Moderne Zeiten? Krieg, Revolution und Gewalt im 20. Jahrhundert

For decades, historians and sociologists working in the field of political violence have been engaged in a seemingly endless debate about the complex relationship between modernity and barbarism in twentieth-century Europe. Following Zygmunt Bauman's influential (but by no means uncontested) interpretation of totalitarian mass violence as an ‘offspring of the modern spirit’, many scholars have subscribed to the notion that the violent excesses of Europe's fascist and Communist regimes (and one should add, in view of the growing historiographical interest in colonial violence, European democracies) were not a deviation from Europe's ‘civilising’ process of increasing self-restraint, but rather part and parcel of a genuinely ‘modern’ project: the attempt to establish utopian societies free of racial, social, or political divisions, an aim ruthlessly pursued by expelling or exterminating those either deemed ‘unfit’ for modern society or perceived to stand in the way of ‘modernisation’. The latest contribution to the ongoing controversy about the ambivalent relationship between modernity and violence is this essay collection edited by Jörg Baberowski, Professor of Modern Eastern European History at Berlin's Humboldt University. Without denying the ‘modern’ character and aspirations of Europe's totalitarian regimes, the volume suggests that many of the most horrific incidents of mass murder in the twentieth century were carried out in non-urban, pre-modern settings where the ‘hubris of the modern interventionist state celebrated its greatest triumphs’. The case-studies presented in support of this general argument range from revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence in the Urals between 1917 and 1922 (Igor Narskij) and ethnic violence in the Western Ukraine between 1944 and 1948 (Christoph Mick) to the GULAG (Bernd Bonwetsch) and mass terror in the rural areas of Mao's China and Stalinist Russia (Gerd Koenen)

Barbarism · Communism · Early Modern Europe · Economic history · Historiography · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law