In 1933 Joseph Goebbels quarrelled with the mother of Horst Wessel. SA-Sturmführer Wessel, murdered three years previously, was the hero of a Nazi cult. His mother wanted a place in the ceremonies commemorating his “martyrdom”. Goebbels found her “arrogance” intolerable. “Our dead belong to the nation,” he wrote.
So, supposedly, did the living. “The only people who still have a private life in Germany are those who are asleep”, boasted a Nazi official. As Paul Ginsborg points out in this original and illuminating book, this was wrong on two counts: for one thing, even while sleeping, “people went on dreaming about the regime”; for another, “private life”, the life of the family, was never entirely extinguished.
The government could suck children out of their homes, recruiting them for the Hitlerjugend or the League of German Girls. It could redefine the marriage bed as a breeding ground for German soldiers. It could stir up sons against their fathers. (Hitler said: “When an opponent tells me ‘I will not come over to your side’, I calmly reply, ‘Your child belongs to me already.’”) But families, as each of the six dictatorships covered in this book would discover, are protean and ultimately indispensable entities. Their relationships with the state, under the revolutionary or dictatorial regimes here examined, were troubled in diverse and often lethal ways, but even in the Soviet Gulag, as Ginsborg reminds us, people found partners and had children. True, those children who survived were sent to state orphanages at the age of two, but their mothers fought bitterly to keep them. Even when the establishment of a family was cruelly prohibited, the yearning for one was ineradicable.
This would have surprised Alexandra Kollontai. Ginsborg, adept at bringing the general to life by zooming in on the particular, chooses a prominent but sidelined individual (Marinetti, the frontman of Futurism, for fascist Italy; female journalists Halide Edib for Kemalist Turkey, the nation created by Mustafa Kemal; and Margarita Nelken for civil war Spain) as a way in to writing about his chosen countries in crisis. Kollontai, the only woman on Lenin’s Council of Commissars, comes first.
For Kollontai, bourgeois marriage was an oppressive institution and romantic love dangerous and devouring. In 1893, at the age of 21, she rebelled against her family of origin, marrying against her parents’ wishes. Five years later she abandoned her new family. Visiting a textile factory, she had seen that for its 12,000 workers “home life” meant a squalid existence, without comfort or privacy, in vast, foul-smelling dormitories. Thenceforward, she declared, she would dedicate herself to the working class and to women’s rights. To that end she left her husband (permanently) and her little son, Misha (for more than a year).
By 1917, in common with many of her fellow Bolsheviks, Kollontai looked forward to a time when the family would wither into obsolescence, and communal living would become the norm. Cooking, mending and laundry would be collectivised. Monogamous marriage would be replaced by the rule of “winged Eros”, under whose aegis a woman “holds out her hand to her chosen one and goes away for several weeks to drink from the cup of love’s joy ... When the cup is empty she throws it away without regret and bitterness. And again to work.” Sexual and familial ties would be secondary: everyone’s first loyalty would be to the collective. Even parental love would become communal. “The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine ... there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers.”
The vision was never realised. Certainly, in the years following the revolution, Russian families were destroyed – by war, famine and terror – but the consequences were not emancipating, but terrible. Ginsborg quotes the recollections of an official who heard, on a railway station at night, during the famine of 1921, a “thin, weak, remote wailing” emanating from a great mass of grey rags. He realised that he was looking at some 3,000 children, homeless and starving, too weak to move. The promised free childcare and education, the welfare for those unable to work, were never forthcoming.
Under the Bolsheviks, what Ginsborg calls the “hyperactive” public sphere encroached brutally on what had once been the private realm, but families – stubbornly, in defiance of dogma – continued to exist.
Ginsborg, a subtle thinker alive to nuance, declares himself suspicious of the term “totalitarianism”, which suggests every tyranny resembles every other one. Eschewing Eurocentrism, he takes as one of his case studies Kemalist Turkey. There, in contrast to Russian collectivism, the nuclear family was protected and praised as the site of modernity and emancipation. For women whose mothers had been obliged to tolerate their husbands’ polygamy, to submit patiently to orders from their mothers-in-law, and to leave the patriarchal home only seldom, and veiled, the nuclear “bourgeois family” – of which the Young Turks approved – seemed exhilaratingly liberated. They bared their heads, if shyly.
But unveiling – as Ginsborg, in a characteristic twist, reminds us – is an ambiguous political metaphor. In Tashkent in 1929, women (pictured in one of the many remarkable photographs that illustrate this book) attended school wearing a horsehair full-face mask – a token of sexist oppression, certainly, but also of “popular resistance to the invasive and intolerant power” of the Soviet state.
Ginsborg mixes biography with social history, political theory with the analysis of art. His focus shifts fluently from the big picture to the close-up, and, whether writing about an individual or a community, he has a sharp eye for telling detail. As a child, Mustafa Kemal (the future Atatürk) was useless at leap-frog: bending low so that others could vault over him just wasn’t in his nature. Small things have large implications. The wide dish from which a Turkish family traditionally ate, using their hands, makes a potent symbol of the family as commune. The plate for one, set on a table with a knife and fork, signifies individualism – deplorable to Kollontai, a liberation to Halide Edib.
Ginsborg’s range of reference is broad. He cites Pushkin and Walter Benjamin, Gramsci and Auden. He is conscious that the debate he is taking part in – about the conflicting demands made on a person by family and state – is an ancient one. He alludes as confidently to Sophocles’ Antigone as he does to Marx and Gentile. Understanding culture as well as ideology, he is perceptive about the profoundly Romantic nature of Nazi thought. The best part of his chapter on republican and Francoist Spain (neither side had much to contribute to theories of family life) is his sensitive response to Picasso’s Guernica.
He can handle the hard work of history, but his statistics are balanced by the immediacy of memoir. Economics matter, and so does ideology, but Ginsborg never lets his reader forget the horrors, and the poignancy, of the events they occasion. One of this book’s dominant themes is the failure of the churches to challenge tyranny. The power they didn’t use is made most palpable by the testimony of Nikolay Borodin, eyewitness to the Russian civil war. Borodin describes captured Red soldiers about to be shot. They undress “quickly, as soldiers do”, folding their clothes neatly. Then, shivering in their dirty underwear, before facing the firing squad, they cross themselves. In extremis, even for communist warriors, religion reasserted itself.
An analysis of the vicissitudes of family life cannot be, Ginsborg acknowledges, “the explanation of everything”. In this compelling and thoughtful book, though, it provides a new view of the 20th-century tyrannies. Hitler asked: “Where would the greater world be” without the “smaller world” of the family? Examining that smaller world, Ginsborg paradoxically enlarges our understanding of the greater one, looking beyond the contingencies of massacre and oppression to the fundamental experiences of human life.
• Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio. To order Family Politics for £20 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
