeno of Citium to Alexander The Great to Michelangelo. Rather than supporting Hirschfeld’s theory of innate homosexuality, this was seen as key evidence against a medical model. As sexologist Benedict Friedländer, wrote in Der Eigene:

“[To accept Hirschfeld’s view] in ancient Hellas in particular most of the generals, artists and thinkers would have to have been hermaphrodites. Every people from whose initiative in all higher human endeavours every later European culture fed must have consisted in great part of sick, hybrid individuals.”

For the contributors to Der Eigene, it seemed only natural that strong male friendship would occasionally incorporate an erotic component. But for them, sexual desire was culturally contingent: homoerotic desire has waxed and waned over time, driven by the sentiments and spirit of the age. Dutch author Peter Hamecher wrote in the journal that, “I altogether hold the sexual instinct, in all its apparent determinacy, to be something very intangible, something swinging back and forth between extremes”.

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Male friendship was particularly sentimental in the 19th century. Expressions of love between friends bordered on the outright romantic — the letters exchanged by Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed being a prime example. Given the gender segregation in many aspects of life, and the strict heterosexual courting rituals, sexual contact between young men was also relatively common. It was in cultures which prioritised beauty, whether physical or spiritual, that the homoerotic sentiment was most cultivated in the wider population.

The decriminalisation of homosexuality, for Der Eigene, was therefore not about protecting a minority, but rather invigorating Germany’s potential for homoeroticism. The journal’s ideals were tied closely to naturist movements of the time — focused on nudism, bodybuilding, and co-existence with nature. Homoeroticism is presented as a way to raise oneself above the pedestrian, bourgeois ideals of industry and production.

Contemporary LGBT scholars are often quick to dismiss Der Eigene as “masculinist” in orientation and even “proto-fascist” in its aesthetics, despite the fact that the journal was a target of Nazi purges. Professor Andrew Stewart from the University of Toronto caricatures Brand’s ideas as calling for a racially pure, bisexual Ubermensch to replace the tainted, effeminate homosexual:

“The importance of physical health and fitness, hyper-masculinity, and white supremacy find modern parallels in the experiences of some queer people of colour, trans people, and others who do not achieve the standards of beauty as set by a white, cisgender, and masculine gay culture.”

These accusations aren’t entirely baseless. Brand and Friedländer were not what we would now call “intersectional”. They criticised early feminist movements, viewing women’s calls for men to take greater responsibility for family life as being contrary to the journal’s goal of re-establishing a homoerotic male culture. Further, unlike the early Swiss gay journal Der Kreis, which they inspired, Der Eigene rarely published lesbian writers.

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to throw out the unique perspective of early gay rights activists, merely because some prominent members had outdated views — especially because their views were not universal across Der Eigene. Frequent contributor Edwin Bab held strong feminist sympathies, writing:

“I assert that there is no difference between man and woman in the psychic and intellectual characteristics … only our customs, which make every productive activity highly difficult for the woman, are to blame for the fact that the number of productive women is relatively small.”

Attempts to connect the journal to National Socialism are even more spurious: Brand, who leant Left politically, was never a supporter of the Nazi Party and was highly critical of homosexual members such as Ernst Röhm, calling him a “hypocrite and a traitor”. However, as scholar Harry Oosterhuis has pointed out, Brand was not as discriminating as he should have been when publishing people who criticised Hirschfeld — who, it should be noted, was Jewish. He ran an article by Röhm’s friend, the Nazi Karl Günther Heimsoth, who gave us the phrase “homophile”. Heimsoth criticised Hirschfeld, Oosterhuis writes, by “asserting that the ‘homosexual feminism’ of the ‘Jewish Committee’ was dangerous to the ‘German eros’”. And, Oosterhuis goes on, “instead of refusing the article or expunging the anti-Semitic phrases, Brand only wrote a preface stating that he did not agree with all of the author’s views”.

Nevertheless, Der Eigene is forgotten today less because the original contributors are deemed “problematic” than their views on homosexuality running counter to how modern gays and lesbians have been taught to see themselves. That one is “born this way” is a key pillar of contemporary LGBT thinking. But in the pages of the first gay journal, sexual desire is better conceptualised as a taste — an appreciation of beauty cultivated through early experience and culture. One is not born homosexual (or heterosexual) but with a capacity to perceive aesthetics; over time, this capacity, combined with experience, shapes sexual preferences.

Despite now being lost to time, these ideas still had currency amongst mid-20th century gay rights activists both in the US and Europe. For example, American gay activist Carl Whitman’s influential 1970 “A Gay Manifesto” notes that:

“Homosexuality is not a lot of things. It is not a makeshift in the absence of the opposite sex; it is not hatred or rejection of the opposite sex; it is not genetic; it is not the result of broken homes except inasmuch as we could see the shame of American marriage. Homosexuality is the capacity to love someone of the same sex.”

Michel Foucault also echoed the goals of Der Eigene in his comments during an interview with The Advocate 1984, where he notes: “I think what the gay movement needs is much more the art of life than a science … Sexuality is something that we ourselves create — it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire.”

While some contemporary “queer” academics take up this anti-essentialist mantle, they do so without appreciating homoerotic desire as a beautifying force. Theorists such as Lee Edelman are quick to frame homosexuality as inherently “transgressive”: the Freudian death drive in opposition to procreative sexual desire. The contributors to Der Eigene, however, understood homoeroticism as constructive — a practice that encouraged healthy and flourishing individuals. Whereas today’s nihilistic queer theory is libertarian, Der Eigene’s was restrained. “Every sexual excess and every sexual dissolution is of course decidedly to be advised against,” wrote Brand in one of the journal’s early issues.

Rather than advocating a full liberation of desire, contributors to Der Eigene often expressed concern about, say, the effects of excessive masturbation, the spread of venereal disease, or the predatory behaviour of men towards young women. Homoeroticism was seen as a cure for the social ills of male sexual desire run amok.

It’s a shame that this view of homosexuality, as neither fixed biological orientation nor “radical” disruptive force, has been forgotten. Key victories in gay rights have not given way to a “post-gay” moment of self-reflection for those who feel predominantly same-sex desire see themselves not as “other” but as universally human. Instead, we see a doubling down of identitarianism, particularly online, where every kink, feeling and sexual experience is ripe for categorisation. The New Left notions of “authenticity” and “finding oneself”, which shaped early gay rights movements have evolved with the internet into what philosophers Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio call “profilicity”, where one’s identity is a process of obsessive self-marketing. There are now labels for those who want both love and sex (demisexuals), who prefer just masturbating to porn (technosexuals), and who don’t like having sex at all (asexuals).

The brilliance of Brand and the other contributors to Der Eigene was that they could move beyond the delusions of sexual identity, while advocating and defending homoeroticism. The group tackled moralist tirades that equated same-sex desire with degeneracy by pointing to the historical and aesthetic evidence that cultures of homosexuality and cultures of greatness were one in the same. It’s precisely at this current time of sexual hysteria, when intimacy has been declared dead and queer theory diffuse, that our current paradigms of homosexuality should be questioned — and we should look to the past to inform our sexual future.

Instead, Abbas launched into a tirade about Israeli crimes, saying that Israel had committed not only “50 massacres” but, in fact, “50 Holocausts”. The visibly annoyed Scholz did not think on his feet quickly enough to contradict Abbas’s relativisation of the Holocaust. Somewhat surreally, after Abbas had finished the two men shook hands and walked off.

Outrage was quick to follow. Abbas backtracked on his statement, and Scholz publicly stated his anger at what Abbas had said. Some German commentators suggested that Germany should rethink its funding for the Palestinian Authority. That idea did not gain traction. After all, the Palestinian Authority governs over those dense population centres in the West Bank that Israel, the occupying power since 1967, does not wish to govern itself. Germany’s funding of the corrupt, inefficient, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority is in Israel’s interest. Ironically, yet largely unbeknown to the outraged German Twitterati, defunding Abbas is a demand that many of Israel’s strongest critics would happily get behind.

As much as it likes to claim the role of the peace-seeking outsider, Germany is deeply entrenched in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not only because of the importance of the Holocaust to the creation and self-understanding of the Jewish state. Germany played an important role in the conflict via its crucial economic, financial, and military support of Israel, especially before 1967. But the 1972 terrorist attacks, and Germany’s relationship with them even 50 years on, throw a spotlight on Germany’s true role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and its connected efforts to whitewash its barbaric past.

Munich was the second time Germany had been invited to host the Olympics. The first invitation came after the First World War, the follow-up after the Second. Both times, the idea was to symbolically welcome Germany back into the circle of “civilised” nations. When, in 1931, Germany was awarded the games to be held in 1936, the Olympic Committee did not envisage the imminent rise of Adolf Hitler to power. The infamous Nazi Olympics became a showcase for Nazi power and ideology. Jews were largely barred from participating.

In 1972, with Social Democrat and former Nazi opponent Willy Brandt in power, the danger of Germany backsliding into Nazism seemed remote. The Federal Republic appeared to be firmly entrenched in the Western bloc. It was also becoming a more autonomous player on the world stage via Brandt’s Russia-embracing Ostpolitik (itself a policy under much scrutiny these days). For West Germany, the 1972 Olympics were another milestone on the road to normalisation, and an occasion to show the world the friendly face of the “new” Germany.

There was, however, something schizophrenic about this effort. Twenty-seven years after the German defeat, most former Nazis and their legions of enablers were still alive. More than that, they were respected members of society. Post-war Germany had normalised its Nazis even before the world had normalised the new Germany. The bureaucrats, professors, diplomats, teachers, journalists, and captains of industry on which the West German state was founded all too often were compromised figures.

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And it could not have been otherwise. The main reason Western allies never saw denazification through was that getting rid of the Nazis would have meant crippling the German state to such a degree that it would have been unable to fulfil its function as a frontline state in the Cold War. The Cold War enabled the survival of the German state at the cost of letting most perpetrators go unpunished. Most recently, David De Jong’s new book Nazi Billionaires shows to what extent Germany’s tycoon families owe their wealth to their involvement in Nazi crimes. His study is the latest of historical efforts to show the extent to which the new Germany was built on the old.

Due to the manifold continuities of Nazism in the new republic — not least in terms of lingering antisemitic and racist attitudes and an only slowly-eroding authoritarian mindset — West Germany needed to signal to the outside world a democratic and civil character. While this was especially true of the immediate post-war years, virtue signalling to the outside world has long become part of the German foreign policy package (a tough pursuit of economic interest being the other and more important part).

And so, in 1972, the German hosts wanted to organise Games that were opposite in spirit to those of 1936. Instead of demonstrating the superiority of the master race, the Olympics were meant to showcase the newfound German pacifism. And this they did, uncompromisingly so. Die heiteren Spiele — the joyous games — went the official slogan. To ensure that nothing disturbed the joyousness, German security guards at the Olympic village were unarmed and dressed in light blue suits, the literal opposite of the black-clad and armed SS-men patrolling the grounds in 1936.

By today’s standards, the lack of security measures was baffling. About as baffling as passengers smoking on a plane, or, for that matter, smuggling guns onto a plane and hijacking it. After all, these were the Seventies, a golden age for anti-colonial and radical Left-wing terrorism. As archival research by journalists of German magazine Der Spiegel revealed, German security services were warned of potential terrorist plots on the Games. However, no effort was being made to increase security measures. Showcasing the peacefulness of the new Germany took priority over safety concerns for Israeli athletes.

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On the morning of September 5, eight members of Black September climbed the walls of the Olympic compound and proceeded to the quarters of the Israeli team. They killed two athletes and took nine Israelis hostage. The next day, after a catastrophically botched German rescue mission undeserving of its name, all Israelis had been killed by the terrorists. One German policeman was dead, as were five of the eight Palestinians. Zvi Zamir, chief of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, was present at the final shootout. “They didn’t make even a minimal effort to save lives,” an exasperated Zamir reported. Zamir was shocked to realise that the German priority had been to continue the Games with as little interruption as possible. Surprisingly and bizarrely, the “joyous Games” had remained uninterrupted almost throughout the whole hostage crisis. While the Israeli team left the Games, the rest of the world continued with the competition.

Two months later, Black September hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Beirut and blackmailed Germany into releasing the three surviving members of the Munich squad. Israel had warned Germany of such a scenario and had asked Bonn not to give in to terrorist demands. Germany did the opposite and expedited the three Palestinian prisoners to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, where they were given a hero’s welcome. Israel was furious. Germany, its crucial ally, had not only refused Israeli help and advice during the Munich hostage crisis but had acted against every principle of Israeli counterterrorism policy.

The attack by Black September was an attack not only on the Israeli team but implicitly also on the political rationale behind the games. Black September named its operation “Ikrit and Biram” after two Palestinian villages razed to the ground after the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and whose inhabitants were banned from returning. All of a sudden, Ikrit and Biram were violently forced into one historical equation with Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi movement, and nearby Dachau, the first concentration camp on German soil. This was a brutal collision of different historical events and logics. A terror attack rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took on a new meaning: Jews were murdered in what was meant to be the new Germany. And more than just a historical footnote in this context is the fact that Black September was aided in its preparations by a known German neo-Nazi. 

The Munich attacks and Israel’s uncompromising retaliation mission in its aftermath have been covered in academic writing, a Steven Spielberg movie, and the Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day in September. It is the stuff of Cold War spy thrillers. Less attention has been paid to the German role in the whole affair. One question is why Germany had been so insensitive to Israeli wishes and opinions throughout the crisis. Germany had widely been considered a key ally of Israel up to that point, and for good reason. However, wondering why Germany had acted irresponsibly towards Jewish lives on its soil misses the original point of West Germany’s pro-Israeli orientation. This point was explained by former chancellor Konrad Adenauer on primetime German television in 1966: “We had done to the Jews so much injustice, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired if we were at all to regain our international standing… Furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”

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Here, as well as on other occasions, Adenauer stated clearly that the goal behind Germany’s support of Israel was rehabilitation — regaining international standing. That goal is then intertwined with a core idea of modern antisemitism: supposed Jewish influence over world affairs. To Adenauer, this was a natural thing to say to the German public as late as 1966. Rehabilitation, whitewashing the past, faking democracy — whatever you want to call it, the Federal Republic consistently prioritised its international reputation over domestic efforts at working through the past.

Belatedly, the German government is seeking to make amends for its 50-year old failure to protect its Israeli guests. Last week, a €28 million compensation deal was finally agreed with relatives of the Israeli victims. No amount of compensation, however, can undo history.

What Black September did in September 1972 was to crash a German party that was all about celebrating and showcasing a novel Germany to the world. And the German response to the terrorist attack was guided by one overarching desire: to throw the party crashers out the door and to continue the party. In the process, 11 Israeli athletes were killed. Perhaps, when the German journalist asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas whether he wanted to apologise for what happened in Munich 50 years ago, he should have addressed this question to Chancellor Scholz as well.

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free elections that produce significant changes of power, including the election, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a Nazi state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests. 

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports Nazis”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing militias, including neo-Nazi ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future. 

Indeed, some of the best coverage of Ukraine’s extreme Right-wing groups has come from the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, which is not known for a favourable attitude towards Russian propaganda. Bellingcat’s excellent reporting of this under-discussed topic over the past few years has largely focused on the Azov movement, Ukraine’s most powerful extreme Right-wing group, and the one most favoured by the state’s largesse. 

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-Nazi black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric Nazism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role translating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance.

The Azov movement was founded in 2014 by Andriy Biletsky, former leader of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine, during the battle for control of Kyiv’s central Independence Square during the Maidan Revolution against the country’s Russia-leaning, elected president Viktor Yanukovych. Back in 2010, Biletsky claimed that it would one day be Ukraine’s role to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led untermenschen“. The revolution, and the war which followed, would give him the national stage for which he had so long craved.

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Alongside other far-Right groups, such as Right Sector, the nascent Azov movement played an outside role in the fighting against Ukrainian security police which left 121 dead and secured the success of the revolution. Acquiring control of a large property, just off Independence Square, from the Ministry of Defence, Azov turned the building, now named Cossack House, into its Kyiv headquarters and recruiting centre. Though Azov has since toned down its rhetoric, and many of its fighters may be non-ideological and simply attracted by its martial reputation, its activists are often to be seen covered in tattoos of SS totenkopfs and lightning bolt runes, or sporting the Sonnenrad or Black Sun symbol of esoteric Nazism. Derived from a pattern created for Himmler at Wewelsburg castle in Germany, chosen as an occultic Camelot for senior SS officers, the Sonnenrad is like the Wolfsangel rune of the SS Das Reich division one of Azov’s official symbols, worn on their unit patches and on the shields behind which their fighters parade in evocative torchlit ceremonies.

I’ve visited Cossack House multiple times to interview senior Azov figures, including the leader of its National Militia (which provides auxiliary patrolling muscle to Ukraine’s official police force), Ihor Mikhailenko, and Azov’s International Secretary and intellectual linchpin, Olena Semenyaka. It’s an impressive setup: along with classrooms for the educational lectures they provide with state funding, Cossack House is home to Azov’s literary salon and publishing house, Plomin, where glamorous young hipster intellectuals busy themselves with organising Right-wing seminars and book translations, beneath glossy posters of fascist luminaries such as Yukio Mishima, Cornelius Codreanu, and Julius Evola.

But Azov’s power derives from the gun, not their literary efforts. Back in 2014, when the Ukrainian army was weak and underequipped, Azov volunteers under Biletsky’s leadership fought at the vanguard of the battle against Russian-speaking separatists in the east, reconquering the city of Mariupol, where they are currently under siege. Effective, courageous and highly ideological fighters, Azov’s efforts in the east won them great renown as defenders of the nation, and the support of a grateful Ukrainian state, which incorporated Azov as an official regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. In this, Azov is believed to have enjoyed the support of Arsen Avakov, a powerful oligarch and Ukraine’s Interior Minister between 2014 and 2019. 

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Both Ukrainian human rights activists and leaders of rival extreme Right-wing groups have complained to me, in interviews, about the unfair advantage Avakov’s patronage gave the Azov movement in establishing its dominant role in Ukraine’s Rightwing sphere — including official functions as election observers and state-sanctioned auxiliary police. Ukraine is not a Nazi state, but the Ukrainian state’s support — for whatever reasons, valid or otherwise — of neo-Nazi or Nazi-aligned groups makes the country an outlier in Europe. The continent has many extreme Right-wing groups, but only in Ukraine do they possess their own tank and artillery units, with the state’s support.

This awkwardly close relationship between a liberal-democratic state supported by the West and armed proponents of a very different ideology has caused some discomfort in the past for Ukraine’s Western backers. The US Congress has gone back and forth in recent years on whether Azov should be blocked from receiving American arms shipments, with Democrat lawmakers even urging in 2019 that Azov be listed as a global terrorist organisation. In interviews, Semenyaka complained to me that this unease was a result of their listening to Russian propaganda, and insisted that American cooperation with Azov would be beneficial for both parties.

In this, the current war has surely come as a blessed relief for Azov. Biletsky’s attempt to found a political party — the National Corps — met with almost zero success, with even a united bloc of Ukraine’s far- and extreme Right-wing parties failing to clear the very low hurdle for parliamentary representation in the last election: Ukrainian voters simply do not want what they are selling, and reject their worldview. Yet in time of war, Azov and similar groups come to the forefront, with the Russian invasion seemingly reversing the downward spiral that set in for them following Avakov’s resignation due to international pressure. Judging by their social media, Azov’s armed units are expanding: they’re forming new battalions in Kharkiv and Dnipro, a new special forces unit in Kyiv (where Biletsky is organising at least some aspects of the capital’s defence) and local defence militias in western cities such as Ivano-Frankivsk.

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This is how despotism ends

By Will Lloyd

Along with other extreme Right-wing groups such as Karpatska Sich (whose militancy against Western Ukraine’s Hungarian-speaking minority, including Roma, has drawn criticism from the Hungarian government), the Eastern Orthodox group Tradition and Order, the neo-Nazi group C14, and the extreme Right-wing militia Freikorps, the Russian invasion has allowed Azov to restore its earlier prominence, burnishing its heroic reputation with its dogged defence of Mariupol alongside regular Ukrainian marines. While just a few weeks ago there was still a concerted Western effort to not directly arm Azov, now they seem to be a prime beneficiary of Western munitions and training: these pictures tweeted by the Belarusian opposition outlet NEXTA show Azov fighters being instructed in the use of British-made NLAW anti-tank munitions by blurred-out trainers. 

Similarly, until the Russian invasion, Western governments and news outlets frequently warned of the dangers of Western neo-Nazis and white supremacists gaining combat experience fighting alongside Azov and their allied Nazi subfactions. Yet in the heat of the moment, these concerns seem to have dissipated: a recent photograph of newly-arrived Western volunteers, including Britons, in Kyiv shows Azov’s Olena Semenyaka smiling happily in the background, alongside the Swedish neo-Nazi and former Azov sniper Mikael Skillt. Indeed, Misanthropic Division, a unit of Western neo-Nazis fighting alongside Azov, is currently advertising on Telegram for European militants to join the flow of volunteers and link up with them in Ukraine, “for victory and Valhalla.”

Like Ukraine’s other extreme Right-wing militias, Azov are dogged, disciplined and committed fighters, which is why the weak Ukrainian state has found itself forced to rely upon their muscle during its hours of greatest need: during the Maidan revolution, during the war against separatists from 2014 onwards, and now to fend off the Russian invasion. There has been a certain new-found reticence abroad to speak frankly about their role, no doubt for fear that doing so will provide ammunition for Russian propaganda. This fear is surely misplaced: after all, groups such as Azov are only prominent precisely because of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine. Instead of de-Nazifying the country, Russian aggression has helped solidify the role and presence of extreme Right-wing factions in Ukraine’s military, reinvigorating a waning political force rejected by the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians.

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If anything, the primary threat posed by groups such as Azov is not to the Russian state — Russia happily supports extreme Right-wing elements in its Wagner mercenary group and in the separatist republics, after all — nor to Western nations whose disaffected citizens may find themselves drawn to a combat role alongside them. Instead, the threat is to the future stability of the Ukrainian state itself, as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have long warned. While they may be useful now, in the event of the decapitation or evacuation of Ukraine’s liberal government from Kyiv, perhaps to Poland or Lviv, or more likely, in the event of Zelenskyy being forced by events to sign a peace deal surrendering Ukrainian territory, groups like Azov may find a golden opportunity to challenge what remains of the state and consolidate their own power bases, even if only locally.

Back in 2019, I asked Semenyaka if Azov still saw itself as a revolutionary movement. Thinking carefully, she replied, “We are ready for different scenarios. If Zelenskyy is even worse than [ex-president] Poroshenko, if he is the same kind of populist, but without certain skills, connections and background, then, of course, Ukrainians would be heavily in danger. And we have already developed a plan of what can be done, how we can develop parallel state structures, how we can customise these entry strategies to save the Ukrainian state, if [Zelenskyy] would become a puppet of the Kremlin, for instance. Because it’s quite possible.”

Senior Azov figures have been explicit, over the course of years, in stating that Ukraine has unique potential as a springboard for the “reconquest” of Europe from liberals, homosexuals and immigrants. While their broader contintental ambitions may have a very doubtful chance of success, a broken, impoverished and angry postwar Ukraine, or worse, a Ukraine suffering years of bombardment and occupation with large areas outside central government control, would surely be a fertile breeding ground for a form of extreme Right-wing militancy not seen in Europe for many decades. 

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Right now, Ukraine and Zelenskyy may well need the military capabilities and ideological zeal of nationalist and extreme Right-wing militias simply to fight and win their battle for national survival. But when the war ends, both Zelenskyy and his Western backers must be very careful to ensure that they have not empowered groups whose goals are in direct conflict with the liberal-democratic norms they both pledge adherence to. Arming and funding Azov, Tradition and Order and Karpatska Sich may well be one of the hard choices forced by war, but disarming them must surely be a priority when the war ends. 

As we have seen in Syria, there is nothing that radicalises a civilian population more than dispossession, bombing and bombardment. Just as in Syria, there is surely a danger that temporarily empowering extremist factions for their military utility, even indirectly, may have grave and unintended consequences. And in Syria, too, there were strong early taboos among Western commentators in discussing the rise of extremist militias that would later cannibalise the rebel cause, for fear of validating Assad’s propaganda that the rebels were all terrorists: this early reticence did not, in the end, work in the rebels’ favour. 

It is not doing Putin’s work for him to observe frankly that there are extremist elements fighting against him in Ukraine: indeed, it is only by carefully monitoring — and perhaps, curtailing — their activities now, that we can ensure they will not deepen Ukraine’s misery in the years to come. For years, liberal Western commentators complained that the Ukrainian state was turning a blind eye to its Right-wing extremist factions: it serves no good purpose for the same commentators to now do the same thing themselves.

With this image, Sullivan ends her book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Her subtitle, less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept, trails the book’s bombshell: that a Jewish Council member, Arnold van den Bergh, was in their view “the betrayer”.

It took five years, a €100,000 public subsidy, cutting edge artificial intelligence and a retired FBI special agent, Vince Pankoke, to reach this conclusion — which was launched less than a month ago by an international publishing machine. Sullivan outlines the theory of the Cold Case Diary team: that Van den Bergh “saved his family by giving up addresses, including Prinsengracht 163, to the SD”.

The team described itself as “confident” of this conclusion, which was based on an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived two years hiding from the Nazis in The Secret Annex. But the global publicity campaign, promoting the idea that it was a Jewish man who betrayed the Franks, unleashed a wave of criticism.

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Some scholars and historians immediately questioned the claim, sources distanced themselves, the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos apologised for any offence caused and paused distribution, influential German magazine Die Zeit accused Sullivan of “sensationalism”, and the heads of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Anne Frank Fonds in Basel expressed doubts about the work. The team fiercely defended their conclusions in their blog. But they did  backpedal on earlier interviews, in which they had stated that there was an “85% probability” that they were correct, saying this was not an 85% certainty but a “conditional probability”.

While the book predicts a strong reaction to its “powerful” and “unsettling” conclusions — which are presented like a “true crime” documentary and with the certainty of a court verdict — the team has apparently been surprised and shocked by the backlash. They feel like victims of a kind of witch hunt.

The Dutch wounds of Nazi occupation are clearly so close to the surface that, at a scratch, they still bleed. The Netherlands has the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: an estimated 73% of the Jewish population died. Professor Frank van Vree — a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies — points out that Remembrance Day on 4 May was named one of the most important national unifiers in a recent, wide-ranging study by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research.

But just as the Dutch self-image of a tolerant, open society has been challenged by admissions of systemic racism, looking closely at the reality of the Holocaust reveals some uncomfortable truths. “From the mid-Sixties, the story of the destruction of Dutch Jewry and the complicity of the non-Jewish Dutch is a permanent struggle with the rosy Dutch self-image,” says Van Vree. “The knowledge that this really happened… in a society that considered itself a haven of tolerance… It never disappeared, this feeling of guilt”.

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And the story of Anne Frank brings a lot of these tensions to the surface. After it was published in 1947 (and with the 1955 Broadway play that brought it to American attention), the diary weathered claims that it was fake, as well as initial hesitancy from international publishers to make Anne Frank, as some historians have it, the centrepiece of Holocaust memorial.

Her story is also perfectly designed for a global audience. “She comes from a very humanist, Frankfurt-based family; she counts as one of the famous Dutch but in reality she’s German,” says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, emeritus professor and chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “And the way Judaism was practised in the Anne Frank family comes very close to the American reform tradition.

“Anne Frank is ideal for identification,” he goes on. “She keeps her faith in humanity, she has all the dreams 13-year-old girls have”. And we fulfil Anne’s dream of becoming a writer by the positive act of reading. “The Anne Frank diary has become a sort of mirror of our society”.

There’s one conspicuous absence in the book, though. “Anne Frank is of course the most famous Holocaust victim”, says ten Cate, “because her book is not about the Holocaust”. The diary ends abruptly; we know where she went, and what happened to her. But “the Holocaust is not mentioned in the book.” The great question the reader is left with is: who betrayed her?

Past theories include warehouse worker Willem van Maaren, Dutch national socialist Tonny Ahlers, famous “Jew-hunter” Ans van Dijk, and a bureaucratic investigation into food stamp fraud. But while ever more books come out to present a new villain to counter Anne Frank’s heroism, the truth of the Dutch war experience was different: collaborating with the Nazis was not the occasional act of the rare individual.

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The Netherlands suffered military defeat in five days. There is evidence of sustained civil service and economic collaboration with Nazism after this — the state railway company, for instance, recently agreed to pay €50m in compensation for transporting people to Nazi camps. The population, meanwhile, mostly kept its head down. But many police and civilians betrayed Jewish people in hiding and received financial rewards: kopgeld or “head bounty” (Pankoke, the retired special agent, discovered a microfilm of 956 kopgeld receipts in an American archive).

Solidarity with Jewish people was greater in France and Belgium, which had experience of resistance movements, and where the Germans did not institute a civilian government. The geography there also made hiding easier.

But after the war, the Dutch popular narrative did not recognise that particular groups had suffered more. Stories of the treatment received by Jewish people returning from the camps are appalling: they were given no preferential state help, and sometimes found their possessions taken by other citizens not keen to return them. They even faced housing tax bills for the time when they were imprisoned by Nazis.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the Protestant Church in 2020 declared its sense of guilt for failing to protect the Jewish population. That year, Dutch king Willem-Alexander said in his Remembrance Day speech that his great-grandmother Queen Wilhelmina — while in exile in London — did not do enough to support the Jewish community, even “if only by words”.

But it’s very late in the day to recognise some of these injustices. When, in 2016, Amsterdam announced a €10m payment to Holocaust survivors for taxing them while they were in the camps, there were not enough of them left to take it, and the money was instead given to Jewish-related causes.

Meanwhile, after years of examining the cases of museums exhibiting art looted by the Nazis, Dutch restitutions policy has only just been changed to show “more humanity and goodwill”. This year, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum is expected to hand back a Kandinsky painting, considered a “forced sale”, to the Jewish heirs. Other claim cases are still rumbling.

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During this moment of reckoning, the aim of the Cold Case Diary team was, to quote Pankoke, to “provide some closure to the descendants of those who were captured”. But the fact that it points the finger at a Jewish man has been a source of much controversy. Van Vree feels this kind of conclusion should only be made when it is beyond any reasonable doubt. “That’s the last thing that you should suggest — only at the very end, if you are absolutely sure about it”, he says. “The critics are almost all people who are very aware of the non-Jewish guilt about what happened. This is very improper, and if you accept it, you might imply that actually the non-Jews are innocent, so to speak”.

For relatives of Van den Burgh, including his great-niece Elise Tak, the accusation is “appalling”. She questions the proof that any list of hiding places existed, and where the accusatory, anonymous note sent to Otto Frank came from.

Meanwhile the Dutch population is left wondering how to feel about the behaviour of its ancestors. Which is ironic, given that the filmmaker Thijs Bayens started the “cold case” project to try to understand what happens to a population if life is “threaded with fear”.

“The truth never is about the past — it always is about us,” says ten Cate, who expects to see another four or five ‘betrayers’ named in his lifetime. “If it’s only about the past, we don’t give a damn. Historians … isolate particular facts and events from the past and bring them into focus because we want to re-form them to something that is relevant for our own identity. Often it takes the form: what would I have done and what exactly is the relation between us, our identity, our self-image, and what happened in the past? Are we entitled to have a better self-image than our parents?”

Whatever your answer, and whatever you think of Sullivan’s book and the team’s conclusions, we have to confront the facts. Reparations can still be made, especially while there are survivors. “It is important to have these conversations now,” he says. “Belated justice is justice.” And even after attempts at justice, it is important to remember, and to trip over, the painful stumbling stones of the past.

Perhaps it’s natural, then, that in later life, the sombre reflections of the middle-aged Jünger as expressed in his recently translated wartime diaries, a husband and father disenchanted with the modern world around him, now seem so compelling.

The diaries open in 1941, with the 46-year-old Jünger serving in an administrative capacity on the general staff of the German army occupying Paris. Initially féted by the Nazi party for the proto-fascist tone of his early works, Jünger publicly rejected the regime’s advances and came under suspicion as a result, his house searched by the Gestapo and the threat of persecution always hanging over him. A central figure in Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Jünger, who stated he “hated democracy like the plague”, had come to despise the Nazi regime at least as much. Ultimately, he was far too Right-wing to accept Nazism.

Jünger’s intellectual circle had aimed to transcend liberal democracy through fusing Soviet bolshevism with Prussian militarism, yet the illiberal regime that actually came to power was wholly repugnant to him. “The Munich version — the shallowest of them all — has now succeeded,” he wrote, “and it has done so in the shoddiest possible way,” filling him with dread that Hitler would drive Germany and Europe towards disaster and discredit radical alternatives to liberalism for generations to come.

Jünger’s two closest friends, the National Bolshevik Ernst Nieckish and the philosopher of law Carl Schmitt, each met different fates under the new Nazi order: Nieckish jailed as a dissident until his liberation by the Red Army in 1945, and Schmitt as the regime’s foremost legal theorist. Jünger remained friends with both. For Jünger, the internal exile, dissidence would come in the veiled form of his dreamlike novella On the Marble Cliffs, published on the cusp of war in 1939, in which he predicted the disaster and bloodshed the Nazis would bring in their train. Carefully monitored and shunted off to a desk job in France, Jünger spent his war as a flâneur along the quais of Paris, buying antiquarian books, conducting numerous love affairs, and recording his impressions of the city he loved.

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A fêted intellectual, and a lifelong francophile, he befriended the city’s cultural elite, socialising with Cocteau and Picasso as well as the collaborationist French leadership and literary figures such as the anti-semitic novelist Céline, a monster who “spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging, and exterminating the Jews — astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it”. For Jünger, Céline represented the very worst type of radical intellectual: “People with such natures could be recognised earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays they hide under the cloak of ideas.” 

While listening to Céline’s ravings about Jews with polite horror, Jünger was embroiled in an affair with Sophie Ravoux, a German-Jewish doctor, and helping to conceal other Jews in hiding, as well as warning the French resistance about imminent deportations. He records the first reports of mass executions in the east, shared among the army leadership, initially with disbelief and then with horror, disgust and shame. Generals back from the east recount meetings with figures like “a horrifying young man, formerly an art teacher, who boasted about commanding a death squad in Lithuania… where they butchered untold numbers of people”, or share third-hand rumours about “men who have single-handedly slain enough people to populate a midsize city. Such reports extinguish the colours of the day. You want to close your eyes to them, but it is important to view them like a physician examining a wound.” 

Yet Jünger’s detachment comes, at times, close to inhumanity. “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported,” he notes, immediately before examining antique engravings in an antiquarian bookshop: “Looking at pictures does me good when I’m upset.” He records, with genuine disappointment, the cold looks of hatred he is given by French shopgirls or diners in exclusive restaurants, yet feels their distaste is inappropriately applied to such a deep thinker such as himself, an  inward dissident after all. 

For Jünger, the real spiritual war is elsewhere: “I find myself entangled in very different conflicts from those of the hostile nations. The solution to those conflicts is secondary,” he writes with cool detachment, pondering his place in the catastrophe around him. “Ideologically, this Second World War is completely distinct from the first… And again the fronts have been drawn up completely differently from the way they look on the map.” 

What was the war about, then, for Jünger? During World War I, he declares, “We confronted the question of whether man was more powerful than machines”, but “we are now concerned with the problem of whether humans or automatons will dominate the earth”. 

By 1944 Jünger floated on the fringes of two army plots against Hitler, without ever committing himself. He had — correctly as it turns out — no faith in the capacity of the generals around him to bring their task to successful fruition. Flirting with the French and German resistance movements just as he served the regime he despised, Jünger lived his concept of the “anarch”, the internal exile who conforms outwardly to the spirit of the times while fostering his own inward, secret rebellion. As Cocteau later quipped, “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”

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A symbolist writer like the decadent Huysmans, Jünger experiences Allied air raids with the same distant, aesthete’s view, standing on a rooftop to observe the bombs fall. A lifetime experimenter with hallucinogens, he experiences the war as a vast trip: “When the second raid came at sunset, I was holding a glass of burgundy with strawberries floating in it. The city, with its red towers and domes, was a place of stupendous beauty, like a calyx that they fly over to accomplish their deadly act of pollination. The whole thing was theatre — pure power affirmed and magnified.” An entomologist and biologist by training, Jünger writes of his almost unnatural detachment that he needs to observe the war’s characters “as if these were creatures like fish in a coral reef or insects on a meadow”. 

But, then, insect and animal metaphors abound throughout the diaries. On almost every page, he records encounters with snakes, real or dreamed, seen in shops or museums or carved on statues. “The primal force of these creatures lies in the fact that they embody life and death, as well as good and evil,” he observes: “the serpent, a tellurian animal, is a powerful medicine.” Indeed, the snake appears as his daimon throughout the book, no doubt a reflection of his own cold-blooded, chthonic  nature. He literally basks in the sunlight reflected from Paris’ limestone walls, observing that its warmth “awakens a primeval little lizard’s soul in me”. 

Throughout the diaries, Jünger’s inner world appears richer and more meaningful than the war around him. Almost every entry begins with a summary of his latest dream, whether recorded as such or described in laconic terms as if it were a real event. He catalogues these dreams obsessively: “In the night, I dreamt of the trenches of World War I”; “Toward morning, dreams of earthquakes — I saw houses swallowed up”; “At night dreams of ancient cave systems on Crete, where soldiers were swarming like ants”; “Dreamed of being burdened with the corpse of a murdered man without being able to find a place to conceal it.” 

What is behind this obsession? Through dreams we communicate with the dead, he notes offhandedly, as well as our innermost self. Indeed, Jünger comes uncannily close to Jung throughout the book: he records strange omens and premonitions, claims that certain generals of his acquaintance are imbued with the power of prophecy, records strange synchronicities and deploys obscure alchemical metaphors. As the diaries go on and Germany’s fortunes worsen, the magical element begins to predominate. 

He discusses the esoteric writers Guénon and Eliade with Schmitt, debating the magic of the mandrake root and the symbolism of the moon, of the sea and of woman (to him a largely interchangeable category of person). Like Robert Graves, his English analogue, Jünger’s exultation with the First World War fruited into occult mysticism. He dreams of re-enchanting a world lost to technology and secular liberalism: “The ancient gods still stand before us with their magical presence, perhaps even in competition,” he observes, and he means this literally. 

Reading the Bible, he records his growing interest in Christianity over the course of the war. “What can one advise a man, especially a simple man, to do in order to extricate himself from the conformity that is constantly being produced by technology?” he asks himself: “Only prayer… In situations that can cause the cleverest of us to fail and the bravest of us to look for avenues of escape, we occasionally see someone who quietly recognises the right thing to do and does good. You can be sure that is a man who prays.”

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For Jünger, prayer is powerful magic, an efficacious antidote to modernity: “It possesses a conductive power.” Without prayer, “our freedom of will and powers of resistance diminish; the appeal of demonic powers becomes more compelling, and its imperatives more terrible.” 

Jünger’s reference to demonic power is here entirely literal. As the years pass, he begins to view Hitler — who he codenames “Kniébolo”— not as a malicious charlatan who has perverted his conservative revolution but as a genuinely demonic figure, possessing a “a certain diabolical greatness” that is “elemental, infernal” and who “feeds” on the forces unleashed by modernity in a way the “liberal intelligentsia” are incapable of understanding. “In their innermost inclinations,” Jünger observes, “minds like Kniébolo’s are bent on the most comprehensive homicide possible. They seem to belong to a world of corpses that they want to populate — they find the stench of the slain pleasant.” 

At the height of the war, while the Holocaust was a marginal concern of the Allies, Jünger would return again and again to “these atrocities perpetrated against the Jews, which enrage the cosmos against us”. The Nazi leadership are “demonic powers” channeling occult forces: “these people are probing the planet, and the fact that they choose the Jews as their primary victims cannot be a coincidence,” he writes, “Their highest-ranking executioners have a kind of uncanny clairvoyance that is not the product of intelligence but of demonic inspiration. At every crossroads, they will find the direction that leads to greater destruction.” Of Hitler, Junger writes that “I sometimes have the impression that the world spirit has chosen him in a subtle way. There are secrets here that other tribes will never comprehend.”

It is essential to remember that Jünger was an opponent of National Socialism from the far-Right: “Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.” For him, the Nazis were the worst embodiment of modernity, which turned humans into automata, mere machines without souls. His fear was that the Nazi interlude would discredit the search for a Right-wing escape route from modernity: “It is also Kniébolo’s role to discredit good ideas by carrying them aloft on his shield.” He writes that “when you have been party to such individual fates and begun to comprehend the statistics that apply to the wicked crimes carried out in the charnel houses, an enormity is exposed that makes you throw up your hands in despair”. An ultranationalist, Jünger writes that “I am aggrieved to feel such things beginning to influence my relationship, if not to my Fatherland, then to the German people”. 

As with the fatherland, so with war, whose seductive power captured the younger Jünger. On a trip to the Eastern Front, the 47-year-old Jünger is forced to duck for cover from Russian machine-gun fire: “I have long since passed the age,” he observes, relatably, “when I find such things amusing.” Awarded Germany’s highest military decoration by Ludendorrf at the age of 22, he reflects that the ancient general warned him “‘it is dangerous for one so young to be decorated with the highest honour.’ Back then I considered it pedantic, but today I know that it was right.” The older Jünger has lost his taste for battle’s glittering accoutrements: “I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much. Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” 

Eventually, Jünger’s eldest son, little Ernstel, is arrested by the Nazi regime for making defeatist comments about the war to his fellow sailors. He is later assigned to the Italian front on a dangerous anti-partisan mission. There, he was killed by a bullet to the head beneath Carrara’s marble cliffs; his father would never be certain  he was not secretly executed by the SS. “Such a good lad,” the heartbroken Jünger would write in his diary, “Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father. Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.” Whatever attraction war ever held for Jünger is now gone for good. Ordered back to Germany after the failure of the Stauffenberg plot, his superiors hanging from meathooks, he lived under constant threat of arrest and execution like the survivors of his elite Paris circle: “Some have been hanged, poisoned, imprisoned; others have been dispersed and surrounded by thugs.” 

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In his Saxon farmhouse, he reads and tends his garden as the war drives ever closer. The bombs he observed with cool detachment in Paris are less aesthetically appealing when they land on his own Hannover: “The places where I had lived as a child, as a schoolboy, as a young officer — all had been levelled.” Hurrying to the basement shelter with his young children under his arms as shrapnel whips around them, Jünger the warrior, who found liberation in its chaos, has been replaced by Jünger the husband and father, a helpless victim of war’s ever-spreading destruction.

In his farmhouse, he devotes himself to writing his Appeal to the Youth of Europe, an early call for the political unification of his beloved home continent as a potential fortress from the twin horrors of modernity and liberalism. His greatest fear is that with Germany defeated, Europe will succumb to liberalism, and its most soulless and destructive manifestation, Americanism. “America is conquering the places of ancient culture — I mean that aspect of America that has been more evident in modern Berliners with each advancing year.” He writes in horror “of American values, which will be further promoted by the obliteration of our old cities”, anticipating the postwar future, our present, with dread. 

Viewing the ruins of Dusseldorf, he fears that “this too is one of the stepping-stones to Americanism; in place of our old haunts, we shall have cities that are the brainchildren of engineers”. It was Jünger’s fate to command the detachment that surrendered to the first American tanks approaching his beloved Saxon village: “I sense the incursion of a mighty superpower into a completely crushed region… much of everything that used to motivate our deepest being perishes in this transition.”

For Jünger, America’s victory was Europe’s defeat, and that of any means of transcending liberal modernity. Like post-liberals today, he roots the horrors of the 20th century in modernity, observing that “the destruction of the Old World begins to manifest itself with the French Revolution… It is thus out of pure self-preservation that we might contemplate other systems of organisation than those established in 1789.” He dreams of transcendent modernities beyond the nation-state, “political systems in which progressive and conservative forces must be congruent”, where “conservative powers will no longer function as restraints, but rather as a driving force.”

This dream would not see reality in his lifetime. A dissident against the Nazis, Jünger refused to submit himself to denazification under British occupation, and found himself blacklisted as a result. Just as he did with Hitler’s regime, Jünger lived and died a dissident against the liberal regime that replaced it, outwardly conforming but never submitting. He despised democracy just as he despised the gullible and easily-swayed demos who had brought Hitler to power. And he despised the liberals who had given themselves over “completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”, setting in train the nightmares of the 20th century, just as he despised the “young conservatives who first support the demos because they sense its new elemental power, and then fall into the traces and are dragged to their deaths”. 

Yet over the decades, as the old warrior devoted himself to writing a series of dreamlike and prophetic novels, collecting insects and experimenting with LSD, his reputation soared. At the age of 101, in his penultimate year of life, Ernst Jünger converted to Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification, fêted by dignitaries like Kohl and Mitterand. The anarch died as he lived, both at odds with and celebrated by the disastrous century his life embodied, a dissident thinker of great esoteric power now thrust back to relevance by our own disordered times. 

And even if Eichmann had pretended, what then? It would have made no difference. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Saul, by becoming Paul, had merely transmuted all that was most baneful about the Jewish conspiracy against the Nordic race into a more infectious, and therefore more lethal, form. Hitler, who traced the glories of ancient Greece and Rome to Völkerwanderung from the northern reaches of Europe, also attributed the downfall of classic civilisation to the virus introduced by Paul into the bloodstream of the Roman Empire. Its devastating effects had been evident ever since. Lethal variants had evolved. In January 1942, even as war was raging in the snows of Russia, Hitler placed Operation Barbarossa in the context of 2,000 years of history:

“The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.”

Two particularly toxic evils, both of them derived from Christian teachings, threatened the Nordic race with ruin. First, there was the insistence that the weak, the sick, the persecuted merited compassion. So infuriating did Hitler find the objections of church leaders to the Reich’s on-going sterilisation of mental and physical defectives that already, by 1937, he had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. Clearly, there was no prospect of the Germans fulfilling their racial destiny while they were cancerous still with compassion. Hitler’s own preference — one that he was quick to put into practice the moment Germany went to war — was for a mass programme of euthanasia. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example and by the most cutting-edge scientific thinking, could never satisfactorily be carried out by a people who persisted in seeing it as evil.

Yet it was their own folly, their own blindness, that constituted the authentic evil. The Christian morality they clung to had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mentally ill patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity. The churches had had their day. “Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.” The strong — as science had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.

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The calculated evil of Adolf Eichmann

By Alexander Faludy

They also had a duty to trample down the second doctrine with which Christianity had poisoned the world. In 1942, an SS pamphlet quoted a line from Paul’s letter to the Galatians to illustrate just what it was that they had been summoned to fight against. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Here, the pamphlet warned, was a universalism that had dimmed the claims of blood, that had privileged the inferior races over the superior, and that over the course of the centuries had served to geld the Nordic race. A doctrine as pernicious in its effects as this could only have come from one source.

Of course Jews were not Greeks, and of course they could not be permitted to live alongside other, healthier races — of whom the healthiest was the Nordic. “Apes massacre all fringe elements as alien to their community. What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans.” Hitler knew that there was nothing particular about man. He was as subject to the struggle for life, and to the need to preserve the purity of his race, as any other species. To put this into practice was not evil. The truest evil was to do as Christians did: to oppose the ways of the world.

The Nazis, of course, did not succeed in their attempt to redefine for Europeans the parameters of morality. Their Reich did not last a thousand years. Their programmes of euthanasia and genocide are not commemorated today as models of enlightened statecraft, crafted in accordance with ancient wisdom and modern science. Quite the opposite. Today, across the Western world, the Nazis serve as the very archetypes of evil. The old supernatural cosmography that for centuries structured how people in Christendom understood the dimensions of hell may no longer possess the currency it once did; but the concept of hell itself still endures. It has become difficult, since the liberation of the death camps, to imagine it as anything other than a muddy cesspool, surrounded by barbed wire, crematoria silhouetted against a wintry sky. A belief in the satanic as Christians had long construed it, as a literal demonic force, may have faded in the West; but not the conviction that evil is to be identified with a single, sulphurously charismatic figure. Who needs the Devil when there is Adolf Hitler?

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Homosexuality's Christian roots

By Tom Holland

Who indeed needs Jesus? It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the more Nazism has come to shadow the imaginings of people in the West, the less they have gone to church. Other regimes in European history have aspired, as Hitler did, to eradicate the hold of Christianity; but only Hitler aimed to eradicate, not just the institutional forms of the religion, but the doctrines of charity for the weak and sick, and the universalism, that lay at the heart of its traditional teachings.

This is why, 80 years on from the Second World War, the Führer retains his starring role in contemporary demonology. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical. Today, when we ask ourselves “what would Hitler have done?”, and do the opposite, we are as obedient to the weathering effects of Christian morality as our forebears were when they wondered “what would Jesus have done,” and sought to do the same.

Nietzsche, declaring in a famous parable that God was dead, declared as well that in the great cave that had once been Christendom His shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow. It is there in our readiness to use “fascist” as the ultimate insult; to sanctify those who suffer oppression; to regard racism as a sin beyond compare: a shadow that continues to define for us, even in this godless age, the meaning of evil.

You didn’t really think the French Revolution was a force for good, did you? As if. All the great political woes of the modern era — Communism, Fascism, and its German bier and swastika variant, Nazism — have their tangled, bitter beginnings in the storming of the Bastille. The French Revolution was the taproot of Tyranny in our time. No French Revolution, no Marx, no Hitler. Voila!

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Imagine a world without the USA...

By James Kirkup

The French Revolution began in 1789 as an Enlightenment experiment. In 1793, however, the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, tried to turn France into a Rousseauian theme park — where the people were sans private possessions and sans self-interest, but were suborned to the state (“the general will”) — by destroying the rich. The Jacobins also wanted to export the ‘benedictions’ of Revolution via the barrel of a cannon. 

Sound familiar? Yes, it is the same millenarian collectivist philosophy of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden. The accompanying praxis was, and is, murder. Mass murder. As Robespierre so delightfully put it: “We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with them…Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Before 1793, Europe  was no stranger to violence, but not until the French Revolution was murder used systematically to erase a designated internal enemy from its existence. The Jacobin’s mass firing squads anticipated absolutely the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen.

The Jacobins desired “Year One,” a cheerless utopia in which individual freedom was rescinded in the name of the commune, and where the people were dosed daily with propaganda to rid them of their vices — such as the desire to own a home of their own (“Property is theft!”), to possess freedom of thought or to enjoy a private life. The Jacobins and their descendant mini-mes, in their thirst and thrust for absolute power, have disavowed all ordinary amusements. Hence the purist, monkish public image cultivated by Robespierre, Hitler, Mao, et al.

It could have been so different. In June 1791 Louis XVI was about to flee Paris in a fast carriage; at the last moment, MarieAntoinette (and her voluminous baggage) insisted on accompanying him, rather than travelling separately. Uxorious to the nth degree, the king agreed. Consequently, they took the big and literal slow coach instead of the speedy light one — and were intercepted by revolutionaries a mere 25 miles from the safety of the Belgian border. The royal couple were then returned to Paris to be shortened by Madame Guillotine.

But in a parallel universe, there exist Les Annals Alternatives de la France and they tell of Europe’s avoidance of the nightmare of tyranny: the right, fast route taken. The relevant extract follows.

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France's African forever war

By John Lewis-Stempel

On the night of 20/21 June 1791 in the Tuileries Palace, Louis XVI  patted his powdered wig and said to the queen: “Don’t be daft, ma petite chou, one valise only! Vite!” Their light coach sped from Paris, to meet loyal soldiers, who escorted the royal family over the border into Belgium. The king, who was a realiste, understood there was only one power that could truly aid him. Thus he swallowed his pride and sailed across La Manche to perfidious Albion, where he was welcomed with wide arms and pawky eyes.

From Britain, Louis XVI sowed discord in France, and eventually reinvaded successfully in 1794. But there was a cost: to pay for his fomenting of counter-revolution he hocked Louisiana and other French properties to Britain. With France disengaged from North America, Britain  had the whip hand over the uppity colonials and won the War of 1812, controlling all of North America into the late 21st Century (latterly on a Canadian “member of Empire” model, rather than direct rule). Britain henceforth not only ruled the waves (having sequestered the French fleet): it ruled half of terra firma. 

Louis XVI reinstalled himself as a reforming monarch and the Revolution stalled, spluttered and died. Louis, a convinced Catholic, retained strong support from the powerful and fiercely anti-revolutionary Church, while his encouragement of legislative self-government separated the mass of revolutionaries from the Jacobin hardliners. Thus, he commanded majority support. However, bound to the Church as the new France was, it made stony ground for science, and France’s Industrial Revolution was henceforth a stuttering affair similar to that of its southern neighbour, Spain. (Britain, meanwhile, boomed.)

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What does it mean to be French?

By John Lichfield

The “proto-communists” of the Revolution did not disappear entirely: their creed was taken up by an obscure German PhD student called Karl Marx. However, he failed to find a following outside students in the newer universities and “polytechnics”. Moderate socialism, however, became a mass force, under the banner “Reform not Revolution!” Indeed, this became the mantra of the entire of Europe. “Ink not Blood!” was another popular slogan. 

The definitive termination of the revolutionary mindset in France itself came with Louis XVI’s exiling of “The 500″ (the principal leaders of the Revolution) to the island of  New Caledonia where, deprived of vin rouge and tobacco, the scarlet and the black, they withered and died. Louis’s political adroitness — the exile was torture which appeared to be clemency — was compared to that of Machiavelli’s Prince.

Inevitably, monarchist France, isolated and enfeebled militarily, produced no sturm und drang reaction in its Germanic neighbours, who failed to proceed beyond a loose federation of Ruritanians. (Essentially, there was nothing for them to unite against; as the saying goes, no grit, no oyster.) “Romanticism” achieved a certain following in Germanic coffee houses and bierkellers. But no more than that.

In a cause célèbre one such Romantic, Adolf Hitler, fell off his ladder in 1967 while daubing anti-Jewish slogans on the walls of the Reichstag. His 30-person strong National Socialist Party claimed he was pushed by agents of the Rothschild banking dynasty. The pathologist’s report determined that Herr Hitler had suffered an aneurism, which was accepted by the house painter’s lover, Bruno, 72.

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How Europe's Last Dictator survived

By Daniel Kalder

Curiously, despite its diminished standing in Europe, there were two spheres in which France led the continent post-Restoration, these being philosophy and music. With the planet dominated by three centuries of the British political model of safely safely pragmatism, French philosophes continually engaged with what 20th Century Parisian academic Jean-Paul Sartre termed “The Ennui of Anglicisation” in his book Critique de la raison Britannique. (In his suicide note Sartre declared “The British Way is So Boring I Revolt by Self-Murder”; a number of other philosophes imitated him, including the Marxist adherent Louis Althusser, who strangled himself with his wife’s stocking.)

To the disappointment — and contempt — of the philosophes, the people showed no inclination to either rise in rebellion or to self-annihilate. Latent hankerings for the excitement of revolution in This Most Boring of All Possible Worlds (see Jacques Derrida, Writing and Indifference, 1962) were ultimately diverted into “pop rock”, the ultimate Anglo-Saxon cultural victory. And so French entertainer Johnny Hallyday became the biggest-selling singer on the planet in the second half of the 20th century, after re-releasing all his songs in English.

Anyone doubting that this remains the case need only consider the now resurgent debate around nationalism. Recent works by Yoram Hazony and Rich Lowry among others have addressed the case for nationalism, yet for all the strengths of their arguments, they all face one giant hurdle: the past.

Across the world nationalism is rarely seen as a problem in and of itself, let alone the worst political problem of all. Throughout Africa, the Middle East and Far East nationalism has been a mixed blessing, but aside from some religious conservatives (who have their own beef with it) it is rarely seen as the locus of bad ideas.

Only in Europe does nationalism ring differently, with something like a feeling that Europeans cannot be trusted with the stuff.

And yet it isn’t quite the case that nationalism is forbidden in Europe: the British are allowed some of it; the Scots certainly have a dose, and so do many other parts of the continent. The real problem is Germany. Even three-quarters of a century after the Second World War, it remains the case that the deepest problem with nationalism is that people are concerned about whether the Germans can be trusted with it. Try it for yourself: “Resurgent German nationalism”. How does it look to your mind’s eye? How does it poll in your personal barometer of political acceptability?

It is one of the reasons why, when you survey the moving political landscape in Europe, Germany is the country that is still different from all the others. The horrors of the 20th century are so well known that even mentioning the fact is a form of cliché, yet still, even in 2020, the country’s politics remain haunted by the mid-century crime scene.

The feeling remains that it was something in the blood, or the water, or the air, or the ideas or the philosophy or all of these and more. The feeling that even after all this time, all this study and knowledge, we’re still not completely certain why the country did what it did. And a feeling that in the meantime we have to keep an extra close eye on developments there.

This close attention was exemplified by the news in May that a sergeant-major in the German army had been arrested by police commandos at his house in Calw. There the officers found a cache of arms and explosives plus a quantity of Nazi memorabilia, including SS magazines.

While the foreign press might have got a tad over-excited, talking about the Calw arrest as though it was the start of a Robert Harris novel, the whole thing rings obvious warning bells. A potential Nazi in the ranks of the German army is more concerning than a potential Nazi in any other nation’s army, for reasons too obvious to be spelt out.

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Shamima Begum will never leave Britain

By Douglas Murray

A similar sensitivity exists in German politics. Where other countries might be trusted with Right-wing and even nationalist parties, the political consensus here is policed more strictly than anywhere else. Right-wing economics may be accepted, but on all cultural issues the borders of acceptable belief are strictly patrolled, and those that step over the line face the consequences.

No party has demonstrated this more clearly than Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), only founded in 2013 on the back of a movement involving a number of journalists, lawyers, academics and others. At that stage its manifesto and platform were centred almost entirely on criticism of the fiscal policies of the eurozone, the flatlining of the Mediterranean economies and the vast bailouts that resulted from the financial crash of 2008 and resulting eurozone crises.

Throughout this period the feeling was growing that Germany was constantly having to bail out its irresponsible southern partners, and so the potential was there for a fiscally separatist movement to arise.

But once it formed into a political party the AfD became explicitly anti-euro, losing those founding figures who favoured a constructive-critical attitude to the currency. Perhaps it was inevitable that a party defined by a policy that was still so far from the political mainstream would attract a certain number of the politically homeless and even malcontent, but the number of skins, and people, that the AfD shed throughout its formative years was striking by any standards.

This was also a result of the party’s extraordinarily swift growth. Within months of its founding the AfD was represented in all 16 German states, and in the Federal elections it won just under 5% of the vote, only just missing out on entering the Bundestag. But the party did manage to enter state parliaments for the first time, and the following year the European Parliament with seven members.

Over the following years this upward trajectory continued, and there was one factor — as in other countries across the continent — which particularly contributed to this: the 2015 European migration crisis partly created by German chancellor Angela Merkel.

By the time of the crisis the AfD had already begun to shift its focus, its eurozone-scepticism taking a back seat to a wider set of priorities which the American scholar of modern European political movements Daniel Pipes has characterised under the umbrella of “civilisationist” parties. With the election of Frauke Petry to the leadership of the party, the AfD was increasingly keen to talk about immigration, Islam and issues of identity.

Of course, Germany being Germany, every millimeter of this terrain was fought over with exceptional bitterness. The media here had already come to expose and condemn the statements of the most minor members of the party, but with each fresh scandal the core of the AfD was reduced, as a concoction might reduce over a sustained flame.

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Cambridge University's very modern bigotry

By Douglas Murray

Each accusation of xenophobia or right-wingery had the same effects seen in other countries in Europe; some moderate conservatives were chased away for fear of being associated with anything even accused of being “far-right”, while people who were genuinely far-right tried to migrate towards what they believed or hoped could be their home. People who were already in the party had to judge where their own personal political limits might lie.

In the aftermath of the migration crisis the AfD’s poll performance made a set of predictable leaps. In regional elections in Pomerania in September 2016 the party beat Merkel’s CDU into third place, while in Berlin it entered the state capital’s Parliament for the first time after receiving a 14.1 per cent share of the vote. Within four years of its founding the AfD was represented in most of the country’s states.

Of course this did not go unopposed. The day before the AfD’s success in Berlin the city’s mayor, Michael Müller (of the centre-left SDP) declared that a double-digit percentage return for the AfD would “be seen around the world as a sign of the return of the right wing and the Nazis in Germany”.

Despite such warnings, and increasingly fractious internal wrangles, the party continued to do well. Their success culminated in September 2017 when voters gave Merkel’s Christian Democrats their worst result since 1949 and the AfD became the third largest party in the Bundestag, with 94 seats. By any standards it is one of the most extraordinary political rises in recent European history: from nowhere to the official opposition in the Bundestag in just four years.

An hour after the Bundestag results came in the AfD’s joint leader, Alexander Gauland, declared that he would “hunt down the government, Mrs Merkel, and get our country and people back”. It was not exactly the sort of overheated declaration that would ease worries about the rise of the party, and that discomfort has grown since, both at home and abroad.

Outside of Germany this alam stems from a range of factors, one of which, without doubt, is sheer laziness. Then there is opportunism, so that in April 2019, when Jacob Rees-Mogg retweeted a speech by Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD’s deputies in the Bundestag, criticising the Merkel government’s handling of the Brexit negotiations, it was seized on by Labour MPs, who sought to paint the AfD as an out-and-out racist and even Nazi political party.

This is simplistic and incorrect, based on a very limited knowledge of the situation in Germany, yet there are certainly individuals near the top of the party who cause concern not only to outsiders but to party members themselves. For instance, I have spoken to several figures in the AfD who have expressed concern over the views of the leadership in Thuringia, in the former East Germany.

Bjorn Hocke in particular has become a lightning-rod of such concerns, not least after a 2017 speech in which he appeared to minimise the Holocaust. In contrast, in most of the statements of a figure like Beatrix von Storch there is nothing that would not be deemed perfectly normal political sentiment in the Conservative Party or Ukip in the period of Nigel Farage’s leadership.

Within the party there seems to me a knowledge that the whole thing could go in any number of ways, towards the more mainstream right or further towards and beyond the boundaries. A party in such flux and on such a swift trajectory as the AfD has been is worthy of serious psychological analysis, yet such analysis has been almost completely lacking in the German media, let alone in the wider international one.

The story of “far-right on the rise in Germany” is simply too potent — and legitimately potent — a force to be responded to by a phrase like “It’s more complicated than that”. But it is more complicated than is currently assumed, and a huge amount will be riding on whether Germany can cope with the complexities involved.

This will include the question of whether sentiment against mass immigration is permissible in Germany, as it has become permissible across the rest of the continent. It will rely on whether the right to defend or speak up for European identity are considered respectable in 21^st Century Germany or not. And hardest of all (and this is something that people can reasonably feel torn over) whether any defence of German cultural identity is possible in the wake of the 20^th century and the painful, jarring ringing that such calls inevitably cause for very many people.

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Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

Personally, I remain torn on these questions. From my many visits to the country I have come to think that there is something not just wrong but cruel about saying to young Germans that they should in some way be treated with suspicion, or deprived of the right to feel pride in their culture, because of the reprehensible things that went on in their country before their birth.

And yet, like many others, I also feel nervous. Can anyone say with total confidence that they know what could and could not bubble up in an era such as the one we are entering? Could anyone honestly put their hand on their heart and say that they are as willing to allow the Germans to be nationalistic, as other nations are allowed to be? The question remains almost impossible to answer in the affirmative, and yet Germans must also be allowed to feel pride in their culture and wish to protect it.

These are not just civilisational issues: they are issues of deep, practical, day-to-day political concern. A concern that the AfD has the opportunity to answer, or to blow apart.

Defying Hitler: A Memoir tells the tale of one man’s struggle against the surging tide of savage nationalism in 1930s Germany. “This is the story of a duel,” the book starts. “It is a duel between two very unequal adversaries: an exceedingly powerful, formidable and ruthless state and an insignificant, unknown individual.” The author’s real name was Raimund Pretzel, but he adopted the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner when he left Germany for Britain, in 1938, where he went on to become a respected journalist. This work charts what he describes as his efforts to preserve “his integrity, his private life and his personal honour”.

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Our prisons are a national disgrace

By Ian Birrell

Such is the potency of the book, that when I mentioned it to the musician Brian Eno recently, he told me he was buying copies for all his friends. “This book has had a bigger impact on me than almost anything else I have ever read because it showed how easy the slide into totalitarianism can be,” he later texted me. The Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman remembered earlier this year how a Tory MP had praised the book to him when they met. “It struck me as significant that we had both been reading about the 1930s to try and make sense of 2019,” wrote Rachman.

The reason is simple. Defying Hitler details with impressive honesty how a civilised nation ended up backing the most barbaric modern regime in Europe. We all know, of course, the outcome of those disturbing events in Germany. And yes, it would be foolish to argue that today’s surge of populism in Western democracies bears direct comparison with the rise of Nazi fascism that led to industrialised death camps. Yet ours is again a time of turmoil and bewildering uncertainty, as despairing citizens turn against democracy, politics shifts to extremes, demagogues patrol the political stages, nationalism rises once more and fake news corrodes free societies. It leaves many people fearful for the future, many public figures unsure how to react.

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By Giles Fraser

As Haffner writes, the first country occupied by the Nazis “was not Austria or Czechoslovakia” but Germany — and his book helps explain how his nation hurtled into the abyss. It begins with a seven-year-old boy in 1914, unhappy at seeing his summer holiday curtailed by outbreak of war; but who then follows the campaign like a sport, with its statistics on ships sunk, prisoners seized and miles advanced.

Four years later, like Corporal Adolf Hitler, he was left distraught by defeat, feeling an unsettling sense of loss. Then come the Weimar Republic years of economic chaos, hyper-inflation and political violence as the Nazi shadow grows. Moderates were left politically homeless in a fight for supremacy between far-Left and far-Right.

It is revealing to see how rapidly the Nazis went from being figures of fun to running the country. After the election of September 1930, “a ridiculous splinter party became the second largest faction” in parliament. But Hitler was still seen as a joke, a repulsive character delighting in incendiary threats — although Haffner notes “the strange befuddlement and numbness of his opponents”. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, “the general opinion was that it was not the Nazis who had won but the bourgeois parties of the Right who had ‘captured’ the Nazis and held all the key positions”. People believed the system would constrain their excesses.

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The power of this work, however, comes not from telling a familiar historical story, but from the author’s personal vignettes as “a typical example of the German educated bourgeois” living “against an arrestingly dramatic backdrop”. His father, a dignified civil servant, suffers with economic struggles. Haffner attends a louche ball which is broken up by snarling police. He hides in doorways to avoid having to salute Nazi parades. In one scene, he is kissing and caressing a Jewish girlfriend in the Grunewald woods, when a group of teenagers passes by and “cheerfully” tells them to perish. A friend’s partner, a Left-wing doctor, disappears. People accept their telephones should be tapped and letters read amid scaremongering about enemies of the state. Judges become “people’s judges” with powers to ignore law, but are subject to instant dismissal.

Some join the Nazis through fear, others jump on the bandwagon or are “intoxicated” by the idea of unity. Haffner works as a legal clerk. Half his small group of friends studying for final exams become Nazis, with one threatening to shop him to the Gestapo after a row; the others go into exile. A Jewish judge presides over his court, but colleagues start to treat him “with a certain tasteful delicacy, like one does suffering from a serious disease”.

As he works in the library, brownshirts burst in, beat up a Jewish barrister and order out “non-Ayrans”. One thug comes up to Haffner and asks if he is Ayran. He replies yes instantly, blushing as he realises he has capitulated to their bigotry. “A moment too late I felt the shame, the defeat,” he writes poingnantly. “I had failed my very first test. I could have slapped myself.”

Later, in 1933, he must attend a Nazi indoctrination camp to continue his fledgling legal career, where they march, sing songs and wear Swastika armbands. As he plays chess under a giant portrait of Hitler, the radio announces the Reichstag has been dissolved and only one party will contest an election. “This still astonished me, in spite of all I had experienced. I was happy that now the Nazis had obviously gone too far.” Instead the evening ends with a massed chorus of the national anthem, right arms outstretched for three minutes. “We all sang or pretended to do so, each one of us the Gestapo of the others.”

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By Daniel Kalder

Such candour gives this book its immense punch. The author, like so many other Germans, lacked the courage of resistance when confronted by swaggering hate. He assumed the norms of civilisation would expose the absurdities of the Nazis, then constrain the excesses of extremists who openly targeted their fellow citizens. Instead, space for dissent was throttled as democracy evolved into dictatorship. Decent people clung on to their careers and their families, retreating in the face of horror or oblivious to the suffering of others. As you turn the pages, they beg a difficult question: how would you respond in such a situation?

On one level, this fine book is a fierce warning about the dangers of nationalism — what Haffner called the “deadliest enemy” to his country,  and something which is seeping back across our continent. He calls this poisonous creed “a dangerous mental illness wherever it appears, capable of distorting the character of a nation and making it ugly, just as vanity and egoism distort the character of a person”. He concludes that any German placing value in humanity and openness had no option but to leave the country they loved. “One came to feel that any foreign country would seem more like home than Adolf Hitler’s ‘Reich’.”

Haffner’s book takes us into the heart of emerging horror and exposes why so many decent people averted their gaze from evil, leading to the destruction of German democracy followed by genocide and war. It offers the reader a real-time sense of witnessing the rise of the Nazis. He wonders at each step into darkness about the reality of the dangers, the best response to their threat and the strength of his state. His story seems so remote, so unreal, so removed from our own lives. Yet echoes from this era can be heard in these uncertain times.

According to Hazony, an Israeli political scientist, most Europeans have drawn entirely the wrong conclusion from the Second World War. They have too readily assumed that what went wrong with Nazism was an extreme form of nationalism, and that nationalism was, therefore, the thing that needed to be solved. Guided by this assumption, nationalism became a byword for racism and bigotry.

But despite the fact that the Nazi party was called “National Socialist”, Hazony argues it was actually neither of those things. Hitler was an imperialist. He sought to establish a “third Reich”, modelled on the “first Reich”, which was the Holy Roman Empire. In other words, Hitler wanted an empire to rule over others. And the political wickedness of Nazism was much more to do with its desire for empire than for its celebration of the nation state. For Hazony, it was empire that led to the Holocaust not nationalism. And had Europeans drawn this conclusion, the debate over the European Union would look very different.

There are two basic forms of political order, Hazony argues: independent nation states and empire. The book’s title is obviously a spoiler as to his conclusion. A political Zionist, Hazony thinks the independent nation state is answer to the threat posed by empire builders. He wants to remind us of the pre-war order when the nation state was considered to be the guarantor of freedom and peaceful co-existence – as, for example, when Roosevelt and Churchill met in August of 1941 to sign the Atlantic Charter to reaffirm the principle of national freedom: “The right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.”

Further reading

Liberal smugness will destroy the Left

By Giles Fraser

For Hazony, the political independence of national self-determination is a basic safeguard against tyranny. “Until not very long ago,” he points out, “support for the independence and self-determination of nations was an indication of a progressive politics and a generous spirit.” This view, he contends, is rooted in the Biblical ideal of independent kingdoms. Moses is instructed by God that the people of Israel are not to interfere with their neighbours:

“And when you come near, opposite the children of Ammon, harass them not, nor contend with them, for I will not give you of the land of the children of Ammon any possession, for I have given it to the children of Lot for possession.” (Deuteronomy, 2:19)

The point about the Biblical ideal of a national kingdom is that it is where people are free and self-determining,  and absolutely not a launch pad for some wider imperial ambition.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, begins at a totally different point when thinking about the state and draws a dramatically different conclusion. Beginning with John Locke, political order is built up on the basis of the individual “pursuing life, liberty and property in a world of transactions based on consent”. On this model there is no legitimacy to anything other than the individual choosing subject. Associations between people are only ever temporary alliances of individual agreement. All forms of group loyalty – family, tribe, nation – are merely aggregates of multiple individual wills and are only as strong as our latest calculations as to the advantage they bestow to the individual.

Further reading

Free minds: Rod Dreher – an American conservative who realised liberalism was the enemy

By Giles Fraser

Alongside the emphasis on the individual, the Enlightenment also adopted a commitment to the ultimate value of the universal. “Act only on the maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should be a universal law”, was Kant’s famous categorical imperative. The individual and the universal are the flip sides of the same coin, and lead, as Kant argues in his book Perpetual Peace, to a belief that nation states should be dismantled in favour, eventually, of a single world government. It’s a version of this argument that is often used to justify the European Union – that nation states make war, and that an ever-wider union is a model of perpetual peace. For Hazony, however, “Kant was merely offering yet another version of the German-led Holy Roman Empire.”

Hazony concludes: “Dogmatic and utopian, [liberalism] assumes that the final truths concerning mankind’s fate have been long since discovered and all that remains is to find a way to impose them.” Hazony thinks this universal liberalism to be a kind of fourth Reich. The dream of the Holy Roman Empire has merged with the Enlightenment dream of an international state where “emperors and imperialists, dream of extinguishing all nations … and suffusing them all with a universal will bearing a single, universal salvation for all”.

Is that too strong? Well, here is one of the godfathers of neo-liberal economics, Ludwig von Mises: we must, he argued “create a frame of mind [of] nothing less than unqualified, unconditional acceptance of liberalism. Liberal thinking must permeate all nations, liberal principles must pervade all political institutions.”

No, this is where it starts getting strong. The crucial section of the book is when Hazony writes about two completely different lessons that can be drawn from Auschwitz – one in which nationalism is seen as the problem and, therefore, internationalism is seen as the answer; and another in which internationalism is seen as the problem and, therefore, nationalism is seen as the answer. Those who set up the state of Israel, for instance, took the second position, believing that a nation state i.e. Israel was to be the best way of protecting the Jewish people. But …

“Jews are not the only ones for whom Auschwitz has become an important political symbol. Many Europeans, too, see Auschwitz as being at the heart of the lesson of the Second World War. But the conclusions they draw are precisely the opposite of those drawn by Jews. Following Kant, they see Auschwitz as the ultimate expression of that barbarism, that brutal debasement of humanity, which is national particularism … According to this view it is not Israel that is the answer to Auschwitz, but the European Union.”

There are, therefore, he argues, two irreconcilable responses to the horror of the death camps. If you see nationalism as the cause of the Holocaust then – basically – you will see the dismantling of nation states as the right and proper response. Thus the European Union. But if you see empire and internationalism as the problem, then the answer is stronger nation states, especially for the vulnerable. Thus the state of Israel.

In other words, the two basic but opposite assumptions about what created the Holocaust inevitably lead to two completely opposite answers as to what should be the right response to it. For one position, nationalism is the solution. For another, nationalism is precisely the problem. For such as these, as Hazony puts it: “Israel is Auschwitz”. If you analyse nationalism as the problem, then more nationalism cannot be the answer. That is, if you believe nationalism is the problem, then “Israel is, is some important sense, a variant of Nazism”!

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

It is no coincidence, Hazony maintains, that Israel is constantly compared to Nazism by some liberal Europeans. Thus, he concludes, opposition to the existence of Israel is deep in the European marrow, it represents a “universal will [that] cannot abide a single, obstinately dissenting people, no matter how small”.

Drawing on Moses, Hazony presents a vision of the nation state in which independent nations are not built upon any sense of national superiority or desire for conquest. They don’t have to believe they are better than anyone else, or that other people should follow their way of doing things – just as my loyalty to my family doesn’t make me in any way hostile to your loyalty to yours. Nations can and should cooperate with each other for mutual advantage. But they should be extremely wary of transferring the powers of national sovereignty to trans-national institutions.

There will be those who believe federalism and subsidiarity represents a third way between nationalism and imperialism – though Hazony rejects such a move, arguing that federalism always seeks to accrue greater power to itself, thus always sliding towards a form of empire. If this is so, then the current debate about the future of the European Union is but the foothills of a much greater conflict about whether we see liberalism as a means of liberation or an empire that seeks world domination – Kant, von Mises etc.

If the debates about the European Union were not already vituperative enough, Hazony has doused the whole argument in ideological gasoline. This is one of the most controversial books I have ever read and I am still processing his conclusions.

I have little love for the EU, but the idea that it is a soft variant of Nazism feels far too strong, even for me. Yet throughout his argument I felt myself nodding away, especially in his attack on liberalism. But, as many will, I reacted instinctively against his comparison of liberalism with Nazism. Liberalism may try and collapse difference and seek to establish some universal order, but it clearly has nothing like the murderous intent of the Nazis. That said, Hazony warns us that even the most apparently benign variants of empire contain within themselves the capacity to turn to violence. And on that point, I fear he is quite right.

Further listening

Test article

By Giles Fraser

In May, I wrote for this website about the roots of this misunderstanding, which are there for anyone with ears to hear. It is there when Jeremy Corbyn and his followers claim that they will “defeat” or “end” antisemitism; as though one of the world’s oldest hatreds is some medical problem which can be solved with the right medicine. Or if enough ‘will’ is deployed.  As I said back then, most Jews will laugh darkly at the idea that you can ever ‘eradicate’ antisemitism.

But the misunderstanding is telling. And it leads to the problem underlying the latest eruption of charges and embarrassments within UK Labour. One of the causes – which can be heard among all of the cheerleaders on the Corbynite Left – is that antisemitism is basically a right-wing disease and something which ‘anti-fascists’ of the kind that Corbynites like to fancy themselves as being could not possibly fall into.

You can hear it in the more honest disputes and debates on the Labour Left: “How dare they use this accusation against us? Don’t they realise this is the sort of stick we use to beat them?”

Of all the simplistic readings of history that prevail in our time, this is one of the most disheartening.  Which is why I am forever recommending that people – especially young people – read a book by the distinguished, liberal, New York-based writer Paul Berman.

More on antisemitism

When will people learn that hate speech is here to stay?

By Douglas Murray

Best known for his post-9/11 work, Terror and Liberalism (2003), my own favourite work of Berman’s has long been his follow-up book from 2005: Power and the Idealists.  That book – which is scandalously currently out of print and only available (like so many of the best books) second-hand – undoubtedly suffers from its subtitle: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath. In 2005, the name of the German Foreign Minister still rang bells.  Not many bells ring outside Germany today when you sound that name.

Berman’s book relates an extraordinary and very important part of post-War history. He describes the movement of a generation of people who were in the orbit of the subtitle-character of his book, who were all deeply and committed members of the German Left.

That generation of German politicians and thinkers, of which Fischer was a part, had in Berman’s telling one absolute rule above all others. One single, defining political and moral point by which to orient themselves. It was this: they were not going to be like their fathers. They were not going to be Nazis. This may seem like an obvious positioning point for a German growing up in the Fifties and Sixties. But it was a crucial one. And as deep an instinct as anyone could imbibe from politics.

More on the Left's antisemitism

Is Jeremy Corbyn anti-Semitic?

By Giles Fraser

However, history and fate play strange tricks. And, as Berman relates, this one guiding light turned out not to perform the task those who held it had hoped. A number of things happen. The call of the global dispossessed goes up. The cry of the underdog goes out. Time moves on. Things – and people – change.

To cut a long and important story short (and I really do urge people to read the book and absorb every painful detail of this), some of those in Fischer’s orbit take a particular interest in the Palestinian cause. They become fixated on the actions of the Israelis – far more than on the actions of any other foreign cause, in spite of a globe positively brimming with foreign causes.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as various ‘Palestinian Liberation’ movements get underway, these find some fervent support on the German Left. Some of the terror-chic which was undoubtedly part of the appeal can still be felt in the residual plaudits still sometimes given to people like the foul Leila Khaled.

Some of these German leftists get involved with their pet cause. Some become intimately involved. And before you know it, some are involved with the groups that are busy committing terror against the Jewish State. Specifically in the hijacking of Israeli and other aircrafts. At the culmination of the book, one of these figures finds himself on a plane he has helped to hijack where his role includes sorting passengers out between the Jews and non-Jews.

The one thing they had hoped not to become was the thing they had turned out to have become. At the top of another ramp, another German, in another place and at another time, is busily carrying out another ‘selection’.

I do not recommend this book or retell this tale in order to say that antisemitism comes from the Left or the Right, or from one place more than the another. I mention it to try to explain the deep but central truth, which is that antisemitism can come from anywhere – with a rider that the place it may be most likely to come from at times is from among those who think that they are immune to it. From people who think that is the thing that they will not be. That that is a thing they could never be. Because they are the good guys. They are the decent ones. They are the ‘anti-fascists’, so how could they possibly be fascists?

When Jeremy Corbyn campaigned for Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami – writing character references for them and generally acting as their defender – I have little doubt that in his own mind he was doing something virtuous. Perhaps he honestly did believe that their plot to put car bombs outside the Israeli embassy in London and outside the building of a Jewish charity in London was some kind of charitable act.

But if he did, he was as ignorant as it is possible to be – not only of the actions of the people he was defending but of the fact that antisemitism can creep up on the ‘virtuous’ and the un-virtuous alike. And that the man who considers himself virtuous is the more likely vessel through which this most foul virus might pass in this age.

This is just one of the deep truths which the British Left could do with facing up to. But they will not. Because this is not an age of introspection. It is an age of grandstanding, and wide-scale self-deceit.