ABSTRACT
The renewed emphasis, already visible in the mid-1980s, on the intertwined fates of the Soviet Union and Germany, especially in the Stalin and Hitler eras, has become greatly intensified in the wake of the upheavals in Eastern Europe. The brutal Stalinist modernising experiment is used to remove any normative links with humanising, civilising, emancipatory or democratising development from modernisation concepts and thereby to claim that Hitler's regime, too, was – and intentionally so – a 'modernising dictatorship'. There can be no principled objection to comparing the forms of dictatorship in Germany under Hitler and in the Soviet Union under Stalin and, however unedifying the subject matter, the nature and extent of their inhumanity. The function of Hitler's 'charismatic' Fuhrer position could be said to have been threefold: that of unifier, of activator, and of enabler in the Third Reich.
