TRAVERSO, Enzo. L'histoire comme champ de bataille: interpréter les violences du XXe siècle. Paris: La Découverte, 2012

Abstract

Review: In 2010, Dan Diner (2010, p. 9) questioned the actuality of the historical judgment (Urteil) for the understanding of pressing issues and problems in the contemporary world: Diner's dense undertaking implies a dip in Illustration and in the intricate woven relationships between the modern, modernity and modernization throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. A similar issue was raised by Enzo Traverso in 2012, in the work L’histoire comme champ de bataille (“History as a battlefield” – still without a Brazilian translation), published by La Découverte editions. Unlike Diner, however, Traverso does not focus on the 18th and 19th centuries: the issues of the contemporary world concern, above all, the unusual 20th century. Historical reflection and judgment illuminate the ghosts of a century that drags itself in the folds of the present. Traverso, a historian who teaches Political Science at the University of Picardy Jules Verne, is well known for his works on the Nazi genocide, 20th-century totalitarianisms, the European wars (1914-1945) and the works of Siegfried Kracauer. In L’histoire comme champ de bataille, the author seeks a theoretical discussion with the main approaches and concepts proposed for the understanding of the 20th century...