ABSTRACT
As the age of fascism and communism appears to recede to the past, it should be possible to look back with greater detachment and reach a deeper level of understanding. But for the time being this is little more than a noble dream. Being a modern phenomenon, fascism was unthinkable in premodern societies, it was possible only on a certain level of economic, social, and technological development. Of the postmortems on communism, Francois Furet's Le passe d'une illusion (1994) an essay on the communist idea in the twentieth century is the most noteworthy so far and has attracted much attention well beyond France. The central part of the book is devoted to the relationship between communism, fascism, and antifascism, and it is in this context that questions and doubts arise. Hannah Arendt's guru on Communism and the Soviet Union in the early days was Waldemar Gurian, born in St. Petersburg of Jewish parents, educated in Germany, and converted to Catholicism.
