The Last European War.
by John Lukacs.
Anchor Press/Doubleday. 562 pp. $15.00.
John Lukacs has here attempted a diplomatic and psychological history of Europe during the first two years of World War II. As a diplomatic historian, Lukacs is a synthesizer rather than a researcher, and there are few surprises in his account of European international relations from 1939 to 1941, which draws heavily on the research of contemporary German historians. What is surprising is his analysis of the factors behind Germany’s initial victories. Where other historians have pointed to Germany’s formidable industrial infrastructure or to the heightened organizational capacities of a totalitarian regime, Lukacs finds the primary source of Germany’s strength in “the German spirit.” That other students of the subject have failed to appreciate this intangible factor he attributes to their inability to liberate themselves from the misleading “Marxist categories” of modern social science and from the fallacies of a “materialistic” philosophy of history.
German preeminence, according to Lukacs, derived from a particular system of thought—“neo-idealism”—which was “the great German contribution in the intellectual history of Europe, ranging from philosophy to physics.” Fortified by their unique philosophy, “the Germans had the potential to rejuvenate old Europe, to extend the European age, and the primacy of Europe, in the world for centuries to come.” That they failed rather singularly to do so does not, in Lukacs’s view, detract from the virtues of neo-idealism; instead, it reflects a “fatal flaw” in the German national character: “The Germans could be tactless and inconsiderate; they could cultivate their virtues to such systematic extremes that these became vices.”
Since Lukacs hardly discusses the actual principles of “neo-idealism” (except to say that it represents a reaction to the “bourgeois materialism” and the “lifeless rationalism,”. respectively, of the 19th and 18th centuries), it may be useful to recall that the most characteristic feature of German idealism was its preoccupation with the Volksgeist, or national character. As against the universalizing impulse of French rationalism, German idealism held that each people had a spirit or genius, unique to itself, which determined its behavior and whose gradual unfolding constituted the core of its history. That Lukacs himself has been powerfully influenced by the Volkisch tradition becomes obvious in the second and more important part of his book. which focuses on the thoughts and sentiments of the European peoples between 1939 and 1941.
According to Lukacs, there are certain enduring “national habits of mind.” far more important than such things as class structure, which determine the “national inclinations” of an entire people. It is soon apparent from his account, however, that these “national habits of mind” are little more than familiar national stereotypes. Thus, Lukacs maintains that during World War 11. “the English feared defeat more than they feared death,” a result of their “unthinking but deeply felt pride,” while the French “feared death more than they feared defeat,” a reflection of their “intelleclualism” and “individualism.” “Opportunism, grandiloquence, and humaneness” characterized the Italians, the Poles were “brave, quixotic, and garrulous,” the Greeks “cunning and tough,” while “a certain slowness of mind” was discernible in the Russians. (Interestingly enough, Lukacs, a native Hungarian who has lived in this country for many years, does not venture to describe the “national habits of mind” of the Hungarians; the Rumanians, on the other hand, traditional enemies of the Hungarians, are described simply as “shamelessly opportunistic”)
Lukacs’s preoccupation with Volkiseh forms of thought, with national psychology and nationalist ideas, leads him to downplay the significance of the political Left—with its commitment to an international and universalist vision of history—in the life of the nation-state. “The history of the Right, all present, intellectual fashions notwithstanding, is generally more interesting than the history of the Left,” he writes. “No matter how cruel, no matter how vulgar, Hitler had a more profound understanding of human nature than Marx.” Lukacs argues that until 1941, because of the inherent weakness of Europe’s Marxist parties, the burden of resistance to Nazi aggression fell on the Right, and that the main struggle in these crucial years was not between Right and Left. but within the Right itself, between those who regarded Communism as a greater evil than Nazism and those who did not. While socialists did join the resistance “eventually,” he claims that “the principal opponents of Nazism, of Hitler, of Germany in 1939-41 were conservatives, often reactionaries, in Germany as well as in England—indeed, nearly everywhere.”
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As with Lukacs’s simplifying descriptions of “national character,” there is some truth in all this. but not very much. It is true that by 1939 the only resistance to Hitler in Germany came from conservatives, but this had little to do with the misleading ideology of the Left, as Lukacs claims. Rather, as George Lichtheim puts it in Europe in the 20th Century, “given the character of the regime, the total suppression of all political parties, and the mass execution or imprisonment of former socialist and Communist functionaries, the only effective opposition during the war was to be found among those conservatives who in 1933-34 had entered into an alliance with Hitler, only to be disillusioned by the increasingly terrorist and irrational traits of his personality.” As for the earliest opponents of Nazism and Fascism in Europe, these were not Lukacs’s “old conservative bourgeoisie or what had remained of the aristocracies” but rather the Social Democrats. In Germany, for example, the Social Democratic party (for all its faults) was the only political party to speak and vote against the Enabling Act of 1933, which in effect made Hitler a dictator; the German center and Right voted for it. And the same is true for Italy. Only the reformist socialists and the Left-liberals voted against the Acerbo Rill, which assured the consolidation of the Fascist dictatorship, while both the Italian center and the Right voted in favor. All too often, in other words, it was “reactionary patriotism” of the European Right which opened the door to dictatorship.
Again, Lukacs’s assertion that the split within the European Right was between those who regarded Communism as a greater evil than Nazism and those who did not is only partially accurate. It is true, for instance, that before 1939 the British Right was split between Conservatives like Churchill. who felt Hitler must be resisted unconditionally. and Conservatives like Chamberlain, who believed that Hitler might be won over to a respectable variety of anti-Communism. Rut in September 1939. when Germany and the Soviet Union, newly allied, jointly assaulted Catholic, conservative Poland, the British Conservatives came down virtually to a man against Hitler. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it became rather difficult for anyone on the Right to argue, in good faith, that he was supporting Hitlerism to contain Bolshevism. Those European rightists who supported Hitler after 1939 did so not because they were anti-Communist, but because they were anti-democratic, because their animus toward the established parliamentary order was so great that they were prepared to welcome anyone who promised to destroy that order.
Lukacs’s own views on the Hitler versus Stalin question are seriously inconsistent. In his discussion of Britain’s appeasement policy, his sympathies are clearly with Churchill, and he is contemptuous of those Chamberlainites who believe Hitler could be fobbed off with concessions. Yet further on in his study he writes: “It is now universally thought that Nazism was much more criminal than Communism . . . only because of the Jewish issue [Lukacs’s emphasis]. . . . Had Hitler and his cohorts not committed their awful deed . . . thoughtful people might have become amenable to the argument that, after all was said, Hitler and Nazism were less evil and much less cruel than Stalin and Communism.” But at the time Churchill and Chamberlain were conducting their fateful debate, and even afterward, only a handful of people suspected that Hitler intended to murder the Jews of Europe, and they were not believed. Since Lukacs feels that, apart from the “Jewish issue,” Stalin was far worse than Hitler, why does he not sympathize with Chamberlain rather than Churchill? According to this reading, after all, Chamberlain chose the lesser of the two evils.
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Perhaps the most disappointing section of the book is Lukacs’s tendentious analysis of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. In spite of the vast and meticulous body of scholarship proving that Hitler’s determination to destroy European Jewry was a constant and unwavering purpose of his career, Lukacs claims that the decisive factor behind the Holocaust was American entry into the war which, it seemed to Hitler, was “prepared and facilitated by powerful Jewish influences there.” “The news of Pearl Harbor,” Lukacs writes, “lifted the hearts of millions of Jews around the world. It was also the death-knell for millions of Jews in Europe, even though none of them knew this.” The Final Solution, in other words, was Hitler’s reaction to what he regarded as an intolerable provocation on the part of American Jews, a way of punishing them for their warmongering.
In fact, as has been abundantly documented, there is no causal connection whatsoever between Pearl Harbor and Auschwitz. Hitler’s decision to destroy European Jewry was planned from the beginning in two stages. Stage I envisaged the consolidation of Europe’s Jews in conquered Poland; Stage II, the actual systematic murder, was to be deferred until Hitler struck at Soviet Russia, the citadel of the Bolshevik-Jewish world conspiracy. Hitler probably started planning the actual mechanics of the Final Solution early in 1939, and he carried it out according to schedule. That Lukacs, a scholar of some repute, is unaware of all this, is impossible to believe. He himself mentions the Wannsee Conference of 1941 in which the administrative guidelines of the Holocaust were laid down; that conference was initially planned for November 1941—a month before Pearl Harbor.
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Altogether, the attitudes toward Jews expressed throughout this book are disturbing, to say the least. In his section on “The Problem of the Jews,” for example, having just assured the reader that “unscrupulous scum, of the type of a Stavisky or an Ilya Ehrenburg, merely floated on the surface” of Jewish society, Lukacs next offers a long quotation from the “intelligent, sensitive, and honest Jewish French philosopher,” Henri Bergson, on the subject of Bergson’s yearnings toward Catholicism. In the same vein, he quotes extensively from the really appalling theories of a Jewish convert to Christianity, “the extraordinary young Jewish genius,” Otto Weininger, whose views on Jewish spiritual degeneracy, among other things, were often cited by the Nazis as justification for their own anti-Semitism. Lukacs seems to feel that while not all European Jews resembled the crooked financier and the Bolshevik intellectual, these notorious Jewish “types” were prevalent enough in Jewish society to induce the best Jews to convert to Christianity. That he does not say so explicitly, but merely implies it by quoting “honest” Jewish sources, is not the sort of rhetorical trick one expects to find in a work of serious historical scholarship by a writer of his evident talents.
