'...this is a genuinely original contribution to our understanding. Students of the Holocaust sometimes worry that too much analysis may immunise us against its unbelievable horror. Traverso avoids that risk with great sensitivity and imagination.' Socialist Review

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 capitalisms 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.

ForewordIntroduction 1. Auschwitz, Marx and the twentieth century2. The blindness of the intellectuals: historicising Sartres Anti-Semite and Jew3. On the edge of understanding: from the Frankfurt School to Ernest Mandel4. The uniqueness of Auschwitz: hypotheses, problems and wrong turns in historical research5. The debt: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising6. The Shoah, historians and the public use of history: on the Goldhagen affairConclusion BibliographyIndex