What significance did totalitarian criticism of the political left have on German discourse of the 20th century and its continuing evolution? The contributions in this volume examine the different developmental stages of discourse while connecting early analysis and critiques from within the Weimar Republic to the conceptualizations from exile and theories and practices of the Cold War. It becomes clear that totalitarian critique was not only a bastion of the liberal and conservative, and that it by no means only emerged during the Cold War. As shown by the example of democratic Marxist and critic of dictatorships Karl Krautsky, the roots of Marxism should not stand in the way of such analysis (which included Bolshevism, Fascism, and Nazism). German text.