Synopses & Reviews
In this volume Europes leading modern historians offer new insights into two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that have profoundly affected world history—Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Until now historians have paid more attention to the similarities between these two regimes than to their differences. Stalinism and Nazism explores the difficult relationship between the history and memory of the traumas inflicted by Nazi and Soviet occupation in several Eastern European countries in the twentieth century. The first part of the volume explores the origins, nature, and organization of Hitlers and Stalins dictatorial power, the manipulation of violence by the state systems, and the comparative power of the dictators personal will and the encompassing totalitarian system. The second part examines the legacies of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern European countries that experienced both. Stalinism and Nazism features the latest critical perspectives on two of the most influential and deadly political regimes in modern history.
Synopsis
Rousso sets two tasks for himself: (1) to provide a history of the problem of contemporariness” in history writing, starting in ancient Greece and coming up to today; (2) to analyze how contemporary history came to be a sub-discipline and especially how it arose in response to mass political violence in Europe over the course of the 20th century. No doubt, his is a European view but his cases come not just from French but from English, American, and German historiography and history. Above all, he is interested in how historians grapple with the problem of distance from an event even if they may have been participants. He is further interested in the struggle between older historians who may have lived through a period of history and younger ones who claim they can understand his experience.
About the Author
Henry Rousso is the author of The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France and The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1914. Richard J. Golsan is a professor of French at Texas A & M University. He is the author of Vichys Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France and the editor of Fascisms Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980, both published by the University of Nebraska Press.