The temptation is all the greater, as civil war is precisely a moment in which these norms turn out to be invalid. This tendency blithely reduces an age of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions to the horrors of totalitarianism. It aims also to re-establish a historical perspective against the anachronism so widespread today that projects onto the Europe of the interwar years the categories of our liberal democracy as if these were timeless norms and values. This book responds to the need to revisit or go beyond certain historical controversies of recent decades around the interpretation of fascism, Communism and the Resistance in order to situate them in a broader perspective, beyond the division into different contexts. But in spite of its importance, this dimension is beyond the scope of the present work. It is obvious that the global crisis of capitalism played a crucial role in provoking the European collapse in the 1930s, setting many countries on the road to fascism, radicalizing social and political conflicts as well as reshaping worries, expectations and collective identities. This book does not tackle several fundamental dimensions of the historical process, which necessarily remain implicit, as the outlines of a wide landscape. Interpreting the relationship between violence, politics and culture in interwar Europe does not mean writing a general history of the old continent. However, this interdisciplinary approach has clear limits. In the perspective of cultural history, it articulates the analysis of ideologies with the investigation of collective imagination engendered by such an eruption of violence. From social history, it endorses some categories that allow the interpretation of total war as violence against civilians, and civil war as a fury that unchains emotions and passions in a context of anomie. From political theory, it adopts the arguments for answering a crucial question: What is a civil war? It recalls the horrors of this experience, but also tries to sketch its features and grasp its logic, to see whether or not this concept can help us understand the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Methodologically, this work draws on various disciplines – political theory, social history and cultural history – borrowing from them both interrogations and analytical tools. If I adopt it here, it is to try and grasp the meaning of an age of wars and revolutions in which the symbiosis between culture, politics and violence has deeply fashioned the mentalities, ideas, representations and practices of its actors. This term has been used by several commentators and interpreters, from the interwar years on, even if the only writer to have developed it systematically – and in a highly debatable manner – is Ernst Nolte. The age of extremes has produced its imaginary of horror, with a whole world of suffering behind it, but also social experiences, shared cultures, ideas and struggles that the present book aims to explore by way of the concept of a ‘European civil war’. We see the trenches, the rail tracks leading into the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau under the snow of the Polish winter, the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. When we think of the decades stretching from the First World War to the Second, however, everything darkens. Everyone knows Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles, the figure of astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon, and the artificial happiness of Marilyn Monroe’s smiles. Read moreĬertain images of the twentieth century are inscribed in our memory as visual references, icons of the past that sum up its meaning and retain its taste. Rejecting commonplace notions of “totalitarian evil,” he rediscovers the feelings and reinterprets the ideas of an age of intellectual and political commitment when Europe shaped world history with its own collapse. Utilizing multiple sources, Enzo Traverso depicts the dialectic of this era of wars, revolutions and genocides. It was a time of both unchained passions and industrial, rationalized massacre. During these three decades of deepening conflicts, a classical interstate conflict morphed into a global civil war, abandoning rules of engagement and fought by irreducible enemies rather than legitimate adversaries, each seeking the annihilation of its opponents. 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. Its overture was played out in the trenches of the Great War its coda on a ruined continent. Europe’s second Thirty Years’ War-an epoch of blood and ashesįire 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).
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