Refugees who called Nazis gangsters later rejected that comparison

Evidence

As Brecht’s play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui shows, many refugees saw the Nazis as gangsters, at least metaphorically. Not all did, however. Hannah Arendt, for example, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958), wrote: “she totalitarian form of government has very little to do with lust forpower or even the desire for a power-generating machine… Totalitarian government, all appearances not withstanding, is not rule by a clique or a gang. . Isolation of atomized individuals provides not only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very top of the whole structure” (p. 407). Miss Arendt singled out Behemoth for criticism on this score in an accompanying footnote. Later, in the aphorism “Massengeaellschaft” in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno also abandoned the gangster comparison and argued that the fascist leaders were basically the same as the masses they led. In Chaplin ‘s The Great Dictator, they pointed out, the dictator and the barber were the same man. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 2151

Categorization

• XREF: Arendt’s critique of Neumann’s Behemoth and the gangster-frame connects to broader debates on totalitarianism theory and the atomization thesis.
• SEED: A comparative essay angle: the gangster-metaphor debate as a lens on how different theorists characterized Nazi rule.