Brutalization and the Civilizing Process: An Ongoing Debate Between Mosse and Elias

When Norbert Elias’s book, The Civilizing Process, was republished in 1969 and translated into English, it was a huge success and became, ‘without a doubt, one of the most important pieces of historical sociology since Weber’. Elias’s theory that civilizing processes depends on the control of violence, has obtained increasing recognition among historians, who have empirically demonstrated the long-term decline of wars, crimes and homicides. Some examples of such analysis can be found in Steven Pinker’s monumental book on the history of violence, as well as in Jonathan Glover’s and Lynn Hunt’s books on humanity, empathy, and humanitarianism. ¹

It is worth mentioning though that the Great War, with its explosion of aggressiveness and exposure to mass death has often been considered a clear sign of the fragility of the civilizing process described by Elias. Already in 1915, Freud observed: ‘our disappointment in this war [is caused] by the brutal behavior of individuals of the highest culture of whom one would not have believed any such thing possible’. ² He returned to the topic in 1929, arguing that ‘the inclination to aggression […] constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization’. ³ Man’s control over his instincts and emotions seemed to have failed in the face of his complete uprooting from civilian life during wartime, when normal standards of hygiene, respect for privacy, personal health, well-being – and especially one’s relationship with violence – were completely overwhelmed by life in the trenches. The phenomenon of indifference towards human life and of dehumanization of the enemy has been defined as ‘brutalization’ by George L. Mosse. In his opinion, the First World War inaugurated a process of brutalization of politics that gave rise to Fascism and later to Nazism. Mosse wrote, ‘there is little doubt that the myth of the war experience made fascist brutality more acceptable and Fascism itself more attractive’. ⁴ As we can see, the concept of brutalization of men who fought or served in the First World War used to be a commonplace in European history. The violence of the Great War seemed to give many veterans a lust for blood and conflict that came to be satisfied by the radical-right movements of the twenties and thirties. Ex-soldiers were certainly numerous in the ranks of fascist and right-wing extremist groups across Europe. The heuristic appeal of the brutalization process lies in the fact that it revealed a close connection between the violence of the First and Second World Wars. In other words, the Great War represented a testing ground for totalitarianism, mass death and the Holocaust.

These two views would seem to be in opposition: Elias’s theory addresses the long-term nature of the civilizing process, while Mosse reflects on the sudden explosion of the brutalization process. The objective of this article is to demonstrate that the two positions are much more nuanced. Moreover, in my opinion, a clearer understanding of the Great War and its effects can be best achieved through a combined reading of these two interconnected processes.

Elias belonged to the first generation, Mosse to the second generation of refugee scholars that, in the 1960s, ‘virtually reinvented German cultural and intellectual history and recast our understanding of it’. ⁵ It is quite surprising that Elias has never been sufficiently considered in the historic reconstructions of the cultural impact of Jewish intellectuals who escaped from Germany. His capacity to explore various disciplinary fields together with his attempts to connect social changes to the aspects related to culture and mentality certainly bring him closer to the group of émigré scholars, a topic that has been thoroughly examined by Steven E. Aschheim. ⁶ As for Mosse, recently scholars have examined his connection with other historians, in particular with Peter Gay and have identified as their shared ability to reintegrate the Weimar experience into American culture. ⁷ However, on closer inspection, one can also observe a certain proximity of the biographical and intellectual paths of Elias and Mosse.

Both were Jewish, and after escaping from Germany when Hitler came to power, both in their autobiographies reflected on the role of the German-Jewish synthesis and on the mechanisms of the Jewish exclusion. ⁸ As a young man, Elias was an active member of a Zionist movement, Blau-Weiß, even if later on, he distanced himself from this form of political participation. ⁹

Tragic personal experiences drove both of them to explore the origins of Nazism and antisemitism. Elias lost both of his parents in the concentration camps, while Mosse was separated from his family. Their education was similar as well: both went to boarding schools in Switzerland and later in England. And it is in London that they met for the first time. Later Mosse would describe their encounter in his memoir:

In London, in the house of my friends Francis Carstens and his wife Ruth […] I met the sociologist Norbert Elias (who played Santa Claus at the Carstens’ Christmas parties). Elias was then quite unknown, though his famous book about the civilizing process had already appeared in 1939, published by an obscure Swiss publishing house. He later obtained a position in Kenya and the University of Leicester before retiring in Holland and enjoying his very belated fame. But the many times I stayed in Amsterdam I never visited him, for I had caused him great offense because of the arguments we had when we met, and because I had written a not too favorable review when his book was republished. Norbert Elias was without doubt difficult to get along with, touchy and opinionated. At the time when I wrote The Crisis of German Ideology we quarreled, especially about the nature of the German National Party. ¹⁰

The strong disagreement between the two has been confirmed by Elias, as may be seen in this letter written by Ruth Carstens to him in 1964: ‘The only thing you’ll miss this year is quarreling with George, because he will stay in America for a year.’ ¹¹ Both Elias and Mosse used to ignore each other in their writings. Mosse quoted Elias only once, in the Introduction to Sexuality and Nationalism, even though he often referred to civilizing process during his classes at Madison and some of his PhD students even organized a seminar dedicated to that topic.

The reason for such a complicated relationship was certainly exacerbated by Elias’s resentment towards Mosse, who had previously criticized The Civilizing Process. ¹² In his review Mosse accused Elias of not taking into consideration the role of chivalrous codes which constituted an important instrument for sublimating aggression. The analysis of the notes Mosse took when preparing the review helps identify other interesting observations in regard to Elias’s book. Here Mosse briefly summarizes the critical aspects of The Civilizing process: firstly, lack of consideration given to religion, family and technological changes and, secondly, excessively rigid theoretical apparatus as well as ‘evidence sometimes minimal or unconvincing’. The rise of pietism in Germany and evangelism in England are relevant aspects of the development of manners, a topic that had been overlooked by Elias. In addition, ‘the refinement of court society had prepared the way for modern manners, more at the table than in sexual behavior’. ¹³ According to Mosse, methodological flaws in Elias’s work were even more significant than ‘the exclusion of crucial factors’. ¹⁴ Historical processes were always interpreted by Elias as step-by-step changes; an approach that is in many ways similar to Braudel’s concept of ‘longue durée’. However, some historical events, such as French Revolution, happen unexpectedly. It is the general theoretical approach Elias adapts in his work that Mosse questions. In the review he writes: ‘the theoretical part of the work is the least convincing, as indeed are all attempts to press history into the straightjacket of single causes which are bound to make fact fit theory rather than have theory fit all of the available facts’. ¹⁵ For Mosse Elias’s book lacked convincing empirical evidence. However, he considered it ‘a fascinating work’, which, for the first time, shifted the focus towards behaviors and collective mentalities and prompted a lively and fruitful discussion. Moreover, in his notes Mosse wonders why the German sociologist wouldn’t consider regression, while in the review he openly addresses the problem of the relationship between Nazism and civilization. This passage is brief, but important, since here Mosse expresses the essence of his own future reflection on a topic that would gradually gain a central role in his work:

National Socialism [was] a movement which claimed to protect the civilizing process. In fact whatever the diversity of European politics, whatever the social tensions, here was a powerful political and social force, a code of manners and morals which was obeyed by all strata of society. Everyone wanted to be respectable. ¹⁶

Yet, good manners and bourgeois respectability are actually the two topics that bring the two scholars together in one common approach, aimed at detecting the factors that facilitate the process of internalization of progressively more binding behavioral norms. In his work Elias analyzes early modern court society, especially in France, the key period that initiated the civilizing process, while Mosse is mostly focused on the way in which the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century nationalism, especially in Germany and Britain, contribute to conformism and respect for the ethical code, slowly starting to affect all the social classes. Both scholars reflect on the role of bourgeoisie, more than anyone else responsible for these transformations. For Elias it is the court nobility that by means of etiquette transmitted their values to the bourgeoisie, who initially imitated those values and eventually absorbed them and readapted and applied them in an even stricter way. For the ‘bourgeois gentilhommes’ the super-ego is stricter, since the restrictions and impositions are not a result of social relations, but are instead dictated ‘by an inner voice, […] in short by a moral commandment that needs no justification’. ¹⁷ On the contrary, for Mosse it is the bourgeoisie that uses good manners as a way of differentiating itself from the dissolute aristocratic libertinism as well as from vulgar popular triviality. ¹⁸ He also recognizes the alliance between nationalism and bourgeois respectability as the key factor leading both to control over gender rules and sexuality, and the development of a racist ideology based on a rigid classification of individuals and ethnic groups. Mosse and Elias do not limit themselves to the analysis of behaviors and extend it to the bodies: in particular, the role of sports as well as of school and military education. ¹⁹ Both are interested in analyzing the homogenizing effects of the civilizing process and on multiple occasions address such issues as exclusion and discrimination of the outsiders. ²⁰ This issue affected them personally, both as Jews, as foreigners, and, no less importantly, because of their homosexuality. While for Mosse difficulties related to his sexual orientation constitute an important motivation to address the history of sexuality and to overcome the fear of being discovered and judged, the relationship that Elias has with his homosexuality is more complicated. One of the reasons for this may be that, during these decades, homophobia and indeed respectability were stronger in England than in the United States. ²¹

The biographies and intellectual paths of the two scholars are very similar and it is not surprising that both of them asked themselves the same question: How is it possible that the mass murder, perpetrated by the Nazis, happened in a civilized country? Both of them tried to find the answer in the German past and interpreted the Nazi era as a real de-civilizing process. Nevertheless, for Mosse the First World War represents the matrix for German Fascism, while Elias does not consider the war a cause of Nazism, since its seeds could already be found in the militarism of post-unification Prussia. Elias considers the militarization that took place before the First World War, more than brutalization caused by the First World War itself, to be the reason for the birth of nationalism and the driving force of de-civilization. He refers to the adjustment of bourgeois values to the military ones, a phenomenon that defines Wilhelmine Germany, and to the uniform’s respectability that Emilio Gentile describes in connection with fascism. Elias wrote: ‘I have treated the expansion of military models into parts of the German middle class somewhat more precisely because I believe that National Socialism and the decivilizing spurt which it embodied cannot be completely understood without reference to this context.’ ²² The brutalization of leading sections of the German middle classes and their absorption of a militaristic code thus formed, according to Elias, one of the preconditions for the process of barbarization in Germany which helped pave the way for Nazism. In short, for him that experience is less important in determining this sort of ‘breakdown of civilization’, since it constituted a relatively limited regression to barbarism.

Certain minimum rules of civilized conduct were generally still observed even in the treatment of prisoners of war. With a few exceptions, a kernel of self-esteem which prevents the senseless torturing of enemies and allows identification with one’s enemy in the last instance as another human being, together with compassion for his suffering, did not entirely lapse. ²³

According to Elias, the First World War simply raised the level of violence without affecting its essence. Therefore, it is not surprising that in 1939, when reflecting on the war in Ethiopia, Elias writes:

Compared to the battle fury of the Abyssinian warriors – admittedly powerless against the technical apparatus of the civilized army – or to the frenzy of the different tribes at the time of the Great Migrations, the aggressiveness of even the most warlike nations of the civilized world appears subdued. […] It is only in dreams or in isolated outbursts that account for as pathological that something of its immediate and unregulated force appears. ²⁴

Elias’s analysis of the civilizing process has been subject to criticism, in part because of the fact that he focused on the containment of violence within the state and ignored the violence coming from outside, in the competition with other nations. ²⁵ In fact, Elias dedicated a book and an essay to the role of the war, in which he emphasized his adherence to ‘the social institutions and the structure of personalities’, a phenomenon continuously reproduced by the human beings, moved by the waves of violence as a ship in the middle of a storm. And, according to Elias, it is precisely that desire for hegemony that prompted aggressive and anti-humanitarian nationalism that eventually led to the outbreak of the First World War and which later, followed by the failure of the peace agreement, led to Nazism’s success. ²⁶

Furthermore, historians have often accused Elias of underestimating the traumatic and brutalizing consequences of the war, but his biography shows that such accusations are unjustified. Elias participated in the war, and in his interview to Alessandro Cavalli the scholar talks about this ‘hideous and terrifying’ experience:

During the First World War I was enlisted as a soldier. I was still in school when the war started. The students of last year were under a lot of pressure of conservative nature: they were expected to sign up as volunteers. […] The ones who signed up as volunteers had less trouble passing the exams and getting a diploma – at the end everyone signed up. I can still recollect the genuine enthusiasm, which, I must admit, I’ve never shared, not even for a second. My parents were quite wealthy, and I was an only child, spoilt, skinny, short and not suited to military service. My worrisome mother and my equally worrisome father had been taking care of me, and all of a sudden I had to go to war. Me and a friend of mine were among the very few who were not enthusiastic. Being volunteers, one could choose a regiment and my father recommended me to join a group of telegraphists. ²⁷

Elias participated in the Battle of the Somme and suffered from the traumatizing effects of the war. In his memoir he writes:

For me they are only grisly memories. Perhaps I was sheltered from the worst, because we were a small group [of telegraphists], very closely integrated. […] I don’t think I was at the front for longer than a year. But I must probably have suffered a shock there at some time. […] I have a vivid recollection of going to the front, of dead horses and a few dead bodies and that underground shelter. Then there is some feeling of a big shock, but I cannot recollect. I cannot even remember how I got back. […] The front itself was a horror. A horror. ²⁸

Each time Elias talked about his war memories, he always described it as terrifying hell. In an interview with Carmen Thomas, for example, he says: ‘The dirt, the morass, the blood, the dying horses, the comrades dying close by, the barrage fire. I can vividly remember the scene when the war front moved nearer. We heard the incessant hollow thunder of barrage day and night; we saw the flashes of the guns.’ ²⁹ For Elias the war represented a total fracture between two worlds, the safe and peaceful one and the front with all its dangers.

One could contest the idea of Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau that Elias removed war from his work and distorted the reality so as not to have to consider war-related violence. The French scholar even accused Elias of staging a sort of ‘récit de trauma’. ³⁰ François Buton argues with those theories, in which Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau underestimates the effects of post-traumatic amnesia of Elias and fails to take into consideration that it is the experience of Elias that demonstrates that, in addition to war-related consent and enthusiasm, there was also such phenomenon as conformism, related to social pressure and to the resigned acceptance of reality. Moreover, as Buton rightly suggests, ‘we know very little on Norbert Elias as a soldier during the Great War. But what he told on his war has great value, because of his perspective, that of an experienced sociologist on his experience of the war, on the war itself, and on the world in general’; ³¹ since it is in that precise situation that he would feel the effects of discipline and self-constraint. There is no evidence to suggest that it was the enormous success of Elias that led to the impossibility of a positive review of Mosse’s work in France. ³²

On the contrary, the attempt to place the theory of brutalization in opposition to the civilizing process has led to Mosse’s second book being translated into French and entitled Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford 1990), a book that has been more successful, as the numerous reissues demonstrate. Therefore, Mosse’s theory was adopted by French historians, who sought to emphasize the connection between war and totalitarianism. Mosse himself at times exaggerated this connection, as in the case of his speech in Camerino on the occasion of his graduation ad honorem. ³³ The fact that Mosse’s book was translated into French as De la Grande Guerre au totalitarisme. La brutalisation des sociétés européennes is proof of such a historiographic operation. After all, Mosse was one of the founding members of the Historial de la Grande Guerre de Péronne (1989). ³⁴

In their uncritical acceptance of Mosse’s interpretation, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker have described the war as a destructive ‘crusade’ against the enemy. But above all, Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker interpret the war as a prelude to Fascism and Nazism; an event that not only created the preconditions for the assumption of power by totalitarian regimes but even anticipated many of their most harrowing features. Indeed, according to them, ‘the specific, momentary decline of civilization that Elias later thought he perceived in National Socialist totalitarianism actually took place in 1914–18; to a large extent, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were but an aftershock of the first upheaval’. ³⁵ In essence, the concept of brutalization underpinned the querelle between the historians of consensus and dissent to war. According to the consensus historians, brutalization was desired while, according to the historians of dissent, it was suffered. The dispute established a contrast between participation and coercion, the willful practice of violence and the passive resignation to it, spontaneous hatred of the enemy versus the shared sensation of being forced to live through the same inhuman experience. This same controversy was the basis for the bitter quarrel that took place between scholars of the Péronne school and the Crid 14–18 (Collectif de Recherche International et de Débat sur la Guerre de 1914–1918). As is often the case with academic debates, it seems that the disagreement has led each school of thought to intensify their positions of opposition, to a fault. ³⁶ One side’s justifiable critique of an approach to the history of the war, which tends to focus on the victims, has generated a historiography completely focused on hatred and violence. Inversely an overemphasis on the coercive and repressive elements of the war has undoubtedly obscured some willing forms of participation stemming from a sense of patriotism and nationalism shared by some soldiers who were no doubt a minority, but not for that any less important to historiographical reconstructions. The risk of these approaches reinforced by the First World War centenary and focused on the sensations and emotions expressed by the soldiers is that it could create a history of an offended humanity, of traumatized identities, in which transnational convergences are taken for granted and are always valid. At the same time, they risk remaining merely a sketch, a suggestive (but not exhaustive) impressionist picture, a result of hurried generalizations.

The notion of a uniform ‘culture of war’ also becomes problematic in its lumping together of cultures that are quite different from one another with respect to national, regional or local contexts; or between the cultures of the city and the country, the coastal or the mountainous regions. The social background, age and gender identity of different subjects are also variables that contribute to a heterogeneous mix of cultures. ³⁷ It would be more appropriate to speak of the culture(s) of war. Yet, even the term ‘war’ poses its own complications. The notion of a common cultural matrix that begins with the war could lead scholars to overlook continuities that exist with the cultural context which preceded, to emphasize forms of rupture instead of forms of re-adaptation and hybridization between old and new, the most characteristic aspect of the culture of war, in anthropological, psychological, artistic, and literary terms.

As we can see, it is the confrontation between Mosse’s and Elias’s interpretations that broadens the observation point for the First World War. There are some studies, dedicated to the destructive aspect of the war, which demonstrate how the war could not be waged without barbarism. There are other studies that analyze the aspects of the civilizing process that resisted the violence of war, even though it wasn’t easy. ³⁸ However, the result of selectively applying only one of these two approaches is that the war is considered either as an arrest of the civilizing process, or as an element that is indispensable for its fulfillment. ³⁹

I would also say that the corruption of values for which these people [Nazis] stand is not abnormal in our civilization. It’s part of a growing brutalization – a part of the idea of a total war which you already have in World War I. The enemy must be killed, and to kill the enemy is a good act. ⁴⁰

With these words, in his Interview on Nazism (1977), Mosse for the first time used the expression ‘brutalization of politics’, which would eventually become a historiographic category of reference. A year later he returned to the topic and, by elaborating on the concept, gave birth to a lively discussion on the subject; and this theme is picked up again and developed in more detail in Fallen Soldiers (1990). ⁴¹ Mosse’s book was written in part in Jerusalem and it was strongly influenced by the Israel situation in the 1970s and 1980s. The glorification of the military values and the celebration of the war dead were present for example both in the First World War and in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Mosse clearly perceived the risk of distorting the Zionist vision to look like nationalism, with the transformation of militarism into a collective liturgy. At the same time, what he saw in the shift to the right in Israeli politics after the occupation of the West Bank was an important source of his thinking about brutalization. ⁴²

One of the reasons for the popularity of Mosse’s position lay in the fact that it was developed in the middle of the anti-Vietnam protest, when it seemed clear that the violation of civilized social taboos of violence could lead to profound psychological traumas in veterans during their post-war life. The research of Paul Fussell and Eric Leed provides ample evidence of the traumatic changes brought about by the First World War, an event capable of radically transforming soldiers’ personalities and creating profound ruptures that were analyzed in anthropological, cultural, or psychological terms.

In Mosse’s letters to Leed, the above-mentioned research was fundamental for the elaboration of his concept of brutalization. ⁴³ The fact that historians were focused on the brutalization process much more than they were on the equally innovative concept of trivializations proves once again that the relationship between violence and politics was central in the 1970s. The particular interest in this relationship was also connected to the spread of historical anthropology: Mosse was particularly respected for giving importance to the mentalities, beliefs and emotions of soldiers and veterans. ⁴⁴

However, civilization and brutalization were not opposed processes that excluded one another; rather, it is only by examining their interaction that we can understand the postwar period and the rise of Fascism and Nazism more fully. The war’s impact in terms of brutalization of its combatants was much less uniform than has long been thought. Recently, a series of studies has tried to demonstrate that the assertion that the soldiers, and in particular the officers, were generally brutalized by their experience of destructiveness and indifference to human life at the front, is groundless. After all, during the war, the front and the home front remained integrated and related, with strong links and interactions. ⁴⁵ The recollections of the soldiers themselves offer two parallel visions of the conflict: war as a traumatic break which contributed to the birth of a new man and war as a confirmation of the ideals and values of the traditional gentleman at arms. Remarque and Jünger are a clear example of this ambivalence: Remarque condemns the brutality of the war, which he tries to interpret in terms of the old pre-war categories; Jünger, forged in storms of steel, identifies himself with the war, fully embraces violence and sets aside the conventions of the civilized world.

The postwar drift towards revolution and dictatorship, similar to the issue of consent under authoritarian rule, should be understood as a consequence of both civilization and brutalization, since both processes helped shape the political discourse of individual actors in ways that were unique. This does not mean that one should underestimate the role of the war in the Fascist seizure of power, however, it is important to remember that the consequences of the militarization of society were not necessarily anti-democratic: in France and England the war created a backlash that led to pacifism. In addition, the brutalization of politics also occurred in other countries that had not taken part in the war, such as Spain and Finland. In Italy the victories in the postwar elections of the Catholics and socialists — two parties that fought against intervention — prove that violence and authoritarianism were ‘not inevitable’ results of the war.

Other critics have pointed out that the vast majority of veterans, who survived the Great War, returned to peaceful civilian lives in late 1918. That was the case in England, as Jon Lawrence has demonstrated by analyzing how the fears of brutalization facilitated the containment of disorder and precluded any legitimation of violence. ⁴⁶ It is therefore not a coincidence that only a few veterans became proto-fascist. One could say the same about Italy. The image of veterans as overwhelming mass of squadrismo has been criticized first by Giovanni Sabbatucci and recently by Angel Alcade. ⁴⁷

The aspiration towards a democratic renewal and the country’s pacification has remained strong in the world of combattentismo at least until 1921. The war appeared merely as a warning against the use of arms. ⁴⁸

Differences in their experience at the front is what makes the trajectories of the veterans so heterogeneous. Even in this field a differentiated reality appears in which political or paramilitary violence of active minorities assumes the proportions that are different for each case. From this point of view France is an important example, since – as Antoine Prost showed in his research – the vast majority of the ex-soldiers had a spirit of reconciliation and contributed significantly to the defense of the democratic culture, insisting on the duty to make home more peaceful. ⁴⁹

At the same time one should also take into account the sector of the veterans’ movement that was attracted to extreme and violent politics. Following Mosse’s footsteps, Chris Millington pointed out that ‘the culture of war remained a weapon in the arsenal of the French right’ who were ready to use it against communism and against other political enemies. ⁵⁰ Strictly speaking, even in Germany the process of brutalization was less unequivocal compared to the way in which it was initially described, as we learnt from Benjamin Ziemann’s research on Bavaria soldiers and on republican war veterans in Weimar Germany. ⁵¹

According to Robert Gerwarth, to understand the escalation of postwar violence, one should consider not so much the war experiences between 1914 and 1917, but the way in which the war ended for the vanquished states. ⁵² It was a time when individual and collective identities were reorganized in order to adapt to the new requirements of peacetime. ⁵³ In order to describe the transition from war to peace, John Horne has introduced the category of ‘cultural demobilization’, that is the pacification of minds and the progressive restoration of peaceful relationships with former external enemies, as well as with internal ones. ⁵⁴ In order to fully understand this phenomenon, it is absolutely necessary to consider the war-related expectations: the higher they were, the greater was the risk of resentment and disappointment towards the end of the war, the feelings that were caused by the failure to fulfil one’s palingenetic desires. According to the American historian Adam R. Seipp, it is precisely ‘the failure of reciprocity’ between the State and the citizen that determined the postwar crisis: legitimate requests of the soldiers and civilians have not been satisfied and that is the reason why the war appeared to everyone as a useless sacrifice. ⁵⁵ Disappointment and resentment of the veterans, related to the broken promises and unmet expectations more that to the traumas of the war, are therefore at the center of the problem.

Mark Edele is another scholar who argued that the brutalization of politics is not merely determined by the actual or experienced threat of Bolshevism and by the existence, before the war, of strong class and ethical conflicts, but, more importantly, by the State’s incapability to maintain the monopoly for violence, and by the little gratitude showed towards veterans. ⁵⁶ One should also consider that, ‘except for the particular case of the German Freikorps in 1919/1920 and the Italian arditi, it was generally not the front generation itself but the younger ones who tended toward violent action’. ⁵⁷

Some historians pointed out that it was the war itself that helped foster humanitarianism, pacifism and human rights. ⁵⁸ In 1925 the Locarno Pact and the Third Geneva Convention, which banned the use of biological and chemical weapons, helped overcome the war culture and reduced frictions between the opposing camps. However, the fact that Nazism managed with such ease to wipe out this climate of reconciliation is a clear proof of the reversible nature of the civilizing process.

Elias published his book in 1939, when the Nazi escalation was destroying the culture of good manners. Not without reason, in the Preface of September 1936 he writes:

The issues raised by the book have their origin less in scholarly tradition, in the narrower sense of the word, than in the experiences in whose shadow we all live, experiences of the crisis and transformation as it had existed hitherto, and the simple need to understand what this civilization really amounts to. ⁵⁹

Therefore, a lot of criticism on the limit of civilization is based on a misrepresentation of Elias’s position, since the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust are central in the context of his theory. For the scholar, the civilizing process is always attended by de-civilizing dangers and tendencies, and the two processes often go ‘hand in hand’. As Fletcher notes, he refers to this idea, using expressions such as ‘regression to barbarism’, ‘vulnerability of civilization’, ‘breakdown’ and ‘decay’ to describe de-civilization, and the term ‘de-civilizing spurt’ to refer to the Nazi genocide of Jews. ⁶⁰ It is in a series of essays and lectures, later published as The Germans (1989), that Elias responded to the challenge presented by the German case to his theory of civilization, but we must not forget that already in December 1929, he had written an article in a Jewish newspaper entitled Zur Soziologie des deutschen Antisemitismus. ⁶¹ In 1933 he was part of a team of social scientists in exile directed by Karl Mannheim and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, meant to study ‘The Sociological Causes of the Cultural Crisis in the Era of Mass Democracies and Autarchies’. ⁶²

Elias argued that Germany was uncivilized in certain significant ways even before the Nazi era, and that because of this lack of civilization the management of violence was lower than elsewhere in Europe. In other words, the un-civilizing process had been brought to a head by a series of long-term causes. In fact, he traced the continuity of a culture of violence stemming from the bourgeoisie of Imperial Germany, through the Weimar era to the formation of the Nazi state. The path towards barbarity and dehumanization, Elias wrote, always takes considerable time to unfold in societies that are relatively civilized. Terror and horror rarely appear in those societies without a long process of social disintegration.

Dunning and Mennell rightly pointed out that some scholars overlooked this point. Elias’s attempts to show that ‘the brutalization of dominant bourgeois groups in the Kaiserreich, during the First World War and in the course of the escalating double-bind of violence and counter violence in the Weimar Republic when there occurred a decay in the state’s monopoly of force, all took place as part of a longer-term process which was on balance de-civilizing and which ultimately led to the Nazis’ rise’. ⁶³ In any case, for most historians, the brutalization process described by Mosse represented an explanation of German barbarity under the Nazis that was more convincing than Elias’s allusion to a German Sonderweg.

However, in his The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origin of the Third Reich (New York 1964) Mosse considers the Nazi aberration a result of ideals and beliefs that have for a long time been rooted in the German mentality. After all, he always adopts a multifactorial approach, where different elements come together in a single way, like tiles in a mosaic that can create different images. The final result is therefore never an inevitable conclusion – already foreseen from the outset. At times, his statements may appear contradictory precisely because in his books he focuses mainly on specific aspects: the body, sexuality, anti-Semitism, nationalism, camaraderie, war, bourgeois respectability. Yet all these elements, these ideas, these experiences together are what give life to the story. Using Mosse’s metaphor, one could say that it takes many pieces of wood to make a fire that, depending on the circumstances, may smoulder for a long time or suddenly flare up.

Both Elias and Mosse are interested in the long-term historical elements which enabled the seizure of power by the Nazis; at the same time both of them are unwilling to underestimate the contingent factors which contributed to the rapid unfolding of brutalization and to the arrest of the civilizing process. The image of an avalanche following a particular event, an image that Emilio Gentile used when describing Mosse’s approach, ⁶⁴ can also be used – in my opinion – for describing Elias’s method. At the same time both scholars point out the unexpected break that took place, the so-called ‘barbarization spurt’, an expression Elias uses in regards to Nazism. For both of them this sudden break is a starting point for the growing avalanche that ended up affecting the long-term processes.

In spite of this common inclination for impressionistic generalizations, suggestive but not always corroborated in full by an attentive analysis of the precise historical context, both of them employed the concepts of civilization and brutalization to understand the relationship between the two processes. Both historians explored the various origins of Nazism, without necessarily concluding that each individual piece of this cultural backdrop would inevitably come together to form the final picture.

In time scholars have significantly elaborated on Mosse’s and Elias’s hypotheses, and the fact that their theories have inspired a series of research studies is a proof of their value and of their great importance. Their heuristic capacity is more descriptive than analytical, especially because, as Mosse himself recognized, ‘unfortunately this disagreement with Elias never became the kind of dialogue built upon different points of view from which I have benefitted so much’. ⁶⁵ And I would say, historiography as well would have benefitted from this dialogue, considering how the concept of civilization and that of brutalization have mutually affected each other.