History and Psychoanalysis in the Columbus Centre (Routledge Studies in Modern History) [1 ed.] 0367186365, 9780367186364

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History and Psychoanalysis in the Columbus Centre

This book draws on a range of key archives and oral testimonies to provide the first systematic and historical study of the origins, context, development, frustrations, inner contradictions, and legacies of the Columbus Centre. The Columbus Centre, a remarkable though largely forgotten research institute, was established at the University of Sussex in 1966, triggered by claims of a dearth of academic research about Nazism and the Holocaust. Its basic stated aim was to bring together psychoanalysis and history for a scholarly investigation of discrimination, mass violence, and the preconditions of genocide in the past and the present. The Nazi crimes were studied along with other instances of prejudice and mass violence, such as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts, South African apartheid, the persecution of the Roma people, and race relations in the United States and modern-day Britain. The book seeks to place the Columbus Centre in the historiography of mass violence by analysing the Centre’s works through the four historiographical prisms or power relations through which they were produced: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. This interdisciplinary volume is a valuable text for scholars and students of historiography, psychoanalysis, genocide and violence, and post-war Europe, as well as for professionals within the field of psychology. Danae Karydaki is a modern historian interested in psychoanalysis, gender, institutions, and post-war social history, currently working as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Thessaly, Greece, and the Research Centre for the Humanities, Athens, Greece.

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Cities, Citizenship and Jews in France and the United States, 1905–2022 (Volume 1) Josef W. Konvitz Cities, Citizenship and Jews in France and the United States, 1905–2022 (Volume 2) Josef W. Konvitz Transnationalism and Migration in Global Korea History, Politics, and Sociology, 1910 to the Present Edited by Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts, and Sang Hwan Seong Longing for the Future Mal D’Afrique and Afro-Optimism in Perspectives on Somalia Edited by Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto, Giusy Di Filippo and Martina Di Florio Class War or Race War The Inner Fronts of Soviet Society during and after the Second World War Tamás Kende Carlo di Rudio and the Age of Revolution Nick Ridley History and Psychoanalysis in the Columbus Centre The Meaning of Evil Danae Karydaki

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge­ Research-in-Modern-History/book-series/MODHIST

History and Psychoanalysis in the Columbus Centre The Meaning of Evil Danae Karydaki

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Danae Karydaki The right of Danae Karydaki to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-18636-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-62383-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19731-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429197314 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: towards the study of the scourge

viii 1

1

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint: psychoanalysis and the Columbus Centre

21

2

This age of unenlightened despotism: modernity, class, and the Columbus Centre

57

3

A latent possibility in all mankind: race, comparison, and the Columbus Centre

109

4

If you are looking for a witch, you are looking for a woman: gender and the Columbus Centre

158

Epilogue: a numbing inner awareness

197

Appendix Bibliography Index

210 211 233

Acknowledgements

When in 2012 I exited 26 Russell Square at Birkbeck, having just obtained the news that I  was accepted for a PhD in history, there was only one thought in my mind as I  was looking around, thrilled with enthusiasm: Bloomsbury it is then! Bloomsbury for three more years! I was a 24-year-old Greek woman, with Greece all over the news illustrated in the worst possible colours and with the Greek Neo-Nazis having just entered the parliament. And I was seeking to study the roots of such extremism, the historiography of Nazism, in a place where a whole new world of knowledge and oppor­ tunities opened up: London. Now, more than ten years later, and having managed—albeit not easily—to transform the material of this PhD into a book, I know that it was not just Bloomsbury, nor could it ever just be; it was the libraries and archives all around London and all over the UK, the dark, snowy streets of Berlin, the seas of Leros and Santorini, the balcony in Avgorou, Cyprus, the small apartment in Kypseli, Athens, where I spent the lockdown, it was the trains, and planes, and boats, and buses I  used to reach my ever-evading destination. It was a long journey, a journey in time and in space, and a journey within oneself. And as it happens with most such journeys, it was largely a lonely one. But it could never have happened without the immense help I received from other people, to whom I am deeply indebted. First and foremost, I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Daniel Pick. Daniel, an excellent academic in his own right, has stood by me all these years, guiding me through the PhD journey whenever any methodological, bibliographical, bureaucratic, or other issues were raised. He read my drafts, listened to my ideas, asked me the right questions, replied to last-minute emails, helped me train in the historical methodology step by step, and gen­ erously offered me further opportunities in academia. Most importantly, he did not give up on me at a moment I almost gave up on myself. I am deeply honoured and grateful to have had Daniel by my side. I would like to genuinely and wholeheartedly thank Robert Langham, edi­ tor in Modern History with Routledge, who has demonstrated incredible patience, understanding, and trust, as well as Jennifer Morrow for her help in the process.

Acknowledgements

ix

My gratitude also goes to Lyndsey Stonebridge, Dan Stone, Jerry White, David Feldman, Amos Goldberg, Adam Goldwyn, Angie Athanassiades, Apostolos Doxiadis, Maria Margaronis, Jessica Reinisch, and Nikolaus Wachsmann who read and commented on my book at various stages of my writing. I am particularly indebted to the late Richard Astor, who very kindly gave me permission to study David Astor’s private collection of papers, held back then at Boodle and Hatfield law firm in London (they are now located at the Bodleian library at Oxford), as well as solicitor Mr Geoffrey Todd and Ms  Paula Corbett for their eagerness to help in this process. Phil Tinline, executive producer at BBC Radio 4, who produced a programme on the Columbus Centre in 2014 under the title “Roots of Extremism,” has my eternal gratitude for putting me in touch with the people with whom Daniel Pick conducted interviews. I  would also like to wholeheartedly thank the interviewees Ms Lucy Astor, Mr Adrian Dicks, and Justice Albie Sachs for letting me use their words from the radio programme; I am especially indebted to Lucy Astor for reading my manuscript and discussing details regarding her father’s work with me. I  am grateful to Roma activist Grattan Puxon and Norman Cohn’s wife Marina Voikhanskaya for agreeing to have an interview with me and for generously giving me valuable information for my research. My thanks also go to certain people who have generously assisted me in my research with their knowledge and experience. I would like to thank David Astor’s authorised biographer Jeremy Lewis, historian and journalist Ron Rosenbaum, academic and feminist Lynne Segal, historian Matt Cook, psychoanalyst Irma Brenman Pick, historian Saul Friedlander, feminist academic Jacqueline Rose, and historian of psychoanalysis Matt ffytche. Political scientist and good friend Dionyssis Dimitrakopoulos deserves special thanks for the opportunities he gave me while at Birkbeck as well as his constant encouragement to go on. I would also like to thank the archivists and librarians from the Wellcome Archive, the Keep at the University of Sussex, the Wiener Library, the University of Glasgow Library, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the Senate House Library, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford for their help while researching the archives. My thanks also go to the Onassis Foundation in Greece for the honour and the financial support they gave me through a scholarship. The stimulating research environment of Birkbeck and its friendly people have been crucial to the completion of this book. Special thanks go to my colleagues, the master’s and PhD students at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, for their useful feedback and friendly approach; of these, allow me to pay special tribute to my good friends Shaul Bar-Haim (who is also wholeheartedly thanked for reading and commenting on my book), Alessandro Silvestri, Alan Bradsaw, Andreas Chatzidakis, and Simon Jarrett for their unconditional support. I am particularly grateful to people who have worked at the administration, ensuring all bureaucratic issues were solved throughout my PhD years, and especially Jana Comfort for her painstaking efforts to organise everything.

x

Acknowledgements

Finally, this book could not have been completed without the constant support, encouragement, and love of people I deeply cherish. I owe the great­ est part of this journey to Maria Daniil, who has helped me evolve from a missing piece to a big O. Tasoula Vervenioti, a pioneering historian in oral history and gender history, who has been my mentor. My students, Chrys­ oula, Panagiotis, Angeliki, Alex Ch., Markos, Alexandra, Harry, Danai, Alex Co., Alexia, and many more, initiated thought-provoking discussions that triggered some ideas that were later transformed into pieces of writing. Eria, my best and oldest friend, has stood unequivocally by me all these years, singing “You’ve got a friend in me” along me, and filling this journey with shared tears and laughs. Marianna and her little one Daphne have shown me the meaning of goodness and selfless support. My friends Michalis G., Nefeli, and Cynthia have been by my side in my darkest hours. I thank my new family, Takis, Stella, Maria, George, and, most especially, Marios and Christoforos, for being the family of my heart. My grandmother, Efi, was always an inspiration for her creativity and will for life that knows no age or gender boundary. My late grandfather, Dimitris, a dedicated doctor and scholar, who always told us that our golden bracelets are our degrees. My brother, Lysandros, has been my lifelong companion, my first student ever (even if unknowingly), my saviour, and my true friend. This book is dedicated to my parents, whose presence, love, and psy­ chological and material support made it all possible. My father, Periklis, a medical doctor with a secret love for the humanities, has always given me his unconditional love and support through both good and challenging times; has motivated me to read, write, travel, and live abroad; and has, most prob­ ably, passed his amateur passion for history on to me. My mother, Lila, a child psychoanalyst who was the first to introduce me to the magic of psy­ choanalytic theory, has been a source of love, care, reassurance, and confi­ dence throughout my life. I thank them both for everything I’ve done so far and everything that is to follow. Last but not least, I want to thank from the bottom of my heart Michalis, the loving man with whom I share my life. I would not have met him had I not done my research at Birkbeck, and I would not have transformed this research into a book had I not met him.

Introduction Towards the study of the scourge

One of the greatest and most empathetic thinkers of all times, Hannah Arendt, writes in her final work, left incomplete due to her sudden demise in 1975: The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth1 Drawing on the work of Immanuel Kant, Arendt discusses the distinction between the mental faculties of “reason” [Vernunft] and “intellect” [Verstand] as well as the one between their respective mental activities of “thinking” and “knowing.” Humans feel the urge to think, argues Arendt in her interpretation of Kant, even about things that cannot be known, because the need to think is guided by the need to find meaning rather than by the need to find truth. The Columbus Centre, a remarkable, if now largely forgotten, research institute established at the University of Sussex in 1966, was permeated by what Arendt would describe just a few years after its foundation. It started as a coordinated attempt to understand National Socialism and the Holocaust and extended its scope to broader interdisciplinary research on discrimina­ tion, racism, mass violence, and genocide in the course of modern history and politics. Its purpose was not merely an investigation into the facts of differ­ ent historical examples of prejudice and mass violence, a quest for historical knowledge so to speak; it was rather an attempt to mobilise the insights of the human sciences, and most especially psychoanalysis, to analyse multiple horrors of collective “inhumanity” and “atrocity,” an attempt to think about and look for the meaning of the unknowable evil, to answer “why it hap­ pens” rather than “what happens.” The question of “why it happens” gradually became fixated in my mind during my early research, when I  was studying the British post-war histo­ riography of Nazism and the Holocaust. To answer this question, I placed emphasis on the psychological, and especially psychoanalytic, endeavours to understand the Nazi ideology as well as the Nazi crimes. The dominant his­ toriographical tendency was that such methodological approaches start after DOI: 10.4324/9780429197314-1

2

Introduction

the 1970s and reach their zenith with the emergence of memory studies in the 1980s and 1990s. During the previous decades and especially immediately after the Second World War, English-speaking historiography is predomi­ nantly characterised by what has often been described as “silence,” namely lack of representation of the genocide of the European Jews. This early post­ war period that roughly extends to 1961, the year of the Eichmann trial when survivors’ testimonies were brought to light, is often seen by Holocaust scholars as a period of reparation or mourning, as well as denial.2 In an interesting mingling between psychoanalysis and history, historian Domin­ ick LaCapra argued, for example, that the Holocaust representation in the post-war period took some times the form of an “acting out,” an emotional reliving of the traumatic experience as a still-present past, in contrast to a “working through” of the trauma as a gradually acquired capacity to remem­ ber the traumatic past without reviving it.3 This arguable “silence” of the early post-war period is reflected in the fact that this genocide did not yet have a name of its own. The term “Shoah” appeared in the 1940s but remained largely unknown in the following decades. And while “Holocaust,” probably the most commonly encountered term nowadays, had also appeared quite early, it became widely used after 1978, when the mini-series Holocaust was broadcasted on American television. Indicative of this is that in the discourse of the Columbus Centre’s protagonists in the 1960s and 1970s there are ref­ erences to the “massacre,” “mass murder,” or “extermination” of the Jews, and only in 1980 in a report marking the end of the Centre’s project does the term “Holocaust” make its first appearance.4 The “silence” of most scholars of the early post-war period regarding cer­ tain aspects of the Third Reich and the Holocaust does not refer to a conspiracy to create silence but rather to the fact that Nazi camps were hardly discussed in early post-war historiography. For instance, the Russian-Jewish-born French historian and Columbus Centre member Léon Poliakov, who had studied the Gestapo archives during his service with the French delegation at Nuremberg, found it very hard to find a publisher for his work that, when it came out in 1951 under the title Bréviaire  de la Haine [Harvest of Hate], accounted for the first general history of the Holocaust.5 Historians have provided several explanations for this absence of Holocaust representations. Tony Judt discusses how post-war silence was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future, what Mark Mazower aptly called “the foundation myths of a Europe liberated from history.”6 Especially in Britain, Tony Kushner describes the unwillingness of the press during the war and, especially, in its aftermath, during the early Cold War years, to give much publicity to the liberation by the Soviet troops of the concentration camps at Majdanek in 1944 and Auschwitz in 1945.7 The context of the ideological division of the Cold War certainly played an important role in this respect. Mainstream Cold War discourse, filtered through the Western or Soviet spheres of influence, dominated foreign relations, people’s everyday lives, and, consequently, historiography as a cultural and intellectual product

Introduction

3

of its time. For instance, Eric Hobsbawm, setting the beginning of the Cold War in 1949, the year when the Russians acquired the atomic bomb, divides the post-war period into two halves, before and after the early 1970s, during which the two superpowers entered the period of Détente.8 Except for the nuclear threat, ideology was a key factor during this period. Britain aligned itself to the strategy of the newly established CIA, attacking Communism with the broad use of cultural weapons: advertising, publications, travelling exhibitions, and film; the emergence of the Encounter magazine in 1953, which 14 years later was revealed to be secretly funded by the CIA, is a prime instance of this tactic.9 History writing, even about an event so decisive and traumatic as the recent war, could not have stayed intact from these practices, or as A. J. P. Taylor puts it, “the origins of the second World war had little attraction when men were already studying the origins of the third.”10,11 This hitherto widely repeated claim of post-war “silence” was challenged in 2012 by David Cesarani, who argued that there are many examples of Holocaust survivors narrating the Nazi atrocities during the early post-war period.12 Thorough and stimulating though it may be, Cesarani’s account focuses on the survivors, rather than discussing the entrance of the camps into the European cultural imagination and book production. For example in Britain, there was, instead of silence, what Dan Stone characterised as “varieties of selective speech”;13 Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hit­ ler was published in 1947, and Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution: the Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 in 1953.14 In his his­ toriographical account The Holocaust in History (1989), historian Michael Marrus observes that Poliakov offered a good enough representation of the persecution and extermination of the European Jews in books such as the aforementioned book Bréviaire de la Haine (1951) and his well-known book History of Anti-Semitism (1955);15 despite being French, it is probably for this pioneering contribution that he was later invited to contribute to the Columbus Centre project. Bearing these in mind and while I was researching the existing literature and available primary sources, I  came across a reference to the Columbus Centre project as “a large-scale collaborative investigation into the history, culture, and psychology of anti-Semitism, Aryan mythology, racism, and genocide” in my academic mentor Daniel Pick’s book The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (2012).16 This caught my attention and led me to a private archive that had never been systematically studied in the past: the Columbus Centre archive that was located in the Astor Papers held by Boodle Hatfield Solicitors in London. The initial stated aim of the Columbus Centre’s founders—The Observer editor (1948–1975) David Astor, who was the inspirer and main funder of the project, and the historian Norman Cohn, who became the Cen­ tre’s academic director—was something that had been appealing to me too: the use of psychoanalysis for the historical understanding of mass violence and dehumanisation, more broadly, and what I call a quest towards finding the “meaning of evil.”

4

Introduction

While most of the books produced by the Columbus Centre participants and published under the auspices of the Columbus Centre Series are widely known, and often even influential in their corresponding fields, the project that generated them is largely neglected in literature. Beyond the brief refer­ ences made to the project outputs within the Columbus Centre Series books, references to the Centre are few, sporadic and rather short. Astor’s biographer Richard Cockett briefly refers to the Columbus Trust as “funded by Astor, to study the psychology of mass murder and mass persecution, with a Chair at Sussex University.”17 In his most recent biography of Astor, Jeremy Lewis did not go into much detail about his books, elaborating rather on how Astor’s involvement in the Columbus Centre was triggered by his interest in psychoa­ nalysis and his abhorrence of any sort of demonisation.18 Moreover, Paul Lay’s and William Lamont’s obituaries of Norman Cohn in, respectively, The Guardian and The Independent do not mention Cohn’s involvement in this project beyond noting that he was the director of the Centre’s research pro­ gramme.19 Another commentator, the psychotherapist Michael Briant, who acknowledges that Cohn “remained eager and willing to discuss the work of the Columbus Centre until the end,” relegates Cohn’s role in the establish­ ment of the Centre, his placement as its director, and its purpose as a nation­ ally unbiased and interdisciplinary study of collective psychopathology to the periphery of his assessment of Cohn’s legacy. In his account, Briant also briefly discusses the influence of the psychodynamic work of Henry Dicks, a British psychiatrist who was part of the British Army team entrusted with the medical care of Rudolf Hess in 1941 and a Columbus Centre participant.20 The work of Dicks as well as Walter Langer, an American psychoanalyst and author of the 1972 book The Mind of Adolf Hitler: the Secret Wartime Report, became the focus of Pick’s aforementioned book The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (2012).21 In his work, Pick sheds more light upon the Columbus Centre. He does so through the recorded recollections of Norman Cohn, stating that courtesy of the project Cohn could study “the horrors of the Nazi regime and of fascist, racist, and ‘totalitarian’ belief systems,” as well as through David Astor’s Papers. Pick highlights that the Centre’s project was a collaborative investigation between scholars and clinicians into the his­ tory and psychology of mass violence and, most importantly, brings forth an essential feature of this research project: studying history in light of psychoa­ nalysis, with all the methodological and theoretical problems that it entails. Pick argues that at the Columbus Centre “[i]ntellectuals continued to study the Nazi problem as a feature of both history and human psychology at large, and in pursuit of answers they continued to draw upon Freud.”22 Because of this apparent literature gap as well as the richness of the neglected archive and the great interest that the books produced by the Columbus Centre presented, I decided to focus my research on the historical and historiographical study of the Centre in order to map this extraordi­ nary, as Arendt would put it, “quest for meaning” that emerged in post-war Britain.

Introduction

5

The Columbus Centre was established in 1966 in Sussex; still, its story begins a few years earlier in London. Its starting date can be placed on 29 April 1962, when David Astor gave a speech at a meeting commemorating the 19th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at St. Pancras Town Hall in London. In it, Astor made a plea for a study of the preconditions and forces that lead ordinary human beings to commit atrocities, such as those performed by the Nazis. “But it is surely our duty,” argued Astor, “to see that the unhealthy political circumstances and the diseased individual and mass thinking which led to the tragedy of their loss will be as closely studied as is the scourge of cancer.”23 Astor was born in London in 1912, the third of five children of an upperclass, half-English, half-American family; his father was Viscount Waldorf Astor, owner of The Observer from 1915 onwards, and his mother was Nancy Astor, an American-born politician and the first woman ever to take a seat in the British House of Commons as a Tory MP. Astor grew up in the family estate in Cliveden and, as a true scion of the English upper class, was educated first at Eton and then at Balliol College at the University of Oxford.24 During his time at Oxford, Astor became close friends with Adam von Trott, a German who later actively participated in the anti-Nazi resist­ ance and, most especially, the July plot to assassinate Hitler. Indeed, von Trott’s activity and execution by the Nazis seem to have deeply affected Astor in his thinking and, perhaps, even his determination to study the Nazi mind. Besides, despite his upper-class upbringing, wealth, and the conservative associations of his family, Astor was fundamentally a liberal. He devoted his life to fighting injustice, advocating for human rights and decolonisation, and exploring—or rather finding the people suitable for exploring—discrimination and violence as aspects of the human psyche. The Observer under his edi­ torship was a revealing indication of this attitude; his proposal for an aca­ demic inquiry into persecution and genocide in 1962 was another. “With all his tolerance,” wrote the journalist, writer, and Astor’s colleague at the Observer between 1955 and 1966 Anthony Sampson, “David was stubborn about pursuing policies he really believed in, and defied anyone who crossed him on questions like nuclear disarmament, African independence or Freud­ ian interpretations.”25 Indeed, the originality of Astor’s suggestion at the Warsaw Uprising com­ memoration meeting was largely his belief that these kinds of historical conditions that led to the Nazi atrocities should be the object of a study of “political psychopathology.” A  transcript of this speech was published in the following August issue of Encounter magazine under the intriguing title “Towards a Study of the Scourge.”26 The Warsaw Uprising commemoration meeting was not the first occasion on which Astor discussed these ideas. Shortly before the beginning of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in March 1961, he had written a leader article for The Observer entitled “The Meaning of Eichmann.” In this article, as well as in his speech one year later, Astor illustrated his understanding of

6

Introduction

the causes and pre-conditions of genocide; Eichmann and the majority of the Nazis, he argued—just like Arendt would do later in her famous book Eich­ mann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)27—were neither mad nor abnormal but merely ordinary people: To many people the cool-headed, bureaucratic violence of an Eich­ mann seems so foreign to their idea of human nature that they prefer to regard him as a madman. To consider Eichmann and those involved with him as sane human beings, men “like ourselves,” might seem to be saying that their crimes were normal actions. . . . [However] the great majority of both [Nazi] leaders and rank and file betrayed no major abnormal symptoms and were involved in no serious civil crimes—until their political movement began to permit them to use violence in the pursuit of what they regarded as a duty. Moreover, the worst Nazis to have survived, such as Eichmann, have been able to return to normal life and live among ordinary people, passing for many years as ordinary people themselves. This clinical normality does not, of course lessen their responsibility; if madness is ruled out, it increases it.28 In “The Meaning of Eichmann,” Astor also observed that it was not just the physical perpetrators that could be held responsible for the Nazi crimes since “in accepting [Hitler’s] view of Jews as sub-human and demoniac, half the German people, knowingly or unknowingly, gave their social consent to the use of violence; it was their acceptance of this fatal view that broke the restraining bond of a common humanity.”29 He did not, however, sug­ gest that such atrocities were limited to Germany or that they were always racially motivated. Precisely for these reasons, he stressed the need for a sci­ entific study of the “workings of irrational hate in politics,” especially one that would bring together “the historian’s and psychologist’s knowledge.” Having read a transcript of this speech in Encounter, the historian Nor­ man Cohn, at that time a professor at the University of Durham and author of The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), a highly regarded book on the traces of modern-day fanaticism in medieval Europe, wrote to Astor express­ ing his interest.30 Cohn was born in London in 1915 to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. He grew up in a British middle-class framework and went on to study at the University of Oxford, where he took a First in modern and medieval languages (French and German) in 1936. In terms of his politics during his Oxford years, Cohn belonged to a little group of social­ ists. The fact that he never became a Communist was something he owed, as he confessed to Daniel Pick in an interview in 2006, “to this group, which was very well informed.”31 With the outbreak of the war in 1939, Cohn joined the Queen’s Royal Regiment.32 At some point during the war, his excellent German led him to work at Bletchley, where the British cracked the Enigma code. Cohn’s task at Bletchley was to edit the decoded German signals.33 After the war,

Introduction

7

Cohn returned to academia and started working as a historian, although he had never been professionally trained in the field. His first breakthrough, the result of the combination of his personal concerns and scrupulous research, came in 1957 with the publication of the aforementioned Pursuit of the Millennium.34 Astor and Cohn had a number of affinities. Like Astor, Cohn had an inter­ est in psychology and the study of persecution, possibly cultivated during his service in the Intelligence Corps during the war.35 One of Astor’s biog­ raphers, Richard Cockett, suggests that Astor’s 1961 highly praised leader piece on Eichmann attracted Cohn’s attention, which led to the founding of “the Columbus Trust, funded by Astor, to study the psychology of mass murder and mass persecution, with a chair at Sussex University.”36 However, this is not precisely the case. Cohn addressed his first letter to Astor on 23 July 1962, stating that the Eichmann article nearly made him write to Astor, but not quite. The actual moment that convinced Cohn of his moral obliga­ tion to write to him came a year after “The meaning of Eichmann,” when a transcript of Astor’s speech at the 1962 anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto Upris­ ing appeared in the August issue of Encounter.37 “Ever since the end of the war,” wrote Cohn in his first letter to Astor, “I have been trying to further just such an enquiry. . . . I have on various occasions tried to launch such an undertaking—usually with the help of some American foundation—but I never succeeded.”38 “Dear Professor Cohn,” replied Astor with great enthu­ siasm on 28 July 1962, “All that you say is of the utmost interest and I very much look forward to meeting you.”39 After a brief correspondence Astor and Cohn decided to meet in September 1962 to discuss the launching of a research project on discrimination and genocide. During 1962 and 1963, several conversations about the form and content of such an undertaking took place among those who had initially registered their interest. Finally, in 1963, Astor suggested Cohn resign his professorship at the University of Durham and work towards translating his initial sugges­ tion into a framework for an institution engaged in a specific programme of research. Astor made clear that Cohn would have his full financial support. Ultimately, Cohn accepted the offer and devoted himself to the formulation of the project, the main aim of which was the comparative study of the pre­ conditions of the mass murder of European Jews. In terms of funding of the project, an appeals committee was formed in London. The committee was chaired by Rab Butler, a Conservative politician associated with the wartime policy of appeasement, minister in the govern­ ments of Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, and Alec Douglas-Home, and—at the time of the Columbus Centre’s establishment—Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Members of the committee, called “sponsors,” were responsible for raising funds; such sponsors included David Astor himself, the historian Max Beloff, the academic and anti-apartheid campaigner Rob­ ert Birley, and the Labour MP Harold Lever. Astor was known for choos­ ing to cooperate with people he knew; Beloff was the brother of journalist

8

Introduction

Nora Beloff, who worked in the Observer, while Birley was his house master at Eaton. Two-thirds of the financial goal was achieved (i.e. £30,000 per annum, or roughly £155,000 in total) from various British institutions (such as the Wolfson Foundation) and individuals (such as Astor himself). Subse­ quently, the committee was turned into a trust to manage the money and given the name the Columbus Trust, although nobody seems to know why Columbus was chosen as the title.40 Meanwhile, Norman Cohn was working for several months on the aca­ demic issues surrounding the implementation of such a project. Finally, in 1965, the Senate and Council of the newly established University of Sussex, through its Vice Chancellor John Fulton, confirmed the affiliation of what was at that time called the Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathol­ ogy. On 1 October 1966, the Centre was launched as an official part of the University of Sussex. The choice of Sussex might seem coincidental and mainly linked to Astor’s connections, given that he was in correspondence with two of the Univer­ sity’s vice chancellors, John Fulton (1961–1967), who, incidentally, had been Astor’s tutor before the war at Oxford, and the historian Asa Briggs (1967– 1976), who was also based at Oxford from 1945 to 1955. Yet this choice can also be associated with social transformations taking place in the field of education in the 1960s as well as a new ethos of interdisciplinary learning that emerged, especially at the University of Sussex at the time. More and more people were advancing to higher education, while univer­ sities during the 1960s were to become, in the eyes of many, the key testing ground and social laboratory for the exploration of new politics, and even for the dissemination of new, radical political beliefs and questions about the relationship of power and knowledge.41 Indeed, in the early 1960s, there was a wave of newly founded universities that corresponded to “the growing aspirations of young people in post-war Britain” but also to “an awareness of national and international realities,” and most especially the aftermath of the Second World War and the Cold War.42 One of the first among those univer­ sities was the University of Sussex, located near Brighton in South England. The University of Sussex has an intriguing history in and of itself. While the idea for a university at Brighton was initiated in 1911, the two World Wars halted the actualisation of the project. The idea was revived in the 1950s and officially approved in 1958. After being granted a royal charter which raised it to full university status, the university finally accepted its first students in October 1961.43 In the following years, the university numbered thousands of admissions, and it gradually became renowned for the radical and liberal ideas of its students and academics. For example, in June 1973, roughly 400 members of the Sussex Student Movement disrupted the American professor and well-known political scientist Samuel Huntington’s lecture on American foreign policy because he was accused of advocating genocide in Vietnam. Before the incident, more than 20 members of staff had signed a letter for a newspaper protesting against the invitation of Huntington.44

Introduction

9

Beyond the social transformations in higher education that created a hospi­ table environment for a research project on “political psychopathology,” the very aim of Sussex’s founding team was to model the university in a different way from traditional British universities—mainly Oxford and Cambridge—and to redraw, in Asa Briggs’s words, “the map of learning” by focusing on a dialogue among different disciplines.45 Instead of conventional departments, three new multidisciplinary “Schools” in the humanities and the social sciences (European Studies, English and American Studies, and Social Studies) quickly emerged at Sussex.46 Hence, the university’s emphasis on cross-disciplinarity as well as new intakes made it perfectly suited for a research project aiming at bringing together history and psychology. Besides, except for the Columbus Centre, another example of interdisciplinarity is the relocation of the archive of the Mass Observation, a social research organisation founded in 1937 in order to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain, at the University of Sussex in 1970.47 Nonetheless, the Columbus Centre members rarely met at Sussex, opting instead for London, where Cohn also had his office around Bloomsbury. “They [at Sussex],” said Cohn at an interview with Daniel Pick, “sponsored the whole thing but I operated from London largely because the sources I needed for [the] work were there.”48 Soon, after having rejected titles such as the “Centre for the Analytic Study of Massacre” and Cohn’s own suggestion for the “Centre for Research in the Politics of Extermination,” the Centre took—in Astor’s secretary Dorothy Salmon’s words—a more “anodyne name,” that is, the “Columbus Centre,” after the Trust that financially supported its existence.49 Cohn became the Columbus Centre’s academic director, while several other researchers, with specialisms in history and the social sciences, along with various clinicians and political activists were involved in the Centre and published their books in the Columbus series.50 As early as 1963, the working party agreed to shelve a pervious draft report in order to determine the funda­ mental aims and methods of the project so as to include, first, a study of the Third Reich as the most pressing example of an overwhelmingly destructive regime; second, a comparative study of at least three large-scale massacres in modern times, seen in their historical contexts (their examples at the time were the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, Slavs, and the European Roma peo­ ple, still widely known then by the racial slur “Gypsies,” the 1915 Armenian genocide during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, and the Hindu–Muslim massacre which accompanied the partition of India); and finally, a compara­ tive study of various persecutions in Western Europe which have been inspired or justified by the belief in a Satanic world conspiracy (their examples at the time were the medieval persecutions of what they call “misbelievers” such as heretics or Jews, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “witch-mania,” and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century persecutions of the Freemasons).51 In the end, the subject matter of the group’s research expanded beyond these subjects, while some of them, such as the Armenian genocide or the Hindu-Muslim massacre, were never taken up by the Centre’s participants.

10

Introduction

Some contributors, such as Henry Dicks and Léon Poliakov, worked on themes directly related to the Holocaust.52 Others, such as Cohn himself and the social historian Christina Larner, worked on the preconditions and motivations behind the “Great Witch-hunt,” namely the official mass killings of women characterised as witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu­ ries. The Great Witch-hunt was chosen as a theme because Cohn thought that the ways in which the victims were targeted and persecuted made it the Holocaust’s closest parallel.53 Eventually, it was deemed necessary to extend the focus of the project into a third field, that of current inter-ethnic rela­ tions, with a particular sub-focus on smaller-scale persecutions on grounds of racial or religious cause. The aim was to adopt a comparative approach to the Holocaust by illustrating the status of discrimination and genocide in the case of Europe’s Roma population and the official racial discrimination and segregation that were enforced by the Nationalist Government in post­ war South Africa. These tasks were undertaken, respectively, by the scholar of Roma history Donald Kenrick and Roma and Traveller rights activist Grattan Puxon and by the South African lawyer and anti-apartheid activist Albie Sachs.54 Finally, some “psy” professionals, such as the Jungian analyst Anthony Storr, the social psychologist Rae Sherwood, and the American psy­ chologist Nevitt Sanford (who, along with Theodor Adorno and others, had co-authored the post-war sociological classic, The Authoritarian Personal­ ity), joined the Columbus Centre team in order to shed light on the psychol­ ogy of violence and discrimination.55 What bound together these disparate topics and research interests was the conviction of the “ordinariness” and “human origin” of Nazi crimes and their “repeatability” under different historical conditions, which could be studied through the lens of psychoanalysis. The core history recounted begins in 1961, the year of the Eichmann trial that triggered Astor’s article “The Meaning of Eichmann,” which gradually led to the establishment of the Centre, and ends in 1981, when the last Columbus Series book, Christina Larner’s Enemies of God: the Witch-hunt in Scotland, was published. This was just one year after Norman Cohn retired from the University of Sussex and the project financing ended. In short, my chronology follows that of the original Columbus project and the key dates of its cycle of production and publication. But this is not an arbitrary point to terminate this story, as other arguments can also be made to justify this date, and deal with the charge that it is an artificial cut-off point. Crucially, I would argue that it is circa 1980 that the relative silence or awkwardness of historians and social theorists that marked the post-war decades in interpreting the Holocaust, the back­ ground of silence (real or imagined) against which Cohn and his coworkers had sought to develop their projects, gradually gave their way to a massive memory boom of the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond.56 This book seeks to rescue the Columbus Centre from the condescension, or rather the oblivion, of posterity, while also recognising the intellectual distance between these endeavours of 40 and 50 years ago, and present-day

Introduction

11

methodologies in historiography and the human sciences. In its structure, how­ ever, it follows closely the contours of the Columbus Centre’s own research and its varied attempts to trace, as the book title suggest, the “meaning of evil.” ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ The key resources for this work are first and foremost the hitherto unpublished archival material of the Columbus Centre (the private collection of David Astor’s papers held at Boodle and Hatfield law firm in London). Along with the Astor Papers, I consider archival material from Columbus Centre partici­ pants such as Henry Dicks and Anthony Storr (Wellcome Library Archives), Albie Sachs (Institute of Commonwealth Studies Special Collection at Senate House), Donald Kenrick (Wiener Library), and various other relevant collec­ tions such as Anthony Sampson’s papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Hilda and Rusty Bernstein Papers at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (digitised edition), Anna Freud’s papers at the Freud Museum, UNESCO archives in Paris (digitised edition), University of Sussex papers, Geoffrey Gorer’s papers at the Keep (University of Sussex Library), the R.D. Laing Collection at the University of Glasgow, The Observer digital archive, and The Times digital archive. I have also made use of my own interviews with Norman Cohn’s wife Marina Voikhanskaya, the Roma activist Grattan Puxon, the psychoanalyst Irma Brenman Pick, and David Astor’s author­ ised biographer Jeremy Lewis, as well as those conducted by others, such as Professor Daniel Pick, with Norman Cohn in the framework of his book The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (2012), and, for the BBC Radio 4, with David Astor’s daughter Lucy, Henry Dicks’s son Adrian, and Albie Sachs. One way to approach the archival material and oral testimonies related to the Columbus Centre would be to map the history of this institution while, at the same time, following separately the works and actions of all the indi­ viduals who took part in this endeavour. However, my aim was to not merely record the facts surrounding this largely forgotten research centre but to dis­ cuss it as part of the post-war intellectual and social response to National Socialism in particular and mass violence, discrimination, and genocide more broadly. I  sought, in other words, for the Columbus Centre writings and discussions to find their place in historiography of mass violence. There have been several historiographical debates about the Holocaust, Hitler, and the Third Reich;57 the questions at stake vary from minor disagreements to great controversies upon certain matters, and from a revisionist approach to his­ tory to outright denial of the historical events themselves.58 This work illus­ trates the historiographical debates that most directly informed, paralleled, or were affected by the research produced at the Columbus Centre. This historiographical investigation into the Columbus Centre’s writings draws upon key primary sources, such as letters, administrative papers, min­ utes of meetings, books, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, diaries, note­ books, and oral testimonies. The first task of this core research is therefore to

12

Introduction

reconstruct the key ideas and debates that appeared in the books and unpub­ lished working discussions of the project, as well as to set them in their historical context. However, any attempt to write a history of ideas or to isolate intel­ lectual history comes with certain methodological limitations that need to be addressed. To begin with, I needed to consider how ideas may reflect on the spe­ cific social and cultural contexts from which they emerged, such as, in the case of the Columbus Centre, the post-war British social consensus, post-colonialism, second-wave feminism, or the Cold War ideological and geopolitical division. I also had to ask how far ideas shape social and cultural conditions, like the concept of totalitarianism that, to a great extent in the West, urged people to think and fear of Nazism and Communism in the post-war period as the twin evils. At the same time, and even more importantly, I needed to do the exact opposite, that is analyse how ideas are products of specific social and cultural frameworks, like the post-war looming interest in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunt, evident also in the Columbus Centre’s works, which emerged out of a will to historically understand another large-scale annihilation project at the wake of the Nazi camps. Finally, I could not but also ask what the agency of the researcher in the identification and interpreta­ tion of patterns of ideas is and, thus, resort to introspection in order to map how my psychoanalytic background combined with my formal training in and love of history as well as my identity as a woman studying in a foreign country may have informed and, undoubtedly, influenced my research. While bearing these considerations in mind, the most important meth­ odological challenge was how best to map and analyse the ideas that appear in the Columbus Centre material. Given that my objective was to designate the Centre’s place in historiography, the methodological approach I followed was to group the material around recurring themes that respond to certain historiographical debates. But how could I  select which historiographical prisms would best enable me to elaborate the Columbus Centre members’ different perspectives and distinct contributions against the background of the historiography of mass violence? Beginning with the conviction that his­ tory writing is a social product, bearing in itself the power relations of the society that generated it, I decided to employ four such forms of power rela­ tions which correspond to four historiographical debates encountered at the Columbus Centre’s works: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. The methodological process is largely informed by the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault’s method of “archaeology,” proposed in 1971, suggests that we can study various ideas, discourses, or systems of thought, as they appear in the writings of the past, in relation to the complicated network of power—institutional and discursive—relationships that existed at the time of their emergence.59 Each idea needs to be studied not as a product of an indi­ vidual thought but together with the dominant ideological discourse of the time of its emergence, which itself belongs in a network of power relations. These power relations are, according to Foucault, constituted on knowl­ edge; this knowledge is, at the same time, shaped and (re)produced by

Introduction

13

power relations. For example, while it was believed that the ever-expanding scientific discourse around sexuality from the eighteenth century onwards sought to discover the truth about sex and liberate individuals from a sup­ posedly repressed sexual life, it was this body of knowledge around sex, around normal and abnormal, argued Foucault, that enhanced social con­ trol over bodies and further oppressed individuals.60 Foucault holds reason, as it emerged with the Enlightenment, historically responsible for a new type of governmentalisation which included the domination of positivist science, the emergence of the modern State “which justified itself as the rea­ son and deep rationality of history,” and, ultimately, a science of the State or statism.61 In other words, the Enlightenment emancipated people from religious dogma but subjugated them to a potentially totalising reason.62 Foucault argued accordingly that post-Enlightenment Western states incor­ porated a form of power previously attached to the Christian Church, that is, pastoral power.63 The State took the role of securing the individual just as the Church guaranteed salvation of its congregation. This protection, in both cases, came at the cost of social control over the population’s bodies; while the Church was imposing fasting or prohibition of pre-marital sex, the State, assisted by systematised scientific discourse, deprived individu­ als of their (bodily) freedom in prisons and mental hospitals and created taxonomies for what it means to be normal. Foucault crystallised this idea by evolving it into the concept of biopower, namely the modern state’s prac­ tice to regulate the human body with regard to the physical and mental health of its subjects as well as its strategies and techniques for the disci­ pline and control of its population.64 Famous examples of pastoral power and/or biopower provided by Foucault in the course of his thinking include the prison, the scientific approach to sexuality, the asylum as well as psy­ sciences such as psychoanalysis.65 In this framework, it is not strange that, after the dominance of reason that came with the Enlightenment, religious anti-Jewish feelings were transformed to a systemised political ideology largely based on pseudo-scientific facts attached to the newly emerged dis­ cipline of Biology by virtue of which there was no place for the Jews within the modern European secular state: antisemitism. Therefore, Foucault’s contribution to our discussion on the Columbus Centre is twofold: on the one hand, he urges a critique that addresses not merely the usual “gover­ nors” of thought, so to speak, such as those who influentially produce, for instance, forms of religious dogma, but also reason and knowledge produc­ tion. On the other, he illustrates this network of knowledge and power in a particularly modern context, that is, twentieth-century Europe, where scientific discourse, notably variants of Darwinism but also applications of the psy-sciences, was used by the state (most notably the Nazi regime), in order to guarantee security for its population, that is, through exterminat­ ing the so-called non-Aryans or through locking up “madmen” in asylums or creating psychopathology taxonomies according to which all individuals could be categorised.

14

Introduction

Beyond pastoral power or biopower, Foucault also discussed three older, distinct but intersecting forms of power; the first form of power is “ethnic, social, and religious domination,” the second is the “exploitation which sep­ arates individuals from what they produce,” and the last is “that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way.”66 Indeed, Foucault acknowledged the latter form of power as the one which makes individual subjects and differentiates between two meanings of subject: being subject “to someone else by control and dependence” and being tied to one’s “own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.” If we take into account the theory of intersectionality, these forms of power correspond to three intersecting axes of power: race, class, and gender, respectively.67 And, in turn, these axes of power, along with Foucault’s analysis on the so-called pastoral power and/or biopower, that is the power of modern states over its citizens’ bodies, can be used as the network of discursive and institutional power relations against which we study history. The writings and discussions of the Columbus Centre are, thus, explored within a network of power relations. Instead of studying each and every one of the works or the participants of the Columbus Centre separately, I have chosen to study them in relation to four discursive and institutional power relationships, or, one might alternatively say, historiographical prisms that correspond to Foucault’s forms of power: psychoanalysis, class, race, and gender. Chapter  1 draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power and/or bio­ power to discuss how psychoanalysis as a power-knowledge aimed at caring for and, at the same time, disciplining human bodies and minds. The integra­ tion of old power techniques of Christian institutions into the political struc­ ture of the modern state deems psychoanalysis a tool of pastoral power and/ or biopower seeking to assure the security and well-being of the population at the cost of oppressing individuals into strictly defined categories of normal and not-normal. Or as Hannah Arendt put it, since [the idea of “normal man” in the sense that all men are the same] is of course impossible, you get a situation in which everybody is “not normal” and needs some psychoanalyst or God knows what to make him like “everybody else.”68 Psychoanalysis is, thus, used in the study of the Columbus Centre as a net­ work of power—discursive and institutional—relations and a historiographi­ cal prism that attempts to define what was normal and what was not in the historical past under examination at the Centre. In Chapter 2, the Columbus Centre’s writings are considered in relation to historiographical debates about whether Nazism, the Holocaust, and other forms of persecution and mass violence, such as the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunt, were products of modernity and thus stemmed,

Introduction

15

directly or indirectly, from the modern capitalist system. At the same time, class as a form of power based on what Foucault called “exploitation which separates individuals from what they produce” enters the discussion of the Columbus Centre writings in order to examine how and if it was taken into consideration. Race as a historical construction of what Foucault described as “ethnic, social, and religious domination” is brought forward in Chapter 3 as the dis­ cursive and institutional power relation against which the Columbus Centre can be understood. Therefore, discussion shifts here to whether and how the Third Reich and its outcomes can be compared to other encounters of racial discrimination, colonialism, and genocide in history, such as the South Afri­ can apartheid. Chapter 4 draws on the power relation that, according to Foucault, ties “the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way.” The urgent persistence of the other two forms, namely class and race, notwith­ standing, this form of power has been, according to Foucault, prevalent in the twentieth century because it proliferated into the whole social body, even in “ancient institutions” such as the family; the power that parents exert over children and men over women are notable examples of this rela­ tion. Departing from this observation, in this chapter, I illustrate the role of gender, a sex-based social structure that defined to a great extent the public debates and struggles in the second half of the twentieth century, as a power relation as well as a historiographical prism in the works and function of the Columbus Centre. The Columbus Centre was a historically significant, if, arguably, rather anomalous project in 1960s and 1970s Britain that merits serious historical scrutiny. The dearth of any extant systematic historical account of its origins, development, and demise makes it all the more timely to examine this largely forgotten body of work. I place the Columbus Centre in historiography as well as in its cultural and intellectual context, tracing the relevant available archives, exploring the circumstances in which it emerged, and understand­ ing the agendas of the people involved. I map the intentions of the Centre’s original architects, most notably Astor and Cohn, suggesting both how and why they came into conflict and the effects of that conflict. Most importantly, I seek to conduct a detailed historical and historiographical investigation into the Columbus Centre’s writings by exploring its novelties as well as its weak­ nesses at the level of ideas and methods, teasing out four basic historiograph­ ical prisms that structured, and, on occasion, were contested within, their broad endeavour. This mapping of the methodology of this book must also account for the complicated institutional and discursive networks of power that exists now: writing today, in these times of turmoil, about the Columbus Centre means writing the history of other people’s attempts to write the history of Nazism

16

Introduction

and the Holocaust in the 1960s and 1970s. Dominick LaCapra elaborately articulates the epistemology of this kind of project: So for me, transference means a form of repetition . . . in the relation­ ship to the object of study. When you study something, at some level you always have a tendency to repeat the problems you were studying. This is related to your implication in the research. . . . In a sense, there are two extreme possibilities for the historian: the first is the extreme of full identification with participants . . . the other possibility . . . is the idea of full objectivity, neutrality. . . . The alternative to this is trying to work out some very delicate relationship between empathy and critical distance.69 In light of the above, I study the ideas promoted by the Columbus Centre through the prism of their social and cultural contexts as well as the discur­ sive and institutional networks in which they emerged. The Columbus Centre members attempted to approach their object of research wavering between a quest for truth and objectivity but mostly, as Hannah Arendt suggests, of meaning. At times, they identified with the victims of “inhumanity” they were studying, and, at times, they were blind to the very discriminations they were supposed to study. In my own effort to study the Columbus Centre’s history and map the Columbus Centre members’ approach, I shall employ both a critical appraisal while also seeking to understand, with some empa­ thy, the largely laudable aims of these scholars. Notes 1 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, CA, New York & London: Harcourt, Inc., 1978), 15. 2 See for example Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inabil­ ity to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975); James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Con­ sequences of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990); and Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holo­ caust Representation (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 3 Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Dominick LaCa­ pra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1998). 4 Norman Cohn, “A  Brief History of the Columbus Centre and Its Research Project,” 1980, www.bbk.ac.uk/thepursuitofthenazimind/Astor/KMBT3502011 0914164050.pdf. 5 Jonathan Judaken, “Léon Poliakov, the Origins of the Holocaust and Theories of Anti-Semitism: Rereading Bréviaire de La Haine,” in Post-Holocaust France and the Jews, 1945–1955, eds. Sean Hand and Steven T. Katz (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 169–92; Léon Poliakov, Bréviaire de La Haine: Le IIIo Reich et Les Juifs (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1951).

Introduction

17

6 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007), 10. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane the Penguin Press, 1998), xiv. 7 Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 138. 8 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (Great Britain: Abacus, 1995), 229. 9 Mazower, Dark Continent; Frances Stonor Saunders, “How the CIA Plotted against Us,” New Statesman, July 12, 1999; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000). 10 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Penguin Books, 1964), 35. 11 Ibid., 34, 35. 12 David Cesarani, “Challenging the ‘Myth of Silence’: Postwar Responses to the Destruction of European Jewry,” in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, eds. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Routledge, 2012), 15–38. 13 Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3. 14 See Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). For Reitlinger’s accounts see Gerald Roberts Reitlinger, The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1953). Gerald Roberts Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945 (London: Heinemann, 1956). For criticism of Reitlinger’s evidence for the number of victims as well as his use sources, see David Luck, “Use and Abuse of Holocaust Documents: Reitlinger and ‘How Many?’ ” Jewish Social Studies 41, no. 2 (1979), 95–122. 15 Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2000), 4. 16 Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 47. 17 Richard Cockett, David Astor and the Observer (London: Andre Deutsch Lim­ ited, 1991), 169. 18 Jeremy Lewis, “Home Affairs,” in David Astor: A Life in Print (London: Jona­ than Cape, 2016). 19 Lay, “Obituary: Norman Cohn”; William Lamont, “Obituary: Professor Nor­ man Cohn,” The Independent, September 29, 2007. 20 Michael Briant, “Psychotherapy and the ‘Plague’: Some Contributions to the Understanding of A Recurring Threat,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 25, no. 1 (2009): 39–55. Briant’s focus on his discussions with Cohn suggest that these were his principal source and that he did not have the Astor Papers, and specifi­ cally the archive of the Columbus Centre, at his disposal. 21 Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind. Pick also produced a radio programme about the Columbus Centre, see “The Roots of Extremism,” BBC Radio 4, March 17, 2014, currently accessible at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03y0n8g. For Langer’s book, see Walter Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (New York: Basic Books, 1972). 22 Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 234. 23 David Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge,” Encounter, August 1962, 62. 24 For a more recent account of Astor’s life, see Lewis’s biography, Jeremy Lewis, David Astor: A Life in Print (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016). 25 Anthony Sampson, “Observing David Astor,” The Observer, December 9, 2001. 26 Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.” 27 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Lon­ don: Penguin Books, 1994).

18

Introduction

28 David Astor, “The Meaning of Eichmann,” The Observer, March 26, 1961. 29 Ibid. 30 Norman Cohn, Letter to David Astor, 23 July 1962, Papers held by Boodle Hat­ field, Solicitors, hereafter “Astor Papers,” private collection, Box 10 BH, Folder: Project General 1958–62. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Rev­ olutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993). Cohn’s book was much praised at the time; for example Yonina Talmon described it in 1962 as “extremely erudite and exhaustive.” The book was also to prove more enduringly influential: English political philosopher John Gray named it in 2009 as “the book that changed his life,” while in 2010 Eng­ lish broadcaster Bettany Hughes defined it as her “book of a lifetime.” Yonina Talmon, “Pursuit of the Millennium: The Relation between Religious and Social Change,” Archives Européennes de Sociologie/European Journal of Sociology/ Europäisches Archiv Für Soziologie 3, no. 1 (1962): 125–48; John Gray, “The Book That Changed My Life,” New Statesman, February  5, 2009; Bettany Hughes, “Book of a Lifetime: The Pursuit of the Millennium, by Norman Cohn,” The Independent, October 15, 2010. 31 Daniel Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn, July 11, 2006. 32 Paul Lay, “Obituary: Norman Cohn,” The Guardian, August 9, 2007. 33 Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. 34 Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. 35 William Lamont, “Norman Cohn (1915–2007),” History Workshop Journal 67, no. 1 (2009). 36 Cockett, David Astor and the Observer, 169. 37 Norman Cohn, Letter to David Astor, 23 July 1962, Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: Project General 1958–62. 38 Ibid. 39 David Astor, Letter to Norman Cohn, 28 July 1962, Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: Project General 1958–62. 40 Dorothy Salmon, “Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathology,” Janu­ ary 28, 1966, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1966. It has not been possible to ascertain whether “Columbus” had some other par­ ticular meaning to David Astor. Neither his son, Richard Astor, nor biographer, Jeremy Lewis, are aware of any other particular reason for the selection of this name. Although there is no archival support for such a claim, however, one can­ not but wonder whether the name “Columbus” offered the connotation of Chris­ topher Columbus and the Age of Explorations to a project that sought to make new discoveries in the field of psychoanalytically informed history. 41 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, 295–298. 42 Matthew Cragoe, “Asa Briggs and the University of Sussex, 1961–1976,” in The Age of Asa: Lord Briggs, Public Life and History in Britain since 1945, ed. Miles Taylor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 227. 43 Tim Carder, “University of Sussex: A Potted History (Reproduced with Permis­ sion from the Encyclopaedia of Brighton),” My Brighton and Hove, 1990, www. mybrightonandhove.org.uk/page_id__6834.aspx. 44 David Leigh, “Students Disrupt US Professor’s Lecture,” The Times, June 6, 1973. 45 Asa Briggs, “Drawing a New Map of Learning,” in The Idea of a New Univer­ sity: An Experiment in Sussex, ed. David Daiches (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 60–80. 46 Cragoe, “Asa Briggs and the University of Sussex, 1961–1976,” 231. 47 “History of Mass Observation,” Mass Observation, 2015, accessed 5 July 2016, www.massobs.org.uk/about/history-of-mo. Norman Cohn also told Daniel Pick

Introduction

48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55

56

57

58

59 60 61

19

in 2006 that he had worked for the Mass Observation project on antisemitism in the East End in early 1938; see Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. Dorothy Salmon, Letter to David Astor, 18 February 1965, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1964–65; Salmon, “Centre for Research in Collective Psychopathology.” Pick discusses Norman Cohn’s disagreement over the use of the term “collective psychopathology” as well as the importance of psychoanalysis as a tool of understanding history more generally; see Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 234. For a full list of the books produced in the Columbus Centre, cf. Appendix. “Progress Report,” 1st December 1963, in ibid. Henry Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder: A  Socio-Psychological Study of Some SS Killers (London: Chatto; Heinemann Educational, for Sussex University Press, 1972); and Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (London: Chatto and Windus: Heinemann for Sussex University Press, 1974). Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons; Christina Larner, Enemies of God: The WitchHunt in Scotland (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981). Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (London: Chatto-Heinemann Educational for Sussex University Press, 1972); and Albie Sachs, Justice in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Anthony Storr, Human Destructiveness (London: Chatto & Heinemann for Sus­ sex University Press, 1972); Rae Sherwood, The Psychodynamics of Race: Vicious and Benign Spirals (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980); and Nevitt Sanford, ed., Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness (San Francisco, CA: JosseyBass, 1971). Enzo Traverso describes the 1980s as the period which brought an end to many years of indifference and repression, and resulted in a shift of historiography as well as a “collective anamnesis”; see Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New York and London: The New Press, 2003), 4. For a study that problematizes the implications of the Holocaust “memory” boom, see Jay Winter, “The Genera­ tion of Memory: Reflections on the ‘Memory Boom’ in Contemporary Historical Studies,” Archives  & Social Studies: A  Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 1 (2007). For a classic on Holocaust historiography until the late 1980s, see Marrus, The Holocaust in History. For a supplement to Marrus on Holocaust historiography, see Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London: Routledge, 2003); Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust (Basing­ stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Stone, Histories of the Holocaust. For an introduction to the major historiographical debates, see Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010). For a study of the role of the Holocaust in the United States, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2000). For a critical assessment of the implications of Holocaust denial, see D. D. Gut­ tenplan’s, The Holocaust on Trial, a report of libel case where, in 1999, David Irving sued the American historian Deborah Lipstadt for supposedly falsely accus­ ing him of Holocaust denial. D. D. Guttenplan, The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice, and the David Irving Libel Case (London: Granta Books, 2002). Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 155–56. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1978). Ibid., 37.

20

Introduction

62 Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 29. 63 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 777–95. 64 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 65 For a detailed account on these examples, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); and Foucault, The Will to Knowledge; Michel Foucault, History of Madness (Routledge, 2006). 66 Ibid. 67 As per, for instance, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston, MA and London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 68 Carol Brightman, ed., Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–1975 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995), 24. 69 Dominick LaCapra, “An Interview with Professor Dominick LaCapra,” June 9, 1998. By Amos Goldberg. Shoah Resource Center. International School for Holo­ caust Studies, accessed November 10, 2016, www.yadvashem.org.

1

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint Psychoanalysis and the

Columbus Centre

In 1976, the historian and director of the Institute of Contemporary His­ tory and Wiener Library, Walter Laqueur, edited a collection of essays titled Fascism: A Reader’s Guide. Two years earlier, Laqueur had asked the psy­ chiatrist and Columbus Centre member Henry Dicks to write an article for the volume. Dicks accepted the offer and produced the essay “Towards a Psychology of Fascism.” However, in 1975, “eighteen months after the due date,” Laqueur dropped Dicks’s chapter on grounds of publishing restric­ tions regarding length. “In the circumstances,” wrote Laqueur, we had to look again at each contribution with a view to drastically reducing it in size. As far as your essay was concerned, we found that, in view of the wealth of material it contained, this would just not be possible without fatally harming it. He offered instead to publish Dicks’s piece in The Journal of Contemporary History or in some other collection of essays. As perhaps expected, Dicks was upset with this decision, stating that he did not want his piece to be treated as a remainder and that he did not “need to be published.”1 Omitting Dicks’s chapter may have merely been a coincidence, but it might as well have been linked to the methodological implications that a “psychol­ ogy of fascism” presented for historians at the time. German-British historian Francis L. Carsten, a German history expert, wrote accordingly in his chapter in Laqueur’s volume: It has often been said that without Hitler there would have been no National Socialism, or that at least National Socialism would have been very different without him. This again seems a field where the historian or the political scientist might have to rely on the help of the social psychologist. A well-known psychologist has recently defined Hitler “as the quintessential embodiment of Germany’s and Austria’s many defeat-shattered, uprooted ‘little men,’ craving for the security of belonging, for the restoration of power and glory, and for vengeance.” DOI: 10.4324/9780429197314-2

22

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint He gave expression to a state of mind existing in millions of people, not only in Germany. This is true, but it does not get us much further.2

As revealed in Carsten’s own footnotes, the “well-known psychologist” was Henry Dicks, and the interpretation mentioned above came from Dicks’s 1973 article “Deadly Fantasies” in New Statesman.3 Although we cannot know with certainty whether this view played a role in rejecting Dicks’s con­ tribution, this incident indicates how the Columbus Centre’s debates took place against a background of relative hostility on behalf of British scholars towards the Centre’s principal methodological tool, psychoanalysis. The Columbus Centre was a British research hub that was established to study discrimination, persecution, and genocide. What most obviously dis­ tinguished the Columbus Centre from other British institutions of the time, such as the Wiener Library in London or the Parkes Library at the University of Southampton, was its emphasis upon psychoanalysis. All these institutions sought to investigate the history of prejudice, and especially antisemitism, but David Astor, Norman Cohn, and their associates at the Columbus Centre stood out for their insistence upon the relevance of Freudian thought, at least in the beginning. In his Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration speech in 1962, David Astor stressed the vital importance of analysing interwar history and its psy­ chology. He urged the case for this attempt “to understand what happened” and “to insure that the underlying psychological processes will become better known.” He suggested that such an undertaking would provide some oppor­ tunity “to reduce the chances of further mass destruction in the future.” The endeavour to revisit this past and learn lessons from it would be “a worthy monument to the memory of the six millions.” This project could take place, he argued, in a centre of studies of “political psycho-pathology.”4 For Astor, and also initially for Cohn, what was missing was not only a full historical study of the Third Reich or the Holocaust. Astor specifically stated that he did not question the value of the work of scholars like Gerald Reitlinger or Raul Hilberg, who had published meticulous historical accounts of the facts of the Nazi regime by the time of Astor’s speech.5 Rather, he stressed that the problem was the lack of subsequent inquiries into “the full reality and mean­ ing of these facts,” echoing, among others, his earlier article on the “mean­ ing” of Eichmann.”6 “I feel,” wrote Astor to Cohn in 1965, we should take the [psychoanalytic] side of our endeavour particularly seriously as it is the side on which we hope to make an advance. After all, everything else about Auschwitz is already known except the psy­ chological processes going on in the minds of the perpetrators and the relationship of these processes to the rest of life.7 Hence, from very early on, psychoanalysis was to prove a key tool through which historical facts were interpreted in the Columbus Centre’s

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

23

own discussions and papers. And, in terms of methodology, it was also to prove its Achilles’ heel. Psychoanalysis in context Psychoanalysis is, at the same time, both a clinical theory entailing certain therapeutic techniques and a set of philosophical ideas about the human psy­ che. It is a theory and a clinical practice that emerged, as we saw in the Intro­ duction, at a time when the modern state, assisted by and based on scientific discourse, assumed the role of protecting the well-being of the population at the cost of social control over their bodies; the task that psychoanalysis, as well as other psy-sciences, came to fulfil on behalf of the modern state was precisely to categorise behaviours, symptoms, identities, and, at times, even whole communities as normal or not normal. The application of psychoanal­ ysis regards, first and foremost, the treatment of patients but, also, its use for the study of society, politics, culture, and ultimately history. While the for­ mer application found its way in British clinics, we can observe a resounding absence of the latter in British university halls and theory gatherings. At the heart of psychoanalysis lies the unconscious, the existence of which is unani­ mously accepted by the different schools of psychoanalytic thought, despite the numerous disagreements among them. And perhaps it was precisely the unconscious that made it so difficult for psychoanalysis to be used as a meth­ odological tool in a culture with such a long tradition of empiricism, such as the British one. “There is no Western country,” argued Perry Anderson in “Components of the National Culture” accordingly, “where the presence of psychoanalysis in general culture is so vestigial” as it is in Britain, and unlike diverse thinkers from the Continent and the United States, “[t]here is no comparable English thinker who has been remotely touched.”8 During and after the Second World War, psychoanalysis migrated, so to speak, from parts of Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain and the United States. In 1938, Freud himself left Vienna to escape the Nazis together with his wife and daughter, Anna. With the aid of the British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones and others, he settled in London, where he died one year later, a few weeks after the outbreak of the war.9 Anna Freud—who was also David Astor’s own analyst—greatly influenced British psychoanalysis. She largely drew on her father’s theories and demonstrated a great interest in child therapy, the development of the ego, and the crucial role of defence mechanisms in the function of the psyche.10 Another émigré psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, who had come to London after accepting an invitation from Ernest Jones (mediated by Freud’s English translator James Strachey’s wife, Alix) in 1926, also focused on child analysis and had a great impact on the development of British psychoanalysis. She followed Sigmund Freud closely, but she placed greater emphasis on the pre­ oedipal phase, that is the early mother–child relationship, rather than the Oedipus complex that, according to Freud, takes place around the fourth

24

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

year of a child’s life.11 Klein’s arrival in London was met with excitement by most members of the British Psychoanalytical Society. “The fact that Ernest Jones,” writes historian of psychoanalysis George Makari, “entrusted the analyses of his wife and two children to the newcomer was a sign of the enthusiasm with which she was received in the new city.”12 The same cannot be said, however, about Klein’s reception in the Viennese society. The apparent similarity between Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s clin­ ical foci in combination with an apparent difference in their approach—evident also in Klein’s sharp criticism of Anna Freud’s study of child analysis in 192713—rendered them opponents on the psychoanalytic battlefield and foreshadowed a clash in the psychoanalytic circles between London and Vienna. Freud himself was one of the first ones to trigger the conflict. “[C]hild analysis  in particular,” he wrote in a footnote he added in 1935 to his Autobiographical Study (1925), attributing seemingly equal value to Klein and his daughter, “has gained a powerful momentum owing to the work of Mrs. Melanie Klein and of my daughter, Anna Freud.”14 The histo­ rian of psychoanalysis Peter Gay, however, observes that this was merely the view that Freud adopted in public. “[Freud] ventilated his most impassioned irritation,” wrote Gay, mainly in the privacy of his correspondence with Ernest Jones, where he allowed himself some rather tart language. He accused Jones of arranging a campaign against his daughter’s way of analyzing chil­ dren, defended her criticisms of Melanie Klein’s clinical strategies, and resented the charge that she had been insufficiently analyzed.15 Not surprisingly, this polemic between the two famous pioneers of child analysis was inherited in the country where they both dwelled and practised psychoanalysis, Britain. Its most notorious manifestation was the Freud–Klein Controversial Discussions held in the midst of the Second World War, between 1941 and 1945. In his review of the collection of essays and minutes of the Freud–Klein controversies, co-edited by the psychoanalyst Ricardo Steiner and the psychoanalyst and Columbus Centre member Pearl King in 1991, Peter Rudnytsky discussed what happened in London after Freud’s death: The British Psycho-Analytical Society became unofficially divided into three camps: those who supported Melanie Klein, those who supported Anna Freud, and those, mainly indigenous British members, who were not aligned with either faction. By the end of 1941 . . . tensions came to a head. A series of Extraordinary Business Meetings was called early in 1942 to address the situation, and what became known as the Contro­ versial Discussions began.16 Lyndsey Stonebridge suggests a reading of the Controversial Discussions as a prolonged debate on the “legitimate frontiers of phantasy.” “The Kleinians,

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

25

as far as the Anna Freudians were concerned,” she writes, “knew no bounds when it came to phantasy. The Anna Freudians, by contrast, for the Klein­ ians, were too quick to erect pedagogical fences around the transference.”17 Elsewhere, in her discussion of the role of anxiety in Klein’s work, Stonebridge observes how during the Controversial Discussions, anxiety became a matter for the legacy and history of psychoanalysis. “If psychoanalysis cannot assign anxiety a proper place,” she argued, “it might be worth asking instead what place, at a specific historical moment, here the war-torn British home front, anxiety assigns psychoanalysis.”18 Indeed, Pearl King herself placed the raison d’être of the controversies in the anxiety caused by the decision that the British Psychoanalytical Society had to make on whether Melanie Klein’s theory should be embraced as an alternative but essential branch of psychoa­ nalysis or whether it should be considered, like Jungian psychoanalysis, as a totally different school of psychoanalytic thought. “Psychoanalysts,” argued King, “are not alone in having to face and come to terms with the problem of how to incorporate new findings and theories into their understanding of their main body of knowledge,” since [a]ny study of the development of scientific, philosophical, or political ideas will give ample evidence of the bitter arguments that not uncom­ monly occur over different points of view and conflicting explanations of observed phenomena, over the relevance of new discoveries and the pain of giving up entrenched positions, and with regard to the implica­ tions of accepting new ideas.19 And although it is not reported in detail how this happened, the fact remains that through this process, the British Psychoanalytical Society did not split into three different societies and its members managed to resolve their prob­ lems by staying together, despite their theoretical disagreements throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and up to the present. The publication of the English Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho­ logical Works of Sigmund Freud (edited by James Strachey) between 1956 and 1975 by Hogarth Press, being the most complete and accessible collec­ tion of Freud’s works in English, immeasurably helped with the proliferation of psychoanalysis in the Anglophone world. At the same time, grace of the work of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, as well as their British associates and students, such as Ernest Jones, John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott, and Wilfred Bion, psychoanalysis found its way to post-war British clinical practice in the most fruitful of ways. Their work was promoted in their private prac­ tices as well as various institutions. The Tavistock Clinic is a notable exam­ ple. It became a leading institution for the development of psychoanalysis after the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948, and, indeed, two members of the Columbus Centre, Henry Dicks and Robert Gosling, worked there. The Tavistock was established in London in 1920, influenced by the psychoanalytic doctrines developed in Vienna and Zurich. It was, in

26

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

fact, a product of the First World War and, especially, the neurologist Hugh Crichton-Miller’s conviction that the pioneering psychotherapeutic treatment he had offered to shell-shocked and neurotic soldiers should also be offered to underprivileged civilians.20 A tension between the Tavistock and the Brit­ ish Psychoanalytical Society, notwithstanding, psychoanalysis still played a crucial role in the psychotherapeutic methods of the Clinic. Daniel Pick describes the Tavistock as “an oasis for those such as Dicks with a close inter­ est in mental health, social reform, and the public provision of new thera­ peutic methods, above all the talking cure.”21 Indeed, Dicks was so much associated with the Tavistock’s vision that he was invited to write its history for the Clinic’s jubilee in 1970.22 Although psychoanalysis was flourishing in British clinics and private practices, it was more or less absent from British university halls and theory gatherings. An exception could perhaps be the Polish-born British historian Lewis Namier, who argued ever since the interwar years that Freud’s under­ standing of the forces behind individual behaviour can be useful for the study of history. His work, however, was better received after his death in 1960.23 While psychoanalysis was not largely embraced by British intellectuals, it did peripherally become an object of critique in Britain. For instance, in 1963, the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper, while recognising its impor­ tance, also critiqued psychoanalysis. Drawing on his liberal views about closed explanatory systems such as Marxism and Plato’s Republic, Popper critiqued psychoanalysis on the grounds of it being a non-falsifiable, and thus non-scientific, intellectual system. There is “no conceivable human behav­ iour which could contradict them,” he argued, since any contradiction can be interpreted as a resistance to therapy.24 Moreover, R.D. Laing and David Cooper, pioneers of the British anti-psychiatry movement, critiqued psychoa­ nalysis as a therapeutic method in their attempt to attack institutionalised psychiatry.25 Indicative of this paradoxical relation between psychoanalysis and post-war British culture is the fact that the social, cultural, and intel­ lectual historians of Britain who have written about the 1950s and 1960s, such as Dominic Sandbrook or Stefan Collini, do not mention the British psychoanalytical society, whereas in books of general history of the twentieth century, such as Hobsbawm’s The Age of the Extremes, the word “psychoa­ nalysis” appears only as an influence on Surrealism.26 Attempts to write the history of psychoanalysis or the biographies of its key figures have often come from psychoanalysts themselves rather than historians.27 In the Continent, we can detect a far greater diversity of influences, as psychoanalysis reverberated through both clinical and theoretical practices.28 In France, for instance, psychoanalysis became part of the intellectual dis­ course in a more obvious way than in the works of most contemporaneous British thinkers. The work of eminent psychoanalysts, such as Jacques Lacan, who gave influential annual seminars from 1953 to 1980, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, authors of the Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse (1967), and Daniel Lagache was often taken up in discussions about politics,

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

27

culture, and society.29 Political theorists and philosophers living and work­ ing in France in the post-war period, such as Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Cornelius Castoriadis, were largely influenced by Freud­ ian theory and often employed psychoanalysis in their work.30 In Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, also employed Freud in critical theory, their neo-Marxist meth­ odological tool for cultural critique.31 Psychoanalysis also migrated on the other side of the Atlantic because of the Nazi persecution of its representatives. The turbulent context of the Cold War as well as the anxiety deriving from a constant nuclear threat made Freudian theory particularly relevant in American culture.32 One can observe a cultural elevation of Freud in the 1950s United States by writers such as Philip Rieff, Lionel Trilling, and Herbert Marcuse and psychoanalysts like Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson.33 More importantly, the question of whether psychoanalysis can be employed as a model for interpreting history emerged into mainstream American professional historical debates. The historian Wil­ liam L. Langer, for instance, famously called for the employment of psychoa­ nalysis for the study of history in his 1957 annual presidential address to the American Historical Association.34 Notable examples where psychoanalysis was used in the interpretation of history in the late 1950s in the United States are Erik Erikson’s 1958 Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History and Norman Brown’s 1959 Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History.35 Nonetheless, the claim that psychoanalysis merits a place in historical inquiry or, more precisely, that the study of unconscious psychological moti­ vations is necessary to explore historical events has been controversial. It is related to psychohistory, a branch of history that focuses on, and often spec­ ulates about, psychological motivations behind historical events. Psychohis­ tory was quite popular during the post-war period, especially in the United States. There, unlike Britain where it never took root in the historical profes­ sion, psychohistory became a distinct if contested branch of the discipline.36 In the 1970s, some American psychohistorians who have been character­ ised as confrontational and controversial emerged. Perhaps the most noto­ rious of them is Lloyd Demause, who founded and edited The History of Childhood Quarterly in 1973 (it was renamed The Journal of Psychohistory in 1976). The relevance of psychohistory to our discussion is apparent also in the fact that Demause had at that time corresponded with the Columbus Cen­ tre participant Henry Dicks. Demause understood psychohistory as the “psy­ chogenic theory of history,” namely “the theory that history involves adults acting-out group-fantasies which are based on motivations initially produced by the evolution of childhood.”37 As a matter of fact, Demause, in his parallel defence of psychohistory and criticism of what he called “narrative history,” addressed a broader discussion in which the very study of the Holocaust was entangled: the uniqueness question. Demause accused those writing “narra­ tive history” of focusing on the uniqueness of the historical events instead of

28

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

the laws of historical motivation that governed those historical instances.38 In the case of the Holocaust, through this method, the question of mapping out the violence as well as the psychological preconditions of the Holocaust contributes to the study of any past or future genocide, rejecting the idea that the Holocaust is unique. Now, in Holocaust and Third Reich historiogra­ phy, famous American psycho-historical accounts written in the time of the Columbus Centre include Peter Loewenberg’s The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort (1971), while infamous cases, in the sense that they were frequently derided by professional historians, include The Mind of Adolf Hitler (1972) by Walter Langer, brother of William Langer.39 More recently and with much more sophisticated argumentation than Demause, Peter Gay and Peter Lowenberg defended the benefits of using psy­ choanalysis as one possible but not exclusive model of interpreting history. In the 1970s and 1980s, that is, during the last years of the Columbus Cen­ tre project, some legitimate objections about psychohistory emerged.40 For instance, the American historian David Stannard in his 1980 book Shrinking History—an equivocal title in that it refers to both the professional activity of the “shrinks” and the shrivelling of history—debunked and, subsequently, rejected psychohistory on both epistemological and ontological grounds. Not only does psychohistory employ a reductionist, naive, culturally ignorant, and trivialising methodology, he argued, but it also does not actually work in practice.41 Stannard presented a much older critique, which was famously developed by Jacques Barzun in Clio and the Doctors (1974).42 Beside the apparent methodological implications of psychohistory per se, the American story of psychoanalysis and its relationship with American cul­ ture is interesting in its own right because it became the object of intense criti­ cism during the emergence of the Columbus Centre. Dorothy Ross argues that the rise and glory of psychoanalysis in America stemmed largely from the work of modernist intellectuals who were ardent proponents of Freud, such as Trilling, Erikson, and Marcuse. Interestingly enough, she claims that the fall of psychoanalysis in America is also linked with modernism, or rather the gradual abandonment of the teachings of modernism in 1960s cultural politics.43 When Astor went to America in 1965–66, he was hoping that, because of the flourishing trajectory of psychoanalysis and psychohistory in America, his cause would be received with enthusiasm. Shortly before his trip, however, Nevitt Sanford, American psychologist, academic and—most famously perhaps—co-author, with Adorno and others, of The Authoritar­ ian Personality (1950), warned Cohn of what Ross described as the fall of psychoanalysis in America: Such expressions of interest, however, should not be taken to mean that the psychoanalytic point of view is enjoying great prestige in this country right now. It is fair to say, I believe, that, for reasons too com­ plicated and tangential to go into here, the prestige of psychoanalysis both as a body of theory and as a psychotherapeutic method has been

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

29

declining in this country for some years. Indeed it appears that intensive psychological studies of individuals are not often done any more. The individual tends either to disappear in the larger social structures stud­ ied by a rising sociology or to be fragmented by a reviving behavioristic psychology.44 If psychoanalysis was never, like in Britain, or no longer, like in the United States, relevant in the study of the history of mass violence, what could its role be in the Columbus Centre? Psychoanalysis in the Columbus Centre Despite the absence of psychoanalysis from British academic research of the time as well as the criticism that psychohistory received, psychoanalysis became the cornerstone of the Columbus Centre project. The Columbus Cen­ tre members, and Astor above all, chose to employ psychoanalysis as the main interpretative tool of their research. Indeed, what bound together the wide spectrum of research topics and scholarly interests in the Columbus Centre was the ordinariness and human origin of the Nazi crimes and their repeat­ ability under different historical conditions, such as apartheid in modern-day South Africa or the witch-hunts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In order to approach these “ordinary” atrocities, the Columbus Centre’s par­ ticipants adopted a psychoanalytical understanding of history, culture, and the society. And this choice came at a price. David Astor and psychoanalysis David Astor’s attachment to psychoanalysis was apparent enough to anyone who knew him well and was publicly revealed on various occasions. From his early Oxford years, during which he suffered a nervous breakdown, Astor had become a fervent adherent of psychoanalysis. It was then when he started his analysis with Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna. Although the precise start and end dates remain uncertain his psychoanalytic treatment lasted from the late 1940s to the early 1950s. David’s daughter Lucy Astor described her father’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis as not academic or scientific, that is, not deriving from extensively reading Freud’s writings, but rather from a deeply personal interest and search for therapeutic assistance. Astor was, as she put it, in pain and needed help, and he turned to psychoanalysis because this was “what it was available to him.” “He felt grateful to psychoanalysis,” concluded Lucy Astor, “it saved his life.”45 Astor himself regarded his psychoanalytic treatment with Anna Freud as very successful, although, as he confessed to Anthony Sampson, he some­ times went to sleep during sessions.46 According to Anna Freud’s biogra­ pher Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Astor became Anna’s “friend.” Anna Freud’s papers, held at the Freud Museum in London, reveal that Astor’s second wife,

30

To be an Eichmann is less rare than to be a saint

Bridget, was grateful to Anna Freud, sending her a birthday card in 1955 and making a terracotta figurine head of child for her, also kept at the archive.47 It is thus not surprising that in 1964 Astor contacted Anna Freud in order to ask her to read Cohn’s preliminary report of the Columbus Centre and act as a referee for possible sponsors. “Although I should be very interested to read it,” she wrote back, “I  cannot help feeling that I  am not qualified to pronounce any kind of judgment on it since neither relevant studies nor experience have equiped [sic] me for such a task.” Though she kindly refused Astor’s proposal, she did suggest instead two people who could offer what she called “an opinion from the psycho-analytic side,” Robert Waelder and Heinz Hartmann, both of whom were Viennese psychoanalysts and émigrés to the United States.48 The truth is, however, that Anna Freud had in the past been involved with similar research projects, such as a UNESCO initiative in 1948 for a proposal about educational and psychological techniques for changing the mental attitudes that affect international understanding. This suggests that the therapeutic relationship she had with Astor, most probably until her retirement, might be another reason for her refusal in addition to her “limited experience” on these issues.49 Astor’s involvement with psychoanalysis is also illustrated in Dimensions of Psychoanalysis (1989), edited by Joseph Sandler, a major figure in the Anna Freud circle. Sandler described at length how Astor contributed to the devel­ opment of British psychoanalysis. Just as he had funded the work of Cohn at the University of Sussex a few years earlier, so had Astor also endowed the Freud Memorial Chair of Psychoanalysis, a new visiting professorial post at University College London (UCL), in 1974. It was the first Chair of psychoa­ nalysis in Britain and its occupant became known as the Freud Memorial Professor.50 James Lighthill, Provost of UCL at the time, argued that Astor’s aim in establishing a Chair of Psychoanalysis was that “students in general should have a chance to hear the discipline of psychoanalysis expounded by its most authentic exponents, psychoanalysts” and should have “actual views of Freud presented together with their ever-changing contemporary application.”51 The well-known American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson was supposed to be the first Freud Memorial Professor in 1974–75, but his ill health prevented him from moving to Britain. Instead, distinguished psy­ choanalysts, such as John Sutherland, Charles Rycroft, Anne-Marie Sandler, and Enid Balint gave lectures during that academic year. The first Freud Memorial Professor was the analyst Roy Schafer in 1975–76. His succes­ sors included the psychoanalysts Hanna Segal, André Green, John Bowlby, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, and the historian Christofer Lasch. In 1984, Astor, as the benefactor, along with UCL’s Board of Management, decided to extend the tenure of the Chair holder. Joseph Sandler became the first long-term holder of the Freud Memorial Chair and the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit—still active nowadays—was established under his direction.52 Perhaps what Astor did not manage to accomplish with the Columbus Centre, which he had hoped in 1965 would be “the first unit in a British university that

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explicitly includes [psychoanalysis] in its set-up,” he accomplished with the Psychoanalytic Unit at UCL.53 Astor’s fascination with psychoanalysis was perhaps most evident at The Observer which, under his editorship, gradually transformed into a paper which emphasised psychological understanding and, especially, psychoa­ nalysis.54 In 1956, a year that marked the centennial of Freud’s birth, The Observer hosted a series of “Centenary” articles on Freud on its first pages. Later reprinted as a pamphlet under the title “The meaning of Freud,” the series comprised biographical sketches by Freud’s translator Nancy ProcterGregg and articles that discussed the influence of Freud on medicine—by the editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis at the time, W. Hoffer— literature—by The Observer journalist Philip Toynbee—and religion—by psychiatrist David Stafford-Clark.55 From 1964 onwards, there was a psychology correspondent whose role was to offer specialised commentary on issues directly related to psychology and, particularly, psychoanalysis.56 In other British Sunday newspapers of the time, such as The Times, there was no psychology correspondent and, on the rare occasions when a psychological issue was raised, it was done by a medical or science correspondent. Psychoanalysis was more often than not mentioned in The Times only in the context of the obituaries of famous psychoanalysts, such as John Rickman, Karen Horney or Melanie Klein.57 During the years that Astor edited the paper, opinion articles that stressed the importance of the application of social sciences, such as psychology or the introduction of psychoanalysis in British universities, appeared frequently. The paper also featured full-page articles that profiled psychoanalysts such as Carl Jung (1948), Ernest Jones (1953), Melanie Klein (1961), and Lou Andreas Salome (1963).58 Contributors also included psychoanalysts like Charles Rycroft and Donald Winnicott, as well as psychoanalytically informed schol­ ars such as the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Geoffrey Gorer. The latter was also a good friend of Henry Dicks, as revealed by their correspondence.59 Anthony Storr, a regular contributor to The Observer and Columbus Centre participant, wrote an article about Churchill in 1969, arguing that it was “the inner drives that made Sir Winston a great wartime leader.”60 Such articles appeared often in The Observer, indicating that this sort of psycho­ analytical study of a public figure seems to have interested Astor more as a methodology than the “mass psychology” that interested Cohn and to which the Columbus Centre’s focus eventually shifted. Under Astor’s editorship, psychoanalysis was also often employed in The Observer as a tool to interpret culture. For instance, the poetry critic Al Alvarez and the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan used psychoanalytic vocabulary in their writings from late 1950s until early 1970s. The language of psychoa­ nalysis also permeated articles discussing a range of other subjects, such as the 1970s women’s movement in the United States. Even John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s interview with New Left writers Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn in 1971 mentioned the subject of psychoanalysis.61

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To sum up, Astor was very familiar with psychoanalysis, and it comes as no surprise, in light of this enduring interest and commitment to the talking cure, that he would so vigorously pursue a psychoanalytical exploration of the Nazi mind and psychological accounts of fascist culture at the Columbus Centre.62 Indeed, psychoanalysis as a theory, a clinical practice, and an insti­ tution was so crucial to Astor that in 1965 he expressed his doubts about Storr and Dicks to Cohn on grounds that, although they were affiliated with psychoanalysis, they were not trained at the British Psychoanalytical Insti­ tute. “[I]t does seem of some importance” wrote Astor to Cohn, that your work should treat the discipline in a way that its own prac­ titioners accept i.e. that your [psychoanalytic] connections should not be only with individuals whose qualifications are not accepted by the Institute. (Isn’t this true . . . of Dicks and Storr?)63 The Columbus Centre archives do not include Cohn’s response to this particular letter. If they did, it might have been easier to shed more light on how they ended up inviting Pearl King as a “true Freudian” and in Cohn’s own words “an ‘orthodox’ and intelligent analyst . . . thoroughly at home in social research,” whom, he later, however did not appreciate much as we will further elaborate in Chapter 4.64 If it did include this response, we might also have learned more about Cohn’s somewhat ambivalent relation with psychoanalysis. Norman Cohn and psychoanalysis Although not such a “pilgrim” of psychoanalysis as Astor, Norman Cohn was also intrigued by a study of history and culture through the talking cure, especially during the Columbus Centre early phase. Cohn underwent psy­ choanalytic treatment with various analysts, the longest of which was with a Jungian therapist named Carl Opperheimer who knew all about Freud but was at the same time critical of Freud “in a very rational way.”65 Later on, he also had therapy with Dr Goldblatt, a Freudian who worked at the Tavistock Clinic. In 1962, Cohn responded to Astor’s plea for an academic investigation into Nazi crimes by highlighting his own psychological understanding of history and culture. He portrayed his own book on the traces of Nazi and Communist fanaticism in medieval Europe, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), as “a modest excursion into the almost unexplored territory of what [Astor called] ‘political psycho-pathology.’ ” What should be sought, Cohn suggested, was a massive exploration of political psychopathology by his­ torians and psychologists, but also perhaps by anthropologists and sociolo­ gists. “This exploration should not be limited to Nazism or antisemitism,” he argued, but rather range over “the vast field of fanatical beliefs and behav­ iour.”66 Cohn presented the Institut für politische Psychologie, founded in

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1956 at the University of Vienna by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilfried Daim, as a possible model for the Columbus Centre. A short while after Astor and Cohn’s first encounter in 1962, Cohn got upset with the Psychoanalytical Society analyst and The Observer contribu­ tor Willie Hoffer, who challenged The Pursuit of the Millennium’s bibliog­ raphy as being not psychoanalytically informed enough. Astor tried to calm him down by stressing that Hoffer, while being “a wise and able man” was “too elderly and . . . too specialised as merely an analyst rather than being a social thinker.” Cohn, apparently enraged with Hoffer’s criticism, responded with two consecutive letters, in which he attempted to defend his psychoana­ lytic background. “I wonder why Hoffer assumes I don’t know such a very stock work as Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego?” he wrote somewhat bitterly, I know it as Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse and regard it as a basic work as far as it goes—or could go when it was written, forty years ago. But presumably Hoffer had not read Chapter III of my book. Without waiting for Astor’s reply, he added in a second letter, two days later, that Hoffer may like to know that I have frequently lectured to gatherings of psychoanalysts both here and in the United States. He will find the text of one of my talks, given at Columbia University, in the Spring issue of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytical Review.67 Another instance of Cohn’s involvement with psychoanalysis occurred during his visit in Germany in 1963. Strikingly, as we will further elabo­ rate in Chapter 2, he described the Frankfurt School as a psychoanalytically driven institute, neglecting to mention any attachment they had with Marx and social theory. The Frankfurt School’s focus on the de-Nazification of Germany led Cohn to argue that their project had nothing to offer to the Columbus Centre initiative. However, of all the participants, Cohn dis­ tinguished the work of German psychologist Frau Dr  Wanda von BaeyerKatte, who carried out a psychoanalytical and sociological study of the Nazi regime. Moreover, he stressed the close relations that its members maintained with the Frankfort Institut für Psychiatrie und Psychoanalyse, under Alexan­ der Mitscherlich, a psychoanalyst who was also intensely interested in the psychoanalytical interpretation of prejudice. Mitscherlich was then head of the Frankfort Institut für Psychiatrie und Psychoanalyse, president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychotherarapie und Tiefenpsychologie, profes­ sor at the University of Heidelberg and subsequent co-author of the 1967 seminal account The Inability to Mourn. A couple of years later, in 1965, when Cohn invited Nevitt Sanford to par­ ticipate in the Columbus Centre, he stressed the methodological importance

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of psychoanalysis. “We are primarily interested” he wrote in his invitation letter, “in the genesis and institutionalisation of unconscious negative pro­ jections; i.e. finding out how a society or social unit comes to regard a cer­ tain category (real or imaginary) of human beings as less than humans,—as demons, animals or things.”68 Strikingly enough, in the same letter, Cohn emphasised the need for the researchers of the Columbus Centre to have undergone psychoanalytic therapy themselves: Like the rest of the project, the investigation would be an interdisci­ plinary enterprise, but with dynamic psychology in the centre; i.e. it should be carried out by historians, sociologists and (one hopes) field­ workers who have been psychoanalysed and would be able to apply the insights of psychoanalysis to their findings; and it should also make use of professional psychoanalysts.69 In what Cohn himself called a postscript of “psycho-historical speculations” to his first edition of Europe’s Inner Demons in 1975, he emphasised fantasy as a core psychoanalytic category for the analysis of the witch-hunt. “For what we have been examining,” he argued, “is above all fantasy at work in history (and incidentally, in the writing of history). It is fantasy and nothing else that provides the continuity in this story.”70 Especially with regard to the accusa­ tion of cannibalistic infanticide as a similar mechanism as the one about the witches, Cohn further elaborated on the role of psychoanalysis in his account: It seems plain that both stereotypes draw on one and the same archaic fantasy. Psycho-analysts would maintain that the unconscious roots of this fantasy lie in infancy or early childhood. Psycho-analysts of the Kleinian school would argue, more specifically, that infants in the first two years of life experience cannibalistic impulses which they project on to their parents; and that the source of the fantasy lies there. . . . It is, that the theme of cannibalistic infanticide, which has bulked so large in this book, owes part of its appeal to wishes and anxieties experienced in infancy or early childhood, but deeply repressed and, in their original form, wholly unconscious.71 The last sentence of the postscript is an encouragement to “others, better equipped, to venture further—downwards, into the abyss of the uncon­ scious,” indicating how central psychoanalysis was as an interpretative tool to Cohn’s thinking.72 Nonetheless, this psychoanalytically informed postscript was removed in the second edition of the book in 1993. This omission seems to be anything but random. In his interview with Daniel Pick, Cohn said that this postscript was the “least satisfactory thing” he had ever written and that he regret­ ted not using psychoanalysis sensibly. “Human beings just behave like this,” said Cohn somewhat dismissively, “we don’t need psychoanalysts to tell us

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so.”73 In other words, despite their initial agreement Cohn started to disagree with Astor as the years went by about the importance of psychoanalysis for the explanation of genocide. In The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind (2012), Pick describes how psychoanalysis became a “personal issue” in the Columbus Centre context. Without disparaging psychoanalysis as a whole, Cohn had objections to Astor’s fanatic support of psychoanalysis and his understanding of Nazi Germany solely as an instance of collective psychopathology.74 Cohn confessed to Pick that he later regarded Astor a “zealot” of psychoanalysis: He thought the answer [to explaining the Third Reich] had to lie with psychoanalysis. . . . He went so far as to describe Nazi Germany as a study in collective psychopathology. That’s absurd. It’s a country of 60 million people. They were not all Hitler worshippers.75 Astor’s daughter Lucy, however, said that although she understands why Cohn had this impression about her father, she considered it a misapprehen­ sion because, for her, Astor was merely “personally very interested, it was what he knew, and felt a great personal affinity and gratitude for psychoa­ nalysis, but I  don’t think he wanted to convert the world.”76 Nonetheless, given Cohn’s change of attitude towards psychoanalysis and Astor, it comes as no surprise that in the second edition of Europe’s Inner Demons, Cohn did not mention Astor in the acknowledgements despite his being the main funder of his research. In any case, the fact remains that despite the later disagreement between Astor and Cohn on the issue of psychoanalysis, when the Columbus Centre was running, psychoanalysis was very significant. Towards the end of his life, however, Cohn, grew somewhat critical of the work of the psychoanalysis experts Dicks and Storr: [Storr’s book] was only supposed to be a third of a book and he didn’t really want to publish it and in point of fact, the book isn’t [satisfac­ tory]. . . . It was translated into various languages. But he felt it to be superficial and deprived of the backing it was supposed to have from other people, who just didn’t produce. It remained rather superficial. And so that wasn’t a great. Henry Dicks’s book was very authoritative in its way . . . but . . . I think didn’t have great sales.77 Still, the way psychoanalysis was employed by Dicks and Storr is a good indication of the fact that the talking cure was highly significant in the early stages of the Columbus Centre. Henry Dicks and psychoanalysis for the study of the Nazi mind Henry Dicks, or as his obituarist called him “one of the most outstanding and most admired figures of British psychiatry,”78 was born in 1900 in the

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Estonian city of Pernau, then part of the Russian Empire, to an English father and a mother of Baltic German origin. A few months after the October Revo­ lution, the Dicks family along with other British nationals were evacuated from the area. Upon arrival in Britain in 1918, he immediately joined the British army. Dicks’s background affected his role in the armed forces, in a similar way that it would later affect his research. More specifically, coming from a bilingual home, while also having been educated at a private school in St. Petersburg, Dicks had acquired language proficiency in English, Ger­ man, and Russian. He, like Cohn, became attached to the Intelligence Corps to work as an interpreter. When the rest of Dicks’s family returned to Per­ nau, Dicks decided, instead, to pursue a medical career as a psychiatrist in Britain.79 His medical career started when he came as a British émigré to study in St. John’s College at Cambridge before proceeding to St. Bartholomew Hospital (widely known as Barts), where he obtained his medical degree in 1925.80 Dicks specialised in psychiatry and served as a junior doctor in the infa­ mous mental hospital Bethlem Royal Hospital (former “Bedlam”) between 1927 and 1928.81 In 1929, Dicks joined the Tavistock Clinic in London, with which he would be affiliated in various ways until quite late in his life. Perhaps his most remarkable experience before joining the Columbus Centre was his service as the psychiatrist of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, after the lat­ ter’s capture in Britain in 1941. His work with Hess, which was presented in J.R. Rees’s 1947 edited volume The Case of Rudolf Hess: a Problem in Diag­ nosis and Forensic Psychiatry, was an investigation into the psychological motivations of National Socialism. Around the same period, the War Office asked Dicks to conduct interviews with German prisoners of war as part of a psychological investigation into Nazi ideology.82 His study was published under the title “Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology.”83 Peter Mandler aptly observes that although Dicks could by no means be char­ acterised as an orthodox Freudian “drew heavy-handedly on the technical language of Freudian psychoanalysis to stigmatize the German personality when recruited by the British authorities during and after the war to perform enemy analysis.”84 Having German as his mother tongue facilitated Dicks’s research, as it would also do later during his time at the Columbus Centre, when he conducted a psychological study of some SS killers, incarcerated at the time in various German prisons.85 As an émigré from what later developed into the Soviet Union, Dicks was openly against the Soviet regime. What is not so well known is that around the time he was working for the Columbus Centre he was also involved with a campaign against psychiatric abuse of dissenters in the Soviet Union. Accord­ ing to his son, Dicks, who was loyal to the purpose of psychiatry to liberate from symptoms, was very passionate about this cause. His personal archive includes a 1971 leaflet from the “Campaign against Psychiatric Abuse” under the title “Remember Auschwitz,” which calls for help for victims of state psychiatry. “This is not Auschwitz, or Belsen, or Dachau,” warns this

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leaflet, “This is Oryol Prison Mental Hospital USSR. Here sane persons are interned and treated with drugs or simply tortured by starvation and solitary confinement because of their political, ethical or religious beliefs.”86 The first time that Dicks was mentioned in the discussions of the Colum­ bus Centre’s founders was in November  1962, in a letter from Cohn to Astor. Cohn had just met Ranyard West, a physician, social psychologist, and author, who expressed interest in participating in the Centre’s project—then still at a very early phase. West was intrigued when he heard Astor’s plea for an academic inquiry into the issue of genocide. Cohn informed Astor that West enthusiastically recommended Dicks.87 About a month later, West asked to withdraw his participation and suggested that Dicks be approached as a contributor: He should be (though perhaps only just) acceptable academically, as ex-Director of the Tavistock; he is not a quite strict Freudian; he has written on psychopathology (a book with that title), and his war and political records are “good”. . . . I think he could command a good very small team of men suitable to advance knowledge of the Unconscious in violence and set out conclusions reasonably quickly, which is what I think you most want done.88 In February 1963, Astor invited Dicks and the academic researcher in Soci­ ology and Social Psychology Zevedei Barbu to discuss with him and Cohn the possibility of participating in their team. Dicks immediately accepted the offer and joined the research project. After the Columbus Centre pro­ posal was accepted by the University of Sussex, Dicks was appointed Sen­ ior Research Officer. He was expected to devote one-third of his time to research and writing for the Centre from 1 October 1966 onwards. One year later, due to the increasing demands of his role as the President of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, his fraction of working time for Sussex was reduced to one-third of what it used to be. Dicks’s work enhanced the Columbus Centre’s conviction that social sci­ ences, and especially psychoanalytic findings, are essential in shaping our historical understanding of National Socialism.89 His Columbus series book Licensed Mass Murder: A  Socio-Psychological Study of Some SS Killers (1972) was an analysis of the psychological profiles of eight former members of the SS whom he had interviewed in various German prisons in the late 1960s. Although Dicks never received any formal psychoanalytic training, he was a loyal supporter of psychoanalysis. For example, the provisional title of what ended up as Licensed Mass Murder was “Nazi Persecutors and Tortur­ ers: a socio-psychiatric study.” Among other things, it indicates his intention to focus on the social and psychological conditions that contributed to the formulation of the “Nazi personality.” Dicks’s intention is also revealed in his suggestion of Nathan Leites as another possible contributor to the Columbus Centre. Leites, an American

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sociologist of Russian origin, had written widely on politics, especially about Stalinism but also Nazi Germany, employing psychoanalysis in his politi­ cal interpretations. Dicks was acquainted with him through the UNESCO Social Science Division and the RAND Social Science Department. For Dicks, Leites was a suitable contributor precisely because of his training as a social psychologist and political commentator with a psychoanalytic background.90 In fact, Dicks used some unpublished hypotheses of Leites about Nazi and Soviet methods of terrorism in Licensed Mass Murder.91 Despite this proposal being rejected by the team, Dicks remained loyal to psychoanalysis and its role in understanding politics, and especially extrem­ ist ideologies. Dicks believed that potentially universal psychological aspects played crucial role in carrying out genocide. His interpretation shows how one may draw on psychoanalysis, not necessarily to diagnose the Nazis as psychopaths or perverts, but instead to detect an annihilating potentiality within human subjects more broadly. And this is how he also justified his choice of the Nazi paradigm: In this case the psychological factor was so blatant that it could not be ignored even by those who prefer to see history as determined by imper­ sonal forces, ignoring the insights that modern psychological science can contribute. Hence my role became that of examining the evidence for and against the “popular,” lay view that the Nazi movement, espe­ cially as expressed in their mass extermination of helpless, unarmed citizens of their own and other countries, was a “collective madness” led by insane individuals and carried out by fiends as inhuman as Nazi propaganda pictured its own enemies.92 For his work at the Centre, Dicks needed to find a sample of former SS officers who would give their consent to be interviewed by a foreign medical doctor in some German prison. This was not an easy task. David Astor stepped in and through his liaison with Herbert Blankenhorn, the West German ambas­ sador to Britain, managed to secure permission for Dicks’s interviews with nine former concentration camp guards in January  1967. More than two years later, in May 1969, after Dicks had conducted six of the interviews, the German ambassador Dr J. Wilmanns conveyed to Dicks the positive answers of yet two more inmates.93 According to Dicks’s account about his methodology, first he gathered material from newspaper files and especially court proceedings from the Ger­ man press, located at the Wiener Library. Then, he asked his interviewees to write a curriculum vitae before his visit. Finally, on the day of the visit, he conducted interviews based on a technique he had developed during the years of his consulting practice. Based on previous research with German PoWs, he analysed his data according to background variables such as demo­ graphic and psycho-cultural factors as well as personality traits. Although results from such a small sample could not be statistically significant, Dicks’s

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purpose was to find correlations between these characteristics and what he called “the High F syndrome,” that is political fanaticism. His model of inter­ pretation and understanding was influenced by Melanie Klein’s work, who commented herself on the psychic mechanism behind the hatred of the Nazi aggressors. For Dicks, the child is “father to the man.”94 Thus, psychoanalysis, which looks for this child within the man through the study of the unconscious, can help identify forces and patterns behind the phenomenally random destruc­ tiveness of Nazi atrocities.95 Dicks clearly stated that he employed the KleinFairbairn model in his interpretation of the conflict situation of his subjects, namely the eight former SS officers.96 Melanie Klein spoke of “positions” and their responding “defences,” that is, the paranoid and the depressive posi­ tions and the splitting and manic defences respectively, instead of Freudian “stages.” In this model, the infant develops the paranoid position straight after her/his birth and reaches the depressive position approximately during the middle of her/his first year of life. What is important in Klein’s theory, however, is that, while “stages” have a connotation of linearity, “positions” may well appear in cycles; one may periodically return to one or the other position during childhood as well as in one’s adult years. According to Kleinian theory, during the very first months of a baby’s life, he or she is in a psychic state which Klein called the “paranoid position.” At this time, strong feelings of love and hate co-exist and are pre-eminently directed towards the primary object, that is, the mother in most cases. How­ ever, during these first few months, the object is not perceived as a whole, but as fragmentary, in terms both of its function and its degree of satisfy­ ing the baby’s needs and desires. Because of the intimate relationship that is developed during breastfeeding, the baby’s feelings are mainly directed to the mother’s breast instead of the mother as a whole. At the same time, this breast is perceived as split: “good” when it satisfies its feeding purpose and “bad” when it frustrates the baby’s real or phantasised hunger. During this period, the dominant mental capacities of the baby are introjection, that is a process through which external objects are taken in/devoured as if through an oral path, and projection, that is, a more confused term which in Klein’s writings broadly denotes that an internal feeling/conflict is experienced as if coming from the outside and is, more specifically, caused by the object. When the object fulfils or fails the baby’s needs, powerful feelings of love or hatred are, respectively, projected onto the object. Subsequently, the object which is perceived once as “good” and another time as “bad” is introjected as two separate split objects. Therefore, the baby’s own sadistic impulses towards the frustrating mother are experienced, through the mechanism of projection, as if the “bad” object is persecuting the baby in order to destroy him or her. This source of persecutory anxiety results in the mobilisation of defence mechanisms which guarantee the denial of this unbearable reality. The aforementioned process of splitting, for example, preserves the goodness of the loved object.97

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Dicks applies Klein’s theory of persecutory anxiety to his analysis of the severe threat experienced by the German people after the First World War and the signing of the—perceived as nationally humiliating to them—Treaty of Versailles. They felt persecuted, he argued, by the Communists, whose lead­ ers were mostly Jews, the “Versailles oppressors” or “Jewish finance capital,” and the Catholics, which for them meant, mostly, the Poles. Thus, a paranoid denial of reality, or the well-known tale of “stab in the back” emerged: Not “we brave, true German soldiers” had lost the war. No, it was alien communists, Jewish war profiteers, Freemasons and Papists with their international networks who had sabotaged the home front and sold the pass. This displacement of hate and guilt of failure from the Kaiser’s élite on to the composite, variously perceived, irrational image of piti­ less enemies was clearly an effect of paranoid scapegoating, a deflection away from “good US” to “bad outside THEY.”98 Another illustration of this persecution anxiety is when Dicks interviewed killers who were terrified of their victims—the projected parts of them­ selves.99 For Dicks, given that all German people had to abide more or less by Nazi laws, the greatest difference between those who eventually also became the “willing executioners” of Nazi atrocities and those who managed to avoid them “seems to be inside the man’s own mind—the degree of hate and paranoid-projection between self as pitiless authority and self as a victim of a pitiless authority outside.”100 Dicks depicted the splitting mechanism, in his account of S2, a former SS Hauptscharführer interviewed in 1967 in Rheinbach prison. S2’s parents had left him when he was eight years old with his uncles in Polish Upper Silesia in order to migrate to Germany. S2 was left with a “ready-made social split” between good love-objects, that is, “good Germans,” and bad hated persecu­ tory objects, that is, the “bad Poles,” instead of a conviction that his mother and father had abandoned their own child.101 Likewise, Captain A, who was formerly immediately subordinate to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Aus­ chwitz, and was interviewed in 1967 in the Bavarian prison of Straubing, hated the Jews on grounds of fears that they were secretly conspiring to ruin him. This sense of menace was, according to Dicks, nothing more than “a terrifying mirror of his inner world.”102 Dicks’s Kleinian reading of the former SS officers seems also to imply that the extreme violence and sadism shown in their case was a result either of a return to a position where paranoid and schizoid anxieties dominated the psyche or to a phase where the transition to the depressive position had failed, and thus, manic defences were mobilised. What is at stake in the so-called depressive position is the recognition of the object, usually the mother, as a whole object and a gradual integration of the formerly split and fragmented good and bad (part) objects into one single object, to which both love and hate would be addressed. Consequently, once the loved and hated objects are

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integrated into one, there emerges a primitive form of guilt, what Klein called “depressive anxiety,” a result of the baby’s phantasised fear that his or her own sadism (previously addressed to the split hated object) had also anni­ hilated the love object. This particular kind of anxiety gradually goes away once the integrated loved object is introjected in a way that assures its secure place in the psyche. However, this is not to imply that guilt simply gives way to love, but rather that the former is a crucial factor in the prevalence of the latter. The baby’s fear that her or his sadism destroyed the object urges her or him to love the object in order to repair the phantasised harm.103 In Dicks’s account, there is one instance where this kind of guilt, and indeed a collective guilt, was presented as a prerequisite for love and altru­ ism. This guilt was addressed not towards the actual victims but towards their SS comrades. Referring to Buchheim et al.’s analysis in the 1965 book Anatomie des SS-Staates, Dicks reported how an SS general sought to foster collective guilt so that “the blood of victims will cement comradeship.”104 The reparative function of guilt was thus displaced from the actual victims to the fellow perpetrators. Dicks argued that more than just guilt was displaced; so too were other emotions towards the mother. Entering a debate of post-war historiography about maternalism, one that indeed is quite problematic from a feminist per­ spective, Dicks argues that good mothering is “the simple answer to all the world’s ills” because emotions such as an infant’s need for exclusivity are displaced or transferred from the original to less immediate figures.105 Dis­ placement of primitive feelings to the analyst is what transference in the psy­ choanalytic encounter is all about. From a methodological point of view, the interviews that Dicks conducted with the former SS officers are by no means a conventional form of analytical space. Nonetheless, some sort of transference between the prisoner-patients and the medical authority of the interviewer did take place. Dicks also constantly brought to the surface various modes of paternal function that he was seemingly fulfilling during these interviews. More specifically, with reference to S2, Dicks reported that he made “an appealing, boyishly open, naïve rapport” with him, just as he had in the past with other substitute father figures, such as the prison’s pastor or his SS supe­ riors. Elsewhere, he wrote that S2’s anti-parental hate had been displaced to “authority-approved targets,” such as the camp inmates.106 On the other hand, Captain A was also displacing his emotions from the father, and indeed a “bad” father-master, to other individuals, since, according to Dicks, being “servant” to a “father-master” was the only relationship of which he seemed capable.107 PF, a former SS lieutenant-colonel interviewed in 1969 in Tegel prison, recalled his Nazi father’s disapproval of the Jewish pogroms when he took PF to the damaged shops of the Jews on the day following Kristallnacht. And he immediately added, mistaking Dicks for a Jew: “And Herr Professor, how the Jews have avenged themselves!” Again here, a recollection of his father’s condemnation of the crimes against the Jews was somehow linked with a conviction that the successful medical authority who was interviewing

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him in prison was, beyond doubt, a Jew himself. Ultimately, Dicks applied his assumptions about the paternal transference of his interviewees to the German people more generally: the “wooing of the Father-figure’s love and approbation by manly bearing, eager devotion and subordination” was a typical “German trait,” stressed also by other scholars in the past.108 Indeed for Dicks, the inability of some “irreconcilable” Germans to mourn “the old soldierly father-image” after the First World War contributed to the outbreak of yet another war.109 In his analysis of the German people, Dicks also wrote that “there arises a failure in balanced growth both of love capacity and of freedom for selfassured independence,” making them so weak that they could never do without a strong ruler.110 The depressive position, both of the infant and of the regressing adult, can be distressing and agonising. The subject devel­ ops certain defences, which Klein called “manic defences,” in order to bear what at times seems unbearable. Among these manic defences, Klein gives prominence to the mechanism of omnipotence, precisely because this mecha­ nism appears very often as a symptom in the clinical picture of manic adults. The omnipotence of the aggressor, which was constantly shown by the Nazis towards their victims, is a manic defence against an inner sense of helpless­ ness, because the integration of the object and the mourning and working through processes were not adequately successful. Klein’s first reference to omnipotence is in her analysis of the case study of five-year-old Fritz in 1923. She referred to his “feeling of omnipotence” and identified it with Freud’s “belief in the omnipotence of thought.” In the case of Fritz, “omnipotence” as a characteristic of normal development describes the child’s sense that “[a]nything that was being spoken of—any skill or handicraft—Fritz was sure that he could do perfectly, even when the contrary was proved to him.”111 In 1935, Klein went further to define omnipotence as a basic characteristic of mania, while in 1940, she described omnipotent phantasies as an early defence mechanism, and, more specifi­ cally, as part of what she termed the “manic position.”112 The omnipotence defence mechanism empowers the ego against its “internal persecutors,” that is its manic and depressive phantasies, as well as “a slavish and perilous dependence upon its loved objects.”113 In 1946, Klein went on to describe yet two more manic defences linked with omnipotence: omnipotent idealisa­ tion of the good object on the one hand and omnipotent annihilation of the threatening object and denial of the stressful condition on the other. This occurs through the splitting process of the object and is linked to immature or disturbed ego structures.114 But how did Dicks employ omnipotence in his analysis of the SS? First, he detected omnipotence in the German people more broadly, especially after the 1918 defeat. “Omnipotence fantasy and hubris,” he argued, are psychological defences of dangerous import against inner feel­ ings of constraint and submissiveness. Men with such feelings tend to

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compensate for them by identifying with group power under a great leader who becomes the repository of decision, responsibility and conscience—in effect, deified.115 Dicks considered Heinrich Himmler the paradigmatic example of a “decent little man” who became one of the greatest killers of all times under the compulsion of omnipotence fantasies.116 Dicks portrayed Doctor MO, a public health doctor interviewed in 1969 in Tegel prison, and his obsession with killing his 26 mental patients as “a wish for omnipotence—the claim to be arbiters on who may survive and who must die.”117 Dicks’s Columbus Series book, however, did not come without some criti­ cism. In 1973, Dicks exchanged some letters with the psychohistorian Lloyd Demause with regard to a book review of Licensed Mass Murder that the psychohistorian and Holocaust scholar George M. Kren was about to pub­ lish in the newly established History of Childhood Quarterly (as The Journal of Psychohistory was formerly known). Unlike the usual representation of the psychohistorians as urging to psychoanalyse everything, Kren accused Dicks of a pointless attempt to psychoanalyse the former SS officers: “The personality and character structure of those who ran Auschwitz,” argued Kren, “is as irrelevant to the operation of the camps and to our understand­ ing of them as the personality structure of U.S. pilots is to the bombing of Haiphong.” Dicks’s reply to justify himself was that his book “was not meant to be an authoritative history of the Nazi revolution, but a study of what kind of men responded to the call of ‘Mein Kampf’s’ author by allowing themselves to become his willing tools.”118 Dicks was not writing the his­ tory of the SS or Nazi Germany but rather attempting to trace the personal­ ity traits, behavioural tendencies, and unconscious motivations behind the action of some very specific individuals who served as SS officials during the Nazi regime. Therefore, he cannot, legitimately, be fully criticised for his psychoanalytical approach to history. He can, however, be criticised for some arbitrary comments of a psychoanalytic nature about German history more broadly, such as the aforementioned example that all Germans were longing for a lost/distant/not appropriately mourned/bad father figure. Nonetheless, when he recommended Leites as a participant to the Columbus Centre, he presented the latter’s employment of psychoanalysis in his methodology as “not forcing interpretations beyond suggestive or illuminating comments on rich first-hand data, letting these speak to our insight.”119 Anthony Storr and a psychoanalytic view of human destructiveness Anthony Storr was “Britain’s most literary psychiatrist,” according to one of his obituarists and “the best writer on [psychoanalytic] subjects in this country” according to David Astor.120 He was also a psy-professional who, in 1972, published his monograph Human Destructiveness in the Colum­ bus Book Series.121 Indeed, Storr perceived the aim of the Columbus Centre

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to be to provide an explanation of human destructiveness. Given that, as aforementioned he was not very content with his Columbus Series account, Storr admitted that he saw his own role in it as a “limited contribution” of a “practicing psychotherapist.”122 Storr was born in London in 1920. He was the youngest of four siblings, with his father and mother being already 51 and 44 years old respectively at the time of his birth. According to his own account, he spent an unhappy and lonely childhood suffering from chronic asthma and occasional depressive episodes. Storr went to Christ’s College at Cambridge to study Medicine and, subsequently, in 1941, Westminster Hospital Medical School. The physical chemist and well-known novelist C. P. Snow, by that time a fellow of Christ’s College, became Storr’s tutor and close friend at Cambridge. In fact, it seems to have been he who encouraged Storr to follow the path of psychiatry. After obtaining his degree in 1944 and his membership in the Royal College of Physicians in 1946, he worked at the Maudsley Hospital. Storr was particu­ larly attracted to psychoanalysis and Jungian theory and completed his train­ ing through the latter approach in 1951. He worked as a psychotherapist in private practice until 1974, when he took up a teaching appointment at the Warnefield hospital in Oxford.123 Despite his great interest in psychoanalysis, Storr’s books reveal a practi­ tioner who rejected narrow dogmatism. Indeed, in an interview with the Eng­ lish novelist Will Self, whose mother was treated by Storr, he admitted that to a large extent psychoanalysis was a function of his own difficulties in form­ ing relationships with people. In a similar manner to what Lucy Astor had said about her father’s attachment to psychoanalysis, Storr’s interest derived from his own personal benefit from psychoanalysis rather than a theoretical conviction.124 Beyond his interest in psychoanalysis, Storr was also very concerned with human rights, making him a suitable participant for the Columbus Centre, at least in Astor’s eyes. For example, in 1960, he published an article in the New Statesman under the title “Torture Without Violence.” In it, he exposed the wartime use of psychiatrists to interrogate and torture prison­ ers as well as the fact that innocent people could also falsely confess under circumstances of torture.125 Will Self wrote accordingly that Storr was “the thinking person’s shrink, the Hampstead shrink, the north Oxford shrink. More literary than technical; rational and melioristic.” Self concluded his description by describing Storr as “a kind of social democrat of the mind,”126 which is particularly interesting in the context of our discussion, because it shows how not only politics derive from emotions but also how personality traits can be understood through ideological terms. Indeed, Storr confessed to Self that the concentration camps had haunted him all his life. “They,” he said aligning himself with Astor’s early vision about the Columbus Centre project, “set back my sense of optimism very considerably. I made myself read a lot about them, and then write, in order to seek some kind of understanding.”127

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Loyal to the Jungian psychoanalytic tradition, Storr was very interested in human creativity. His books The Dynamics of Creation (1972) and Music and the Mind (1992) deal with the therapeutic powers of creativity and music, respectively. In fact, the “creators” themselves asked for his psychi­ atric help. “One of your many admirers, I write you now seeking your help, your advice,” wrote the renowned American artist R. B. Kitaj, I am deeply troubled and so far my attempts to approach my problems through psychiatry have failed badly. I have never found anyone I can talk with to any effect and I begin to think I never will. It seems to me there must be a wise and learned psychiatrist like the man who writes your books, but I’ve not met such a person. Are you in practice?128 In addition to human creativity, Storr also closely considered its “oppo­ site,” that is, human destructiveness. In 1968, he wrote in Human Aggression that aggression is a normal aspect of the human psyche. In his subsequent book Human Destructiveness (1972), published under the auspices of the Columbus Centre, he further elaborated this particular theme. Storr nar­ rowed down the main themes of his book to the manifestations of human destructiveness in ideological war, such as the Cold War, concentration camps, for example those built by the Nazis, and racial violence, for example the 1967 Detroit race riots or the 1915 Armenian massacre.129 Storr was one of the principal participants in the Columbus Centre who directly underlined the role of psychotherapy more broadly and psychoa­ nalysis in particular to the understanding of historical events. “Whatever political and social factors may be important in determining the behaviour of nations,” he argued, it remains true that decisions are ultimately made by individuals, who are influenced both by the conception of human nature which is cur­ rent at the time, and also by the way they themselves have learned to cope with their own natures. In this field the psychotherapist may have something to add to the wider perspectives of his historical, sociologi­ cal, and economist colleagues; for his daily work is much concerned with how individuals control, or fail to control, violent impulses within themselves.130 Thanks to Freud, he added, and the emphasis he had placed on sexual­ ity for the economy of human psyche as well as Klein’s preoccupation with human aggression and hostility, psychoanalysis becomes an effective tool in the study of manifestations of human destructiveness, such as genocide or racial violence.131 Storr observed that psy-professionals tend to assume that the forces that drive individuals are the same that drive nations. He underlined, instead, a significant difference between aggression, which is basically biological and

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appears also in animals, and destructiveness or cruelty, which is a cultur­ ally acquired element of human character. Following, in his own words, the paradigm of his friend and colleague at Maudsley, the British psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft, Storr challenged the analysts’ tendency to “equate aggres­ sion with hate, destructiveness, and sadism” by highlighting both the original etymology of the word (ad-gradior, meaning “I  move forwards”) and the traditional signified of aggression as “dynamism, self-assertiveness, expan­ siveness, drive.”132 Indeed, Storr argued that the exercise of aggression in war, which may derive from the will to survive, does not need to be accompanied by the hatred or destructiveness that invokes the Freudian death drive.133 Interestingly enough, Storr also challenged another explanation often employed by clinicians to explain human cruelty and violence as a result of an “unhappy childhood.” Storr argued that the behaviour of Nazi officials in the concentration camps and the participants in the famous obedience experiment of Stanley Milgram provided good examples of how ordinary people with no obvi­ ous psychopathology or unhappy childhoods can be trained first to overlook cruelty and then to behave cruelly to fellow humans themselves. “To be an Eich­ mann,” Storr observed, echoing Arendt’s “banality of evil,” “is less rare than to be a saint.”134 And it is this “ordinariness” of the Nazi crimes to which Storr, and the Columbus Centre’s members more broadly, sought to shed more light. Not attributing the Nazi crimes to unhappy childhoods does not mean that Storr repudiated the role of psychoanalysis. To the contrary, he stressed the influence of the early experiences in the life of an adult. It is true though that he did also point out the limitations of a dogmatic appropriation of psychoanalytic theory and the pathologisation of a society or culture. He even brought in the analytical category of class to his work by mention­ ing in the very beginning of his book that it is not safe to draw conclusions about society based on the experience of a psychotherapist, since it is limited “to a highly selected class of individuals who might briefly be described as Western-educated, sophisticated, intelligent, complex and prosperous.”135 At the same time, however, Storr analysed the conditions under which otherwise “normal” and even “highly intelligent” people are easily persuaded to accept “the most absurd calumnies about supposed enemies,” such as “witches, Negroes, Jews and other minority groups” through psychoanalytic theory. Storr belonged to the Jungian psychoanalytic tradition, and he even wrote in a letter to Rycroft that the feminist and psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell is “virtually the only Kleinian” whom he liked and admired.136 However, indi­ cating precisely how undogmatic he was, while he did not like the Kleinians he chose, just like Dicks, to analyse human destructiveness through Klein. Like Dicks, Storr argued that this kind of human cruelty against certain minorities and groups of people who have been demonised is linked with paranoid pro­ jection. More specifically, he associated human cruelty with the recurrence of the paranoid position in adult life that renders people capable of “falling in hate.”137 This paranoid projection describes the mechanism by which internal rage is projected instead on persons in the environment, so that instead of

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recognising one’s own violence, the subject feels that the threat comes from the outside and is turned against the self.138 “Directly our paranoid potential is aroused,” he argued, “it is as if we set foot into a mythological world inhabited, not by human beings but by demons, ogres and witches whose evil practices can only be combated by equal malice on our own part.”139 It is thus very easy, according to Storr’s reading of Klein, for someone to be thrown into a state of profound regression in which the defence mechanisms they employed when they were an infant are revived. Storr called this phe­ nomenon an “artificially produced” psychosis which is present in the case of brainwashing techniques and “reveals the kind of psychopathology which is present at a deep level in all of us, but which seldom comes to the surface.”140 Particularly interesting in the context of the Columbus Centre’s effort to bring together psychoanalysis with history and the social sciences is the fact that Storr adopted a sociological or rather psychosocial perspective in his conclu­ sion. He suggested that instead of looking for a specific traumatic event in the life of a child or an unhappy childhood more broadly, one should acknowledge that there is something deeply troubling in the way children are being reared in the Western World that determines how they would later handle their (normal) aggression. Storr offered the example of the Inuits as an alternative way of chil­ dren upbringing. Instead of penalising aggression, which would be inconsistent with ethological findings, or blaming the mother for a child’s, an adult’s or a whole nation’s destructiveness, Storr proposed a combined psychological and sociological examination of the factors that could and had led humans to perse­ cute and kill their fellow humans on the basis of a presumed difference. ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ The vicissitudes of the psychohistorical and psychoanalytical methodology in Britain, the Continent, and the United States, David Astor’s personal and pro­ fessional attachment to psychoanalysis, Norman Cohn’s ambiguous and also shifting views about the use of psychoanalysis in studying history, Henry Dicks’s Kleinian interpretation of the conflict situations of former SS officers, and, finally, Anthony Storr’s psychoanalytically informed understanding of human destructiveness stress how psychoanalysis was promoted as the basic lenses through which historical issues would be explained at the Columbus Centre. The original founders of the Centre translated a gap in Nazism and Holo­ caust historiography into a failure to mobilise the insights of the human sci­ ences, and most especially various applications of the talking cure. Under their guidance in the early stages of the project, bringing together psychoanalysis and history for a scholarly investigation into discrimination, racism, violence, and the preconditions of genocide became a basic stated aim of the Centre. Henry Dicks and Anthony Storr were invited to act as the psychoanalysis experts, and, although they came from different backgrounds and perspec­ tives, their systematic use of Klein, an émigré that was embraced by British psychoanalytic circles, attempted to map how humans are capable of atrocities

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such as those performed by the Nazis. Indeed in the beginning, the ambition was to make the Columbus Centre a research institute exclusively specialised in the use of psychoanalysis to study “the meaning of evil.” However, for vari­ ous reasons, the Columbus Centre did not end up playing this role. One possible reason for the failure of the Columbus Centre to become the nucleus of psychoanalytic research on mass violence was the clash between Astor and Cohn on the issue of psychoanalysis in the later stages of the pro­ ject. Astor, for all the aforementioned reasons that kept him attached to psy­ choanalysis, aimed to make it the chief interpretative tool in the Columbus Centre project. Cohn’s views, on the other hand, shifted from rather favoura­ ble to critical, if not opposed to psychoanalysis as a methodological approach to history. He commented accordingly with regard to the role of psychoa­ nalysis in the works of the project: “David Astor’s dream of throwing much light upon the awful aspects of human nature etc etc, nothing ever came of that. . . . He and I had very different ideas about what that could be.”141 Another possible reason is the fact that neither of the two supposed psy­ choanalysis experts, Dicks and Storr, had been trained in the British Psycho­ analytic Institute. Had this been the case, their work in the Centre would not have been alienated from the centre of psychoanalytical discussions of the time and from those who would have most probably received it with enthusi­ asm. Given that, as we saw, psychoanalysis had not permeated general British culture, the lack of links between the Centre and the main institution of psy­ choanalysis in Britain made the emergence of the Centre as a psychoanalytic research hub virtually impossible. A final reason is the several objections and methodological concerns regarding the use of psychoanalysis as an interpretative tool for history as well as the critique of the discipline of psychoanalysis per se that emerged during the time when the Columbus Centre operated. The most important point of critique was perhaps that psychoanalysis should only be employed as a useful analytical tool and not a doctrine; otherwise, it becomes a religion or ideology which bears its own totalising elements. Perhaps the best way to put how psychoanalysis was supposed to be employed in the Columbus Centre’s writings was, as the Centre’s participant Leon Poliakov stressed, to try cautiously and as far as possible undogmatically, to throw light upon the history of western society by means of depth psychology; for the instrument which was forged by Freud, though far from perfect, enables us to explore better than any other means, the unconscious foundations of collective beliefs.142 Poliakov also noted a very distinct advantage of psychoanalysis: The bias of Reason . . . was all the heavier in its consequences because pre-racist ideas were in any case likely to be included by the new methods

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of experimental science. Experience is observation, but it also implies instruments of observation, the magnifying-glass, the scalpel, the scales. Until the invention of psychoanalysis, positive science investigated only what was tangible in man, only what could be weighed and measured.143 Although psychoanalysis was also partially influenced by the positivist tra­ dition of the nineteenth century and served as a tool of social control via the taxonomies it provided for normal and not-normal, the principle of the unconscious—that has recently been attempted to be measured and imaged through modern neurosciences—allowed for its employment as the glue, as the resort for when words and numbers and reason eludes us. Hence, although problematic in various ways, a critically engaged employment of psychoanalysis in the study of history can break a well-established stereotype that the Nazis were mad, exceptionally sadistic, and a unique type of perpe­ trators, presenting them, instead, as “ordinary” and “banal” human beings. As we know well, Hannah Arendt was by no means a Freud enthusiast. Yet, the Columbus Centre project was inspired by both Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” and the psychoanalytic notion of normal and ubiquitous unconscious murderous fantasies. Still, the resistance to employing psychoanalysis in the study of the long history of so-called inhumanity, as chronicled by many scholars and, in the end, by Norman Cohn himself, seems to lie in the fact that it risks normalis­ ing and trivialising evil. Nonetheless, perhaps this resistance does not only lie in the ethical implications of normalising evil but in the threatening prospect of seeing evil as a potential aspect of the normal self. In “The Meaning of Eichmann,” Astor argued accordingly that “people’s difficulty in reacting [to the Nazi crimes] is connected, as some psychologists have suggested, with a numbing inner awareness of the possibilities of violence that exist in man­ kind.”144 We all are, in other words, in a constant battle with Nazism’s, and virtually any other comparable example of mass violence, “inner demons.” The role of psychoanalysis lies in providing a language for understanding these demons, re-imagining our political and historical lives, and tracing the ever-evasive meaning of what it is to be human. Notes 1 See Henry Dicks, Towards a Psychology of Fascism, n.d.; Walter Laqueur, Let­ ter to Henry Dicks, 1 September 1975; Henry Dicks, Letter to Walter Laqueur, 16 September 1975, in Henry Dicks Collection, Wellcome Archives, Section PP/ HVD/F: Authoritarian psychology and collective psychopathology 1970–1976, Box  8, Folder: Lectures, drafts and unpublished papers. For Laqueur’s edited volume, see Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Aldershot: Wildwood House Limited, 1976). 2 Francis L. Carsten, “Interpretations of Fascism,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Walter Laqueur (Aldershot: Wildwood House Limited, 1976), 425. 3 Henry Dicks, “Deadly Fantasies,” New Statesman, February 16, 1973.

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51

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37 Lloyd Demause, Foundations of Psychohistory (New York: Creative Roots, 1982), ii. 38 Ibid., iv. 39 See Peter Loewenberg, “The Psychohistorical Origins of the Nazi Youth Cohort,” The American Historical Review 76, no. 5 (1971); and Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler. 40 See Gay, Freud for Historians; and Loewenberg, Decoding the Past. 41 See David Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud & the Failure of Psychohis­ tory (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 42 Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, & His­ tory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 43 Ross, “Freud and the Vicissitudes of Modernism in the United States, 1940–1980.” 44 Nevitt Sanford, Letter to Norman Cohn, 15 April 1966, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. 45 Daniel Pick, Interview with Lucy Astor, “The Roots of Extremism,” BBC Radio 4, March 17, 2014. 46 Sampson, “Observing David Astor.” 47 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A  Biography (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 357. Bridget Astor, 60th Birthday Let­ ter to Anna Freud, 6 December  1955, in Anna Freud Papers (1880–1998), AF/03/07/02/041. 48 David Astor, Letter to Anna Freud, 28 February 1964; Anna Freud, Letter to David Astor, 3 March  1964, Astor Papers: Box  10 BH, Folder: Project Spon­ sors 1962–64. Samuel A. Guttman, “Robert Waelder—1900–1967,” Interna­ tional Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50 (1969): 269–73; Rudolph M. Loewenstein, “Heinz Hartmann—1894–1970,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 51 (1970): 417–19. Despite Anna Freud’s suggestion, research into the Colum­ bus Centre’s archives have not yet revealed any contact between Astor or any other Columbus Centre member and either Waelder or Hartmann. 49 Anna Freud, “Educational and Psychological Techniques for Changing Mental Attitudes Affecting International Understanding,” (1948) in the UNESCO Doc­ umentary Database, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001581/158149eb. pdf, accessed online on 11 April 2016. 50 Joseph Sandler, ed., Dimensions of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1989), vii, ix–xv. 51 James Lighthill, “Foreword: The Freud Memorial Professorship at University College London,” in Dimensions of Psychoanalysis, ed. Joseph Sandler (Lon­ don: Karnac Books, 1989), x. 52 Ibid., xi–xv. 53 David Astor, Letter to Norman Cohn, 24 March 1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1964–65. 54 Cockett, David Astor and the Observer, 169. For The Observer leader, see Astor, “The Meaning of Eichmann.” 55 The title “the meaning of . . .” may have been chosen by Astor, judging by its similarity to other titles he gave, such as: Astor, “The Meaning of Eichmann”; Dennis Bloodworth, “The Meaning of the Witch-Hunt,” The Observer, Novem­ ber  13, 1955; OM Green, “The Meaning of Maoism,” The Observer, Octo­ ber 12, 1952; Kathleen Kenyon, “The Real Meaning of Masada,” The Observer, April  11, 1965; Anthony Sampson, “The Meaning of Watergate,” August  4, 1973; “The Meaning of Malan,” The Observer, May 30, 1948. Nancy ProcterGregg, “The Mind of Man,” The Observer, April  29, 1956; Nancy ProcterGregg, “Conflicts & Cure,” The Observer, May 6, 1956; W. Hoffer, “Medicine

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56 57 58

59

60 61

62

63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

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since Freud,” The Observer, May 20, 1956; Philip Toynbee, “Freud and Litera­ ture,” The Observer, June 3, 1956; David Stafford-Clark, “Freud and Religion,” The Observer, May 27, 1956. See The Guardian and the Observer digital archive at www.theguardian.com/ info/2012/jul/25/digital-archive-notice, accessed 30 October 2015. Roger Money-Kyrle, “Dr. John Rickman,” The Times, July 9, 1951; “Dr. Karen Horney,” The Times, December 6, 1952; “Mrs. Melanie Klein: Exploring the Child Mind,” The Times, September 23, 1960. Gordon Rattray Taylor, “The Proper Study,” The Observer, June  11, 1950; Our Psychology Correspondent, “Psychoanalysis and the Universities,” The Observer, March 14, 1965; “Profile-C. G. Jung,” The Observer, July 11, 1948; “Profile-Dr. Ernest Jones,” The Observer, July 26, 1953; Charles Rycroft, “The Kleinian Viewpoint,” The Observer, April 9, 1961; Philip Toynbee, “Mistress to an Age,” The Observer, May 5, 1963. Charles Rycroft, “Problem Children,” The Observer, February 5, 1961; Don­ ald Winnicott, “Strength out of Misery,” The Observer, May 31, 1964; Mar­ garet Mead, “Transatlantic Man,” The Observer, August  29, 1948; Geoffrey Gorer, “Putting Us in Our Places,” The Observer, January  3, 1960; Geoffrey Gorer, “Freudian Interpretations,” The Observer, May  16, 1971. For Gorer’s correspondence with Henry Dicks, see Dicks, Henry 30 letters, pcs. 1955– 1975 at the Geoffrey Gorer Archives held at the University of Sussex Library, SxMs52/4/1/1/4/26. Anthony Storr, “Churchill,” The Observer, May 30, 1969. “From Keystone to Kafka,” The Observer, November 15, 1970; Kenneth Tynan, “Traumatic Values,” The Observer, July 27, 1958; Joyce Egginton, “Women’s Lib,” The Observer, January 31, 1971; John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “The Acid Dream Is over,” The Observer, March 7, 1971. A well-known example was provided by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who drew on Marx and Freud to analyse fascist ideology, for which see Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946). David Astor, Letter to Norman Cohn, 24 March 1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1964–65. Norman Cohn, Letter to David Astor, 8 April 1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1964–65. Cf. Ch. 3, fn 124. Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. Norman Cohn, Letter to David Astor, 23 July 1962, Astor Papers: Box 10 BH, Folder: Project General 1958–62. Norman Cohn, Letter to David Astor, 23 July  1962; David Astor, Letter to Norman Cohn, 16 November 1962; Norman Cohn, Letter to David Astor, 17 November  1962; Norman Cohn, Letter to David Astor 19 November  1962, Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: Project General 1958–62. Norman Cohn, Letter to Nevitt Sanford, 24 December  1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. Norman Cohn, Letter to Nevitt Sanford, 8 July 1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 258. Ibid., 260–1. Ibid., 263. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 234. Ibid. Ibid. “The Roots of Extremism.”

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103 For Klein’s original contributions to the theory of the depressive position, see Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States”; and Melanie Klein, “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” in The Writings of Melanie Klein, Volume I, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1937); and Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 21 (1940): 125–53. Also, for two well-written psychoanalytic dictionaries, see Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis; and R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dic­ tionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1989). 104 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 54. 105 Ibid., 23–29. For a recent discussion on the debate about mothering in post-war Britain, see Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 106 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 108. 107 Ibid., 126. 108 Ibid., 106. 109 Ibid., 40. 110 Ibid., 36. 111 Klein, “The Development of a Child.” 112 Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States”; and Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.” 113 Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States.” 114 Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” 115 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 39. 116 Ibid., 48. 117 Ibid., 149. 118 See Lloyd deMause, Letter to Henry Dicks, 10 October  1973; Henry Dicks, Letter to Lloyd deMause, 29 October 1973; George M. Kren, “The Limits of Psychology,” draft of book review of H. V. Dicks’s Licensed Mass Murder in History of Childhood Quarterly (1973), as it appears in Henry Dicks Collection, Wellcome Archives, Section PP/HVD/F: Authoritarian psychology and collective psychopathology 1970–1976, Box 8, Folder: Press Reviews. Cf. fn. 42. 119 Henry Dicks, Letter to David Astor, 4 March 1963, in Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: Columbus Trust Working Party 1963–64. 120 Anthony Stevens, “Anthony Storr: Formerly Honorary Consultant Psychia­ trist, Oxford Health Authority,” Psychiatric Bulletin 25, no. 9 (2001): 365–66. David Astor, Letter to Norman Cohn, 24 March 1965, Astor paper, Box 10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1964–65. 121 Storr, Human Destructiveness. 122 Ibid. 123 See “Obituaries: Anthony Storr,” The Telegraph, March  21, 2001; Stevens, “Anthony Storr: Formerly Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Oxford Health Authority”; and Anthony Stevens, “Anthony Storr: Gifted Psychiatrist Whose Compassionate Approach Was Born of His Own Childhood Suffering and Lone­ liness,” The Guardian, March 20, 2001. 124 Will Self, “Clearing My Mind over Mater,” The Times, October 22, 1992. 125 Anthony Storr, “Torture without Violence,” New Statesman, March 12, 1960. 126 Self, “Clearing My Mind over Mater.” 127 Ibid. 128 R. B. Kitaj, Letter to Anthony Storr, n.d., Charles Rycroft Collection, Wellcome Archives, Section PP/RYC/B.97: Anthony Storr, Box 12. 129 Storr, Human Destructiveness, 9–10.

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130 131 132 133 134 135 136

Ibid., 12. Ibid. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 9. Anthony Storr, Letter to Charles Rycroft, n.d., Charles Rycroft Collection, Wellcome Archives, Section PP/RYC/B.97 “Anthony Storr,” Box 12. However, although Juliet Mitchell edited the Selected Melanie Klein (1987), her analysis is not necessarily a Kleinian one nor does she identify as Kleinian, but rather as “independent,” see Melanie Klein, Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: The Free Press, 1987). Storr, Human Destructiveness, 80–87. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 101–102. Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 4. Ibid., 148. Astor, “The Meaning of Eichmann.”

137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

2

This age of unenlightened despotism Modernity, class, and the Columbus Centre

On 18 May  1966, Harry Dee, an American resident of New Paltz, New York, who worked as editor in the technical public relations department of IBM’s Components Division, addressed an envelope to David Astor, which included the following handwritten note: “Don’t worry about genocide. THE BOMB will take care of everything.”1 On the back side of the note there was a typewritten anonymous poem titled “Epitaph for Humanity,” which reads in part: When man’s A-bombs are exploded, And nuclear war is begun; When Balls of Fire sear the earth, And Death Clouds hide the sun— The victor will die with the vanquished, Both blasted into traceless dust; Humanity will breathe its last gasp, And disappear—as it must. . . . There’ll be no more human strife, No Christian, Moslem, Jew; No fiends to torture millions of Souls— No Mozarts or Schwitzers, too! Harry Dee’s pessimistic and somewhat mystical attitude towards the atomic bomb could be justified within the social and political context of the Cold War. Contemporary popular culture was largely infiltrated by the nuclear threat, as manifested in apocalyptic novels like Pat Frank’s Alas, Baby­ lon (1959) or films such as Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe (1964), Stanley Kubric’s classic comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), and Peter Watkin’s BBC documentary The War Game (1965). Dee’s corresponding fear was that humanity’s catastrophic tendencies would lead to its annihilation, as well as the destruction of any cultural and intellectual achievement of the DOI: 10.4324/9780429197314-3

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Enlightened West: no more Mozarts or Schwitzers, we read. A paradigmatic product of modern capitalist system such as the atomic bomb threatened to eliminate all other exemplary modern outcomes, such as Mozart’s classi­ cal music or pioneers like the American mechanical engineer and recognised automobile race driver Louis H. Schwitzer (1880–1967). The message of this particular correspondent from New Paltz, albeit obscure in itself, invites a historiographical question taken up at the Colum­ bus Centre: what could the consequences of modernity truly be? Dee high­ lighted to Astor this modern and indeed ubiquitous nuclear threat that now existed, and which in part had generated the very urgency for new thinking, and for action, that had galvanised members of the Columbus Centre to study genocide in the first place. “Entire generations,” writes Eric Hobs­ bawm accordingly, “grew up under the shadow of global nuclear battles which, it was widely believed, could break out at any moment, and devastate humanity. . . . It did not happen, but for some forty years it looked a daily possibility.”2 Besides, “holocaust” (spelled with a lowercase “h”) was a term that in the early post-war period was employed in order to describe both the Nazi atrocities and the nuclear threat. As Jacqueline Rose observes, the word “holocaust” first entered popular culture in the late 1940s as a reference to the prospect of nuclear catastrophe, before being projected back on to the concentration camps, while Jon Petrie argues that the word “holocaust” without a contextual framework was widely understood as nuclear warfare by 1961.3 Ran Zwigenberg, a historian of East Asia, argued in Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (2014) that until the 1980s, it was common to refer to the Hiroshima nuclear bomb and Auschwitz “as the twin horrors of the war,” and it was the emergence of memory studies only after the end of the Cold War, and, of course, Eurocentrism, that resulted in the marginalisation of Hiroshima.4 Indeed, this shared terminology could be an indication of the anxiety that both the camps and the nuclear bomb triggered. The timing of Dee’s letter, namely 18 May  1966, indicates that it may have been inspired by Bernard Bard’s article “After Eichmann,” which had appeared in the New York Post the day before.5 This article discussed David Astor’s role in the upcoming project of the Columbus Centre and his fund­ raising trip to the United States. It referred to Astor as “a supremely civilized man” and discussed his motivation in pursuing an academic study under the auspices of the Columbus Centre. The following quote by Astor is included in the article: We have the choice of either putting this painful subject aside, of con­ sidering Auschwitz as a meaningless aberration, an event that has no relevance to the rest of human behaviour; or we can accept it as part of the human story, something that ordinary people did, that therefore has to be fitted into our idea of human nature and of ourselves.6

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These lines reveal Astor’s standpoint on the historiographical debate that was crucially entangled with the Columbus Centre’s works: whether Auschwitz, the Holocaust’s most common metonymy, could be regarded as a break in history, a “meaningless aberration” in Astor’s words, or an essential part of modern history’s continuity. In his 1962 speech that triggered the creation of the Columbus Centre, Astor seems to have taken a stance in this debate: When a great event, so terrible, so strange, so nearly insane as this hap­ pens, here in the centre of the most advanced continent of the world, in one of the mother countries of our European civilization, in the middle of the twentieth century, one would have expected at least an enquiry comparable to that currently devoted to the minor crimes of our juve­ nile delinquents, or a study comparable to that which has been devoted to the relatively small-scale killings of the Kikuyu and other such primi­ tive tribes. But this has not happened.7 Astor stresses the fact that the Nazi atrocities that took place “in the centre of the most advanced continent of the world” and “in the middle of the twentieth century” are essentially a product of modernity. The significance that he attributed to the nuclear threat is also indicative of his point of view: since it happened once in the modern period, it could happen again. For Astor, atrocities similar to those performed by the Nazis were not limited to Germany, nor were they always racially motivated. To link it back to the discussion of the nuclear threat, it was the Americans—seemingly radiant in their modern lifestyle—that in August 1945 caused large-scale atrocities by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.8 Astor’s interest in the nuclear threat in not only evident in the fact that he kept Dee’s—an unknown person’s—note in his personal file on the Columbus Centre and, of course in the fact that he was an advocate for nuclear disarma­ ment,9 but also in his earlier Commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Upris­ ing speech that eventually led to the foundation of the Columbus Centre. In it he had posited the imagined and menacing prospect of a new genocide in the context of the Cold War, the prospect of a genocide on the grounds of political belief: Communists versus their opponents in the West.10 Most importantly, in this speech, Astor hinted at a historiographical question that stands right at the heart of the Columbus Centre’s works and debates: was the Holocaust, almost unquestionably the most frequently discussed genocide in the Western world and also, of course, the main topic of the Columbus Centre’s study, a product of modernity, the Enlightenment, and the capitalist system or, rather, a break in the history of human progress, like some atavistic relapse to pre­ modern barbarism? Or to put it differently, how can intentional mass vio­ lence on such a scale be understood in a modern cultural framework? This debate appears to be the most problematic of all the historiographical controversies that overshadowed the Columbus Centre’s inquiries. In what

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follows, I will present the opposing views evident within this long-standing historiographical debate from a historical perspective, while illustrating, at the same time, the ways in which this debate was central to the work of Léon Poliakov, Norman Cohn, Henry Dicks, and other researchers at the Centre. Historicising modernity’s evil doings Early post-war British responses to Nazism

One of the earliest British post-war accounts about National Socialism and Hitler can be found in The Last Days of Hitler (1947), written by the Oxfordbased historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. The Last Days of Hitler was commis­ sioned in September  1945, initially as a report by the Counter-Intelligence Unit of the British Zone of Germany, in order to investigate Hitler’s absence when the Allies and the Red Army arrived in Berlin.11 This probably hap­ pened because, after initially confirming Hitler’s death, the Soviets started purposely to spread Hitler’s “survival myth,” revealing “one of the first har­ bingers of the bitterness of the embryonic cold war.”12 Consequently, the Deputy Director of MI6, Dick White, sent Trevor-Roper to Berlin in order to examine this issue with his own eyes, combining his skills in meticulous historical research with the intelligence experience he had acquired during his military war service. Trevor-Roper’s central thesis was that Hitler was an ideologue and a demagogue whose spell lasted long on his people: “when he wanted to mes­ merize, he did have the wherewithal,” said Trevor-Roper in an interview with journalist Ron Rosenbaum for the latter’s book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (1998).13 Rosenbaum records how TrevorRoper supported the view that Hitler was a “sincere believer”: “What Mein Kampf revealed about Hitler to Trevor-Roper was something that few took seriously before the war and even after: ‘a powerful, horrible message which he had thought out, a philosophy.’ ”14 We read accordingly in The Last Days of Hitler: For by the winter of 1944 the positive alternative of the formula had failed, as all knew except a few still blinded devotees. That positive alternative was described in general terms as “world power,” or “histor­ ical greatness”; more particularly defined, it meant one thing only—the conquest of Russia, the extermination of the Slavs, and the colonization of the East. This was the real message of Nazism. It is the burden of Mein Kampf. . . . All the general concepts of that terrible creed conceal a particular anti-Russian significance. Racialism means the supremacy of Germans to Slavs; “living space” and “geopolitics” mean the con­ quest of their territory; the rule of the “master race” means the enslave­ ment of their surviving population.15

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Two things are striking in this passage. The first one is the extreme signifi­ cance that Trevor-Roper attributed to Hitler’s anti-Slav/anti-Russian ideol­ ogy for the outcome of the war. The second one is the absence of reference either to antisemitic ideology or the Jews themselves as a similar motivation of Hitler’s actions. When we contextualise the book in its cultural frame­ work, that is, as a product of the immediate post-war period commissioned by the British military as a response to the Soviet rumours of Hitler’s sur­ vival, we can more easily explain Trevor-Roper’s choice. The book comprises an exceptional scholarly work of the last stage of the war and a challeng­ ing account of Hitler’s persona; it is, however, almost a natural extension of wartime writings, where the Jewish genocide was largely concealed. At the same time, Trevor-Roper’s account is a product of the then newly emergent Cold War, during which the Russians, and more specifically the Soviets, were characterised as the archenemy of the West. Indeed Trevor-Roper’s 1953 introductory note to Hitler’s Table Talk, the transcribed monologues and dialogues of Hitler between 1941 and 1944, “The mind of Adolf Hitler,” became, according to Rosenbaum, “the foundation document of an entire school of Hitler explanation: the ideological school that gained popularity and had occasional impressive expositors (J. P. Stern in England, Eberhard Jäckel in Germany) in the 1970s.”16 Trevor-Roper was not only in favour of this ideological school but also, naturally, against one rival historiographical school of his time, most notori­ ously represented by his compatriot and another early biographer of Hitler, Alan Bullock. In 1952, Bullock, a historian of antiquity during the pre-war period who was also based at Oxford, published one of the first historically documented biographies of Adolf Hitler and subsequent world bestseller Hitler: A Study in Tyranny.17 Indeed, in 1967, Columbus Centre academic director Norman Cohn characterised it as indispensable for the study of the history of the Nazi movement.18 Unlike Trevor-Roper’s account, Hitler appeared in Bullock’s book as a “mountebank”19: “An opportunist entirely without principle,” Bullock argued, he showed considerable consistency and an astonishing power of will in pursuing his aims. Cynical and calculating in the exploitation of his histrionic gifts, he retained an unshaken belief in his historic role and in himself as a creature of destiny.20 A reviewer of Bullock’s book commented accordingly in 1953 that [i]t was Hitler’s evil genius that he was able to exploit such techniques to perfection in order to gain the prize which he sought, the possession of unlimited power which he could employ on behalf of the nation whose fate he had identified with his own.21

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Instead of the ideological domination that Trevor-Roper saw in Hitler’s motives, Bullock focused on his ignoble passions: His career did not exalt but debased the human condition, and his twelve years’ dictatorship was barren of all ideas save one—the further extension of his own power and that of the nation with which he had identified himself.22 The epigraph of Bullock’s book was inspired by his former interest in the classical world, deriving directly from Aristotle’s Politics; most strikingly, it also reveals his book’s twofold aim: “Men do not become tyrants in order to keep out the cold.”23 On the one hand, Hitler was presented as a dictator who did everything out of his unlimited will to power and not out of a desire to comfort himself or his people; on the other, he was a tyrant who could be compared with a plethora of other tyrants throughout history. When Bullock was asked by Rosenbaum to comment on his Aristotelian epigraph, the fol­ lowing dialogue was produced: “All right: Men become tyrants because they wish to exercise power. It is not for material betterment or comfort, but because they have an itch for power.” “The love of power for its own sake?”

“That was my view of Hitler then. It’s changed, you know.”24

While Bullock’s original view in the 1950s, and in the various re-editions of the book in the 1960s, was that Hitler did what he did out of sole interest in power, when he was interviewed by Rosenbaum at some point between 1994 and 1995, he admitted a shift in his thinking: “I now think the ideology is central. I  think it’s what armors Hitler against remorse, guilt, anything. Hitler was unmovable on this ideology, this belief that he was the man sent by providence.”25 The second point of controversy between Bullock’s and Trevor-Roper’s schools of thought is that the former presented Hitler as an extreme example of a known historical category: “In this Age of Unenlightened Despotism,” wrote Bullock in 1952, lending us the title of the current chapter, Hitler has had more than a few rivals, yet he remains, so far, the most remarkable of those who have used modern techniques to apply the classic formulas of tyranny .  .  . Hitler will have his place in history, but it will be alongside Attila the Hun, the barbarian king who was surnamed, not “the Great,” but “the Scourge of God.”26 Bullock’s use of the phrase “Unenlightened Despotism” to describe the twentieth century as well as his focus on Hitler’s employment of mod­ ern techniques in the application of an ancient recipe is notable here; it is

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precisely Hitler’s “modern profile” that makes him an extreme case of a series of “unenlightened despots.” Rosenbaum commented accordingly that: Bullock’s Hitler, in that context, seems to be a deliberately deflated figure, particularly in contrast with the irrational, demonic Hitler Trevor-Roper had given the postwar world. Bullock’s Hitler was, if not a rationalist, then a man of shrewdly rational calculation, a humanscale schemer, an astute and able politician, not a monster of madness or an evil genius of theological dimensions who burst the bounds of previous frameworks of explanation.27 After reconsidering his rationale, Bullock came up with an idea about Hitler which synthesises the two rival schools of thought that he confided to Rosen­ baum around 1994 and 1995: There may well have been the evil dream of a final solution [early on, but] this remains speculation. . . . What is clear is that, whenever he may have first conceived the idea, Hitler’s judgment of what was practical in carrying out his fantasies . . . meant [that the idea for the Holocaust] developed by stages [and] was not programmatic but evolutionary.28 Bullock was not the only historian in the judgments of whom Trevor-Roper differed. In 1961, the then Oxford-based historian A. J. P. Taylor pub­ lished The Origins of the Second World War, an alternative and revisionist approach to the motivations and causes behind the war. The basic revision­ ist points of Taylor’s book are as follows: first, that the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War was to a great extent responsible for the disaster that followed; second, that the British foreign policy of appease­ ment that played a crucial role in the origins of the Second World War was a significantly popular programme devised by Neville Chamberlain and not, as it was then widely believed, imposed by Hitler29; and, last but not least, that Hitler should be seen as an ordinary man, a typical German statesman and neither a wicked and monstrous madman nor a mastermind holding sole responsibility for planning and executing the war. To put it differently, Taylor was critical towards the two versions of Hitler in the historiography of his time: the one of being “a maniac, a nihilist, a second Attila” who, for his own sake, wanted evil and destruction to fall upon people and civilisa­ tion; and the other, more constructive, one of having “a coherent, long-term plan of an original nature which he pursued with unwavering persistence.”30 Taylor’s view was that Hitler was neither mad nor a leader with a careful plan from the very beginning—with the sole but crucial exception of his core antisemitic beliefs which accompanied him from his first until his last day. He, thus, opposed both Trevor-Roper’s view that Hitler was a mesmerising ideologue and Bullock’s early contention that he did what he did out of mere will for power. He claimed that Hitler was not a system-maker nor had he

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prepared and then followed a detailed preconceived plan but proceeded step by step as events unfolded. It is rather the historians, argued Taylor, that construct the systems in hindsight: The systems are created by historians . . . and the systems attributed to Hitler are really those of Hugh Trevor-Roper, Elizabeth Wiskemann,31 and Alan Bullock. There is some ground for these speculations. Hitler was himself an amateur historian, or rather a generaliser on history; and he created systems in his spare time. These systems were day-dreams. Chaplin grasped this, with an artist’s genius, when he showed the Great Dictator transforming the world into a toy balloon and kicking it to the ceiling with the point of his toe. Hitler always saw himself, in these day­ dreams, as master of the world. But the world which he dreamt to mas­ ter and the way he would do it changed with changing circumstances.32 Taylor’s book is now recognised as a significant turning point in British histo­ riography of the Second World War. However, what was striking at the time was the degree of controversy it evoked. When he was writing the book, Tay­ lor was afraid that the origins of the Second World War “had little attraction when men were already studying the origins of the third one.”33 When the book came out it became clear that people’s preoccupation with the “Third World War,” that is the Cold War, did not make them uninterested in the book’s approach and theme but rather furious because it deconstructed a convenient narrative in the context of the hegemonic ideology of the Cold War. Historian Gordon Martel, who edited a volume devoted to historio­ graphical discussion of Taylor’s Origins of Second World War, explains the “storm” that the book evoked on grounds of the great challenge that it posed to “an interpretation of the war’s origins that had until 1961 satisfied almost everyone in the post-war world”: Blaming the war on Hitler certainly suited the Germans: with the Nazis either dead or in hiding, they could claim to be blameless and to have a claim to a respectable role in the new democratic alliance. This was equally satisfactory in the west, where one might have expected an Orwellian unease to emerge when the enemy was transformed into ally and the ally into enemy—but the west now claimed to be united against “totalitarianism” rather than against states or nations. The Second World War had been fought for a great and noble principle, and this principle endured into the era of the Cold War. The enemy had merely changed location: his ambitions and tactics remained the same.34 Indeed, this feeling regarding Taylor’s account was also taken up in the Columbus Centre’s early discussions. In a 1962 letter to the Encounter edi­ tor, assistant director of the Wiener Library C.C. Aronsfeld stressed that it was necessary to run a study on Nazism in light of new historical findings.

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He referred here specifically to Taylor’s (then) recent and provocative book. Indeed, Aronsfeld criticised Taylor for the enthusiasm his book triggered in German right-wing politicians, whose “burrowings are less conspicuous but far more insidious than the ado created by the run of neo-Nazi politicians, for they prepare the ground on which the demagogues can hope to prosper.” For Aronsfeld, Taylor’s revisionist account almost cleared Hitler’s name: The “re-writing” has already gone to extraordinary lengths. The whole of the Hitler era is being blamed on the Treaty of Versailles; the Battle of Britain (it is said) was never lost because it was never fought as the Nazis never intended to invade Britain; the extermination of millions of Jews is either denied or minimised; and above all, Hitler is boosted as the far-seeing champion of a “united Europe” against Bolshevism.35 Given that Astor’s study proposal had the Wiener Library’s full support, we can safely assume that its members were, at least in the beginning, expected to ensure that “the false prophets who seek to vindicate the evil of the past” would be exposed, probably referring also to Taylor himself.36 The controversy over Taylor’s book was most famously evidenced in the response of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Trevor-Roper had also been mentioned once critically in Taylor’s account.37 In 1950, Trevor-Roper had attended a Berlin conference of anti-communist intellectuals that resulted in the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the emergence of its magazine Encounter in 1953, which 14 years later was revealed to be secretly funded by the CIA.38 He was indeed a frequent contributor to Encounter, and it is in this magazine that his critique of Taylor appeared in July 1961. Trevor-Roper opened his review by characterising Hitler as “the megalomaniac from Berlin,” openly express­ ing his position about the origins of the Holocaust. Moreover, Trevor-Roper blamed Taylor for discounting all personal memories and emotions when he presented himself as the “enlightened historian” who could interpret the past based on documents alone. His critique focused on Taylor’s view of Hitler as an ordinary German statesman without a plan; like Aronsfeld, Trevor-Roper reproached Taylor for his book being “hailed with cries of delight in neo-Nazi or semi-Nazi circles in Germany.”39 Two years later, as a response to such claims about the neo-Nazi supporters, Taylor wrote a foreword to the second edition of his book entitled “Second Thoughts” in which we read: I have no sympathy with those in this country who complained that my book had been welcomed, mistakenly or not, by former supporters of Hitler. This seems to me a disgraceful argument to be used against a work of history. A historian must not hesitate even if his books lend aid and comfort to the Queen’s enemies (though mine did not), or even to the common enemies of mankind.40

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Resisting a revisionist account of the dominant post-war explanation of the origins of the war—that Hitler alone was to blame—was not surprising for Taylor, as the old narrative satisfied everybody in Britain: both the “resisters,” like, clearly, Winston Churchill and Lewis Namier, a British historian and author of the 1952 book In the Nazi Era, who proved their point that Hitler should have been confronted from the very beginning, and the “appeasers,” like Neville Chamberlain, who exclaimed that appeasement would have been a perfect policy had it not been for this mad ruler of Germany.41 In addition, given that West Germany was seen as an ally of the West within the Cold War context, it was very convenient for everybody not to blame the Germans: “[w]ith Hitler guilty,” argued Taylor accordingly, “every other German could claim innocence” for everything: the Second World War, the concen­ tration camps, the gas chambers.42 For Taylor, instead of describing Hitler’s actions as products of madness or of a master plan, he saw them as an out­ come of the current war between Great Powers. Trevor-Roper exclaimed that he found Taylor’s revisionist historical account overall “utterly erroneous” and “demonstrably false.”43 Despite the fact that the Columbus Centre’s members were implicitly invited by one of their sponsors, the Wiener Library, to expose Taylor as a “false prophet,” Astor did not, however, choose to side with one of his most ardent critics. When he was considering his options for inviting scholars to the Columbus Centre, he expressed serious doubts about including TrevorRoper on grounds of the latter’s passionate, rather than scientific, approach. Revealing his own views and vision for the Columbus Centre’s approach towards the ordinariness of Nazism, Astor was particularly worried about how Trevor-Roper tended to attribute the deeds of Eichmann and the other Nazis to peculiarly German characteristics and to disparage the opposition to Hitler in Germany.44 Hence, he invited neither Taylor, who was controversial at the Wiener Library and other institutes from which Astor was seeking sup­ port, nor Trevor-Roper, who tended to attribute the Holocaust solely to Hit­ ler’s actions. This choice of Astor demonstrates, among other things, how he as well as the other members of the Columbus Centre imagined their research project’s approach towards modernity. Despite their differences, however, Bullock, Trevor-Roper, and Taylor did share a fundamental similarity, namely a will to know the origins of what happened, best articulated in Bullock’s own words: All of us, I think, came back wanting to know why . . . I spent the war in London during the blitz, building up the broadcasting to Europe, so I was sensitized in a big way to the politics and history of Europe of that period. I think all historians in one way or another who were drawn into the war, like Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hugh Seton-Watson, came back with the question “Why?—How did this happen?”45

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The historical visibility of 1961 This burning question of “why, how the Holocaust happened?” became even more relevant after 1961, the year that marked a shift in historiography of the Second World War with Taylor’s book. But 1961 is crucial for at least two more reasons; it is the year when the American historian Raul Hilberg pub­ lished The Destruction of the European Jews as well as the year of the Eich­ mann trial. Not surprisingly, the concurrence of the publication of one of the first historical accounts that recorded the Jewish genocide with the televised trial of one of the last-remaining perpetrators of the Nazi atrocities triggered more scholars in the Western world to write about the Holocaust. Besides, the Columbus Centre’s bibliographical production could also be considered a consequence of the 1961 greater historical visibility, given that it was pre­ cisely in 1961 when David Astor wrote the leader article “The meaning of Eichmann” in The Observer that led first to his London speech one year later and, then, to the creation of the Centre. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, that Holocaust his­ torian Michael Marrus has called “a landmark synthesis that remains unsur­ passed as a survey of the destruction process,”46 was recognised as a turning point in historiography even by his contemporaries. His reviewer at the time, Andreas Dorpalen, praised Hilberg’s account, saying that “he has covered his topic with such thoroughness that his book will long remain a basic source of information on this tragic subject.” More than 40 years after its first edition, in 2004, Tom Lawson argued that Dorpalen underestimated the impact of Hilberg’s account since without Hilberg we may not have witnessed, and certainly not in the same way, debates about when that “Final Solution” was designed, about what the essential conditions for genocide were, about the extent of criminal­ ity and complicity within the organised German community, about the responses of the bystanders, or notoriously about the reaction of the Nazis’ Jewish victims.47 Hilberg’s book seems to have been a valuable source of inspiration and inspiration also for the Columbus Centre project. In fact, in his 1962 speech, Astor praised it as the work of a devoted scholar who had “faced the pain­ ful task of collecting and recording the facts.”48 Indeed, Hilberg, at the time working as a political scientist at the University of Vermont, spent more than a decade from 1948 onwards in order to gather data on the Jewish genocide. He was not only one of the first Holocaust scholars but also one of the very first thinkers who described this genocide as a long administrative process. According to Hilberg, the extermination of the estimated 5.1 million Euro­ pean Jews was not originally planned but was mostly carried out bit by bit. In other words, the “final solution,” namely the euphemistic term the Nazis

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themselves used in order to signify the mass extermination of the Jews, came into being when other “solutions,” such as deportation, were ruled out. One of Hilberg’s most significant contributions is that he documented that while the Holocaust is usually identified with death camps such as Auschwitz, 3 million perished in the camps while the rest died because of either open-air shootings, or the ghettoization and general privation.49 Beyond Hilberg’s account, if now one wished to explore the greater vis­ ibility that the Eichmann trial gave to the history of the Holocaust as well as the way that it contributed to a historiographical shift about modernity, they could not but start with one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century who, in 1961, went to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker magazine: Hannah Arendt. The book that was produced after the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), was not the first time Arendt dealt with the question of modernity and its atrocities. In 1951, Arendt had pub­ lished her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism in the United States, where she had also emigrated to escape the Nazis.50 In it, she criticised anti­ semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism as the products of Western thought. We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. She writes, The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape, from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.51 In her critique, Arendt emphasised the role of ideology in politics from the perspective of political philosophy, and especially in the so-called totalitar­ ian regimes, that is, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Especially with regard to antisemitic ideology, Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totali­ tarianism that a relatively unimportant phenomenon in terms of world poli­ tics, such as antisemitism—which she defined as a secular nineteenth-century political ideology distinguished from traditional religious Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish stereotypes52— became the catalytic agent first for the rise of the Nazi movement and the establishment of the organizational structure of the Third Reich, . . . then for a world war of unparalleled ferocity, and finally for the emergence of the unprecedented crime of genocide in the midst of Occi­ dental civilization.53

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For her, the Jews were transformed from a religious enemy of normative Christian Europe to a political enemy functioning within a nationalist dis­ course with the emergence of the Enlightenment: “The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jew­ ish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism.”54 While attending Eichmann’s trial, Arendt reconsidered the way she treated the origins of the Holocaust. In her corresponding book Eichmann in Jeru­ salem (1963), she coined a famous term to describe Eichmann that also appeared in the subtitle of the book: “the banality of evil.” Historians like Michael Marrus and Peter Novick have often pointed out that the Eichmann trial brought the Holocaust into the light of history, especially in the Anglophone world.55 As aforementioned, the Columbus Centre was also one of the trial’s consequences, as Astor first came up with the idea of the necessity of an academic study when he wrote the Eichmann leader in The Observer. It was not only its great publicity, being the first trial ever televised, nor its timing 16 years after the end of the war that made the Eichmann trial a turning point in Holocaust historiography. It is also the fact that it relied so heavily on the oral testimonies of the survivors that made it, as Lyndsey Stonebridge writes in her book The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), a demonstration of “how the experience of traumatic memory could become a legal event in its own right.”56 And Arendt’s account played a significant role in this process. She refused, in Stonebridge’s words, to “inhabit a rhetoric of traumatic testimony” that was often taken up by her contemporaries.57 Instead, she reset the rules of how one approaches and speaks about evil in a judicial commentary when a collective trauma is so ubiquitously present. To put it differently, Arendt opened the way to discuss the possible modern origins of the Holocaust and evil deeds more broadly. Although her book is more of a historical journalistic case study rather than a theoretical text or a piece of historical research per se, it serves as an exemplary account of reflec­ tions on modernity and the Nazi perpetrators. The “banality of evil” concept caused a lot of controversy among schol­ ars of her time, mostly because it was seen as removing responsibility from perpetrators. However, her intention was not to trivialise the atrocious actions of the Nazis, but rather to challenge mainstream representations of their demonisation, which implied that they found some sort of delight in the crimes they performed. Arendt focused on Eichmann’s ability to think in the philosophical sense, as becomes apparent if we put some context to her famous phrase: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”58 Unlike most previous accounts which pictured the Nazis as the incarnation of sadis­ tic, savage, and mentally ill people or, at least, pure ideologues who would employ any means towards their end, Arendt saw Eichmann as a thoughtless bureaucrat, an ordinary person who was only following orders59; he was,

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like so many others, in Arendt’s words, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Especially with regard to the frequently heard argument that the Nazis were psychotic or sadistic personalities, Arendt reported in her book that [h]alf a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal”—“More normal, at any rate, than I  am after having examined him,” one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable.”60 On the surface, Arendt seems to be profoundly in favour of a view that supports that the origins of the Holocaust can be traced in the function and structure of the Nazi Party and the German state more broadly. “The exter­ mination machinery,” she writes, had been planned and perfected in all its details long before the horror of war struck Germany herself, and its intricate bureaucracy functioned with the same unwavering precision in the years of easy victory as in those last years of predictable defeat.61 The great emphasis she places on the bureaucracy of the Third Reich and the modern German state as a fundamental cause of the Holocaust is also evident when she presents Eichmann imagining “an assembly line, at whose beginnings the first document is put, and then the other papers, and at its end the passport would have to come out as the end product.”62 Elsewhere, she illustrates Eichmann as a modern-day ideologue who was following orders and was, in his own words, “swallowed up by the Party.”63 Arendt’s shift in her philosophical thinking regarding the origins of the Holocaust or, indeed, evil deeds more broadly, is also apparent in her pref­ ace to part one of the 1968 edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. The reason why this shift is all the more important in this chapter is because she directly criticises Norman Cohn’s belief that antisemitism is a continuous phenomenon from Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages to modern times, as expressed in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) and his books in the Columbus Series. She argues that the idea that modem antisemitism is no more than a secularized version of popular medieval superstitions is no less fallacious (though of course less mis­ chievous) than the corresponding antisemitic notion of a Jewish secret society that has ruled, or aspired to rule, the world since antiquity. In the corresponding footnote, Arendt further specifies her argument by stating that the latest example of the view that modern antisemitism is no more than “a secularized version of popular medieval superstitions” is

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Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1967), a book that Norman Cohn wrote while preparing the launching of the Columbus Centre. Arendt is particu­ larly critical towards the historicisation that Cohn makes towards the Jewish people as well as the antisemites and accuses him of failing to see the ubiqui­ tous trivial antisemitism that existed in Germany long before Hitler came to power. We read accordingly from her footnote: The author starts from the implied negation that there is such a thing as Jewish history at all. Jews are in his view “people who .  .  . lived scattered across Europe from the English Channel to the Volga, with very little in common to them all save their descent from adherents of the Jewish religion” (p. 15). Antisemites on the contrary, can claim direct and unbroken lineage through space and time from the Middle Ages when “Jews had been seen as agents of Satan, devil-worshippers, demons in human form” (p.  41), and the only qualification to such sweeping generalizations that the learned author of Pursuit of the Mil­ lennium sees fit to make is that he deals only with “the deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted geno­ cide” (p. 16). The book also tries rather strenuously to prove that “the mass of the German population was never truly fanaticized against the Jews” and that their extermination “was organized and in the main carried out by the professionals of the SD and the SS,” bodies that “did not by any means represent a typical cross-section of German society” (pp.  212 fl.). How one wishes this statement could be squared with the facts! The result is that the work reads as though it were written about forty years ago by an unduly ingenious member of the Verein zur Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus of unhappy memory.64 Arendt was adequately critical towards Cohn, whereas he wrote in Warrant for Genocide (1967) that Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem provided valuable and varied insight into the Nazi mentality.65 At the same time, while Arendt had her reasons to critique Cohn, she would be in greater agreement with the other protagonist of the Columbus Centre, David Astor. For one, because while one of the driving forces of Astor’s initiative for establishing the Colum­ bus Centre was his fear that such horrors might happen again in the modern world, there was a historically specific event that triggered his actions; as the title of the New York Post article also hints, the Columbus Centre “grew out of [Astor’s] preoccupation with the Eichmann trial.”66 Indeed, in 1961, Astor had written a leader for The Observer entitled “The Meaning of Eich­ mann.” In similar fashion to Arendt’s famous statements two years later, Astor argued that Eichmann was an ordinary human who exerted “cool­ headed, bureaucratic violence.” While we cannot be sure whether Arendt had read Astor’s Eichmann article in 1961 before writing her famous report, we do know for a fact that she was a regular reader of The Observer later

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on, as she mentioned in several letters to her friend Mary McCarthy (herself an occasional contributor to the paper).67 Besides, one year later, in his 1962 speech, Astor also pointed out how sanely Eichmann and other Nazi officials behaved during his trial, just as Arendt did in her report: This is what happened in Germany and elsewhere between the years 1933 and 1945, and on a vast scale after 1941. But it was done by peo­ ple who were technically not mad at all. None of the Nazi leaders had a medical history approaching insanity; the German public who gave them support and power were not mad people, but ordinary folk; even the individuals who carried out the most insane extermination policies of the Nazi leaders—for which they were ready to disrupt their wartime trans­ port system at a crucial time—were not mad in a medical sense. We have seen how sanely Eichmann behaved throughout his trial—and, indeed, throughout all his private and public life—except for this terrible work of officially-approved human destruction; and he was only one of several thousands who must have been needed to carry out a crime of this size.68 One of the most famous critics of Arendt’s “banality of evil” was her old friend and Israeli philosopher Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem, who wrote a let­ ter to her in June 1963: After reading your book, I am not in the least convinced by the notion of the ‘banality of evil.’ If the book’s subtitle can be believed, you strove to develop the theme. This banality seems rather more of a slogan than the result of the kind of in-depth analysis, and again in August 1963: One of these days the two of us will no doubt discuss evil and its banal­ ity through bureaucratization. Though you think you have proven it, I have not seen proof. Maybe this kind of evil exists; but if so, philo­ sophically it would have to be considered differently. I  don’t picture Eichmann, as he marched around in his SS uniform and relished how everyone shivered in fear before him, as the banal gentleman you now want to persuade us he was, ironically or not.  .  .  . The gentlemen enjoyed their evil, so long as there was something to enjoy.69 In September 1963, Arendt defended the concept of the “banality of evil” in her reply to Scholem: The point isn’t to turn evil into something banal or harmless. The oppo­ site is true. Evil is a surface phenomenon, the decisive issue being that completely average people, neither good nor evil by nature, were able to bring about such immense ruin.70

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Within this context, Arendt saw antisemitic ideology and bureaucracy, this fantasy of an “assembly line” where an order comes in and after a long administrative process, hundreds are sentenced to their death, as products of modernity. In this way, she shifted the focus of discussion from whether the Nazis were an outcome of their era or ancient sadistic villains, to a redefini­ tion of evil in the ordinary and everyday encounter. Presenting the Nazis as “ordinary” or “banal” human beings does not remove their responsibility of the crimes but stresses the possibility of evil that exists in any “ordinary” or “banal” human being, breaking a wellestablished stereotype that the Nazis were exceptionally sadistic or lunatic perpetrators. As we know well, Hannah Arendt was by no means a Freud enthusiast. Yet, her thesis echoes the Freudian view on human destructive­ ness, on “normal” and ubiquitous murderous fantasies discussed in the pre­ vious chapter. This indicates, as Lyndsey Stonebridge has also aptly pointed out, that the Arendtian and Freudian readings of history are not mutually exclusive and can benefit from each other.71 Or as Arendt herself put it “[t]he need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning.”72 Besides Scholem, there were several other contemporary thinkers who crit­ icised Arendt’s work on different grounds. For instance, Raul Hilberg himself had a lingering bitterness towards Arendt, especially because he was confident that Arendt used much material from his research in Eichmann in Jerusalem without always giving credit to him.73 He, on the other hand, attributed to Hugh Trevor-Roper most of the recognition that his book received in a 1984 preface to the “revised and definitive edition” of his monumental account.74 Despite his bitterness towards Arendt, Hilberg had arrived at similar con­ clusions to her—before Eichmann in Jerusalem was published—with regard to the importance of German bureaucracy, the lack of resistance on behalf of the Jews, the obscure role of several Jewish Councils and organisations as well as the ignorant attitude of the bystanders, especially the Allied powers, towards the mass killings, hinting to a historiographical tendency to include modernity in thinking about mass violence that was also taken up by the Columbus Centre members. The Columbus Centre was, to a great extent, a product of the greater historical visibility that 1961 brought to the discussion about the Nazi atroci­ ties. As we saw, in 1961, Astor wrote a leader for The Observer triggered by the launching of the Eichmann trial, titled “The meaning of Eichmann.” Per­ haps the most crucial point that Astor made in this article is that the apparent human incapacity to react to this event derived from the possibly ubiquitous potential in people at large to kill their fellow humans, even in the twentieth century, on the basis of presumed differences, and more specifically on the basis of an irrational feeling that the other is less human than themselves.75 Yet, Astor argued, everyone needed to study this genocide, even those who consider themselves members of a highly civilised modern culture, such as

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the British, should be more careful because of what he claimed was a unique antithesis inherent in the Nazi atrocities: What was unique in the crimes of the Nazis was that they were com­ mitted by members of an advanced highly educated society; yet the irrational element in the Nazis’ attitude to their Jewish victims of both despising and fearing them was comparable to attitudes in primitive societies. The new element was the technical power and political insta­ bility of a modern setting; this allowed irrational hate to be carried to lengths never previously imagined.76 Astor found the modern framework of these atrocities especially alarming and urged its cautious examination. At the same time, however, he also hinted at the deeply rooted mechanisms of dehumanisation and demonisation as part of his explanation of the Holocaust origins. He stressed the fact that the Jews had been persecuted in the past as a menace to Christendom. Moreo­ ver, Astor pinpointed how dangerous it proved to resort to this demonising tradition of the past; “in accepting [Hitler’s] view of Jews as sub-human and demoniac,” he argued, “half the German people, knowingly or unknowingly, gave their social consent to the use of violence: it was their acceptance of this fatal view that broke the restraining bond of a common humanity.”77 One year later, in his Commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising speech and the following Encounter article, Astor again stressed that this irrational bru­ tality took place “in the centre of the most advanced continent of the world, in one of the mother countries of our European civilisation, in the middle of twentieth century.” It is interesting to consider here how the idea of “moderni­ sation” as a benign, progressive force featured in political rhetoric in the 1960s Britain. An obvious example is Labour Party’s leader Harold Wilson’s vision of change and the technological revolution. Just one year after Astor’s speech and one year before becoming Prime Minister, in October 1963, Wilson gave a speech at the Annual Labour Conference at Scarborough called “Labour’s Plan for Science.” In this speech, he famously argued that the Labour Party’s pur­ pose in that conference was to re-define and re-state their “Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution” and that a New Britain “is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution.”78 That is to say, there are very different nar­ ratives emerging about the implications of change and of modernisation, with Astor offering these cautionary notes, linking technology and genocide. Astor’s main point in his speech was a plea for a study of the preconditions and forces that lead ordinary humans to commit such atrocities; understand­ ing what happened and preventing it from happening again would be “a worthy monument to the memory of the six millions.” In this speech, Astor was quite worried that intellectuals had not yet further explored “the phe­ nomenon [of Nazism],” and, thus, invited them to initiate this investigation. For Astor, the most appropriate approach was to study “these grave matters” in a way that would be “as unemotional as possible.”79

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This attitude evoked numerous and varied expressions of interest. For instance, in a commentary of the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial Meeting on the front page of the Jewish Chronicle, it was stated that although original, Astor’s views and dispassionate tone did not match the emotional attitude of the event.80 On the other hand, in the letter to the Encounter editor, C.C. Aronsfeld, writing in his capacity as assistant director of the Wiener Library, which was mentioned in the speech as a possible place to locate the centre, wholeheartedly welcomed an opportunity to study the history of National Socialism and the Nazi crimes.81 Indeed, it is striking that Aronsfeld, who was so openly against revisionist historians like A. J. P. Taylor, found this kind of study absolutely necessary. After all, in his own words, people could be found proclaiming “Hitler was right” even in Britain. Astor’s point was to insist that we should dwell pre­ cisely upon this afterthought: “even in Britain.” Echoing his psychoanalytic influences, Astor argued that such latent destructive potentiality can and has been found in German people. But they were also latent in people in Britain, indeed people anywhere. There was a studied attempt here, in other words, to do two things at once: first, to make the question of modernisation and modernity central to the exploration of the Holocaust and second, to insist that the destructive political forces that were unleashed in the 1930s and 1940s were neither geographically localised, nor securely confined to the (recent) past. Astor’s arguments and dispassionate but multidisciplinary approach appealed, as we saw, to Norman Cohn. By the time Cohn wrote his first letter to Astor in 1962, he had already published his important work The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), a book on the traces of fanaticism in Western Europe between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. By bringing his impres­ sive scholarship on the medieval and early modern past so directly to bear upon the study of contemporary politics, group processes and human emo­ tions, Cohn was exactly the kind of intellectual that Astor wanted in order to engage in a large-scale project for the study of persecution and genocide.82 Indeed, Max Beloff, another Oxford-based historian and an occasional con­ tributor to The Observer—he had, for instance, reviewed Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism—wrote a letter to Astor suggesting Cohn for the project, ignorant of the fact that they had already been in contact.83 For Beloff, Cohn was especially appropriate for the task because, unlike Trevor-Roper, for example, he had made his reputation in a distant though analogous field of enquiry and he would thus not come to the problem with his mind already made up. In this sense, Cohn proved a good choice for Astor: instead of an obviously politically partisan approach or passionate style, he had what his obituarist would later call, qualities of “patience, scrupulous testing of evi­ dence and empathy into minds of very different cultures.”84 The assessment of this choice, however, is more complicated, as we will further examine, when it comes to what significance the two protagonists attributed to a cri­ tique of modernity in running a study of persecution and mass violence.

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The Frankfurt school and the Columbus Centre English-speaking scholars were not the only ones concerned with why and how Hitler, Nazism, and the camps happened. And certainly British scholars were not the only ones concerned with whether and how acts of barbarism can happen in the midst of the twentieth century in Europe. German scholars, often of Jewish origins, were very much concerned with these thoughts in the post-war period, and nowhere was this more evident than in the works of the Frankfurt School, a tradition of political and social theory that was first devel­ oped at the Institute of Social Research in 1923 in Germany. Despite their personal affiliations, ideological accordance, and, at times, their geographical and cultural interconnections, Frankfurt School members were by no means a homogeneous group. There are enough reasons, however, for referring to the Frankfurt School’s own body of work on this history and its meanings. First, there were direct ties between the Institute of Social Research and the Columbus Centre. Cohn visited the Institute himself in 1963 to report back for the Columbus Centre while Nevitt Sanford, a Columbus Centre member, was one of the co-authors of the Authoritarian Personality (1950) along with Theodor Adorno. Second, the Frankfurt School members were pioneers in bringing together psychoanalysis with political theory and history, just as was attempted, albeit less successfully as we saw, at the Columbus Centre. Indeed, the Frankfurt School’s Freudian approach was always combined with Marxist analysis, which was, arguably, precisely what the Columbus Centre was lacking. Last but not least, by linking the horrors of twentieth-century European history with a critique of modernity and the Enlightenment, the Frankfurt School thinkers contributed a great deal to a historiographical debate that preoccupied the Columbus Centre, that is a discussion of the modern origins of Nazism. The first Frankfurt School member to hint on the modern origins of Nazism was a philosopher who remains perhaps, symbolically, the most famous Frankfurt School associate of all, Walter Benjamin. Just a few months before his suicide in 1940, Benjamin wrote a well-known and highly controversial essay, titled Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which he contributed to a discussion on modernity and Fascism through a redefinition of the histori­ cal discipline. “The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century,” wrote Benjamin, “is not philo­ sophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.”85 Benjamin critiqued the central role that “progress” has had in modern—both historical materialist and liberal—historiography. For him, such a “Messi­ anic” reading of history led to either a trivialisation of Fascism as a “histori­ cal norm,” such as a weapon of capitalism for the survival of the ruling class, or a break, an exception to a rule of escalating prosperity, enlightenment, human rights, and freedom. Instead, he suggested a definition of history in which its subject, that is, time, is neither homogeneous, in the sense that all

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events necessarily lead to a certain telos through which they can be explained, nor empty, to be filled in an additive way with fragmentary events. Rejecting both a historical reading preoccupied with the past and an alternative vision preoccupied with the future, Benjamin gave prominence to the present time as the “enormous abridgement” which embraces a very real time and place where Fascism is a “here and now.” Theodor Adorno, a political philosopher and leading member of the Frankfurt School, was one of the first to stress that modernity is intertwined with barbarism and that the role of those reflecting on history or philosophy is to critically revisit and, inevitably, reformulate the Enlightenment doc­ trines.86 His Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, deals with this problem.87 They began writing the book in the United States in 1942. Adorno and Horkheimer had arrived in the United States after fleeing Germany, where they had faced persecution by the Nazis and had had their Institute shut down. In the brief essay “Was ist Aufklärung?” (What is the Enlightenment?) (1784), Immanuel Kant had argued for the freedom to be always able to make public use of reason and advocated the essential case for release from blind trust in the guidance of a book, a pastor or any kind of “expert.” Cor­ responding to such reflections on Enlightenment doctrines, the intention of Adorno and Horkheimer 160 years later was revealed in the opening lines of their book: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”88 Just a few years later, in 1949, Adorno and Horkheimer resettled in Ger­ many and reopened the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. In the preface to a new edition of the book in 1969, they discussed how timely it was to reprint the work 20 years after its initial appearance: In a period of political division into immense blocs driven by an objec­ tive tendency to collide, horror has been prolonged. The conflicts in the third world and the renewed growth of totalitarianism are not mere historical interludes any more than, according to the Dialectic, fascism was at the time. Critical thought, which does not call a halt before pro­ gress itself, requires us to take up the cause of the remnants of freedom, of tendencies toward real humanity, even though they seem powerless in face of the great historical trend.89 Through their study, Adorno and Horkheimer formulated many of the ques­ tions from which critical theory evolved. More specifically, critical theory was understood as a methodological approach that aims at liberation from any form of slavery, not merely religious dogma—the main subject of the Enlightenment project—but also from a very modern concept, the idea of progress itself.

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In 1949, Adorno famously declared that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,”90 a dictum that demonstrates but one example of a well-known Holocaust metonymy. In the representational realm, the Holocaust stands at the centre of the Second World War, while the camp becomes the nucleus of what we call the Holocaust. If we resort to language, as post-structuralists often do, to support this view, we can observe how often the name of a single concentration camp, that of Auschwitz, appears as a metonymy not only for all Nazi camps but also for the whole Nazi plan for the organised mass annihila­ tion of the European Jews and the other targeted victims. A de-contextualised version of this metonymy could classify Adorno among several postmodernist scholars who claimed that the Holocaust was an aberration in human history, after which nothing could be the same, not even history itself. Nevertheless, in his 1966 book Negative Dialectics, Adorno retracted his celebrated 1949 “no poetry after Auschwitz” dictum, which presupposes that such a traumatic event changes the flux of language, literary production, and history itself: “There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the electrified barbed wire around the camps.” “Perennial suffering” wrote Adorno “has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence, it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.”91 Between repudi­ ating the claim that the Holocaust is an outcome of modernity and explaining it as solely a product of modern economic and social forces lies an alternate way in which to reconcile with the former and critically engage with the latter. The question that inevitably emerges is whether the Frankfurt School’s critical approach of Nazism reached the Anglo-Saxon world. The answer is probably not. The reason for it might lie with the great difference in philo­ sophical traditions—between, on the one hand, German idealism, structur­ alism, phenomenology, and the critical theory of Continental philosophy, and, on the other, analytical, empirical, or ethico-political philosophy of the Anglo-American world.92 An alternative interpretation is suggested by George Orwell, a good friend of Astor’s and one of the British intellectuals who critically engaged with the Nazism-modernity question from very early on. Orwell wrote in 1941 that the “sheltered conditions of English life” had prevented England from engendering a great contemporary political theo­ rist, that is, someone able to conceptualise these phenomena. By contrast, Orwell argued that émigré writers such as Franz Borkenau, who had been affiliated in his earlier days with the Frankfurt School but later rejected Com­ munism whatsoever, “have seen totalitarianism at close quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution.”93 References to the works of the Frankfurt School in the British public sphere at the time of the Columbus Centre are but a few. In 1962, The Times Literary Supplement published a tribute to the Frankfurt School; in its advert in The Times we read: What Marxist critics have said about literature and art is a mixture of superb insight and ideological blindness. This week’s front page article of

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The Times Literary Supplement tries to sort out the gold from the dross. It suggests that “no aesthetic and philosophical criticism produced in the twentieth century can lay stronger claim to being a minor art in its own right than that of Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.”94 We see how, in a conservative publication such as the Times Literary Sup­ plement, these German intellectuals were discussed only with regard to their aesthetic philosophy, whereas their Marxist insights were more or less pre­ sented as dogmatic; thus, the author of the article urges his readers “to sort out the gold from the dross.” One could argue that, in the Cold War context, post-war Britain’s mainstream hegemonic discourse was characterised by a liberal seemingly “anti-ideological” ideology. This tendency was also present in the Columbus Centre protagonists’ choice to not include a Marxist analy­ sis in the Centre’s works, even though they were attempting a task similar to that of the Frankfurt School. The literary critic Raymond Williams, a representative of the British New Left and the author of The Long Revolution (1961), one of the most influen­ tial works of socialist theory in Britain, was one of the first British thinkers to write about critical theory and the Frankfurt School. In 1974, Williams wrote an article for the Guardian, in which he commented on the surprising absence of discussion about the Frankfurt School in Britain: It is often said that English culture is insular, but most islands have imports and in this century especially there has been a steady intake of thought originating elsewhere. What is really striking is not the insular­ ity but the selectivity. Freud, Jung, the Logical Positivists, a version of Existentialism: all these have crossed frontiers relatively quickly.  .  .  . Thus we came to know Fromm and Marcuse, but it is only now, many years after the event, that we can begin to know in substance, as oppose to casual reference, the Frankfurt School of which they were both mem­ bers, and which must be, by any standards, one of the most remarkable intellectual movements of the century.95 In this article, Williams referred to Martin Jay’s seminal account of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectics of Imagination (1973), initially written as a PhD thesis at Harvard, which made the intellectual history of the Frankfurt School largely available to English-speaking readers.96 Williams concluded his article with the following words: “If Europe means anything, the Frank­ furt School is now inevitably part of our intellectual landscape.” However, for most British historians and commentators on twentieth-century “totali­ tarianism,” such as Trevor-Roper or Alan Bullock, the work of that “school” still remained largely invisible. Its relationship to the Columbus Centre’s key writers is far more complex. A subtle link between the Columbus Centre’s works and the Frankfurt School, and Adorno in particular, became apparent in the 1970s, on two

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occasions. The first one, in 1971, was the fact that Nevitt Sanford, co-author of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), published the edited volume Sanc­ tions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness with the aid of a Columbus Centre research grant.97 Moreover, the methodological structure of Henry Dicks’s book Licensed Mass Murder (1972) was significantly influenced by Adorno’s approach in the Authoritarian Personality.98 However, the most striking link between the Columbus Centre and the Frankfurt School was evident from early on, when during 1962 and 1963 a number of conversations about the form and content of the Columbus Cen­ tre’s undertaking took place among those who had initially registered their interest. Besides Norman Cohn’s great involvement in the project and Max Beloff’s advice, other scholars were also approached and consulted. Among those who were initially part of the Columbus project but, for various rea­ sons, did not end up cooperating and publishing a book under its auspices was none other than Theodor Adorno.99 There is a lack of direct evidence regarding an encounter or any correspondence between Adorno and a mem­ ber of the early working party of the Columbus Centre. However, when Cohn visited Germany in late 1963, he reported an opinion that Adorno held of Alexander Mitscherlich’s daughter Monica Seifert; this suggests that Cohn had some direct knowledge of this opinion.100 After this visit to Germany in 1963, Cohn came up with a commentary on the “work in ‘political psychology’ in Germany,” which he presented at the Columbus Centre’s meetings on 1 December 1963 and summarised three days later in a report.101 In this report, Cohn recognised the Institute for Social Research under the leadership of Adorno and Horkheimer at Frank­ furt as the only full-time centre for research in the field of political psychol­ ogy in Germany. While the Frankfurt School aimed at revisiting and bringing together Marx and Freud, Cohn gave too much weight to the psychological rather than the political aspect of the Institute for Social Research: “The rel­ evance of psychoanalysis is taken for granted; not only are psychoanalytical findings on the basis of the empirical research, but close relations are main­ tained with the Frankfort Institut für Psychiatrie und Psychoanalyse, under Mitscherlich,” he wrote in his report, in which, no less strikingly, Marx was never mentioned. Cohn observed that while the Institute for Social Research was financed by the West German Federal Government—“Horkheimer in particular has a reputation for skill in finding funds,” he stressed—recommendations for further research on the field were usually ignored by German universities. Cohn’s assessment of the German people’s somewhat superficial interest in political psychology was that: [T]he intention behind the whole series is essentially practical and local: to democratise German political life by fostering a sense of personal responsibility in politics. What drives these self-sacrificing and desper­ ately over-worked part-timers is their haunted awareness of the Nazi

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experience, plus their realisation that democratic habits of thought have never yet been securely established in Germany.102 Therefore, Cohn concluded, a group of “political psychologists” like the one in Frankfurt “have little to offer for our undertaking.”103 In these preliminary stages of the Columbus Centre project, Cohn appears to have a powerful voice in deciding the goals and contexts of the future research. Within this framework, the modernity debate was only peripherally touched, as was the idea for comparison among modern genocides. At the same time, however, the anciently rooted demonisation process was identi­ fied as fundamental, whereas an important aspect of the modernity debate such as a critique of the Enlightenment doctrines was entirely ignored. Cohn was probably right when he saw the democratisation and de-Nazification of Germany behind the intentions of the newly emerged field of political psychology, but, at the same time, he failed to acknowledge the centrality of a revisited, redefined, and intertwined Marxist-Freudian discourse in the Frankfurt School’s critique of totalitarianism. Looking at some texts that were subsequently produced will help us shed more light on how the Colum­ bus Centre project can be positioned within the modernity debate. Modernity in the Columbus Centre during the 1970s Some members of the Columbus Centre research project, such as Léon Polia­ kov, Christina Larner, and Henry Dicks, appear to have conceived National Socialism also as a modern manifestation, or, at least, to have touched upon the modernity debate, while others, and especially its academic director Nor­ man Cohn, insisted on the significance of ideology rooted in ancient and primordial emotions. Léon Poliakov and his Aryan Myth of modernity Léon Poliakov was a French-Jewish historian who published a book with the Columbus Centre and was, according to Cohn, “indeed one of the best” scholars who participated in the project.104 He was born in St. Petersburg in 1910 to a Jewish family that fled Russia for Berlin after the 1917 Revolu­ tion, before moving to Paris in 1924 because of the anti-Jewish sentiments in Germany. He studied law at the Faculté de Droit, and when the Germans occupied France, he joined the Resistance.105 In 1943, he cofounded the Centre de Documentation Juive (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documen­ tation, CDJC) in Grenoble. The CDJC was an initiative of the French rabbi and industrialist Isaac Schneersohn to preserve Jewish archives; the archives themselves were later transferred to Paris.106 In 1946, Poliakov, making use of these archives, served as an expert in attendance at the Nuremberg Trials. Along with Gerald Reitlinger, a British historian and author of The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945

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(1953), Poliakov was one of the first scholars to have written exhaustively on the history of antisemitism; he wrote his book La Condition des Juifs en France sous l’Occupation Italienne as early as 1946.107 In 1951, after having studied the Gestapo archives during his service with the French delegation at Nuremberg, Poliakov, who had much trouble finding a publisher inter­ ested in his “embarrassing” theme, managed to publish his breakthrough work, Bréviaire  de la Haine, with Calmann-Levy publishing house. Brévi­ aire  de la Haine, written with the aid of the philosopher Raymond Aron, was perhaps the first general history of the Holocaust.108 In 1954, Poliakov was made director of research at the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) and, three years later, in 1955, he published the first volume of his well-known book History of Anti-Semitism. In 1960, Poliakov was the first recipient of the Prix Edmond Weil for his services to Jewish his­ tory. Interestingly enough, in her discussion of Eichmann’s lack of defence documents, Arendt reports how excerpts from Poliakov’s books, as well as Reitlinger’s, were submitted by and originated with his defence attorney Dr Servatius.109 Poliakov came to London and met with Norman Cohn at some point between late August and early September 1964 at Astor’s expense. Poliakov’s authority in the discipline was arguably a sufficient reason for the Columbus Centre organisers to seek to appoint him. The similarity of his approach to the Columbus Centre’s goals must have been another one; not only did he used Freudian insights in Bréviaire de la Haine but also his obituarist quotes him to say that he devoted his life to the study of antisemitism because “[he] wanted to find out why certain people have it in for [him].”110 The Columbus Centre’s research project was, of course, similarly devoted to the study of the inner forces that drive ordinary human beings to perform atrocities such as those performed by the Nazis. On his way back to France, Poliakov wrote a letter to Astor, whom he had not yet met, to express his gratitude for his hospitality. In this letter, he included a copy of his own assessment of Eichmann’s trial appearing in Le Procès de Jérusalem, a book presenting the documentation of the pro­ ceedings with an 85-page introduction from Poliakov. Making a direct link to Astor’s leader on Eichmann, Poliakov wrote to him in French that “ce procès-fleuve qui se trouve á l’origine de votre beau projet” (“this lengthy trial which is the origin of your fine project”).111 In a report of the Eichmann trial proceedings that he had published in the American Jewish Year Book in 1962, he had stressed that, unlike Nuremberg, where, he knew too well, “the tragedy of European Jewry had a marginal part in the case for the prosecu­ tion,” in Jerusalem the main purpose “was not merely to assess Eichmann’s culpability and pronounce punishment—that could have been done in far less than three months—but to unfold the whole horrifying tragedy from begin­ ning to end.” In this account, Poliakov described Eichmann as a bureaucrat, yet he stressed, unlike perhaps the famous Arendtian report, the antisemitic ideology of the accused. He quoted Eichmann, for instance, telling the Dutch

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Nazi collaborator and journalist Willem Sassen that had all ten million Jews perished he would say “Good, we have destroyed an enemy.”112 Nonetheless, Poliakov also quotes Eichmann to argue “that he had tried all his life to live in accordance with Kant’s Categorical Imperative, ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law,’ ” marking the importance that the Eichmann trial and the debate about the perpetrators’ modern behaviour, ordinariness, and normality had for the initiation of the Columbus Centre project.113 This viewpoint is also evident on another occasion. Between his agreement with the Columbus Centre and the publication of his book under the Centre’s auspices, Poliakov published in 1968 the third volume of his book History of Anti-Semitism with the sub­ title “From Voltaire to Wagner,” which was translated into English in 1975. In it, Poliakov examined how antisemitism was largely ignored by support­ ers of civil rights and justice in the Enlightenment as well as how antisemitic theory had infiltrated modern sciences.114 In 1971, after conducting his research in Paris, where he lived, and occa­ sionally visiting London for the Columbus Centre meetings, Poliakov pub­ lished his Columbus Series book in French under the title Le Mythe Aryen: Essai sur les Sources du Racisme et des Nationalismes. Its translation by Edmund Howard, The Aryan Myth: A  History of Racist Ideas in Europe (interestingly enough the subtitle about nationalisms was omitted in the Eng­ lish translation), became available to the English-speaking readers in 1974.115 Poliakov’s book deals with the long-term ideological preconditions of anti­ semitism in Europe and the ancient myths of race. He understood early 1940s antisemitic ideology as the crucial factor that divided European population into those who were supposed to live, namely the Aryans, and those doomed to die, namely the Semites.116 While his book aimed also at tracing the ancient pre-scientific origins of this division, Poliakov stressed how antisemitism was elevated to the level of science in the late nineteenth century: [T]he Aryan theory had achieved pride of place among men of learning alongside the theory of spatial ether. In its various forms, the Aryan the­ ory nearly always involved a value-judgement in favour of the Aryans, and the ideologists of the Third Reich did no more than stress this bias out of all proportion. We are therefore dealing in the first place with an episode in the history of anthropology, badly warped by European ethnical egotism.117 Poliakov went further to criticise Western culture for its post-war hypocrisy: even if at the beginning of the twentieth century the West shared a sense of cultural superiority often elaborated with some theory of biological legitima­ tion, “the Hitlerite catastrophe banished such ideas from political and public life so effectively that now a fresh confusion has arisen, between science and ethics.” Poliakov very aptly observed that after the war, antiracism “has been promoted to the rank of a dogmatic orthodoxy .  .  . which will brook no

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criticism, and which is an impediment to sober thinking.”118 In other words, Western countries such as France, where Poliakov was settled, or Britain, usually referred to as “bystanders” to the Nazi atrocities, would rather elimi­ nate their antisemitic past whatsoever than admit their role in history. Exam­ ples of antisemitic behaviour were, according to Poliakov, treated either as exceptions or as exclusively German peculiarities. For Poliakov, this form of ideological censorship reflected “the uneasiness of a society which not so long ago, in thought if not in deed, was an accomplice of Hitler’s racism.”119 Poliakov brought two examples of people who resisted this practice: The one group was a “minority of German intellectuals” and a number of crit­ ics in other countries, most probably referring to the Frankfurt School and other “adherents” of critical theory. The other one was French students of May 1968 who, according to the French media of the time, were demonstrat­ ing that “ ‘we are all German Jews,’ likewise attempting, though without realizing it, to dispose of that taboo.”120 Given that May  68 was a leftist social movement and political uprising that started from student demonstra­ tions and spread to building occupations and workers’ strikes, we can see how, unlike Cohn, Poliakov found some relevance to Marxism in the context of the discussion about the Nazi crimes. What is of particular importance in our discussion is that Poliakov, in his attempt to write a detailed history of antisemitic ideology, aimed at demy­ thologising the concept. Beyond his exhaustive account of the genealogical myths of the, so to speak, archetypal Western nations, that is, Spain, France, England, Italy, Germany, and Russia, Poliakov specifically referred to the influence of the Enlightenment on the further development of the Aryan myth and especially its modern manifestation in the Third Reich: “To make our approach as clear as possible, we shall distinguish to some extent between the distant (emotive, implicit) sources of the Aryan myth and its closer (ideo­ logical, explicit) sources.”121 In this sense, Poliakov’s book aimed mostly at historicising antisemitic ideology and contextualising it in a long tradition of mythologically embedded discrimination that was enhanced by “enlight­ ened” scientific discourses rather than commenting on the Holocaust as a break in modern history. Especially when he attempted to trace the origins of antisemitism in France, his own country of residence, Poliakov made a direct link to its mod­ ern origins: The unbroken line and succession of the Patriarchs could not hold together against the rational spirit of the age, and it was through the gap thus created that the speculations of the Age of Enlightenment as to the origin of Man would sweep, to give rise in due course to the Aryan myth.122 Poliakov argued that in France, as well as other European countries, the Christian Church of the medieval period created neither the myth of the Aryan

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race nor the ideology of antisemitism; on the contrary, the Judaeo-Christian tradition was, according to him, both anti-racist and anti-nationalist in the sense that all men were equal before God so that “the social structure and barriers of the Middle Ages, with its feudal, horizontal hierarchies, no doubt helped the Church to translate this ideal into reality.”123 The theory of the Aryan race, concluded Poliakov, did not originate in the Christian Church’s dictums but rather in the reaction of anti-clericalism and anti-obscurantism: “it is a product of the first gropings of the sciences of man as they tried to model themselves on the exact sciences and so strayed into a mechanistic and determinist blind-alley where they remained for a century.”124 Moving on to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Poliakov briefly revisited the early history of psychoanalysis in his attempt to pre­ sent how the Aryan and Semite myths were preserved and (re)produced in modern-day psychological theories. He begins by mentioning two of Freud’s greatest influences whose theories had been spread and utilised “by extreme forms of racism”: Gustav le Bon and his theory of collective psychology and the racial soul and Jean-Martin Charcot, a degeneration theory advocate and Freud’s early mentor in Paris who argued for a “Jewish neurosis, as well as its dangerous possibilities of contagion.”125 Then Poliakov proceeds to sketch the father of psychoanalysis and his “secessionist disciple” Carl Jung’s contribution to Aryan mythology. He illustrates the fact that the former was Jewish and the latter a Christian as a deeper source of their own schism but, loyal to his historical methodology, goes far beyond psychoanalytic interpre­ tations and personal implications.126 He observes how Freud suggested that the hatred against the Jews derived from a struggle between Jewish monothe­ ism and archaic fantasies re-enacted with Christianity. Yet, while in Totem and Taboo, adds Poliakov, Freud attributes all cultural products, regardless of racial descent, to the “original patricide,” he seemed to accept “the reality of a constitutional or hereditary difference between Semites and Aryans” by references to “our Talmudic way of thinking,” to a “peculiar psychical apti­ tude” of the Jews of Antiquity, and to how the Totem and Taboo “will serve to cut us off completely from all Aryan religiousness.”127 Still, Poliakov does not hide his admiration towards Freud by arguing that in spite of defending the disputed biological theory of Lamarck on inheritance of acquired mental characteristics, the father of psychoanalysis “showed the same scientific pru­ dence in pausing on the threshold of problems which in one way or another engaged him as a person.”128 On the other hand, Poliakov does not appear to share the same appreciation towards Jung. He argues that Jung sought to frame a universal experience common to all men in his theory of the col­ lective unconscious, which, however, had to “submit to the laws of evolu­ tion, and diversify itself along the successive stages of development,” ending up contrasting the “Aryan Unconscious” to the “Jewish Unconscious” soon after Hitler’s rise to power in 1934.129 And as if to affirm Freud’s hypoth­ esis that the publication of Totem and Taboo would alienate psychoanalysis from “Aryan religiousness,” Poliakov cites an anecdote from the Munich

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Congress where Ernest Jones was supporting Freud, only for Jung to exclaim “I thought you were a Christian.”130 Poliakov’s brief recounting of the history of psychoanalysis aims at enhanc­ ing his point that the Aryan myth does not come from a distant, ancient, “uncivilised” past but from a genealogy of thought production inextricably linked with modernity: the evolution theory, the social control over bodies on behalf of the modern state, the racial origin of the psyche. He closes his treatise with the following characteristic statement about the modern origins of the Nazi atrocities: We have explained elsewhere how abuse directed against this barbarous people, whose superstitions swamped the West, was once a stock tech­ nique of anti-religious propaganda. After its beginnings in the infant science of the Enlightenment, the struggle against the old demytholo­ gizing books, by way of historical and social changes of every kind, and involving every aspect of life, finally led to a war of extermination against men. The same link exists between the elaboration of the Aryan myth at the beginning of the nineteenth century when it arraigned the truth of the Biblical genealogies and its murderous consequences in our own times.131

Norman Cohn and the ancient roots of the Nazi crimes There are numerous reasons why Poliakov, among others, used history to critique the much-celebrated French Enlightenment and European spirit; the fact that he was a Jewish intellectual living in post-Vichy France may invoke the explanation for which these issues were crucial also to most members of the Frankfurt School who resettled in post-Nazi Germany. On the other hand, the academic director of the Columbus Centre, Norman Cohn, who had a very different background, followed a slightly different path, influenced also perhaps by the different trajectory of his life. Cohn himself defined Pursuit of the Millennium as a study of the medieval antecedents of both Nazi and Communist fanaticism.132 It has been suggested that his service after the end of the war as an officer in the Intelligence Corps, interrogating former members of the SS and meeting refugees from the Soviet Union, could have influenced the interest in totalitarianism that was appar­ ent in the Pursuit of the Millennium. For him, as it is hinted perhaps in the fact that he quite problematically omits to comment on Marxism with regard to the Frankfurt School, Communism and Nazism are two sides of the same coin. He said accordingly at an interview with Daniel Pick in 2006: There was a lot of communist propaganda which penetrated every­ where and so one did know about [the concentration camps], but one didn’t of course see it at that time, at first hand anyway. The only time

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I came into contact with it directly was at the end of the war when I was with the army of occupation in Austria. Well, it was there that I saw the full horror of what Nazism had really done and also what communism at that point was visibly doing, you understand. I  saw both sides of that.133 Especially regarding his attitude towards communist views, he commented in the same interview about the celebrated Marxist historian Eric Hobs­ bawm: “I  found him so smugly communist that I  was felled. Most people were charmed by him, but the famous charm didn’t get a chance to work on me because of what he was saying.”134 And elsewhere in this interview, he stressed precisely how totalitarianism had influenced his work: The Pursuit of the Millennium was very directly inspired by that period—these two fanaticisms with the idea that the world could be purified forever if all Jews could be killed, and on the other [hand] if every property owner could be killed. The so-called bourgeoisie. In both cases there is this absolutely paranoid dream that purification of the world for ever and ever by the extermination of one category of human beings. That in fact I have to say is what all my work has been about.135 Especially with regard to his experience with the Soviet Union, it is impor­ tant to mention his somewhat personal involvement with it. Cohn married in 1941 his first wife Vera Broido, the mother of whom was the prominent Rus­ sian Jewish revolutionary and Menshevik Eva Broido, who was shot on Sta­ lin’s orders. Both Vera Broido and Cohn’s second wife Marina Voikhanskaya, whom he married in 2004 but had known since the 1960s, were Soviet refu­ gees and appear to have held a grudge towards not only the USSR but com­ munist ideology more broadly. However, since, according to his wife, Norman Cohn destroyed his per­ sonal archive of letters and diaries when he moved out of his London home (presumably because of lack of space), it is difficult to know whether his anti-communist feelings preceded or followed the writing of his book.136 It is arguably safer to draw the assumption, nonetheless, that these feelings might have been related to his blindness to Marx when it came to the Frankfurt School, as well as his reluctance to critique modernity also on the grounds of critical theory. While he was writing this book, Cohn developed a special interest in medi­ eval history and the historical roots of fanaticism and demonisation. Later on, he put the results of this scholarly research into Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1967), a book he wrote while appointed at the University of Sussex but before the Columbus Centre was launched.137 In it, he exposed through academic analysis how the Protocols were forged as well as how these fake

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documents offered up the Jews as a scapegoat to a modern conspiracy trig­ gered after the French Revolution and the Jacobin subversion. P. G. J. Pulzer, who reviewed Cohn’s book in 1968, linked his account to Arendt’s, focusing on the significance that Cohn attributes to demonisation: Is evil banal? In his central thesis Professor Cohn takes issue—however indirectly—with the argument of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusa­ lem. Evil, when it leads to genocide, or threats of genocide, is daemonic; and it is a characteristic of this daemonism that its possessors need to project on to their enemies all their own attributes—secret codes, occult dabblings, a conspiratorial mentality, a sense of world-mission.138 Thus, in Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt, published in the Columbus Series in 1975, it was perhaps to be expected for Cohn to focus on the history of demonisation of witchcraft and to explore, specifically, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-craze as a metaphor or point of historical comparison for other modern genocides. Besides, the idea that of all primitive elements of Nazi ideology the primary ones are dehumanisation and demonisation emerges constantly in the writ­ ings of the Columbus Centre’s members. Cohn based Europe’s Inner Demons precisely on the observation that the demonisation, and thus, dehumanisa­ tion of certain groups of people, in his case women who practised black magic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eventually led to their persecution and murder. More specifically, Cohn argued that the stereotype of the witch originated from diverse elements, among which a very old fantasy which can be traced back to antiquity: the belief that there existed, somewhere in the midst of the great society, another soci­ ety, small and clandestine, which not only threatened the existence of the great society but was also addicted to practices which were felt to be wholly abominable, in the literal sense of anti-human.139 Interestingly enough, Cohn ended up, as we saw, rejecting psychoanalysis, against which a persistent critique is that it focuses on timeless and universal inner feelings and (unconscious) fantasies while it ignores the specific social conditions in which these feelings and fantasies emerge. It is, thus, rather striking that Cohn adopted a view that interpreted genocide and mass vio­ lence, more broadly, as a product of individuals’ feelings and fantasies while choosing to discard a theory that could prove a useful methodological tool in this process, namely psychoanalysis. By explaining the witch-hunt as a product of an anciently rooted emotion, Cohn positioned himself in the middle of a pre-existing historiographical debate: on the one hand, there were those historians who believed that there was indeed a cult of witches and, on the other, those who repudiated their

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existence whatsoever. Cohn argued instead that the origins of the witch-hunt lay in a combination of two practices that had survived the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion in the West: first, some pagan rituals and ceremonials, and, second, a habit of demonisation and dehumanisation of a certain group of people who were perceived as society’s “other.” Indeed, the second practice could, according to Cohn, be traced back to antiquity when for example the pagan Romans saw the early Christians as “a body of ruthless power-hungry conspirators.” For instance, the Eucharist, namely a Christian sacrament where believers communally consume one loaf of bread and one cup of wine in memory of Christ’s body and blood, respectively, was regarded by the Romans as constituting an act of cannibalism, whereas the Agape, that is, communal meal affirmation of Christian fellowship, was imagined as a sexual, and often incestuous, orgy.140 Cohn’s basic point was that both the early Christians in the Roman period and some people, mostly women, possi­ bly performing pagan rites in medieval and early modern times—and perhaps also the Jews in modern antisemitic ideology—were targeted as anti-human and demonised so that their subsequent persecution could be legitimised. In this analysis, Cohn seems to neglect the modern influences of persecu­ tion and genocide, and to locate its origins to a very primitive and quite threatening fantasy of demonisation. However, in his discussion of Conrad of Marburg, a thirteenth-century German priest who was commissioned to combat the heretic group Albigensians, he highlighted that it was the first time the Pope “lent his authority to those fantasies” and that from that date onwards “other persecutions were to be stimulated in the same way, also with support and approval from the highest quarters.”141 In other words, he emphasised the importance of the sovereign in the process of persecution. Christina Larner, a historian and sociologist with a strong interest in the history of religion in Scotland, who, as we will further elaborate later, was invited by Cohn to participate in the project, further developed this relation between the sovereign leader and demonisation as a means of controlling his followers. In the book, she published in the Columbus Series in 1980, that is, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland, she focused on the period between 1590 and 1700, giving particular attention to the position of women, the system of witch-beliefs and, especially, the role of the witch-hunt as a tool for social control with the emergence of the modern state.142 Henry Dicks and the modern Nazi psyche Perhaps the most interesting example of the modernity debate at the Colum­ bus Centre, precisely because it dealt directly with the perpetrators’ “psyche,” was Henry Dicks’s aforementioned book Licensed Mass Murder (1972). In it, Dicks never expressed a clear view about the modern origins of National Socialism, but he commented at times on the nature of Nazi ideology as well as the twisted employment of pedagogy and medicine as a source of brain­ washing and physical harm, respectively.

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Dicks underlined from the very beginning of the book that the aim of the Columbus Centre was to alert people to “the potentialities of murderous destructiveness” of people in “modern” societies which were “close to our own ethically and historically.”143 In other words, he realised that studying Nazi Germany through the comparative lens of the Columbus Centre meth­ odology could serve as an example of manifestations of extreme violence and discrimination in other parts of the modern “enlightened” world, such as Britain. Thus, while Dicks believed that his findings were more likely applica­ ble “to other members of that great family and its descendants overseas,” they could not, he argued disagreeing with Cohn’s view, “with any confidence be extended to massacres and genocide in epochs and places far removed from us in space and time.”144 The cultural heritage of Germany, which stands at the geographical and historical heart of European peoples, makes Dicks’s findings more applicable to other nations of similar background, such as, most pointedly, Britain.145 “We too have our high Fs . . . our leaders that have failed and our stresses of adaptation,” writes Dicks elsewhere.146 That is to say, yes, these issues should be addressed comparatively, but the variable of modernity, in the sense of time, that is, the middle decades of the twentieth century, as well as space, the Western world, could not be eliminated from the equation. In his postscript, Dicks saw his book as, on the one hand, “a psychiatrist’s concern over the quality and maturity of society and its cul­ tural climate as the nutrient matrix for the growing of whole and self-reliant human beings” and, on the other, himself as the person who “only hinted at some phenomena that worry our own societies in a time of breathtaking technological and social change.”147 With regard to the supposedly primordial roots of Nazi ideology, Dicks argued that some ancient Teutonic cultural myths had remerged in the Nazi movement, leading to what Norman Cohn had earlier called the “culture lag” of National Socialism. At that point, Dicks observed how some of his contemporary thinkers “have regarded the accelerated technological change of our era as having outrun Man’s capacity for social adaptation and con­ trol.” In other words, modernity’s achievements ran faster than men’s ability to cope with them, leaving the latter full of anxieties. Subsequently, men look to “no longer adequate but deep cultural imprints” for dealing with their anxieties: “Modern men have these old patterns slumbering below the sur­ face, left there by the nursery years and the cultural prescriptions bequeathed by those who in love and wrath and piety were concerned to reproduce their kind.”148 Dick’s concept of primitive aggressive instincts, to which one turns when in stress, was partially inspired, as we saw in the previous chapter, by his deep interest in psychoanalytic theory. However, the recurring idea that Nazi ideology contained primordial and obsolete elements was also found elsewhere in his book. First, Dicks observed that the gothic handwriting of one of his interviewees, whose name he abbreviated in the text to “BS,” was reintroduced by the Nazis as the “good German” script form.149 Second,

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he noted that Dr MO recognised the pressure of primitive emotions in the “over-civilized nations,” and, like many other Nazis, was preoccupied with “the highly ambivalently charged attraction—repulsion for the pristine, primitive and hence very potent image of the Russian ‘barbarian’—so fresh and strong.”150 One of Dicks’s interviewees, S2, a former SS warrant officer, who served as a Rapportführer, that is, just under the deputy commandant of the Peniten­ tiary Camp, and was interviewed in 1967 in Rheinbach prison in the BonnCologne area, told him, unconvincingly, that it was only after Kristallnacht in November 1938 that the Jews were classified as a separate ethnic group. Subsequently, they were sent to the concentration camps as members of this group. In fact, Dicks made a note next to S2’s comment that the SS had no special feeling about the Jews: “This seems a surprising expression, ex post facto, of the bureaucratizing of the KZ murder business—like a post office which by an administrative decision has to open traffic for a new type of commodity.”151 S2 added, as if aware of the whole “banality of evil” debate: “we suddenly had phenomenon Eichmann, another of these pure office bureaucrats who never saw what the likes of us had to carry out.”152 Draw­ ing on the aforementioned Arendtian analysis, Dicks described another of his interviewees, BS, a close collaborator of S2 and also a Hauptscharführer who was interviewed in 1967 in the Bavarian prison of Straubing, as the ordinary man who carried “Hannah Arendt’s dictum about the ‘banality of evil.’ ” Indeed, Dicks illustrated his argument with a pop culture image, by comparing this “ordinary man” with the frightened little soldier who was impersonated by Charlie Chaplin alongside the Great Dictator in the 1940 homonymous film.153 Dicks’s most intriguing observation about Nazi ideology was how it embraced high technological expertise with a primitive, almost savage, dehu­ manising process: “Dehumanization and/or demonization—essential prelim­ inaries to murder—are hall-marks of paranoid thinking and feeling, even if they do not result in murder,” he wrote.154 Dicks’s specific phrasing about the target of the camps “recruitment” was “all categories of human beings Hitler had ordained as unfit to survive.”155 Dicks found examples of these processes in the attitudes of certain prisoners-interviewees: in his official trial record, the former sergeant who served as sick-bay nurse GM stated that he did not consider the prisoners as humans but simply numbers, while he himself admitted strangling people when they were “of no further use.”156 Humans were actually treated as disposable subhumans. What makes this element of Nazi ideology even more important in Dicks’s writings was the description of the way it was conveyed from the high-ranking ideologues to the mass of camp guards and executioners: education, or rather indoctrination. This form of training, dating back to 1934–35, was largely the lifework of Theodor Eicke, who was appointed by Himmler as comman­ dant of Dachau in 1933 and promoted to SS-Brigadeführer in 1934. Most

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strikingly, Dicks employed Orwellian language to describe indoctrination processes: With totalitarian “double-think,”157 the camps were intended to “reform” as well as to detain. Dachau became the alma mater in which Eicke played his sinister, norm-setting role for numerous KZ officers, drawing on his own record of brutality and chicanery derived from Free Corps and Feme days.158 S2 reported to Dicks that during the six months of his intensive training in Ordensburg Vogelsang, one of the highest National Socialist indoctrina­ tion schools, “we lost what was left of the Ten Commandments.”159 In other words, making someone capable of treating fellow humans as non-humans comprised a certain degree of a dehumanising education of oneself. In the somewhat distorted appropriation of modern sciences by the Nazis, pedagogy was almost transformed into indoctrination, whereas medicine was largely understood as eugenics and almost a synonym for the euphemis­ tic term “mercy killings.” As an extreme example of Foucauldian biopower in that the human body was subjected to the total power of the state, medi­ cine intervened in order to determine who would reproduce and who would die, based on the “Nazi doctrine of ‘survival of the strongest’ ”160; in any case, medicine in the context of the camp dehumanised its subjects. Being obvi­ ously sarcastic, Dicks called two of his interviewees, who had some sort of medical training, “medical humanitarians.”161 Their examples depicted “the effects of Nazi dehumanization and degradation of medicine in the service of organized crime.”162 With regard to the “reproductive” aspect of race science, Dicks described the pseudo-scientific research centre for inheritance through which several of his subjects had found their wives. Its purpose was to match mates for the creation of a new breed of the “warrior-yeomen close to the earth, despis­ ing modern culture and leaving political and value judgments to their lords to whom they would give entire loyalty.”163 Furthermore, Dr MO, who had qualified in “proper eugenics,” gives account of his views on sterilisation of genetic handicaps.164 However, Dicks, himself a doctor and perhaps more sensitive to a version of medicine that would harm instead of cure, severely critiques the “murderous” aspect of race science, what the Nazis euphemisti­ cally called “mercy killings.” The medical professionals justified the killings on grounds of the race science doctrine of “survival of the strongest,” and therefore, the “useless, dangerous or merely inferior” had to be extermi­ nated.165 Thus, during his trial, doctor MO admitted being in favour of kill­ ing “worthless life.” Then when challenged with the Hippocratic oath, “he denied ever having sworn to preserve life.”166 Ironically enough, the same per­ son claimed that he avoided a “bloody mess” by adopting “a more humane way” for killing 26 mentally ill patients in 1945: he gave them large doses of an unidentified white powder as well as a compound for pain alleviation,

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which only made them sick, just to give them the “mercy shot” after three days of suffering.167 Finally, it should be mentioned that, although Dicks was influenced by Adorno’s methodology, he also criticised him and his research team because in The Authoritarian Personality they equated a high score in the F-scale with the Right and democracy with the Left, “a claim still vainly made by Stalinism and its successors.”168 Like Cohn but unlike Adorno, Dicks was openly anti-communist and he often marked similarities and/or continuities between Communism and Nazism in the totalitarian spectrum: “the Nazi movement canalized a good deal of ‘Left’ or directly parricidal emotion” or how some of his subjects had previously been “disillusioned Marxists.”169 Dicks’s interest in basic human rights and inherent opposition to totalitari­ anism is also apparent in his study and critique of the Soviet regime. His son Adrian, when asked in a BBC interview about post-war examples of “hor­ rors” that concerned his father, immediately replied: “Most of all the Soviet Union.”170 Furthermore, Dicks, funded by the RAND Corporation and Har­ vard’s Russian Research Centre (itself supported by the US Air Force Human Resources Research Institute) conducted interviews with 29 Soviet defectors, published in a paper which appeared in Human Relations in 1952.171 Similar to his research on Nazism, Dicks adopted a “psycho-cultural” methodol­ ogy: “I relate human personality not only to the operation of innate or bio­ logically inherited factors but also to the intra-personal representation of the culturally and socially transmitted mechanisms for regulating, distributing, and controlling tensions of these innate need-systems.”172 He also wrote a number of papers about the Russian “mind” and “national character” and in 1956, he gave a lecture on the “anatomy of totalitarianism” at the Royal Army Medical College. Indeed, Dicks’s son Adrian’s reply when asked whether his father used his findings in order to critique certain attitudes of the West, such as the Vietnam War, was that yes, Germany was chosen because it is a Western society close to our own, but Nazism’s equivalent in modern times was pre-eminently Soviet Communism. It was easier for Henry Dicks to detect hatred for other­ ness in Communist Russia but this was not the case about race superiority narratives in the British Empire and Western colonialism, more broadly. “He has his biases,” noted the physician and social psychologist Ranyard West about Henry Dicks in a letter to Astor, “he collected and wrote up German character and neglected English character (I shew [sic] my bias here, and it was what he was invited to do.”173 In other words, Dicks was suggesting that except for Nazi Germany and Communist Russia and despite the universal­ ity of human destructiveness other modern Western countries did not need a similar form of critique. In the conclusion of the book, in which Dicks assessed his contribution to existing knowledge, he underlined that two widely believed stereotypes about the Nazis were weakened: (a) that the SS killers were insane and clini­ cally uncontrollable people and (b) that Hitler’s plan of annihilation and

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massive killings were exclusively directed towards the Jews, as “a murderous exaggeration of anti-Semitism alone.”174 The aftermath of the Columbus Centre: 1980s Functionalism versus intentionalism

In his discussion of the historiography of National Socialism in the 1950s and 1960s, presented earlier, Rosenbaum described the two rival schools as “[p]oles that might be designated the Romanticist and the Classicist, or per­ haps the Gothic and the Ironic,” envisaging Hitler “as monster or mounte­ bank, believer or cynic, possessed or manipulator.”175 Somewhat similarly, just one year after the Columbus Centre project was officially terminated, in 1981, the Marxist historian of Nazism Tim Mason who, like many of the aforementioned historians was based at Oxford, wrote a well-known essay on the historiography of the Third Reich called “Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism.” In this essay and in the context of Nazi historiography, Mason coined the terms “intentionalism” and its counterpart “functionalism.” The basic point of controversy in the functionalist-intentionalist debate was the nature and ori­ gins of the “Final Solution” as well as Hitler’s role in it. As we saw through the exploration of the Columbus Centre texts, the endeavour to understand the history of the Holocaust and Nazism in those terms existed earlier than that; in fact, Mason himself writes that the purpose of his essay was to draw attention to a partly hidden—and, thus, pre-existing—debate, and to attempt to categorise historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, historian David Blackbourn wrote in his note on Mason that his paper “marked the moment when a scholarly footnote war was first brought into the open and the issues properly defined.”176 On the one hand, the historians who have been characterised as inten­ tionalists regard, in Mason’s words, “the consistent dictatorial will as being of the essence of National Socialist rule.” In other words, for them, Hitler aimed at a genocidal war from the very beginning, usually identified with the writing of Mein Kampf.177 Especially in the context of our discussion on modernity, Lawson located the origins of intentionalism in the history of ideas, a view implying that a coherent ideological domination, independ­ ent of any material evidence, is assumed as cause of the Holocaust.178 The intentionalists would often deny any relation between the Holocaust and the Enlightenment and would trace its origins to a primordial system of beliefs. Among the intentionalists could be included Hugh Trevor-Roper, the German author of The German Dictatorship (1969) Karl Dietrich Bracher, and the American historian and author of The War Against the Jews (1975) Lucy Dawidowicz. The intensity of intentionalism varies: while historian Michael Marrus traced back the roots of intentionalism to the Nuremberg trials, “when American prosecutors first presented Nazi crimes as a carefully

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orchestrated conspiracy” hoping to reinforce the Nazi culpability, Lawson observed that the apogee of intentionalism in Dawidowicz’s book The War Against the Jews depicted Nazi antisemitism “as the bastard child of Chris­ tian anti-Judaism.”179 In a nutshell, most intentionalist historians tended to support the view that the Holocaust was akin to an eruption of barbarism into the history of progress, thus a vision in which Hitler’s master plan and ideology rooted in the ancient past were solely to blame. On the other side of the debate, the functionalist historians placed empha­ sis on the modern capitalist machinery of the Nazi Party, the functional structure of the German State, and their effects upon decision-making in the Third Reich. Indeed, when Mason wrote his essay, the functionalists were under attack for unwittingly supporting, or at least trivialising National Socialism. For him, the so-called functionalists (or structuralists) highlighted the fact that total war and genocide were not part of a carefully prepared master plan, but the inevitable outcome of the Nazi organisation of power and administration before the war, with bureaucracy playing a crucial role in the actualisation of the Holocaust.180 Lawson located the roots of the functionalist metanarrative in the social science of government and organi­ sation.181 Marrus noted that functionalists, such as the German historians Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen, interpreted the road to the Holocaust as “twisted.” From this perspective, the Final Solution was not the immediate result of a single decision made by Hitler but was, instead, carried out “bit by bit.”182 From the accounts we have discussed, the historians Raul Hilberg and A. J. P. Taylor and the philosopher Hannah Arendt could be characterised as moderate functionalists. Indeed, commenting on Hilberg’s emphasis on Nazi bureaucracy highlighted in his famous line that “When in the early days of 1933 the first civil servant wrote the first definition of ‘non-Aryan’ into a civil service ordinance, the fate of European Jewry was sealed,” Dan Stone observes that “one can see Hilberg as the first structuralist in Holocaust his­ toriography.”183 However, though the functionalists describe the Holocaust as an outcome of a modern administrative process, their accounts do not necessarily include a critique of modernity per se. German controversies Throughout the 1980s, a series of historiographical controversies over the understanding and interpretation of Nazism and the Holocaust took place also among German historians in—the then still divided—Germany. It was famously called the Historikerstreit. Although its focal point was the debate over the singularity of the Holocaust, it also addressed other historiographi­ cal issues more relevant to our discussion about the modern origins of the Holocaust. Such tensions would famously erupt in the “Sonderweg question” in Ger­ man historiography about whether Germany had followed a special, differ­ ent historical path from other European countries in the twentieth century.

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In 1986, the historian Heinrich August Winkler wrote a piece as part of the Historikerstreit, in which he argued against the Sonderweg theory: Culturally, Germany is a country of the West. It participated in the European Enlightenment and in a long tradition of the rule of law . . . Hitler and his helpers must be judged by our Western norms. In this historical context the systematic genocide of the Jews ordered by the German state—but also the murder of Sinti and Roma—is the greatest crime of the twentieth century, in fact of world history.184 In 1985, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of Nazi rule in May 1985, functionalist historian Martin Broszat published an essay entitled “A  Plea for a Historicization of National Socialism,” in which he argued that the Nazi period should be treated historically as a normal period, rather than a break in history and that it should be, in other words, historicised rather than demonised.185 His essay triggered controversy, most famously from historian Saul Friedländer, who, given his research interests in the late 1960s and 1970s, corresponded with Cohn about the use of psychohistory for the understanding Nazism and was, indeed, invited to participate in the Columbus Centre project but never published his works under its auspices.186 Friedländer argued that, although the task of historicisation is self-evident for the historian, the Third Reich cannot be treated as a normal historical period, but as an anomaly. The constant juxtaposition and differentiation between the normal and everyday and the abnormal and criminal within the Third Reich itself, when not accompanied by sufficiently precise categories of differentia­ tion and by a clear framework for analysis, may, within the new ideo­ logical context, confront the historian who considers historicization as some kind of more ‘objective’ approach to the Nazi era, with unex­ pected outcomes.187 Their controversy, in the form of letters exchanged between Broszat and Friedländer, was published in English, in New German Critique in 1988.188 Modernity and the Holocaust in 1989 In 1989, Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist who lives and works in Brit­ ain, followed a path which had elements of functionalist thought, but most crucially was very much Arendtian. In 1983, Henry Feingold, a scholar of the Holocaust reception in the United States, described the very symbols of modern industry standing right in the heart of the Nazi crime.189 Picking up these threads in his book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Bauman chal­ lenged the idea of the Holocaust as a “break” and argued that the Holocaust must be studied “as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden

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possibilities of modern society.”190 Bauman implied that not only can we use our understanding of modernity to grasp the Holocaust but also use our understanding of the Holocaust to grasp modernity. According to Bauman, the Holocaust would not have been possible if it were not for modern civi­ lisation and its greater achievements: industrialisation and rational bureau­ cracy. While industrialisation made dispensable things like the trains—for the mass deportation—and the gas chambers—for the mass killings—rational bureaucracy enabled the erosion of moral inhibitions against violent atroci­ ties through the authorisation of violence, the routinisation of work, and the dehumanisation of victims.191 In his book, Bauman also argues that antisemitic ideology was not the greatest driving force of the Nazi machinery although the indifference of the bystanders might have originated from a vague anti-Jewish sentiment. In this particular argument, he quotes Cohn from his book Warrant for Genocide: Never during the process of destruction did popular antisemitism become an active force. At most it is suggested that it obliquely con­ tributed to the perpetration of mass murder by inducing the apathy with which most Germans viewed the fate of the Jews when they knew of it, or resigned themselves to ignorance. In Norman Cohn’s words, “people were unwilling to bestir themselves on behalf of the Jews. The very widespread indifference, the ease with which people dissociated themselves from the Jews and their fate, was certainly in part a result of a vague feeling that . . . Jews were somehow uncanny and dangerous”. . . In Norman Cohn’s opinion, an organized group of “professional Jew-killers” (itself a phenomenon not unconnected with antisemitism, yet in no way identical with it) is the very material and operative cause of violence; without it, resentment of the Jews, however strong, had hardly ever erupted into physical assaults against Jewish neighbours.192 Bauman again uses Cohn’s book to describe the antisemitic stereotype that, albeit not the sole driving force for the atrocities of Third Reich, did prove lethal on many occasions: One variety of antisemitic stereotype that travels easily is described in length by Norman Cohn as the image of the Jews as an international conspiracy set on ruining all local powers, decomposing all local cul­ tures and traditions, and uniting the world under Jewish domination. This is, to be sure, the most vituperative and potentially lethal form of antisemitism; it was under the auspices of this stereotype that exter­ mination of the Jews was attempted by the Nazis. It seems that in the contemporary world the multi-faceted imagery of Jewry, once drawing inspiration from multiple dimensions of “Jewish incongruity,” tends to be tapered down to just one fairly straightforward attribute: that of a

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Warrant for Genocide is not the only mention of Cohn in Bauman’s work. He also refers to the Columbus series book Europe’s Inner Demons, in order to stress the fact that the emergence of modern reason had also in the past not prevented organised and intentional persecution and mass violence against another targeted group, the so-called witches: I believe that the production of Jewish incongruity as a by-product of the self-constitution and self-reproduction of the Christian Church has been a major cause of the prominence of the Jews among those of Europe’s Inner Demons that Norman Cohn so vividly described in his memo­ rable study of European witch-hunt. Most remarkable among Cohn’s findings (and one that has found ample confirmation in numerous other studies of the problem) is the apparent lack of correlation between the intensity of witch scare and irrational fears in general, and the advances of scientific knowledge and general level of daily rationality. As a mat­ ter of fact, the explosion of modern scientific method and the powerful strides towards the rationalization of daily life in the early years of mod­ ern history coincided with the most fierce and vicious episode of witchhunting in history. It appears that the irrationality of witchcraft myths and witch persecution was very loosely related to the retardation of Reason. It was, on the other hand, most intimately related to the inten­ sity of anxieties and tensions provoked or generated by the collapse of the ancien régime and the advent of the modern order.194 Dan Stone makes an important point about a problematic and insufficiently theorised feature of Bauman’s claims. Stone notes how it remains unclear in Bauman’s approach whether modern bureaucratic culture and the Enlighten­ ment’s doctrines caused the Holocaust, thus making it their logical and inevi­ table outcome, or whether they are perceived as the conditions that facilitated or allowed it to happen through a very efficient bureaucratic machinery as well as the dogmatic belief in modern scientific ideas such as Darwinism.195 Stone aptly observes that while the latter is true, the former is more prob­ lematic and not even claimed by the most eminent critical theorists of the Frankfurt School: Where even Horkheimer and Adorno describe a dialectic of Enlight­ enment, so that Enlightenment only becomes totalizing and “radiates disaster triumphant” once it becomes its own myth, Bauman sees a line heading directly from rationalization to genocide. Thus, downplay­ ing the roles of charisma and the non-rational facets of Nazism, Bau­ man provides a seductive, productive, and provocative, but ultimately

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one-sided argument about the nature of modernity and, as a conse­ quence, about the origins of the Holocaust. Even if it is by no means a sufficient explanation for the Holocaust, modernity, however, remains a useful term of analysis.196 1989, the year Bauman wrote his book, was also the year that historian Jane Caplan, who had been a close colleague of Mason’s, and herself a specialist on Nazi Germany, argued that fascism is “the archetypal fist smashed in the face of the Enlightenment’s humane rationality.”197 As we saw, this “arche­ typal fist” marks a significant controversy regarding the origins of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Adherents of the one side of the debate see the Holocaust as a rupture in human history and thus fail to associate the Nazi atrocities with modernity. Among those, there are both the most conserva­ tive intentionalist historians, who deny the Holocaust was a result of the age of reason and trace its origins to the indictment of an ideology rooted in the distant past, and also some postmodern scholars who support the idea of a break through a very different path claiming that, “after Auschwitz,” history, like any other form of metanarrative, is impossible. Postmodernist discourses flourished, mainly on the Continent, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that is to say, by the time the Columbus Centre was coming to an end. The aim of introducing postmodernism here, however, is in order to discuss one more attitude towards the theory of a modernity break. The notion of the postmodern was famously first defined in 1979 by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard as “incredulity toward metanar­ ratives.”198 Accordingly, Jameson described how “the post-modern looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the tell-tale instant after which it is no longer the same,” while Edgar and Sedwick suggested that the “post”­ theories as a whole mark a radical departure from the concepts and values of a humanist discourse.199 In postmodern scholarship, the Second World War, with the Holocaust often at its centre, was represented as a break, a rupture or a discontinuity in history, and especially history’s progressive tendencies. Certainly, the Holocaust is often cast here as the most fundamental experi­ ence for modern philosophy to engage with: Robert Eaglestone even argues that postmodern scholars such as Jacques Derrida or Emmanuel Levinas write as if in a continuing response to the Holocaust.200 ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ In this chapter, I have attempted to show how the Columbus Centre can be situated in relation to a much wider set of historiographical controversies. There is a risk of anachronism here, admittedly, since the controversies at issue were largely to spark and gain wide public attention, after the demise of the Centre, and largely in ignorance of the work of its key figures. Nonethe­ less, it is helpful, I argue, to set out the nature of this ensuing debate, since

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many of its elements, as I have shown, were already present implicitly if not explicitly by the 1960s, and were already evident in the forms of analysis explored by Cohn and his collaborators. We could characterise, on the one hand, Norman Cohn and Saul Friedländer as moderate intentionalists who tended to overlook the role of modernity in the actualisation of the Holo­ caust, and David Astor, Léon Poliakov, and Henry Dicks as moderate func­ tionalists, convinced that the modern framework of the Nazi atrocities is not independent from the actual deeds. The two Columbus Centre protagonists, namely its inspirer and main funder David Astor and its director and book series editor Norman Cohn, were not wholly as one regarding the analysis of the relationship between totalitarianism and modernity. On the one hand, Astor’s thoughts reveal, albeit in embryonic form, his intention to mount a critique of modernity as the possible, if not necessary, harbinger of Nazism. In doing so he per­ haps echoed the ideas, already evident in the war years, of his friend George Orwell, who saw the Nazis as “the truly modern men,” and modern Ger­ many as “far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous.”201 On the other hand, as Hannah Arendt observed, Cohn seems to have come to the project with views pre-shaped through his Pursuit of the Millennium: funda­ mental elements of Nazi and Communist ideologies, he argued, were deeply rooted in medieval beliefs and practices. If Astor stressed the modern ori­ gins of the Holocaust, Cohn insistently pushed the time horizon backwards. Moreover, they also differed in their temperaments and capacity for historical scholarship. Indeed, Astor brought to the Columbus Centre a liberal mind­ set and some alertness to Fascism as a modern product, yet no real interest in or capability for systematic academic study. Cohn’s focus on the longue durée and his interest in the more mystical and millenarian, even apocalyptic, aspects of Nazism, however, was based on meticulous historical research. We could also safely assume that all the Columbus Centre members lacked the toolkit of critical theory. In other words, for various reasons, while some of them described the modern origins of the Holocaust, they did not critically engage with a critique of modernity and Enlightenment—and inevitably into a Marxist analysis of its history taking class into account—which could conceive the Holocaust as their possible but not inevitable aftermath. Some of its mem­ bers had good intentions about such an aim and were able to spot contradic­ tions and speak of religious or secular “totalitarian orthodoxies,” for example, Astor or Poliakov. But these did not have a significant impact on British histo­ riography; the former was not a scholar and the latter was based in France and much of his work was not translated at the time. Overall, and perhaps because of the hegemonic liberal discourse of post-war Britain within the Cold War context, the Columbus Centre members did not go so far as their Frankfurt School contemporaries in ascribing to the Enlightenment a key role in shaping the ideas that led to twentieth-century totalitarian ideologies. Nonetheless, they were particularly insightful when it came to the application of a comparative approach to genocide and mass violence as we will see in the following chapter.

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Notes 1 “New Paltz News: Area Social Notes,” The Kingston Daily Freeman, Janu­ ary 19, 1963; Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1966. 2 Ibid., 226. 3 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 208; Jon Petrie, “The Secular Word HOLOCAUST: Scholarly Myths, History, and 20th Century Meanings,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 31–63. 4 Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 9. 5 Bernard Bard, “After Eichmann,” New York Post, May 17, 1966. In 1966, the afternoon edition of the daily New York Post, under the ownership of Dorothy Schiff, was regarded a paper devoted to liberalism and social welfare: in 1989 Schiff’s obituarist called the Post “a liberal power in journalism.” “Obituaries: Dorothy Schiff, 86, Ex-Post Owner, Dies,” The New York Times, August  31, 1989. After 1976, when Schiff sold the New York Post to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the editorial style shifted in order to fit Murdoch’s right-wing views. Deirdre Carmody, “Dorothy Schiff Agrees to Sell Post to Murdoch, Australian Publisher; Dorothy Schiff Agrees to Sell Post to Murdoch, Australian Publisher,” The New York Times, November 20, 1976. 6 Bard, “After Eichmann.”

7 Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.”

8 For a study that explores the proposition that the fear of the nuclear bomb was in

fact based on imagery intertwined with emotions that originated many years before the first atomic bomb was dropped, see Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988). 9 Sampson, “Observing David Astor.” 10 See Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.” My use of “totalitarianism” here is informed by Hannah Arendt’s account in The Origins of Totalitarianism: a political system can be described as “totalitarian” when the state has total con­ trol over civil society and private life. Despite their vast differences and their open opposition, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany can be both described as “totalitarian” with respect to ideology: they were driven by the ideal of a “class­ less” or “racially pure” society through class and race struggle, respectively; see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1973). However, the term “totalitarian­ ism” has been called into question by historians who propose that there are lim­ its to its application for understanding Nazism; for example, see Ian Kershaw, “Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2, Understanding Nazi Germany (April 2004): 239–54. Thus, my own use of the word will be as cautious as possible. 11 For the immediate British post-war commentators on occupied Germany, see Lara Feigel, The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 12 Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (Bos­ ton, MA: Da Capo Press, 2014), 64. 13 Ibid., 65. Ron Rosenbaum told me in a private conversation in February 2016 that the interviews both with Hugh Trevor-Roper and Allan Bullock were held at some point between 1994 and 1995. 14 Ibid., 70.

15 Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler.

16 Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 75; Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944,

trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953).

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17 Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London: Odhams Press, 1959). 18 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre  & Spottiswoode, 1967), 290. 19 Rosenbaum defines “mountebank”—a word rarely used nowadays—in context as “a grander, more pretentious figure than a mere con man or a charlatan—he’s a figure of public life, often a politician, one who practices his charlatanry from a public platform.” Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 69. 20 Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, 735–6. 21 Richard F. Schier, “Reviewed Works: Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bull­ ock; In the Nazi Era by Lewis Namier,” The Western Political Quarterly 6, no. 3 (September 1953): 573–79. 22 Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, 736. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 83. 25 Ibid., 89. 26 Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, 735–6. 27 Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 83. 28 Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 95. 29 For example, Taylor argues that it was the British government that took the lead in dissecting Czechoslovakia in 1938 and that showed more concern with imposing concessions on the Poles than resisting Hitler in 1939. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 1964, 172–174. Ibid., 8. 30 Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 1964, 10–11. 31 Elizabeth Wiskemann was an English journalist and historian of English-German origin who wrote extensively on German history and the Nazis, see for exam­ ple Elizabeth Wiskemann, Undeclared War (London: Constable & Co, 1939); and Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Rome-Berlin Axis: A  History of the Rela­ tions between Hitler and Mussolini (London: Oxford University Press, 1949); and Elizabeth Wiskemann, Europe of the Dictators, 1919–1945 (London: Col­ lins, 1970). 32 Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 1964, 97–8.

33 Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 34.

34 Gordon Martel, “The Origins of the Second World War” Reconsidered: A. J. P.

Taylor and the Historians (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 2–3. 35 C. C. Aronsfeld, Letter to Encounter editor, 24 July 1962, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Project Sponsors 1962–64. see A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961). 36 Ibid. 37 Cf. fn. 221. 38 Saunders, “How the CIA Plotted against Us.” 39 Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, “A. J. P. Taylor, Hitler and the War,” Encounter, July 1961. Aronsfeld, the director of the Wiener Library, who accused Taylor of the same claim, cf. fn. 238. 40 Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 1964, 8. 41 Ibid., 34. 42 Ibid., 34, 35. 43 Trevor-Roper, “A. J. P. Taylor, Hitler and the War.” 44 David Astor, Letter to Max Beloff, 31 July  1962, Astor Papers: Box  10, BH, Folder: Project Sponsors 1962–64. 45 Ibid., 81. 46 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 4–5. For Hilberg’s unprecedented account, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (London: W. H. Allen, 1961).

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47 Tom Lawson, “Review of the Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg (review No. 394),” Reviews in History, accessed April 16, 2015, www.history. ac.uk/reviews/review/394. 48 Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.” 49 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes & Meier, 1985), 338. 50 See Stonebridge, “Inner Emigration,” 42–54. 51 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, ix. 52 Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. II (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 141. 53 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xiv. 54 Ibid., 7. In a relevant discussion in Nochlin and Garb’s 1995 book The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, the authors write that “if conversion could deliver the medieval and early modern Jews from the stigma of their identity, this was not the case for Jews in the modern period. Now Jew­ ishness came to be conceived not as a matter of belief but as a racial identity, one which could be observed, measured, understood, and pathologized.” Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Con­ struction of Identity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 22. 55 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 4; Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 106. 56 Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (Edin­ burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 49. 57 Lyndsey Stonebridge, “Hannah Arednt’s Testimony: Judging in a Lawless World,” New Formations 67 (2009): 78. 58 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 252. 59 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. 60 Ibid., 25–26. 61 Ibid., 116. 62 Ibid., 45. 63 Ibid., 33. 64 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xi. 65 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 289. 66 Bard, “After Eichmann.” 67 Brightman, Between Friends, 341, 386. 68 Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.” 69 Gerschom Scholem, A Life in Letters, 1914–1982, ed. Anthony David Skinner (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 397, 402. 70 Ibid., 402. 71 Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination; Lyndsey Stonebridge, “Refugee Style: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Rights,” Textual Practice 25, no. 1 (2011): 71–85. 72 Arendt, The Life of the Mind. 73 Nathaniel Popper, “A Conscious Pariah,” The Nation, March 31, 2010. For fur­ ther discussion of the complicated association between Raul Hilberg and Han­ nah Arendt, see Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, 74–75. 74 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Revised and Definitive Edition (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1985), xii. 75 A few years later in 1973, member of the Frankfurt School Erich Fromm would publish a psychoanalytic treatise precisely on those issues, see Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, CA: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). 76 Astor, “The Meaning of Eichmann.” 77 Ibid. 78 Harold Wilson, “Labour’s Plan for Science,” 1963, Labour Party Library, http:// nottspolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Labours-Plan-for-science.pdf.

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79 Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.” 80 “Astor Urges Study of Nazi Psychology,” The Jewish Chronicle, May 4, 1962. 81 The roots of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide can be traced back to interwar Germany, where Dr  Alfred Wiener, a German Jew, started an archive “to collect information about the Nazis, which formed the basis of campaigns to undermine their activities” in the 1920s. Dr Wiener fled initially to Amsterdam in 1933 and subsequently to the United Kingdom in 1938, bringing his collection with him. Today, the Wiener Library is in the Bloomsbury area of London and comprises one of the “largest and most respected” collections for the study of antisemitism and the Holocaust in the world; see “Our History,” The Wiener Library: For the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, accessed June 12, 2014, www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Our-History; see C.C. Aronsfeld, Let­ ter to Encounter editor, 24 July 1962, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Project Sponsors 1962–64; see Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 1961. 82 A Brief History of the Columbus Centre and its Research Project 1980, Astor Papers: Box  10 BH, Folder: Minutes of Columbus Trust Management Com­ mittee, Standing Committee and Trustees, 1970–78; and A Brief History of the Columbus Centre and its Research Project, 1980. 83 Max Beloff, “Totalitarianism,” The Manchester Guardian, July  27, 1951. For Astor-Beloff’s correspondence, see Max Beloff, Letter to David Astor, 3 August 1962, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Project Sponsors 1962–64. 84 Lamont, “Obituary.” Cohn’s part Jewish heritage might have played a role here, but it has been not possible to draw any conclusion on that based on the existing archival material and the interview with his second wife. 85 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1968). 86 David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berke­ ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980). 87 Dialectic of Enlightenment was first published in 1944 under the title Philo­ sophical Fragments; it was revised in 1947 and given its current title; see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophi­ cal Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 88 Ibid., 1. 89 Ibid., xi. 90 Adorno, Prisms, 34. 91 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362. 92 Josh Cohen, “Post-Holocaust Philosophy,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 469. 93 George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State,” Horizon, August  1941, 141–2; for a more detailed discussion on Orwell’s views on Nazi ideology, see Danae Karydaki, “National Socialism and the English Genius: Revisiting George Orwell’s Political Views on Nazi Ideology,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 1 (2016): 53–73. 94 “Multiple Display Advertisements: Insight,” The Times, February 15, 1962. 95 Raymond Williams, “The Frankfurt School,” The Guardian, January 10, 1974. 96 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973). 97 Sanford’s book is an anthology of essays by various leading American scholars on the social and psychological preconditions that lead a group under a higher authority to treat fellow humans as nonhumans, perform violence, and, ulti­ mately, commit murder. Sanford, Sanctions for Evil. 98 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 268. 99 See Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1963–4.

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100 Norman Cohn, “Work in ‘Political Psychology’ in Germany,” 04/12/1963, in Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th Meetings of the Working Party; “Progress Report” to 1st December 1963, in ibid. 101 Norman Cohn, “Work in ‘Political Psychology’ in Germany,” 04/12/1963, in Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th Meetings of the Working Party; “Progress Report” to 1st December 1963, in ibid. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. 105 James Kirkup, “Obituary: Leon Poliakov,” The Independent, December  11, 1997. 106 “The History of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDJC),” accessed February 17, 2016, www.memorialdelashoah.org/index.php/en/archives­ and-documentation/the-cdjc-catalogue/the-history-of-the-center-of-contemporary­ jewish-documentation-cdjc. 107 Reitlinger, The Final Solution. For the criticism, see Luck, “Use and Abuse of Holocaust Documents: Reitlinger and ‘How Many?’ ” Léon Poliakov, La Condi­ tion Des Juifs En France Sous L’occupation Italienne (Paris: Editions Du Centre, 1946). 108 Judaken, “Léon Poliakov, the Origins of the Holocaust and Theories of AntiSemitism: Rereading Bréviaire de La Haine.”; Poliakov, Bréviaire de La Haine. 109 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 221. 110 Kirkup, “Obituary: Leon Poliakov.” 111 Léon Poliakov, Letter to David Astor, 2 September 1964, in Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: Columbus Trust Working Party 1963–64. 112 Léon Poliakov, “The Eichmann Trial: The Proceedings,” American Jewish Year Book 63 (1962): 54. 113 Poliakov, “The Eichmann Trial: The Proceedings.” 114 Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume 3: From Voltaire to Wag­ ner (1975). 115 Léon Poliakov, Le Mythe Aryen. Essai Sur Les Sources Du Racisme et Des Nationalismes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1971). For the English translation; see Poliakov, The Aryan Myth. 116 Ibid., 1. 117 Ibid., 2. 118 Ibid., 3. 119 Ibid., 6. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid., 23. 123 Ibid., 326. 124 Ibid., 328. 125 Poliakov, The Aryan Myth, 285. 126 Poliakov, 286. 127 Poliakov, 287, 289. 128 Poliakov, 287. 129 Poliakov, 288–89. 130 Poliakov, 289. 131 Ibid., 330. 132 See also Prof. Norman Cohn Lectures, in Centre for Continuing Education Col­ lection (1969–2007), University of Sussex Library, SxMs57/5/5. 133 Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid.

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136 Danae Karydaki, Interview with Marina Voikhanskaya, September 3, 2014. 137 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. 138 P. G. J. Pulzer, “Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Norman Cohn,” History 53, no. 178 (1968): 280–81. 139 Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, xi. 140 Ibid., 8–10. 141 Ibid., 31. 142 Even though Cohn invited Larner to be part of the research project, her book was not funded by the Columbus Centre Series, but by Social Science Research Council. See Larner, Enemies of God. Cf. Ch. 5. 143 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 18. 144 Ibid., 230. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 269. “Our Fs” refers to fascist personality traits according to the 1947 California F-scale personality test designed by Adorno and other authors of the Authoritarian Personality (1950) that Dicks used extensively in his study of the former SS prisoners as he has previously also done in his study of the Nazi PoWs, see Dicks, “Personality Traits and National Socialist Ideology.” 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 22. 149 Ibid., 128. 150 Ibid., 150. 151 Ibid., 102. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid., 141. 154 Ibid., 266. 155 Ibid., 55. 156 Ibid., 162–3. 157 As the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, the word “double-think” was coined by George Orwell in his 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to denote the mental capacity to accept as equally valid two entirely contrary opin­ ions or beliefs. In fact, Dicks provides a good example of “double-think” from his research subjects: euthanasia or “mercy-killing,” contradictory in its very wording, was accepted as necessary evil by the camp guards, Ibid., 60. 158 Ibid., 55. 159 Ibid., 100. 160 Ibid., 143. For an analysis of biopower, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 161 See Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, chap. 7. 162 Ibid., 143. 163 Ibid., 50. 164 Ibid., 149. 165 Ibid., 143. 166 Ibid., 146. 167 Ibid., 147–8. 168 Ibid., 268. 169 See Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 267 & 45. 170 Daniel Pick, Interview with Adrian Dicks, “The Roots of Extremism” (BBC Radio 4, March 17, 2014). 171 See Henry Dicks, Observations in Contemporary Russian Behaviour, 1952, and Some Notes on the Russian National Character, 1958, in Henry Dicks Collec­ tion, Wellcome Archives, Section PP/HVD/C “Soviet Russia 1952–1971,” Box 5.

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172 Henry Dicks, “Observations on Contemporary Russian Behaviour,” Human Relations 5, no. 2 (1952): 111–75. 173 Ranyard West, Letter to David Astor, 20 December  1962, in Astor Papers: Box 10 BH, Folder: Columbus trust General 1963. 174 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 230. 175 Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, 64. 176 Tim Mason, “Intention and Explanation: A  Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism,” in Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason, ed. Jane Caplan (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1995), 212; David Blackbourn, “Tim Mason,” Past & Present 128 (1990): 3–6. 177 Mason, “Intention and Explanation,” 217–218. 178 Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, 74. 179 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 36. Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, 76. 180 In his recent book, Stone prefers the term “structuralism” instead of “function­ alism;” see Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 2010. Mason, “Intention and Explanation,” 213–214. 181 Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, 74. 182 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 40–41. 183 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, vol. 3, 1044; Stone, His­ tories of the Holocaust, 118–9. 184 Heinrich August Winkler, “Eternally in the Shadow of Hitler? The Dispute about the Germans’ Understanding of History,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concern­ ing the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 174. 185 Martin Broszat, “Reworking the Past,” in A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990). 186 Personal correspondence with Saul Friedländer 26 February 2016. For his books on psychoanalysis and Nazi history, see Saul Friedländer, L’antisémitisme Nazi. Histoire d’une Psychose Collective (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970); and Saul Friedländer, History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978). 187 Saul Friedländer, “Some Reflections on the Historicization of National Social­ ism,” German Politics & Society 13, The Historikerstreit (February 1988): 9–21. 188 Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” New German Critique 44, Special Issue on the Historik­ erstreit (1988): 85–126. 189 Feingold writes that those symbols are the “factory” chimneys which “poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh,” the perfect railroad system that transferred prisoners as if they were cargo and the gas chambers as product of the advanced German chemical industry; see Henry Feingold, “How Unique Is the Holocaust,” in Genocide: Critical Issues of the Holocaust : A Companion to the Film Genocide (1983). 190 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2000), 12. 191 The authorization of violence refers to obeying the commands from superiors and thus discarding moral responsibility. The routinization of work signifies the repetition that makes the subjects act without thinking so that they do not face their moral choice. Ultimately, the dehumanization of the victims concerns mediating the action of killing, making the victims invisible and denying the victims’ humanity when referring to them, see Ibid., 19–30. Regarding the dehu­ manization of the victims, Primo Levi addresses precisely this issue to the visitor

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This age of unenlightened despotism of Auschwitz: human beings were exterminated in the camps as if they were harmful insects; see Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz (Cambridge: Pol­ ity Press, 2005). If we return to terminology and especially terminology used while the Holocaust was taking place, dehumanisation is also revealed in the very name of the whole Nazi plan: the “Final Solution.” This euphemistic term has neutral connotation which reveals neither the atrocity of the deeds nor the culpability of perpetrators towards human beings, but rather a production line leading to the resolution of a certain, almost bureaucratic, problem: the “Jewish Question.” Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 32. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 40. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 122–4. Ibid., 124. Jane Caplan, “Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians,” Central European History 22, no. 4 (1989): 119–37. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition.” In The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Stephen Seidman (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1994), 27. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press Books, 1990), ix; Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2007), 263. Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004). George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.” In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. II: My Country Right or Left, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker  & Warburg, 1968), 71; George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler and the World State (Hori­ zon, 1941),” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. II: My Country Right or Left, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 143; Karydaki, “National Socialism and the English Genius.”

3

A latent possibility in all mankind Race, comparison, and the Columbus Centre

“I didn’t stand a chance,” said Albie Sachs at an interview for the George W. Bush Institute; even my name . . . I was named after an African trade union leader who died shortly before I was born in 1935. Everything about me from the moment of my birth in a sense destined me to end up in the freedom struggle in South Africa.1 Albie Sachs is an eminent figure in South Africa: a member of the African National Congress (ANC) from his early youth, a revolutionary activist who lost one arm and sight of one eye from a car bomb in Mozambique in 1988, and a Constitutional Court Judge, appointed by Nelson Mandela after the abolition of apartheid in 1994. His Jewish parents had left Lithuania for South Africa as young children to flee from Soviet antisemitic pogroms and were both involved with the workers’ movement and Marxism. Sachs’s white-skin privilege did not prevent him from siding with the oppressed in the racially segregated South Africa, perhaps because his Jewish ancestry reminded him of the universality of discrimination and race-based violence. “That,” he remarks, was a real world for me as a young white child growing up in South Africa. In our small space of our home and our daily life . . . everything revolved around the idea of a nonracial, free, and democratic society.2 Indeed, in 2008, at an interview he gave to historian and curator Daniel Greene at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sachs underlined the links that he perceived between Nazism and apartheid: For me, the anti-apartheid struggle was a form of combating racism, which had manifested itself in antisemitism, reaching ghastly propor­ tions through the genocide. But it was all part and parcel of a similar form of inhumanity of human beings to other human beings.3 DOI: 10.4324/9780429197314-4

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It is precisely this theme of inhumanity into which Sachs attempted a deeper inquiry in late 1960s and early 1970s as a Columbus Centre participant. By the time Sachs wrote his Columbus Series book Justice in South Africa (1973), South Africa was not a colony in the traditional sense; it did, none­ theless, have a long colonial history that played a crucial part in the estab­ lishment of apartheid. The history of colonisation of South Africa starts as early as 1487, when Bartholomeu Dias led a Portuguese expedition to the Mossel Bay. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company founded a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope, resulting in the creation and gradual expansion of the Afrikaners or Boers, an ethnic group descended mainly from Dutch settlers, in the region. During the Dutch set­ tlement, slaves were imported from other parts of the Dutch colonies, while indigenous populations were often employed as servants. In the late eight­ eenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Cape Colony was subject to succes­ sive conquest and exchange between Dutch and British colonisers. During that period, most labour, skilled and unskilled, was done by slaves; “whites became increasingly disinclined,” wrote Sachs in Justice in South Africa, “to suffer what they considered to be the degradation of doing work fit for slaves. Gradually, it came to be thought by colonists that slavery was the proper condition for all dark-skinned people.”4 This mentality remained dominant even after the abolition of slavery by a British Act of Parliament in 1833. In other words, Black people became de jure, but not de facto, emancipated, resulting in the survival of certain types of work held exclusively by them. As Sachs put it, by the nineteenth century “the buying and selling of servants and absolute restraints upon their mobility were outlawed, but many of the features of the master-slave situation were reproduced in labour legislation and pass laws, and sustained by social practice.”5 At the turn of the twentieth century, between 1899 and 1902, “The War between the Whites” or Sec­ ond Boer War was fought between Britain and the Boer republics (Transvaal and Orange Free State), resulting in Britain’s victory and dominance in the region. In 1906–7, Britain gave white-only parliamentary government to the former republics, and a few years later, in 1910, the Union of South Africa was formed.6 Between then and 1948, when the Afrikaner National Party won the general election and introduced the infamous policy of apartheid, segregation between whites (mainly Afrikaners and British) and non-whites (mainly Black inhabitants but also other ethnic or mixed-ethnic groups such as Indians) was gradually promoted. The substantial book that Sachs published under the auspices of the Columbus Centre reminds us that the history and memory culture of the Holocaust emerged during a period of mass decolonisation as well as con­ tinuing racial discrimination that was largely (but not exclusively) linked with colonial contexts. The decision to include a book on South Africa in the Centre suggests that the members were aware of other forms of mass vio­ lence and segregation that could be comparable to the Nazi crimes. Indeed, despite being one of the few Columbus Series accounts to directly address

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colonialism, Justice in South Africa was heavily influenced by the Centre’s methodology; as its director Norman Cohn put it, Sachs “felt that [his book] owed a good deal to the interdisciplinary habit of mind which had developed at the Centre.”7 Indeed, Sachs’s choice to explore similarities, differences and entanglements between Nazism and other ideologies or regimes, such as the government, legal system, and prevailing system of ideas in South Africa from 1625 to 1970, indicates the Columbus Centre’s fundamental support of a comparative historiographical approach to the Holocaust, what David Astor envisioned in 1962 as a study of the “latent possibility in all mankind.”8 Likewise, Henry Dicks introduced his book Licensed Mass Murder by stating that the “German case” was chosen by the Columbus Centre research team “as a paradigm of a planned, highly organized mass-murder operation” and that the study of Nazi Germany would assist in understanding “the SS’s accursed confrères of other times and climes,” such as members of the Holy Inquisition or the Turkish units who carried out the Armenian genocide.9 In other words, the Columbus Centre can be situated in the context of a particu­ lar and enduring aspect of Holocaust historiography, namely a set of debates about “uniqueness,” for evidently they challenged the notion that the Holo­ caust was a process that defied comparison by their insistence on exploring links between the murder of millions of Jews in Europe and other forms of discrimination and genocide in colonial and other contexts. Picking up the threads from the discussion in Chapter 2 about the mod­ ern origins of Nazism, this chapter introduces the historiographical debate between the so-called universalists, that is, those in favour of a comparative methodology to racial segregation, persecution, and genocide, and the socalled specifists or particularists, namely the advocates of Holocaust unique­ ness. I  focus on the two sides of the debate in historical perspective while designating the significance that these questions had in the context of the Columbus Centre works, such as The Observer under Astor’s editorship, Albie Sachs’s view of South Africa, Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon’s his­ tory of the Roma people, Rae Sherwood’s psychological study of interracial relations in the UK, and Nevitt Sanford’s work on racism in the United States. We shall now turn to the history of comparing Nazism and the Holocaust to explore how these Columbus Centre texts fit into the picture. Comparing Nazism and the Holocaust Totalitarianism as a comparative context in the 1950s and 1960s

In the years between the end of the Second World War and the launching of the Columbus Centre, the first and perhaps most easily comprehensible object of comparison of Nazism and the Holocaust was the Soviet Union under Stalin. Within a Cold War discourse on totalitarianism, the Nazi death camps were thus compared to the Gulag and the Nazi ideology was com­ pared to Communism. One of the first British writers to stress the similarities

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between the two ideologies was the person who was coincidentally also the first to introduce the term “Cold War,” namely George Orwell.10 “[T]here is not much to choose between Communism and Fascism,” proclaimed Orwell in a letter to the editor of the Strand magazine Richard Usborne in 1947, “though for various reasons I would choose Communism if there were no other choice open.”11 His well-known equation of totalitarianism on the left with totalitarianism on the right, as famously depicted in his 1945 allegory Animal Farm and his 1949 novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four, soon entered Eng­ lish language and popular culture.12 After his death in early 1950, there was an ongoing debate among disciplines such as political science, history, and philosophy that classified both ideologies and regimes under the big totalitar­ ian umbrella. As discussed in Chapter 2, Hannah Arendt brought together Hitler’s Ger­ many and Stalin’s Soviet Union in her seminal account Origins of Totali­ tarianism in 1951. There, she emphasised the role of ideology in politics and, especially, in the so-called totalitarian regimes: a political system can be described as “totalitarian” when the state has total control over civil society and private life. For Arendt, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany could thus be both described as totalitarian with respect to ideology, despite their vast differences and the open opposition between each other from 1941 onwards. Their common ground was, according to Arendt, the fact that they were driven by the ideal of a “classless” or “racially pure” society through class or race struggle, respectively.13 In 1956, political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in their book Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, enhanced the idea that Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes were similar to each other by defining the crite­ ria based on which a regime can be identified as totalitarian. Moreover, in 1965, American historian Walter Laqueur ran a comparative research from a historical perspective between Russia and Germany in his book Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict.14 A few years later, in his 1962 speech, Orwell’s good friend David Astor brought up again the Cold War condition; the Soviets’ labour camps were an issue comparable to the Nazi camps. People on each side of the ideological divide, he argued, believed that the world’s evil stemmed from one small cat­ egory of people that constituted a “world-wide conspiracy aiming primarily at their debasement or destruction.” The suggested—final—solution on both sides was the elimination of this other “devil-class.”15 Race was replaced by class, or, at least, ideology but the process of hating and pursuing extermina­ tion was very similar. The Cold War discourse about an equation of “totali­ tarianism on the left with totalitarianism on the right” also informed Astor’s point that the emotional element of both ideologies resembled the mentality of antisemitism.16 Indeed, as revealed in a letter from Norman Cohn to the American anthropologist George DeVos in 1965, Astor was keen to include an inquiry into “the psychopathological elements in the Communist/anti­ imperialist world-views, and in anti-Communism of the McCarthy type.”

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Cohn, however, advised against such an undertaking, as it would be, in his own words “too large a theme to tackle when the project is just coming into existence.”17 Holocaust uniqueness and intentionalism in the 1960s and 1970s The question of the Holocaust’s uniqueness shares a special place in contem­ porary historiography, and, more intriguingly, popular imagination.18 How­ ever, in the 1960s and 1970s, the view that the Holocaust was a unique event in human history was not so common as it would later become. Indeed, Dan Stone argues that back then the claim basically “served the important func­ tion of countering the relative inattention paid to the Holocaust.”19 The uniqueness question is salient for our discussion because it was directly challenged in David Astor’s 1961 Eichmann leader and his 1962 London speech, in which he argued that large-scale deliberate killings were by no means limited to Nazi Germany. What seemed unique about the Holo­ caust in Astor’s eyes was the modern nature of the crime, as discussed in the previous chapter.20 In her 1967 preface to part one of Origins of Totalitarianism on antisem­ itism, Arendt echoes (again) what Astor had previously stressed: it was an “unprecedented crime of genocide in the midst of Occidental civilization;” in other words, it is its Western Enlightened character that provides the Holo­ caust with its unique quality.21 By contrast with the implication here of Astor’s or Arendt’s remarks, advocates of the Holocaust’s historical “uniqueness” usually also pursue the intentionalist approach. They insist, more specifically, that the vast array of crimes by the Nazis, including their genocidal policies, were planned and constituted a fundamental break in history: the Holocaust. According to this line of thought, the Holocaust must be unique because Hitler himself wanted, carefully planned, and carried out this crime. Thus, many well-known inten­ tionalist historians adopted in the 1960s and 1970s a view that the form of the Holocaust, that is, Jews being murdered in death camps, reveals a programmatic and wicked intention, running back to the 1920s, which also marks the singularity of the crime. For instance, German historian Eberhard Jäckel argued in his book Hitlers Weltanschauung: Entwurf einer Herrschaft (1969) translated into English as Hitler’s World View: a Blueprint for Power, that in the summer of 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and initiated the Final Solution on a large scale, “the blueprints of Hitler’s foreign and racial policy reached their respective climaxes at precisely the same moment.”22 For Jäckel, Hitler had a strong antisemitic view that informed not only the anti-communism that largely motivated Operation Barbarossa but also the pursuit of a more sys­ tematic extermination of the Jews: “when Hitler spoke of Marxism as being Jewish,” Jäckel argued “he referred not only to the Jew Karl Marx but also, beyond that, to the international character of Marxism.”23

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In a more polemic style, the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz ana­ lysed in The War Against the Jews (1975) how the German government under Hitler and his National Socialist party began to carry out by all means available to them—law (more correctly, pseudolaw), violence, terror—those ideas that Hitler had salvaged from the rubbish heap of German anti-Semitism and elaborated in, first in Mein Kampf and then in his second book (unpublished during his lifetime).24

Comparing the Holocaust with colonial contexts 1950s–1960s For Holocaust scholars and historians of the Third Reich, the post-war period is often seen as a period of reparation or mourning, as well as denial.25 Seen from a different perspective, however, the post-war period signifies a long but steady process of decolonisation, which, from a Eurocentric point of view, equates to a gradual loss of empires, whereas from a post-colonial perspec­ tive, it can be described as the road to independence, liberation, and right to the self-determination of nations. In either case, this process took place through a long history of anti-colonial struggles and diplomatic negotiations. The partition of the British Indian Empire in 1947, the declaration of inde­ pendence from Britain by Cyprus in 1960, and Kenya in 1963, the independ­ ence of Algeria from French colonial rule in 1963, and the independence of Mozambique from Portugal in 1975 represent but a few in a long list of such movements. And hardly, if ever, was this process non-violent. Indeed, in his writings that led to the establishment of the Columbus Centre, Astor, fer­ vent in his anti-colonial struggle, made references to atrocities similar to the Nazi crimes that took place in colonial contexts: the extermination of Native Americans and Aborigines by British settlers, the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the 1935 Italian invasion and massacre in Abyssinia, and the murder of millions of Muslims and Hindus during the 1947 British partition of India. Indicative of the fact that anti-colonialism had entered the mainstream discourse in Britain was that even the Conservative Party gradually shifted its views. For instance, in February 1960, British Conservative Prime Min­ ister Harold Macmillan, under whose leadership ten former British African colonies achieved independence, gave a famous speech at the joint meeting of both Houses of Parliament of South Africa in Cape Town, in which he famously spoke of African national consciousness as “the wind of change” of this period.26 Because of the place of the address, Macmillan also made a brief reference to his discontent with the policy of apartheid, to which, how­ ever, South African Prime Minister and architect of apartheid Hendrik Ver­ woerd coolly responded that “there must not only be justice to the Black man in Africa, but also to the White man.” South African historian Saul Dubow

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argued accordingly that, contrary to the enthusiasm with which the speech was met in Britain, in South Africa, it unintentionally helped empower Verwo­ erd to seek independence from the Commonwealth by making “two hitherto separate strands of his political career seem mutually reinforcing: republican nationalism on the one hand and apartheid ideology on the other.”27 The memory and history of the Holocaust emerged also within such a context of change and transformation and ultimately formal transfers of power to various nationalist movements in the erstwhile European empires. It was in this context that a new wave of studies of Empire and imperial­ ism also emerged.28 Indeed, Arendt devoted part two of Origins of Totali­ tarianism to imperialism, underlining the importance of studying it during a scholarly investigation of totalitarianism. She argued that Hitler’s policies are related to, if not rooted in, the history of European imperialism and the policies having been applied in the colonies for many years. We read from her book: [The imperialist era’s] political narrowness and shortsightedness ended in the disaster of totalitarianism, whose unprecedented horrors have overshadowed the ominous events and the even more ominous mental­ ity of the preceding period. Scholarly inquiry has almost exclusively concentrated on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia at the expense of their less harmful predecessors. Imperialist rule, except for the purpose of name-calling, seems half forgotten, and the chief reason why this is deplorable is that its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.29 In this excerpt, Arendt traces back the origins of American crimes in Vietnam in Europe’s, and most notably Britain’s imperialist past. Elsewhere, she links the Nazi atrocities with the imperialist type of rule, meditated through the narratives of European white supremacy that were cultivated through the colonial relation of domination with the indigenous people. Richard H. King and Dan Stone comment on how The Origins of Totalitarianism was one of the first accounts to stress that the colonisation of Africa and Asia by white European settlers partly generated the theories of racial and cultural supe­ riority that led to the establishment of totalitarian regimes with genocidal consequences in twentieth-century Europe, that is, what Arendt described as the “boomerang effect.”30 In 1955, the French author and politician from Martinique Aimé Césaire wrote Discourse on Colonialism (1955), in which he also argued that coloni­ alism was responsible for the dehumanisation of European societies that led to the atrocities of Nazism. Colonisation, wrote Césaire, “works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” For Césaire, the Europeans were Nazism’s accomplices

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before they were its victims by imposing, tolerating or legitimising acts of barbarism against non-European peoples in the colonies: Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.31 Another Martinique-born French philosopher and psychiatrist, Franz Fanon, dealt extensively with the theme of colonialism around the same period. Fanon had served in the military during the Second World War and had joined the French resistance against Nazi Germany; during that period, how­ ever, he experienced extreme racism. In his book Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he commented on the similarities between racism and antisemitism. “Colonial racism,” wrote Fanon, is no different from any other racism. Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man. I  cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother.32 Subsequently, he quoted from memory a speech of Aimé Césaire in his 1945 election campaign in Fort-de-France, where he was elected mayor: When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I  turn on my radio, when I  learn that Jews have been insulted, mis­ treated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead.33 Later on, in his book Wretched of the Earth (1961), he argued for disobedi­ ence against those people in the West who wanted to colonise the underde­ veloped countries and drew a parallel line between what Germany owed to

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the rest of Europe after the defeat of the Nazis with what was happening then with the former colonies: We should flatly refuse the situation to which the Western countries wish to condemn us. Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdraw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the underdevel­ oped world like nothing more than war criminals. Deportations, mas­ sacres, forced labor, and slavery have been the main methods used by capitalism to increase its wealth, its gold or diamond reserves, and to establish its power. Not long ago Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.34 Evidently, Arendt, Césaire, and Fanon were not historians. And to the histo­ rian’s eye, no doubt, the association between Nazism and imperialism seems somewhat arbitrary and ahistorical. However, two historiographical ques­ tions on colonialism inevitably emerge in our attempt to explore the Colum­ bus Centre’s comparative approach to the Holocaust: Is British or any other European imperialism linked to Nazism? And is there a direct link between German imperialism and the Holocaust? Several historians, such as Henning Melber, Jürgen Zimmerer, and Michael Kater, have argued for a direct link between Germany’s rather short colonial rule in South West Africa between 1884 and 1915 and the Nazi regime.35 Indeed, Zimmerer sees Nazi rule in Eastern Europe as a continuation of the colonial practices of “racism and the conception of ‘living space.’ ”36 Others, such as Donald Bloxham and Jared Poley, associate Germany’s lack of imperialist experience with the adoption of ruthless tactics against the Jews.37 This view can be linked both to an actual lack of experience and to a fantasised will for experiencing what they had lacked as an empire. In 1986, historian Heinrich August Winkler wrote a piece as part of the Historikerstreit, in which he argued against the Sonderweg theory: Culturally, Germany is a country of the West. It participated in the European Enlightenment and in a long tradition of the rule of law . . . Hitler and his helpers must be judged by our Western norms. In this historical context the systematic genocide of the Jews ordered by the German state—but also the murder of Sinti and Roma—is the greatest crime of the twentieth century, in fact of world history.38 It would be more accurate indeed to argue for a unique path of European or Western civilisation that includes a great amount of sheer violence against its colonies as well as its own European citizens. And Britain, the country where the Columbus Centre resided, had one of the most murderous imperial histories of all the European countries.39

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David Astor and anti-colonialism in The Observer Comparing Nazism and the Holocaust with colonialism is important to our discussion because David Astor’s 1961 article and 1962 speech that led to the foundation of the Columbus Centre were influenced by this tendency to detect similarities between the Nazi crimes and mass violence in colonial con­ texts. More specifically, Astor gave examples of comparable atrocities such as the 1915 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the 1935 Italian invasion and massacre in Abyssinia, and the millions of deaths of Muslims and Hindus during the 1947 British partition of India. Moreover, he under­ lined that such atrocities were not exclusively twentieth-century phenomena; in the past, the American Indians and Aborigines were exterminated in their own lands by British settlers. Both Astor’s article and speech, in which he underlined the genocidal con­ sequences of British and European imperialism, were addressed to British readers. It was a clear message: Britain was not at all innocent when it came to mass violence in the colonies. Besides, just a few years earlier, in Novem­ ber 1956, he had written a much-discussed leader on the Suez crisis in The Observer, accusing the British government of the Conservative PM Anthony Eden of “folly and crookedness.” He wrote accordingly with regard to the British invasion of Egypt: In the eyes of the whole world, the British and French Governments have acted, not as policemen, but as gangsters. It will never be possible for the present Government to convince the peoples of the Middle East and of all Asia and Africa that it has not been actively associated with France in an endeavour to re-impose nineteenth-century imperialism of the crudest kind.40 In his constant critique of imperialism, Astor also tried to unravel what George Orwell had called the “sheer hypocrisy” of the British people to accuse the Nazis of imperialistic and murderous inclinations.41 Astor brought these views to the Columbus Centre project as he had done to The Observer. If we take a look at the paper under Astor’s editorship, a strong opposition to imperialism and colonialism is revealed. Orwell is an obvious example. As famously illustrated in his first novel Burmese Days (1934), Orwell was deeply affected by imperialism and was especially alert to colonial issues. His first piece for The Observer in February 1942 argued for Indian independ­ ence, signalling the newspaper’s longstanding opposition to British colonial­ ism. The paper welcomed Indian independence in 1947 and sustained its anti-colonial attitude towards African nations. South Africa in The Observer The election of the Nationalist Government in South Africa in 1948 coincides with Astor’s promotion from foreign editor to chief editor of The Observer.

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In that year, the newspaper published an article entitled “The meaning of Malan” about the victory of the National Party, in which the correspond­ ent alerted the readers to the Nazi sympathies and the white-supremacist discourse of the new regime.42 “I am so glad,” Orwell wrote to Astor in this regard in 1948, “[that] the Obs. is taking up Africa so to speak.”43 Indeed, Astor’s biographer Richard Cockett considers Orwell to be instrumental in The Observer’s anti-imperialist and socially aware voice: “Orwell argued that Africa would become the greatest challenge for decolonization, and it was there that Britain could avoid the mistakes made during the course of the struggle for Indian independence.”44 Even after his death, Orwell’s legacy survived in The Observer through the contributions of various journalists who described close links between National Socialism and Western—primarily British—imperialism. For exam­ ple, the anti-apartheid South African journalist and author Collin Legum reg­ ularly contributed in The Observer with articles on the segregation status of South Africa, and in 1951, he joined the paper to serve as its Commonwealth correspondent.45 Indeed, in an early article from 1950, Legum underlined the fact that the National Party in South Africa “had adopted an anti-British and pro-German policy throughout the dark years of the war.”46 Coming back to our conversation about the Columbus Centre, it should also be noted that in 1963, Legum was invited to the Columbus Centre working party meeting in order to bring his insights of South Africa to the discussion.47 The British journalist, author of the much-discussed Anatomy of Britain (1962) and Mandela’s authorised biographer Anthony Sampson also wrote articles on the issue of colonialism and South Africa for The Observer. Samp­ son had lived in Johannesburg between 1951 and 1955 working as the editor of Drum, a South African magazine aimed primarily at Black readers and promoting social equality in the country. There, Sampson had met Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and other ANC activists and had helped in the preparations for the Defiance Campaign of passive resistance against apart­ heid.  In 1955, Sampson came back to Britain and joined The Observer in the role of Assistant to the Editor, as a personal letter from Astor reveals.48 Through the column “Pendennis,” Sampson frequently commented on the state of South Africa and white-supremacist narratives. Other contributors on the issue in the paper include Reverend Michael Scott, Stanley Uys, Irving Wardle, and Robert Stephens. Intellectuals and activists, such as the writer Nadine Gordimer, also published articles in The Observer. An abridged version of Nelson Mandela’s historic speech from his Pretoria trial published in April 1964 in The Observer under the well-known title “Why I  Am Ready to Die,” marks perhaps the heyday of the paper’s anti-apartheid stance.49 Astor’s open anti-colonialism cost The Observer thousands of readers but also made it the first and—for a long time—only British newspaper to focus on the right of nations to self-determination.50 Albie Sachs said in an interview with Daniel Pick for the BBC in 2014 that Astor did an enormous amount of work, perhaps more than any other

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individual in the UK, to put South African freedom fight on the map by publishing “humanised stories” in The Observer and to give voice to those struggling.51 We shall now turn to Sachs’s own contribution in order to shed more light on the Columbus Centre’s comparative approach to mass violence and critique of colonialism. Albie Sachs and Justice in South Africa Albie Sachs was born on 30 January  1935 in Johannesburg into a secular Jewish family. His parents, Emil Solomon Sachs and Ray Ginsberg, had emigrated as children from Lithuania and had participated in South Africa’s communist youth movement in the 1920s. After his parents’ separation when he was very little, his father Emil (who went by the nickname Solly), an emi­ nent labour leader—who was expelled, however, from the Communist Party because of his independent views by 1931—stayed in Johannesburg. Albie and his mother, who worked as a secretary for Communist Party and African National Congress leader Moses Kotane, moved to Cape Town, where he attended the South African College School.52 South Africa, as a member of the British Empire, participated in the Second World War on the side of the Allies. On his sixth birthday, in 1941, while the war was raging in North Africa and Europe, Sachs received a postcard from his father, which he admits left a trace on his life journey: “Dear Albert, congratulations on your sixth birthday. May you grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation.”53 Apartheid was established just a few years later and, as if fulfilling his father’s wish, Sachs became politi­ cally engaged with the anti-apartheid movement from a very early age. While he was studying for a law degree at the University of Cape Town, he joined the progressive political group Modern Youth Society. During his studies, he supported the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign, a result of which was his arrest for sitting in a non-white area: “My first serious political act,” said Sachs at an interview with Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle in 2011, was very much in the Gandhian non-violent tradition. A  17-year-old second-year law student in 1952, I led a small group of white volun­ teers to sit on post office seats marked non-whites only. . . . The cam­ paign was crushed, but the spirit of defiance continued.54 Three years later, in 1955, he participated in the Congress of the People at Kliptown, that is, an alliance between the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats, and the South African Coloured People’s Congress, during which the Free­ dom Charter was adopted.55 The Freedom Charter declared the people’s sov­ ereignty and equality in South Africa and called not for independence but, in

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Sachs’s own words, “the creation of a non-racial democratic state;” it opened with the following words: We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.56 Among other reasons, the importance of the Freedom Charter lies also in the fact that, as Sachs also testifies in Justice in South Africa (1973), the “rad­ ical lawyers” Nelson Mandela and later ANC president (1967–1991) Oliver Tambo were arrested and sent to the infamous Treason Trial (1957–1961) based precisely on this document.57 The judges, however, failed to produce a—much desired by the government—verdict of guilty at this trial. Thus, after being released, Mandela started to secretly organise the Umkhonto we Sizwe (or MK), which gradually became the military wing of the ANC. He was arrested again one year later and sent to what came to be known as the Rivonia Trial (1962–1964), referred to by Sachs as “the most sensational [trial] ever held in South Africa,” the radicalism and publicity of which was “the price the authorities had to pay for using courts as an integral part of their system of social control.”58 Meanwhile, in 1961, South Africa declared itself a republic and severed its ties with the British Commonwealth; gradu­ ally the apartheid regime was becoming stricter and stricter in the degree of segregation and number of racial discrimination laws enacted. “This benevo­ lent judicial paternalism,” commented Sachs, became increasingly difficult to maintain as social conflict became more acute. By 1960, the law began to lose much of its more tolerant, liberal aspect. Large scale African protests were met with large scale repression by the authorities; African movements went underground and began to plan insurrection, whilst the authorities abandoned normal procedures and counter-attacked with specially trained corps of police.59 Perhaps as a direct consequence of this tactic, Mandela was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia Trial. Meanwhile, Tambo emi­ grated to London to lead first the anti-apartheid struggle in exile and then, after the death of its President Albert Lutuli in 1967, the ANC itself. Upon meeting Tambo at the Peace House in London some years later, around 1967, Sachs recollected how the death of five enemy soldiers in combat in (what was then called) Rhodesia, between the Umkhonto we Sizwe and PM of Rhodesia Ian Smith’s regime, made Tambo admit, to the audience’s great surprise that, despite being the subject of extreme violence for many years, now “Yes, we’ve become killers.”60 The role of violence in the South African anti-apartheid movement reoccurred in Sachs’s thinking: in his Columbus Series book, he

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characterised South Africa as “the birthplace of commandos and concentra­ tion camps” that, because of M. K. Gandhi’s strong presence and action in Transvaal in the early twentieth century, “became known as the birthplace of passive resistance, or, as Gandhi preferred to call it, satyagraha.”61 One year after the Congress of the People, in 1956, when Sachs was 21 years old and still living in South Africa, he launched his career as a Cape Town barrister, defending mainly clients who were either Black or white radi­ cals in the anti-apartheid movement.62 Because of his practice, Sachs was targeted by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement, and ultimately held for interrogation in solitary confinement: between October  1963 and March  1964, Sachs spent 168 days in deten­ tion without trial as a political prisoner under the new South African 90-day detention law (at the end of the first 90 days period, he was told he had been released and was immediately re-arrested). Sachs described this experience as absolutely shattering: I never got over that. I never got over that. I found, when I was blown up afterwards, years later, the attack on my body was far less lasting than the attack on my mind. And I  function more comfortably and easier without an arm than I was able to function after the sleep depri­ vation and solitary confinement.63 In the meanwhile, Sachs met and fell in love with his client Stephanie Kemp, a fellow freedom fighter of Afrikaner descent who was also imprisoned in 1964 under the Sabotage Act. Between January and March 1966, Sachs was again detained as a potential witness under the new 180-day law.64 He imme­ diately realised that “it was impossible . . . to carry on practising as a lawyer, and . . . decided (he) just couldn’t function in South Africa anymore;”65 he thus became an exile and moved to Britain. Soon afterwards, Kemp followed him. They married and settled in London where they had two sons, Alan and Michael. In the same year of his arrival, Harvill Press in London published Sachs’s book about his imprisonment, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, which was adapted into a Royal Shakespeare Company play by David Edgar in June 1978. In a contemporary review of the play, theatre critic Irving War­ dle wrote in The Times that Albie Sachs “emerges as a brave, humane, and intelligent man, who was nevertheless unprepared for the fanaticism of the regime,” while his story could be perceived as a pivotal moment in South African politics when apartheid begun repressing whites as well as blacks; as an example of the impotence of liberalism in a revolutionary context; or as yet another example of the power of modern police methods to crush even the best of men.66 Almost straight after his arrival in Britain, Sachs went to the newly estab­ lished University of Sussex to study for a PhD. He was then encouraged

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by the University to establish contact with Norman Cohn. In a Columbus Centre meeting in January 1967, it was decided that, due to the shortage of available funds, Sachs could not be offered financial assistance by the Centre but was warmly welcomed to join the academic team.67 Sir Robert Birley, former headmaster of Eton, visiting professor at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg at the time, anti-apartheid campaigner, and sponsor of the Columbus Centre, put him in touch with the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in York, from which he received a stipend to undertake his PhD.68 Sachs started his research in Sussex University under the supervision of Cohn and Gerald Draper, who, before becoming a professor of law, was a Colonel during the Second World War and also served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.69 In an interview with Daniel Pick for the BBC in 2014, Sachs observed that probably neither of his two supervisors actually read his chapters, but he was very happy to be part of the Columbus Centre team because after his imprisonment and emigration he was grateful for the moral support he received: “[Cohn] was very interested in my ideas, thought I had been through the fires and that writing the PhD would help me understand and give meaning and a sense of connection to what appeared to be chaotic experiences.”70 The result of his doctoral research at Sussex University was his 1971 PhD thesis, The Administration of Justice in a Racially Stratified Society—South Africa 1652–1970, which discussed the role of South African courts in enforcing laws which promoted racial discrimination. Although not funded by the Columbus Trust, he later transformed his thesis into the book Justice in South Africa, published under the Centre’s auspices in 1973. An adherent of the Columbus Centre’s agenda of comparative method­ ology, Sachs started the preface of Justice in South Africa, by placing the situation of South Africa in a comparative framework while simultaneously underlining its uniqueness: “Race discrimination can be found in many parts of the world. South Africa is unique in being the one country in which such discrimination is still openly supported by the Government and expressly written into the laws.”71 In this book, Sachs focused especially on the latter, namely the interpretation, application and enforcement of the law within a context of racial discrimination. Sachs explored forms of inequality in the judiciary system of South Africa by situating it in its historical context: an openly imperial regime at first, during the Dutch and British occupations, and a colonial structure disguised as democracy later on during the apartheid period. For instance, in his description of the British occupation during the nineteenth century, he posed a frequent, and almost philosophical, question of the time as to whether Africans should be legally represented in courts. This question was inextri­ cably linked to the struggle for Black people’s recognition as subjects and humans, let alone equal citizens.72 However, Sachs himself did not succumb to a “colonial” reading of the Black subject. To the contrary, he referred to reports from late nineteenth century that described the “ordinary native” as “the most dexterous cross-examination” and “far superior as a rule to the

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ordinary European in a witness box” and underlined the complications based on interpretation and translation.73 Most importantly, Sachs discussed the essence of white sovereignty in South Africa: the problem in the legal order was not a cultural difference between Black and white populations, since both based systems of jurisprudence “on the determination of liability on essentially rational procedures,” but the courts’ role in preserving colonialtype relationships under the “white law.”74 Sachs’s PhD thesis and subsequent book raised two important questions in the conclusion: The first one, touching upon the essence of the comparative approach, is whether any legal system—that speaks the language of the oppres­ sor while giving, through the measured language of the law and the decorum of the courtroom, a sense of orderliness and regularity to oppression—can be assessed based merely on its own tradition and history: In any society where courts exist they tend to play a significant role in the system of domination. They normally claim a monopoly of the right to sanction the use of force, and they speak in the name of the sovereign, usually on behalf of the community. Yet just as no individual can be judged simply in terms of his own opinion of his conduct, so no legal system can be evaluated simply in terms of its own traditions and concepts. It may be useful as a starting-off point to consider whether or not the Judiciary is departing from its own well-established norms, and then to examine the norms themselves, both in relation to internal consistency and in respect of international standards.75 The second question is how a system of justice can work based on unjust laws. Sachs places this question at the centre of his book: “How could the judges manage to play the role of the benign carers for justice on the one hand and the ferocious enforcers of racist authoritarian laws on the other?” He answers this question elsewhere in the book: “Instead of investing their office with the prestige associated with the pursuit of justice, they allow the prestige associated with their office to be used for the pursuit of injustice,”76 and again: The failure of the courts to save black people from being dispossessed by the processes of law can be defended on the basis of constitutional subordination of the Judiciary to the Legislature. . . . Yet to emphasize the concept of judicial subordination is to undermine the notion of judicial independence. . . . [Therefore,] the mere existence of a Judici­ ary confident in its learning and independence is no guarantee that justice will in fact be administered by the courts . . . if the symbol of the administration of justice in South Africa is a two-edged sword, the edge that menaces the black population has become increasingly sharp, while the edge that restrains white officials and police grows increas­ ingly blunt.77

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After finishing his PhD, Sachs took a teaching post at the University of South­ ampton and continued his anti-apartheid struggle in exile. Having spent eleven years in Britain, he moved to Mozambique in 1977, where two years earlier a revolution had overthrown Portuguese colonial rule. Many ANC members, such as activist and scholar Ruth First, had already gathered there and continued to fight for the anti-apartheid movement by raising aware­ ness and organising the struggle from afar. Sachs again pursued an academic position as a law professor at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. On 7 April 1988, a bomb planted by the South Afri­ can regime in Sachs’s parked car in Maputo exploded, resulting in the loss of his right arm and the sight in one eye. Narrating the incident of the car bomb, Sachs recalled thinking “that moment every freedom fighter waits for, well they’ve come for me today, and they’ve come for me and I’ve survived.” South African writer and activist Nadine Gordimer said with respect to what happened to Sachs: “But nobody was safe, nobody at all. The very fact that he was such an important opponent of the apartheid [system], meant that he was in enormous danger all the time.”78 In the 1980s, Sachs was working closely with Tambo to produce the socalled Code of Conduct for the armed struggle. In it, he insisted that torture or any other form of inhuman or degrading treatment of the enemy should not be part of the anti-apartheid struggle. “I  fully and unabashedly sup­ ported the right of the oppressed and disenfranchised majority,” he argued, “to resort to armed struggle. But to counter violence with violence was one thing, to use torture was quite another.”79 In a similar manner, Sachs also advocated a politics of reconciliation, even during the hardest times for him as an individual and for the anti-apartheid movement as a whole: Lying in bed, recovering, I receive a note “Don’t worry comrade Albie, we will avenge you.” Avenge me? We’re going to chop off arms, we’re going to blind people? Where’s this going to get us? But if we get democ­ racy in South Africa, and freedom, that will be my soft vengeance.80 And the road to his “soft vengeance” started gradually to open. Under pressure from the long-time international “Free Mandela” movement, Nel­ son Mandela was released after 27 years of incarceration in February 1990. The ANC as well as other anti-apartheid political organisations were finally officially recognised and, thus, legalised by the South African State. One month later, Sachs returned to his homeland after 24  years in exile. Four years later, in 1994, in a historical and logistically rather difficult election where all South African citizens, regardless of their race, had the right to vote, the ANC marked a victory, Mandela became the first Black president of South Africa, and apartheid was once and for all abolished.81 Sachs was appointed Constitutional Court Judge by Mandela and worked towards the creation of the new Constitution for the new non-racial democracy of South Africa.82

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At the same time, Mandela introduced the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995 that brought Truth and Reconciliation Com­ mission (TRC), that is, a form of restorative justice for the reparation of the South African society that investigated human rights violations from all sides during the period of apartheid and anti-apartheid struggle and pro­ vided perpetrators with amnesty upon confession of their crimes. Albie Sachs got involved with the TRC and indeed admitted that the Columbus Centre’s work influenced him to a large extent in the way he saw the TRC’s work. More specifically, he argued that restorative rather than punitive justice is based on storytelling from people who suffered a trauma or a loss and those who had committed terrible crimes and it aimed at all those people being heard, believed, and healed. For Sachs, the purpose of the TRC was, just as in psychoanalytic work, to transform “knowledge into acknowledgment.”83 Nowhere is this more apparent than in a moving and humorous narrative that Sachs gives about his own reconciliation experience upon meeting Henri van der Westhuizen, the man who had made the attempt on his life, whom Sachs accepted to greet with a handshake only after he had gone to the TRC. “And that moved me because he is humanising himself, I’m humanising myself,” said Sachs, he’s not just a figure out there, ‘The Enemy,’ and I’m not just a target for him, I’m Albie, I’m a person, and he’s Henri, he’s a person. . . . It wasn’t a question of forgiveness, it was moving on .  .  . I’m a person because you’re a person, I conceptualize my humanity from acknowl­ edging your humanity.84 Nazism and South Africa The debate between what is human or humanising and what is inhuman or dehumanising stands right at the heart of the Columbus Centre’s set of inquiries. Their starting point, driven by Astor’s initiative in 1962, was Nazism and the Holocaust, which they approached through a comparative methodology. Within such a context, Albie Sachs studied South Africa, also through comparing the often dehumanising function of South African law with Nazism. His choice to compare and link the apartheid and older status quo of discrimination in South Africa with Nazism derived both from his personal experience and his academic research. “I grew up during WWII,” Sachs said in his interview with Daniel Pick, “and Nazism and the war against Nazism was very central to my world­ view.”85 He also admitted at the interview with Daniel Greene that his own Jewish background, and especially the fact that his parents were forced to leave Lithuania in the early twentieth century because of state-supported vio­ lent antisemitic attitudes in the Russian Empire was a very important part of the context of his anti-apartheid struggle; he had inherited from his parents “the ideals they carried with them, their responsiveness to the idea of a world

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based on justice, rights for everybody.”86 And he was not, in this respect, an extraordinary case. Indeed, many of the white middle-class anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa were Jewish or had a Jewish background. Upon nar­ rating the story of the married anti-apartheid activists Ruth First and Joe Slovo in Rivonia’s Children, Glenn Frankel underlines the fact that they too were Jews of Lithuanian descent: Although they seldom cared to acknowledge it, the fact that Ruth and Joe were both Jews whose ancestors came from Lithuania was an important clue to their radicalism. Jews comprised a large propor­ tion of the whites involved in left-wing politics in South Africa, and perhaps as much as 75  percent of the country’s 100,000 Jews hailed from Lithuania and its immediate neighbors . . . [South African Jews] were generally more liberal than other whites and they tended to be less comfortable with white domination even though they benefited from it economically.87 Years later, when Sachs was mutilated by the car bomb in Mozambique, he had direct experience of what it meant to be persecuted and targeted for his ideas, a moment resembling Nazi persecutions of the intellectuals. During a symposium held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London in 2012, as a tribute to his fellow anti-apartheid fighter and university colleague Ruth First who was murdered by a letter bomb in Maputo in 1982, Sachs said, echoing, perhaps his own experience: She was murdered, targeted; targeted because she was an intellectual, because she dealt with that dangerous material called ideas. Ideas that could be liberatory, tranformatory, [sic] challenging, awkward, diffi­ cult. Sometimes presented in a rasping, sheering, even dismissive way. Sometimes with wit, with humour, but always centred on a vision, a heart, and intelligence dedicated to the deepest ideas of Enlighten­ ment, of knowledge, serving emancipation, enabling people to be more human, to be freer.88 Indeed, the man who actually planted the bomb in Sachs’s car, Henri van der Westhuizen, declared, in an almost Eichmann-kind of style echoing Arendt’s banality of evil: Nothing that I did, I did out of my own means. I did it because I was a soldier and I got an instruction. I’m just a functionary for the State, that’s why, there’s a threat against my country, I have to take action.89 Beyond his personal experience, Sachs made an academic inquiry into the similarities and entanglements between Nazism and South Africa. As early as the submission of his PhD research proposal to the Columbus Centre

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in 1967 under the provisional title “Breakdown of a Legal System under Stress,” Sachs underlined that the antidemocratic philosophy and influence of Nazism was one of the greatest challenges to the South African legal sys­ tem.90 Moreover, both his supervisors, Cohn and Colonel Draper, were in one way or another involved with Nazism. As we saw, during the Second World War, Cohn had served in the Intelligence Corps and later on developed a great interest in the medieval millenarian roots of Nazi (and Communist) extremism. Similarly, Draper was one of the first Allied officers to arrive at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 and one of the interroga­ tors of the captured Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz.91 Most importantly, in Sachs’s book Justice in South Africa, there are not only direct references to the Nazi regime and ideology but also indirect comparisons between South Africa and Nazism. Sachs spotted two alarming affiliations between the Nazi Party in Germany and the National Party in South Africa. First, the South African white-supremacist rhetoric resembled Nazi ideology in its discriminating and racist nature. Sec­ ond, during the Second World War, the NP leaders had supported Hitler and, as Sachs underlined, had seen Nazism “as a way of getting at the British.”92 Although Sachs and many of his comrades were white, and could thus pass unnoticed by the racist regime, his Lithuanian Jewish descent rendered him especially alert to the nature of the Afrikaners’ sometimes proto-Nazi sympa­ thies. In his account of South African Jews, Frankel noted accordingly: They feared the National Party . . . which preached a brand of racial purity and ethnic destiny that was similar in genre, if not in murder­ ous intent, to Nazis. National Party leaders viewed Jews at best as a regrettable but irreversible addition to the white community. Moderate Nationalists in the 1930s wanted South Africa’s gates closed to further Jewish immigration; extremists wanted those already in the country expelled.93 In his discussion of the changing character of the South African Judiciary in the 1950s, Sachs wrote how “the strongest dissentient judgments in favour of liberty were handed down by an Afrikaner judge who during the war had defended pro-Nazi rebels.”94 Moreover, in his critique of the South African positivist legal tradition, Sachs argued that “the distinction which it drew between law and morality enabled the Judiciary to apply the hardest laws with an easy conscience.” Citing the South African professor of international law John Dugard, Sachs made reference to a similar legal tradition in post– First World War Germany: Positivism was the only legal philosophy acceptable to the legal profes­ sion. This stance, with its servile obedience to the will of the sovereign and strict distinction between law and morals, was exploited by Hitler and resulted in the debasement of the German legal system.95

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In linking apartheid with Nazism, Sachs described how Sir James RoseInnes, Chief Justice of South Africa between 1914 and 1927, spoke up, after his retirement, against depriving Black people of their already limited rights: “His dismay at the increasing racism of public life in South Africa,” wrote Sachs, “was matched by his horror of racism in Nazi Germany, where his grandson, Helmut von Moltke, also a lawyer trained in the English tradition, was to play a leading role in the anti-Hitler opposition.”96 However, Sachs also recorded how earlier on in 1909, Innes had argued that the meaning of the word “native” should be narrowed down to coloured races, otherwise “even a Jew from Palestine would be liable to be relegated to a location, compelled to carry a permit and subjected to other stringent restrictions.”97 In other words, while Innes saw worrying similarities between the treatment of Blacks in South Africa and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, he did himself reproduce certain stereotypes about race. The process of dehumanisation was closely entangled with racial ste­ reotypes and was a theme often addressed in the Columbus Centre writ­ ings. However, in Sachs’s own direct comparison of the dehumanisation of the Jews in Europe during the years leading to the Nazi regime and the non-whites in South Africa in the nineteenth-century Boer Republics, he spotted also a significant difference: The administration of justice and race relations did not include lynching—a traditional feature of American culture that after the abolition of slavery emerged as particularly violent against Black Americans—of the non-whites by members of the dominant white communities except on some rare occasions. Indeed, Sachs com­ mented on this issue by critiquing again some habits and states of mind in the West: Perhaps the proper approach to the question is to ask why it was pre­ sent elsewhere rather than why it was absent in South Africa. In the Southern States of the U.S.A. lynching was first used primarily against white men and expressed something in the character of early nineteenth century American society; only during Reconstruction, when white supremacy was under serious threat, was it converted into a weapon of terror and discipline against black Americans. In Europe lynching was from time to time practiced against Jews, who, like the black people of North America, constituted a minority group in the population and could more easily fill the role of scapegoats than could members of a majority group such as Africans in South Africa.98 Beyond the direct references to the Jews or Nazism, there are several occa­ sions in Justice in South Africa in which Sachs indirectly discusses issues that appeared both in South Africa and the Nazi regime. And they can be classi­ fied under two larger categories: religion versus race and interracial sexual relations.

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First, Sachs described how in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the largest part of what is now known as South Africa was under Dutch colonial rule, it was religion, and not race or skin colour, that regulated social relations and attitudes. The key factor in determining the behaviour of the settlers towards the indigenous people was whether they were Christian or not, rather than whether they were “black, brown, or white.” And since the religion narrative includes the option of conversion, social attitudes and rela­ tions among people of different races were more flexible. “The social and legal gap that existed between Christian and non-Christian,” wrote Sachs, “could be crossed by means of baptism, which, particularly in the case of women slaves, opened the way to marriage and full legal and social integra­ tion into the Christian community.”99 However, with the emergence of modern states, as we observed in the moder­ nity debate in the previous chapter, this gradually started changing—just as in the case of Jews who transformed from a religious enemy of normative Chris­ tian Europe into a political enemy functioning within a nationalist-antisemitic discourse. “[I]f conversion could deliver the medieval and early modern Jews from the stigma of their identity,” argue Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garbin in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (1995), “this was not the case for Jews in the modern period. Now, Jewishness came to be conceived not as a matter of belief but as a racial identity, one which could be observed, measured, understood, and pathologized,”100 one, we could add, that is fixed and cannot change. In the case of the Blacks of South Africa, Sachs recorded how in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries even the adoption of Christianity no longer served to enable a slave to become his own master, for the Church Council in Cape Town declared that neither the laws temporal nor the laws spiritual prohibited the retention of baptised persons in slavery. And thus “the great social and legal divide was no longer between Chris­ tian and non-Christian, but between white master and black slave or servant.” From Sachs’s legal perspective, the extent to which colour had superseded religion as the key determinant of social relations was “the instruction given in 1780 that Company black servants were no longer to be sent to arrest white offenders.”101 Moreover, commenting on I. D. MacCrone’s 1937 book Race Attitudes in South Africa: Historical, Experimental, and Psychological Studies, Sachs concluded that Race attitudes of the dominant section of community, whether on the frontier or in Cape Town, have remained essentially unchanged since the end of the eighteenth century. What has changed is their rationalisa­ tion. The emphasis then was on the Christian and his religion, now it is on the white man and his “civilisation.”102

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We read in a corresponding review of the book in 1938 that according to MacCrone “the basis of racial antipathy must be sought for not so much in gregariousness or in conditioning as in psychoanalysis and the working of motives hidden in the unconscious mind” and that “it will be necessary to regard race prejudice, if not as something ‘instinctive,’ at least as something deep in the human mind, and the task of producing race harmony becomes more difficult than ever.”103 The nineteenth century brought a revival of restrictive laws against Black people, the so-called native foreigners: they were “ ‘natives’ as far as duties were concerned and ‘foreigners’ as far as rights were concerned,” wrote Sachs accordingly.104 Especially with regard to the court system, Sachs underlined an issue of the British occupation also manifested in cases of pre–Second World War antisemitic Europe: As a whole the court system emphasised on a day-to-day basis the sub­ ordination of all inhabitants of the Cape to a common law-making authority. Together with the expansion of a single-market economy, the promotion of a single language (English), and the propagation of the belief in a single deity (God), the extension of a single court-centred administration may be regarded as one of the main integrative forces in South African social history. Yet while it bound the diverse peoples of South Africa together in submission to a common authority, it was also destined on an increasingly large scale to enforce separation; the greater the integration the more rigid the segregation.105 Later on, in the early twentieth century, wrote Sachs, the word European had no geographical meaning in South Africa—it also included American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander and South African—and it was often used in contrast with the word Asiatic—again without strict geographical determination, since a Jew from Palestine was considered European while a Turk from Istanbul was regarded as Asiatic. “[A]lthough colour,” observed Sachs, “is not the only, it is usually the chief factor in determining whether a particular person is of European descent or not.”106 Indeed, in a correspond­ ing legal dispute from 1907, it was decided that Syrians, although native Asians, belonged to the white race and were therefore not excluded from owning property.107 The other large category where Nazism and South Africa meet is closely related to the assimilation of the other: interracial sexual relations and their restrictions or banning. Indeed, interracial sexual relations are closely related to the perceptions of race and religion. In other words, if social relations are mostly influenced by religion rather than “blood,” as was the case during the early Dutch settlement, sexual relations and marriage between whites and Blacks were allowed and could even lead to social integration as a result of conversion. Hence, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, interracial marriage was not uncommon. For instance, Sachs recorded that “the first Dutch commander arranged a special bridal feast in his home to celebrate the

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marriage of his surgeon to a Khoi woman,” while “[t]he most popular as well as the most ardently Dutch of all the Governors at the Cape in the eighteenth century was in fact the son of an inter-racial marriage.”108 Later on, however, following the broader narrative on race that is largely based on the scientific construction of race in the discipline of biology, inter­ racial sexual relations and marriage were gradually restricted and ultimately banned. This newly emerged legal framework invokes Hitler’s Nuremberg laws regarding racial purity and mixed weddings. “The issue of banning intermarriage and outlawing sexual relations between Jews and ‘aryans,’ ” writes Ian Kershaw in Hitler: A Biography (2010), “had by this time [sum­ mer 1935] gone to the top of the agenda of the demands of the radicals. Racial purity, they claimed, could only be attained through total physical apartheid.”109 In South Africa, penal sanctions to the offenders were often closely attached to the new segregation measures. In the early twentieth century, Sachs reports that sexual relations between persons of different colour was a field of increasing intervention by the law. Before the Union of 1910, sexual intercourse between white women and Black men was prohibited, but there appears to be no such defined status for sexual intercourse between white men and Black or brown women; indeed, in 1911, the term Black Peril was applied to cases of sexual assault committed by Black or brown men on white women. This also reveals how social relations were defined not only by race but also by gender. However, later on, as segregation was gradu­ ally intensified, the role of gender seemed to also be overshadowed by race: the Immorality Act of 1927 penalised sexual intercourse between “Europe­ ans” and “natives” of the opposite sex, the Immorality Act of 1950 extended the prohibition to “non-Europeans” and the Immorality Act of 1957 fur­ ther forbade any form of sexual activity between “white” and “coloured” while increasing the penalty to a maximum of seven years imprisonment of the offenders.110 Sachs argued that the maintenance of racial purity was the ultimate goal of the government and thus interracial sexual intercourse and marriage resulting in assimilation of the physical characteristics was treated as a threat to the social order.111 He supported this point by quoting from the South African scholar, activist, and co-exile Jack Simons’s book African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (1968): “The dominant group will apply strong pressure to prevent coition between its members and the underlying population.”112 As for the gender factor in the dominant narrative, Sachs made an apt remark: Yet if the preservation of white purity is seen as the primary objective of the Immorality Act, in practice it is white men who seek sexual inter­ course with black and brown women rather than black and brown men who attempt intimacy with white women.

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In 1928, 78 white men and African women were convicted under the Immorality Act as compared to 11 white women and African men, whereas in 1966, out of 488 people convicted in total, only 17 were white women and Black or brown men.113 Again, this fact reveals the intersection between gender and race in the case of interracial relations in South Africa: although Black men are considered to be a greater threat to social integration because in the case of a pregnancy a white woman would give birth to a mixed-race offspring, Black women, who are oppressed both on the axis of race and on the axis of gender, are more likely to have had intercourse with a white man who is socially privileged on both aforementioned axes. The general assump­ tion that Sachs makes both in terms of social integration and interracial sex­ ual relationships agrees with the Foucauldian argument about sexuality and social control:114 modernisation and industrialisation of South Africa did not result in a relaxation of race domination but rather in an improvement in the techniques of control and greater sophistication in their justification.115 This mind-set, that the ideas and actions of the Nazis and the South Afri­ can regime were, in Sachs’s own words, “part and parcel of a similar form of inhumanity of human beings to other human beings,” reflects the Columbus Centre’s approach to mass violence and discrimination: a comparative one. South Africa presents a good example of the persistence of old colonial prac­ tices into the modern era. This form of colonialism’s survival at the time of the Columbus Centre’s emergence is significant in our comparative discussion of the “inhumanity of human beings to other human beings.” Rae Sherwood and race in a London neighbourhood Although Justice in South Africa was the only Columbus Series book directly addressing the issues of that region, Albie Sachs was not the only South Afri­ can member of the Columbus Centre. Rae Sherwood was also from South Africa. Indeed, she was the sister of Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, an architect and well-known anti-apartheid activist, political prisoner, and husband of Hilda Bernstein, born Watts, a British author and political activist. Rae Sherwood’s brother Rusty Bernstein was one of the accused in the infamous Rivonia Trial in Pretoria, along with Mandela. Being a Jewish anti-apartheid fighter in South Africa and having been tried in Rivonia made Bernstein one of the characters in Frankel’s aforementioned book Rivonia’s Children (2011).116 He was found not guilty but was immediately rearrested and, later on, managed to flee the country and settle in Britain along with his wife. Unfortunately, the exact date of Rae Sherwood’s birth cannot be traced, but using the information we have about her brother from other sources (such as Anthony Sampson and Colin Legum’s obituaries as well as Hilda and Rusty Bernstein Papers held at the University of Witwatersrand in Johan­ nesburg), we can safely assume certain things about her life. Rae Sherwood, neé Bernstein, was thus born before 1920 to a family of Jewish emigrés in the South African city of Durban. Besides Rusty, who was the youngest of the

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family, Rae had two more siblings, Harold and Evelyn. Around 1928, her parents died and the children went to live with various relatives.117 The psychoanalyst Irma Brenman Pick told me that she met Rae Sherwood in the 1950s when she was a student of Social Science at the University of Witwatersrand and Sherwood was teaching in the Sociology Department as a social psychologist. Sherwood, at that time, had recently returned from the United States and was married to Ed Sherwood, who also worked in the department. Brenman Pick recalled that Sherwood had an interest in psy­ choanalysis, and that “she knew even of Melanie Klein.”118 Sherwood was also involved with the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR) in Johannesburg. Indeed, in 1958, Sherwood ran an empiri­ cal study under the NIPR’s auspices about Bantu-speaking African civil serv­ ants and their role expectations with regard to their white supervisors. The results of this research were subsequently published in a paper in The Jour­ nal of Social Psychology under the title “The Bantu Clerk: A Study of Role Expectations.”119 During this study, she had worked under the direction of the psychologist Simon Biesheuvel, then the director of the NIPR, who had argued in 1943 against cross-cultural testing between the white and Black communities as the multiple differences in upbringing, education, and way of living made the comparison virtually impossible.120 According to Johann Louw, after the publication of Sherwood’s article, the Nationalist govern­ ment had issues both with the Institute, which was always treated with sus­ picion due to its liberal perspective on racial relations, and Sherwood and Biesheuvel themselves. As a result, Biesheuvel resigned from the NIPR and Rae Sherwood was not allowed to use her results towards her PhD at the University of Witwatersrand. She was examined much later and, strikingly, her thesis was embargoed and marked with the sign “Definitely not for con­ sultation” until 2008.121 At some point between 1958 and 1964, while her brother Rusty Bern­ stein stood at the Rivonia Trial, Rae Sherwood left South Africa, moved to Britain, and settled in Hampstead, London. We know she was in Britain by then because an article from The Times placed her at a demonstration in front of the South African Embassy in London in protest against the verdict of the Rivonia Trial in June 1964.122 Although we have no direct evidence that Rae Sherwood was openly an anti-apartheid activist, we do have a clue that she must have been concerned about her brother and, thus, involved in protests surrounding the Rivonia Trial. During late stages of the trial, the prosecutor Percy Yutar blamed Bernstein for accusing the state of coach­ ing the witnesses. Frankel recorded that Yutar asked whether Bernstein had specifically said that “[a]part from police evidence and documents . . . all the substantial witnesses have been detainees who made statements under pres­ sure and while subject certainly to threats of either indefinite detention or prosecution or both.”123 In his book Memory Against Forgetting: Memoirs from a Life in South African Politics (1999), Bernstein writes that he realised at that point that Yutar must have elicited this information from a letter he

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had written to his sister in England in 1964 in an attempt to give her an idea of how the case was going.124 Frankel writes that “the statements came from a letter he had written from prison to his sister Vera and her husband in Brit­ ain.”125 However, research into the Hilda and Rusty Bernstein Papers reveals, first, that Vera is the name of Hilda’s and not Rusty’s sister, and, second, that Bernstein’s other sister Evelyn was most probably in South Africa at the time of the trial.126 Hence, we can safely assume that the letter in question was addressed to Bernstein’s sister Rae Sherwood who was in Britain at the time and was later to become a Columbus Centre member. Interestingly enough, however, while Sherwood thanked her two other siblings, Evelyn and Har­ old, and their spouses, in the acknowledgements section of her Columbus Series book in 1978, neither her brother Rusty nor his wife Hilda are men­ tioned. Judging by their regular correspondence at the time and no apparent clash in their relations, we can only speculate that this omission is due to Rusty Bernstein’s political background at a period when the anti-apartheid struggle was at its climax.127 As we will further elaborate in the next chapter, a few years later, follow­ ing a job advert in The Times in 1970 Rae Sherwood joined the Columbus Centre team to work as a social psychologist under its auspices. She carried out six months of field research under the supervision of Dr Robert Gosling on the inter-ethnic relations between three racial groups who shared the same neighbourhood. She chose an East London neighbourhood and conducted unstructured interviews with three four-member nuclear families of different ethnic origin; these families came from the West Indies (nowadays the Carib­ bean), India, and England. This collective effort led to the 1980 book The Psycho-Dynamics of Race: Vicious and Benign Spirals.128 As it is apparent by the title, Sherwood’s own psychoanalytic interest as well as the fact that it was Pearl King, psychoanalyst, subsequent President and Honorary Archivist of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and co­ author of The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45, who in 1969 and, with the help of the academic and social psychologist Marie Jahoda, had prepared and submitted a draft plan of this research,129 reflect how much psychoanaly­ sis affected also the Columbus Centre’s approach to race, what Astor viewed as “the possibilities of violence that exist in mankind.” Indeed, echoing Astor’s constant quest for meaning, in her exposition of the book’s concep­ tual approach, Sherwood states that although she adopts an interdisciplinary methodology which takes into account sociological and cultural aspects of life, “the emphasis is a psychodynamic one so that the search for meaning in the research material is largely in terms of individual depth processes.”130 Psychoanalysis stands at the heart of Sherwood’s interpretation of her material but without leaving behind meticulous field research and awareness of the up-to-date bibliography of her time. Brenman Pick told me that Sher­ wood “knew even of Melanie Klein” from her early days in South Africa and, indeed, Klein—an influential figure in the English-speaking psychoanalytic circles as we saw in a previous chapter—was central in her understanding of

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race relations in modern-day Britain. For instance, she applies the Kleinian theory of the unconscious splitting of good and bad in the case of Adrian James, the youngest son of the Black working-class West Indian family who was separated from his parents at the age of two when they left for England and reunited with them at the age of 15: The developmental stage at which separations occur is therefore extremely important and since Adrian’s parents left before he was three years old, he was then at a developmental please when fears normally arise from inner phantasies of destructiveness, stimulated by the neces­ sary absences and frustrations of the mother; and when, as in his case, both parents disappear, he may well have feared that he had driven them away because of his own phantasies and thus because of his “badness.”131 Sherwood uses Adrian’s unconscious splitting also to explain Adrian’s per­ ceptions of and investment in different racial groups—his English and Indian male schoolmates, respectively—during his early encounter of a multiracial environment: He perceived the English boys as rough, destructively aggressive, undis­ ciplined, wild, shocking and sexually provocative. This group of Eng­ lish boys seems to have unconsciously served as a repository for his disowned and frightening aggressive feelings, while the Indian and Pakistani boys were idealized and seen as very good and admirable, apparently serving the function of keeping alive for him his own ideal self-image.132 Klein and her theory of splitting as a coping mechanism is used again in Sherwood’s analysis of Eric Singh, the young son of the Indian Sikh family: The reality is distorted into a stereotyped picture, whereby all the Eng­ lish boys are felt to be stupid, lazy, aggressive, badly behaved, sexually free and lacking in drive and ambition. His positive sense of identity is inextricably bound up with his parents’ expectations of him, and cen­ tre on ideas of hard work, ambition, self-discipline, good manners and behaviour, sexual and aggressive control and restraint.133 Although Sherwood’s account includes no direct comparison between anti­ semitism in Nazi Germany and racism in contemporary Britain, the psychodynamic approach to the empirical data provided in the book offers some useful insight into the Columbus Centre’s broader methodology towards race in Nazi Germany and elsewhere. Indeed, resonating with Astor’s early vision of the Columbus Centre project as a study of the “latent possibility in all mankind,” in the very first lines in the foreword of the book, Sherwood

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argues that “making . . . assumptions about oneself and about others is ubiq­ uitous . . . prejudice is endemic.”134 One instance of an indirect comparison of racism with Nazism, or at least ubiquity of human aggressiveness, appears in her discussion of the white English family, where Sherwood uses Dicks’s psy­ choanalytically informed argument in Licensed Mass Murder (1972) about former SS officers seeing policemen as embodying parental images: By a process of displacement and substitution for his primary relation­ ship with his missing, rejecting father, [Mr  Chattaway] perceives the authority symbols of his community as unfair, punitive and persecutory towards himself but protective towards immigrants. They are neglect­ fully “absent” towards the native-born English. He feels victimized by this, deprived of support and protection from feared and frightening violence, and is outraged that there are “favourite sons” whose mis­ deeds can be overlooked by the police while others, felt to be innocent like himself, are severely treated or are overlooked indeed, deserted by these father-figures.135 In an apt and socioculturally not ignorant manner, Sherwood manages to employ psychoanalysis to accomplish what Cohn did not when he ultimately rejected Freudian theory in his attempt to understand why people tend to target, discriminate against, marginalise, persecute, and, finally, annihilate whole groups of people who are socially perceived as the Other. We read accordingly from her discussion of her research material: Although race constitutes only one kind of socially differentiated group within society, nonetheless racial groups possess distinctive and unique aspects which make them more susceptible to exploitation by others for the unconscious working-through of unresolved inner conflicts. It is above all else the visibility of skin-colour differences, physical type and appearance which distinguish one race from another. These act as visual signals and they very easily become associated in people’s minds with a range of social characteristics, status factors and roles which, while not part of racial differences as such, often become linked with racial groups by the process of association.136 Nevitt Sanford and race in the United States The research interest in a comparative psychological approach to Nazism and the Holocaust was also apparent when the Columbus Centre members invited American psychologist and academic Nevitt Sanford, co-author with Adorno and others of The Authoritarian Personality (1959), to join the team in 1965. Nevitt Sanford was born in 1909 in Chatham, Virginia to a family of Baptist ministers. He was educated at the University of Virginia, Columbia

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University and, ultimately, Harvard, where he obtained his PhD in psychol­ ogy. He joined the staff of the Harvard Psychological Clinic in 1935, and in 1940, he was appointed Professor of Psychology at the University of Califor­ nia, Berkeley. Sanford had made his reputation as co-author of the Authori­ tarian Personality, a book both Cohn and Astor knew very well, but he had also gained some publicity during the anti-communist McCarthy era. More specifically, in 1950, during the infamous Red Scare, Sanford and several of his university colleagues, including, most notably, the famous psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, refused to sign a loyalty oath, namely a document that disa­ vowed radical beliefs imposed under the Levering Act in the state of Cali­ fornia. As a result, they were fired. Sanford went to London as a research associate at the Tavistock Institute and then to Vassar College. Nine years after his dismissal, the California Supreme Court ruled to reinstate him at Berkeley, only for him to leave again in 1961 to become a professor at Stan­ ford University’s Institute for the Study of Human Problems.137 Cohn contacted Sanford in 1965 and suggested the possibility of him join­ ing the project, in light of a shared desire of both Cohn and Astor to develop a branch of the Columbus Centre project in the United States. The anthro­ pologist and psychologist George DeVos, who also worked at Berkeley since the early 1960s and had been to London and met with Cohn, had introduced Sanford as a possible invitee. “George DeVos” wrote Cohn to Sanford in 1965, “suggests that a comparative study should be made of attitudes and behaviour towards the Negro [sic] in the United States and in Brazil, starting with the first introduction of Negro [sic] slaves and continuing down to the present day.” Perhaps as an indirect reference to the endorsement of antisem­ itism in Europe after the gradual assimilation of the Jews in the modern way of life, Cohn also noted in this letter that “in the United States these [nega­ tive] projections became stronger after the abolition of slavery than they had been before.”138 Sachs underlined accordingly how lynching against Black Americans intensified after the Reconstruction that followed the abolition of slavery, while it is widely known that the Jim Crow laws that legalised racial segregation in the former Confederacy came into effect after the 1880s. Sanford accepted the invitation and said he was growing very excited about a possible project on slavery “in its historical, sociological and psy­ chological aspects, and in its relations to other forms of oppression and per­ secution.”139 In the spring of 1966, Cohn went to the United States to serve as a visiting fellow at the Palo Alto Center and met Sanford in person. They continued their correspondence regarding the project ahead of Astor’s visit to the Unites States to fundraise for the Columbus Centre. Indeed, Sanford offered valuable insights as to how to approach possible American funders.140 At a time when the African American Civil Rights movement was at its heyday, with Martin Luther King, Jr. giving speeches all over America and the Vietnam War already raging for more than ten years, the Columbus Cen­ tre members decided to incorporate a study of racism in the United States and Americans as perpetrators in their research project. Sanford was awarded

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a one-year grant from the Columbus Centre in order to run a collabora­ tive research between the Centre and the Institute for the Study of Human Problems at Stanford. Other members of the Institute such as George DeVos, as well as people outside of it such as Robert J. Lifton, a Jewish American psychiatrist known for his research on Hiroshima survivors, Vietnam vet­ erans and Nazi doctors, participated in the project. Their basic stated aim was to conduct comparative research on the interactions between the Black and white communities in the United States. Drawing on the Columbus Cen­ tre’s initiative, the American group focused on the destructive tendencies in individuals and the social conditions under which they break out and take the form of mass violence against Blacks as well as the behaviour and inner disposition of the Blacks themselves. “We assume that many white Americans” wrote Sanford in his Colum­ bus Centre research proposal, “are disposed to see Negroes [sic] as categorically different from themselves, as essentially all alike, and as not entitled to full membership in the human community. (There are indeed, numerous American institutions that serve to perpetuate this way of viewing the Negroes [sic].) Often, we believe, images of crea­ tures and monsters, generated in the dreams and fantasies of childhood, come to dominate perceptions of Negroes [sic], who are then responded to as if they were these creatures or monsters.”141 In 1971, the outcomes of this research were published in the book Sanc­ tions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, a volume edited by Craig Comstock and Sanford himself. Although an initiative largely funded by the Columbus Centre, it was published under the auspices of the Wright Institute, a centre for interdisciplinary research, graduate training, and social action in Berkeley, California, that was founded by Sanford in 1968.142 In their pref­ ace, Sanford and Comstock make special mention to Cohn and the Colum­ bus Centre, stating that it was their collaboration that revived their interest in antisemitism and authoritarianism in 1966. They went on to describe the Centre’s project as “a fresh attempt to understand the phenomenon of Nazism or, more generally, all those forms of collective destructiveness in which the victims are seen as less than human” and their methodological approach as “mainly psychoanalytic and historical.”143 The volume, thus, comprises chapters by various leading American scholars on the social and psychological preconditions that lead a group under a higher authority to treat fellow humans as non-humans, perform violence, and, ultimately, com­ mit murder.144 Loyal to Astor’s vision of the project, psychoanalytic theory was, again in this volume, summoned to understand the racial divisions of the Ameri­ can society. Robert Bellah, for instance, in his contribution to the volume titled “Evil and the American Ethos,” describes the splitting mechanism that has led white Americans to “project evil and then inflict aggression on the

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allegedly evil group(s):” Black Americans and communists who both had,145 for different reasons, been persecuted and discriminated against in the United States. “Another consequence of this primitive form of splitting of good and evil to which Americans have been so prone,” argues Bellah, is the notion that the good, being good, can do no evil. Any action taken against groups seen to be evil is justified, for good can have only good ends in view. Thus, in America the enslavement of blacks, the mass murder of Indians [sic], the lynching of Negroes [sic], the atom bombing of Japanese, and the massacring of Vietnamese have all had their defenders.146 The similarities, now, between racism in the United States and Nazism were illustrated from the very beginning. “While taking issue with critics who argue that the United States purpose in Vietnam has been genocidal or that our society is now fascistic,” wrote Sanford and Comstock, we do find certain disturbing similarities between the mass victimization of another people in Vietnam and the way black people in our country have been treated as if they were things or even of the way the Nazi regime set out to eliminate “inferior races.” The similarity to which we mainly refer lies not in the intentions of the dominant group in each case . . . but rather in the creation of . . . a “cruel relationship.”147 In one of the chapters, Edward M. Opton discussed precisely the similari­ ties between the genocide of Vietnamese people in My Lai and the Holocaust by adopting an introspective methodology. “This chapter,” he wrote, is addressed primarily to that large minority who are at least able seriously to entertain the possibility that the cruelties we fought against in Germany and Japan must be faced within our own country as well. The lessons of My Lai are, I hope, the basis for a small part of the learning from history that will be required if we are not to repeat that history endlessly.148 Elsewhere, Opton referred to Samuel P. Huntington’s attitude towards Vietnam, which triggered the student protest at the University of Sussex dis­ cussed in the Introduction of this thesis. “This official policy,” he argued, “is to obliterate not just whole villages but whole districts and virtually whole prov­ inces. This policy had been eulogized in polished academic prose by Samuel P. Huntington, professor of government at Harvard.” He further commented on Huntington’s description of “the most massive bombing and scorched-earth operation in the history of the world” as an “American-sponsored urban revo­ lution:” “[It] must be one of the most panglossian rationalizations of the mur­ der of civilians since Adolph Eichmann described himself as a coordinator of railroad timetables.”149

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Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon and the history of the Roma In addition to the apparent comparisons between the Nazi atrocities against the European Jews and racism in the South African, British and American contexts, the Columbus Centre members also included researchers of the largely neglected history of discrimination against the Roma people. They invited Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, two scholars already engaged in writing the history of European Roma people (still called “Gypsies” then), to publish their book The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (1972) under the auspices of the Columbus Centre. Although the initial intention of this book was to assist in the claims for reparations from German and Austrian gov­ ernments for the genocide against the Romani people, in the end the authors seemed to have been profoundly influenced by the Centre’s comparative methodological approach. “This book was originally intended,” wrote Kenrick and Puxon in their preface, to recount only the story of the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies [sic]— a story which has not yet been told. It soon became apparent that this chapter in Gypsy [sic] history could not be regarded in isolation. It formed part of a chain of persecution and harassment based upon prej­ udices deep-rooted in European history.150 Kenrick was born in 1929 in the London neighbourhood of Hackney to a Jewish family who had emigrated to Britain before the beginning of the First World War. He was involved in left-wing politics from a very young age and was very interested in the protection of vulnerable minority communi­ ties.151 Indeed, Kenrick dedicated his life to working with minorities, and especially the Roma people, and had published a plethora of corresponding accounts. Indeed, he served as Director of the Institute of Contemporary Romani Research and Documentation in London in the 1960s. In 1968, Kenrick, along with Grattan Puxon, started collecting evidence to help the Roma people’s reparations claims against the Nazis. Eventually they were awarded a joint grant for research into modern history from the Institute of Contemporary History at the Wiener Library in order to gather material on the Roma genocide during the Nazi period.152 “[The people at the Wiener Library] hadn’t themselves thought of Roma,” Puxon told me during an interview, “but they were interested and they had a small amount of publications and papers where I  could get started on the research.”153 When the Institute of Contemporary History grant was exhausted, Kenrick and Puxon applied for and, ultimately, were awarded a Columbus Trust grant. While Kenrick was a scholar of the Roma minority, Puxon brought to the project his activities as a Roma rights activist, since by the time he was summoned to help in collecting the documents for the Nazi reparations he was already Secretary of the Gypsy Council, of which he was also a founder.

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Puxon told me that he left school when he was 16 and started working as a journalist at his local paper in Colchester. He participated in the anti-nuclear movement and was against militarism so, in order to avoid his army service, he decided to go to Ireland in early 1960s. He went on to live in a wagon on the outskirts of Dublin and in 1962 was approached by the Dublin Cor­ poration Bailiff, which informed him that he was going to be evicted. Some members of the Irish Travellers, an itinerant ethnic group of Irish descent (also referred to as “pavees”) who were living in tents were also threatened with eviction. As revealed also in his semi-autobiographical account Freeborn Travel­ ler (2007), Puxon abandoned the place where his wagon was settled and joined them in a big field as well as in a united struggle against Dublin Corporation.154 There, he was allegedly involved with the Irish Republi­ can Army, illustrated also in his semi-autobiographical book, where in his own words everything is pretty well true except the one where some IRA men went off and met with this guy from the Dublin Corporation Bailiff whom we called Big Bill and shot him in the leg. They might have wanted this to be true but it wasn’t.155 Subsequently, he faced problems with the Irish state and church and was forced to leave Ireland and go back to England. John Dillon, the writer of an article about the late Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey, knew Puxon, whom he described as “sort of upper-class hippie,” via his sister who was teaching Travellers at the time. Upon Puxon’s capture and expulsion from the country, Dillon met with Haughey, the Minister of Justice of Ireland at the time, to intercede on his behalf. “[Puxon] is actually damn lucky to be expelled from the country,” said Haughey to Dillon, “he could be in jail, but it didn’t suit us to put him there. Acting on a tip, the guards found an arms cache buried in his back garden.” Disarmed at this response, Dillon realised only years after that “there was not a word of truth in it.”156 Puxon himself said that the IRA did help their campaign against the Dublin Corporation but the charges against him were unfounded.157 After Puxon went back to England, and with the aid of the French organi­ sation Communauté Mondiale, he founded the Gypsy Council in 1966, which led five years later to the organisation of the First World Romani Congress in London in 1971. After the congress, Puxon emigrated to Yugoslavia and then to Thessaloniki in Greece, where he lived in the Romani quarter of the city for 14 years. In the meantime, Puxon joined Kenrick in the attempt to study the history of the Roma people under the Nazi regime and beyond. Puxon said that after being awarded the Columbus Trust grant, they met with Nor­ man Cohn, who offered his guidance for their project and then went on to conduct most parts of the research on their own.158 Their work, however, was

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considered very important to the Columbus Centre project. “In the spectrum of the Centre’s publications” wrote Norman Cohn, [Kenrick and Puxon’s book] bridges the gap between the works dealing with situations making for persecution and the works dealing with the Holocaust. For while four of its chapters are devoted to the usual situ­ ation of the Gypsies [sic] in Europe, as a conspicuous minority which is frequently an object of harassment, five chapters deal with their fate in the Nazi period, when over a quarter of a million Gypsies [sic] were killed—at the same time, and in the same ways, as the Jews.159 To put it differently, a historical investigation of the Romani history before and during the Nazi period served the aim of a comparative approach into dehumanisation and genocide. Kenrick himself drew the parallels at a podcast for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust: Well, the Gypsies have never been popular since they arrived in Europe in the 15th century, but things peaked, I think with the cometh of the nation state and Bismarck and, in Germany particularly, from Bis­ marck onwards, there was more and more laws against Gypsies. . . . Well, from the very beginning the Nazis classified the Gypsies alongside the Jews.160 The outcome of their effort The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies was published by the Centre’s series in 1972. The book is a pioneering scholarly account on the Roma minority. It sheds light on Romani history between 1300 and 1930, their fate during the Nazi period between 1930 and 1945, and, above all, their post-war condition.161 Puxon said that the point of the book was, among other things, to show that the targeting, persecution, and genocide of the Roma by the Nazis was not an isolated act, but part of an ongoing pattern of discrimination that existed before the Nazi period and continued after it. Indeed, Puxon’s view can be linked to our discussion of a compara­ tive approach to genocide and the role of colonialism in the process. Internal colonialism and class division, argues Puxon, play a crucial role in the dis­ crimination against the Roma people. The fact that they get paid less or have no job at all, placing them at the bottom, or rather, on the edge, of the social structure is a determining factor in their dehumanisation that could and did lead to their persecution and genocide. The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies is one of the first accounts of this subject to register a largely neglected if not invisible history of discrimination. It is all the more important in our discussion of the Columbus Centre because it adopts a comparative approach to genocide, directly drawing parallels between the destiny of Europe’s Jews and the destiny of Europe’s Roma peo­ ple. To start with, Puxon said that one of the aims of the book as well as of

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the First World Romani Congress was the claim of a land for the foundation of a Romani state. Indeed, some results of this intention were the Romani flag, the Romani national anthem, and the establishment of a national day, all decided in this first congress. The aspiration for a Romani state, which was however never achieved and which Puxon now characterises as an emo­ tional and unreal aftermath of the genocide, followed, in Puxon’s view, the example of the successful demand for the establishment of the state of Israel. The book itself also had many references to a direct comparison between the genocide of the Jews and the genocide of the Roma. First, Kenrick and Puxon refer to a perceived link between the two “pariah minorities” of the Roma and the Jews rooted in the fifteenth century, when an anonymous French author wrote in the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris that the Roma were “a race of Jews who later became mixed with Christian vagabonds.”162 The most extended comparison between the Jews and the Roma in the book regards, as expected, the Nazi period. Kenrick and Puxon write how in the early pre-war years of the Third Reich, the Gypsies and the Jews were both characterised as non-Aryans in administrative, legal, and pseudoscientific documents, despite the fact that Romani is an Indo-European, and therefore, Aryan language. The early Nazi period references to the Jews and the Roma stressed their shared “alienness” to European race origins. They included descriptions such as “the Jews and the Gypsies” are “far removed from us because their Asiatic ancestors were totally different from our Nomadic fore­ fathers,” they are “of foreign blood,” and they “count as foreign (artfremd) in Europe.”163 Perhaps this shared racist discrimination on the basis of “nonAryan blood” was the one that made the Nazis perform medical experiments on both the Jews and the Roma in the concentration camps later on. Steri­ lisation, intended infection with typhus, injections with a solution of salt or phenole, mustard gassing, and various experimental surgeries on twins were some of the many medical atrocities performed on Jewish and Romani camp prisoners by Nazi doctors.164 In addition to Germany, Jews and Roma were treated together in other countries during that period, such as Mussolini’s Italy, northern Yugoslavia (where signs reading “No Serbs, Jews, Nomads and dogs allowed” were to be found in public spaces), Hungary, and Poland.165 In other places, write Kenrick and Puxon, such as Romania, Greece, and Slovakia, the persecution of the Roma was much milder than that of the Jews, whereas in others, such as Bulgaria or Latvia, people were more willing to get rid of the Gypsies than the Jews; “Some Letts,” wrote Kenrick and Puxon, “were apparently pleased to be rid of the Gypsies. As one said, ‘From the Jews we do at least get some trade, but what can these parasites the Gypsies give us.” ’166 In addition to the apparent similarities between the treatment of the Jews and the treatment of the Roma by the Nazis, there were also some differ­ ences. For instance, Kenrick and Puxon argued that some of the Nazi laws were even stricter for the Roma than they were for the Jews. For example, the definition of “mixed blood” was stronger in their case, since “if two of

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a person’s sixteen great-great-grand-parents were Gypsies he was classed as part-Gypsy and later, in 1943, could be sent to Auschwitz,” whereas, they argue, “a person with one Jewish grandparent (four great-great-grandparents) was not generally affected by Nazi anti-Jewish legislation.”167 On the other hand, in the early days of Auschwitz, the orders concerning the Roma were less murderous than those for the Jews: We cannot say for certain on the basis of existing knowledge that the Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz to be killed. Those unfit for labour were not gassed on arrival and only a few Gypsies worked during the first months, so there was no policy of “Annihilation through Work.” Also the Gypsies in other camps were not transferred to Auschwitz.168 Comparing the Holocaust: historiographical implications in the 1980s–1990s The 1980s, the decade when the Columbus Centre was officially terminated, is in many ways a crucial decade for Holocaust historiography, especially regarding the uniqueness question. First, there was a proliferation of “mem­ ory culture” and the “memory studies” that it entailed, bringing the Holo­ caust memory to the centre of popular and scholarly interest. The so-called silence or awkwardness of Holocaust representation, against which the mem­ bers of the Columbus Centre had sought to develop their projects, gradually gave way to a massive memory boom. Historian Enzo Traverso described the 1980s as the period that brought an end to many years of indifference and repression and resulted in a shift of historiography as well as a “collec­ tive anamnesis.” At the same time, however, there were certain implications about the intensity and degree of this commemoration.169 Second, the so-called Historikerstreit, that is, German historians’ historio­ graphical controversies over the historical understanding and interpretation of Nazism and the Holocaust that we sketched in the previous chapter, took place in—the still divided—Germany throughout this decade. Although it also addressed other historiographical issues and has often been revised, the focal point of the challenge of the Historikerstreit was precisely the singular­ ity of the Holocaust. On the one hand, some conservative thinkers, such as the philosopher Ernst Nolte, the historian Michael Stürmer, and the journal­ ist Joachim Fest, suggested that the time had come for historians to challenge the uniqueness narrative. Although there were some differences between their approaches, what they shared was the insistence that Nazi crimes needed to be contextualised and thus be compared to other similar atrocities, which, critics soon argued, also morally “relativized” them. This move was thus contentious, rejoining an old argument about whether “to explain” comes close to or equates with “forgiving.” Nolte, for example, argued in 1980 that “[t]he Third Reich should be removed from .  .  . historical isolation” and “be examined in terms of its

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historical genesis and not merely by comparing it structurally with other totalitarian systems.”170 He believed, in other words, that Nazism and the Holocaust should be compared with other historical events or ideologies besides Communism, as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s. However, Nolte, like some of the others, was arguably aiming at various nationalistic agendas of the time: in 1980 he argued that a contextualisation is needed so that “[t]hose who criticize the Third Reich in order to strike at the Federal Republic, or even the capitalist system, must be shown to be the fools they are,” while in a speech published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1986, he argued that “all the deeds—with the sole exception of the technical process of gassing—that the National Socialists later committed had already been described in the voluminous literature of the 1920s.”171 More specifically, since the Gulag Archipelago preceded Auschwitz and “the Bolshevik murder of an entire class (was) the logical and factual [prior to] the ‘racial murder’ of National Socialism,” Nolte, performing a logical leap between the analyti­ cal categories of race and class, wondered whether the National Socialists or Hitler committed “an ‘Asiatic’ deed merely because they and their ilk con­ sidered themselves to be potential victims of an ‘Asiatic’ deed.”172 The word “Asiatic” bears resemblance to and possibly also derives from Hegel’s Eurocentric view of history, as presented in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, originally a set of university lectures given in Berlin in 1822, 1828, and 1830. It is precisely this view of history that the post-colonial theorist Edward Said criticised as orientalist in 1978.173 On the other side of the debate, some leftist or liberal thinkers, such as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the historians Hans Mommsen, Eber­ hard Jäckel, Martin Broszat,  and Heinrich August Winkler, supported the significance of treating the Holocaust as a singular unprecedented event and warned of the moral dangers of relativising it. Habermas contested the view of Nolte and other revisionists by linking it to an effort to reformulate a German identity, in which, in Nolte’s words, the (Nazi) “past will pass”: the Holocaust was not unique but rather a reaction to the Communist threat, a threat that still existed at the time; thus, not only did the Germans not commit an unprecedented crime but they also eternally stood on the side of the anti-communist enlightened West. Strongly disagreeing with such a view, Habermas concluded that “those who desire to call the Germans back to conventional forms of their national identity are destroying the only reli­ able foundation for our ties to the West.”174 In the spectrum between full acceptance and the emergence of “denial” of the Holocaust as a category in historical discourse, this notion of relativising the Holocaust historically seemed to Habermas and other German critics as a means of apologising for it or masking its full moral evil. Now, if we try to place the comparative approach of the Columbus Cen­ tre’s writings within this context, we should proceed with caution. For, while it may be regarded as conservative—or even nationalistic—for a German historian to argue for comparing the Holocaust with other events, the same

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suggestion bears a different meaning when it takes place in a British context. It can be considered nationalistic for a German historian to argue for com­ paring the Holocaust, because it might imply getting rid of the responsibility and the guilt for the crimes performed by German people. At the same time, it can be considered nationalistic for a British historian to argue for Holo­ caust uniqueness because it might neglect the crimes performed by the British in their colonies. The end of the 1980s decade marked the apparent end of the Cold War, often symbolised with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The perceived end of the Cold War also signified the final abandonment of a politically moti­ vated tendency to equate “totalitarianism of the left with totalitarianism on the right,” since Communism no longer presented the threat it had in the past. In this way, it also allowed for a departure from the uniqueness nar­ rative and an emergence of a critical comparative approach to mass kill­ ings. Especially after the disclosure of former Soviet archives, a comparison between the Nazi camps and the Gulag, the state-sanctioned violence, the means of repression, and the power of ideology of the two regimes could be studied more systematically and with fewer political biases.175 And so could the Holocaust uniqueness argument. In the 1990s, Holocaust scholars like Yehuda Bauer and Steven T. Katz defended the uniqueness position.176 The historian Dan Stone takes up Bau­ er’s suggestion that the term “genocide” signifies partial murder and the term “Holocaust” stands for total destruction. He aptly observes that, according to this definition, the Holocaust is a “genocide” and not a “Holocaust.” Moreover, the intention to destroy all members of the targeted group in the case of Rwanda appears to be similar to the genocidal drive of the Nazis. As for Katz’s similar point that the ideological motivation to kill every Jew dis­ tinguishes the Holocaust from other mass killings, Stone presents the polemi­ cal critique of David Stannard. Stannard accused Katz of racism and denial of great scale genocides, such as the American Indians genocide, which, for him, was the greatest of all genocides.177 Michael Marrus, one of the first scholars meticulously to study Holo­ caust historiography in The Holocaust in History (1989), disagrees with the uniqueness position and raises three crucial points.178 First, even though the camp experience of the Jews was arguably the worst of all groups and the Jews comprised the majority of victims, there were still other groups who shared their horror: Roma people, Soviet prisoners of war, and mentally ill Ger­ mans, among others, a point that had of course been made before by writers such as Kenrick and Puxon in their Columbus Series book. Second, while the camps can and have been described as the actualisation of Nazi terror and the nucleus of what is called the Holocaust, the history of the camps is not identical to the history of the Holocaust.179 As noted in the previous chapter, Raul Hilberg reported that of the 5.1 million Jewish victims of the Nazis, 3 million died in the camps. The rest were killed in either open-air shoot­ ings, or the ghettoisation and general privation.180 Hence, not all Holocaust

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victims died in the camps. At the same time, the camp, in this modern sense, was not an actual invention of the Third Reich—even if the Nazi camp held indeed certain originality in many of its policies.181 For instance, it is reported that in 1896 the Spanish applied a “reconcentrado” policy during the Cuban War of Independence.182 Especially within the colonial context, during the South African War and, specifically, in late December 1900, the British instituted a policy of concentration camps for thousands of Boer women, children, and old men, as well as dislocated refugee Africans.183 Third and, perhaps, most importantly, Marrus discusses how malleable an argument of uniqueness per se could be for a historian.184 This claim can only be justified on the grounds that the Holocaust, like every other histori­ cal event, is unprecedented. An important distinction needs to be made here. Indeed, it is important to insist on the difference between these two key words. “Unprecedented” refers to a non-repetition in the past, whereas “unique” bears also the connotation of non-repeatability, the impossibility of ever being repeated in the future. Thus, the advocates of Holocaust uniqueness risk being unfair to other vic­ tims of genocide—who came either before, such as the Armenians in 1915, after, such as the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda in 1994, or during the mass extermination of the European Jewry by the Nazis, such as the Romani peo­ ple.185 It is also “unfair” to the Jewish people, or any other people, because it presupposes that it is impossible for such a genocide to happen again in the future. It is useful at this point to return to Stone’s argument which power­ fully suggests the futility of comparing genocides in order to find out which is the “greatest.” “Memory is not a zero-sum game in which all groups must engage in a kind of social Darwinist competition for which there is only one winner,”186 or as the American intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra puts it, the uniqueness rhetoric can be easily transformed into a “grim competi­ tion for first place in victimhood.”187 Given that the Holocaust was not repeated when it happened but it is repeatable in the future, the historian is, thus, indebted to Jewish survivors, to other victims of Nazi terror as well as to every human being—as a pos­ sible future victim of genocide—to write the history of the Holocaust, as warning, as well as record of the past. Doing so while embracing a nonuniqueness rhetoric might mean either simply to focus on the events as such, or to conduct a comparative research, where the Holocaust is stud­ ied side by side with other genocides. Besides, Raphael Lemkin, the very man who in 1944 coined the term genocide as “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group,” sought to name “an old practice in its modern development.”188 ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ The Columbus Centre adopted a comparative approach to map out vio­ lence so that a better understanding might one day help in preventing it from

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happening again. This was itself a particular perspective on the function of historical research and writing—that is, its warning function—it was thus the antithesis of antiquarianism. The most crucial point made in the Colum­ bus Centre was that the apparent human incapacity to react to Nazi crimes derived from the potentially ubiquitous quality of people, even in the con­ temporary period, to kill their fellow humans on the basis of presumed differ­ ences, and more specifically on the basis of an irrational feeling that the other is less human than themselves. And it is precisely this irrational feeling that made several of the Columbus Centre participants resort to psychoanalysis to analyse their findings. The universal process of dehumanisation was what bound together all the different topics that were studied comparatively at the Columbus Centre. “The common theme is the various investigations is ‘dehumanisation,’ varie­ ties of dehumanisation and how they come about, viewed psychoanalytically, sociologically, historically,” wrote Cohn to Sanford in 1965, In other words, how are the persecuted seen by the persecutors—what negative projections are thrust upon them,—what needs in the persecu­ tors are satisfied thereby—and what social situations brought all this about? What we are aiming at is a wide range of comparative material, but studied always from this same point of view—with the accent on what George DeVos, adapting Talcott Parsons, calls expressive as dis­ tinct from instrumental exploitation.189 The category of race proved particularly important in the Columbus Cen­ tre’s comparative approach. Astor showed through his editorship of The Observer that it was not just the Germans but everyone who needed to study this genocide, as large-scale deliberate killings were by no means limited to Nazi Germany; British imperialism, for instance, was one of the most mur­ derous conditions in history. Albie Sachs researched South Africa, a study case where race played a crucial part. And he did so also through compar­ ing the often dehumanising function of South African law with Nazism. Rae Sherwood in the book she wrote and Nevitt Sanford in the volume he co-edited investigated modern forms of racism in the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively, through the analytical lens of the category human/non-human. Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon focused on the long course of humanity’s inhuman attitudes towards European Roma People. In this way, they concluded that the binary between human and inhuman is artificial; human includes inhuman, and vice versa. As we saw, not all Columbus Centre members explicitly referred to psychoanalytic theory. Yet, they all wrote against a background of psychoanalytic understanding of the process of dehumanisation that allowed them to draw parallels between the Nazi crimes and other instances of social destructiveness without risking to trivialise and relativise evil.

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Notes 1 “Interview with Albie Sachs,” The Freedom Collection, George W. Bush Insti­ tute, accessed July 6, 2022, www.freedomcollection.org/interviews/albie_sachs/. 2 “Interview with Albie Sachs.” 3 Daniel Greene, “Albie Sachs, 9 October  2008,” Voices on Antisemitism, accessed February  27, 2016, www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/ antisemitism-podcast/albie-sachs. 4 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 20. 5 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 11–12, 30. 6 Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), xix–xxii.

7 Sachs, Justice in South Africa. SOS Norman Cohn preface p. 9.

8 Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.”

9 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 17–18.

10 George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Tribune, October 19, 1945. 11 George Orwell, “Letter to Mr Usborne,” in Orwell: A Life in Letters, ed. Peter Davison (London, 2010), xi–xii. 12 Orwell had an important impact on both British and American culture. Nineteen Eighty-Four became very popular among critics and the public from its very early days, shaping both intellectuals’ and the wider audience’s conceptions of totalitarianism: terms from the novel such as “Newspeak,” “doublethink” and “Thought Police” as well as the descriptive adjective “Orwellian” entered Eng­ lish vocabulary. For a thorough discussion of the reception of Orwell in Britain, see Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). As for the American context, see Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 285–91. In addition, John Rodden provides interesting perspectives of Orwell’s reception in the Soviet Union and West Germany, see John Rodden, The Politics of Literary Reputa­ tion: George Orwell (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 13 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

14 Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (New Brunswick,

NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 1990). 15 See Astor, “Towards a Study of the Scourge.” 16 Ibid. 17 Norman Cohn, Letter to George DeVos, 8 July 1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. 18 Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 206. 19 Ibid. 20 Astor, “The Meaning of Eichmann,” cf. Ch. 2, fn 233. 21 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xiv. 22 Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power (Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 1981), 61. 23 Ibid., 100. 24 Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam, 1986), xxi. 25 Cf. Ch. 1, fn. 54. 26 Harold Macmillan, “Draft of a Speech Given to the South African Parliament,” in Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Bodleian Libraries (1960), https://genius.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/exhibits/browse/draft-of-a-speech-given­ by-harold-macmillan-to-the-south-african-parliament1960/.

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27 Saul Dubow, “Macmillan, Verwoerd, and the 1960 ‘Wind of Change’ Speech,” Historical Journal 54, no. 4 (2011): 1087–1114. 28 Of course earlier studies on imperialism in the early twentieth century such as John A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) and Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) can be regarded precursors to the later accounts in the 1950s; see John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, Rev. ed. (Lon­ don: Archibald Constable & Co., 1905); and Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism (Communist Party of Great Britain, 1928). 29 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xxi. 30 Richard H. King and Dan Stone, eds., “Introduction,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 2–3. 31 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 2–3. 32 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 65. 33 Ibid., 66. 34 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 101. 35 Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 229–31. 36 Ibid., 233. 37 Ibid., 232. 38 Winkler, “Eternally in the Shadow of Hitler?,” 174. 39 See Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Lon­ don: Pimlico, 2005). 40 David Astor, “Suez Leader,” The Observer, November 4, 1956. 41 Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” 60. 42 David Astor, “The Meaning of Malan,” The Observer, May 30, 1948. 43 George Orwell, “To David Astor,” in Orwell: A Life in Letters, ed. Peter Davi­ son (London: Secker, 2010), 421–3, at 422. 44 Cockett, David Astor and the Observer, 126. 45 Colin Legum, “Races Set Apart,” The Observer, June 11, 1950; Colin Legum, “Crisis in South Africa,” The Observer, March 23, 1952; Colin Legum, “The Roots of Violence,” The Observer, May  5, 1963; Colin Legum, “Tortured in Verwoerd Jail,” The Observer, November 3, 1963; Colin Legum, “The Conti­ nent Full of Danger,” The Observer, December 28, 1975. 46 Legum, “Races Set Apart.” 47 Gwyn Barker, Letter to Colin Legum, 20 November 1963, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Project Sponsors 1962–64. 48 David Astor, Letter to Anthony Sampson, 14 July  1955, Anthony Sampson papers, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Sampson dep. 186, fols. 1–176 49 Nadine Gordimer, “Two Souths--One World,” The Observer, June 9, 1963; Nel­ son Mandela, “Why I Am Ready to Die,” The Observer, April 26, 1964; Sachs, Justice in South Africa. 50 Orwell, Orwell: The Observer Years, x, xiii. Cockett, David Astor and the Observer, 126. 51 Daniel Pick, Interview with Albie Sachs, “The Roots of Extremism.” 52 “Albie Sachs Biography Constitutional Court of South Africa,” Academy of Achievement, December  4, 2013, www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ sac0bio-1; “Judge Albert Louis ‘Albie’ Sachs,” South African History Online, August 27, 2013, www.sahistory.org.za/people/judge-albert-louis-albie-sachs. 53 Patrick Barkham, “Albie Sachs: ‘I Can’t Tell My Son Everything,’ ” The Guard­ ian, October 8, 2011. 54 Drucilla Cornell, Karin van Marle, and Albie Sachs, Albie Sachs and Transfor­ mation in South Africa: From Revolutionary Activist to Constitutional Court Judge (Abington and New York: Birkbeck Law Press, 2014), 76.

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55 The Freedom Charter was a statement of core principles in the spirit of older documents such as the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man during the French Revolution, and most recent ones such as Purna Swaraj, a declaration of Indian Independence promulgated by the Indian National Congress in 1930. 56 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 214; “The Freedom Charter,” African National Congress, 1955, www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=72. 57 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 213–4. 58 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 224, 220. 59 Ibid., 231. 60 Cornell et al., Albie Sachs and Transformation in South Africa, 77–8. 61 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 206. See Albert Louis Sachs Papers: legal cases & other  papers, 1956–1968, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Senate House Library. 62 As for the broader context, Glenn Frankel’s book Rivonia’s Children (2011) provides a detailed biographical account of Jewish South African activists who fought apartheid as well as a stimulating historical narrative of the gradual transformation of South Africa into a police-state; see Glenn Frankel, Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2011). 63 Greene, Albie Sachs, October 9, 2008. 64 Albie Sachs, Curriculum Vitae, 1966, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Colum­ bus Trust Management Committee 1966–69. 65 Greene, Albie Sachs, October 9, 2008. 66 Irving Wardle, “The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs,” The Times, June 19, 1978. 67 https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=092E407BFE616FC0&id=92e407bfe616fc0%2 12067&v=3. 68 Robert Birley was interested both in South Africa and in Nazism. As part of his anti-apartheid campaign, he wrote a piece for the Observer entitled “What’s changing in South Africa.” Moreover, in a letter to Astor from 1 August 1962 when he agreed to sponsor the Centre, Birley commented on Astor’s initiative: “My difficulty about this, and other similar problems which affect individuals rather than communities, is that one may leave the place “swept and garnished” with nothing in its place so that the evil spirit returns in due course. A Czech philosopher said to me in late 1938: “Granted that Hitler and the Nazis are devils but one must remember that they entered an empty room’;”, see Robert Birley, Letter to David Astor, 1 August 1962, Astor Papers: Box 10, BH, Folder: Project Sponsors 1962–64; Robert Birley, “What’s Changing in South Africa,” The Observer, April 23, 1967; Daniel Pick, Interview with Albie Sachs, “The Roots of Extremism.” 69 “Top Human Rights Judge to Deliver First Memorial Lecture,” University of Sussex, 2009, www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/2028. 70 Daniel Pick, Interview with Albie Sachs, “The Roots of Extremism.” 71 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 11. 72 Ibid., 201. 73 Ibid., 97–98. 74 Ibid., 99. 75 Ibid., 261. 76 Ibid., 262. 77 Ibid., 263. 78 Abby Ginzburg, Soft Vengeance Trailer, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v= gYgXNpk6jIM. 79 Cornell et al., Albie Sachs and Transformation in South Africa, 75–6.

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80 Ginzburg, Soft Vengeance Trailer. 81 “Newsnight South African Elections,” BBC 2, May 9, 1994, www.bbc.co.uk/ archive/apartheid/7226.shtml. 82 Ginzburg, Soft Vengeance Trailer; Hoyt Webb, “The Constitutional Court of South Africa: Rights Interpretation and Comparative Constitutional Law,” Jour­ nal of Constitutional Law 1, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 205–83. 83 Daniel Pick, Interview with Albie Sachs, “The Roots of Extremism.” 84 The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter: Albie Sachs at TEDxEuston, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS4g5sPU5eU; Maya Jaggi, “Justice of the Peace,” The Guardian, August 26, 2006. 85 Daniel Pick, Interview with Albie Sachs, “The Roots of Barbarism.”

86 Greene, Albie Sachs, October 9, 2008.

87 Frankel, Rivonia’s Children, 43–6.

88 Ruth First: A Revolutionary Life 1925–1982 (Ruth First Papers and the Institute

of Commonwealth Studies), 2012. 89 Ginzburg, Soft Vengeance Trailer. 90 Albie Sachs, “Breakdown of a Legal System Under Stress (Proposal),” 1966, Astor Papers: Box  10, BH, Folder: Columbus Trust Management Committee 1966–69. 91 Lamont, “Norman Cohn (1915–2007).” Bruce Anderson, “Auschwitz Is No Subject for Point-Scoring, and Neither Party Emerges with Any Credit,” The Independent, February 25, 2008. 92 Greene, Albie Sachs, October 9, 2008.

93 Frankel, Rivonia’s Children, 45.

94 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 257.

95 Ibid., 260. John Dugard, “Judicial Process, Positivism and Civil Liberty,” The

South African Law Jounra 88 (1971): 185–6. 96 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 136. It should be noted that during the Second Boer War, fought between Britain and the Boer Republics (Transvaal and Orange Free State), in late December 1900, the British instituted a policy of concentra­ tion camps for Boer women, children and old men, as well as dislocated refugee Africans. This incident was also used by the Nazis in their propaganda that the camp was a British invention; see Christian Goeschel and Nikolaus Wachsmann, “Before Auschwitz: The Formation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–9,” Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 3 (September 14, 2010): 515–34; Bill Nasson, The South African War 1899–1902 (Arnold, 1999). Ibid., 220–221. 97 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 134–6.

98 Ibid., 71.

99 Ibid., 20.

100 Nochlin and Garb, The Jew in the Text, 22. 101 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 28. 102 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 30. 103 Charles Loram, “Review: I. D. MacCrone, Race Attitudes in South Africa: His­ torical, Experimental, and Psychological Studies,” The American Historical Review 44, no. 1 (1938): 63–65. 104 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 63. 105 Ibid., 66–7. 106 Ibid., 134. 107 Ibid., 135. 108 Ibid., 20. 109 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A  Biography (New York: W. W. Norton  & Company, 2010), 342. 110 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 174–5.

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111 Ibid., 176. On that note, see also Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Derek Hook, A Critical Psychology of the Postco­ lonial: The Mind of Apartheid (London: Routlege, 2012). 112 Harold Jack Simons, African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (Lon­ don: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 106; Albie Sachs, “Obituaries: Pro­ fessor Jack Simons,” The Independent, August 3, 1995. 113 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 176. 114 For a more detailed discussion about the Foucauldian theory on sexuality and a historicization of social control in Modernity see Foucault, The Will to Knowl­ edge; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Foucault, History of Madness; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997). 115 Ibid., 200. 116 Frankel, Rivonia’s Children. 117 Anthony Sampson, “Lionel Bernstein: White Fighter in South Africa’s Black Freedom Struggle,” The Guardian, June 26, 2002; Colin Legum, “Lionel Bern­ stein Obituary,” Rusty and Hilda Bernstein, n.d., www.rusty-bernstein.com/ independent-obituary.htm. 118 Danae Karydaki, Interview with Irma Brenman Pick, London, 25 February 2016. 119 Rae Sherwood, “The Bantu Clerk: A Study of Role Expectations,” The Journal of Social Psychology 47 (1958): 285–316. 120 Simon Biesheuvel, African Intelligence (South African Institute of Race Rela­ tions, 1943). 121 Johann Louw, “South Africa,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Psy­ chology: Global Perspectives, ed. David B. Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 506. 122 “Demonstrations in Britain over Pretoria Sentences,” The Times, June 13, 1964. 123 Frankel, Rivonia’s Children, 250. 124 Rusty Bernstein, Memory against Forgetting: Memoirs from a Life in South Afri­ can Politics (London: Viking, 1999), 316. 125 Frankel, Rivonia’s Children, 251. 126 Hilda and Rusty Bernstein Papers 1931–2011, held at Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, accessed March, 16 2016, www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c= A3299/R/9010. 127 Sherwood, The Psychodynamics of Race, xvi. Rae Sherwood correspondence (B9.2.18.1) in Hilda and Rusty Bernstein Papers 1931–2011, held at Histori­ cal Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, accessed March, 16 2016, www.historicalpapers.wits.ac.za/?inventory/U/ collections&c=A3299/R/9010. 128 Sherwood, The Psychodynamics of Race. 129 A Brief History of the Columbus Centre and its Research Project, 1980, Astor Papers: Box  10 BH, Folder: Minutes of Columbus Trust Management Com­ mittee, Standing Committee and Trustees, 1970–78  & A  Brief History of the Columbus Centre and Its Research Project 1980. For more information about Pearl King’s life and work, see Pearl King, Time Present and Time Past: Selected Papers of Pearl King (London: Karnac Books, 2005) and Riccardo Steiner and Jennifer Johns, eds., Within Time and Beyond Time: A Festschrift for Pearl King (London: Karnac Books, 2001). 130 Sherwood, The Psychodynamics of Race, 33. 131 Sherwood, 361–62. 132 Sherwood, 367. 133 Sherwood, 484.

A latent possibility in all mankind 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164

155

Sherwood, xi. Sherwood, 395. Ibid., 493. Daniel Goleman, “Nevitt Sanford, 86, Psychologist Who Traced Roots of Preju­ dice,” The New York Times, November 7, 1995. Norman Cohn, Letter to Nevitt Sanford, 8 July 1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. Norman Cohn, Letter to Nevitt Sanford, 5 October 1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. Nevitt Sanford, Letter to Norman Cohn, 15 April 1966, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. Nevitt Sanford, Research Proposal, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6. Cf. Appendix. Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock, “Preface,” in Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, eds. Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1971), x–xi. Sanford, Sanctions for Evil. Robert Bellah, “Evil and American Ethos,” in Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, eds. Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1971), 185. Ibid. Nevitt Sanford and Comstock, “Chapter I: Sanctions for Evil,” in Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, eds. Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1971), 1–2. Edward M. Opton, “Chapter III: It Never Happened and besides They Deserved It,” in Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, eds. Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1971), 50. Ibid., 52. Kenrick and Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, ix. Juan de Dios Ramírez-Heredia, “Donald Kenrick, Pioneer of Roma Struggle, Dies,” Union Romani, November 16, 2015, www.unionromani.org/notis/2015/ new2015-11-16.htm. See Donald Kenrick Papers, Wiener Library, Material relating to the persecution of the Gypsies under the Nazis. Danae Karydaki, Interview with Grattan Puxon, 14 September 2015. Grattan Puxon, Freeborn Traveller (Small World Media, 2007). Karydaki, Interview with Grattan Puxon, 14 September 2015. John Dillon, “How Charlie Cast His Spell,” Irish Independent, June 26, 2006. Karydaki, Interview with Grattan Puxon, 14 September 2015. Ibid. Norman Cohn, “A  Brief History of the Columbus Centre and Its Research Project,” 1980, www.bbk.ac.uk/thepursuitofthenazimind/Astor/KMBT3502011 0914164050.pdf. Donald Kenrick, Nazi Persecution (Roma and Sinti), Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, accessed March  8, 2016, http://hmd.org.uk/resources/podcast/ nazi-persecution-roma-and-sinti-donald-kenrick. Kenrick and Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies. Ibid., 20, 48; for the original edition of the anonymous manuscripts, see Alexan­ dre Tuetey, ed., Journal D’un Bourgeois de Paris 1405–1449 (Paris: Champion, 1881). Kenrick and Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies, 59, 62–63. Ibid., 177–183.

156 165 166 167 168 169 170

171

172

173 174

175 176

177 178 179 180 181 182

A latent possibility in all mankind Ibid., 108, 112, 125, 140. Ibid., 130, 136, 143. Ibid., 67, 85. Ibid., 153. Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 4. For a problematisation about the implications of the Holocaust “memory” boom, see Winter, “The Generation of Memory.” Ernst Nolte, “Between Historical Legend and Revisionism? The Third Reich in the Perspective of 1980,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Docu­ ments of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 14. Ibid.; Ernst Nolte, “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Writ­ ten but Not Delivered,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Docu­ ments of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 21–22. Nolte, “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered,” 22. The term Gulag Archipelago was coined by Russian historian and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his 1973 homonymous book, see Alek­ sandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (London: Collins/Fontana, 1974). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1975); and Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Jürgen Habermas, “A Kind of Settlement of Damages: The Apologetic Tenden­ cies in German History Writing,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 44. Such efforts resulted in books like Stephane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA and London: Har­ vard University Press, 1999). For the original accounts, see Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Con­ text: Vol. 1, The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). David Stannard, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Westview Press, 1996). Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 19–20. For a recent account on the history of the camps, see Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little, Brown, 2015). Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1985, 338. For a discussion of the establishment of the camps, see Goeschel and Wachs­ mann, “Before Auschwitz.” Having recognized the Cuban insurrection as a guerrilla war, they “re-concen­ trated” Spanish farmers and sugar cane field workers deemed sympathetic to the guerrillas, in garrisons located in major Cuban cities; this repressive policy led to the death up to half a million Cubans from starvation and disease. S. R. L. Var­ gas, “History, Legal Scholarship, and LatCrit Theory: The Case of Racial Trans­ formations Circa the Spanish American War, 1896–1900,” Denver University Law Review 78 (2001).

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183 As a matter of fact, this confinement experience was characterized as traumatic as “reflected in letters from some of over 116,000 inmates who fought a sub­ merged battle to keep body and soul together in what had become an audit of life and death.” Nasson, The South African War 1899–1902, 220–221. Cf. fn. 93. 184 Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 18–20. 185 For historical accounts of the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, see Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A  Complete History (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011); and Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (London: Hurst, 1998). For Nazi persecution and extermination of Romani people, see the Columbus Series account Kenrick and Puxon, The Des­ tiny of Europe’s Gypsies. 186 Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 211. For the whole discussion of the unique­ ness debate, see pp. 206–213. 187 LaCapra, An Interview with Professor Dolinick LaCapra, Yad Vashem, Jerusa­ lem. The Multimedia CD “Eclipse of Humanity,” Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2000. 188 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Gov­ ernment, Proposals for Redress, 79. 189 Norman Cohn, Letter to Nevitt Sanford, 22 October  1965, Astor Papers, Box 10, BH, Folder: American Study 1965–6.

4

If you are looking for a witch, you are looking for a woman Gender and the Columbus Centre

On 16 April  1970, an advert for two Columbus Centre job vacancies appeared in The Times. The one was for a research fellow and the other for a research assistant, both of whom were expected to work for one year in the newly launched psychodynamic and social psychological study of the relations between ethnic minority families and English host families. The word “male” was put in a parenthesis next to the word “research fellow.” In the job description, it was specifically stated that “candidates should be men” with experience in psychodynamic and social psychological method­ ologies. The research assistant position description was gender neutral, and the only requirement was a degree in psychology, sociology or social anthro­ pology. The annual salary of the former ranged between £1,585 and £2,850 (roughly estimated in present-day salaries between £27,800 and 50,000 per annum) and of the latter between £800 and £1,100 (est. between £14,000 and £19,300).1 They ended up hiring the psychiatrist Robert Gosling as the research fellow and the social psychologist Rae Sherwood as the research assistant. As we saw in Chapter  3, Rae Sherwood ran all the research and wrote the almost 600-page book The Psychodynamics of Race: Vicious and Benign Spirals (1980). Indeed, according to Norman Cohn, because of a failure to renew the grant, the success of the project was due above all to the extraordinary devotion of Rae Sherwood, who not only organised and supervised the field-work and did much of it her­ self, and encouraged and inspired her colleagues, but also continued to work at writing up the results for some seven years after she had ceased to draw any salary. Gosling was appointed as a research fellow to advise and assist her. He was paid almost twice as much as her.2 Considering that the Columbus Cen­ tre was both a project about ideas and an institution with a material basis, where there were finances, hiring policies, wage rates, and administration, this detail adds a very important dimension to its history, the history of a research centre that was purposed to study discrimination. DOI: 10.4324/9780429197314-5

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The fact that 1970, when the job advert was posted, coincides with the year that the Equal Pay Act was passed in the House of Commons makes it even more interesting. In that year, the Labour MP and employment secre­ tary Barbara Castle, supported by Prime Minister Harold Wilson, sponsored the Equal Pay Act that dictated that men and women must be paid an equal amount of money for an equal amount of work in the same role.3 Although the Act was only enforced five years later in 1975, an advert from 1971 for a research fellow in the University of Bath specifically refers to “the effects of the implementation of the Equal Pay Act 1970 on the payment and uti­ lisation of female labour.”4 The Columbus Centre advert was posted one month before the bill was passed in Parliament on 29 May 1970 and can­ not thus be characterised as “illegal.” Nonetheless, as is usually the case, this act of parliament was not created in some sort of social vacuum. To the contrary, it was triggered by what Sheila Cohen characterised as “Britain’s May 1968,” namely a strike, in June 1968, by 187 women sewing machinists at Ford’s Dagenham plant demanding equal pay legislation that “brought a multinational company and a national government to their knees.”5 Indeed, between 1968 and 1970, several articles regarding equal pay appeared in the press, especially in papers affiliated with the Labour Party.6 It is, thus, safe to assume that during that period, a discussion about the pay gap between men and women was prominent in the public discourse. Hence, while the Colum­ bus Centre’s job advert was not illegal, it was, arguably, either ignorant of the social conditions of the period or knowingly made on grounds of discrimina­ tion against women. In either case, it requires further investigation. This chapter seeks to explore theories of gender and most especially the use of gender as an analytical tool in the historiography of mass violence and genocide. It also attempts to shed light on the historical context of the Columbus Centre in 1960s and 1970s Britain with regard to sexism, misogyny, and homophobia. Through this prism, it will focus on the way in which gender was (or was not) acknowledged in the work and function of the Columbus Centre. More emphasis will be placed on the scholarship and mentality of two of its figures, the academic director Norman Cohn and the sociologist and social historian Christina Larner, who both contributed to the Centre’s project with their books on witch-hunts. Subsequently, we will shift our focus to the role of gender in Holocaust historiography and the way in which it appears in Henry Dicks’s Columbus Series book before moving on to a broader contextualisation of the Columbus Centre and women in the framework of 1960s–1970s Britain. Sexism versus feminism in 1960s–1970s Britain We can safely assume that Norman Cohn, as the academic director of the Centre, was the one who made the decision for the evidently sexist job advert. Besides, he mentioned in an interview with Daniel Pick in 2006 that he carefully excluded David Astor from attending meetings.7 Perhaps Cohn

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made that decision because he was, as his second wife Marina Voikhanskaya told me at in interview in September  2014, “an old man, with old fash­ ioned views about women.”8 In 1970, Cohn was in his early fifties, which, by the standards of the time, might have qualified for “old.” What is more important than his age, however, was that Cohn was a man of his own time. Although there are not many similar adverts in The Times that explicitly ask for male researchers, discrimination against women in academic or insti­ tutional context in the 1960s–1970s Britain was considered commonplace. Lynne Segal, a socialist feminist, academic, and one of the activists who par­ ticipated in the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s, remarked to me in November 2015 that sexism was truly ubiquitous even in 1970 when this advert was published in The Times. The 1960s, she said, closed with so little having changed around women’s rights, apart from somewhat easier access to contraception and the legalising of abortion under certain conditions with the Abortion Act in 1967, that is, only one year after the Columbus Centre was launched. Elsewhere, Segal recalled, whether in jobs, pay, education, culture or political representation, women faced discrimination at every turn, since as we saw the Equal Pay Act passed in 1970 and was forced from 1975 onwards.9 In her book Making Trouble (2007), she describes how confused and lost many women felt in 1960s Britain through the voices of some of her feminist friends and colleagues: “I didn’t know who I was then,” Catherine Hall begins; “I was on the run,” Barbara Taylor echoes; “It was lonely as an American Jew, trying to be an academic, a New Leftie and a mother,” Cora Kaplan recalls; “I  was very confused,” Sally Alexander explains, “I  think now there was no way to be a woman and to be intelligent and articulate in the Sixties.”10 An important part of the history of women in Britain around that time is the Women’s Liberation movement, to which Segal also belonged. Perhaps one of the most emblematic moments of the movement was the protest during the Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall in London in November 1970. In that case, members of the Women’s Liberation Workshop expressed their demands for equal rights by disrupting the act of the comedian Bob Hope, who kept on telling sexist jokes such as “it’s been quite a cattle market—I’ve been out there checking calves.”11 The historian and Women’s Liberation activist Sally Alexander, who was arrested that night, narrates her experience at Royal Albert Hall in an interview with Andrew Whitehead: I don’t really know where the idea came from. Except women being judged by their looks, and their bodies .  .  . if we could disrupt the spectacle, as we called it, going into everyone’s homes, it would make an impact. We had no quarrel with the contestants. Our argument was with, you know, why do you have to be beautiful and looked at like

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this before you’re noticed as a woman? There was a sense of exhilara­ tion and excitement that we were making a mock and we were making ourselves heard. . . We dressed up, we wanted to fit into the audience . . . You felt “oh my God! We’re gonna do this!” we were terrified . . . the signal came very early because the woman who had the rattle, she got so angry with the jokes that Bob Hope was producing, they were shocking and he was genuinely demeaning . . . so we leapt up and so other women leaping up too. We climbed over people who were horri­ fied about what we were doing.12 An article from The Observer at a time where Astor was its editor, however, reveals both the feminist activism and the open sexism of the Miss  World contest. More specifically, Bob Hope is quoted referring to the activist as “a bunch of mad women,” while Jennifer Hosten, the woman who was awarded the title of Miss World that year, stated that she did not think “women should ever achieve complete equal rights.”13 The neglected history of women revisited: cultural outputs of second-wave feminism In the political arena, the Women’s Liberation Movement and women’s organised labour had a strong presence in Britain from late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, resulting in some important social changes such as the Abortion Act in 1967 and the Equal Pay Act in 1970. Some of the activ­ ists who belonged to what came to be known as second-wave feminism also produced some key texts reflecting on the issue of women. Juliet Mitchell, a British leftist and feminist activist, member of the New Left Review editorial committee, whom Anthony Storr admired a lot as we saw in Chapter 1 is a fine example. In 1966, the New Left Review published her much-cited essay Women: The Longest Revolution, the title of which was an obvious reference to Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961). In it, Mitchell discusses how to deal with and think about women’s oppression in the domestic envi­ ronment and their exploitation in the socioeconomic realm; in other words, how to bring together Marxism and feminism.14 These problems are further discussed by another socialist feminist of the time, the historian Sheila Rowbotham. In 1969, Rowbotham wrote a highly influential pamphlet under the title Women’s Liberation and the New Poli­ tics, which is “widely considered to have been the first manifesto” for the women’s liberation movement in Britain.15 Her next book, Hidden from His­ tory: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight against It, originally published in 1973, is a long history analysing women in Western societies from seventeenth century until the 1930s, through the prisms of class and gender, while Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (1974) dealt with feminist trajectories in revolutionary contexts such as Russia and China.16 It is only to be expected,

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one may argue, for a feminist activist to write a woman’s history almost as an attempt to study what other women had been doing in terms of action before her own time. Indeed, as a socialist feminist historian, Rowbotham is of key importance to the Women’s Liberation movement also because she attempted to touch upon women’s history along with workers’ history. We read accord­ ingly from Women, Resistance and Revolution: Despite the depth of their historical analysis, the range of their knowl­ edge, and the extent of the commotion their writing has helped to cre­ ate, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were still a couple of bourgeois men in the nineteenth century. They saw a particular world through particular eyes. This is not to suggest that if they had happened to be women they would have had the last word on women’s liberation, but that they were bound to see women’s situation through the eyes of men, and working-class women through the eyes of middle-class men. Inevi­ tably this affected how they saw and where they looked.17 Vera Broido, an émigré to Britain from a Russian Menshevik family and, most importantly in the context of our discussion, Norman Cohn’s first wife between 1941 and 2004, also wrote a book around that period that merits our attention. In 1977, she published Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II, which focuses on the role of women as leaders, organisers, and members of the revolutionary move­ ment in the 1860s and 1870s Tsarist Russia. Broido’s book, however, was not about Russian feminists: “To assign to revolutionary women the narrow par­ tisan role of feminists,” she explicitly argued in her book, “is to distort their position in the revolutionary movement and to diminish their contribution to Russian history.”18 Although it was not a book about feminists, it was seen from a feminist point of view similar to the one adopted by activists such as Mitchell or Rowbotham; Broido managed to illustrate the role of women in revolutionary movements in such a way that she brought gender as an analyti­ cal category of history into the picture. The social historian Gillian Scott writes accordingly in her review of one of Rowbotham’s later books, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (1997): Since the 1970s, she explains, women’s history, like labour history and black history, has been active in a “recasting of historical ‘knowledge.’ ” In “applying a gender lens” to the past, it has documented “everyday life and culture,” and raised new questions about the organization of work, the structure of the family, and attitudes towards sexuality. Its most general starting point is that “women’s lives matter” and should not be excluded from the historical record. But in seeking to redress that balance, the experience of women must be integrated: women, Rowbotham insists, do not exist apart “from life, from society and thus from history.”19

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Still, however, some Marxists had difficulty analysing history with anything other than the category of class. Indeed, Rowbotham described in her book Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century (2010) how, during that period, the women’s question and feminist cause were undermined not only by the conservatives or the liberals, but also by those fighting hard for a communist utopia of social equality. “Because Marxists gave priority to the workplace,” she argued, “other aspects of daily living tended to be regarded as, at best, of secondary significance; at worst as the preserve of capitalist mass consumption.”20 Marxism was not the only theory that people sought to combine with feminism in the 1970s. In 1974, in the midst of her participation in the Women’s Liberation movement, Juliet Mitchell focused on another topic, perhaps equally controversial, which is very relevant to the Columbus Cen­ tre’s research: psychoanalysis. Bringing together psychoanalysis and femi­ nism, especially after the influential publication of American feminist Betty Friedan’s polemical book The Feminine Mystique (1963), was a challenging task. However, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, in which Mitchell revisited and revaluated psychoanalysis through a feminist lens, came out of this effort and remains a classic in the field. Around the same time, in 1975 the film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote her seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Nar­ rative Cinema.” in which she theorised for the first time the much celebrated “male gaze” at women on screen.21 In 1979, during the time-span of the Columbus Centre, American histo­ rian Joan Kelly contributed to gender historiography from across the Atlantic with her article “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory.” Coming also from a Marxist perspective, Kelly opened a dialogue between patriarchy and the current socioeconomic system without imposing a causal relation between the two: women are subordinate in the private sphere of patriarchal society, she argued, whereas labour—of men as well as of women—is exploited in the public realm of social and economic relations.22 In 1985, a few years after the Columbus Centre’s project was terminated, the American social historian Joan Wallach Scott gave a lecture at a meet­ ing of the American Historical Association in New York entitled “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” In 1986, the lecture was turned into an article published in The American Historical Review, a traditional and prestigious journal of history that was also the official publication of the American Historical Association.23 Until then, argued Scott, historians used the word “gender” to denote “women”—besides, “Women History” or “Women Studies” foreran the now widely accepted prefix “gender.” “This use of ‘gender,’ ” suggested Scott, “is one facet of what might be called the quest of feminist scholarship for academic legitimacy in the 1980s.” Gender his­ tory was in fact women’s history, that is, women were the ontological object of gender history.24 Among others, this also made some scholars—usually males—regard, and therefore often discard, gender history as merely a wom­ an’s task to fill the gaps of their own separate histories; usually those of

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family, sexuality, reproduction, and domesticity, excluding high politics or warfare. Scott called for the abandonment of the fixed binary opposition between men and women, males and females, and consequently men’s or women’s separate histories. She suggested instead an analysis of history based on three categories or axes or possible ways to organise history based on the historian’s present knowledge:25 gender, class, and race. For Scott, the terms of sexual difference needed to be historicised and deconstructed. “We must become more self-conscious,” she wrote, “about distinguishing between our analytic vocabulary and the material we want to analyse.” In other words, a gendered approach to history is not one about women but one that employs the roles of women as women and of men as men as an interpretative tool to the historical events as such. Scott analysed history based on three categories or axes: gender, class, and race. These three ways of perceiving and analysing reality are, at the same time, both conceptual and empirical: they touch upon the observable outside world while they re-enact this reality in the historian’s own mind. So far as we know from current bibliography, gender, class, and race are three analytical categories which emerged from three separate alternative readings of history, aiming to tell the same story from the point of view of the oppressed: a femi­ nist, a historical materialist, and a post-colonial one, respectively.26 However, explaining reality often turns out to be far more complex than establishing binaries between men and women, bourgeoisie and proletariat, superior and subaltern races. Recent historiography suggests abandoning these binaries, yet using their defining components together as analytical tools. However, this is not to imply that analytical categories also mean fixed meanings, but, instead, that they were historically specific. “Like class,” wrote American historian Alice Kessler-Harris in response to the question “what is gender history now?” in a 2002 edited volume drawing on E.H. Carr’s 1961 seminal account on the philosophy of history, “gender is a process, changing over time and in relation to historical circumstance; like class it is ideational and normative, conditioning expectations of individual futures and views of the world.”27 The Columbus Centre protagonists worked against this background of ubiquitous sexism as well as of some feminist voices that resisted it. Taking a closer look at their own direct or indirect views will help us create a more integrated picture about the role of gender in their wider endeavours. David Astor and the representation of women’s rights in The Observer The fact that Cohn was probably the one who took the decision for the job advert does not necessarily mean that Astor did or would disagree with this choice. Indeed, the Columbus Centre archives provide no signs that Astor either openly opposed sexism or that he supported (or at least that he had any special interest in) feminism and the Women’s Liberation movement’s causes.

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A more careful investigation, however, into The Observer archives during Astor’s editorship from 1948 until 1975 reveals that there were plenty of articles discussing those issues. More specifically, early in Astor’s editorship, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, we can find articles subtly touch­ ing upon feminism written by the fashion editor Alison Settle, the theatre critic Ivor Brown, and the literary critics and writers John Wain and Harold Nicolson.28 Later on, in the 1960s, Katharine Whitehorn, a columnist at The Observer for 36 years (1960–1996) known for her humour and wit, often commented on women issues. In 1963, she wrote perhaps her most famous article in defence of women who, in a society that constantly expects them to be perfect, “wear dirty collars,” “change their stockings in a taxi,” “brush their hair with someone else’s nailbrush,” and leave “cups in the study.”29 Even more importantly, in the 1960s, The Observer hosted articles in favour of wider access to female contraception, the right to an abortion, and fam­ ily planning, which was one of the greatest demands of the British feminist movement at the time.30 Moreover, as mentioned earlier, The Observer published an article about the Women’s Liberation Movement protest at the Miss World contest. While describing both the actions of the Women’s Liberation movement and Hope’s and Hosten’s reaction, the reporter of the paper commented on neither of them. Faithful, however, to its longstanding anti-apartheid position, The Observer highlighted in the article that the first South African non-white contestant (who was sent as Miss Africa South along with the official white candidate of South Africa) placed second, spreading joy among the coloured community in Cape Town.31 While Astor appears to have elevated the antiapartheid struggle as one of his stated life and, thus, also editorial priorities, he seems to neither oppose nor passionately support the feminist struggle of the time. This combination of a feminist discussion with a discussion of race is not the only example of interdisciplinarity in the paper when it came to gender issues; in an article from 1967, there is an attempt to psychologise the drag trends that were popular at the time on the basis of gender roles: At a deeper level, it may be that the female-impersonator enacts the predicament of the defensive male. Historically speaking, cyclic periods of forceful, if not actually aggressive feminism reach a point where the male feels over-threatened. And the atom-bomb, like the long threat of war (not war itself), induces excessive pacifism and a logical fear of the aggressiveness of normal masculinity.32 What is intended by this overview of Observer articles on women, gender roles, and feminism is not to prove that the paper was militant in the feminist cause—which it was not—but to show that, at least, it was not totally blind to it. Hence, the decision of the Columbus Centre team to open a research fellow vacancy only for men while hiring a much less paid (female) research

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assistant to do the job was a consequence of what we would now see as ingrained sexism—a policy that followed their, and especially Cohn’s, casual assumption of norms that discriminated against women. Norman Cohn and women Cohn’s wife described her late husband as “old-fashioned” on the issue of women, in her attempt to explain why he did not discuss much with her. “There were,” she added, “a few friends and on the other hand there were the females.”33 The “females”: female research assistants, female secretaries, female friends, wives of the researchers, all these women who would often remain in the shadows and work underpaid, if not unpaid, so that men of a certain authority in the academic or institutional world, such as Norman Cohn and David Astor, would be in the spotlight. As far as female research assistants are concerned, Cohn’s wording towards Sherwood and Gosling, when the former did all the job and the latter merely advised, is characteris­ tic of this phenomenon of gender-blindness and discrimination: Sherwood is described as extraordinary devoted, encouraging and inspiring towards her colleagues and is praised for continuing to “work at writing up the results for some seven years after she has ceased to draw any salary” while Gosling is celebrated for “the combination of enthusiasm, technical skill and human understanding” he brought to the work.34 The quality of a woman renders at being devoted, loyal, and enduring hardships, such as not being paid for the job; in other words, a woman is good when she reproduces her traditional gender role of passivity. On the other hand, the quality of a man is illustrated by words pertinent to action and activeness: enthusiastic, skilful, but also understanding. The case is even worse when it comes to women who under­ took the administrative work of the Columbus Centre. Female secretaries like Gwyn Barker and Dorothy Salmon were instrumental in keeping the pro­ ject going due to their hard work, consistency, and organisational skills; they were also, perhaps unintentionally, responsible for preserving the Columbus Centre’s memory, grace of the organisation of its archive. However, these women are never mentioned or acknowledged by the Columbus Centre pro­ tagonists, at least not while they were still alive. One female administra­ tive secretary who died in 1970, while the project was still ongoing, is the exception: “the series,” wrote Cohn in the identical editorial forward of the Columbus series books, “owes a great deal to the devoted service of the late Miss Ursula Boehm, who was the administrative secretary to the Centre from its inception until her death in 1970.”35 A post-mortem acknowledgement of female labour is not exactly what women contributors to the research project deserve. The psychoanalyst Pearl King who, as aforementioned, also participated in the Columbus Centre as the “true Freudian” after Astor’s suggestion, pro­ vides another good example of Norman Cohn’s mild scorn towards women. King (1918–2015) was renowned as a clinician and an associate member of

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the British Psychoanalytical Association from 1951 onwards, an activist, a historian and editor of The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45 (1991), the honorary archivist of BPA (1984–1994), and the first president of the BPA not to have trained as a doctor.36 Nonetheless, at the interview he gave to Daniel Pick in 2006, Cohn repeatedly said that King “did not play a big part in the project,” that “she never wrote anything at all,” that she was not a person to rely on, that she made no contribution, that “she was at sea” and “didn’t know anything about politics,” and that the work she presented to the group was of poor quality.37 All these might be true. Even if they did not, they could be attributed to Cohn’s antipathy towards King because of personal taste or to a number of identities that King shared and Cohn most probably was at odds or felt uncomfortable with: she was a woman, a lesbian (in 2005 she entered into a civil partnership with her long-term companion Elizabeth [Tina] Carlile), a devoted psychoanalyst, a communist, and a Christian.38 It is difficult, and pointless, to say the least, to attempt to predict which of her identities met Cohn’s most serious objections, as he had openly expressed his contempt at least about psychoanalysis, communism, and Christianity. However, we can only speculate that it was not just that King did not write or contribute anything to the project. On that note, Cohn never expressed any doubt about Gosling, who was head of the Tavistock Clinic at the time and who also never wrote anything about the project. Gosling, however, was paid much more than the person who was hired to advise, that is Rae Sherwood. In the editorial forward to The Psychodynamics of Race (1980), Cohn praised Sherwood’s “determina­ tion and devotion” for carrying out the project and financing herself (for the most part); he only briefly referred to King’s “very substantial assistance.” None of these, however, can be compared to Cohn’s words about Gosling: “Throughout the extraordinarily difficult enterprise which has borne fruit in this book,” he wrote, Dr Gosling has given most generously of his time and energy, and has never failed to provide expert guidance, constructive criticism and moral support as and when they were needed. As general editor of the books sponsored by the Columbus Centre, I  am deeply indebted to him.39 That Gosling himself characterised his own work as “playing only a small part behind the scenes” in Sherwood’s “heroic effort” in combination with the apparent pay gap between the two supports the notion that there was some bias against the women who carried out the work in Cohn’s words. There was one woman whom Cohn seemed to deeply respect and whom he personally invited to participate in the Columbus Centre project, even though she was paid by the Social Science Research Council rather than the Columbus Trust. This was Christina Larner, a historian and sociologist with a strong interest in the history of religion in Scotland. In the beginning, Cohn

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intended to cope with the issue of witch-hunts on his own. By 1974, how­ ever, when he had realised that he could not manage this sort of research by himself admitting that he could not cope with it single-handed as “the subject was too vast for any one scholar,”40 he persuaded the person he thought the most suitable to join him, according to his account from 1980: I would look round for someone who would be willing and able to make a detailed study of the actual operation of witch-hunting in a sin­ gle area in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By 1970 my enquir­ ies had led me to a remarkable thesis on Scottish witchcraft beliefs, which in 1962 had brought its author the degree of Ph.D. at Edin­ burgh. By 1974 I had persuaded its author, Christina Larner, to resume research in this field.41 In the foreword to Larner’s Columbus Series book Enemies of God (1981), Cohn described how she met his expectations: This book makes a truly original contribution not simply to historical knowledge but to historical understanding. The vast territory which we call the great witch-hunt had long awaited an explorer who would be equally learned, and equally gifted, as historian and as sociologist. In Christina Larner it has found that explorer. Where hitherto our view has been blocked by a seemingly impenetrable mass of undergrowth, a path has been hacked out. A wide vista stands revealed. From now on it can surely never be lost to view.42 Cohn’s biases towards women is revealed in the fact that in order to appreci­ ate their contributions, Cohn demanded more from women than from men; they had, like Larner, to prove their value because they started from a lower point in his eyes. The fact remains, however, that, regardless of his attitude towards women in his every-day life, as a historian he did neglect women, or more precisely, gender, in his writing. As we have already shown, this is not to apply anach­ ronistically a later set of historical preoccupations. The question of gender in historiography was increasingly widely debated at the time of Cohn’s direc­ tion of the project. Moreover, he neglected this issue even while researching a historical period and a historical activity where gender as an analytical cat­ egory played such a crucial role: sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchhunts where mainly women, and especially older women, were targeted, persecuted, and, eventually, killed by the authorities. One can spot the irony of the discrimination against women in the project as well as the blindness to the gender question in Cohn’s work, while his role as director of the Colum­ bus Centre was to organise a collective study of discrimination against spe­ cific groups of people.

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Christina Larner, on the other hand, did the exact opposite. In her Colum­ bus Series book, one of the first accounts to touch upon the issue, she dis­ cussed the crucial relationship between witch-hunts and patriarchy. Before we go into more detail about the two accounts and analyse the role of gender in those two books and the Centre’s other works, it is necessary to contextu­ alise the absence of women in historical accounts, to briefly visit the relevant historiography, and to give particular note to the absence of women in the history of mass violence, and most especially, witch-hunts and, later on, the Holocaust. The Columbus Centre research: women and mass violence During the time that the Columbus Centre was running, we can find on the one hand evidence of actual working women rendered invisible or at least marginal in the universities and institutions while they fought, on the other, notable struggles for their rights. Likewise, we can find both the absence of women or rather, gender, as an analytical category in history writing of the time and the emergence of key texts and theories regarding women and feminism. Precisely because the Columbus Centre focused especially on discrimina­ tion and mass violence, it is crucial to focus on how women were or were not studied in the historiography of the subject. Despite the fact that the link between masculinity and femininity, on the one hand, and perpetrators and victims, on the other, had been stressed earlier by feminist writers, it is striking that only in the twenty-first century has gender been systematically employed as a methodological tool to approach discrimination and mass vio­ lence, in works such as Adam Jones’s essay “Gender and Genocide” in Dan Stone’s edited volume The Historiography of Genocide (2008), Valerie Oos­ terveld’s chapter “Gender-Based Crimes against Humanity” in Leila Nadya Sadat’s edited volume Forging a Convention for Crimes against Humanity (2011), and the volume Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A  Comparative Survey (2015) by Amy Randall.43 There are two notable instances of the discussion of gender and mass violence, and both of them are directly connected to the works of the Columbus Centre: first, the six­ teenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts as a gender-based process of mass violence, and, second, the Holocaust. The first one is represented in the works of Larner and Cohn, while the second, which also served as the pretext for the foundation of the Columbus Centre itself, is represented in the work of Dicks. Witch-hunting or woman-hunting? It is, for sure, entirely plausible for historians to study sixteenth- and seven­ teenth-century witch-hunts in the context of an analysis of mass violence. Classic studies such as the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s The Night

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Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen­ turies (1966) and Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1968) attempted to shed light on the reasons behind the tendency for mass violence in the early modern period. While Ginzburg focused on the revival of ancient beliefs about witches that led to their persecution in the peasantry, Trevor-Roper placed more emphasis on the social and cultural conditions triggered by a clash between the traditional religious approach of the Church and the emergence of the Enlightenment’s rationalistic doctrines.44 A  few years later, Alan Macfarlane’s Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (1970) and Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), both published while the Columbus Centre was running, stressed the economic dimension of the witch-hunt, and particularly the targeting and abolition of the practice of charity towards the poorest members of a community.45 Neither of these historians, however, seriously considered the question of gender, and the fact that the vast majority of the victims were women at a time when women virtually were scarcely, if ever, accused of any other crime. To the contrary, Trevor-Roper made a rather dismissive statement about women, assuming carelessly the very tropes of the past, that is the easy and rather misogynistic assumption that women are peculiarly hysterical that marked so much late Victorian medical discussion. In this sense, the text was symptomatic of that very blindness in so many male historians of the time, to their own potential sexism: “the Hammer­ ers of Witches,” he argued, “built up their systematic mythology of Satan’s kingdom and Satan’s accomplices out of the mental rubbish of peasant cre­ dulity and feminine hysteria.”46 The ubiquitousness of sexism and misogyny in modern Western societies of the time made historians blind to the fact that it can be no coincidence that the term “witch” bears negative connotation as well as gender characteristics. But not just historians. Christina Larner recounts a story of a protest against Margaret Thatcher’s policies where this issue was particularly relevant: When the organisers of a recent unemployment rally suggested “Ditch the Witch” as a banner slogan, it was left to a schoolgirl member of the local Labour Party to protest that this was sexist. They changed it to “Ditch the Bitch” and the schoolgirl gave up.47 Following the emergence of gender history in the late 1980s and 1990s, after Joan Scott’s seminal article in 1986, gender gradually became a more sig­ nificant factor in analyses of the witch-hunt, albeit, strikingly most of these new accounts were written by women. Notable examples include Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (1996) by Robin Briggs (who was one of the few male historians to address the issue), Caliban and the Witch (2004) by feminist Marxist historian Syl­ via Federizi’s who spots an intersection between class and gender by argu­ ing that women suffered more intensely than men the consequences of the

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emergence of early capitalism and that the witch-hunt was a form of modern social control against female financial independence, Lyndal Roper’s histori­ cal approach to the German witch-trials in Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (2004), the art historian Linda Hult’s The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (2005), or Heidi Breuer’s study in medieval and early modern literature Crafting the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England (2009).48 In 1995, the historian Elspeth Whitney provided her own explanation for the surpris­ ing gender-blindness to a historical condition so obviously gender-related: “Although the reasons for this resistance [to the impact of women’s history] are unclear,” she argued, it may be precisely because the witch hunts are so egregious an example of Western misogyny that many historians have repressed the impor­ tance of gender to understanding the hunts. In some ways the shadow of the hunts still lies over even its modem observers.49 Or as Christina Larner argued in Witchcraft and Religion (1984), “[i]f you are looking for a witch, you are looking for a woman, and it could be any woman.”50 Taking into consideration the discrimination against women that took place in the Columbus Centre, it seems very intriguing to examine the two Columbus Series books that dealt with the issue of witch-hunts, Cohn’s Europe’s Inner Demons (1975) and Larner’s Enemies of God (1981). Norman Cohn and Europe’s inner demons Probably driven by his previous book The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cohn had developed a special interest in medieval history and, specifically, in trac­ ing the historical roots of fanaticism and demonisation. In the book, he pub­ lished in the Columbus Series in 1975, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt, he focused on the history of demonisation of witchcraft and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-craze as a point of historical comparison with modern genocides. Cohn based Europe’s Inner Demons on the observation that the demonisation, and thus, dehuman­ isation of certain groups of people, in his case women who supposedly prac­ tised black magic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eventually led to their persecution and murder. Yet, in his attempt to compare different forms of persecution and violence on the basis of an inner dehumanisation process against a group of people, he failed to profoundly examine and seri­ ously take gender into consideration in his critical analysis. Cohn manages to detect that the targeted group consisted mainly of women only in the last chapter of Europe’s Inner Demons. Indeed, on page 248 of his book, does Cohn wonder “who was selected for the role of the witch?,” only to respond that “[t]he most striking fact is the preponderance of women,”

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without further elaborating on this “interesting fact.”51 He stresses that male witches did exist, especially what he called the “touring storm-raisers of the early Middle Ages, who so effectively terrorized the peasants,” but that later on “maleficium at the village level was almost a female monopoly.” Based on meticulous research in the extant sources, Cohn argues that “the witch was almost by definition a woman”52 but is historiographically blind to this “woman,” and by extension, gender as an analytical category to his material. Moreover, while Cohn refers to the special characteristics as well as the professions of women who were accused of practising maleficia, he fails again to examine them through the lens of gender. For example, he mentions that the accused were usually old, between the age of 50 and 70, and married or widowed women, “rather than spinsters.” He uses the currently deroga­ tory term “spinster” almost as if it were expected that an unmarried woman would be socially threatening and, perhaps blinded by his own biases, does not reflect on the role of gender in the targeting process. More specifically, Cohn does not question why social hatred was directed towards a woman beyond her reproductive age when she would no longer be of (social) use, not able to fulfil her alleged life purpose to bear children. Beside “old age,” Cohn reported that women might have had a personal peculiarity that drew down upon them suspicions of witchcraft: they might have been “solitary, eccentric, or bad tempered” or have “a sharp tongue” and be “quick to scold and threaten.” Moreover, women accused of male­ ficium might have been “frightening to look at—ugly, with red eyes or a squint, or pock-marked skin; or somehow deformed; or else simply bent and bowed with age.” These women were felt to be uncanny, commented Cohn, since people’s imagination was “capable of transforming old women, weighed down by their infirmities, into embodiments of malevolent power.”53 Although Cohn cared enough to chronicle the types of women who were more prone to be accused of witchcraft, he remained bling to gender as a cat­ egory in his analysis. In this case, Cohn took for granted characteristics of the accused women such as “old age,” “ugliness,” “deformations,” or “sharp tongue,” without questioning why these traits dehumanised or demonised the accused: that is, the connection with the social status quo, why, for instance, patriarchally embedded cultural habits and people’s perceptions at the time deemed ugly, old, or deformed men less threatening than ugly, old, or deformed women. Cohn also mentioned their profession as a possible reason for accusing someone of witchcraft: midwives and practitioners of folk medicine. Because of the high level of infant mortality at the time and the fact that infanticide, and indeed cannibalistic infanticide, was a crime that was considered “inhu­ man” and was usually attributed to a targeted demonised group of people (e.g. the early Christians for pagans, the Satan worshippers for Christians, etc.), those responsible for the delivery of the baby, that is, the village mid­ wives, were often accused of witchcraft. Similarly, the practitioners of folk medicine, “male and female alike,” were also accused of witchcraft without

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necessarily being charlatans because of the high death rates after their prac­ tice.54 While Cohn provides an interesting link between the accusation of witchcraft and the traditional demonisation of infanticide, he, yet again, fails to critically approach the overrepresentation of midwives and medical practitioners among the accused through the lens of gender. By practising midwifery and folk medicine, women acquired a powerful knowledge over the bodies of their community’s members; with the emergence of the mod­ ern state and the gradual constitution of modern science—medicine in this case—after what Foucault has called the “caesura that establishes the dis­ tance between reason and non-reason,”55 these female knowledge-carriers had to be expelled, and thus targeted and persecuted, so that the social con­ trol over the community’s bodies would be a monopoly of the reason holders: the state and the scientists. When conditions, such as age, appearance, and profession, did not apply, witchcraft, argued Cohn, was believed to be something running in the family, for example “the daughter of a woman who had been executed as a witch often found herself in a dangerous position.”56 Again, here, he discussed the “biological” or “hereditary” essence of maleficium in people’s minds without wondering why only the daughter and not the son of a witch would be in the dangerous position of also facing a witch trial. Instead of focusing on gender, Cohn placed himself in the middle of a pre­ existing debate by explaining the witch-hunt as a tendency to persecution and mass violence rooted in the ancient past, yet triggered by modern-day social conditions. By contrast, Christina Larner, who was characterised by Whitney as “one of the prime architects of the view that witch-hunting was intimately linked to the rise of the modern nation-state,” gave special atten­ tion both to gender and the modern state as a cause of the witch-hunt.57 Christina Larner and “woman-hunting” In comparison with Cohn and, perhaps influenced by her own experience as a young woman scholar in the 1960s and 1970s, Christina Larner paid much attention to the issue of gender in her Columbus Series book, Enemies of God. “Among scholars of the hunts,” argued Whitney, “Larner was the first to provide at least a partial theoretical framework drawn from the insights of women’s history to a consideration of gender.”58 Larner née Ross, born in London in 1933, had entered the field of witch­ craft history as a doctoral student when, in 1962, she completed her PhD thesis “Continental Influences on Scottish Demonology, 1560–1700” at the University of Edinburgh.59 After her graduation, she worked first as a parttime teaching assistant in the Department of History at Glasgow Univer­ sity and then as a Social Science Research Council Conversion Fellow in the Department of Politics and Sociology at the same university. Earlier dis­ cussed ubiquitous sexism in academia did not leave Larner unaffected; Ben­ edikt Bock suggests accordingly that “given the gender-discrimination still

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strong in Scottish academic life at that time . . . it was difficult for her to gain a permanent, full-time position in a Scottish university.”60 Ultimately, in 1972, Larner did find a permanent job as a lecturer in the newly formed Department of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. With research at the intersection of history and sociology, Larner proved a very promising social historian. She used this methodological approach to con­ duct systematic research about witchcraft. In 1977, for instance, she co­ authored the Source Book of Scottish Witchcraft, a comprehensive study of witch-trials.61 Later on, after Cohn’s invitation to the project, she wrote her Columbus Series book Enemies of God (1981). In it, she situated her analysis of Scottish witchcraft between 1563, when the state recognised it as a crime punishable by death, and 1736, when, after the 1707 Act of Union with Eng­ land, the British Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Act both in Scotland and in England, rendering witchcraft no longer a criminal offence. She developed her analysis along the three axes of class, ideology, and patriarchy. The question of class in Larner’s work was also important because it was one of the very few references to Marx and the methodology of social his­ tory in the context of the Columbus Centre. It was also important because it led her into two rather conflicting forms of argument. On the one hand, she suggested that it was anachronistic to seek to apply a class-based analy­ sis to a pre-capitalist society; on the other, she argued that the witch-hunt was “an activity fostered by the ruling class” and a “process whereby the politically powerful pursue a group of persons selected for their beliefs or supposed attributes rather than for anything they have done.” Indeed, she commented that although the use of the category of class might be inappro­ priate in that it fails to recognise the complex stratifications of the society in seventeenth-century Scotland, it nevertheless remains the most convenient term to describe the relationship between the powerful and the powerless. At the same time, the category of class succeeded in stressing the social, politi­ cal, and economic gap that divided the peasants, from whom 95% of witchsuspects were drawn, and other social ranks.62 Larner seemed tempted to argue that the concept of ideology was also useful, and that ideology might have determined the social practices that followed rather than the other way around. Or, at least, she argued that witchcraft is “an idea before it is a phenomenon.” And, consistent with the Columbus Centre members’ broader and psychoanalytically informed worldview, she suggested that witchcraft is the almost culturally non-specific idea of the “summation of evil” and the “capacity and intention to harm through non-natural means.” Indeed, she wrote that it is first and foremost the witch­ craft beliefs that were demonised rather that the witches’ activities, such as the cursing, the incantation, the manipulation of objects or their supposed secret meetings. “It is, however, possible to say definitely,” she concluded, “that a secret society of women was both believed in and feared during the period of the witch-hunt.”63 In other words, during the period of the witch-hunt, belief in witchcraft was not merely an ideology, but a dominant ideology, or as the

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Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would put it, it was the cultural hegemony of the period, that is the worldview of the ruling class, that was imposed on and, ultimately, embraced by the people.64 While Larner did not directly make use of Gramsci’s theory, she com­ bined, as a pioneering social historian, her understanding of class, namely the relation between the powerless (peasants) and the powerful (ruling class), and ideology, namely the witch-beliefs of the community, in order to give shape to a comprehensive and meaningful analysis of the Scottish witchhunt. “Ideas,” she argued, “are social products in that they are not handed down on tablets of stone from on high. They are developed by humans in a social context.”65 The third axis on which Larner situated her discussion of the Scottish witch-hunt is patriarchy. One may argue that Larner was more hesitant than later feminist historians to shed light to the cruciality of gender in the history of witch-hunt. This is because she argued that patriarchy is subordinate to the themes of class and ideology, with which it is organically intertwined. Whitney comments accordingly that Larner “pushed the analysis of gender as a factor in the hunts considerably further but also stopped short of making gender a central element in her analysis.”66 Given the time and the cultural and social context of her research and writing, however—a time that pay gap and gender discrimination in job adverts were institutionally acceptable in academia—the fact remains that, unlike her colleagues like Cohn, she did not stay blind to gender as an analytical category. Indeed, by examining gen­ der along with class, Larner demonstrated how it is possible to not neces­ sarily pick sides between labour history and women’s history, or as it has most recently been referred to, as between social history and cultural history. Rather, one could study both at the same time, as in the following example from Larner’s book67: The female witches in the seventeenth-century Scottish courts may be equivalent to the males accused of slaughter and murder. This is to assume what is sometimes forgotten in analyses which involve oppres­ sor and oppressed, that women are not more virtuous than dominant males any more than the poor are more virtuous than dominant land­ lords. They are merely less powerful.68 Larner takes a rather different, and perhaps more current theoretical orien­ tation than other Columbus writers by analysing the intersectional aspects of class and gender that constitute subjects oppressed on different yet inter­ twined axes. What Larner wanted to examine by focusing on patriarchy was, in her own words, “the extent to which witch-hunting is to some degree a synonym for woman-hunting.”69 Having said that, it should be noted that Larner was very careful to not exclude the almost 20% of male witches who were accused, nor to provide the idea of an overt sex war as a satisfactory explanation

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for the witch-hunt. For instance, she did point out that it was not a conflict between men and women per se, and that there were women accusing other women of witchcraft. She observed, however, that it is not biology but mostly power relations within society that determined which side one would be on: One line of argument is that, since women accused other women and were frequently chief witnesses in courts, there was nothing misogy­ nous about witch-hunting. Male judges were simply responding to pressures from below; pressures which came largely from women. This line of reasoning is based on a failure to recognize that a patriarchal social structure divides women. Dependent for their livelihood on the goodwill of men, most women will not only conform, but also attack women who by their nonconformity threaten the security of conformist women.70 Unlike Cohn, Larner was alert to the fact that since the overwhelming major­ ity of the accused were female, the factor of gender “should form a major part of any analysis.” Without making a specific reference to Cohn’s book, Larner noted that recent attempts to explain the phenomenon of women’s preponderance among the ranks of witches had been quite disappointing since “[t]he suggestion that the stereotype of the witch was always a woman seems tautological.”71 Or, as she noted elsewhere in her book, the stereo­ typical explanation, offered from Christian Europe to West Africa, that most witches were women because they are more evil, “more wanton, more weak, and more wicked than men” does not seem particularly helpful, as they do not deconstruct the stereotype, but, one may add, merely reproduce it.72 Larner’s initial research questions, established from the very outset, were entangled with the themes of class and ideology; she sought to know first, “whether there is a significance in the simultaneous rise of prosecutions for witchcraft (old women) and infanticide (young women)”; second, “whether there was any change in the socio-economic position of women in this period”; third, “why a female secret society should seem particularly threatening at this juncture”; and lastly, “to what extent the popularization of Christianity, a patriarchal form of religion, was a factor” in making women more prone to be characterised as witches, or as the title also suggests, enemies of God. Larner’s skill as a historian is evident first and foremost in the way in which she acknowledged her own agency in writing history. As Rowbotham had done earlier, so too Larner noted that women are beginning to emerge from the historical record, rather as the working class did a generation or so ago, in response to changes in levels of consciousness among historians and social scientists. They have not, however, emerged very far.73

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This can be attributed both to the agency of the historians, a largely maledominated profession at the time, and to the apparent lack of evidence about women, by comparison with men in the extant sources. In various archives, traditionally used by the historical profession, those pertaining to diplomatic, ecclesiastical, or political history, information about men was often easier to come by. This skewing of the primary data in ways that placed men in the limelight (combined with the way in which historians used to look at them), made the position of women often less visible, certainly less prominent in mainstream works of history. And one instance to highlight how historians could study the position and social role of women was, according to Larner, to focus on the fact that in many accounts, including archival material from Scotland, the first appearance of women in historical records as individuals occurs as witches, as criminals. Interestingly enough, this aspect of Larner’s analysis could be compared to the research focus of another Columbus series book, Albie Sachs’s discussion of the position of Black citizens in the legal system in Justice in South Africa. Larner argued that in medieval Scotland women did not exist in criminal law, just as Sachs had noted that during the British occupation of South Africa a frequent question of the time was whether Africans should be legally repre­ sented in courts. To acknowledge them legally might also go hand in glove with demands for their recognition not just as equal citizens, but as subjects and humans as well.74 “Their status” wrote Larner about women of the time, “was the same as children and convicted felons and they were not admitted as witnesses in courts of law.”75 Larner expanded on this in her later book Witchcraft and Religion (1984), writing: “Up to this period, women tended to be regarded in law as the responsibilities of their fathers or their husbands. In the sixteenth century, certain activities of women were made into crimes for the first time.”76 Indeed in 1591, a special act had to be passed so that women could testify in witch-trials. Civil law regarding the rights of women to own and inherit property remained more obscure. As for the gender-specific demographics that Larner recorded, witchcraft in Scotland, as well as elsewhere in Europe, was overwhelmingly a crime for which women were accused and punished. Indeed, according to histori­ cal archives, witchcraft was almost the only crime of which women were accused during that period in Scotland. The characteristics of the accused again were typical of those in rural Europe: they were poor, middle aged, or elderly women, very often widows or wives of tenant farmers near the bot­ tom of the social structure.77 Larner’s interpretation as to why witches came from this particular class also relate to gender and dominant ideology. She argued that there was a belief in the seventeenth century that women were attracted to witchcraft because they hoped to alleviate their poverty: “In situ­ ations of domestic stress and tension in which men resort to violence, women use witchcraft,” or as she put it rather poetically in Witchcraft and Religion (1984) “[w]here men used knives, women used words.”78

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Moreover, on the axis of ideology, Larner made an interesting observation. The Reformation of the Church of Scotland took place in 1560, only three years before witchcraft became a crime punishable by death. She argued that this was not a coincidence, since religion, as the dominant ideology of Scot­ tish society, for the first time demanded that women be “fully responsible for their own souls.” This can be also recognised as a great step forward for the position of women in cases where, for example, preachers referred to both men and women in their sermons for the first time. Still, she argued, religion remained patriarchal, perhaps even more patriarchal than before. “The ritual and moral inferiority of women” wrote Larner, “was preached along with their new personal responsibility.”79 It was only normal for the male-dominated status quo to be threatened and thus to forge the stereotype of the witch on the model not of the “child­ woman,” but of the “adult, independent woman.” Therefore, in this respect, the witch-hunt could be seen as a reactionary effort against the emergence of those women, a necessity to enforce moral and theological conformity.80 Indeed, Larner stressed her theory of the ideology of witchcraft even more by arguing that this kind of gendered persecution was a shared worldview of the ruling class, uniting people under a common goal during a turmoiled and transitional period when Christianity was transforming into a political ideology. It was, she argued in a rather Foucauldian manner towards the emergence of the modern capitalist state, “characteristic of new regimes in their search of legitimacy that they demanded a high level of social control and of conformity in behaviour as well as belief.”81 In this light, “[t]o punish witchcraft was a uniquely economical procedure for witchcraft was imagined as the summation of all possible forms of disorder and evil.”82 Especially because witches were persecuted as “enemies of God” and not common criminals during a critical time for the Church’s role in the emerging modern state, the witch-hunt in Scotland lasted as long as Christianity had any politi­ cal importance whatsoever. “In so far as the rise of secular ideologies is to be equated with the rise of rationalism,” she wrote, invoking our earlier discus­ sion in about modernity, “the identification of rationalism with the decline of witch-hunting is correct.”83 In an attempt to provide an alternative explanation which would take into consideration themes of both ideology and of gender, Larner argued that perhaps witch-hunting incited misogyny rather than that misogyny was incit­ ing witch-hunting. Insofar as the record on the social role of women at the time was so poor, women’s place in society could variety widely. Their status could have been so high that it threatened patriarchy or so low that women were peripheral property without necessarily provoking a witch-hunt.84 The gendered aspect of witch-hunting was even more pronounced in Eng­ land: of those accused of witchcraft in Scotland between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, around 82% were women; in England, by con­ trast, it was almost 93%.85 Since she was not content with the interpretations of why most, but by no means all, of the witches were women, she attempted

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to provide her own explanation of why witchcraft was not a gender-specific but a gender-related crime. Larner distinguished between the witchcraft stereotype and witch-hunting. She argued that the former is directly linked with gender: witches are women and, thus, all women are potential witches. The witch-hunting, however, although gender-related as the overwhelming majority of witches were women, is not, according to Larner, gender-specific: witches were not hunted because they were women but because of ideologi­ cal reasons against the “enemies of God.”86 In other words, witches were de facto considered to be women, but, writes Larner, there was a change in the social and ideological conditions not related to gender that triggered their persecution. Nonetheless, this witchcraft stereotype that predates the witchhunting is intriguing in itself as it bears a long tradition of gender discrimina­ tion. Larner comments accordingly: The stereotype rests on the twin pillars of the Aristotelean view of women as imperfectly human—a failure of the process of conception—and the Judaeo-Christian view of women as the source of sin and the Fall of Man. Since witchcraft involved a rejection of what are regarded as the noblest human attributes women were the first suspects. Women were intrinsically and innately more prone to malice, sensuality, and evil in general, and were less capable of reasoning than men were, but were nevertheless to be feared by men. There are a number of ingredients in this fear: through their life-bearing and menstruating capacities they are potential owners of strange and dangerous powers.87 In a great manifestation of the power of biopolitics, child bearing, and men­ struation (demonisation shifted throughout time from the menstrual blood as bodily fluid to the woman herself) were, according to Larner, two char­ acteristics that implied the “secret power” of women.88 “All women,” she noted a few years later in Witchcraft and Religion (1984), “threaten male hegemony with their exclusive power to give life” and social order depends on women conforming to male ideas, adopted by men and women alike, of female behaviour.89 In addition to menstruating women, menopausal women were also often suspected of being witches; they were accused of “jealousy thwarting the sexual activities of others.”90 It is those characteristics, among others, that made men afraid of women as “a source of disorder in patriar­ chal society.”91 Rather than identifying witch-hunting with women-hunting, Larner concluded, it would be more accurate to argue that witch-hunting was “the hunting of women who do not fulfil the male view of how women ought to conduct themselves.”92 Or, as she eloquently put it in Witchcraft and Religion, the stereotypical witch was an “independent adult woman who does not conform to the male idea of proper female behaviour,” because she is assertive, she “does not require or give love (though she may enchant),” she “does not nurture men or children,” she has no interest for the weak but has, instead, the power of words.93 Cohn, as the academic director of the

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Columbus Centre and editor of the book series, did not specifically respond to Larner’s analysis of witchcraft as a gender-related crime, but he did, as we have noted, show his great appreciation for her intellect and meticulousness, unlike virtually all the other female participants. Christina Larner was living proof that discrimination against women had changed, albeit perhaps only a little, during the previous four centuries. Holocaust historiography and gender The factor of gender has been largely neglected not only in the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunts but more broadly in the his­ tory of discrimination and mass violence. The Holocaust, which triggered the Columbus Centre’s research, is a notorious example of this negligence. In 1985, just a few years after the Columbus Centre had officially stopped functioning, Joan Ringelheim, current director of Oral History at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, stressed an issue, neglected until then in historiography: women and the Holocaust.94 Two years earlier, the first conference about women survivors—in which Ringelheim was largely involved—had taken place, while Holocaust scholar Sybil Milton had pub­ lished an essay on women’s experience of the Holocaust in an edited vol­ ume.95 In her well-known, pioneering article, Ringelheim stated that there was until then no feminist scholarship on women and the Holocaust. The fact that feminist historians finally stressed the issue of gender with regard to the Holocaust in the 1980s must itself be historicised. In addition to the proliferation of gender-sensitive accounts produced specifically as a result of second-wave feminism, a transformation in Holocaust historiography itself further created conditions favourable to the emergence of a gendered approach in the field. In the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of Oral History, a discipline that resorts to oral testimonies of those who could not or would not leave written sources behind, revolutionised historiography as it gave voice to those traditionally and structurally excluded from or, at least, over­ looked in historical discourse: the workers, the immigrants, the colonised, the ethnic minorities, the queers, the women, the traumatised survivors.96 In the case of Holocaust historiography, the historian of Germany Jane Caplan has stressed that only when the individuality of the camp experience was studied in more detail was it possible for gender to enter fully into historical discourse. Until then, Caplan argued, organisational histories of the camps addressed the unspoken norm of male political prisoners.97 Ringelheim’s research explored the experiences of Jewish women survivors of Auschwitz from a cultural feminist perspective.98 Although Ringelheim’s theoretical approach is somewhat uncritical, what is especially important in her work is that her research questions focus on two aspects of the gender role of the survivors: the special vulnerability of women with regard to their sexuality and maternity and women’s capacity in enduring physical and psy­ chical trauma. She concluded by calling for a reconsideration of the role

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of gender in Holocaust historiography. Gradually, other historians, mostly women, picked up the threads from these 1980s researchers and elaborated on the matter in the 1990s and 2000s. Holocaust scholars such as Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, for instance, explored different experiences of women during the Nazi persecutions and camp imprisonment and produced a signifi­ cant corpus of literature.99 There were, nonetheless, some objections to a gendered historical approach to the Holocaust that usually came from men and had to be refuted by women. And although this discussion may appear to stray a long way from the Columbus projects, it is important to map these later developments in the gendered history of the Holocaust because it will prove useful in order to understand both Christina Larner’s effort to write the history of witchhunt as a manifestation of mass violence and in Cohn’s opinion “the closest parallel to the Holocaust,” and Henry Dicks’s attempt to approach gender and Nazism that we will examine later. The social historian of the Third Reich Lisa Pine summarised the main points of critique towards a gendered approach to Holocaust history. One point was made by Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer who argued that gender difference seemed irrelevant within the broader context of “equal­ ity” between men’s and women’s destinies under the Third Reich. A second one was the fear, articulated by the journalist Gabriel Schoenfeld, that the Holocaust might be incorporated in a broader feminist agenda. And, finally, a point often made in general about the Holocaust was that studying it like any other—gender-specific—issue bears the risk of trivialisation of the events and minimisation of the Nazi horrors and atrocities.100 These critiques can be addressed within the specific context of a gendered historiography of the Holocaust as well as in a more inclusive framework where gender has been used as a tool of historical understanding. An analysis of the latter will enable us to move towards the former. Lawrence Langer’s objection to a gendered approach to the Holocaust echoes the supplementary reading of gender history that Joan Scott referred to: the Third Reich and the Nazis’ murderous policies are part of a “serious” history in which women’s experience seems only a side story, irrelevant to the depiction of the atrocities. However, as Ringelheim suggested, a gendered approach to the Holocaust is not necessarily opposed to gender neutrality. Such an approach should not exclusively focus on the gender charged issues, such as sexual violence against female prisoners, or the experience of men­ struation, pregnancy, and going to labour inside the camps—which are, how­ ever, no less important to draw the full historical picture of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, employing gender as an analytical category goes far beyond these topics as it could assist the historian to illustrate an integrated his­ tory of the Holocaust. In fact, Jane Caplan elaborated Gisela Bock’s thesis, according to which, in the case of the concentration camps, race set the lim­ its within which gender became a meaningful category and argued for an “ultimate priority of racial difference.”101 Thus, the work of gender becomes,

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according to Alice Kessler-Harris, “to fragment the idea of ‘women’ into its multiple and sometimes contesting parts” so as to open “the possibility for creating a larger explanatory palette.”102 And, to respond to Lawrence Langer, a depiction of the Nazi atrocities would be neither full nor valid if gender roles, framed by and intersected with the category of race, were rejected as irrelevant. In the specific case of the gendered history of the Holocaust, writing wom­ en’s history as a “supplementary” to the “serious” Holocaust history “misses the point about the entanglement of gender and power.”103 For Foucault, gender is an axis of power inextricably linked to sense of identity and our subjection to others. As a society, Nazi Germany was embedded in a system of difference and identity, be it racial, ethnic, or gender hierarchies; thus, it cannot be studied without gender as one of its analytical categories.104 If we accept that power is spread throughout the social body, gender plays a cru­ cial role in a long catalogue of social relations: between the hypermasculine SS guard and the emasculated male prisoner, among male inmates, among female inmates, between heterosexual male and homosexual male prison­ ers (lesbian relationships were usually invisible in these contexts), between female prisoners who were forced to work in the camp brothels and male prisoners who were not, between female guards and female inmates, between male guards and female inmates, between pregnant inmates and their fel­ low prisoners, between survivors who had sexual relations in the camps and those willing to listen to their stories in the post-Holocaust period, etc. Now, in the specific case of the feminist historians, these “useful categories” would prevent the work from being a refusal or attempted reversion of the hierar­ chical male-female relationship. Instead, gender would serve as an analytical tool, alongside class and race. Hence, the second point of critique, that a gendered approach to the Holocaust risks an exploitation of the events for the purposes of a feminist agenda—an implicitly misogynistic view that femi­ nism is something to be avoided—, is also addressed here. Following Scott’s conceptual framework as well as the theory of intersectionality, a gendered history of the Holocaust serves a feminist agenda only in so far as it also serves a historical materialist or a post-colonialist one. The third objection to a gendered history of the Holocaust was that of minimising the uniqueness of the events by trivialising them through a gen­ dered approach applicable to any issue. Employing gender as an analytical category to the study of the Holocaust is not, in my view, a trivialisation of the events. Speaking, for instance, about menstruation (or cessation of it) with regard to the sense of time in the camps or about sister network­ ing but without reducing “gender intimacy as female and political solidarity as male survival strategies,” about differences in assimilation between the sexes, which usually made men more vulnerable during the period of perse­ cutions, or about sexual intercourse as a means of trade in the camps, do not seem trivial.105 To the contrary, recognising what the victims acknowledged as their gendered identities and presenting women’s stories alongside those

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of homosexuals and men generally can only do justice to the sufferers of this unprecedented genocide. It was earlier demonstrated that writing a gendered history of the Holo­ caust is not identical to writing the history of women in the Holocaust as a supplementary to “serious history.” However, speaking about gendered specific experiences of women and the Holocaust allowed for the experi­ ences of other gendered groups such as male homosexuals and lesbians to enter historical visibility alongside heteronormative men. Scott points out how often male scholars discredited gender history as “supplementary” to serious historical accounts. Especially in the case of the Holocaust, Caplan picked up the thread from Scott and pointed out that “the unmarked male escapes gender altogether—meaning that ‘gender’ is not treated as a univer­ sally meaningful analytic category which might help us to understand the sit­ uation of all inmates, male as well as female.”106 For example, the American sociologist Janet Jacobs, who conducted an ethnographic study of memorial culture of Jewish women in the Holocaust, admitted her own research agency and biases: Through the lens of my camera, the men’s work shoes became the back­ drop against which the silk high heels and peasant women’s boots were framed. Even the numerous and tragic children’s shoes were relegated to a place of secondary importance in the photographic compositions that I recorded for analysis. Both at the Holocaust site and then later at home, with the photographs strewn across my desk, I experienced a “crisis” of observation in which I not only questioned my betrayal of Jewish men and children but my responsibility for a research project that, by its very nature, could contribute to the dissemination of images of women’s subjugation and degradation that were already so pervasive in Holocaust memorial culture.107 Except her sense of betrayal of the victims as well as of a gendered method­ ology, Jacobs became aware of another danger that Holocaust scholars of women often come across: women’s overrepresentation in atrocity images at camp sites (e.g. Auschwitz). Occasions such as experimentation on women’s body re-enacted the recurring representation of both Jewish men and women and women in general as weak, passive, and victimised.108 In order to resolve this problem, Jacobs decided to apply a deconstructed gender approach to her research and expand her scope to include representations of Jewish masculinity.109 We should be reminded that writing a gendered history of the Holocaust is not solely about women nor solely about victims and camp inmates. It can also include the study of the family in the pre-war period, both the Jewish and the German one.110 Ultimately, it also addresses a gendered study of the per­ petrators: female warders are not the only aspect of the Nazi killing machine that can be examined from a gendered historiographical perspective; such an

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inquiry could also include an examination of masculinity and sexuality in the history books of the Third Reich.111 In light of the development of feminist critiques of Holocaust historiography, Henry Dicks’s own scholarship must also be re-examined. Gender and Dicks’s licensed mass murder “It is a commonplace that until recently ‘gender’ has been marginalized as an aspect of the history of the concentration camps,” wrote Jane Caplan in 2010.112 Does this imply that there was complete silence about gender and the Holocaust before the 1980s? I argue that just as there was no complete silence with regard to the Holocaust in the early post-war period, there was also no complete silence also about gender and the Holocaust. Primo Levi, an iconic Holocaust figure, for example, introduced his 1947 autobiographi­ cal account of his experience in the camps with the famous poem “If this is a man,” which, also, however, refers to women with “her eyes empty and her womb cold.” Primo Levi represented the women’s experience in the camps in parallel with his depiction of men. However, while noting such earlier, occasional references to women’s experience in the camps, I  by no means imply that gender was adequately explored and employed as an analytical tool in early Holocaust historiography or cultural representations. I rather seek to under­ line the extant—if unsophisticated—study of gender in early post-war histo­ riography, in order to challenge too simplistic a dichotomy between earlier gender-blind historiography, and post-1980s alertness to gender politics. Among the work to require consideration then, against this background is Dicks’s Licensed Mass Murder. His references to gendered roles are brief, fragmentary, and occasionally somewhat naïve, yet still significant for the time they were written. He discussed women victims, especially with regard to sexual violence, and also German wives and mothers before moving on to an intriguing analysis of the perpetrators’ masculinity and sexuality. In his analysis of KW, a former senior Gestapo sergeant interviewed by Dicks in the Westphalian prison of Werl in 1967, Dicks reported that “[r]umour, related in court as such, had it that KW raped young Jewish girls and then shot them,” while witnesses described him as a “power-drunk, trig­ ger-happy sybarite.”113 In this case, Dicks’s focus was mainly on the murder­ ous aspect of KW’s personality and its possible link to sexuality. Besides, while elsewhere he did call KW a “rapist-murderer,” in the very next sentence he observed how “sleeping with girls” was in his mind associated with mur­ der and that he would, in Dicks’s words, shoot his “mistresses” just to have fun with his fellow SS men. This rhetorical indecision suggests that Dicks was wavering between acknowledging the parameters of consent in sexual inter­ course, when the Jewish girls were illustrated as victims of rape, and denying it entirely when they were merely called “mistresses” with whom KW was “sleeping.” This view should be contextualised in the broader social and

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cultural contexts within which it was produced: it was only in 1976, that is four years after the book’s publication and at least a decade of feminist struggle, when the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act in the UK defined rape as an act of intercourse to which a woman does not consent even if force or intimidation is not employed by the rapist. Even when the sexual relations between Nazi officials and female inmates did not take the form of rape, gender as an axis of power was still something to take into account. During his interview with Captain A., Dicks briefly interrogated him about “how the SS men were waited on and ‘cherished’ in the quarters by beautiful young Jewish girls.” Captain A. responded that the SS had had a heavy night’s work and they “needed some recreation,” which Dicks merely regarded as a naïve comment about how the SS men chose to console themselves.114 In other words, “rape” is employed interchangeably and somewhat thoughtlessly with “sleeping with girls,” having an affair with a “mistress” or “being cherished.” A sexual act between inmates and guards, despite being strictly forbidden by Nazi law in the case of Jews, did not always include the use of physical force. However, beyond rape in the physi­ cal sense, there is also the concept of psychological rape or coercive sex, of which Dicks might have not been aware. As Caplan pointed out with regard to camp brothels, the question whether the girls were prostitutes before—and in Dicks’s case whether they gave their consent—may be answered by the mere fact that they were forced to be in the position of a camp inmate in the first place.115 Drawing on both KW and Captain A’s examples, Dicks appeared to not explicitly speak about sexual violence, rather than about sexuality and vio­ lence. This link between sexuality and violence in Dicks’s understanding is also illustrated in an example from another interviewee, Dr  MO, who described the euthanasia of a depressed country girl who was an inmate of the mental defective group at St Joseph’s home. The girl had an illegitimate child with a German soldier and was, thus, sent for “mercy killing” on moral grounds: despite the priest, nuns, and the community’s plea for mercy, for Dr MO she was “nothing but an immoral woman.” For Dicks, this behav­ iour revealed Dr MO’s “pharisaical condemnation . . . of the poor girl.” In this case, Dicks was able to detect hypocrisy as well as violence linked to immoral sexual performance (pre-marital sex), yet he was not so alert to the vulnerability of a woman who, under unknown circumstances, became a mother and was sent to her death, even though she was, as Dicks observed, a “simple but not defective country girl.”116 It is not surprising that Dicks, unlike Larner or other feminist writers of the period, employed neither gen­ der nor class as analytical categories in his writings. There are, however, some even more problematic references to the gen­ der roles of women victims in Dicks’s book. In the case of BS, a former SS Hauptscharführer interviewed in the Bavarian prison of Straubing in 1967, Dicks wrote that he was transferred to a Waffen SS unit where there was no possibility of excess drinking and smoking or “Auschwitz orgies with

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girl-inmates.”117 Furthermore, in the case of the somewhat emotionally unstable interviewee GM, a former sergeant who served as sickbay nurse and was imprisoned in Ziegenhain prison in Hesse, Dicks reported how intensely he had disliked his transfer to the female camp at Ravensbrück because he was “not a fool for women.” GM was repelled by the thousands of female inmates who, supposedly, “had had no sexual intercourse for years, and who ogled you and kept calling after you.”118 It is true that Dicks, coming from a psychoanalytic perspective, recognised GM’s “horror of ‘sexual’ women” (where sexual was put into quotes as if to denote the subjective factor in GM’s words) and “antifeminine attitudes.”119 However, he rather uncritically inter­ preted GM’s feelings at Ravensbrück camp as repulsion by “maltreatment—of women, as if this came too close to his own internal conflict.”120 Here, Dicks rushed to psychoanalyse the ex-SS sergeant and, hence, failed to historicise what “Auschwitz orgies” or inmates’ sexuality might have been. Perhaps, the more problematic, yet historiographically interesting, part of Dicks’s treatise stands at the heart of Licensed Mass Murder: the study of the perpetrators. While he had proposed to present a sociopsychological study of some SS killers, his sample consisted only of men. Dicks, coming from his psychoanalytical and semifunctional perspective, chose to focus only on the latent capacities of these ordinary men, as he wrote in his conclusion.121 One may argue that he wanted to remain close to a strict definition of the SS organisation, which did not include women among its ranks. However, we know that female guards, who were not members but were closely attached to the Waffen SS, what Caplan called an “exclusively male and supposedly élite organization,” participated in the killings.122 Alternatively, one may make the case that his former experience with German POWs, who were, by definition as soldiers, male, made him familiar with the process of conduct­ ing such interviews with male subjects; thus, this sort of familiarity may have marked his decision for a sample consisting exclusively of men in late 1960s. Nonetheless, in 1952, Dicks was invited to run a similar study with Soviet defectors; in this case he explicitly chose male subjects even though many women had also defected, often with their husbands but also individually as invited performers, athletes, or independent professionals.123 In Licensed Mass Murder, Dicks depicted German women—not necessarily Nazi themselves but usually pre-war or Nazi wives—as typically subordinate and relegated to the well-known sphere of “kids, kitchen, church.”124 As indicated above in the case of the depressed girl with the illegitimate child, German women were expected to have “female virtues,” of which chastity was extremely important.125 Dicks also referred to what Foucault would describe as power relations: Germany had a “widespread pattern of authoritarianism in state and home” and presented a “patriarchal-authoritarian” culture.126 However, the danger that lurks in discarding a gendered reading of the perpetrators is the same as discarding the gender of the victims: such an account fails to produce an integrated history of the events. A  reading without concern for gender presents a certain “victimization” of German women as wives

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alongside the indirect accusation that, as mothers, they gave birth and raised male killers.127 This needs to be contextualised and deconstructed to inscribe gender roles, both of women and of men, in a more critical way in public consciousness. In her historiographical account, Caplan discussed “this troubling rela­ tionship between power and masculinity, between absolute power and hypermasculinity—cultivated by the SS but visible too in the military” and visited the brief literature on the matter chronologically starting with George Mosse’s 1985 book Nationalism and Sexuality.128 Around the same time, in 1987, Klaus Theweleit also presented the Nazi men’s mentality against women as well their own masculinity through the lens of psychoanalysis and the study of the unconscious in Male Fantasies.129 What is indeed strikingly pioneering in Licensed Mass Murder is the fact that Dicks did approach this issue at all in the early 1970s. However, this happened through the lens of a psychoanalytically informed psychiatrist and of a man who, like most men of his time, had not yet crystallised gender as an analytical category. Dicks more than once refers to a “cult of manliness” that was developed among the ranks of the SS and the German army more broadly.130 Pick com­ mented with regard to pre-war accounts on National Socialism: A kind of hyper-masculinity, based on a cult of violence and contempt for weakness or even tenderness, was commonplace; meanwhile women (except in kitsch and unreal, idealized representations) were denigrated. A  marked propensity to sadism laced with pseudo-sentimentalism, it was sometimes said, characterized many men of the German far right; they had learned from their earliest years to distance themselves from genuine maternal goodness, kindness, and softness, and to identify with the cruel paternal aggressor. Yet deep down, it was argued, they were profoundly confused by their conflicting attachments and identifica­ tions, and driven, more and more, to insist on their hyper-masculine identities in order to retain their equilibrium.131 And indeed this cult of manliness was represented by Dicks as a reaction or a consequence of a fragile self-image. More specifically, Dicks wrote that “the contradiction between a submissive relation to a dreaded father figure and being a ‘ruthless hero’ can be resolved by romanticizing group potency and might.”132 Men of the SS or the army idealised the male bonds and sense of fraternity among them to survive the conflict of contradicting power rela­ tions: that between the subjugating child and the cold-blooded self-sacrificing warrior.133 Strikingly, in another book funded by the Columbus Centre, Nevitt San­ ford’s edited volume Sanctions for Evil (1971), a connection can be drawn between the fragile masculinities of the Nazi and the Allied (or even Jewish) soldiers. In one essay of the collection, Neil Smelser discussed the legitimisa­ tion of “evil” in the cultural myth of American masculinity in the 1960s, and

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especially folk heroes such as Superman or Batman. “Here,” argued Smelser, “is the one-man vigilante, who, by sheer dint of his hypermasculine qualities, his cleverness, and, above all, his moral superiority, brings the evil forces at least to justice and perhaps to their destruction.” This figure usually stands along a fragile and helpless representative of the law, such as a police com­ missioner, who is on the sidelines.134 On that note, it is worth mentioning that almost all early superhero stories were created by second-generation Jewish immigrants in the United States; Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Batman by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, and Spiderman, The Hulk, the Fantastic Four, X-men and several more were created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.135 A brief literature review reveals that superheroes have been seen as expressions of their creators’ experiences such as the Jewish angst regard­ ing the Holocaust, the widespread antisemitism in the United States, and the disenfranchisement of the immigrants. Indeed, the Golden Age of Comic Books, in which the genre of superhero fiction emerged, ranges from late 1930s (Superman was coined in 1938) until late 1940s, while beating Hitler and Nazism via supernatural and hypermasculine powers was a recurring theme in the comic books, with Captain America designed to fight the Axis powers in 1941 as the most obvious example.136 Back to Dicks’s narrative, this fragile self-image of the male (Nazi) warrior was, often and rather problematically but not unusually for the time, described with “feminine” epithets. We learn that a “femininely handsome courteous” young Luftwaffe fighter-pilot, whom Dicks interviewed in 1943, joined the air force to fulfil a double purpose: his father’s will and the “beauty of educating and moulding young men for their great destiny.”137 Dicks also presented GM as embodying a contradiction between a “body configuration .  .  . showing ‘feminism’—i.e. an untypical fat distribution and pubic hair for a male” and the “ ‘manly facing’ of the charges” during the trial as dictated by the “gen­ eral SS indoctrination of courageous ‘standing foursquare’ by one’s deeds as the worthy stance of the élite brotherhood.”138 In fact, Dicks attributed the development of this “cult of manliness” to Himmler’s own fragile self-image, and especially his physical inadequacies and religious inhibitions. Himmler was, argued Dicks, “a myopic, narrow-chested fellow with a weak digestion,” whose Catholic home made him guard “his pre-marital chastity.”139 This “cult of manliness,” however, was used somewhat uncritically and also often interchangeably with “homosexuality” in Dicks’s book.140 In his description of methodology, Dicks presented a table with the personality var­ iables of German PoWs, where “homosexuality,” by which he explicitly said that he meant “cult of manliness,” is one of those variables.141 This choice can be regarded as extremely problematic if it is not contextualised in Dicks’s nar­ rative as well as his broader cultural framework. Dicks, wearing his psycho­ analytic hat, explained that the SS organisation was a product of its own time: an extremely authoritative male bonding military fraternity which managed to compromise childlike submission to the undisputed master that a father in pre-war Germany was with pitiless sacrificing heroism. “This stress-prone,

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abnormally father-longing and father-hating cohort,” he argued, “could not deal with the new situation of 1930 precipitating loss of worth and security except by the regression to crude and childlike expressions of their social homosexuality—that universal link between fathers and sons.”142 ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ “Gender” argued Alice Kessler-Harris, “is both informed by and enriches every branch of the historical enterprise, providing the kind of synthetic framework we have recently lacked.”143 Sheila Rowbotham argued a similar point in her book Women, Resistance and Revolution, originally published in 1974, that “there is no “beginning” of feminism in the sense that there is no beginning to defiance in women. But, she argued, “there is a beginning of feminist possibility—even before it is conceived as such. Female resistance has taken several historical shapes.”144 In this sense, women have historically expressed feminist causes that responded to the social and cultural frame­ works in which they lived, and people, usually men, have been reacting by, among other things, disregarding or resisting these causes.145 Norman Cohn, as the academic director of the Columbus Centre, was one of those men. He was, in this sense, blind, so to speak, both to discrimination against women, manifested in the pay rates or social roles or opportunities within the Colum­ bus Centre project, and to gender as an analytical category of his historical research, the latter of which was especially pronounced in his dismissal of the gendered politics of underlying his historical analysis of witch-hunting. In its sexism and blindness to gender, the Columbus Centre was not unique among British institutions in the 1960s and 1970s, where pervasive sexism similarly existed in the civil service, journalism, academia, law, and media. Indeed, Christina Larner’s account of the Scottish witch-hunt, which was very much appreciated by Cohn, is a good indication that a basic analysis on the axis of gender was possible under the auspices of the Columbus Centre, which would, however, conclude with the hesitant thesis that witch-hunting was not a synonym of woman-hunting. We cannot help but draw out the irony that this gender-blindness emerged in a research centre where the theme of dis­ crimination, persecution, and mass violence was a central issue in the histori­ cal work they were doing, and the psychological theories they were exploring. Notes 1 Richard Browning, “Historic Inflation Calculator: How the Value of Money Has Changed since 1900,” This Is Money, accessed July 6, 2022, www.thisismoney. co.uk/money/bills/article-1633409/Historic-inflation-calculator-value-money­ changed-1900.html#comments. 2 “University Appointments: The University of Sussex Columbus Centre (for Research in Collective Psychopathology) (a) Research Fellow and (b) Research Assistant,” The Times, April 16, 1970; Cohn, “A Brief History of the Columbus Centre and Its Research Project.”

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3 Black Amy and Stephen Brooke, “The Labour Party, Women, and the Problem

of Gender, 1951–1966,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 4 (1997): 419–52.

4 “University Appointments: University of Bath School of Management,” The

Times, December 6, 1971. 5 Sheila Cohen, “The 1968–1974 Labour Upsurge in Britain and America: A Crit­ ical History, and a Look at What Might Have Been,” Labor History 49, no. 4 (2008): 395–416. 6 See, for example, Brian Morton-Smith, “Big Pay Rise for Petticoat Strik­ ers,” Daily Mirror, July 2, 1968; “So Who’s for Equal Pay?,” Sunday Mirror, August 31, 1969; “Women Strike Demand National in Equal Pay Fight,” Daily Mirror, March 19, 1970. 7 Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn.

8 Karydaki, Interview with Marina Voikhanskaya.

9 Lynne Segal, “Bibliography Request,” November 30, 2015.

10 Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life and Politics (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007), 62. 11 Gaby Wood, “The Bottom Line,” The Observer, April 15, 2001. 12 Andrew Whitehead, Sally Alexander: Miss World: My protest at 1970 beauty pag­ eant (Witness), BBC, March 5, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26437815. 13 Christopher Walker, “Miss World Was Not Amused,” The Observer, Novem­ ber 22, 1970. 14 Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” New Left Review 40 (1966): 11–37. 15 “Sheila Rowbotham,” British Library: Sisterhood and After, accessed Janu­ ary 18, 2016, http://www.bl.uk/people/sheila-rowbotham. 16 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (London: Pluto Press, 1977); and Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (London and New York: Verso, 2014). 17 Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution, 44. 18 Vera Broido, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II (London: Viking press, 1977), vi. 19 Gillian Scott, “A  Gender Lens to the Century, Review of Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States,” Radical Philosophy 90 (August 1998): 42–44; Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States (London and New York: Viking, 1997). 20 Sheila Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twen­ tieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 239. 21 For a useful introduction to second wave feminism, see Judith Evans, Feminist Theory Today: An Introduction to Second-Wave Feminism (London: SAGE, 1995); and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassess­ ment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Books, 2000); and Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 22 Joan Kelly, “The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory: A Postscript to the ‘Women and Power’ Conference,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 1: Women and Power: Dimen­ sions of Women’s Historical Experience (Spring 1979): 216–27. 23 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The Ameri­ can Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75. 24 The term gender was coined by sexologist John Money in 1955 in order to differentiate between biological sex and gender as a social role, that is, learnt behaviour. Drawing also on the existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s famous opening line of the first chapter of Second Sex that “One is not born,

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but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other,” gender as a concept was further elaborated on by second wave feminists in the 1970s. A famous debate about patriarchy includes the exchange of articles between Sheila Rowbotham and Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander. Michel Foucault’s theory of the network of power also applied to gender, as did the emergence of the field of gender studies, which heavily relied on the Lacanian and Derridean tradition in the works of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and oth­ ers in France, and, above all, in the United States, Judith Butler. Butler’s notion of gender performativity contributed to the establishment of the term gender as a widely accepted signifier for traits that are assigned to femininity and masculin­ ity, at least in the academic world. See John Money, “Hermaphroditism, Gender and Precocity in Hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic Findings,” Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 96, no. 6 (1955): 253; Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Judith Thurman (New York and Toronto: Vin­ tage, 2011), 21; Sheila Rowbotham, “The Trouble with ‘Patriarchy,’ ” in Peo­ ple’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander, “In Defence of ‘Patri­ archy,’ ” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); Foucault, “The Subject and Power”; Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93; Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Mel­ ancholia (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 25 In her critique, Scott partly aligns with the historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood’s epistemology, albeit her approach remains much less idealist than Collingwood’s. In An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) Collingwood suggested that metaphysics would rather be the study of principles and analytical categories of a certain query than an investigation of the ontology of the query per se. Collingwood extended this thought in the philosophy of history in the posthumously published book The Idea of History (1946). Rejecting any sense of historical objectivity, he wrote that history is a regulating science of mind and its object is not something outside the mind but, to the contrary, an activity of thought “which can be known only in so far as the knowing mind re-enacts it and knows itself as so doing.” Subsequently, Collingwood gives an apt example of histo­ rians, perhaps able to engage only with “enlightened” time periods: “Certain historians, sometimes whole generations of historians, find in certain periods of history nothing intelligible, and call them dark ages; but such phrases tell us nothing about those ages themselves, though they tell us a great deal about the persons who use them, namely that they are unable to re-think the thoughts which were fundamental to their life.” R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History: Revised Edition with Lectures 1926–1928 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 218. For Collingwood’s earlier texts, see R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940); and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). 26 For Marx’s theory of history and introduction to historical materialism, see Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Part One; with Selections from Parts Two and Three, Together with Marx’s “Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy”

192

27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45 46 47

If you are looking for a witch, you are looking for a woman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970). For two groundbreaking accounts in the post-colonial studies, see Said, Orientalism; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illi­ nois Press, 1988). Alice Kessler-Harris, “What Is Gender History Now?,” in What Is History Now?, ed. David Cannadine (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 102. Alison Settle, “Proud Man,” The Observer, March  7, 1948; Alison Settle, “Germany: The Women’s Place,” The Observer, July  11, 1948; Alison Settle, “A  Woman’s Viewpoint,” The Observer, September  20, 1953; Ivor Brown, “Duck and Sundries,” The Observer, November 14, 1948, sec. At the theatre; Ivor Brown, “Rebels and Roses,” The Observer, May 29, 1949, sec. At the thea­ tre; John Wain, “Feminist Novels,” The Observer, December 9, 1956; Harold Nicolson, “Sex and Sociology,” The Observer, December 21, 1958. Katharine Whitehorn, “Sisters under the Coat,” The Observer, December 29, 1963. Joan Malleson, “Family Planning To-Day,” The Observer, April 1, 1956; Dilys Rowe, “Plain Words on Family Planning,” The Observer, October 27, 1963; Paul Ferris, “Contraception: An Observer Inquiry,” The Observer, June 12, 1966. Walker, “Miss World Was Not Amused.” “This Drag Business,” The Observer, October 15, 1967. Karydaki, Interview with Marina Voikhanskaya. Cohn, “A Brief History of the Columbus Centre and Its Research Project,” 13. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, x. Ken Robinson, “Pearl King Obituary,” The Guardian, February 5, 2015. Pick, Interview with Norman Cohn. Robinson, “Pearl King Obituary.” Rae Sherwood and Norman Cohn, “Editorial Forward,” in The Psychodynam­ ics of Race: Vicious and Benign Spirals (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). Cohn, “A Brief History of the Columbus Centre and Its Research Project,” 4. Cohn, “A Brief History of the Columbus Centre and Its Research Project.” Christina Larner and Norman Cohn, “Foreword,” in Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), ix. Adam Jones, “Gender and Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 228–52; Valerie Oos­ terveld, “Gender-Based Crimes Against Humanity,” in Forging a Convention for Crimes against Humanity, ed. Leila Nadya Sadat (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 78–101; Amy E. Randall, ed., Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft  & Agrarian Cults in the Six­ teenth  & Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); and Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harper & Row, 1968). Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Harper & Row, 1970); and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scriber, 1971). Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen­ turies, 116. Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 84.

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48 Robin Briggs, Witches & Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of Euro­ pean Witchcraft (London: Fontana, 1996); Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2004); Linda C. Hults, The Witch as Muse: Art, Gender, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Heidi Breuer, Craft­ ing the Witch: Gendering Magic in Medieval and Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2009). 49 Elspeth Whitney, “The Witch ‘She’/The Historian ‘He’: Gender and the Histo­ riography of the European Witch-Hunts,” Journal of Women’s History 7, no. 3 (1995): 77–101. 50 Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 85. 51 Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 248. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 249. 54 Ibid., 249, xi–xii. 55 Foucault, History of Madness, xxviii. 56 Ibid., 248. 57 Whitney, “The Witch ‘She’/The Historian ‘He.’ ” 58 Ibid. 59 Benedikt Bock, “Christina Jessy Larner Reader in Psychology, University of Glasgow 1933 to 1983,” The Gifford Lectures, accessed April 17, 2016, www. giffordlectures.org/lecturers/christina-jessy-larner. 60 Ibid. 61 Christina Larner, Christopher Hyde Lee, and Hugh V. McLachlan, A SourceBook of Scottish Witchcraft (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1977). 62 Larner, Enemies of God, 1–2. 63 Ibid., 2–3. 64 See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 65 Larner, Enemies of God, 202. 66 Whitney, “The Witch ‘She’/The Historian ‘He.’ ” 67 For a recent debate on the issue, see Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005). 68 Larner, Enemies of God, 96. 69 Larner, Enemies of God, 3. 70 Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 86. 71 Larner, Enemies of God, 4. 72 Ibid., 10. 73 Ibid., 51. 74 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 201. 75 Larner, Enemies of God, 51–52. 76 Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 86. 77 Larner, Enemies of God, 89. 78 Ibid., 96; Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 86. 79 Larner, Enemies of God, 101. 80 Ibid., 102. 81 Larner, Enemies of God, 195. 82 Larner, 195. 83 Ibid., 195. 84 Ibid., 197. 85 Larner, Enemies of God, 89–91.

194 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97 98

99

100

101

If you are looking for a witch, you are looking for a woman Larner, Enemies of God, 92–3.

Ibid.

Ibid., 93.

Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 84–5.

Larner, Enemies of God, 131.

Ibid., 93.

Ibid., 100.

Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, 84.

Joan Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research,”

Signs 10, no. 4, Communities of Women (Summer 1985): 741–61. See Esther Katz and Joan Ringelheim, Proceedings of the Conference: Women Surviving the Holocaust (New York: Institute for Research in History, 1983); and Sybil Milton, “Women and the Holocaust: The Case of German and German-Jewish Women,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, eds. R. Bridenthal, A. Grossmann, and M. Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). For a detailed discussion on this function of Oral History, see Alessandro Por­ telli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991); and Vervenioti Tasoula, The Civilians of the Greek Civil War: Memory Dynamics [in Greek] (Athens: Koukkida, 2021). Jane Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” in Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories, eds. Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachs­ mann (New York: Routledge, 2010), 82. Ringelheim self-describes cultural feminism as “a tactic for battling the antiwoman line in a sexist world” as well as a “detour around it without violent revolution; without confronting the state, family, marriage, or organized religion; and with­ out eliminating institutions intent on keeping women in their place.” Basically, “cultural” is a substitute for a “political” and perhaps even politicized feminism; see Ringelheim, “Women and the Holocaust: A Reconsideration of Research.” See Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman, eds., Women in the Holocaust (Bing­ hamton and New York: Vail-Ballou Press, 1998). J. Ringelheim, “The Holo­ caust: Taking Women into Account,” The Jewish Quarterly, no. 147 (1992), 21.9. The secondary literature is too large to list here, but some of the most significant books include: Carol Rittner and John K. Roth, eds., Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust (New York: Paragon House, 1993); Judith Tydor Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London: Mitchell Val­ lentine, 1998); Elizabeth Roberts Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003); and Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004). In addition, a useful section on the relationship between race, gender, and genocide can be found in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds., The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 147–88. Lisa Pine, “Gender and the Family,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 370–71. For the origi­ nal pieces, see Lawrence Langer, “Gendered Suffering? Women in Holocaust Testimonies,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitz­ man (Binghamton and New York: Vail-Ballou Press, 1998) and Gabriel Schoen­ feld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary 105, no. 6 (1998): 42–46. Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” 100. For Bock’s original text, see Gisela Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany. Perpetrators, Victims,

If you are looking for a witch, you are looking for a woman

102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

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Followers and Bystanders,” in Women in the Holocaust, eds. Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (Binghamton and New York: Vail-Ballou Press, 1998). Kessler-Harris, “What Is Gender History Now?,” 98–99. Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” 84. Ibid., 84–85. Ibid., 85–86. Lisa Pine, “Gender and the Holocaust Victims: A  Reappraisal,” Journal of Jewish Identities 2, no. 1 (July  2008): 121–41. Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” 94. Pine, “Gender and the Holocaust Victims: A Reappraisal.” Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” 84. Janet Jacobs, Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, Genocide and Collective Memory (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 16. Ibid., 16–18, 21. Ibid., 22. See Pine, “Gender and the Family.” Lisa Pine, “Gender and the Holocaust Vic­ tims: A Reappraisal,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, eds. R. Bridenthal and M. Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). See Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps.” Cate Haste, Nazi Women (Basingstoke and Oxford: Channel 4 Books, 2003). Bock, “Ordinary Women in Nazi Germany.” Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” 82. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 191. Ibid., 121. Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” 93. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 146, 157. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 171, 176; See also Theweleit’s analysis of the misogyny in the Freikorps ranks, Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); and Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 176. Ibid., 231. Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps.” Dicks, “Observations on Contemporary Russian Behaviour;” Vladislav Kras­ nov, Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List (Hoover Institution Stanford Uni­ versity, 1986), 134–135. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 35. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 35, 253. For example, see the case of KW in Ibid., 189–203. Caplan, “Gender and the Concentration Camps,” 86, 102 fn20. Theweleit, Male Fantasies I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History; Theweleit, Male Fantasies II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. See Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 35, 37–38, 49, 70, 138. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 72. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 38. For an interesting account on the matter of fraternity and aggression, see Juliet Mitchell, Siblings (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). Neil Smelser, “Chapter II: Some Determinants of Destructive Behavior,” in Sanc­ tions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness, eds. Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1971), 20.

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135 Nirit Anderman, “Supermensches: Comic Books’ Secret Jewish History,” Haaretz, January 24, 2016. 136 See Sharon Packer, Superheroes and Superegos: Analyzing the Minds Behind the Masks (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Publishin Group, 2010); and Ander­ man, “Supermensches: Comic Books’ Secret Jewish History.” 137 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 37. 138 Ibid., 165. 139 Ibid., 49. 140 Homosexuality was decriminalised in Britain only under the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 and was listed in DSM, the official diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders of the APA (American Psychiatric Association), until 1974. Considering that, according to Foucauldian theory, sources of power, such as legal and medical institutions, amongst others, produce discourses, Dicks was more or less under a power that makes individuals subjects. Especially in the case of homosexuality, the following could be suggested: (a) as we saw, pastoral power, formerly exerted by the Christian Church, was gradually attached to the emergence of the modern state (see Foucault, “The Subject and Power.”); (b) the study of biopolitics reveals that the human body is subjected to the power of the state and that “the subjects of right on which political sovereignty is exer­ cised appear as a population” that the state must manage, with the right of life and death over them (see Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 22.); (c) male homosexuality gradually developed from a sin to a criminal act and from being regulated by the Church to being regulated under the state law (see R. Daven­ port-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Brit­ ain since the Renaissance (London: Fontana Press, 1991)). 141 Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder, 68–70. 142 Ibid., 46. 143 Kessler-Harris, “What Is Gender History Now?,” 96. 144 Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution, 10. 145 For example, in early twentieth-century Britain, suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst were advocating their right to vote, namely, their demand for political equality. Socialists of the time rejected this cause as being a bourgeois demand with no material roots; in 1912, Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg responded to her comrades by pointing out that “[t]he contemporary mass struggle for the political equality of women is only one expression and one part of the general liberation struggle of the proletariat, and therein lies its strength and its future.” Rosa Luxemburg, “Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle,” Marxists Internet Archive, 1912, www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1976/women/4-luxemburg. html.

Epilogue A numbing inner awareness

In a letter to her friend Mary McCarthy from 1954, Hannah Arendt casu­ ally revisits the history of modern philosophy to map a notion that is often taken for granted as merely a method, but to which she gives much credit: the process of thinking. We have already seen how, almost a decade later, she described Eichmann’s famous “banality of evil” as “word-and-thought­ defying,” locating the Nazi bureaucrat’s source of criminal activity to his “inability to think.” In this letter to McCarthy, Arendt argues that modernity is rooted in the distrust in the senses that the discoveries of natural sciences demonstrated, which was followed by the emergence of common sense as a “control-instance for the possible errors of the five other senses.”1 Yet, this “common sense” that assumes the existence of a common world, which does not exist, was replaced by a logical faculty we all have in common—as in the acceptance of the truth of the statement that “2 plus 2 equals 4.” This logi­ cal faculty is, however, incapable of helping us grasp anything other than a (wrong) assumption that we all are the same. It is, thus, in thinking, argues Arendt, and not in reason, that we can look for a way to understand the not-common world we not-same (wo)men inhabit. Arendt then moves on to recount how the original motives of doubt, in the sense of cognito, and thus thinking, in Descartes is “the real anxiety that not God but an evil spirit is behind the whole spectacle of Being,” as if the awareness of the existence of evil is what triggers the thinking process.2 Arendt’s own contribution to the theory of thinking regards the chief and “oldest fallacy of Western phi­ losophy” dating back to Socrates, that of believing that “Truth is a result which comes at the end of a thought-process.”3 Truth, according to Arendt, “is always the beginning of thought” and the “condition for the possibility of thinking,” whereas “thinking is always result-less.”4 Thinking, as Arendt further elaborated in her final and posthumously published treatise Life of the Mind (1978), is not guided by the pursuit of truth, but by the need to find meaning.5 It is this meaning, the meaning of evil, rather than some sort of truth, that the members of the Columbus Centre, a largely unknown British research institute for the study of discrimination, persecution, and mass violence in the 1960s and 1970s, sought to find through the thinking process. And it is DOI: 10.4324/9780429197314-6

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the Columbus Centre’s meaning that this book has attempted to map. It does so through “thinking” because of the conscious choice to not merely record its history but rather focus upon four historiographical prisms, four power relations in which the writings were produced, four thinking and analytical categories if you may, that were dominant in the Centre’s research: psychoa­ nalysis, class, race, and gender. Psychoanalysis has thoroughly been examined in Chapter  1 as a core methodological question of whether and how it can be employed in the study of history. It has been illustrated how the initial choice of the Columbus Centre members to use Freudian insights for an inquiry into mass violence and discrimination is no less interesting than it is controversial. Still, the clash between the two main Columbus Centre’s actors, later on, bears its own significance. Astor was deeply impressed by psychoanalysis, and that posi­ tive view was also clearly transmitted through The Observer. Astor’s faith in psychoanalysis was also evident in his funding of a Chair in psychoanalysis at UCL, and, most importantly, his psychoanalytically informed proposal for the Columbus Centre research itself. Cohn, by contrast, grew increasingly sceptical, if not dismissive, towards the value of the “talking cure” in applied historical research. Henry Dicks and Anthony Storr employed psychoanaly­ sis in their psychological work in the Centre, influenced by their Kleinian and Jungian backgrounds, respectively. Psychoanalysis enabled these researchers to allow for, if not legitimise, a certain pathologisation of perpetrators, an approach that could turn out to be highly problematic. The use of psychoa­ nalysis in history involves several methodological constraints, the greatest of which perhaps being, as Foucault would argue, that it is a power-knowledge aiming at building categories between normal and not normal. Still, I would agree at least with the aim of those early pioneering researchers to seek to draw upon the insights of psychoanalysis in exploring Nazism, genocide, and the cognate questions with which the Columbus Centre was concerned. Psy­ choanalysis, in short, can prove useful if employed undogmatically. The analysis in Chapter 2 of the role of modernity in the Columbus Cen­ tre’s accounts of Nazism, antisemitism, and the history of discrimination and mass violence illuminates the historiography of the time. In their Colum­ bus Series writings, both Léon Poliakov and Henry Dicks consider the mod­ ern nature of Nazi crimes, while Christina Larner discusses the role of the modern capitalist state in the Scottish witch-hunt by explicitly class, a histo­ riographical prism as well as a historical construct that can hardly be under­ stood outside the context of modernity. We have seen that the differences and similarities between the two Columbus Centre’s leading figures’ reasoning regarding Nazism and modernity are especially revealing. For while Astor did see modernity as playing an important role in the Second World War outcomes, Cohn insisted on placing the causes of modern-day fanaticism in ancient and primordial instincts. However, what both Astor and Cohn had in common was a certain— conscious or unconscious—reluctance to explicitly examine Nazism and

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the Holocaust through the prism of class, that is to say, a construction to categorise people based on their position in the production relations that emerged in the modern capitalist system. On the one hand, Astor, liberal in his political inclinations, while devoting all his life to fighting racial injustice he did not use class as a lens in his thinking and, most importantly, was not by inclination scholarly. On the other hand, Cohn, despite his undoubted fastidiousness, was openly opposing Marxism, both as a political standpoint and as a way of writing history, to the point that he regularly compared, or even at times equated, Nazism with Communism in his books. The context of Cold War plays a crucial role in determining which forms of criticism were to be voiced and which to be silenced. At the time of the Columbus Centre, a unified and, often, ideologically homogenous West was required to oppose the communist Eastern Block. The deeds of Germany—now represented by West Germany, as a European power and a US ally—were moved, in public dialogue, in a distant past: discourses that employed “totalitarianism,” with their tendency to equate Nazism with Communism, served much more obvi­ ously as a means to displace the evil qualities of the first form of rule to the other rather than an analytical tool for approaching the ideologies per se. By the time the Columbus Centre emerged, demonisation mechanisms had in a sense shifted from Hitler to Stalin. At the same time, the employment of the category of class in history, which was so important in a Marxist worldview, was overruled by those who rejected Communism, such as Astor and, espe­ cially, Cohn. Unlike class, the category of race, a social construct that classifies humans based on their ethnicity or biological ancestry, was to prove central in the thought and research of the Columbus Centre, as we have seen in Chap­ ter 3. And so too was the tendency to link the politics of race to a theory of “dehumanization” processes. Race becomes even more important in light of the historical context in which the Centre emerged: the process of decolonisa­ tion, the decline of the British Empire, and the struggles of national libera­ tion in Africa and elsewhere. As was apparent in The Observer, Astor was firmly against imperialism, and he supported struggles for independence and national self-determination. Nowhere was this more evident than in his open and persistent opposition to the South African apartheid, the most long-lasting twentieth-century discriminatory regime on grounds of race. Cohn did not openly discuss race in his work on witch-hunt, although he did briefly mention it in Warrant for Genocide. Instead, for example, of find­ ing a case study where race was an important factor in order to compare this with the Holocaust, he preferred to focus on the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury witch-hunt. However, as the overall academic director, he was also influential in shaping several Columbus Centre members’ subject choices, and here we do see analyses that gave central importance to the exploration of race. One of these choices was to accept the South African lawyer Albie Sachs as a PhD student of Cohn’s, and to publish his book about the justice system of a racially unjust society in the Columbus Series. Other instances

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of this attitude include the invitation of the South African social psycholo­ gist Rae Sherwood to conduct a fieldwork survey on race relations between three families living in Britain, the collaboration with the American psychol­ ogist Nevitt Sanford, who co-edited a volume of essays on race prejudices across the Atlantic, and the funding of Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon’s research on the diachronic discrimination, persecution, and mass killings of the Roma people. All these examples reveal the Columbus Centre’s unwaver­ ing conviction that a comparative approach to genocide, discrimination, and mass violence based on the category of race would do justice to the historical discipline. In Chapter  4, gender became the prism through which I  explored the function and works of the Columbus Centre. I considered several instances of discrimination against women with regard to pay rates, social roles, and opportunities within the Centre itself. Norman Cohn was openly prejudiced against women by seeking to hire a well-paid male researcher while a woman, Rae Sherwood would do all the job for a much lower salary; moreover, he was evidently blind to the analytical category of gender in his work, despite the fact that he focused on a particularly gender-related topic, that is, the persecution and mass killing of those accused of witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the other hand, Christina Larner analysed patriarchy as one of the power axes upon which the witch-hunt emerged and, thus, elevated gender to an important subject of her historical account, although she did not go that far to argue that witch-hunting was a syno­ nym for woman-hunting. Regarding the Nazi atrocities, Henry Dicks briefly discussed gender-related experiences of the male former SS officers that he interviewed for his book, yet without being particularly critical towards gen­ der as an analytical category. What is especially striking in the context of the Columbus Centre is that a research institute that sought to investigate prejudice-based violence remained largely blind to, if not actively supporting at times, gender discrimination. Our tendency, however, as trained historians, to create taxonomies to sys­ tematically approach research questions, build narratives, and draw conclu­ sions, is more often than not defeated on the ground of the research material. The selected historiographical prisms, thus, intersect, creating new ways to approach the history of the Columbus Centre. For instance, race intersects with gender in Sachs’s discussion of the prohibition of interracial sexual rela­ tionships in South Africa whereas gender intersects with class in Larner’s reading of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-hunt; the relation between women and men can be compared with the one between the poor and the rich landlords of the time as it is a relation between “the powerful and the powerless.” Moreover, class intersects with race in Léon Poliakov’s analysis of the history of antisemitism and the “Aryan myth” when he argues that the origins of the systematic discrimination against and persecution of the Jews in Europe lies not in traditional religious anti-Jewish feelings of the Christian Church but in the emergence of modern sciences and the capitalist system.

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The most obvious example of intersection of historiographical prisms, or a network of power relations if you may, is psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis runs through the discussions about modernity, race, and gender, lending its name also to the subtitle of this book. The methodological limitations of psychoanalysis notwithstanding, it does offer valuable insights in a study of mass violence, such as the one undertaken by the Columbus Centre members. The most crucial of these insights is the significance that psychoanalysis attributes to the inner aggressiveness of all humans that also facilitates the comparative approach to persecution and genocide evident in their work and more widely at the Centre. As we saw in Chapter 2, Astor, in his attempt to convince others that a scholarly under­ taking such as the one of the Columbus Centre was absolutely necessary in the post-war modern world, argued that a latent destructive potentiality can and has been found in German people, British people and, indeed, peo­ ple anywhere. In tracing the modern origins of Aryan mythology, Poliakov also referred to psychoanalysis, this time to argue that, despite its initial aim to look for a universality in the motives of human behaviour, key repre­ sentatives of psychoanalysis, and especially Freud and Jung, did (re)produce racial stereotypes between “Aryans” and “Semites.” On the other side of the modernity debate, Cohn saw the witch-hunt as well as the Holocaust as products of anciently rooted emotions but ended up rejecting psychoanalysis as a tool to explore such emotions. As we saw in Chapter 3, Rae Sherwood made the exact opposite choice from Cohn as she elevated psychoanalysis, and especially the Kleinian concept of the unconscious splitting between good and bad emotions, to a basic interpretive tool in her analysis of race rela­ tions in modern-day Britain. Psychoanalysis was also employed to approach race relations in the United States between Black and white Americans as well as between Americans and the Vietnamese in Sanford and Comstock’s edited volume. It was also in this work where a psychoanalytic understand­ ing of the dehumanisation process that allowed for racial discrimination and persecution—one of the main research aims of the Columbus Centre—became a focal point. Christina Larner, in Chapter 4, although not explicitly using psychoanalysis, interpreted witchcraft as people’s perception of evil and the inner destructive potentiality that was attributed to women because of their role in patriarchy. Gender also intersects with psychoanalysis in the case of Henry Dicks, who chooses to provide an explanation for the “cult of manli­ ness” of the former SS officers through Freudian theory. Through the study of all these histories, controversies, and intersections, this book attempts to contribute to post-war British historiography of Nazism and genocide, and studies of racial discrimination, prejudice, and what has sometimes simply been seen as “evil.” But it would not be complete if it did not include a discussion about the reasons, be it personal, institutional, or cultural, that led to the Columbus Centre’s apparent partial failure and prevented it from being more widely known as well as, notwithstanding that partial failure, the extent of its intellectual successes and legacies.

202 Epilogue Hardships, failures, and frustrations In 1980, Cohn retired from the University of Sussex and wrote a report on the history of the Columbus Centre that marked its formal closure. In my attempt to mark the closure of this first historical account of the Centre, a key question inevitably emerges. How and why has an initiative such as the Columbus Centre been so neglected in the work of mainstream historians since the early 1980s? Why, so often do even their bibliographies fail to register this varied and path-breaking set of initiatives? The answer to this question must be related to the fact that the Columbus Centre did not achieve by any conventional measure “great success.” It failed, in other words, to produce books that crossed over from a specialist readership to the widest possible academic community, still less to become required reading for the general educated public. As the relevant historiography reveals, the Colum­ bus Centre is not even widely known as a research centre for the study of the Holocaust, or as part of the British attempts to understand Nazism. The Columbus Centre never made it to a research institution of international rec­ ognition that promoted a certain school of thought, as did, for example, the Institute of Social Research, home of the Frankfurt School. This partial fail­ ure, or at least relative obscurity, can be explained in various ways, reflecting both personal considerations, and personalities, as well as external condi­ tions and practical issues, and, perhaps, crucially, methodological problems and ideological tendencies inherent within the project itself. The failure of the Columbus Centre to have a greater impact in histori­ cal or cultural studies derived in part from a latent clash between Cohn and Astor. To start with, the two men differed in their temperaments and capacity for historical scholarship. Indeed, Astor brought to the Columbus Centre a liberal mindset and some alertness to injustice and discrimination—especially on racial grounds—yet no real interest in systematic academic study. “Although he was far cleverer than most,” his authorised biographer Jeremy Lewis told me in an interview in 2014, “Astor wasn’t an intellectual, nor was he given to reading books. Like so many of the best publishers and editors I’ve come across, he was a marvellous listener, and picked up his information by talking to experts (many of them employed on The Observer).”6 On the other hand, Cohn’s focus on the longue durée, and his interest in the more mystical and millenarian, even apocalyptic, aspects of Nazism was based on meticulous historical research. Although he was not trained as a historian in the first place, he turned out to be particularly scrupulous when it came to the study of sources. It is only normal that this difference between the two approaches led also to the pursuit of different aims for the future of the Columbus Centre, and perhaps a certain amount of confusion about the nature of its public engagements. As for the content of the research, despite several differences between Astor and Cohn in other instances, such as their views on race or gender, nowhere is their clash more evident than in the employment of psychoanalysis for the

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explanation of discrimination and genocide. While Astor was unequivocally in favour of using Freudian insights in the Columbus Centre project, Cohn was initially sympathetic towards psychoanalysis, then gradually abandoned it, only to end up being extremely critical against it in the last years of his life. Hence, although we can dramatise these tensions as characterising dif­ ferences between the two leading figures, they were also tensions that were evident within the thought of both. These lines of tension also ran through all of the studies that were produced, albeit to varying degrees. In terms of practical difficulties, one needs to consider the lack of resources that Cohn himself reported. Beyond what Astor and Wolfson had originally offered, no more funds were raised for the continuation or the promotion of the project. Especially with regard to the latter, Cohn was also very suspi­ cious about advertising the Centre in the press. In the beginning, Astor tried to publicise the Centre in The Observer and arranged several press meetings for raising awareness over the project. Cohn, however, discouraged this effort and ultimately refused any further contact with the media, as he thought that it would discredit the academic process. On that note, it should be added perhaps that the Columbus Centre did not have a charismatic intellectual leader—with all the irony that this might entail given that the pathologies of charisma were one of the historical and psychosocial issues most obviously at stake. Still, Cohn was a scrupulous scholar but not an inspired project chief, whereas Astor was a great impresario with connections in the media and the political world but not an intellectual. Not only was a charismatic leader lacking, but almost all the Centre’s members worked in isolation from each other. Probably at Cohn’s instructions, the members chose to not actively participate in the university life of the newly established University of Sussex and to hold most meetings in London hotels. In general, no effort was made to build a community of scholars, activists, or students around the Centre, a community that could identify with the scopes of the project and promote it to a larger audience. The sense of community is also linked to the institutional framework of the Columbus Centre which might also have played a role in the project’s lim­ ited success. The newly established University of Sussex did provide a certain freedom to the Columbus Centre’s members and enhanced their intention to conduct interdisciplinary surveys. However, it did not enjoy at the time the prestige of other institutions that counted centuries, not decades in British academia, such as Oxford or Cambridge. One might speculate whether an institutional home at the University of London, rather than Sussex, would have rendered the work of the Centre more publicly visible in the legal world, the BBC, Fleet Street and so forth, but the key issue here was Cohn’s own mistrust of public “vulgarisation” of his findings. In a similar manner, the fact that neither of the two psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who pub­ lished their books in the Columbus Series, Dicks and Storr, belonged to the British Psychoanalytical Society, that is, the official and most prestigious cen­ tre of psychoanalysis in Britain, might have also affected the Centre’s success.

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Dicks had a professional base at the Tavistock Clinic for many years, but the Tavistock was never to be used as a platform for Cohn’s project either. Lack of resources and a charismatic leader or a community as well as other practical difficulties led to the decision not include in the Columbus Centre project some scholars who had been initially approached or invited and could have contributed to the effort. Among those are Zevedei Barbu, academic researcher in sociology and social psychology and author of the 1956 book Democracy and Dictatorship: Their Psychology and Patterns of Life; Ellic Howe, author of several books on occultism, such as the 1972 book Astrology and Psychological Warfare during World War II; Wolfgang Scheffler, German historian with a research experience in the study of the Third Reich and also a member of the German delegation at the Eichmann trial and expert witness at the Treblinka trials; Joan Wescott, an anthro­ pologist with psychoanalytical training, working at the Tavistock Institute; and Michael Chance, an academic researcher in ethology. Those approached during the preparations of the project included, among others, the anthro­ pologist and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Spillius and the founder of modern ethology and rather controversial scientist Konrad Lorenz.7 Approaching the latter seems quite paradoxical for a Centre that sought to study the Holo­ caust, given that Lorenz had joined the Nazi Party before the war—which he later regretted doing—and had supported, through his research, the policy of eugenics and racial hygiene.8 The reason behind this approach might be the wide ignorance of Lorenz’s Nazi past until the early 1970s. Equally important to the institutional framework are the cultural and social conditions in which the Columbus Centre was developed. The Cold War politics of the period, for instance, pose a question about how useful a research project about manifestations of inhumanity such as Nazism, the witch-hunt, or racial discriminations could prove in wider cultural life, when Communism, with which the Columbus Centre did not really deal in any substantive sense, was increasingly to be the focus of British media atten­ tion.9 Nor were they expressing any of the concerns of the New Left, for example, as most of its participants were either liberal or conservative in their views and they came from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. Moreo­ ver, anti-imperialism was a political stance represented more than often in The Observer, but the Centre, consisted of only white scholars, did not pick up the threads from it in order to formulate a systematic academic inquiry on relevant issues (except perhaps for Sachs’s book which was very specific in its law-related themes). Hence, they lost perhaps readers from a more radical audience in Britain and abroad who were interested in decolonisa­ tion or the anti-apartheid struggle. The ubiquitous sexism of British society of the time, finally, did not enable the male-dominant Columbus Centre to adopt an attitude of gender equality that could have made it more popular in feminist circles of the time. In a nutshell, the Columbus Centre seems to have been irrelevant to agencies of both hegemonic and revolutionary narra­ tives of the 1960s and 1970s Britain. They were exiles from their own land

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of ideas, because they failed to efficiently represent both those who expressed mainstream liberal or conservative views and those who sought for an intel­ lectual or actual revolution. Finally, the methodological path followed by the Columbus Centre, namely the use of psychoanalysis as an interpretative tool of history, pre­ sented certain methodological concerns in an age increasingly dominated by critiques of psy-sciences. Thinkers like Foucault, Popper or representa­ tives of the British anti-psychiatry movement were critiquing psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, “psychohistory,” as a genre of the discipline, promoted by some in the United States was fiercely attacked by prominent historians such as Geoffrey Elton who likened “the appeal of psychoanalysis, alongside Marx­ ism, to psychedelic drugs.”10 Instead of transforming the clash between Astor and Cohn on the issue of psychoanalysis into a chance to employ Freudian theory undogmatically, the Columbus Centre members chose to either use it as an unchallenged theory or reject it whatsoever. In addition, at a time when the field of social history was emerging, and thus class-based analyses were rife, class was notably not an important analytical category in the works of the Centre. Although some of the Centre’s members, such as Poliakov or Larner, did discuss class in their work, this central historiographical choice to exclude it—unlike for example what members of the renowned Frankfurt School did through critical theory—might have contributed to the partial failure of the project to be more widely known. Achievements and legacies There are several legitimate reasons for considering the Columbus Centre, at least on the global scale, as a partial intellectual and academic failure. Be that as it may, there are also enough counter arguments to present it, at least, as a partial success. This success is mostly evident in its legacies in diverse fields including, most crucially, its influence on subsequent comparative studies of persecution and genocide. To start with, several of its published books were well received and made a considerable academic impact in their own right. Dicks’s Licensed Mass Mur­ der, for example, although it did not sell in large numbers, is cited in influen­ tial accounts such as Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority (1974) and Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986).11 Moreover, it received very favourable reviews, one of which characterised it as an “excellent contribution to Holocaust studies,” while in an Observer review (admittedly a paper perhaps unlikely to have criticised this particular work, given its provenance in a project funded by Astor, the proprietor), the philosopher Stuart Hampshire described it as one that must become “a standard source and a standard authority.” In the same review, Hampshire also praised another Columbus Series book The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies by Kenrick and Puxon. “[It] is,” he argued, “an amazing book, a chronicle of murders of Gypsies, both systematic and casual, which

206 Epilogue are characteristic of every Christian century, and which reached a high point under the Nazis. At the end the reader is just numb, perhaps hoping that the research could be challenged; I cannot challenge it.”12 Indeed, Kenrick and Puxon’s account, one of the first histories of the Roma people, was translated into numerous languages including Puxon’s own translation into Romani so that Roma people could read it in their own language. The work has had a significant impact on scholars of Romani history such as Judith Okely as well as historians of Nazism who adopt a comparative approach to genocide such as Henry Friedlander.13 Sachs’s work in Justice in South Africa is cited in influential accounts such as Harold Wolpe’s Race, Class and the Apartheid State (1990) and Lauren Benton’s Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (2002).14 Moreover, Sachs stressed an indirect legacy of the Columbus Centre and its focus on the use of the psychoanalyti­ cal model in his own role in the TRC, a form of reparative justice. Finally, Christina Larner’s book Enemies of God was one of the first accounts to bring social and cultural history together by studying the Scottish witch-hunt through the lens of both class and gender, and has been cited in other influ­ ential accounts such as Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (2009) by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda or Brian Levack’s The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (1987).15 An impressive characteristic of the Columbus Centre is the insistence on interdisciplinary teamwork as well as on perspectives that transcend national biases, or exclusively national cases. This studied attempt at cosmopolitan­ ism, cross-disciplinarity, and comparative history was reflected in the com­ position of the research group and in its research questions. The Columbus Centre participants came from diverse professional backgrounds; clinicians, historians, activists, and social scientists met in order to study different forms of inhumanity. Furthermore, the importance of the multinationality of the research is reflected in the geographical spread of its contributors, such as the South African Sachs and Sherwood, Poliakov who was based in France, and Sanford who conducted research in the United States. The reason for which I have sometimes so meticulously reconstructed the biographical details of Sachs, Sherwood, Dicks, Puxon, and the others was not simply that it is interesting anecdotally in its own right to understand the provenance of the key authors of these Columbus publications, but that through this reconstruction of circumstances and networks, I tried to show the de facto existence of an intellectual project and exchange that spanned several countries (South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ger­ many). In an analogous way, the research questions were not exclusively British-oriented and were to be focused on various cultural, temporal, and geographical contexts. This provides some evidence for arguing that the Columbus Centre was part of a global set of intellectual developments in and after the 1960s and that it had consequences far beyond its immediate Brit­ ish milieu. At the same time, however, the project cannot but be considered a substantial part of the post-war British responses to Nazism as it managed to

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bring together some very British concerns such as the psychological profiles of their arch enemy in the last war. Ultimately, the Columbus Centre’s methodological choice to employ psy­ choanalysis for a comparative, intercultural, and interracial study of evil or, if you will, inhumanity, in the course of Western history offered, despite its numerous limitations, a way out of a historiographical deadlock. “The Columbus Centre, like psychohistory itself,” wrote Hampshire, received its impetus from the Nazis, from the sense of an intellectual void that this monstrosity in modern experience had left behind. Being a revolution of destruction, National Socialism could not be understood as previous revolutions had been, in terms of their presumed functions in human development; in fact, it could not be understood at all, except as revealing the bankruptcy of the social theories, and the systems of belief, by which historical experience had been interpreted so far. At least Freudian psychology was from its beginnings, in the imagination of its founder, a variant of classical pessimism, and therefore not obvi­ ously and disgustingly inapplicable.16 The category of class and the economic preconditions of genocide were largely overlooked in the Columbus Centre’s research. But had they not, would a hard-core Marxist explanation of the Holocaust as yet another tool of the ruling class to control the masses and preserve capitalism be adequate? Or, if the Columbus Centre took gender into more serious consideration, would an interpretation of Nazism based on a “cult of manliness” within patriarchy or an identification of witch-hunting to woman-hunting be sat­ isfactory? And, ultimately, considering that race played an important role in the Centre’s writings, are racial theory and fanatic antisemitism enough as motives to understand what happened in the Second World War or other cases of discrimination and genocide? Is there not always an excess of irra­ tional behaviour, destructiveness, and diachronic inhumanity that eludes all these otherwise constructive and useful historiographical metanarratives? Freudian theory has not unjustly been described as a problematic approach to history; it exerts the power of categorisation between normal and notnormal and looks for unconscious motivations behind political and social behaviours without being equipped to analyse these unconscious traces in the clinical environment in which it was born. Yet, as this book has sought to demonstrate, psychoanalysis combined with other forms of historical analy­ ses can help to put the so-called inhumanity of human beings back into the mainstream of the stories we tell about history. Afterword Here concludes a long endeavour to research, understand, and write about the Columbus Centre, and to locate it in a wider historiography of Nazism,

208

Epilogue

discrimination, mass violence, and genocide. During this time, I have learned a good deal. This book embodies my effort to pass this knowledge to my reader. At the same time, I  have realised my numerous limitations, so my hope in completing the present account is that it has opened a space for fur­ ther research in the future. Writing about “the meaning of evil,” even through the prism of other peo­ ple’s attempts to explore it, has not been an easy task. Astor himself placed great emphasis on the relation between personal attitudes towards introspec­ tion and the ability to accept a psychoanalytic or psychological inquiry into mass violence. “It seems more likely,” he argued in “The meaning of Eich­ mann” (1961), “that people’s difficulty in reacting [to the Nazi crimes] is con­ nected, as some psychologists have suggested, with a numbing inner awareness of the possibilities of violence that exist in mankind.”17 The subject of my book, concerning the atrocious possibilities of human behaviour—behaviour all too present in the twenty-first-century Western society I  inhabit as I  write—has been challenging. Current events such as the bloodshed war in Ukraine, the cold-blooded murder of Black Americans by police officers, the legitimisation of bigotry and sexual harassment through the election of a US president, the state-initiated inhumane treatment of refugees off the Mediterranean coasts, the rise and legitimisation of the far-right in mainstream politics, and the fas­ cist pogroms in Europe have often led me to this “numbing inner awareness of the possibilities of violence that exist in mankind.” But my enduring con­ viction is that this kind of research is not futile and that we do well not only to revisit the darkest chapters of the twentieth century but also the various significant past endeavours that have been undertaken, such as by the Colum­ bus Centre’s participants, to chart that dark history too. What kept me going can be summarised in a snapshot from the graphic novel Maus, an illustrated narrative of the Holocaust experience of the author Art Spiegelman’s father. Two mouse figures, the author and his psychoanalyst, sit in the armchairs of a consulting room, the one opposite to the other. The analyst—a Holocaust sur­ vivor himself—says that maybe it is better not to have any more stories since the victims who died can never tell their side of the story. “Uh-huh,” replies the author, “Samuel Beckett once said: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’ ” Then, there is a wordless image, depicting the author and his analyst looking at each other in silence. In the next panel, the author exclaims: “On the other hand, he SAID it.”18 Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Brightman, Between Friends, 23.

Brightman, 24.

Brightman, 24–25.

Brightman, 24–25.

Arendt, The Life of the Mind.

Danae Karydaki, Interview with Jeremy Lewis, 2014.

Astor Papers, Box 10 BH, Folder: Columbus Trust General 1963–4.

Epilogue

209

8 For a more detailed discussion about Lorenz’s involvement with Nazi ideology, see Theodora Kalikow, “Konrad Lorenz’s Ethological Theory: Explanation and Ideology, 1938–1943,” Journal of the History of Biology 16, no. 1 (1983). 9 Cohn’s earlier study in the Pursuit of the Millennium on the predecessors of com­ munist fanaticism was not part of the Centre’s project. 10 Pick, “Psychoanalysis, History and National Culture,” 212. 11 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (London: Harper & Row, 1974), 177; Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Kill­ ing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 419. 12 Richard Grunberger, “X-Ray of Killers,” Jewish Chronicle, November 3, 1972; Stuart Hampshire, “Roots of Barbarism,” The Observer, November 5, 1972. 13 Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 14 Harold Wolpe, Race, Class  & the Apartheid State (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990); and Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 15 Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (West Sussex: Wiley—Blackwell, 2009); and Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Harlow: Pearson, 1987). 16 Hampshire, “Roots of Barbarism.” 17 Astor, “The Meaning of Eichmann.” 18 Art Spiegelman, Maus (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 205.

Appendix

The Columbus Centre books Author

Title

Nevitt Sanford & Craig Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Comstock, eds. Social Destructiveness Henry Dicks Licensed Mass Murder: A Socio-Psychological Study of Some SS Killers Anthony Storr Human Destructiveness

Publication Data 1971

(The Wright Institute)

1972

(Columbus Centre Series)

1972

(Columbus Centre Series)

1972

(Columbus Centre Series)

1973

(Columbus Centre Series)

1974

(Columbus Centre Series)

*translated from French by

Edmund Howard 1975 (Columbus Centre Series)

Donald Kenrick & Grattan Puxon Albie Sachs

The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies Justice in South Africa

Léon Poliakov

The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe

Norman Cohn

Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt The Psychodynamics of Race: 1980

Vicious and Benign Spirals (Harvester Press)

Enemies of God: The Witch- 1981

Hunt in Scotland (Chatto & Windus)

Rae Sherwood Christina Larner

Bibliography

Unpublished material Archives

• David Astor Papers, private collection held by Boodle Hatfield, Solicitors in London. • The Columbus Centre, Box 10. • • • • • • • • • • • •

Project General 1958–62. Columbus Trust General 1963. Columbus Trust Working Party 1963–64. Project Sponsors 1962–64. Meetings on 24 February 1963. 6th 7th 8th 9th Meetings of the Working Party. Columbus Trust General 1964–65. Columbus Trust General 1966. Columbus Trust Management Committee 1966–69. Columbus Trust General ’67–68. Columbus Trust General ’69–77. Minutes of Columbus Trust Management Committee, Standing Committee & Trustees.

• Hilda and Rusty Bernstein Papers 1931–2011, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, (dig­ itised version, accessed March, 16 2016, at www.historicalpapers.wits. ac.za/?inventory/U/collections&c=A3299/R/9010.) • B9.2.18.1: Rae Sherwood correspondence. • Centre for Continuing Education Collection (1969–2007), University of Sussex Library. • SxMs57/5/5: Prof. Norman Cohn Lectures.

212

Bibliography

• Henry Dicks Collection, Wellcome Archives. • PP/HVD/F: Authoritarian psychology and collective psychopathology 1970–1976, Box 8. • Lectures, drafts and unpublished papers. • Licensed Mass Murder: Notes and correspondence. • PP/HVD/C: Soviet Russia 1952–1971, Box 5. • Ruth First Papers, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Senate House Library. • Anna Freud Papers (1880–1998), Freud Museum. • AF/03: Personal, professional and family correspondence (1913–1984). • Geoffrey Gorer Archives, University of Sussex Library. • SxMs52/4/1/1/4/26: Dicks, Henry 30 letters, pcs. 1955–1975. • Donald Kenrick Papers (1934–1996), Wiener Library. • GB 1556 WL 611: Material relating to the persecution of the Gypsies under the Nazis. • R.D. Laing Collection, University of Glasgow Library. • Charles Rycroft Collection, Wellcome Archives. • PP/RYC/B.97: Anthony Storr, Box 12. • Albert Louis  Sachs  Papers, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Senate House Library. • Legal cases & other papers, 1956–1968. • Anthony Sampson Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. • MS. Sampson dep. 186, fols. 1–176. • The Observer Digital Archive. • The Times Digital Archive. • UNESCO Documentary Database, (digitised version, accessed April, 11 2016 at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001581/158149eb.pdf.) Interviews • Karydaki, Danae. Interview with Grattan Puxon, 14 September 2015. • Karydaki, Danae. Interview with Irma Brenman Pick, London, 25 February 2016. • Karydaki, Danae. Interview with Jeremy Lewis, 28 May 2014. • Karydaki, Danae. Interview with Marina Voikhanskaya, 3 September 2014. • Pick, Daniel. Interview with Adrian Dicks “Roots of Extremism,” March 2014 (courtesy of Phil Tinline, executive producer at BBC Radio 4).

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Index

accountability activists: anti-apartheid 125, 127,

133–134; feminist 160–162;

human rights 11, 119, 141;

political 9, 133

Adorno, Theodor: The Authoritarian

Personality 10, 28, 80, 93, 137;

Dialectic of Enlightenment 77

African American Civil Rights

movement 138

African National Congress (ANC) 109,

119, 121, 125

African women 132–133 aggression 45–47, 139

Alexander, Sally 160

Ali, Tariq 31

Allies, the 60, 120

Althusser, Louis 27

Alvarez, Al 31

American: foreign policy 8; historians

28, 67, 94, 112, 114, 163–164

American Historical Association 27, 163

ANC see African National Congress Anderson, Perry 23

anti-apartheid activism 7, 10, 109,

119–123, 125–127, 133–135,

165, 204

anti-Semitism 3, 94, 114

anxiety 25, 27, 39–41, 58, 197

appeasement 7, 63, 66

Arendt, Hannah: banality of evil 46, 49,

69, 72, 91, 127, 197; Eichmann

in Jerusalem: a Report on the

Banality of Evil 6, 68; Life of

the Mind 197; The Origins of

Totalitarianism 68, 70, 115

Aristotle, Politics 62

Armenian genocide 9, 45, 111, 118, 148

Aronsfeld, C.C (Caesar Casper) 64–65,

75

Aryan mythology 3, 81, 83–86, 95,

200–201

Asiatic 131, 144, 146

Astor, David: 1962 speech 22, 32–33,

59, 67, 72, 75, 112–113, 118;

Dimensions of Psychoanalysis

30; Meaning of Eichmann, the

5–7, 10, 22, 49, 67, 71, 73, 208;

possibilities of violence 135–136;

project vision 138–139, 149;

psychoanalysis, fascination with

29–31, 198; women’s’ rights

159, 164–166

Astor, Lucy 29, 44

Astor, Nancy 5

Astor, Viscount Waldorf 5

asylums 13

atomic bomb 3, 57–59 atrocity 1, 5–6, 29, 47, 74; see also Nazi

atrocities

Attila the Hun 62–63 attitudes: mental 30; social 130

Auschwitz 2, 22, 36, 40, 43, 58, 68, 78,

99, 128, 145, 180, 185

Auschwitz orgies 185–186 authoritarianism 139, 186

Balint, Enid 30

Barbu, Zevedei 37, 204

Bard, Bernard, After Eichmann 58

Barzun, Jacques, Clio and the Doctors

28

Bauer, Yehuda 146

Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust 96–99

Beckett, Samuel 208

234

Index

Bellah, Robert, Evil and the American Ethos 139–140 Beloff, Max 7–8, 75

Beloff, Nora 8

Benjamin, Walter, Theses on the

Philosophy of History 76–77, 79

Bernstein, Lionel “Rusty,” Memory Against Forgetting: Memoirs from a Life in South African Politics 133–134 Biesheuvel, Simon 134

biology 13, 132, 176

Bion, Wilfred 25

biopower 13–14, 92

Birley, Robert 7–8, 123

Black: Americans, violence against 129,

138–140, 208; people 110, 114,

123, 129, 131–132; see also

interracial sexual relations

black magic 88, 171

Blackburn, Robin 31

Blankenhorn, Herbert 38

Bock, Benedikt 173

Bock, Gisela 181

Boers 110, 129, 148

Bolshevism 65

Boodle Hatfield Solicitors 3

Borkenau, Franz 78

Bowlby, John 25, 30

Breuer, Heidi, Crafting the Witch:

Gendering Magic in Medieval

and Early Modern England 171

Briant, Michael 4

Briggs, Asa 8–9 Briggs, Robin 170

Britain, modern-day 136, 201

British: bystanders 84, 97; foreign policy

63; historians/historiography 21,

26, 64, 66, 79, 81, 100, 147,

201; liberation 2, 114, 120, 199;

occupation 123, 131, 177; policy

on concentration camps 148;

psychoanalyst 23–26, 30, 46;

universities 8–9, 22–23, 189

British anti-psychiatry movement 26,

205

British Psychoanalytical Association

(BPA) 167

British Psychoanalytical Institute 32

British Psychoanalytical Society 24–26,

135, 203

Broido, Vera 87, 162

Broszat, Martin 95–96, 146

Brown, Ivor 165 Brown, Norman, Life against Death:

The Psychoanalytical Meaning of

History 27

Buchheim, Hans Anatomie des SS-

Staates 41

Bullock, Alan, Hitler: A Study in

Tyranny 61–64, 66, 79

Butler, Rab 7

Cambridge University 9, 203

Carr, Edward Hallett 164

Carsten, Francis L. 21–22 Castoriadis, Cornilius 27

CDJC (Center of Contemporary Jewish

Documentation) 81

Centre for Research in Collective

Psychopathology 8

Césaire, Aimé 115–117 Cesarani, David 3

Chamberlain, Neville 63, 66

Chaplin, Charlie 64, 91

Charcot, Jean-Martin 85

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 30

child analysis 23–24 childhood 27, 34, 39, 44, 46–47, 139

children 5, 15, 24, 70, 109, 120, 134,

148, 172, 177, 183

Christian Church 13, 84–85, 98, 200

Christianity 13, 85, 89, 130, 167, 176,

178

Churchill, Winston 7, 31, 66

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 3, 65

Cockett, Richard 4, 7, 119

Cohn, Norman: Europe’s Inner

Demons 34–35, 88, 98, 171;

as old-fashioned 166; political

psychologists 81; Pursuit of the

Millennium, the 6–7, 32–33,

70–71, 75, 76–87, 100, 171;

Warrant for Genocide: The Myth

of the Jewish World-Conspiracy

and the Protocols of the Elders

of Zion 71, 87, 97, 199

Cold War 2, 8, 12, 27, 45, 58–59, 61,

64, 100, 111–112, 147, 199,

204

Collini, Stefan 26

colonialism 15, 96, 111, 115–119, 120,

133, 143

Columbia University 33, 137

Columbus Centre: British research hub 22; consequences of modernity

Index 58; psychoanalysis project 3, 28–29, 44, 48–49, 67, 81, 94, 118, 136, 149; research grant 80, 142; research institute 1, 48, 197, 200; women and mass violence 169–170 Columbus Trust 4, 7–8, 123, 141–142, 167 Communism 3, 12, 78, 86, 93, 112, 146–147, 199, 204 Communist Russia 93 comparative research 112, 139, 141, 148 Comstock, Craig 139–140, 201 concentration camps 2, 44–46, 58, 66, 86, 122, 144, 148, 181, 184 Controversial Discussions 24–25 Cooper, David 26 Crichton-Miller, Hugh 26 cross-disciplinarity learning 9, 75, 206 Cuban War of Independence 148 cultural: conditioning 124, 135, 170, 172, 175, 180, 185, 201–202; history 2, 26, 175, 206; myths 90, 93, 187 Darwinism 13, 98, 148 Dawidowicz, Lucy 94–95, 114 decolonisation 5, 110, 114, 199 Dee, Harry 57–59 dehumanisation 3, 74, 88–89, 97, 115, 129, 143, 149, 171, 201 Deleuze, Gilles 27 Demause, Lloyd 27–28, 43 demonisation 4, 69, 74, 81, 87–89, 171, 173, 179, 199 depressive position 39–40, 42, 44 Derrida, Jacques 99 destiny 61, 128, 143, 188 Détente (relaxation of strained relations) 3 DeVos, George 112, 138–139, 149 Dicks, Henry 4, 10–11, 21–22, 25, 27, 35, 47, 60, 80–81, 89, 93, 100, 111, 159, 181, 184, 198, 200–201; early life 35–36; inner child theory 39–40; Licensed Mass Murder: A SocioPsychological Study of Some SS Killers 37–38, 43, 80, 89, 111, 137, 184, 186–187; maternalism 41; Nazi paradigm 38; omnipotence characteristics 42–43

235

discrimination: gender 173, 175, 179, 200; history of 141, 143, 198; patterns of 111, 143; racial 10, 15, 110, 121, 123, 201, 204 Dorpalen, Andreas 67

Douglas-Home, Alec 7

Draper, Gerald 123, 128

Dublin Corporation 142

Dugard, John 128

Eaglestone, Robert 99

Eichmann trial 2, 5, 67–69, 71, 82–83,

204 empathy, attitude of 16, 75 Encounter magazine 3, 5–7, 64–65, 74–75 England 78, 84, 100, 135, 142, 174, 178 Enigma code 6 Enlightenment 13, 59, 69, 76–77, 81, 86, 96, 98–100, 127 enslavement 60, 140 Equal Pay Act 159–161 equal rights 160–161 Erikson, Erik, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History 27–28, 30, 138 Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt 88, 171 evil: banality of 46, 49, 69, 72, 91, 127, 197; forces 47, 69, 140; genius 61, 63; meaning 3, 11, 48, 197 exploitation 14–15, 61, 137, 149, 161, 182 extermination 2–3, 38, 60, 65, 70–72, 87, 97, 112–114, 148; see also mass murder fanaticism 6, 32, 39, 75, 86–87, 122, 171, 198 Fanon, Franz 116–117 fascism 21, 76–77, 99–100, 112 Fascism: A Reader’s Guide 21 Federizi, Sylvia 170 Feingold, Henry 96 feminism, second-wave 12, 159, 161, 180 feminist: activist 161–162; historians 164, 175, 180, 182; movement 163–165 Fest, Joachim 145 First World Romani Congress 142, 144

236

Index

First, Ruth 125, 127 Foucault, Michel: archaeology method 12; biopower concept 13–14, 92 France 26–27, 84, 86, 100, 118, 206 Frankel, Glenn, Rivonia’s Children 127–128, 133–135 Frankfort Institut fur Psychiatrie und Psychoanalysis 33, 80 Frankfurt School 33, 76–81, 84, 86, 98, 100, 202, 205 Franks, Pat Alas, Babylon 57 freedom 13, 42, 76–77, 109, 120, 122, 125 French: delegation 8, 82; philosopher 99, 116; Revolution 88 Freud Memorial 30 Freud-Klein Controversies 24, 135, 167 Freud, Anna 11, 23–25, 29–30 Freud, Sigmund 23, 25, 29; Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 25 Friedlander, Henry 206 Friedländer, Saul 96, 100 Fromm, Erich 27, 79 Fulton, John 8 Garbin, Tamar 130 gas chambers 66, 97 Gay, Peter 24, 28 gender: history 159, 163–164, 168, 170, 180–181, 183–184; roles 15, 132, 164, 169, 172, 176; theories 158–159 gender-blindness 166, 171, 189 genocide: deliberate killings 113, 149; discrimination and 10–11, 15, 22, 111, 143, 203, 207; history 2–3, 5–8, 37–38; Jewish 61, 67 German: controversies 11, 95, 99, 145, 201; historians 21, 43; people 6, 40, 42, 74–75, 147, 201; prisons 36–38; scholars 76 Gestapo 2, 82, 184 Gestapo archives 2, 82 Ginsburg, Carlo 169–170 God: deity of 14, 62, 85, 131; enemies of (witches) 178–179 good/bad projections 39–40, 42, 68, 136, 140; see also splitting Gordimer, Nadine 119, 125 Gorer, Geoffrey 11, 31 Gosling, Robert 25, 135, 158, 166–167

Gramsci, Antonio 175 Great Dictator 64, 91 Great Witch-hunt 10, 168 Greece 142, 144 Green, André 30 Greene, Daniel 109, 126 Guattari, Felix 27 guilt, displacement of 40–41, 62 Gulag 111, 146–147 Gypsies 9, 141, 143–145, 205 Gypsy Council 141–142 Habermas, Jürgen 146 Hall, Catherine 160 Hampshire, Stuart 205, 207 hardships 166, 202 Hartmann, Heinz 30 Harvard University 79, 138–140 hate 6, 39–41, 46, 74 Hess, Rudolf 4, 36 higher education 8–9 Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews 22, 67–68, 73, 95, 147 Hilda and Rusty Bernstein Papers 11, 133, 135 Himmler, Heinrich 43, 91, 188 Hiroshima and Nagasaki 58–59, 139 historical events 11, 27, 45, 146, 164 Historikerstreit 95–96, 117, 145 historiography: methodologies 11–12; war 28, 37, 63, 67; see also Holocaust Hitler, Adolph: controversial view of 62, 65; death of, confirmation 60; histography of 60–63, 65; Mein Kampf 43, 60, 94, 114; not dead 116; plot to assassinate 5; national socialist ideology 21, 60–64 Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of the Extremes 3, 26, 58, 87 Hoess, Rudolf 128 Hoffer, Willie 31, 33 Holocaust 10; death camps 68, 111, 113; gendered history 180–183; historiography 2, 28, 47, 68–69, 82, 94–95, 111, 115, 145, 147–148, 180–184; singularity 95, 113, 145; survivors 2–3, 69, 139, 148, 180, 182; unique event 27–27, 74, 111, 113, 123, 145–148

Index Holocaust Memorial Day Trust 143

homophobia 159

homosexuals 182–183, 188–189 Hope, Bob 160–161, 165

Horkheimer, Max 27, 77, 80, 98

Horney, Karen 31

Höss, Rudolf 40

Hosten, Jennifer 161, 165

hostility 22, 45

House of Commons 5, 159

Hult, Linda, The Witch as Muse: Art,

Gender, and Power in Early

Modern Europe 171

human creativity 45

human destructiveness 43–46, 73, 90,

93, 136, 139, 149, 207

human origin 10, 29

human psyche 5, 23, 45

human rights 5, 44, 76, 93, 126

humanity 6, 57–58, 74, 77, 126

Huntington, Samuel 8, 140

IBM Corporation 57

identity 12, 14, 130, 136, 146, 182

ideology: antisemitic 61, 68, 73, 82–84,

89, 97; political 13, 64, 68, 79,

112; religious 147, 174–175,

177–178

Immorality Act 132–133

imperialism 68, 115, 117–119, 149,

199, 204

Indigenous peoples 24, 110, 115, 130

industrialisation 97, 133

infanticide 34, 172–173, 176

infants 34, 39, 41–42, 86

inhumanity 1, 16, 49, 109–110, 133,

204, 206–207

injustice 5, 124, 199, 202

Institute for Social Research 76–77, 80

Institute of Commonwealth Studies 127

Institute of Contemporary History 21,

141

Institute of Contemporary Romani

Research and Documentation

141

integration 14, 40, 42, 130

Intelligence Corps 7, 36, 86, 128

interdisciplinary: learning 8, 111, 135;

research/study 4, 139, 203

interracial sexual relations 111, 129,

131–133, 200

intersectionality 14, 182

Irish Republican Army (IRA) 142

237

Irish Travellers 142

Italy 84, 144

Jäckel, Eberhard 113, 146

Jacobs, Janet 183

Jahoda, Marie 135

James, Adrian 136

Jameson, Fredric 99

Jerusalem 5, 68, 82

Jew in the Text: Modernity and the

Construction of Identity, the 130

Jewish Chronicle 75

Jewish genocide 61, 67

Jones, Adam 169

Jones, Ernest 23–25, 31, 86

Jung, Carl 31, 85–86, 201

Kaing, Ronald David 11, 26

Kant, Immanuel 1, 77, 83

Kaplan, Cora 160

Katz, Steven T. 147

Kelly, Joan 163

Kenrick, Donald 10–11, 111, 147, 149,

200, 206; Destiny of Europe’s

Gypsies (co-author) 141, 143,

205

Kershaw, Ian, Hitler: A Biography 132

Kessler-Harris, Alice 164, 182, 189

King, Martin Luther Jr. 138

King, Pearl 24–25, 32, 135, 166–167

Klein-Fairbairn model 39

Klein, Melanie: “paranoid projection”

theory 39–40, 46–47;

child psychoanalyst 23–24;

controversies 24, 45, 135; see

also splitting

Kleinian theory 39, 136

knowledge: beginning 76, 80, 93, 127;

quest for 1, 6, 8, 12–13

Kramer, Stanley, On the Beach 57

Kren, George M. 43

Kubric, Stanley, Dr. Strangelove or:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying

and Love the Bomb 57

Kushner, Tony 2

Labour Party 74, 159, 170

Lacan, Jacques 26

LaCapra, Dominick 2, 16, 148

Lagache, Daniel 26

Laing, R.D. 11, 26

Lamont, William 4

Langer, Lawrence 181–182

238

Index

Langer, Walter, The Mind of Adolf Hitler:

Secret Wartime Report 4, 28

Langer, William L. 27–28 Laplanche, Jean 26

Laqueur, Walter 21, 112

Larner, Christina 10, 81, 89, 159,

167–170, 175–181, 185, 189,

198, 200–201, 205–206;

Enemies of God: The Witch-

Hunt in Scotland 10, 89, 168,

171, 173–174; Source Book of

Scottish Witchcraft (co-author)

174; Witchcraft and Religion

171, 177, 179

Lasch, Christofer 30

Lay, Paul 4

le Bon, Gustav 85

Legum, Colin 119, 133

Leites, Nathan 37–38, 43

Lemkin, Raphael 148

Lennon, John 31

Lever, Harold 7

Levi, Primo 184

Levinas, Emmanuel 99

Lewis, Jeremy 4, 11, 202

liberal ideology 5, 8, 26, 76, 79, 100,

121–122, 134, 146, 163, 199,

204

Lifton, Robert J. 139, 205

Lighthill, James 30

Loewenberg, Peter, The Psychohistorical

Origins of the Nazi Youth

Cohort 28

MacCrone, Ian Douglas, Race Attitudes

in South Africa: Historical,

Experimental, and Psychological

Studies 130–131

Macfarlane, Alan 170

Macmillan, Harold 7, 114

Makari, George 24

maleficium 172–173

Mandela, Nelson 109, 119, 121,

125–126, 133

manic defences 39–40, 42

Marcuse, Herbert 27–28, 79

Marrus, Michael, The Holocaust in

History 3, 67, 69, 94–95,

147–148

Martel, Gordon 64

Marx, Karl 33, 80, 87, 113, 162, 174

Marxism 26, 84, 86, 109, 113, 161,

163, 199, 205

Marxist 76, 78–79, 81, 87, 93–94, 100,

163, 170, 175, 199, 207

mass murder 2, 4, 7, 97, 111, 140; see

also massacre

Mass Observation 9

mass violence: forms of 1, 110, 139;

gendered 169, 173, 198, 200;

historiography 11–12, 29, 159,

169, 201; prejudice and 1, 11,

14, 75, 98

massacre 9, 45, 71, 90, 114, 117–118

master race 60

Mazower, Mark 2

McCarthy, Mary 72, 197

Mead, Margaret 31

meaning of evil 3, 11, 48, 197, 208

medieval: history 6, 87, 171;

superstitions 70, 86

Menshevik family 87, 162

mental health 13, 26

mental hospital 13, 36–37 Milgram, Stanley 46, 205

Milton, Sybil 180

misogyny 159, 170–171, 178

Miss World contest 160–161, 165

Mitchell, Juliet 46, 161–163 Mitscherlich, Alexander, The Inability

to Mourn 33, 80

modern capitalist system 15, 58, 95,

178, 198–199

modern-day fanaticism 6, 198

modernity: critique 76, 95, 100;

products of 14, 59, 73; role of

99–100, 198

Mommsen, Hans 95, 146

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 57–58 Mulvey, Laura 163

Mussolini 144

Nadya, Leila, Forging a Convention

for Crimes against Humanity

169

Namier, Lewis, In the Nazi Era 26, 66

narrative history 27

National Institute for Personnel

Research (NIPR) 134

National Socialism 11, 21, 36, 60, 75,

81, 89, 90, 94–96, 119, 146,

187, 207

National Socialists 146

National Unity and Reconciliation Act,

1995 126

Nationalist Government 10, 118

Index Nazi: atrocities 3, 5, 9, 39–40, 58, 67, 73, 84, 86, 99, 115, 141, 144, 182, 200; camps 2, 12, 78, 112, 147; crimes 6, 10, 29, 32, 46, 75, 84, 86, 110, 114, 145, 149, 198, 208; ideology 1, 36, 88–91, 111, 128; as ordinary people 6, 9, 46, 58, 72; persecution 27, 127, 141, 181; personality 37; revolution 43 Nazism: British response to 60, 206; origins 66, 74, 76, 78, 98, 128, 139, 201, 207 Negro 46, 116, 138–140 New Left Review 161 New Statesman 22, 44 New Yorker magazine 68 Nicolson, Harold 165 Nochlin, Linda 130 Nolte, Ernst 145–146 nuclear: bomb 58 (see also atomic bomb); disarmament 5, 59; threat 3, 27, 57–59 Nuremberg 2, 81–84, 94, 123 Observer, the: anti-colonialism 118; The meaning of Eichmann 67, 69, 71, 73; psychoanalysis fascination 31, 33; South Africa 118–120; women’s rights 161, 164–165 October Revolution 36; see also Revolution of 1917 Ofer, Dalia 181 Ono, Yoko 31 Oosterveld, Valerie 169 oppression 13, 109, 124–125, 133, 138, 161, 164, 175 Opton, Edward M. 140 ordinariness 10, 29, 46, 66, 83 Orwell, George 78, 100, 112, 118–119 Ottoman Empire 9, 114, 118 Palestine 129, 131 Parsons, Talcott 149 pastoral power 13–14 perception 131, 136–137, 139, 172, 201 persecution: of ethnic peoples 3, 141, 144, 200; psychology/study of 4–5, 7, 9, 75, 89, 171, 182, 205 Petrie, Jon 58 phantasy 24–25

239

Pick, Daniel 6, 9, 26, 34–35, 86, 119, 123, 126, 159, 167; The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind 3–4, 11, 35 Pick, Irma Brenman 134–135 Pine, Lisa 181 Poliakov, Léon, Bréviaire de la Haine 2–3, 10, 48, 60, 81–86, 100, 198, 200–201, 205–206; Bréviaire de la Haine 2–3, 82; History of Anti-Semitism 3, 82–83 political psychopathology 5, 9, 32 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 26 Popper, Karl 26, 205 population control 13–14, 23, 83; see also genocide Positivism 128 power: networks 8, 12, 14–15, 201; relations 12, 14, 176, 186–187, 198, 201 prejudice 1, 22, 33, 137, 141, 200–201 Procter-Gregg, Nancy 31 progress 59, 76–77, 95 psychoanalysis: context 23; fall of in America 28; history 25–27, 85–86; importance of 35, 135; language of 31; psychoanalytic theory 46, 90, 139, 149; role of in Columbus Centre 29, 31, 135, 198; shrinks 28, 44 psychohistorians 27, 43 psychohistory 27–29, 96, 205, 207 psychology of fascism 21, 76 psy-sciences 13, 23, 205 Puxon, Grattan 10–11, 111, 147, 149, 200, 206; Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (co-author) 141, 143, 205 quest for meaning 1, 4, 73, 135 race: construction of 15; discrimination 131, 137, 146 (see also interracial sexual relations); myths of 83, 85 (see also Aryan mythology); riots 45; science 92, 132; violence 109, 112, 115 racism 1, 3, 47, 84–85, 109, 111, 116–117, 129, 136–138, 140–141, 147, 149 RAND Corporation 38, 93 Randall, Amy, Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey 169

240

Index

rape 184–185 reality, denial of 11, 39–40, 42,

146–147

reason 1, 13, 48–49, 73, 77, 98–99, 173

Reconstruction 129, 138

Red Army 60

Red Scare 138

Rees, John Rawlings, The Case of

Rudolf Hess: a Problem

in Diagnosis and Forensic

Psychiatry 36

Reformation of the Church of Scotland

178

Reitlinger, Gerald, The Final Solution: the Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 3, 22, 81–82 religion: history of 89, 130, 167;

influence 131, 176, 178

reparations 119, 141, 204

responsibility 6, 43, 63, 69, 73, 80, 147,

178, 183

revolution 74, 87, 125, 140, 205, 207

Revolution of 1917 (Russian

Revolution) 81

revolutionary movement 109, 122,

161–162, 204

Rheinbach prison 40, 91

Rickman, John 31

Rieff, Philip 27

Ringelheim, Joan 180–181 Rivonia Trial 121, 133–134 Roma: activist 11, 141; history 10,

143, 206; non-Aryan 13, 95,

144; people 9, 111, 141–143,

147–148, 200, 206

Roper, Lyndal, Witch Craze: Terror and

Fantasy in Baroque Germany

171

Rose-Innes, James 129

Rose, Jacqueline 58

Rosenbaum, Ron 60–63 Ross, Dorothy 27

Rowbotham, Sheila 161–163, 176, 189

Royal Albert Hall 160

Rudnytsky, Peter 24

Russia 60, 81, 84, 93, 112, 115,

161–162

Russian Empire 36, 126

Rycroft, Charles 30–31, 46

Sachs, Albie 10–11, 109–111, 119–133,

149, 177, 199–200, 204, 206;

car bomb 109, 125, 127; Justice

in South Africa 110–111,

120–121, 123, 128–129, 177,

206

sadism 40–41, 46, 187

Said, Edward 146

Salmon, Dorothy 9, 166

Salome, Lou Andreas 31

Sampson, Anthony 5, 11, 29, 119, 133

Sandbrook, Dominic 26

Sandler, Anne-Marie 30

Sandler, Joseph 30

Sanford, Nevitt: The Authoritarian

Personality (co-author) 137;

Sanctions for Evil: Sources of

Social Destructiveness 80, 139,

187

Sassen, Wilhem 83

Schafer, Roy 30

Schoenfeld, Gariel 181

Scholem, Gershom 72–73 Schutzstaffel (SS): Hauptscharfuhrer 40,

91, 185; history of 38–41, 43,

47, 93

Schwitzer, Louis H. 57–58 Scotland 89, 167, 174, 177–178

Scott, Gillian 162

Scott, Joan Wallach 163–164, 181–183 Scott, Michael 119

second-wave feminism 12, 161, 180

Segal, Hanna 30

Segal, Lynne 160

segregation 10, 110–111, 119, 121,

131–132, 138

self-image 136, 187–188 self-knowledge 14

Self, Will 44

Semites 83, 85, 201

Settle, Alison 165

sexism 159–161, 164, 166, 170, 173,

189, 204

sexual intercourse 132, 182, 184–186;

see also rape

Sexual Offences Act 185

sexuality 13, 45, 133, 162, 164, 180,

184–186

Sherwood, Rae 10, 111, 133–137, 149,

158, 166–167, 200–201, 206;

family ties 133–135; Psycho-

Dynamics of Race: Vicious

and Benign Spirals 135; social

psychologist 10, 135; see also

splitting

Shoah see Holocaust

Index silence 2–3, 10, 145, 184, 208 Simons, Jack 132 slavery 77, 110, 117, 129–130, 138 Smelser, Neil 187–188 social control 13, 23, 49, 86, 89, 121, 133, 171, 173, 178 social integration 130–131, 133 social sciences 9, 31, 37, 47 South Africa: apartheid 15, 125, 132, 199; Jews 127–128; National Party (NP) 110, 119, 128; Nazism 126; sanctions 132 Spiegelman, Art 208 splitting, theory of 39–40, 136, 139–140, 201 sponsors 7, 30, 66 Stafford-Clark, David 31 Stanford University 138–139 Stannard, David Shrinking History 28, 147 stereotype 34, 49, 68, 73, 88, 97, 129, 136, 176, 178–179, 201 Stone, Dan 3, 95, 98, 113, 115, 147–148, 169 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg 24–25, 69, 73 Storr, Anthony: Human Destructiveness 10–11, 31, 35, 43–48, 161, 198 Strand magazine 112 Stürmer, Michael 145 Surrealism 26 Sussex University 4, 7, 123 Sutherland, John 30 Tavistock Clinic 25, 32, 36, 167, 204 Taylor, Alan John Percivale: controversy 64–66; false prophet 65–66; The Origins of the Second World War 63 Taylor, Barbara 160 terror/terrorism 38, 114, 129, 147–148, 172 Thatcher, Margaret 170 Third Reich: historiography 9, 11, 15, 22, 28, 94–97, 114, 144, 181, 184, 204; organizational structure 68, 70, 83–84, 148 Thomas, Keith 170 torture 37, 44, 57, 78, 125 totalitarianism 12, 64, 77–79, 81, 86, 93, 100, 111–112, 115, 147 Totem and Taboo 85

241

Toynbee, Philip 31 traumatic memory 2, 47, 69, 78 Traverso, Enzo 145 Treaty of Versailles 40, 63, 65 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, The Last Days of Hitler 3, 60–66, 73, 79, 94, 170 Trilling, Lionel 27–28 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 126, 206 Tynan, Kenneth 31 UCL see University College London Unenlightened Despotism 62 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 11, 30, 38 United Kingdom 149, 206 United States: antisemitism 188; psychoanalysis 23, 27, 29–30, 47; racism 111, 137–140, 149, 201; women’s movement 31, 180 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 109, 180 University College London (UCL) 30–31, 198 University of Bath 159 University of California, Berkeley 138 University of Durham 6–7 University of Glasgow 11, 174 University of Oxford 5–6 University of Sussex 1, 8–11, 30, 37, 87, 122, 140, 202–203 University of Vermont 67 University of Virginia 137 University of Witwatersrand 11, 133–134 unprecedented crime 68, 113, 115, 146, 148, 183 Usborne, Richard 112 USSR 37, 87 van der Westhuizen, Henri 126–127 Vassar College 138 victims: dehumanisation of 97, 116, 139; Jewish 67, 74, 147–148; state psychiatry 36, 40; targeted 10, 16, 78; women 170, 182–186 Vietnam 8, 93, 138–140 violence: consent to use 6, 74, 97, 147 (see also mass violence); racial 45, 47, 109 von Baeyer-Katte, Wanda 33

242

Index

von Moltke, Helmut 129

von Trott, Adam 5

Waelder, Robert 30

Wain, John 165

Wardle, Irving 119, 122

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 5, 7, 22, 59

Watkin, Peter, The War Game 57

Weitzman, Lenore 181

West Indies 135

West, Raynard 37

White: people 109, 114, 129; privilege

109, 133

White, Dick 60

Whitehead, Andrew 160

Whitehorn, Katharine 165

Whitney, Elspeth 171, 173, 175

Wiener Library 21–22, 38, 64–66, 75,

141

Williams, Raymond 79, 161

Wilmenns, J. 38

Wilson, Harold 74, 159

Winkler, Heinrich August 96, 117, 146

Winnicott, Donald 25, 31

Wiskemann, Elizabeth 64

witch-hunt 12, 14, 88–89, 98, 159,

168–179

witchcraft: accusation 172–173,

178–179, 200; demonisation 88,

171

woman-hunting 169, 173, 175, 189,

200, 207

women’s liberation movement 160–165 working class 136, 162, 176

World War I 26, 40, 42, 63, 128

World War II 2, 8, 23–24, 63–64, 66,

78, 99, 111, 116, 120, 123, 128,

198, 207

Wright Institute 139

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 29

Yugoslavia 142, 144

Yutar, Percy 134

Zwigenberg, Ran, Hiroshima: The

Origins of Global Memory

Culture 58