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Understanding the Nazi Genocide

Understanding the Nazi Genocide

Enzo Traverso

(1999)

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Abstract

'...this is a genuinely original contribution to our understanding. Students of the Holocaust sometimes worry that too much analysis may immunise us against its unbelievable horror. Traverso avoids that risk with great sensitivity and imagination.' Socialist Review In Understanding the Nazi Genocide Enzo Traverso sustains a dialogue with writings on the Shoah from Hannah Arendt to Daniel Goldhagen by drawing on the critical and heretical Marxism of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalism’s pent-up capacity for destructive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organisation and advanced technology. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the gulag, the old warning slogan - socialism or barbarism - formulated by European Marxists at the beginning of twentieth century needs to be seriously ‘revised’. The choice we face today is no longer between the progress of civilisation and a fall into ancient savagery, but between socialism conceived as a new civilisation and the destruction of humankind. For Traverso the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is an image of what should impel us to rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.
'...this is a genuinely original contribution to our understanding. Students of the Holocaust sometimes worry that too much analysis may immunise us against its unbelievable horror. Traverso avoids that risk with great sensitivity and imagination.' Socialist Review In Understanding the Nazi Genocide Enzo Traverso sustains a dialogue with writings on the Shoah from Hannah Arendt to Daniel Goldhagen by drawing on the critical and heretical Marxism of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalism’s pent-up capacity for destructive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organisation and advanced technology. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the gulag, the old warning slogan - socialism or barbarism - formulated by European Marxists at the beginning of twentieth century needs to be seriously ‘revised’. The choice we face today is no longer between the progress of civilisation and a fall into ancient savagery, but between socialism conceived as a new civilisation and the destruction of humankind. For Traverso the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is an image of what should impel us to rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Contents iii
IIRE Notebooks for Study and Research vi
Foreword vii
Introduction 1
1. Auschwitz, Marx and the Twentieth Century 7
Auschwitz and the Final Solution 9
The Sociology of Auschwitz 14
Auschwitz and Modernity 16
Rereading Marx after Auschwitz 19
2. The Blindness of the Intellectuals: Historicising Sartre’s \"Anti-Semite and Jew 26
3. On the Edge of Understanding: From the Frankfurt School to Ernest Mandel 42
The Frankfurt School 46
Ernest Mandel 50
4. The Uniqueness of Auschwitz: Hypotheses, Problems and Wrong Turns in Historical Research 63
The Uniqueness of Auschwitz: Definition and Comparisons 66
Uniqueness of Memory and Uniqueness in History 71
Auschwitz and the Uniqueness of the West 73
The Uniqueness of Auschwitz and the Public Use of History 75
5. The Debt: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 79
Poland's Jews between Passivity and Resistance 80
The Ghetto 82
The Uprising 84
A Revolt Left to its Fate 86
The Proper use of Memory 88
6. The Shoah, Historians and the Public Use of History: On the Goldhagen Affair 90
A Monocausal Explanation 92
Minimising the Gas Chambers 97
Goldhagen's German Triumph 102
Conclusion 105
Notes 109
Introduction 109
1. Auschwitz, Marx and the Twentieth Century 109
2. The Blindness of the Intellectuals 112
3. On the Edge of Understanding 117
4. The Uniqueness of Auschwitz 125
5. The Debt 130
6. The Shoah, Historians and the Public Use of History 132
Conclusion 135
Bibliography 136
Index 147
Action Française, 31 31
Adler, Victor, 21 21
Adorno, Theodor 7