Instructor:   Douglas T. McGetchin, Ph.D.
Time:  Tuesday/Thursday  3:30 - 4:50 PM
Location: Warren Lecture Hall 2111
Office:  HSS 4047  (858) 822-2643
Office Hours: Tuesday 5:30 to 7:30 PM
Email:  [email protected]

Course Description

    This course explores Fascism and Communism in Europe between 1917 and 1945. The focus of the course is on Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but we will gain a greater appreciation for these regimes by looking comparatively at Italian Fascism and other movements in Spain, Eastern Europe, and other European countries.  There are many reasons why the modern developments of Fascism and Communism merit closely study.  We will examine several central questions in this course.
   What went wrong in these regimes?  The twentieth century was the bloodiest in human history; over 100 Million people violently lost their lives in the First and Second World Wars, the Russian Civil War, Soviet Collectivization, and the Holocaust.  The extreme ideologies Nazi Germany and the USSR followed caused most of this destruction and suffering.
   How did Fascism and Communism arise and how did they function?  What drew people to such extreme measures?  We can appreciate each of these movements as reactions to specific historical circumstances such as the trauma of the First World War and the Great Depression.  Communism was also a reaction to longer-standing developments of modernity such as increasing urbanization and the development of a capitalist economy, which had been growing at a prodigious pace from the nineteenth century.
   Totalitarianism, Fascism, and Authoritarianism are all terms used to describe political regimes characterized by violence and varying degrees of radical ideology.  Yet there are many disagreements among scholars about how exactly to characterize these terms; for example, Stanley Payne outlines thirteen major definitions of Fascism.  The politics of the cold war and ideological commitments blur precise analysis. Totalitarianism has been a cold war trope and the target of justifiable scholarly criticism.  In this course we will go beyond propaganda stereotype and sort through several scholarly analyses to gain a better understanding of these complex political systems. This course will allow you to better arrive at your own working definitions of these concepts by drawing upon the rich field of historical evidence.
 

Course Requirements

You must complete all of the following assignments to pass the course.

1. (25%) Midterm, October 31 (Thursday).

2. (35%) Short Analytical Paper (hard copy due in lecture November 21 (Thursday)).  Write a 4-6 page paper, approximately 1000-1500 words, typed, double-spaced.  You may write a book review, a comparison of two books, or an exploration of a major problem having to do with the course that uses a book as a point of departure.
If you are writing a book review, the first half of your paper should provide a clear overview of the book’s thesis and evidence.  In the second half, provide a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the book’s interpretation of its topic considering what you have learned in the course readings and lectures.
You must obtain my approval by October 24 (Thursday) for the work on which you are writing. Extensions without prior approval and without a reduction of your grade will be granted only in cases of documented illness or major personal crises such as deaths in your immediate family.  Assignments turned in late lose 1/3 of a grade per day.
I expect your writing to be clear and grammatically correct.  The font should be 10 or 12 point, double-spaced.  Document your sources; Chicago style using footnotes or MLA style using imbedded citations are both acceptable.  I prefer Chicago style, as most historians use it.  Do not use lengthy quotations.  Write using your own words and avoid close paraphrasing.  I don’t give written comments on rough drafts or read them outside office hours, but you are welcome to come by and discuss any specific questions you have about the paper or the course in office hours.

3. (40%) Final Friday, December 13, 3-6 PM, Warren Lecture Hall 2111.
 

Course Readings

Books are available at Groundworks Books at the first UCSD student center (mail code 0323), (858) 452-9625.

Required

1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973)
2. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
3. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 1917-1932, 2nd Ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
4. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

Recommended

5. Roderick Phillips, Society, State, and Nation in Twentieth-Century Europe (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall,
1996).
 

Suggested Books for the Analytical Paper

     The work you choose can be either a primary or secondary source.  A primary source is a document, correspondence, or any other "text" created during the period being studied (for this class, roughly 1917 to 1945).  A secondary source is a text created later, usually by scholars analyzing an event.  A memoir falls into a gray area: it was written after the event, but recounts an eyewitness account of a participant.  You may analyze a memoir for this paper.  I did not assign a novel or any first person narrative accounts for the readings in this course.  The paper is your opportunity to read a primary source and relate it to course secondary readings and lectures; I encourage you to do so, but do not require it.
      You are not limited to the lists below, but must receive approval to use any book not on them.

 Primary Sources and Memoirs

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler, Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations
Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz
Werner Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness
Elena Kochina, Blockade Diary [Leningrad siege during World War Two]
Lenin, What is to be Done?
Lenin, State and Revolution
Mussolini, My Autobiography
Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned [purges in the USSR]
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell, 1984
John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World
John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Nikolai Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record
Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed
Leon Trotsky, The Class Nature of the Soviet State
 

 Secondary Sources

William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power
Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Paul Avrich, Kronstadt 1921
Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army
Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust
Robert Benewick, Political Violence and Public Order: A Study of British Fascism
Wolfgang Benz, The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide
Martin Blinkhorn, Democracy and Civil War in Spain 1931-1939
Martin Blinkhorn, Mussolini and Fascist Italy
Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship
Ernest Bramsted, Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda
Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men
Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide
Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union
Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives
I. C. Butnaru, The Silent Holocaust: Romania and Its Jews
I. C. Butnaru, Waiting for Jerusalem: Surviving the Holocaust in Romania
David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture
Alan Cassels, Fascist Italy
Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1945
Barbara Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Alexandra Kollontai
Barbara Clements, Daughters of Revolution: A History of Women in the USSR
Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution
Stephen Cohen and Robert Tucker, The Great Purge Trial
Stephen Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment
Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow
Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938
Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism
Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy
Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization
Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews
Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy
Geoffrey Giles, Students and National Socialism in Germany
Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War
Igor Glomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy
Richard Grunberger, Art in the Third Reich
Tsutosi Hasegawa, The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917
Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within
Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania
Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth
Jon V. Kofas, Authoritarianism in Greece: The Metaxas Regime
Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics
Miklós Lackó, Arrow Cross Men, National Socialists, 1935-1944
Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943
Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War
George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police
Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies
MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War
Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past
Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History
Carlile A. Macartney, October Fifteenth: A History of Modern Hungary, 1929-1945
Allen Paul, Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Seeds of Polish Resurrection
Bruce Pauley, Hitler and the Forgotten Nazis: A History of Austrian National Socialism
Stanley Payne, Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931-1936
Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944
Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution
Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany
Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 1921-1939
Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer
Georg von Rauch, The Baltic States: The Years of Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, 1917-1940
Gerald Reitlinger, The SS, Alibi of a Nation, 1922-1945
Bryan Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers
Fritz Ringer, The German Inflation of 1923
Ruby Rohrlich, Resisting the Holocaust
David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939
Dennis Mack Smith, Mussolini
Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924-1933
Peter F. Sugar, ed., Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918-1945
Charles Sydnor, Soldiers of Destruction
Edward Tannenbaum, Fascism in Italy: Society and Culture, 1922-45
Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power, 1928-1941
Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!  The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia
Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler's Thirty Days to Power
Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews
Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy
David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews
Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jews
 

Calendar and Assignments

September 26 (Thursday)  1. Introduction: Totalitarianism
Arendt, xxiii-xl

October 1 (Tuesday) 2. The Rise of Radical Politics, 1880 to 1917
Payne 71-79; Fitzpatrick 1-39; Recommended: Phillips, 36-9, 57-9

October 3 (Thursday) 3. The Bolshevik Revolution
Fitzpatrick 40-67; Recommended: Phillips, 114-119

October 8 (Tuesday) 4. War Communism: The Russian Civil War and the NEP
Fitzpatrick 68-119; Recommended: Phillips, 168-172

October 10 (Thursday) 5. The Rise of Italian Fascism 1919-1929
Payne 80-128; Recommended: Phillips, 161-163

October 15 (Tuesday) 6. Authoritarianism in Eastern and Southern Europe, 1919-1929
Payne 129-146; Recommended: Phillips, 147-152.

October 17 (Thursday) 7. Italian, Austrian, and Spanish Fascism in the 1930s
Payne 212-267;
Recommended: Phillips, 161-163, 183-190, 247-250.

October 22 (Tuesday) 8. Minor Fascist Movements and Fascism in Eastern Europe
Payne 267-327;
Recommended: Phillips, 224-233, 254-257.

October 24 (Thursday) 9. Nazi Propaganda and Hitler's Seizure of Power
Burleigh, 1-43; Arendt, 341-364.
Recommended: Phillips, 164-168, 178-183, 218-224.
DUE: Approval for paper topic

October 29 (Tuesday) 10. The Nazi State during the 1930s
Burleigh, 44-74; Arendt, 364-388;
Recommended: Phillips, 239- 247, 265-283.

October 31 (Thursday) 11. Midterm

November 5 (Tuesday) 12. The War Against the Jews and the Holocaust
Burleigh, 75-112; Recommended: Phillips, 304-312.

November 7 (Thursday) 13. The Volksgemeinschaft and its Outcasts
Burleigh, 113-135, 162-197 (136-162 recommended).

November 12 (Tuesday) 14. The Youth Movement in Nazi Germany
Burleigh, 199-241.

November 14 (Thursday) 15. Gender in Nazi Germany
Burleigh, 242-307.

November 19 (Tuesday) 16. Trial by Combat: Fascism in World War II
Payne, 355-391, 436-437 (391-436 recommended);
Recommended: Phillips, 284-304, 312-322.

November 21 (Thursday) 17. The Demise of Fascism
Payne, 441-495; Recommended: Phillips, 322-338.
DUE: Paper

November 26 (Tuesday) 18. Stalin's Revolution
Fitzpatrick 120-172;
Recommended: Phillips, 197-200, 233-238, 257-265.

November 28 (Thursday)  Thanksgiving (No Class)

December 3 (Tuesday) 19. Totalitarian Power and Utopia
Arendt, 389-419, 437-459 (419-437 highly recommended).

December 5 (Thursday)  20. Totalitarian Terror and Conclusion
Arendt, 460-482.

December 13 (Friday)  Final, 3-6 PM, Warren Lecture Hall 2111
 

Academic Integrity

     It is your responsibility to know and observe all the UCSD rules concerning academic integrity and plagiarism. You should familiarize yourself with your responsibilities and rights under the UCSD Student Conduct Code (http://ugr8.ucsd.edu/judicial/22_00.html); see especially section 22.21.  Any student found to have committed a substantial violation of the university rules concerning academic integrity will fail the entire course.  We view one of our chief responsibilities to help you produce first-rate academic work that reflects your own original thinking about the course themes and material.  If you have any questions whatsoever about what constitutes plagiarism, how to properly credit the work and ideas of others, how to evaluate sources for quality and reliability, and so forth, please feel free to see me to discuss the matter.
  Students agree that by taking this course the required paper will be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. Use of the Turnitin.com service is subject to the terms of use agreement posted on the Turnitin.com site.
 

Instructions for submitting paper to Turnitin.com

The final version of your paper is due at the beginning of lecture on Thursday November 21.  Please disregard anything the turnitin.com site says about the due date of the paper; it is due when the syllabus says it is due. Within 24 hours of the time the paper is due (i.e. by 5 PM on Friday, November 22), you must also submit the paper on-line to turnitin.com, as described below. You must submit an exact electronic copy of the paper you turn in at lecture.  If you miss the electronic filing deadline, you will lose one-third of a letter grade for each class meeting your submission is late, up to a maximum of a full letter grade off.  If for some reason you are unable to file online and believe an extension is justified, please contact me immediately (email is best). Extensions will only be granted for good cause, and only if you have made timely attempts to contact me.  If you have any questions about how to use the turnitin.com system, please let me know.

1. Go to www.turnitin.com on the internet; click on "user login."
2. Check the box for "student" under "user type."
3. Fill in your e-mail address and turnitin.com password.  If you are a new user of the system, follow the instructions for new users, using the "click here to get started" link. If you've forgotten your password, click that link to have it sent to you, then follow the instructions given in order to get back to this page of the web site.
4. This will take you to the "your classes" screen. Click "join new class."
5. For "Class ID," enter _________; for the enrollment password, enter __________, which is the class Section Number. Click "submit." (If you are not on the page with classes for 2002, use the pull-down menu and the "GO" button to view 2002 classes.)
6. Click on the blue part of the link with the section number and the UCSD ID number of the class to select the class listed.
7. You will now be on your "Class Portfolio Page." Click on the "assignments" button near the top of the page. This should take you to an "assignment page" that lists "Paper" as the assignment to be submitted. (Disregard the system's warning that the paper is overdue; it is only overdue if you have missed the deadline.)
8. Type in the title of your paper in the box indicated.
9. Use the pull-down menu to select the assignment number (1 -- Paper).
10. Copy and paste the body of your work into the box labeled "main text." Do not post anything in the "Abstract" box, and do not post your Bibliography in the "Bibliography" box.
11. Click "submit"; be sure to print or save the receipt page (it will be e-mailed to you as well); log out at the top of the page.