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Once and for all: The encounter between Stalinism and Nazism. Critical remarks on Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2012

JÖRG BABEROWSKI*
Affiliation:
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Historisches Seminar, Lehrstuhl für die Geschichte Osteuropas, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany; [email protected]

Extract

Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable for a historian to combine the National Socialists’ murderous excesses and programme of extermination with Bolshevik atrocities in a single history. He would have been accused of ‘relativising’ one set of murderous crimes by relating it to the other. The comparison does indeed have a relativising effect in that it puts the events in a new light and so makes them, for the first time, comprehensible. But at that time, when historians still treated all historical questions as moral ones, nobody wanted to anything to do with that comparison because it ran counter to the political will. You could compare anything with anything, except the Holocaust, which had to remain unique. Nobody could write about the excesses of Stalinist violence without acknowledging that the Nazi murder programme was unique. Nonetheless everybody knew, even then, that uniqueness cannot be established without comparisons and contrasts.1 Since then, a view that used to be considered shocking has become a self-evident: no examination of state atrocities is now possible without a comparative element. But this change can also serve political ends: the Holocaust has become the sole yardstick for measuring state-organised crimes of violence. It seems that such crimes can only be taken seriously if they are comparable to Nazi atrocities.2

Type
Forum: Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 See the documentation of the ‘historians’ dispute’ in ‘Historikerstreit’: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse über die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1987); Evans, RichardIn Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New Yok: Knopf, 1989)Google Scholar is a tendentious and one-sided view of the quarrel.

2 See, for example, Naimark, Norman, Stalin's Genocides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

3 Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I: The Years of Persecution (London: Phoenix, 1998)Google Scholar. For a comparison of the interrelatedness of both regimes see Fitzpatrick, Sheila and Geyer, Michael, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

4 See also Baberowski, Jörg, ‘Totale Herrschaft im staatsfernen Raum: Stalinismus und Nationalsozialismus im Vergleich’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 57, 12 (2009), 1013–28Google Scholar.