200 pages
English language
Published May 20, 2003 by New Press.
The Origins of Nazi Violence
5 stars
(1 review)
In the half-century since the appearance of Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism, innumerable historians have detailed the history of the Nazi years. Now, in a brilliant synthesis of this work, Enzo Traverso situates the extermination camps as the final, terrible moment in European modernity’s industrialization of killing and dehumanization of death. Traverso upends the conventional presentation of the Holocaust as an inexplicable anomaly, navigating an excess of antecedents both technical and cultural. Deftly tracing a complex lineage—the guillotine and machine gun, the prison and assembly line, as well as widespread ideologies of racial supremacy and colonial expansion—Traverso reveals that the ideas that coalesced at Auschwitz came from Europe’s mainstream and not its margins.
Subjects
- National socialism.
- Political violence -- Germany -- History -- 20th century.
- Political violence -- Europe -- History -- 20th century.
- National socialism -- Europe.
- Terrorism -- Germany -- History -- 20th century.
- Ideology -- Germany -- History -- 20th century.
- Racism -- Germany -- History -- 20th century.
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Causes.