Enzo Traverso - Fire and Blood - The European Civil War 1914 - 1945

C ertain images of the twentieth century are inscribed in our memory as visual references, icons of the past that sum up its meaning and retain its taste. Everyone knows Andy Warhols Coca-Cola bottles, the figure of astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping onto the Moon, and the artificial happiness of Marilyn Monroes smiles. When we think of the decades stretching from the First World War to the Second, however, everything darkens. We see the trenches, the rail tracks leading into the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau under the snow of the Polish winter, the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. The age of extremes has produced its imaginary of horror, with a whole world of suffering behind it, but also social experiences, shared cultures, ideas and struggles that the present book aims to explore by way of the concept of a European civil war. This term has been used by several commentators and interpreters, from the interwar years on, even if the only writer to have developed it systematically and in a highly debatable manner is Ernst Nolte. If I adopt it here, it is to try and grasp the meaning of an age of wars and revolutions in which the symbiosis between culture, politics and violence has deeply fashioned the mentalities, ideas, representations and practices of its actors. Methodologically, this work draws on various disciplines political theory, social history and cultural history borrowing from them both interrogations and analytical tools. From political theory, it adopts the arguments for answering a crucial question: What is a civil war? It recalls the horrors of this experience, but also tries to sketch its features and grasp its logic, to see whether or not this concept can help us understand the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. From social history, it endorses some categories that allow the interpretation of total war as violence against civilians, and civil war as a fury that unchains emotions and passions in a context of anomie. In the perspective of cultural history, it articulates the analysis of ideologies with the investigation of collective imagination engendered by such an eruption of violence. However, this interdisciplinary approach has clear limits. Interpreting the relationship between violence, politics and culture in interwar Europe does not mean writing a general history of the old continent. This book does not tackle several fundamental dimensions of the historical process, which necessarily remain implicit, as the outlines of a wide landscape. It is obvious that the global crisis of capitalism played a crucial role in provoking the European collapse in the 1930s, setting many countries on the road to fascism, radicalizing social and political conflicts as well as reshaping worries, expectations and collective identities. But in spite of its importance, this dimension is beyond the scope of the present work.

This book responds to the need to revisit or go beyond certain historical controversies of recent decades around the interpretation of fascism, Communism and the Resistance in order to situate them in a broader perspective, beyond the division into different contexts. It aims also to re-establish a historical perspective against the anachronism so widespread today that projects onto the Europe of the interwar years the categories of our liberal democracy as if these were timeless norms and values. This tendency blithely reduces an age of wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions to the horrors of totalitarianism. The temptation is all the greater, as civil war is precisely a moment in which these norms turn out to be invalid. It has its own logic and its own laws, which fatally imposed themselves on all the combatants, including those who took up arms in order to struggle against fascism, to defend or restore democracy. In other words, it is a false perspective to try to analyse with the spectacles of Jrgen Habermas or John Rawls an age that produced Ernst Jnger and Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt and Leon Trotsky. If we see democracy not simply as a set of norms but also as a historical product, we can grasp the genetic link that connects it to an age of civil war.