In a New York Times column, Ian Kershaw, one of the most outstanding scholars of the Nazi period, asks, “Could something like it happen again?”

And in a speech republished in the journal Telos, Jeffrey Herf, following Theodor Adorno, poses a related question: “What does coming to terms with the past mean?”

Both writers engage with the issue of how the past, and specifically the period of Nazi rule, impacts on our own time. Both seem to agree that echoes of that awful past are audible in the present; Kershaw cites a list of regimes and rulers - Mugabe, Chavez and Ahmadinejad among them - which manipulate and twist populist sentiment into authoritarian rule, Herf examines the commonalities between radical Islamists and what he describes as “their fascist and Nazi predecessors.”

But Kershaw is convinced that the Hitler years were “a uniquely terrible episode in history.” He writes:

…neither in their acquisition of power nor in their use of it do modern authoritarian rulers much resemble Hitler. International organizations and institutions that did not exist in interwar Europe - the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund - also provide some barriers to the sort of calamity that engulfed Germany.

Despite his concerns with some post-unification developments in Germany, Herf doesn’t see the spectre of fascism stalking Europe again either. However, he does argue that a proper reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust - in other words, a “coming to terms with the past” - demands a proper reckoning with the current threat presented by Islamism. As he writes:

Despite important differences, there are a series of parallels between contemporary totalitarianism and that of the past. In both cases, fanatical anti-Semitism plays a decisive role. For the Jews, the threats with weapons of mass destruction coming from bin Laden and Ahmadinejad recall memories of
Hitler’s threats.

Herf’s urgent prose and impassioned references to Israel’s vulnerabilities may lead some to charge that he’s playing geopolitics with the Holocaust. The risk with an argument like that is that it can be applied to any attempt to apply our understanding of the Holocaust to what we witness around us.

Neither Kershaw nor Herf are prepared to hermetically seal the Holocaust. Kershaw concludes that the Nazi years “remind us - if such a reminder is necessary - of the need for international cooperation to restrain potential ‘mad dogs’ in world politics before they are dangerous enough to bite.” Herf, recalling his recent work with other American writers on an American version of the Euston Manifesto, focuses his appeal upon the left:

We thought and we think that the ideological and military confrontation with radical Islam should not be waged only from the right-of-center side of the political spectrum. The battle against anti-Semitism, terror, and the aftereffects of National Socialism and of the continuing crisis of modernization in the Arab and Islamic world should also be an important component of Western liberalism.