Concepts That Came in from the Cold: Totalitarianism and Genocide

This paper argues that by confining its concepts to the Sattelzeit, as Reinhart Koselleck famously called the period from 1750 to 1850, his lexicon of historical semantics (the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe), neutralized and suppressed the traumatic history of 20^th century Europe.  This paper draws on the example of two concepts invented in the 20^th century, “totalitarianism” and “genocide,” to demonstrate how a new political language reversed Koselleck’s signature opposition between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.”  Totalitarianism has always been a protean term, adjusting meanings to changing political affiliations at several crucial historical moments (in the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s). In other words, the ‘moment’ of totalitarian performs a well-established political function, defining a horizon of cognitive and intellectual orientations at the expense of  moral and political ambiguities.. 

Much the same can be said for “genocide” coined by the Polish-Jewish jurist, Raphael Lemkin. Like totalitarianism, genocide was a semantic stockpile that bridged the destruction of European Jewry with other mass murders in interwar and wartime Europe.  The concept of genocide was discursively situated at the intersection of the two most fractious issues of the early 1950s – Cold War politics and the politics of race in America. Examining the historical roots of this failure is particularly revealing about the ambiguity that I believe is inherent in the concept of genocide – the “instability” between the historical and the legal, between the cultural and the “ethnical,” between intent and consequence – that continue to haunt Lemkin’s concept.