Benno Ennker / Heidi Hein-Kircher (Hrsg.): Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Marburg/Lahn: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2010. VII, 384 S. = Tagungen zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 27. ISBN: 978-3-87969-359-7

Benno Ennker / Heidi Hein-Kircher (Hrsg.): Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts. Marburg/Lahn: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2010. VII, 384 S. = Tagungen zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 27. ISBN: 978-3-87969-359-7.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/exlibris/aleph/a20_1/apache_media/UKXK3VUP2NXBEJ62LGPMJPGAJ6V2EE.pdf

It took a long time until historians turned to the cults of modern leaders, whose bronze statues populated the built environment of some countries until the watershed years 1989–1991. When historians finally did take up the topic during the 1990s and 2000s, their main focus were the “major” cults of Mussolini, Lenin, and Stalin. Among the few studies that considered “minor” cults were a 2002 monograph on Poland’s Joseph Piłsudski by Heidi Hein-Kircher (see: Der Piłsudski-Kult und seine Bedeutung für den polnischen Staat: 1926-1939) and a 2004 volume edited by Balázs Apor et al., which included chapters on the cults of Poland’s Bolesław Bierut, Bulgaria’s Georgi Dimitrov, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, and Albania’s Enver Hoxha (see: The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc). Thanks to the volume under review here we now also have studies of such cults as that of right-wing Lithuanian interwar dictator Antanas Smetona or Estonian authoritarian leader Konstantin Päts (see the excellent contributions by Klaus Richter and Olaf Mertelsmann, respectively). It is the great merit of this volume, based on a 2007 conference in Marburg, to have firmly recentered on the multiplicity of cults in Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and the Balkans.

But there is also a lot to learn about the “major” cults in the fourteen German and two English articles, many of which (eight) are based on archival research that would not have been possible before the opening of the Iron Curtain. Sandra Dahlke, in a fascinating case study of Emelian Iaroslavskii, who dreamed of becoming the single impresario of the Stalin cult but was forever competing against other high-ranking Party members, shows how this antireligious campaigner fell prey to his own cult-building and became dependent in an existential sense – literally, in terms of health – on signs of approval from “the father of peoples”. Toni Morant i Ariño demonstrates how representations of Franco, the Caudillo, were openly Christian and predicated on a distancing from the “godless” Bolsheviks. Other pieces are comparative in outlook, showing important commonalities and differences, entanglements and transfers between the cults. Nicola Hille compares the posters of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin; Daniel Ursprung the cults of Stalin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, and Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu; Jan Behrends offers a sweeping panorama of Fascist, Bolshevik, and Nazi leader cults; and co-editors Hein-Kircher and Benno Ennker situate the leader cult phenomenon in the vast anthropological, sociological, and political science literatures (see Hein-Kircher’s introduction and Ennker’s essay).

While openly Christian references were typical of the cults of Mussolini, Franco, Austria’s Dollfuß, and Slovakia’s Jozef Tiso (on Dollfuß and Tiso see the articles by Werner Suppanz and Stanislava Kolková), hardly any of the authors pursue lines of interpretation harking back to the field of political religion. Most use Max Weber’s charisma concept, and this raises some questions. For one, was charisma innate in a person or manufactured via modern mass media? In broad concluding essays, Jan Behrends and Ennker favor an interpretation of Weber that leans toward the latter, anti-essentialist reading (pp. 326–328, 353, 360–361), but Daniel Ursprung speaks of Hoxha’s “authentic charisma” (p. 72), Ralph Meindl describes East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch as “not as charismatic” as Hitler (p. 231), and Stefan Dietrich writes that Croatia’s Ante Pavelić “in contrast to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini was neither particularly charismatic nor rhetorically gifted” (p. 292). If one takes Dietrich’s claim seriously, one wonders how Stalin with his subdued rhetorical style can be called “charismatic”. Personally, I would favor a middle-of-the-road approach: beyond the essentialism but also beyond radical constructivism, I would argue that charisma was fabricated or projected, but the projection never happened on a white screen. Personal characteristics did play some role. I would also emphasize more strongly the role of the mass media, which transpires from some essays, e.g. Andreas Oberender’s on the cult of Brezhnev, who had to cope with the medium of television that made his senility more difficult to hide than that of some prewar Party luminaries (p. 215).

Connected with Weberian charisma is the issue of social integration. Most authors explicitly state that this was the main function of the personality cults (Ennker, for instance, describes the aftermath of the First World War as a “crisis of […] the integration of national societies,” p. 351). But what if the cults were as short-lived as in Estonia, where “the portraits in offices were changed too often” (p. 251) because of rapid regime changes? What if there was a rival cult, as in the person of Raštikis in 1938–1939 in Smetona’s Lithuania (p. 134)? What if it proved impossible to “keep the cult of Tito alive beyond the death of the head of state” and this cult ended up being “an element of disintegration” (pp. 198–199), as Marc Živojinović writes? Can we still speak of a “cult” if it was widely contested and did not integrate?

Contestation is another important, if rather more implicit, theme of the volume. Alexey Tikhomirov in an impressive article hints at competing interpretations of the Stalin Cult in East Germany (pp. 300, 305) and so does Mertelsmann for the Estonian Stalin cult (pp. 242–243). For Romania Ursprung points to “a widely disseminated counter-cult, above all manifest in a culture of [anti-Ceauşescu] jokes” (p. 71). Clearly, contestation is one of the issues that deserves to be fleshed out more fully by future scholarship.

More generally, several authors touch on the notoriously difficult discussion of reception. Balázs Apor in his article on Mátyás Rákosi uses opinion reports (stored at the National Archives of Hungary), but I am not convinced that they really prove that “popular indifference characterized the reception of the cult” (p. 94). The fact that these reports emphasized, for example, the insufficient enthusiasm among Party workers and propagandists in disseminating the cult (see p. 98) might well be a function of the document genre, which seems to have been predicated on the identification of problems that the organs would then rectify. Indifference and a lack of enthusiasm, in other words, are necessary findings of those who drew up the reports in order to make themselves look better. Another article in the volume, that by Meindl on Gauleiter Koch, in fact shows how sensitive such mass sources as the reports used by Apor are: he cites a case in which Koch successfully mobilized thousands of telegrams that the general population sent to Reich President Hindenburg in order to lobby for Koch’s nomination as highest official in Eastern Prussia, as Oberpräsident der Provinz (p. 224).

Yet none of these questions and criticisms should detract from the value of this volume. It is a very welcome contribution to the growing and increasingly multifaceted literature on modern personality cults.

Jan Plamper, London