Understanding the Nazi Genocide Marxism after Auschwitz

Essays over het theoretisch onvermogen van het marxisme de shoah te begrijpen.
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 rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative. /

Born in Italy, Enzo Traverso was lecturer in Jewish Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales of Paris. He currently teaches political science at the Jules Verne University of Amiens. Two of his earlier books have been published in English, The Marxists and the Jewish Question (1994) and The Jews and Germany (1995).

Foreword / Introduction / 1. Auschwitz, Marx and the twentieth century / 2. The blindness of the intellectuals: historicising Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew / 3. On the edge of understanding: from the Frankfurt School to Ernest Mandel / 4. The uniqueness of Auschwitz: hypotheses, problems and wrong turns in historical research / 5. The debt: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising / 6. The Shoah, historians and the public use of history: on the Goldhagen affair / Conclusion / Bibliography / Index