Bonn Great men make history, and sometimes great women too. In political reporting, “strong leaders” such as China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dominate the headlines. Enormous creative power is ascribed to them, they supposedly shape the world.
The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle summed up this view, which is still widespread today, as early as 1840: “The history of the world is merely the biography of great people.”
Personal decisions can undoubtedly shape the course of time. The British historian Ian Kershaw, best known for his groundbreaking biography of Hitler, has been analyzing for decades how the interplay of individual power and structural conditions affects the historical process.
With his recently published book “Man and Power. On the Builders and Destroyers of Europe in the 20th Century” he once again takes issue with the simplistic thesis that large individuals in particular are the decisive driving forces of history.
In twelve essays – from Josef Stalin to Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev to Helmut Kohl – Kershaw explores the question of which economic, political and social conditions bring strong personalities to power and how the factors then promote or restrict the exercise of power. Ultimately, the question arises as to whether there is some kind of mathematical formula for weighting personal and structural factors that bring about profound historical changes.
Ian Kershaw: Man and the Force
German publishing house
Munich 2022
589 pages
36 euros.
Translation: Klaus-Dieter Schmidt
Why was Benito Mussolini able to become prime minister in 1922 and turn Italy into a fascist dictatorship? His emphatically masculine, virile, martial demeanor seems outdated today, but at the time corresponded to the ideal of a strong leader.
Women fell at his feet and the crowds cheered the Duce for promising a “national rebirth”. Mussolini’s rise to power would have been unthinkable without the preceding decades of corrupt governments and the widespread and exaggerated feeling that the Allies had cheated Italy of the territorial fruits of victory after World War I. His elixir of life was the crisis.
This also applies to Hitler. Had it not been for the effects of World War II on Germany and the Great Depression that followed, Hitler would, according to Kershaw, “remained a political nobody.” After the seizure of power, however, the “Führer” consolidated his rule with terror and mass murder even more than the “Duce”. Unlike in Germany, Italy was able to cultivate the image of the “mild dictator” after the war – this is a good basis for the neo-fascist party of the new Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
In Russia, the image of the former dictator Josef Stalin is already shining in its old glory because of President Vladimir Putin’s revisionist historical policy. The incendiary speech of his successor Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced the crimes of the regime in 1956 – and at the same time made Stalin’s role in history absolute, is suppressed. Until his death in March 1953, according to Khrushchev, “everything depended on the arbitrariness of a single man”.
As Kershaw shows, there can be no question of that. Stalin’s personal leadership was decisive for the industrialization and rearmament of the huge empire, which was pushed forward with iron hardness, without which Hitler’s Germany could hardly have been defeated.
Democrats are also leaving their mark
At the same time, however, the implementation of his orders depended on the willingness of the party and state bureaucracy to carry out terrorist orders themselves. Like all dictators, the despot Stalin was dependent on the army of subordinate despots, which included the Politburo member Khrushchev in a prominent position.
Unlike dictators, the political leeway of democratic rulers is institutionally restricted from the outset by the system of checks and balances. But Democrats are also leaving their mark on history.
For example, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the only woman among Kershaw’s twelve protagonists – changed Great Britain for decades with her neoliberal policies that served the interests of the financial industry. It is an irony of history that the financial industry forced Liz Truss, the reincarnation of the “Iron Lady”, to resign from office at 10 Downing Street after only 44 days because of her insane tax policy.
The conservative politician had only been in office for 45 days when she announced her resignation.
(Photo: AP)
Helmut Kohl, on the other hand, according to his biographer Hans-Peter Schwarz, would have been remembered only as a “mediocre chancellor” without the surprising fall of the Wall in November 1989 – just think of Kohl’s foolish comparison of Soviet party leader Gorbachev with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
In fact, the eulogies that were later held for Kohl would be unthinkable without the fall of the Berlin Wall, which he neither expected nor intended. The Palatinate skilfully seized the moment and went down in history as the outstanding “Chancellor of German Unity”. Kohl provides the prime example of the dialectical tension between suprapersonal factors and personal decision-making power.
It is astonishing that Kershaw rightly acknowledges Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as the key architect of the Federal Republic’s “Western ties”, but also acknowledges that he was “indispensable” for the stabilization of democracy in West Germany. This is surprising because Kershaw Adenauer rightly attests to a “stuffy, authoritarian conservatism” in socio-political terms.
Above all, however, the successful striving of broad sections of the population for more prosperity during the “economic miracle” of the 1950s was probably the central prerequisite for the success of West German democracy. Structural factors such as the largely intact industrial capital stock after the end of the war and the German export boom supported by the Korean War were decisive for this – but not Adenauer’s decisions.
At the end there is a Marxian insight
But what about Gorbachev, the USSR’s gravedigger and midwife of free Central and Eastern Europe? He is undoubtedly a towering historical figure. Without the turning point he promoted – glasnost and perestroika – the Soviet system would probably have survived for many more years, despite its sclerosis.
Kershaw sees Gorbachev as the “main actor” in the dynamics of political change. His personal role was also decisive in the total transformation of Soviet foreign and disarmament policy.
Ultimately, however, structural factors brought even these titans to their knees: the economy was becoming less and less functioning, the queues in front of shops were getting longer, even fuel and medicines had to be rationed. By 1990, Gorbachev’s initial popularity among the general public was largely gone.
What followed was his political end. To this day, Gorbachev’s legacy has met with mixed responses – in the West he is seen as a positive leader, in Russia and China on the other hand as a failure, according to Putin responsible for the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
More literature:
Kershaw bases his essays on the existing literature, so readers interested in contemporary history should already be familiar with many of the facts. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to follow how the dialectic process works and transforms drivers into driven ones.
However, the story is too complex for a mathematical formula that weights the respective proportion of personal and structural factors at historical turning points.
Therefore we have to be content with an insight from Karl Marx: “People make their own history, but they do not make it of their own free will, not under self-chosen circumstances, but under immediately encountered, given and transmitted circumstances.”
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