Abstract
Many years ago, I discovered Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West at my favourite second-hand bookstore in downtown Manchester. It was intriguing because the author was clearly a Conservative, but surprisingly his book was published by Victor Gollancz’s Left Wing Book Club. Gollancz was a fascinating character. A German Jew who moved between Liberalism and Communism while calling himself a Christian Socialist.
Citing Kolnai’s work in an undergraduate essay prompted the comment ‘Obscure reference. Do not use.’ When I very cautiously asked the lecturer about this, he had clearly never read the book and asked to see it. After a brief inspection he told me that his suspicions were confirmed because Kolnai did not provide standard academic references. Forty-five years later, Wolfgang Bialas corrected this problem when he made the first German translation of Kolnai’s work complete with footnotes based on the Kolnai Papers housed at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Hopefully, he will now produce a much-needed English version complete with footnotes.
As a result of the German translation, the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research into Totalitarianism at the Technical University, Dresden, held a conference in July 2016 on Kolnai’s work which resulted in the publication of “Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West Reconsidered”, which has appeared in both English and German. This is an excellent book, which ought to be available in all college and university libraries. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the rise of National Socialism and its overtones today.
In the first chapter, Bialas offers a contextualization of Kolnai’s work noting that some of the things he says, about homosexuality and popular resentment against Jews, for example, sound strange today but must be understood in the context of the time which he explains. Then he discusses the reaction of reviewers to the book when it first appeared before providing an outline of Kolnai’s work.
The book is then divided into four parts. These are: chapters two to four, “Part I: Topics addressed in Kolnai’s The War Against the West”; chapters five to seven, “Part II: Comparing Kolnai with contemporary attempts of coming to terms with Nazism”; chapters eight to 10, “Part III: Kolnai’s work and the reception of The War Against the West”; and chapters 11 to 13, “Part IV: Kolnai’s political and moral philosophy”. Each offers details descriptions and critiques of Kolnai’s work.
Uwe Backes provides a stimulating critical discussion of Kolnai’s work in chapter two, pointing out the complexity of Kolnai’s thought and the contorted reality of the movement he was discussing. As such it is a wake-up call to many scholars who often simplify political and social developments. Richard Steigmann-Gall and Micha Brumlik identify weaknesses in Kolnai that they relate to his Catholicism. While Dan Stone points out that as late as 1938 many British people wanted to see Hitler and Nazism in a sympathetic light, a fact that made Kolnai’s task particularly difficult. Michaela Hoenicke Moore then situates Kolnai’s work in the American context where an influential lobby of pro-Nazi Americans attacked him although he received a much better reception from the press than he did in Britain.
Kolnai work is compared with that of Franz Neumann by Rolf Zimmerman who shows how it supplemented and supported Neumann’s popular work Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933-1945 (1942). Lee Congdon further contextualizes Kolnai by providing fascinating insights into the development of his thinking. After that Bialas carefully analyses Kolnai’s critique of National Socialism and Graham J. McAleer provides a careful discussion of Nazi sexual politics which Kolnai grounds in their commitment to vitalism. These are closely argued and complex chapters that raises a lot of issues.
Zoltán Balázs follows with an analysis of the complex relationship between Kolnai and Carl Schmidt. This leads on to a discussion of Kolnai’s moral philosophy by Chris Bessemans. These chapters work well together and continue to raise important issues. The book concludes with Andrew S. Cunningham’s discussion of Kolnai’s post-war moral and political philosophy which brings it to a rounded conclusion.
Overall, this is an excellent introduction to Kolnai’s work which invites further research by addressing issues that continue to be relevant today. Importantly, it is a warning against complacency. It reminds us of the horror and threat posed by Nazism both in the 1930s and today.