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Congratulations to Victor Zaslavsky, who on December 5th was awarded the 2008 Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought by the Heinrich Böll Foundation for the German edition of Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn. Class Cleansing explores the truth and cover-up of the murder of 25,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest. Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn by Victor Zaslavsky. Available for the first time in English translation, this shocking analysis of the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers and civilians in 1940 is a significant contribution to our understanding of European history. Revisiting the events of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which some 25,000 Polish prisoners of war were shot by the Soviet secret police on Stalin’s orders, Zaslavsky explores a paradigmatic and terrifying example of the policy of class cleansing practiced in the Soviet Union and its occupied territories during World War II. By blaming the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis, the Soviets constructed one of the greatest historiographical falsifications of the twentieth century. Based on secret documents that only became available after the collapse of the Soviet regime, Zaslavsky unearths the methods used to create and maintain the “official version” of what happened at Katyn, a process involving the complicity of Western governments and left-leaning historians, which resulted in the upholding of this falsification until the fall of the Soviet Union. Perhaps we just were lucky and simply picked the right moment. Perhaps it was the logical consequence of many years of work, gaining experience, and reflecting on many conflicts, including personal ones. Some things need their time and then, perhaps, if we are lucky, we catch hold of the one end of the thread just at the right moment and that leads to the untangling of the web that hides things. At least partially we were successful in this respect with the exhibition “‘We just didn’t have that’: Anti-Semitism in the GDR.” Working with 76 youths from 8 cities in Eastern Germany, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation began to research local history in 2006. The Foundation had the results of this research vetted by historians and presented the findings to the public in an exhibition in May of 2007. Most of the participants in the process come from the former GDR. Some of them are also Jewish. Since re-unification we had been trying to encourage a public discussion about anti-Semitism in the GDR: while there had been some interesting scholarly research on the topic, there had been no public engagement with it. The exhibition has unleashed wide ranging discussion on the issue at different events, conferences, and in the media. And the discussion is not only about the former East Germany. It is a debate about a heritage that affects all of Germany, a debate about ideologies, repression and new anti-Semitism. Jeffrey Herf’s “An Age of Murder: Ideology and Terror in Germany” appears in Telos 144 (Fall 2008). An excerpt follows below. Click here to read the full article (in PDF format). It is best to begin with the obvious. This is a series of lectures about murder, indeed about an age of murder.[1] Murders to be sure inspired by political ideas, but murders nevertheless. In all, the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, hereafter the RAF) murdered thirty-four people and would have killed more had police and intelligence agencies not arrested them or prevented them from carrying out additional “actions.”[2] Yesterday, the papers reported that thirty-two people were killed in suicide-bomb attacks in Iraq, and thirty-four the day before, and neither of those war crimes were front-page news in the New York Times or the Washington Post. So there is an element of injustice in the amount of time and attention devoted to the thirty-four murders committed by the RAF over a period of twenty-two years and that devoted to the far more numerous victims of radical Islamist terror. Yet the fact that the murders of large numbers of people today has become horribly routine is no reason to dismiss the significance of the murders of a much smaller number for German history. Along with the murders came attempted murders, bank robberies, and explosions at a variety of West German and American institutions. The number of dead could have been much higher. If the RAF had not used pistols, machine guns, bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), remote-controlled bombs, and airplane hijackings, and if the West German radicals of the 1970s through the 1990s had only published turgid, long-winded communist manifestos, no one would have paid them much attention at the time. I doubt that the German Historical Institute would have decided to sponsor a series about Marxist-Leninist sects of the 1970s. The philosophical thought of Iris Murdoch proposes that no ethical tradition has ever adequately fashioned a picture of human beings as they truly are, and in the course of her career this was what she used her writing in philosophy and literature to illustrate: a personal vision of man’s morality. If we consider ethicists’ preoccupations in recent history, we might argue that these have mainly been the examination of moral being to justify why humans choose what they choose in particular circumstances, rather than the development of any concept of a “moral character” that might constitute the essential source of all the moral choices that ordinary human beings make. If we acknowledge that such a character does indeed exist, then it will naturally follow that we as humans have an important inner life characterized by a certain degree of essential unity. In the end, what is certain is that our “moral character” becomes apparent in the moment we act, and is itself the result of something that began long ago. And for Murdoch, this was the importance of virtue. Telos Press Publishing is proud to announce the newest addition to our book list: Ernst Jünger’s On Pain, translated and introduced by David C. Durst and prefaced by Russell A. Berman. Originally published in 1934, this remarkable essay provides valuable insights into the cult of courage and death in Nazi Germany, but also throws light on the ideology of terrorism today. |
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