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Zeev Sternhell (2016)

Zeev Sternhell (born April 10, 1935 in Przemyśl , Poland ; died June 21, 2020 in Jerusalem , Israel ) was an Israeli political scientist and historian . He was Léon Blum Professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . Sternhell emigrated to Israel in 1951 and lived in Tel Aviv . He was best known for his research on fascism .

Life

Sternhell's father was a wealthy cloth merchant; he died early. His mother and sister were victims of the Holocaust . Sternhell witnessed numerous brutal murders and manhunts by the German occupiers in the forced ghetto in Przemyśl . He was able to flee the ghetto with his aunt and uncle and survived with the help of two Catholic Polish families. After the end of the war he was baptized a Catholic and finally reached France in 1946 on a children's transport run by the Red Cross. At the age of 16 he emigrated to Israel unaccompanied .

From 1957 he studied history and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1960. In 1964 he received his master's degree in political science. From 1961 to 1964 he worked as a teaching assistant in the political science faculty of the Hebrew University before he went to Paris for two years on a research grant. From 1966 to 1968 he taught again at his home faculty, from 1969 as a lecturer. In 1969 he obtained his doctorate at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris with the dissertation The social and political ideas Maurice Barrès . In 1972 he was a visiting professor there. From 1973 he worked again at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: first he took over a full lectureship in political theory, from 1975 to 1977 he then headed the Levi Eschkol Institute for Social Research and, at the same time, from 1975 to 1978 the Faculty of Political Science. From 1977 he was an associate professor there and from 1982 a full professor of political science. In 1989 he was elected Léon Blum Professor at the head of the faculty and retired in 2003. He has held numerous international fellowships and visiting professorships.

Sternhell participated in several wars as a soldier in the Israeli armed forces . First as the commander of a unit of the Golani Brigade in the Suez War 1956, later as a reservist until the Lebanon War in 1982 .

His daughter Yael Sternhell is a former television news presenter and teaches with a PhD in history at Tel Aviv University. Zeev Sternhell died on June 21, 2020 at the age of 85.

Work and reception

Sternhell's work on Maurice Barrès and the French extreme right and nationalism in France: Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (1972); La droite révolutionnaire, les origines françaises du fascisme (1978, 1984); Ni droite, ni gauche. L'idéologie fasciste en France (1983, 1987) made him known as a historian. In this work, Sternhell developed a strictly ideological concept of fascism. In his opinion, the fascist ideology arises from a fusion of anti-Marxist or anti-materialist currents of socialism with radical nationalism. Sternhell characterized fascism as "revolutionary" and strictly separated it from the "traditional" right. He advocated the thesis that in France - from Boulangism to the Cercle Proudhon on the eve of the First World War - a more or less developed fascist right had existed since the 80s and 90s of the 19th century, to whose intellectual representative he was Charles Péguy , Maurice Barrès, Édouard Drumont , Charles Maurras and Georges Valois counted.

Sternhell's publications were controversial in France and in English-language research (but hardly noticed in Germany for a long time). William D. Irvine also characterized Boulangism as proto-fascist , but rejected Sternhell's reference to its “left” roots and described it as an alliance of “old” conservatives and radical nationalists or as a “profound transformation of the traditional, conservative right”. Even if, like Sternhell, one accepts the ideological documents “at face value”, French fascism is clearly on the political right and therefore impossible to locate in a “revolutionary” line of tradition. Conservative French historians such as René Rémond, however, rejected Sternhell's theses mainly because they contradicted their traditional view that fascism in France was always marginalized and was only imported "from outside" in the interwar period . The climax of these disputes was in 1983 a lawsuit by the economist Bertrand de Jouvenel , who was one of the most influential French intellectuals of the post-war decades and who (because of his political positions in the 1930s and 1940s) saw himself denigrated by Sternhell as a fascist and collaborator .

In 1996, a well-respected study of the origin of Israel and Zionism followed : Aux origines d'Israel (1996). In 1999, a German translation of his work Naissance de l'idéologie fasciste , first published in 1989, was published , which made Sternhell known to a wider specialist audience in Germany. In this publication he again referred to France as the “real cradle of fascism”, but extended the investigation of the ideological genesis of fascism to Italy. In an essay published a little later, Sternhell put the fascist ideology in context with attitudes that - like historicism or Edmund Burke's political philosophy - were directed against the Enlightenment and modernity: “The attractiveness of the solutions that the radical right had to offer , was all the greater since the fascist ideology was simply the hard core and the most radical variant of a much more widespread and much older phenomenon: a comprehensive revision of the essential values ​​of the humanistic, rationalistic and optimistic legacy of the Enlightenment. At the end of the 19th century the turn away from the Enlightenment took on truly catastrophic proportions and swept across large parts of cultural Europe. "

Sternhell was one of the most resolute opponents of Ernst Nolte's twin theory from the 1960s and its refreshment by François Furet , according to which communism and fascism were “both accomplices and enemies” and fascism opposed the danger of “ Bolshevism ” from the First World War developed. According to Sternhell - who put the emergence of fascism far earlier and pointed out other origins - is not only a "banalization of fascism and Nazism , but also a distortion of the true nature of the European catastrophe of our century".

Sternhell's work is seen as an essential basis for research into prefascism and the so-called conservative revolution and stands for approaches that do not assume that the “extreme, fascist or fascist-influenced right was buried once and for all in 1945. This right, whether in the variety of the Pétainists , the supporters of Mussolini or Hitler , which included the greatest intellectuals as well as the common people of the largest European cities, was not born in the trenches of the First World War and also did not die in the ruins of Berlin . Whatever future we may imagine, this right will always be part of our world. "

Political engagement, attack on September 25, 2008

Sternhell regularly wrote political columns in Haaretz and, as a member of Shalom Achschaw and a sharp critic of Israeli settlement policy - for him the borders of Israel are those of 1949 - became a target of hatred by the extreme political right in Israel.

On September 25, 2008, a bomb attack was carried out on Sternhell in front of his home in Jerusalem, which he survived with only minor injuries. The police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld assumed a political motive. In 2009, the Israeli police arrested the right-wing extremist settler Jakob Teitel on suspicion of being responsible for the bomb attack.

Awards

Sternhell was the recipient of the Israel Prize for Political Science. In 2016 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

Essays

  • Fascist Ideology . In: Walter Laqueur (Ed.): Fascism. A Reader's Guide; Analyzes, Interpretations, Bibliography . Scolar Press, London 1991, ISBN 0-7045-0190-2 , pp. 315-376 (unaltered reprint of the Berkeley, Calif. 1976 edition).
    • German edition: Fascist ideology. An introduction . Revised new edition, Verbrecher Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-95732-312-5 (1st edition 2002).
  • From the Enlightenment to Fascism and Nazism. Reflections on the fate of ideas in the 20th century .
    • In: Siegfried Jäger , Jobst Paul (ed.): “These rights are still part of our world”. Aspects of a New Conservative Revolution . DISS , Duisburg 2001, ISBN 3-927388-78-5 , S, pp. 49-68.
    • In: jour fixe initiative berlin (ed.): History after Auschwitz . Unrast Verlag, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-89771-409-4 , pp. 61-94.

Monographs

  • Neither right nor left. Fascist Ideology in France . Princeton University Press, Princeton Calif. 1996, ISBN 0-691-00629-6 (EA Berkeley, Calif. 1986).
    • French edition: Ni droite, ni gauche. L'idéologie fasciste en France (= Folio, 203). Gallimard, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-07-044382-6 (EA Paris 1983).
  • The Birth of Fascist Ideology. From cultural rebellion to political revolution . Princeton University Press, Princeton, Calif. 1994, ISBN 0-691-04486-4 (EA Berkeley, Calif. 1989, together with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri ).
  • The Founding Myths of Israel. Nationalism, Socialism, and the Making of the Jewish State . Princeton University Press, Berkeley, Calif. 1999, ISBN 0-691-00967-8 (as e-book, ISBN 978-1-4008-2236-2 ).
    • French edition: Aux origines d'Israël. Entre nationalisme et socialisme (= Folio Histoire, 132). Gallimard, Paris 2004, ISBN 2-07-030161-3 (EA Paris 1996)
  • Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (= Historiques, 26). Editions Complexe, Brussels 1985, ISBN 2-87027-164-6 . (Revised version of the dissertation, University of Paris 1969).
  • The anti-enlightenment tradition . University Press, New Haven 2010, ISBN 978-0-300-13554-1 .
    • French edition: Anti-Lumières. You XVIIIe siècle à la guerre fride . Fayard, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-213-62395-3 .
  • Histoire et Lumières. Changer le monde par la raison, Entretiens avec Nicolas Weill . Editions Albin Michel, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-226-24631-8 (life-historical memories and remarks on today's politics in conversation).

Forewords and Afterwords

  • Gilbert Michlin: "Aucun intérêt au point de vue national". La grande illusion d'une famille juive en France . Albin Michel, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-226-12140-4 .
    • German edition: "Not in the interests of the nation". A Jewish family in France (= Jewish memoirs, 18). Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-942271-75-2 (translated by Erica Fischer).

literature

Web links

Commons : Zeev Sternhell  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Ari Shavit : Amazing grace. In: Haaretz. March 6, 2008, accessed June 21, 2020 (English, biographical interview).
  2. ↑ Historian Zeev Sternhell died at the age of 85. In: Deutschlandfunk-Kultur - “Kulturnachrichten”. June 21, 2020, accessed June 21, 2020 .
  3. ^ William D. Irvine: The Boulanger Affair Reconsidered. Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France. Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford 1989, ISBN 978-0-19-505334-0 , p. 16.
  4. ^ William D. Irvine: Boulanger Affair , p. 15.
  5. ^ Zeev Sternhell, Mario Sznajder, Maia Asheri: The emergence of the fascist ideology. P. 14.
  6. ↑ Zeev Sternhell: From Enlightenment to Fascism and Nazism. In: jour fixe initiative berlin (ed.): History after Auschwitz. P. 64.
  7. ↑ Zeev Sternhell: From Enlightenment to Fascism and Nazism. In: jour fixe initiative berlin (ed.): History after Auschwitz. P. 86.
  8. ↑ Zeev Sternhell: From Enlightenment to Fascism and Nazism. In: Siegfried Jäger, Jobst Paul (ed.): “These rights are still part of our world”. P. 48.
  9. ^ Zeev Sternhell: The conquest ended in 1948. In: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Israel Office. September 21, 2016, Retrieved May 4, 2017 (originally published in the Haaretz in Hebrew on September 24, 2015 ).
  10. ↑ Shahar Ilan, Roni Singer-Heruti: Poet: Attack on Prof takes us back to days of Rabin assassination. In: Haaretz. September 25, 2008, archived from the original on September 25, 2008 ; accessed on June 22, 2020 (English). Attack on peace activists: Olmert: New underground group active. In: Tagesspiegel.de . September 28, 2008, accessed June 22, 2020 . Joseph Croitoru : Israeli left-wing intellectuals under pressure - To attack the historian Seev Sternhell. In: Deutschlandfunk . September 27, 2008, accessed June 22, 2020 . Jörg Lau : Assassination attempt on fascism researcher in Israel. In: Zeit Online . September 27, 2008, accessed June 22, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Roni Singer-Heruti, Shahar Ilan: Poet: Prof Attack Takes Us Back to Days of Rabin Assassination. In: Haaretz . September 25, 2008, archived from the original on October 20, 2012 ; accessed on May 4, 2017 (English).
  12. ^ Mark Weiss: Israeli police arrest West Bank settler over Palestinian killings. In: The Irish Times . November 2, 2009, accessed June 22, 2020 .
  13. ↑ Tamara Traubmann: Haaretz 'Ze'ev Sternhell wins Israel prize in political science. In: Haaretz . February 8, 2008, archived from the original on October 18, 2012 ; accessed on May 4, 2017 (English).
  14. ^ American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2016 Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members with their Affiliations at the Time of Election. In: amacad.org. 2016, archived from the original on April 22, 2016 ; accessed on June 22, 2020 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Sternhell, Zeev
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli political scientist and historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Przemyśl , Poland
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 2020
Place of death Jerusalem , Israel