The origins of Nazi violence: by Enzo Traverso ; translated by Janet Lloyd

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. \

Traverso, though Italian born, is currently professor of political science at the Jules Verne University of Amiens (France) and is the author of Understanding the Nazi Genocide, The Marxists and the Jewish Question and The Jews and Germany. In this clear-minded work, which started as a short essay but grew as the months passed, he challenges the conventional notion of the Holocaust as an inexplicable anomaly, finding its roots in history and its singularity in a particular blend of distinctively Western violence. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Publishers Weekly

Traverso, a political scientist who teaches in France, offers a clear thesis in this longish essay: Nazism was not an aberration or a throwback to the barbarities of an earlier age. Instead, it was very much a modern phenomenon rooted in the major trends of European history since the 18th century. The "rationalization" of killing that the Nazis perfected began with the guillotine of the French Revolution. Nazi racism had its origins in European imperialism and scientific advances, including Darwin's theory of evolution. The Nazis' total war drew on the model of WWI. The problem with Traverso's discussion is that he adds very little to ideas put forward by major social theorists like Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman. Moreover, he writes with broad generalizations that, in many instances, would barely survive historical scrutiny. The Nazis indeed developed an industrial-style killing operation. But fully 40% of European Jews were killed in face-to-face shootings or from the effects of malnutrition and disease in the ghettos. Traverso likes to invoke Frederick Taylor, the American apostle of time-management studies, to show that the Nazis implemented a capitalist-style system. But Taylor sought economic efficiency, which the Nazis never came close to accomplishing. And the primacy they gave to racial killings directly undermined the process of production. There is food for thought in this volume, but some of the theories do need to be tested against the historical reality of the Third Reich. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

"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. Enzo Traverso's brilliant synthesis, The Origins of Nazi Violence, maps the troubling genealogy of the Nazi regime, situating the extermination camps at the terrible intersection of European modernity's industrialization of killing, dehumanization of death, and colonialist mindset." "Challenging the conventional presentation of the Holocaust as an inexplicable anomaly, in which Nazi crimes have been excised from the trajectory of the Western world, Traverso navigates the intricate history of technical, cultural, and ideological antecedents to the horrors of the Holocaust. The uniqueness of Nazism, he argues, lay not in its opposition to the West, but in its terrifying blend of many forms of distinctively Western violence."--Jacket Traverso rejects the belief that the Holocaust was an historical aberration completely outside the trajectory of Western civilization, and sets out to demonstrate that it was the culmination of Western liberal thought.