The Origins of Nazi Violence

Download or read book The Origins of Nazi Violence written by Enzo Traverso and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.