Pip: A Trumpet of Sedition asks a question most history coverage sidesteps entirely: when we talk about fascism, are we actually talking about fascism, or have we quietly swapped it out for something more comfortable?
Mara: freerein61 has a piece this week that takes that question seriously, working through how liberal memory culture handles the history of Nazism — and what it systematically leaves out. Let's start with the argument about Katja Hoyer, Daniel Goldhagen, and what the Marxist tradition says both of them get wrong.
Katja Hoyer, Goldhagen, and the Class Question
Pip: The setup here is a Financial Times article by Katja Hoyer on newly digitised Nazi Party membership records. The surface reading is: here is an opportunity for Germans to confront difficult family histories. The argument in this post is that the surface reading is the problem.
Mara: The post frames it precisely. A Marxist critic quoted in the piece puts it this way: "reduces the greatest crimes in human history to a matter of individual family shame and personal conscience, while leaving untouched the class forces that made fascism possible and that are re-emerging today."
Pip: So the archive becomes a mirror rather than a document. The question shifts from what structural forces enabled fascism to whether your grandfather was a good person — and that shift is not innocent, it is doing ideological work.
Mara: The post draws a direct comparison to Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, and the pairing is pointed. Goldhagen nationalises guilt — fascism as a German cultural pathology. Hoyer privatises it — fascism as a family secret. The post argues both moves share the same blind spot: class conflict disappears entirely from the explanation.
Pip: Goldhagen says Germans killed because they wanted to. Hoyer says look inward at your grandfather. Neither asks who funded Hitler or why the organisations representing millions of German workers collapsed without a fight in 1933.
Mara: That collapse is where the post spends real time. The SPD clung to bourgeois legality. The KPD, following Stalin's line, called the SPD social fascists and wrecked any prospect of a united front. Trade union leaders marched workers into Nazi May Day celebrations on May 1, 1933 — one day before SA and SS units raided their offices and seized their assets. The post quotes directly: "These organisations… capitulated passively to Hitler."
Pip: That sequence — the deliberate political disarming of the only force capable of stopping fascism — is exactly what neither Hoyer's genealogical introspection nor Goldhagen's national-character thesis can accommodate, because admitting it would mean asking class questions about 1933 and about today.
Mara: The post brings in Trotsky's definition as the counter-framework: "Fascism is a particular method of rallying and organising the petty bourgeoisie to serve finance capital." That reframes the whole problem — fascism as a product of capitalist crisis and political betrayal, not psychology or culture.
Pip: And the post closes by connecting this to the present. Germany is rearming. Historical revisionism is climbing. The individualised-guilt framework is politically useful precisely because, as the post puts it, one can feel personal shame about a grandfather while supporting the deployment of German troops — the class question is never posed.
Mara: Which is why the post argues the digitised Nazi files matter most not as a therapeutic resource but as a historical archive of fascism's class nature — and why the working class needs a framework that can actually explain what happened, rather than one that stops at the family tree.
Pip: The throughline is that how we explain fascism determines what we think can stop it. Psychology and genealogy leave the structural causes intact.
Mara: That's the stakes the post keeps returning to. The next time this territory comes up, it will be worth watching which questions get asked and which get quietly set aside.
A Trumpet of Sedition 