Cataclysms

by Diner, Dan; Templer, William; Golb, Joel

• ISBN13: 9780299223502
• ISBN10: 0299223507
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-11-21
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Cataclysmsis a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop. Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis,Cataclysmschronicles twentieth century history as a "universal civil war" between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West. Dinerrs"s interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and "ethnic cleansing," situating the Holocaust at the core of the centuryrs"s predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.

Author Biography

Dan Diner is Professor of Modern European History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
Contingencies and Periodizations
Reestablished Spaces and Revived Times
Peripheral Perspectives and Pivotal Events
Continuous Narrations and Intentional Omissions
Interpretations: Two Varieties of Universal Civil War	p. 11
War and Civil War
America and Europe
Balance and Hegemony
Constitution and Nationality
Freedom and Equality
Warfaring Virtues and Mechanized Death
Two Kinds of Anti-Bolshevism
Race and Class
Sea Power and Land Power
Demos and Ethnos
Self-Government and Self-Determination
Fascism and Anti-Fascism
West and East
Conversions: Nation and Revolution	p. 59
War and Revolution
Society and Ethnicity
Expansion and Intervention
Red Nations and White Nations
Patriotic Wars
Borders and Minorities
Hungary and Rumania
Greeks in Odessa
Poles and Soviets
Stalin and Tukhachevsky
Germany and Russia
Revision and the Status Quo
Hitler's Wars
Poland's Frontiers
Germany's Unity
Regimes: Democracy and Dictatorship	p. 106
Weimar Lessons
Hermann Muller and Ramsay MacDonald
Tradition and Contingency
Stability and Crisis
England and France
Social Democracy and Radical Republicanism
Parliamentarianism and Authoritarianism
Cabals and Intrigues
Papen and Schleicher
Hitler and Hindenburg
Access to the Ruler
Emblematics of Contingency
Dictatorship and Dictatorship
Cataclysms: Genocide and Memory	p. 153
Eastern Questions
Ethnic Cleansing
Greeks and Turks
Armenian Catastrophes
Poland's Demography
Germany's Ideology
Eastern Expansion and Holocaust
Opposing Perspectives
Memory and Narrative
Hierarchy of Remembrance
Nazism and Stalinism
Labor and Death
Genocide and Class Extinction
Comparison and Perception
Dualisms: Decolonization and the Cold War	p. 199
Translatio Imperii
Britain and America
Geography and Ideology
Greek Questions-Far Eastern Answers
Asian Crisis and Western Freedoms
Worlds Divided - Worlds Apart
Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek
Dulles and Mendes-France
Dien Bien Phu and European Integration
History Neutralized-History Revived
Acknowledgments	p. 251
Notes	p. 253
Index	p. 303
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.