Understanding The Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz

by Enzo Traverso, Peter F. Drucker (translator)

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 not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.

Genres: History, Germany

176 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1998

About the author

Enzo Traverso is an Italian scholar of European intellectual history. He is the author of several books on critical theory, the Holocaust, Marxism, memory, totalitarianism, revolution, and contemporary historiography. His books have been translated into numerous languages. After living and working in France for over 25 years, he is currently the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.

Reviews

[ehk2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Auschwitz’s challenge to Marxism is thus twofold. First, history must be rethought through the category of catastrophe, from the standpoint of the defeated. Second, socialism must be rethought as a radically different civilisation, no longer founded on the paradigm of the blind development of the forces of production and the domination of nature by technology. Socialism must be based on a new quality of life; a new hierarchy of values; a different relationship with nature; egalitarian relations among sexes, nations and ‘races’; and social relations of sisterhood and solidarity among peoples and continents. This means reversing the line of march followed by the Western world for several centuries. It means jettisoning the naive optimism of a way of thinking that claimed to be the conscious expression of the ‘movement of history’, and of a movement that believed it was ‘swimming with the tide’. It also means restoring socialism’s utopian dimension."