ABSTRACT

In a discussion of the moral comparison between Nazism and Communism, it is appropriate, indeed essential, to discuss World War II. During the war, this comparison and the question of lesser and greater evil was not only, as the editors of this volume put it, a chapter in ‘the history of the mentality of the intelligentsia in the twentieth century’; it was an urgently practical issue, whose resolution had a direct impact on the outcome of the war. Second, it seems to me that the intellectual debates of the 1990s recall those of the postwar decade. The organizers of the conference on which this book is based spoke of a ‘growing consensus that neither the condemnation of Communism should imply a rehabilitation of Nazism, nor should a condemnation of Nazism be taken as implying a rehabilitation of Communism’. To the extent to which such a consensus has grown, it amounts to a reconstruction of an even-handed defense of liberal democracy against its antagonists. During the early Cold War such a stance was known alternatively as ‘the vital center’, in the United States, and ‘militant democracy’ or ‘the anti-totalitarian consensus’, in West Germany. The renewed exploration of these themes in recent years has taken place against the crystallization of the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag into far sharper focus than was the case in the postwar decade. Recollection of those wartime and postwar views should help us in clarifying the old and new elements in more recent reflections.