THE ORIGINS OF NAZI VIOLENCE

Traverso, a political scientist who teaches in France, offers a clear thesis in this longish essay: Nazism was not an aberration or a throwback to the barbarities of an earlier age. Instead, it was very much a modern phenomenon rooted in the major trends of European history since the 18th century. The "rationalization" of killing that the Nazis perfected began with the guillotine of the French Revolution. Nazi racism had its origins in European imperialism and scientific advances, including Darwin's theory of evolution. The Nazis' total war drew on the model of WWI. The problem with Traverso's discussion is that he adds very little to ideas put forward by major social theorists like Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman. Moreover, he writes with broad generalizations that, in many instances, would barely survive historical scrutiny. The Nazis indeed developed an industrial-style killing operation. But fully 40% of European Jews were killed in face-to-face shootings or from the effects of malnutrition and disease in the ghettos. Traverso likes to invoke Frederick Taylor, the American apostle of time-management studies, to show that the Nazis implemented a capitalist-style system. But Taylor sought economic efficiency, which the Nazis never came close to accomplishing. And the primacy they gave to racial killings directly undermined the process of production. There is food for thought in this volume, but some of the theories do need to be tested against the historical reality of the Third Reich. (July)