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In the last few years, we have observed a growth of historiographic research on anticommunism that a few years ago was unthinkable. Arising from research into transnational anticommunist networks, the collection of essays here reviewed documents the results of a symposium held at the Jena Center 20th Century History and the Imre Kertész Kolleg, which took place in November 2014.1 The fourteen papers, some written in German and some in English, are structured into three parts. They examine the genesis, the impact and the meaning of anticommunism as an ideological worldview in Germany, Europe and the United States. In the preface to the collection, one of its editors, Norbert Frei, says that the focus of the work is to explore how anticommunism became the common political denominator of certain institutions, individuals and political parties. What made anticommunism a popular lens with which to view so many political, social and cultural issues in the twentieth century? What linked and what distinguished the anti-Bolshevism that followed Russia’s 1917 revolution from Cold War anticommunism (p. 8)? The opening paper by Anselm Doering-Manteuffel is separate from the three parts of the book that follow it. The author discusses the stabilizing effect anticommunist mobilization had on its adherents, which stemmed from their fear of economic and political revolution. Doering-Manteuffel seeks to integrate the philosophy of anticommunism into the history of ideas. He draws upon Ernst Nolte’s expertise and the so-called “westernization” of Western Europe in the middle of the twentieth century.2 Nolte described the phenomena that emerged during the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century.3 Social dislocation in that period caused feelings of anxiety among Western Europeans. The threat to their material and ideological values awakened the hidden driving force of anticommunism (p. 11). The author has developed a four-phase model of social and economic breakdown in the anticommunist era, based on the development of anticommunism in Germany. Doering-Manteuffel distinguishes the following periods in the history of twentieth century anticommunism: the period of “changing enemy images” up to the beginning of the 1930s; the anti-Bolshevist policy of extermination pursued by the Nazi regime; Cold War-era anticommunism in Germany and the West; and finally, anticommunism faced with the policy of détente with the Soviet Union. This exposition of Doering-Manteuffel’s original theoretical approach could have been a successful conclusion to this collection of essays. Unfortunately, for various reasons, such collections of essays often lack a concluding chapter.

Norbert Frei and Dominik Rigoll, eds., Der Antikommunismus in seiner Epoche. Weltanschauung und Politik in Deutschland, Europa und den USA