Alice Kaplan, “The Collaborator: the Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach” (2000) – This book grapples with questions that should interest me more than they do. What are words worth? How does the answer to the previous question change during wartime? What constitutes treason, or crime of any kind, when it amounts mainly to words?

American scholar of French history Alice Kaplan attempts to answer these questions by examining the case of Robert Brasillach. Brasillach was a fascist intellectual. In some ways, he’s the kind of far-right intellectual you don’t see much of anymore: a genuine homme de lettres, critic, novelist, poet, read by his intellectual opponents due to his power to shape the discourse from his post at the right-wing paper Je Suis Partout. In other ways, he’s a familiar figure: an edgelord and a shitposter, hiding by turns behind irony and sentimentality, the former mostly in his political/critical writings and the latter in his novels and poems.

He started out as a student with Action Francaise, the French royalist proto-fascist grouping, which had a significant intellectual wing to go along with its street fighters. Kaplan depicts Brasillach as being swept away by the romance of fascism as the ideology grew stronger. Always anti-democratic, Brasillach was enamored of the newness, youth, optimism, virility of fascism, the rallies and the parades and the in-group camaraderie and on and on. He was also a committed anti-semite, placing the Jews at the top of a list of enemies including leftists and parliamentarians that were supposedly degrading France. In his writings, he compares Jews to monkeys and rats, and when the time came, was entirely in favor of their being deported from France, most of them to their deaths in the concentration camps.

What exactly he did during the war became a bone of contention in the trial. He was drafted into the French army and taken prisoner by the Germans, where, already pro-Nazi, he began his formal career as a collaborationist. He continued writing during the Occupation, publishing pro-Nazi pieces, encouraging the puppet Vichy regime to crack down harder on dissidents, and living it up with his Nazi and collaborator buddies during a time of want for most French people.

To me, what renders a lot of the back-and-forth inspired by the Brasillach case that Kaplan tries to sort out moot is Brasillach’s participation in another favorite pastime of the contemporary far right: doxxing. In the pages of Je Suis Partout, Brasillach outed resistance members, communists, and Jews in hiding. Kaplan is careful to point out that we do not know if any of Brasillach’s doxes actually led to any arrests… but it wasn’t for lack of trying on Brasillach’s part. A doxxing then meant a lot more then mean phone calls and stalking by basement-dwelling chuds, it could mean torture and execution. As far as I’m concerned, even if you don’t think being a fascist is a punishable offense by itself, doxxing constitutes direct collaboration with fascist occupying authority with intent to kill.

The Resistance arrested him around the time Paris was liberated by the allies. Brasillach’s entire imprisonment and trial took place under the shadow of the ongoing war and France’s fledgling reconstruction of its own nationhood. The charge against him was treason- giving aid and comfort to the enemy and degrading the nation. Notably, his propagandizing for French participation in the Holocaust was not emphasized in the case, happening as it did before the Nuremberg Trials came up with the idea of crimes against humanity- otherwise, they could’ve gotten him like they got Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher.

Kaplan goes into great detail about those involved in the case, not just Brasillach. She discusses the two attorneys, for the prosecution and the defense, at great length. Both signed the Vichy pledge of loyalty to Marshal Petain; family legend has it the prosecutor helped the Resistance, but we have no real way of knowing. Virtually all of France’s lawyers signed the pledge- they were part of the state apparatus, after all, and Vichy was the state until DeGaulle had consolidated sufficient control over the Resistance (and the German grip slipped some). The jurors were drawn from lists of Resistance-friendly Parisians, and Kaplan profiles them, too, telling about their lives mostly in the working class suburbs of Paris, their small but noble acts of resistance, etc.

Brasillach’s lawyer tried to get him out of it by citing his career, from the high-end Ecole Normale to his collections of poetry and translations- not, Kaplan points out, the sort of thing that would appeal to this jury. Moreover, Brasillach himself came to compare himself to the Resistance, in poems and statements- both were just carried away by difficult times and ideology, or something like that (something tells me we may see contemporary fascists try that one before it’s all over). Nobody bought it. The prosecution layered on — and thereby made the whole thing “problematic” — insinuations of Brasillach as being gay or womanly, as being in love with the Nazis, a way to further inflame and disgust the jury. I agree that’s messed up, though Kaplan herself seems to agree there was a distinct erotic edge to Brasillach’s feelings for fascism. Either way, the jury voted to convict and execute Brasillach.

He appealed to de Gaulle to save his life, and so did a number of prominent French writers (including Camus but not including Sartre or de Beauvoir, for those keeping score at home). French intellectuals had become alienated from the purge of collaborationist elements and the complicities and complexities it continuously revealed. De Gaulle refused- some say due to being confused by a picture of Brasillach with French fascist leader Jacques Doriot, where Doriot was in German uniform and de Gaulle thought Doriot in uniform was Brasillach in uniform. Either way, Brasillach was shot, and became a martyr to the French far right to this day.

Kaplan concludes by saying that Brasillach should have been found guilty of treason, but not have been executed. I tend to disagree and think that his doxxing during wartime earned him a bullet. I see Kaplan’s point about making martyrs, but a living Brasillach could be an inspiration to the French far right, too. Speaking extra-judicially, I think Brasillach got what was coming to him, and think he should serve as an example to other fascist propagandists. ****

James Whitman, “Hitler’s American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (2017) – This book has a funny tone. Whitman, a prominent legal scholar, acts shocked and sickened by the very idea that anything American might have influenced Nazi Germany’s policies. He continually braces the reader to prepare themselves for the revelations he has in store. I don’t know- is it that weird of an idea that Hitler took inspiration from America? Maybe I’m just jaded or have just read too much about fascism to be shocked by that kind of thing anymore.

The warnings also serve to pad out this slim volume. When I think of American influence on Nazism, I think about the ways Nazis from Hitler on down cited the American westward expansion as an inspiration for their bloody campaign for lebensraum on the Russian steppes. But Whitman is a lawyer concerned with lawyerly things. And so he looks mainly to American race law, most notably immigration and citizenship law as well as the Jim Crow laws. He argues that the Nazis, when they looked abroad for examples, found the best developed sets of laws pertaining to race in the United States (and, he says, the British dominions- it’d be interesting to see more on that). He further argues that what they saw influenced Nazi race law.

This book stirred up a certain amount of controversy (perhaps why Whitman felt the need to do so much hand-holding), on some reasonable grounds. Influence is notoriously elusive. Whitman can find plenty of examples of Nazis praising American race law, citing it in legal research, and so on. But can he proves influence? He tries to, by showing how the Nuremberg Laws, the core Nazi anti-semitic legistlation, was preceded by a Nazi legal conference that discussed the American example extensively. But how much that really proved essential to the Nuremberg Laws — which, Whitman allows, are quite different from American race law, in some instances even softer (no “one drop” rule for Jews, for instance) — is up for debate. So is the influence of law and lawyers on Nazi Germany in general, given it’s “Fuhrer principle” and rebuking of “sterile legalism.”

From the cheap seats, I’d split the difference. Intellectual historians deal with influence all the time, and while they haven’t made it any less elusive they have learned to deal with its iffyness. From an intellectual history perspective, the Nazis saw themselves as part of a community of racist white states, of which they sought to be the most advanced. They saw the US as part of that community, an advanced part in terms of its techniques of racism, and not for no reason. But this is more along the line of the frontier-lebensraum connection. Whitman wants to establish an almost legal culpability for American law, and it’s unclear that he does. I’m not sure how much that matters- the courts being adjudicators of law and not necessarily justice. The American-Nazi connection passes the muster of justice, if not that of the notional letter of notional law. ****

Fritz Stern, “The Politics of Cultural Despair: a Study of the Rise of the Germanic Ideology” (1961) – German-American expat Fritz Stern was among the first to undertake intellectual history as directed at Nazism. In this instance, he looks at three German intellectual figures as precursors of Nazism: Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. They were most popular in the 1870s, 1890s, and 1920s, respectively. All three were “of a type;” self-made outsiders from petty bourgeois backgrounds, alienated from a Germany that seemed to be modernizing in all the wrong ways, reactionary but not down with the traditional elite, and scholars rather than organizers. All three embraced a view of history where Germany’s historical mission was as high and mighty as those holding it back — liberals, socialists, and almost inevitably, Jews — were low and ubiquitous. All three attracted big readerships.

You learn a lot about these three and their contexts, and a picture of German intellectual life in the late 19th/early 20th century as promising but with some deep issues emerges. Of course, being a mid-century intellectual, Stern throws himself bodily to protect poor innocent misunderstood Nietzsche, whose sister presumably made him say all that “blond beast” crap, but the picture is still a clear one for all that. It fills in a lot of context for what would come in the 1930s. This helped open doors that figures like George Mosse and other intellectual historians of fascism would walk through.

As the title and subtitle indicate, Stern sees the contributions of these men as twofold: as contributors to a Germanic ideology of romantic racialism and antisemitism, and as both early sufferers from and exponents of “cultural despair,” the idea that society was irredeemable short of (counter-)revolutionary change. Stern puts a lot of chips on cultural despair as an important concept, something that conditioned the German people to undertake extreme measures. In many respects, the emotional reality of this feeling — one gets the feeling Stern is doing some reporting here of something he witnessed while in Germany — is stronger and more relevant than the actual ideological content of what the three thinkers or those they influenced in the Third Reich actually believed.

This is a provocative thesis but I don’t really agree with it. Stern was a much more dab hand with ideological differences than many of his fellow American historians of the postwar consensus decades, but he seems to accept with them that ideology is a kind of sickness that can be explained psychologically or sociologically rather than a set of ideas and practices that deserve to be understood politically. Among other issues, this undermines his writing on his three subjects. They tend to run together, exemplars of a type — feckless intellectuals projecting their fantasies onto a complex reality — rather than individuals with differences and agendas. This is especially clear in the case of Moeller van den Bruck, who had more of a direct political impact than the other two, and was part of a movement, the Conservative Revolutionaries, that involved very serious intellectuals such as Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt (neither of which are so much as mentioned). You don’t need to agree with or see as rational a given movement in order to try to understand it on its own terms.

All the same, the book is pretty good, well-written and with clear points, even when I disagree with them. Stern’s priors are clear- admirer of “real” German culture and foe of the ideological fervor, left and right, that would have loomed so large as he came of age during the Weimar period. And he’s not all the way wrong, especially with the terror of modernity that he saw gripping not just Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, but much of the western world. Moreover, it doesn’t seem like we’ve seen the last of something that looks an awful lot like Stern’s “cultural despair” rearing its head with the sense of thwarted greatness and petty malice that sweeps the land. ****

Victoria de Grazia, “How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1944” (1992) – I had read de Grazia’s great book on the spread of American-style consumer capitalism in Europe in the early/mid-20th century, so was excited to pick this one up. She situates Italian fascism’s policies towards women as existing in a luminal space between the ideology’s misogyny, women’s efforts to make political space for themselves, and processes of modernization that both pre- and post-date the fascist era. For all of its totalitarian pretensions, the fascist state was never able to control and/or eliminate civil society the way Hitler or Stalin could. But it could promise just enough to the more bourgeois women’s groups to get them hopelessly entangled with the regime while eliminating any ability to act independently. More radical groups were quashed along with the left more generally.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. The Italian right believed itself to be in demographic decline (despite the numbers showing otherwise- their real problem was male labor migrating away) which put pressure on women to be mothers. Anglo-American consumption habits were both a lure and a threat, a level of living the regime wanted to be able to promise but also resented, in part because of the way it allowed women more independence from the home. Some bourgeois Italian feminists attempted to create a “Latin Feminism,” feminism that “respected Italian tradition,” which basically amounted to them getting their cut of power without sharing it with women of the lower orders, but even that didn’t hold the fascist regime’s interest. All told, a fine historical work tracing the delicate networks of continuity and discontinuity in women’s politics before, during, and after the fascist regime. *****

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist” (2014) – Ukraine! Tough country. Learning history seriously put a crimp in my desire to live in other time periods/places. Even leaving aside the toilet arrangements, in so many times and places there are just no good choices. Ukraine is one such place that finds itself in that position time and again, including right now. In this book, German historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe takes us back to an even harsher time, which has all too many echoes of contemporary Ukraine.

How to even describe Ukraine’s situation in the early twentieth century? Well, for one thing, there was a lot of disagreement about where it began and ended, who was a Ukrainian, and what being Ukrainian meant. After WWI, there were major Ukrainian populations in three or four countries and in none of them were they well-treated, between the famine and the terror in the USSR and minority status in Czechoslovakia (where they were at least left alone) and Poland (where they weren’t). Eastern Ukrainians were more culturally Russian where western Ukrainians were in uneasy proximity to Central Europe and especially the Poles.

Ukrainian nationalism was profoundly frustrated, especially in the west where, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was no major power for them to look to the way Eastern Ukrainians looked (and look) to Russia. Frustrated nationalism in the early twentieth century was dynamite, dynamite sweating out little beads of nitroglycerin and waiting to blow. One of the men who slammed down the plunger on that little bundle of explosive joy was Stepan Bandera.

The son of a Greek Catholic priest (don’t ask me how Greek Catholicism came to be the national church of western Ukraine, I do not understand it) and raised in the Ukrainian part of postwar Poland, Bandera was the right (or, really, exactly wrong) kind of crazy for his time and place. A nationalist extremist from the beginning, he made his name by taking an already angry nationalism and bringing it to a higher boil, ever to the right, ever more purist, ever more violent. Schoolmates report the young Bandera as sticking pins under his fingernails and whipping himself with his belt in order to prepare for the tortures he expected from the Polish secret police. He was a real character.

He joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) as a youth and proceeded to help take the group in an ever more violent, fascist, and antisemitic direction. He built a following with younger, mostly Poland-based members. Like Hitler, he was one of those guys where people argue over whether he was truly charismatic or not — he was a dweeby little twerp who looks for all the world like Stephen Miller — but clearly had something that got him over with angry young Ukrainians. One thing that probably helped was the stark simplicity of his answers to the complex questions of Ukrainian nationality. Ukraine has a unique destiny, it’s defined by Ukrainian blood, and anyone foreign and anyone who stands in the way — Poles, Russians, Jews, democrats, communists, anyone who questions the Provydnik (leader) — need to be exterminated. This message proved popular and soon Bandera’s branch of the OUN has outstripped more moderate Ukrainian nationalists and began undertaking terror campaigns.

Bandera was in Polish jail for conspiracy to kill the interior minister when the Nazis invaded. From the beginning, Bandera and the OUN hailed the Germans as liberators (note- these were not Ukrainians who suffered from the famine in the USSR, this was Ukrainians who were somewhat discriminated against in Poland) and as the people who could help bring about an independent Ukraine. As these groups do, OUN had split, there was an OUN-B (for Bandera) and an OUN-M (for Melnyk, another fascist chieftain). When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and quickly rolled over much of Ukraine, these two competed to become the puppet government of Ukraine. Bandera had more popular appeal but Melnyk appealed more to the Germans, in large part because he was less egotistical and more pliable.

The early parts of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union saw massive atrocities carried out by both Axis soldiers and local civilians against Jews and other minorities. The book has numerous sickening depictions of Ukrainian nationalists teaming up with the Nazis to beat, humiliate, and kill Jews. Both OUN factions saw this as a positive thing at the time, the beginning of the great cleansing that would lead to a Ukrainian national rebirth. In some cases, the Germans even intervened to slow the Ukrainians down- they were getting too messy, too disorderly.

Of course, in the end, the Nazis did not want to see an independent Ukraine, even as a loyal puppet state. They wanted a slave colony. They were happy to use Ukrainians as muscle (like in the SS-Galizien division) but had no intention of making Bandera, Melnyk, or anyone else leader of a Ukrainian state. The Nazis wound up arresting Bandera, keeping him in a special division of one of the camps, a nice sort of place for high-end political prisoners like the last of the Hapsburgs and Otto von Bismarck’s grandson.

This turned out to be important, because both Bandera and the OUN (and it’s tedious subfactions and minor rivals) survived the war. While not giving up their fascist ideas, they pivoted towards the west and sought to aid in the American side of the Cold War. The CIA, as well as British and West German intelligence, made cat’s paws of numerous Ukrainians (and many others) with dubious war records, allowing thousands to slip into new lives in the west. They didn’t turn out to be that useful — there would be no “rollback” in Eastern Europe — but it allowed them to hold on. Moreover, they could enlist the Cold War propaganda establishment, including academic historians, to whitewash their crimes, defining away their fascism and turning a blind eye to the atrocities.

Bandera got got by the KGB in Munich in 1959 (the KGB tried to frame a Nazi war criminal in the West German government- too bad that didn’t work, would’ve been a two for one). This was probably a convenient time for him to die, from a Ukrainian nationalist perspective. He wasn’t too much use — the Americans thought he was too egotistical to work much with — and the promised Third World War that would allow the Ukrainians their next bite at the apple likely wasn’t going to materialize by then.

Instead, Bandera became a martyr, and more than that, a synecdoche for right-wing Ukrainian nationalism more generally. Diaspora Ukrainians carefully tended to his cult for decades. Soviet propaganda helped, too, by insisting any Ukrainian they didn’t like, even if it was just for speaking Ukrainian where they weren’t supposed to, was a Banderist. This made him a symbol for resistance even among Ukrainians who didn’t share his violent ultranationalism. Bandera managed to outlive a Melnyk, Bulba, and the other little fascist chieftains of the area to become this symbolic figure in time for Ukraine’s independence in 1991. While a many Ukrainians, especially in the more russified east, don’t really care about Bandera or his cause, a critical mass (especially in the west) see him as a key symbol for what the Ukraine should be. This is, to say the least, unsettling. In nearly the same breath, Ukrainian nationalists will uphold Bandera, insist that Bandera did nothing wrong and was a democrat (he hated democracy), and say anyway, it’s all the fault of those nasty Jews like Soros. If it’s for a western audience, they’ll throw in Putin too.

I, for one, love big fat serious books about the ideological madness of the twentieth century, and this fits the bill. It was Rossoliński-Liebe’s dissertation, and he’s very careful with his historiography (which always takes me back to my early grad school days, all that wrangling over defining fascism- good times) and evidence. If there’s one thing he didn’t address enough, I’d say it was “why Bandera” — why he got to be the symbol instead of his rivals. Was it just the martyrdom? The extremity? I don’t know. I do know this book got Rossoliński-Liebe in some trouble- between his claims about national hero Bandera and the gauntlet he throws at nationalist (and Cold War) historiography, when he came to Ukraine the only place he could do a reading was, ironically, the German embassy. Everywhere else was threatened to the point where they cancelled (and one gets the idea the Ukrainian academic establishment wasn’t thrilled to help out either). Bandera, who wasn’t above petty shit like that — no fascist, no matter how bloodied, is ever anything other than petty — would have been proud. *****