The black book of communism

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The Black Book of Communism is the title of a collection of essays from 1997 in which eleven (in the German-language edition from 1998 two more) authors describe crimes , terror , and oppression (subtitles) by communist states, governments and organizations. The editor, the French historian Stéphane Courtois , published the book on November 6, 1997, the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1917, as the first global total account of 80 years of communism . In the foreword he compared the causes and the total number of victims he researched for these crimes of 100 million people with those of National Socialism and demanded that they be appropriately dealt with historically and morally.

The title Black Book identifies it as a collection and documentation of negative examples. He also reacted to the black book on the criminal mass extermination of Jews , which was written by Ilja Ehrenburg and Wassilij Grossmann until 1948 and was then banned in the Soviet Union , which Arno Lustiger had re-published in 1994 under the title Das Schwarzbuch: Der Genozid an der Soviet Juden .

The book quickly became a multiple reissue bestseller , translated into 26 languages ​​and sold around a million times worldwide. It was discussed controversially among the authors involved, in politics and the media, especially in France and Germany . A second part appeared in France in 2002, and its German edition appeared in 2004.

content

structure

The French original edition from 1997 comprises 846 pages and begins with a foreword by Courtois under the programmatic title The Crimes of Communism . The book is divided into five main parts (chapters). The German edition from 1998 names the title and authors:

1. A state against its people. Violence, Oppression and Terror in the Soviet Union

In this part, Nicolas Werth deals with the history of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1956 on almost 300 pages.

2. World revolution, civil war and terror

In this main part Courtois and Jean-Louis Panné deal with the Comintern (2.1) and the behavior of the NKVD in the Spanish Civil War (2.2); Rémi Kauffer deals in general with the relationship between communism and terrorism (2.3).

3. The rest of Europe as a victim of communism

In this part Andrzej Paczkowski deals with the relationship between the Soviet Union and Poland (3.1), Karel Bartosek with Central and Southeastern Europe (3.2).

4. Communist Regimes in Asia: Between "Re-education" and Mass Murder

In this part, Jean-Louis Margolin deals with the period of communist rule in China (4.1), Vietnam (4.2.2), Laos (4.2.3) and Cambodia (4.3), Pierre Rigoulot deals with North Korea (4.2.1).

5. The Third World

In this part Pascal Fontaine deals with communist states and movements in Latin America (5.1), Yves Santamaria in Africa (5.2), Sylvain Boulouque deals with the Soviet-ruled Afghanistan (5.3). Courtois closes this main part with a summary under the title Why? .

The original edition was originally supposed to contain a chapter on the GDR . However, this did not apply because - according to the historian Hans Mommsen , citing Courtois' own statements - the intended author, who came from the GDR, did not present the SED's policy primarily as terror and violence. It was not until the German edition of 1998 that there was a further chapter under the title The Processing of Socialism in the GDR . In it Ehrhart Neubert deals with political crimes in the GDR (6.1), Joachim Gauck on the difficult handling of perception (6.2). As in the French original, it ends with an afterword by the editor.

introduction

The introduction was originally supposed to be written by François Furet : In 1995 he portrayed communism and national socialism as rival but complementary currents that were comparable in their hostility to the bourgeoisie and which emerged from the First World War , and in doing so positively affiliated with Ernst Nolte . After Furet passed away in July 1997, Courtois wrote the preface to the book himself.

He pointed out that communism was both a theory of an ideal polity and a real practice that had introduced systematic repression, including terror, as a form of government. The theory should be measured by its empirical results. It is not without reason that the Soviet Union also invoked the forerunners of utopian communism . In order to consolidate their power, communist regimes “made mass crimes a regular system of government”. The memory of earlier terror guaranteed the credibility and effectiveness of later threats of repression. This regularity characterizes all historical and existing communist regimes. Despite later weakening, “archives and innumerable testimonies have shown that terror was a basic feature of modern communism from the beginning.” The idea that it was only a “chance coincidence of unfortunate circumstances” in individual countries or times should be finally abandoned.

In a list by country, he estimated the dead by communists at nearly 100 million. These are crimes against humanity within the meaning of the statute of the International Military Tribunal of 1945: All the crime categories named there, which the new French criminal law has specified, apply to many crimes that were committed under Lenin , Josef Stalin and in all other communist countries except possibly in Cuba and Nicaragua under the Sandinista .

Mass crimes under Lenin and Stalin, which were ideologically justified as “class war”, especially the shootings and deportations of Cossacks (1920ff.), Kulaks (1930–1932) and the willful starvation of several million Ukrainians ( Holodomor 1932–1933), are genocide: Here the "class murder" is very similar to the "race murder". "The death of a Ukrainian kulak child who the Stalinist regime deliberately delivered to the famine is just as serious as the death of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto who fell victim to the hunger brought about by the Nazi regime." He does not want the singularity of the Holocaust contest: namely mobilization and use of top technological resources in an “industrial process” that includes the construction of an “ extermination factory ”, gassing and burning of the gassed in crematoria . However, many communist regimes systematically used hunger as a weapon and, with the desired total control and distribution of food according to “merit”, brought about famine.

Courtois then made another list of crimes committed by communist governments. Historians could also describe these as genocide as the legal category, since this was also applied to comparable mass crimes after the Nuremberg trials. In doing so, as Robert Conquest called for in 1968, one must include the fact of complicity.

It is not about "making any macabre arithmetic comparisons, a kind of double-entry bookkeeping of horror, a hierarchy of cruelty." The around 100 million victims of communism versus around 25 million victims of National Socialism are a fact. This should "at least stimulate thought about the similarity that exists between the Nazi regime, which has been regarded as the most criminal system of the century since 1945, and the communist regime, whose legitimacy on the international level was unchallenged until 1991, which has determined to this day Countries in power and still has followers all over the world. ”He further declared:“ The methods developed by Lenin and systematized by Stalin and his students suggest the methods of the Nazis, but often anticipate them. ”So The Reich Security Main Office gave the camp commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß , a detailed report on Soviet forced labor camps. The National Socialists were inspired by these “techniques of mass violence” introduced by communists. Regarding possible reservations about such comparisons and theses, Courtois recalled Wassilij Grossmann: He described how Stalin demonized the kulaks as parasites and child murderers in order to win the population over to the massacre of them, and this with the extermination propaganda of the National Socialists against Jewish children equated.

He then added the question of why communist crimes, unlike Nazi crimes, were given far less attention and condemnation in politics and science after 1945. He made a fixation on the singularity of the Holocaust that was inadequate in his view jointly responsible for this. After the collapse of the communist power center in Moscow, his book should serve to remember and commemorate these hitherto neglected crimes of communism.

List of casualty numbers and mass crimes

In his introduction, the historian Courtois listed estimates for people killed by communists, which he characterized as "rough approximations based on unofficial sources":

  • Soviet Union : 20 million
  • People's Republic of China : 65 million
  • Vietnam: 1 million
  • North Korea: 2 million
  • Cambodia: 2 million
  • Eastern Europe: 1 million
  • Latin America: 150,000
  • Africa: 1.7 million
  • Afghanistan: 1.5 million
  • the international communist movement and communist parties without government power: around 10,000.

He also listed mainly mass crimes in the Soviet Union and others:

  • the execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners without trial,
  • the murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922,
  • the 1922 famine that caused 5 million deaths,
  • the extermination and deportation of the Cossacks in 1920,
  • the murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps from 1918 to 1930,
  • the liquidation of nearly 690,000 people in the Great Terror of 1937-1938,
  • the deportation of 2 million kulaks and so-called people from 1930 to 1932,
  • the annihilation of 4 million Ukrainian and 2 million Russian and other farmers as well as Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads by an artificial and systematically prolonged famine from 1932 to 1933,
  • the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans and residents of Bessarabia from 1939 to 1941 and again from 1944 to 1945,
  • the deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941,
  • the complete deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943,
  • the complete deportation of the Chechens in 1944,
  • the complete deportation of the Ingush in 1944,
  • the deportation and extermination of the urban population in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978,
  • the slow annihilation of the Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950.

In addition, he summarized similar crimes of the regimes of Mao Zedong , Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot .

Details of the causes of the crime

In the socialist countries, according to the view represented in the Black Book, violence spread beyond classes against all those people who were regarded as " counter-revolutionary elements" and who did not represent communist ideology . During the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China and Cambodia, the educated people of the upper class, such as e. B. Doctors or teachers, killed or suppressed, but also political opponents from all other strata. Although there was no industrial annihilation in socialist regimes as in the Third Reich , the number of victims of the state systems based on communist ideology worldwide exceeds that of fascism many times over, since whole countries first got into bloody conflicts as a result of the revolution , then accompanied by large ones political cleansing and famines deliberately brought about or caused by serious organizational errors. Examples are the kulak murders and murders of millions in Ukraine alone , caused by Lasar Moisseyevich Kaganowitsch or the Gulag system . The reason for the higher number of victims is primarily that the spatial and temporal scope of real existing socialism, especially in the 20th century in China, the USSR and the other Eastern Bloc states, exceeded that of fascism many times over. Already in the introduction Courtois writes that the executors of genocide driven by Stalinism killed four times more people than the National Socialists, and demands that this must also be allowed to be said in order to demonstrate the similarity of the two ideologies in this regard without being suspected of being a " Hierarchy of Cruelty ”. This is necessary because the communist ideology still has many followers and people are in the hands of corresponding regimes.

Courtois names the attempts of the perpetrators and supporters of the Marxist-Leninist idea to disguise or downplay the communist crimes:

  • Justification of the crimes related to the revolution: "Where there is planing, chips fall";
  • Intimidation, defamation of opponents and critics up to and including murder;
  • Self-portrayal as the most outstanding representative of anti-fascism in view of the fact of the Soviet-communist victory over criminal National Socialism; whoever triumphs over evil must belong “to the camp of the good”.

Reception in France

Co-authors

In France, the co-authors Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Margolin and Karel Bartosek publicly distanced themselves from the introduction and the title “The Book of Communist Crimes” planned by Courtois since the end of October 1997, even before the publication date. They had protested against it beforehand; Margolin had only agreed to the publication when the publisher threatened to take action for compensation.

On October 31, 1997, Margolin declared in the newspaper Le Monde : Unlike National Socialism, Stalinism sought to “eradicate class enemies”, but not of individuals or entire strata of the population. Werth and Margolin criticized on November 7th and 14th, 1997: Whether mass crimes belonged to the central characteristics of communist regimes, emerged from the ideology itself and was essentially related to National Socialism, are legitimate questions. However, nowhere does the book treat this with the necessary thorough discussion. Courtois neglects a qualitative difference between communism and national socialism: the former was originally an emancipatory ideology that does not necessarily cause terror. There were no extermination camps in the Soviet Union. To what extent communist teachings had to and did lead to mass murders remains, contrary to his claim, unexplained. His casualty estimates are unclear and contradict official investigations and the details on Soviet (according to Werth 15, not 20 million) and Vietnamese (according to Margolin 500,000, not 1 million) victims. Apparently Courtois is "obsessed" with being able to reach his total estimate of 100 million. You yourself estimated the victims of communist regimes at 65 to 93 million. Bartosek welcomed the "world's first synthesis" of communist crimes, but refused to "view the suffering of the victims ideologically and politically."

In December 1997 Werth declared that a methodologically careful comparison of mass deaths in different communist systems had not been made in the book, as was a comparison with National Socialism. Communist dictatorships do not have to systematically take on criminal forms. There were mass executions in the Soviet Union only in certain phases and a total of ten years. That their camps were role models for the National Socialists has not been proven. Mass starvation deaths of around 11 million are not to be equated with around 1.5 million people who perished in labor camps and around 800,000 people executed. Only by adding up all the different causes of death would one arrive at a maximum of 15 million Soviet victims between 1917 and 1953. Today's French communists have nothing to do with this past occurrence in the USSR. Only Courtois and his publisher had intended the book to have a political effect that bothers him.

politics

From August 25, 1997, the right-wing extremist Front National party announced that a “ Nuremberg Trial against Communism” would be held on November 9, 1997 in Paris . Party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated this announcement after the publication of the Black Book. On November 9, 1997, around 1000 people demonstrated in Paris against the criminal trial against Maurice Papon and for a moral trial against communism. The National Front MP Bernard Antony called for this and , with reference to the Black Book, referred to Hitler as a “baby” or “milk boy” compared to Stalin. The journalist Pierre Daix described the book as the "Nuremberg Trial against Communism".

On November 12, 1997, the Black Book was discussed in the French National Assembly . With reference to this, the party leader of the UDF , François Bayrou , and his group colleague Michel Voisin demanded that then Prime Minister Lionel Jospin “hold those who have supported such crimes to account”. What was meant was the KPF , with which the PSF then formed a government coalition. Jospin rejected the request and recalled the anti-Hitler coalition between France and the Soviet Union. The PCF has already condemned the Gulag , albeit possibly too late. "But for me, communism has to do with the Popular Front, the struggles of the Resistance , the governments from 1945 to 1981. I am proud that communism is represented in my government." The UDF deputies then left parliament in protest, but not the Gaullist MPs.

On December 3, 1997, Courtois, the then PCF chairman Robert Hue , the former Gulag prisoner Jacques Rossi, the former advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev Andrei Grachev , the singer Jean Ferrat and others discussed on a television broadcast. Courtois stated that he did not support le Pen's request because he was a historian and not a lawyer. Hue condemned the crimes in the Soviet Union, which he considered separate from the idea and possible future of communism. Ferrat referred to child labor and 40,000 starvation deaths every day and asked when there would be a program on a "Black Book of Capitalism".

media

All the major French newspapers and some specialist journals took part in the discussion about the black book, in some cases with special editions and article series in which historians, political scientists, philosophers and writers took a stand. These included Le Monde , Le Figaro , Le Point , Liberation , L'Humanité , La Quinzaine littéraire , Le Monde diplomatique , L'Histoire , Commentaire , Le Nouvel Observateur and Sud-Ouest Dimanche .

As a critic in the black book approximately expressed Gilles Perrault , Lilly Marcou , Maurice Nadeau , Annette Wievorka , Jean-Marie Colombani , an advocate about Pierre Briancon , Jean-Luc Domenach , Laurent Joffrin , Jacques Julliard , André Glucksmann , Jean-François Revel , Bernard -Henri Lévy , Simone Korff Sausse , Krzysztof Pomian , Emile Copfermann .

Reception in other countries

International reviews

Amir Weiner said in 2002: The list of the black book for mass murders, deportations, state-initiated famines and barbaric torture by communist regimes offers hardly any new facts, but is informative and largely indisputable. Even where the numbers are questionable and obviously inflated, the brutality of communism in power is well illustrated. In addition, the fact that the atrocities consistently went hand in hand with the seizure of power supports the argument for deliberation, especially in the chapter on the Soviet Union by Nicolas Werth. Nevertheless, the thick volume is afflicted with serious errors, incoherent and often tends to mere provocation. Unfortunately, the authors reduced the comparison between National Socialism and Communism to mere counting of the dead, accusing the Communists of murdering 100 million and the Nazis of 25 million. This approach is at best ahistorical and degrading.

Shane J. Maddock noted in 2001 that the controversy that sparked the Black Book was largely due to its introduction. Courtois postulates here that communism is "a greater evil" than National Socialism. However, the polemical nature of the introduction is not carried over to all of the following chapters. Werth and Margolin's contributions do not betray Courtois' ideological claims. She summed up: “Beyond polemics and the lack of reliable sources, even the best chapters of the Black Book seem to focus so intensely on the internal workings of terror and oppression that they fail to answer the question of why communist regimes so often target violence resorted to their own peoples. The Black Book also fails to provide the reader with an understanding of how communism has garnered popular support from millions around the world. If violence and repression were all Marxism had to offer, why has it ever received popular support, and why do some still defend and advocate it? "

David J. Galloway emphasized in 2001: The fact that Courtois' co-editors Werth and Margolin had distanced themselves from his equating the “class murder” of communism with the “racial murder” of National Socialism shows the significant possibilities of interpretation of the book. Above all, he positively highlighted the study of the Soviet system.

Noam Chomsky has expressed himself critically on the Black Book and its reception on several occasions: The foreword rightly condemns the terrifying and unspeakable crimes of communism, although absurdly it claims this condemnation as new. It describes communism as a system of unique evil, with no compensatory characteristics. In contrast, crimes of the West, capitalism and democracy would be viewed, at best as minor mistakes here and there or as a failure to react quickly enough to the crimes of others. The horrors of communism had been described in books and media for 80 years, so reviewers who portrayed the book as surprising and new must have somehow failed to notice this steady stream of criticism. The vision of one's own fundamental, albeit sometimes faulty, goodness in contrast to the incomprehensible monstrosity of the enemy repeats in detail the imagery of the last half century, as it was captured vividly in a founding document of the Cold War from 1950 ("NSC-68"). The picture was extremely useful and once again made it possible to erase the balance of the terrible crimes on our own side that had accumulated in recent years. For Chomsky, the book's reception was an example of a Western moral inconsistency: to be indignant about the crimes of others in order to distract from the crimes, for which one's own consent was often decisively responsible and which could be changed. Instead, the US had condemned and punished Vietnam for one of the clearest cases of humanitarian intervention , namely against the Pol Pot regime depicted in the Black Book.

Reviews in Germany

The debate in Germany began in November 1997 with articles in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. After the German translation was published, the weekly newspaper Die Zeit launched a multi-part debate on the black book of communism in the summer of 1998 , which included Jutta Scherrer , professor of Russian history in Paris, the sociology professor Helmut Dubiel , the writer Lothar Baier , Manfred Hildermeier , professor for Eastern European history in Göttingen, and Joachim Gauck participated. Christian Geulen , Professor of History in Konstanz, discussed the black book for the Frankfurter Rundschau . The Black Book reminded the Bonn political scientist Volker Kronenberg of Ernst Nolte's theses . Kurt Pätzold , professor of history in Berlin, got involved in the discussion in the newspaper Junge Welt . The political scientist and PDS politician André Brie warned the German left against rejecting the debate about the black book .

The Piper-Verlag carried the debate with four panel discussions from 15 to 18 June 1998, Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Dresden, where in addition Courtois and Joachim Gauck three other people, German historians, political scientists and journalists took part: including Hans -Ulrich Wehler , Heinrich August Winkler , Jürgen Kocka , Hans Maier , Horst Möller , Hans Mommsen , Wolfgang Wippermann .

"Red Holocaust"

Critical reviewers summed up Courtois' central thesis that the mass crimes of communist regimes were ideologically determined genocides, comparable in extent and intent to the Holocaust, since his interview in Die Zeit (No. 48, November 24, 1997) with the expression " Red Holocaust ” together.

Wolfgang Wippermann and Jens Mecklenburg titled their critical volume of essays 1998 "Red Holocaust"? Criticism of the Black Book of Communism to warn against equating National Socialist and Communist mass crimes. Horst Möller, on the other hand, used the term in 1999 in his book The Red Holocaust and the Germans without quotation marks and almost exclusively presented authors who support the central thesis of the Black Book .

Responsive Publications

Gilles Perrault, who was one of the first critics of the black book in France, published in 1998, as announced in 1997, a collection of essays under the title " The Black Book of Capitalism ". In it, 27 predominantly French historians, political scientists and sociologists deal critically with the overall consequences of the globalized market economy .

In 1999 Robert Kurz published the black book Capitalism as a history and analysis of the market economy from the point of view of the value-critical school of Marxism .

In 2003 the French historian Marc Ferro published his 840-page “Black Book of Colonialism ” with the same publisher as Courtois , which dealt primarily with the colonization of North America and North Africa, especially Algeria , by the French. The author explicitly described it as the counterpart to the Black Book of Communism.

Council of Europe resolution

On January 25, 2006, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a majority vote on Council of Europe Resolution 1481 (2006) on the need for international condemnation of crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes . Göran Lindblad , a Swedish MP for the conservative EPP , submitted a report for the draft text in 2005. This took over unchanged the number of victims from the introduction to the Black Book. The resolution called on all communist and post-communist parties in the EU to distance themselves clearly from the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes, which had been justified in the name of the theory of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat , and to condemn them unequivocally , in view of the history of communism .

The resolution remained highly controversial in the Council of Europe and provoked a number of counter-motions that refused to equate state communism and National Socialism using the category of totalitarianism.

Second part

In 2002 Courtois published a sequel to the Black Book in France. It was titled Du passé faisons table rase! (“Let's clean up the past!”), A quote from the first stanza of the “Internationale” . In 2004 the German translation was published under the title The Black Book of Communism 2. The heavy legacy of ideology .

content

In the 160-page long first chapter, written by Courtois himself, the author mainly dealt with his critics as well as the conflicting reactions and debates in general that the publication of the first black book had triggered in Europe and especially in France: During communism in Eastern Europe widely as an “immense tragedy”, it remains as an idea in Western Europe, especially in the French left, “mostly positive” and is “glorified”. This is due, among other things, to the historical significance of the Holocaust: “As long as National Socialism is characterized as absolutely evil, communist crimes are automatically relativized. [...] It is a strange approach to use the genocide of the Jews to build a hierarchy in the category of 'crimes against humanity'. "

The other authors Mart Laar , Diniu Charlanow, Liubomir Ognianow, Plamen Zwetkow, Romulus Rusan, Ilios Yannakakis and Philippe Baillet presented studies on communist regimes and movements in Estonia , Bulgaria , Romania , Italy and Greece . The forewords to the US edition of the first part by Martin Malia and the Russian edition by Alexander Jakowlew , a former member of the Politburo of the CPSU and theoretician of perestroika, were included . In it, he presented how the communist past in Russia had been dealt with since 1990.

reception

The book found no echo comparable to the first part. In the German press, for example, it was discussed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by Manfred Funke , who saw himself “pressed” by Courtois' descriptions into the question “whether evil in man only uses the promise of a just world as a pretext for devilry”. . Josef Riedmiller wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung : “Courtois has now (...) submitted a second 'black book' in which he primarily deals with his opponents from France's left-wing elite, also asks the question of comparing systems, but they do answered rather cautiously. ”Alexander Jakowlew is less squeamish, who rejects everything that he once believed in. For him, Bolshevism was "the same category as German National Socialism". In contrast, Rudolf Walther criticized the book in the daily newspaper as an “anti-totalitarian infusion” of the first part and its introduction as apologetic self-praise. Courtois shows no understanding of the "difference between comparing and equating" between communism and National Socialism.

expenditure

  • Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin, Rémi Kauffer, Pierre Rigoulot, Pascal Fontaine, Yves Santamaria, Sylvain Boulouque: Le livre noir du communisme - Crimes, terreur, répression. Robert Laffont, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-221-08204-4 ; Bouquins, 1999, ISBN 978-2-221-08861-6 ; Pocket, 2009, ISBN 2-266-19187-X .
  • Stéphane Courtois etc., Joachim Gauck, Ehrhart Neubert: The black book of communism - oppression, crime and terror. (1998) Piper Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-492-04053-5 .
  • Stéphane Courtois et al. (Ed.): The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-674-07608-7 .
  • Stéphane Courtois et al. (Ed.): The black book of communism 2. The heavy legacy of ideology. Piper Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-492-04552-9 .

literature

  • Jens Mecklenburg, Wolfgang Wippermann (Ed.): “Red Holocaust”? Criticism of the Black Book of Communism. Konkret Literatur-Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-89458-169-7 .
  • Horst Möller (Ed.): The Red Holocaust and the Germans. Piper-Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-492-04119-1 . Table of contents (PDF).
  • Dietrich Seybold: Historical culture and conflict: historical-political controversies in contemporary societies. Peter Lang, Bern 2005, ISBN 3-03910-622-8 , pp. 77–84: The dispute over the “Black Book of Communism” (1997) ( books.google.de text excerpt).
  • Johannes Klotz: Worse than the Nazis? “The Black Book of Communism”, the new totalitarianism debate and historical revisionism. Papyrossa, Cologne 1999, ISBN 3-89438-169-8 .

Web links

swell

  1. ^ Henry Rousso (Ed.): Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared. University of Nebraska Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8032-9000-4 , p. 13 ( books.google.de ).
  2. ↑ Cf. Stéphane Courtois: “Clear the table with the adversary!” In: ders. Et al. (Ed.): The black book of communism 2. The heavy legacy of ideology. Piper Verlag, Munich 2004, pp. 15–175, here: p. 38.
  3. ↑ Hans Mommsen: "The Black Book of Communism": A bestseller in the service of resentment
  4. ^ François Furet: Le Passé d'une illusion , Paris 1995; German: The end of the illusion. Communism in the 20th Century. Munich 1996, ISBN 3-492-03507-8 , 1996
  5. ↑ Ulrike Ackermann: Anti-totalitarian traditions in a cultural comparison. A Franco-German intellectual dispute. (pdf, p. 165)
  6. ↑ Stéphane Courtois and others (ed.): The black book of communism - oppression, crime and terror. Munich 2004 (1998), pp. 13-15
  7. ↑ Statute for the International Military Court of August 8, 1945 (pdf; 23 kB)
  8. ↑ Stéphane Courtois and others (ed.): The black book of communism - oppression, crime and terror. Munich 2004 (1998), pp. 16-19
  9. ↑ Stéphane Courtois and others (ed.): The black book of communism - oppression, crime and terror. Munich 2004 (1998), p. 21
  10. ↑ Stéphane Courtois and others (ed.): The black book of communism - oppression, crime and terror. Munich 2004 (1998), pp. 22-24
  11. ↑ Stéphane Courtois and others (ed.): The black book of communism - oppression, crime and terror. Munich 2004 (1998), p. 27 f.
  12. ↑ a b c d Jürg Altwegg / FAZ, November 13, 1997: One hundred million. From Russia to North Korea: A French “black book” accounts for the dead of communism
  13. ↑ lemonde.fr: Rétrocontroverse: 1997, communisme et nazisme, histoire et mémoires
  14. ↑ Tom Heneghan (Reuters, November 7, 1997): "Black Book Of Communism" Sparks French Debate ( Memento of January 12, 2002 in the Internet Archive ); Le Monde, November 14, 1997
  15. ↑ Dorothea Hahn (die tageszeitung, December 1, 1997): "That cannot be explained in five pages" ( Memento from July 12, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) (Interview with Nicolas Werth)
  16. ↑ Le Monde, September 12, 1997; lectured by Bernhard Schmid: French reactions , in: Jens Mecklenburg, Wolfgang Wippermann (ed.): “Red Holocaust”? Criticism of the Black Book of Communism. 1998, p. 25 and footnote 2, p. 38
  17. ↑ Christoph Winder (Der Standard.at, November 12, 1997): "Against Stalin, Hitler was a baby". France: Party dispute and historians' dispute over crimes of communism ( Memento from July 14, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  18. ^ Carlos Widmann: Communism: The blue eyes of the revolution . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1997, pp. 212-222 ( Online - Nov. 24, 1997 ).
  19. ↑ Quoted from Lucas Delattre (Die Zeit, November 21, 1997): Fidel Castro's fan club
  20. ↑ Bernhard Schmid (Konkret 1/98): extrapolation ( memento from July 12, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  21. ↑ Ulrike Ackermann: Anti-totalitarian traditions in a cultural comparison: A Franco-German intellectual controversy (PDF, pp. 169–175)
  22. ↑ Amir Weiner: Review of The Black Book of Communism. In: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Volume 32, No. 3/2002, pp. 450–452
  23. ↑ Shane J. Maddock: Review, in: The Journal of American History. Volume 88, No. 3 (December 2001), p. 1156.
  24. ^ David J. Galloway: Review, in: The Slavic and East European Journal. 45th volume, No. 3 (autumn 2001), pp. 587-589.
  25. ↑ David Barsamian (ed.): Propaganda and the Public Mind. Conversations with Noam Chomsky. Pluto Press, 2001, p. 182
  26. ^ Noam Chomsky: Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. South End Press, 2000, pp. 174-176
  27. ^ Robert F. Barsky: The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower. With Press, 2007, p. 183
  28. ↑ T. Chervel: Lenin's corpses. About the new French historians' dispute . In: SZ, November 12, 1997
  29. ↑ J. Scherrer: "Let the dead bury their dead". Why Russia does not want to know anything about the Soviet mass crimes (5th part of the ZEIT debate) . In: Die Zeit, July 2, 1998
  30. ^ H. Dubiel: Founding Crimes of Democracy. Memory is an act of moral maturity (7th part of the ZEIT debate) . In: Die Zeit, July 16, 1998
  31. ↑ L. Baier: Windei 98. In German, the “Black Book of Communism” is a disaster. A settlement . In: Die Zeit, June 10, 1998
  32. ↑ M. Hildermeier: In the realm of evil. The "Black Book of Communism" and the Facts of Historical Research . In: Die Zeit, June 4, 1998
  33. ↑ J. Gauck: The ritual of the anti-fascists. Experience in dealing with the opponents of the "Black Book of Communism" . ( Memento of December 2, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) In: Die Zeit, July 30, 1998
  34. ↑ C. Geulen: On the impossibility of a historical balance ( Memento from September 24, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: FR, May 27, 1998
  35. ^ V. Kronenberg: Ernst Nolte sends his regards. The “Black Book of Communism” under discussion . In: Rheinischer Merkur, July 17, 1998
  36. ^ K. Pätzold: Germania docet, and Marianne does not want to learn. From the local echo to a "black book" . In: Junge Welt, February 4, 1998. Available here. Archive version ( Memento from July 12, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ).
  37. ↑ A. Brie: The Troublesome Discussion. ( Memento from July 13, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ). In: taz , 11./12. July 1998
  38. ↑ Dresdner Bank - Book Tips Recommendations ( Memento from July 11, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  39. ↑ Gilles Perrault (ed.): Le Livre Noir du Capitalisme. Le Temps des cerises, 1998, ISBN 2-84109-144-9 ; 2002, ISBN 2-84109-325-5 (authors: Caroline Andréani, Francis Arzalier, Roger Bordier, Maurice Buttin, Canale, François Chesnais, Maurice Cury, François Delpla, François Derivery, André Devriendt, Pierre Durand, Jean-Pierre Fléchard, Yves Frémion , Yves Grenet, Jacques Jurquet, Jean Laïlle, Maurice Moissonnier, Robert Pac, Philippe Paraire, Paco Pena, Gilles Perrault, André Prenant, Maurice Rajsfus, Jean Suret, Subhi Toma, Monique et Roland Weyl, Claude Willard, Jean Ziegler)
  40. ^ Marc Ferro: Le livre noir du colonialisme. Robert Laffont, ISBN 2-221-09254-6
  41. ↑ Doc. 10765, 16 December 2005: Need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian communist regimes ( Memento of February 14, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) (Section 3.26, Crimes of communism , and footnote 2)
  42. ↑ Stéphane Courtois: “Clean the table with the adversary!” In: ders. Et al. (Ed.): The black book of communism 2. The heavy legacy of ideology. Piper Verlag, Munich 2004, pp. 15–175, here: p. 79.
  43. ↑ Manfred Funke: Knowledge without grief . The memory of the bloody world experiment communism. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . No. 16 , January 20, 2005, ISSN  0174-4909 , p. 6 ( faz.net [accessed March 16, 2013]).
  44. ↑ Josef Riedmiller: Hierarchy of Terror . The second "black book" on communism continues the debate about comparing it to brown totalitarianism. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . November 29, 2004, ISSN  0174-4917 .
  45. ↑ Rudolf Walther: Crime-producing character . Anti-totalitarian infusion: The second “Black Book of Communism” is a real sham package. It delivers defensive prose on its own behalf. In: the daily newspaper . December 31, 2004, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed on March 16, 2013]).