To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships: Volume 1 Paperback – 17 Jan 2008

MacGregor Knox wants to cut the Gordian Knot that has been the various historian's debates about whether totalitarianism is a useful concept, whether the rise of Nazism could only have happened in Germany and just how militarist was the German culture of the early twentieth century. His methodological sword is comparative history. In this book, Knox looks at the pre-WW1 cultures of Prussia and Italy, how WW1 impacted/uprooted both of those cultures and how each culture reacted by eventually turning to a savior/dictator whose ideology celebrated an extreme nationalism/racialism.

This volume is the first half of that comparative history. In fact, the first 250 pages of the book deal with the "long nineteenth century" (1800-1914) and WW1. The purpose of this long opening investigation is two-fold. Knox wants to claim that the history of both Italy and Germany in the 19th century is a history of the development of late-blooming (for Western Europe) nation states that were internally torn and structurally unprepared for the advent of mass democracy. WW1 erupted out of those structural tensions and basically destroyed the old regimes of both Italy and Germany.

Liberal Italy and Weimar Germany were the governments that came out of the peace process and which tried to control those internal fractures while (at least pretending) to become true mass democracies. They both failed in their own ways; some of which were unique to each country and some of which they shared.

For example, both countries faced strong populist Catholic and Socialist parties which challenged the national elites for governmental control. To my surprise, during the 1920s, at least, the Italians tended to settle these contestations in the streets with violence much more frequently than did the Germans.

Another example of a similarity is that in both cases, the party that rose to power during the `20s did so with a fervently nationalistic ideology. In Italy, it was the cause of Greater Italy, the vision of a state that control
both sides of the Adriatic and which had its `fair' share of colonies in Africa and Asia.
The German variation had a strong racialist tinge to it. The Aryan people needed their Lebensraum, their "living space" where they could thrive. That space happened to include portions of what is now Belgium, France, Poland and the Czech Republic. It is easy to see how the Nazi party would find fertile ground in a population already used to these ideas. The amazing thing was how far back those ideas can be traced in the German culture.

One of the more interesting themes of the book for me is Knox's assertion that the universal literacy which Germany had so much right to take pride in also was a great benefit to the Prussian military system. Knox is a rueful admirer to a degree of that interaction of education and training. He sees the education system as instilling militaristic values. My title is based on a quote (somewhere) in the book that expresses those values. The result was a population well trained in arms, versed in strategy and used to acting independently and ruthlessly if so needed. It was also an army that had some serious weaknesses (like a tendency to increasingly gamble of the bold throw of the die as the strategic situation got more desperate).

In a short review like this, it is difficult to express how nuanced Knox's analysis can be. His mastery of the historical sources is astounding. He is as good at regional history as the national or international, as good with the biographical as he is with the structural.

And he makes it all interesting. And therein lies a problem for me. I came to the horrific realization while reading this book that one of the pleasures of reading history for me is a sort of intellectual and moral frisson. Reading the history of the rise of the Fascist and the Nazi parties is the historical equivalent of slowing down to gape at a traffic accident. There is a sort of intellectual wonder that people could have been so stupid and/or a moral high horse to look down on their follies from.

Knox gives in to that now and then. He does not suffer fools gladly. Wilson had "utopian" principles and delivered an "infantile" message (pp242-3). Other historians are modish (p.169) or victimized by their historiography (see his discussions of the `new social historians' on p.9)

On the other hand, the strongest argument for the utility of Knox's comparative history approach is his own book. As with all authors, read Knox with a combination of the hermeneutics of generosity and of suspicion. You will learn much from this one, young padawan.