In her ambitious and thoroughly researched Die Erfindung des Terrorismus in Europa, Russland, und den USA 1858–1866, Carola Dietze undertakes a paradoxical task: to bring order to the disorderly house of terrorism studies and at the same time to dismantle that house. Dietze's ultimate objective is to challenge the standard historiographical narrative that locates the emergence of terrorism in late 1870s Russia (the People's Will) and western Europe (the anarchist Propaganda of the Deed). Instead, Diezte argues that terrorism was the invention of volunteeristic actors who participated in a transatlantic learning process facilitated by modern communications, transportation, and the mass media. Actors who previously had been marginalized or omitted from the standard narrative now take center stage. In Dietze's account the two originators of terrorism are Felice Orsini (the attempted assassination of Napoleon III in 1858) and John Brown (the raid at Harper's Ferry in 1859), who become models for future imitators; namely, Oskar Wilhelm Becker, John Wilkes Booth, and Dmitrii Karakozov. Modern terrorism was the collective invention of these actors.
The first chapters of Dietze's study offer a methodical survey of and challenge to the field and provide the building blocks for a new theory of terrorism, founded upon Rainer Paris' identification of terrorism as a species of provocation and Peter Waldmann's definition of terrorism. Dietze puts forth a three-fold categorization of modern terrorism. Both social revolutionary and ethno-nationalist terrorism take their inspiration from the European Enlightenment's ideals of personal liberty and national sovereignty, while right-radical (racial and religious extremist) terrorism is a reaction against these ideals. The following chapters offer case studies—for Orsini and Brown, exhaustive ones—of the affairs that pivot around the individual actors but also present detailed historical/political context as well as fascinating discussions of the acts' public reception and symbolic resonance.
As a historian, Dietze possesses the virtues of engaging storyteller and a rigorous theoretician. Her discussion of Becker, Booth, and Karakozov is prefaced by dramatic narrative accounts of their terrorist assassinations followed by comparative analysis that toggles between cases to show that all three actors were politically engaged members of an educated elite; all three actors found their agendas blocked; all three actors suffered personal crises before their acts of violence. In some respects, the imitators seemed to have learned little from their models: they were hastier in their preparations for the attacks, lacked experience with media and publicity, and failed to broadcast their self-justifications or find support among the public (Dietze attributes the new genre of Bekennerschreibens [“Claims of Responsibility”] to these imitators). For these reasons, all three could have been said to “fail” even if they met their mark, and their broader political agendas were thwarted.
Where these imitators ran aground, Dietze's argument, too, stumbles. If the “imitators” are quashed, to what degree are they generative and to what degree full stops? Dietze's narrative ends without her compellingly showing how Becker, Booth, or Karakozov influenced the future development of terrorism. Likewise, the argument for the salience of transnational influence—rather than more localized political and cultural influence—leaves room for debate, especially in Karakozov's case, where Dietze credits John Brown, mediated by Nikolai Chernyshevskii's Rakhmetov in What is to Be Done (1863), as the model for Karakozov. While she provides compelling evidence for Brown's influence on Booth and Orsini's on Becker, Brown's status as a source for Rakhmetov is largely speculative, though Chernyshevskii's own admiration for Brown is well substantiated. Both Brown and Karakozov were undeniably galvanized by the same emancipatory ideals, but the connection between the two is otherwise tenuous.
In her conclusion, Dietze forthrightly addresses counterarguments and raises the question of other possible models, such as Karl Ludwig Sand, terrorism's traditional point of origins in German historiography, or Charlotte Corday, or the numerous plots against Napoleon I. What then constitutes modern terrorism's prehistory, and what is its “history,” or are the distinctions of “pre/history” better understood as an evolution or a continuum? To what extent were transnational models definitive—do they carry such weight that the historical narrative must be reorganized around them? To what extent is it accurate to use the characterization “imitators” (Nachahmer) rather than simply successors (Nachfolger), and do imitators require further imitators to form a link in the chain and ultimately a tipping point for the emergence of terrorism as a concept? Certainly, the most significant contribution of the Die Erfindung der Terrorismus is, as Dietze puts it, “bringing the United States back in” (649). The US's history of political violence has too long been exempted from histories of terrorism, and Dietze's masterful study deserves an English edition that it will be accessible to a broader audience of historians and terrorism experts.
