ABSTRACT
In German Nazism, as in the other two cases, the significance of idiosyncratically personal, ahistorically banal, and national contextual factors is not in dispute. But a supranational, historically specific dimension, made possible by the earlier historical-political break, interfaced with those more familiar dimensions to fuel the action we seek to understand. And in the German case, too, pulling back from the master narrative prepares us better to recognize a novel content that did not merely serve the interests of existing elites or respond to the traumas of petty bourgeois losers. Even the Nazi departure must be considered a quest for a post-Marxist alternative to the liberal mainstream, and we must be prepared to recognize irreducible and unanticipated difference as an outcome of the attempt, which proved to reveal further possibilities of totalitarian great politics. It goes without saying that we find much about that attempt undesirable in the first place and that, whatever the plausibility of the originating aspiration, it led to tragedy and disaster.
