Zara Steiner. The Triumph of the Dark

Zara Steiner's long book is a diplomatic history of how World War II began. It is the second of a two-volume history of the European interwar years. The author, well-known simply as Zara and nearly iconic in stature, has produced an impressive history of a still controversial subject. It is a prodigious work, reflecting great industry and mastery of Western scholarship on the 1930s. The book's title sounds like a heading from J. R. R. Tolkien, but Steiner's work is not fiction, although it is almost as complex as Tolkien's plot lines. “This is a time,” writes the author, “with few heroes, two evil Titans, and an assortment of villains and knaves” (p. 1). Perhaps she is being a little unkind, for there were more than a few “heroes” who struggled to raise the alarm against the tenebrous peril of Nazi Germany. They were found everywhere in Europe from London to Moscow and were of every political conviction. Unfortunately, their Cassandra-like warnings went unheeded by Steiner's “villains and knaves,” driven by hubris and/or fear. Some of them thought they were smarter than they were, or at least smart enough to conciliate Adolf Hitler and to avoid war, ruin, and socialist revolution.

Conviction · Hubris · Millenarianism · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Subject (documents) · World War II · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies