The Jews and Germany debunks a modern myth: that once upon a time there was a Judeo-German symbiosis, in which two cultures met and brought out the best in each other. Enzo Traverso argues that to the contrary, the attainments of Jews in the German-speaking world were due to the Jews aspiring to be German, with little help from and often against the open hostility of Germans. As the Holocaust proved in murder and theft, German Jews could never be German enough.Now the works of German Jews are being published and reprinted in Germany. It is a matter of enormous difference whether the...
The Jews and Germany debunks a modern myth: that once upon a time there was a Judeo-German symbiosis, in which two cultures met and brought out...
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...
In the half-century since the appearance of Hannah Arendt s seminal work "The Origins of Totalitarianism," innumerable historians have detailed the...
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political...
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the politic...
Jewish modernity flourished between the age of Enlightenment and World War II and in fact was a major driver of intellectual, scientific, social, literary, and artistic progress in that period. But the age of Jewish modernity is over. That s the argument that historian Enzo Traverso mounts in this provocative book. With great sensitivity and nuance, he teases out the fundamentally conservative turn that the mainstream of Jewish thought has taken in the years since World War II, revealing its roots in the Holocaust and the establishment of the United Nations and Israel as the new poles of...
Jewish modernity flourished between the age of Enlightenment and World War II and in fact was a major driver of intellectual, scientific, social, lite...
Europe's second Thirty Years' War--an epoch of blood and ashesFire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two world wars as a single historical sequence: the age of the European Civil War (1914-1945). Its overture was played out in the trenches of the Great War; its coda on a ruined continent. It opened with conventional declarations of war and finished with "unconditional surrender." Proclamations of national unity led to eventual devastation, with entire countries torn to pieces. During these three decades of deepening conflicts, a classical interstate conflict...
Europe's second Thirty Years' War--an epoch of blood and ashesFire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two world wars as ...
