This book explores the entanglement between politics, culture and violence in the age of the "European civil war" (1914-1945). In these cataclysmic three decades, the old continent experienced a new fusion of "warm" and "cold" violence, of unchained passions and industrial, rationalized massacre. The dialectic of a century forged by the Soviets and Auschwitz, by revolution and genocide, is the subject of this book in which Traverso scrutinizes multiple sources spanning from political theory and philosophy to literature and the arts. Rejecting commonplace notions of "the age of totalitarianism," his book rediscovers the passions and ideas of an age of intellectual and political commitment when, for the last time, Europe shaped world history with its own collapse.

Author Biography

Enzo Traverso studied history at the University of Genoa (Italy) and received his PhD from the EHESS of Paris in 1989. He has taught political science for almost twenty years in France. Since 2013, he is Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. His publications, all translated into different languages, include more than ten authored and other edited books, among which The Marxists and the Jewish Question (1994), The Jews and Germany (1995), Understanding the Nazi Genocide (London, 1999) and The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003).