The Origins Of Nazi Violence

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.

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.

In this collection of essays, Enzo Traverso examines the relationships between anti-Semitism, modernity and the Holocaust. The different parts of the book analyse multiple dimensions of the destruction of the European Jews, debates over historical memory and left-wing debates on the nature of anti-Semitism. Inspired by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the heterodox Marxism of a thinker like Walter Benjamin, Traverso argues that after Auschwitz, critical thought needs to reconsider the notion of progress as such. Enzo Traverso is the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His publications include: The New Faces of Fascism, Populism and the Far Right, Verso, 2019; Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, Columbia University Press, 2017, The End of Jewish Modernity, Pluto Press, 2016; Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945, Verso, 2016; The Origins of Nazi Violence, New Press, 2003.

The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.

Hannah Arendt first argued the continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'. This text uses Arendt's insights as a starting point for further investigations into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked.

For decades, history ignored the Nazi persecution of gay people. Only with the rise of the gay movement in the 1970s did historians finally recognize that gay people, like Jews and others deemed “undesirable,” suffered enormously at the hands of the Nazi regime. Of the few who survived the concentration camps, even fewer ever came forward to tell their stories. This heart wrenchingly vivid account of one man's arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis for the crime of homosexuality, now with a new preface by Sarah Schulman, remains an essential contribution to gay history and our understanding of historical fascism, as well as a remarkable and complex story of survival and identity.

This groundbreaking work is the most detailed, carefully researched, and comprehensive analysis of the evolution of Nazi policy from the persecution and "ethnic cleansing" of Jews in 1939 to the Final Solution of the Holocaust in 1942.

"This book employs archival research and statistical analysis on an original dataset of a summer 1941 wave of anti-Jewish pogroms to show that pogroms occurred not where antisemitism was strongest, but where local Jews challenged local non-Jews' dreams of national dominance"--