Comparative Horrors

Timothy Garton Ash

  • Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989 edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately
    Chicago, 231 pp, US $27.95, September 1997, ISBN 0 226 25273 6

I recently received a letter from a German theatre director, objecting to a passage of my book The File in which I wrote that, back in the Stalinist Fifties, an East German friend of mine had been ‘denounced’ by one Dr Warmbier, then a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism at Leipzig University. ‘It’s the word “denounced” that is wholly inappropriate,’ the director wrote, in defence of his old friend Dr Warmbier. He gave three reasons for thinking it inappropriate. Dr Warmbier had not, he argued, decisively contributed to my friend’s dismissal from the university; the letter in which Dr Warmbier criticised my friend had not been addressed to an official body; and Dr Warmbier had no selfish motives in lodging those criticisms. He was a Communist and was merely acting on his beliefs.

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[*] Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, edited by Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge, 381 pp., £45 and £15.95, 15 May 1997, 0 521 56345 3).