Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (review)

This book traces two fundamentally different paths taken by activists from the German extra-parliamentary radical Left of the 1960s. At the root of these divergences lay radically opposed understandings of and responses to Auschwitz and antisemitism. The common point of departure was a belief that the postwar Federal Republic had not fully broken with the Nazi past. This apparently highly principled stance set many in the 1968 generation against their elders, whom they criticized (often rightly) for their complicity in and unwillingness to face up to the great crimes that had been committed. But, despite repeated calls not to allow a repetition of Auschwitz, this position was not based itself on an unambiguous rejection of antisemitism. Nazism was understood rather as a form of fascism—one in which antisemitism did not play a central role. It was intimately connected to capitalism, supposedly following Max Horkheimer’s famous dictum that “whoever does not want to speak about capitalism should not speak about Nazism.” In fact both Horkheimer and his Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno had a much more sophisticated understanding of Auschwitz and of Nazism, and became increasingly critical of sections of the student movement from quite early on (the feeling was mutual).

The failure to take antisemitism seriously had two immediate consequences. The first, often attractive to many on the left, was to over-generalize, seeing the Holocaust as only one case of genocide among many, rather than as a radical break (as the Frankfurt School insisted) and as the unprecedented case that it was (which is why it led to the Genocide Convention). The second, which followed as it often does from the first, was the tendency to see genocides everywhere, losing sight of the distinctiveness of the crime. Soon claims were made, especially by some in the German radical student movement, that the United States was committing genocide in Vietnam. Later, and with much more disastrous consequences, they accused Israel (seen as an accomplice, or worse, of the hated Americans) of committing the same crime as the Nazis. Words were followed by actions that can still astonish even after forty years. Just as left-wing activists were denying with all apparent sincerity that they were in any way antisemitic, a bomb was placed, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, in a Jewish community center in the heart of Berlin. As Kundnani points out, the choice of target was highly significant. It was a symbol not of capitalism, or American imperialism, or Israel, but of the Jewish community itself. The line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, grey at best, had been crossed.

Kundnani then follows the logic of this politics through the careers of two emblematic figures, Dieter Kunzelmann and Horst Mahler. The latter was closely involved with the Baader-Meinhof gang and had links to a number of prominent figures on the German Left. Although Mahler came to reject the mindless violence his former associates advocated, his antisemitism became increasingly overt, leading him for a while into membership in the neo-Nazi NPD. Kundnani’s explication of Mahler’s reasoning is most insightful. He shows that Mahler’s politics were based on a form of nationalism that was not immediately visible but was detectible nevertheless in the thinking of Rudi Dutschke, the inspiration for much of the German New Left. This nationalism was consonant with, if it did not underpin, the original anti-Nazism and explains some of its fatal limitations. If Nazism was essentially a form of fascism in which antisemitism was not a central element, and if the FRG as a capitalist society had not made a clean break with Nazism, then Germans, too, could be its victims. This was all the more likely as the FRG was fully integrated into a West dominated by the United States—a state that was itself more than capable of committing genocide in defense of its empire. Drawing on Dan Diner’s concept of “exonerating projection,” Kundnani shows how...