ABSTRACT
From the beginning, the emergence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth
century has left behind a broad trail of interpretations and analyses by
contemporaries of those regimes. This begins with the perception of Com-
munism, Fascism and National Socialism recorded in reports of travellers,
journalists, writers and politicians following 1917, 1922 and 1933. It
continues in the efforts to discover appropriate descriptions for the new
phenomena. And it leads, finally, to larger interpretive patterns. Of these,
the concepts of totalitarianism and political religions have become the best known ones.1
