The author of Hope and Memory was born in Bulgaria in 1939 and emigrated from there to France in 1963, having spent the most impressionable years of his youth under Bulgarian communism, the most disciplined and successful of the post-1945 European communist tyrannies.
Hope and Memory is a kind of philosophical meditation on the history of the world in the 20th century, focusing mainly on Europe and its collective experience of total war and genocide. The author uses the device of looking at the history of European totalitarian tyranny through the eyes of articulate victims of the Nazi and communist regimes: Margarete Buber-Neumann, David Rousset, Primo Levi, Germaine Tillion. He also uses witnesses who fought in the second World War, such as Vasily Grossman, who served in the Soviet army, and Romain Gary, who was an RAF airman.
Todorov claims that totalitarianism, whether of regime or of thought, is the distinctive innovation and characteristic mark of the 20th century. Nazism and Stalinism are equated in the book as exercises in immorality, although the author is sensitive to the differences between the two regimes. In a way, Nazism could claim to be less hypocritical, for it openly glorified its own evil, asserting the sub-human status of Jews, gypsies and Slavs. Russian communism's inhumanity lurked, by contrast, behind a veneer of humanist rhetoric. Both murdered millions, the Nazis killing Jews in particular, the Stalinists killing Ukrainian peasants in millions.
Grossman, born in Russia in 1905 and a soldier from 1941 to 1945, came to see the German and Soviet regimes as mirror images. In his novel, Life and Fate, there is an Orwellian encounter between an old Bolshevik and a senior Gestapo officer, in which the latter tries to persuade the communist that the regimes are identical. Both denied the ideal of human liberty, and accepted the truth that human life was about violence and conquest. Both were scientistic in that they worshipped the power that the fruits of technology gave them, without partaking of the scientific spirit, which is tentative and philosophically modest. The secret policeman even points out that the economic systems are the same: "Our capitalists are not the masters. The State gives them their plan." Furthermore, both states have the same enemies. After all, the Stalinists and the Hitlerites both murdered communists.
Primo Levi, an Italian Jew and a scientist, survived Auschwitz. He saw both inhumanity and humanity in the camp. Concentration camp guards and prisoners were all human beings, and he saw through the regime's attempt to demonise one set of people and ennoble the other. Some prisoners behaved cruelly and ignobly, while some guards tried to slip food to the inmates. There was a huge moral "grey zone", which most human beings inhabit most of the time. Levi clung to the idea that Nazis were not monsters and that the prisoners were not turned into saints by their frightful sufferings. Fundamentally, he was trying to avoid falling into the same barbaric and Manichean view of the world that his captors wished to impose on everyone.
The writer is interesting on the survival of anti-fascist rhetoric after the defeat of fascism and Nazism, particularly in his adopted country, France. Anti-fascism became a mantra that distracted attention from the monstrousness of communism and which smeared the opponents of the Soviet Union and its empire of enslaved people with the label neo-fascist. Another theme is the irresponsibility of so many fashionable Western intellectuals in the face of Soviet tyranny. Intelligent people seemed to rather like being useful idiots, to use Lenin's arrogant and accurate phrase.
There are some brilliant and moving anecdotes in the book, dramatising the general theme, which is one of hostility to the kind of black-and-white thinking beloved of tyrants and ranters. A French deportee, released at the end of the second World War, had been in hospital because of nightmares brought on by the torture he had endured. He said little about having been deported:
He didn't seem to hate Germans or the minority of Frenchmen who had co- operated with them. He had a shaved head, and he came to a dance with his girlfriend's sister, who'd had her head shaved at the Liberation. So there they were, dancing together, one shaved head with another.
The two shaven heads, one shaved by the Germans as an enemy and the other by the French for fraternising with Germans "give us a snapshot of two humiliated individuals supporting each other without regard for the 'sides' each was supposed to be on". This image is a powerful one, perhaps more powerful than any elaborate or reasoned argument. Hope and Memory is a powerful and moving meditation.