Books

Justifying Genocide. Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler – Stefan Ihrig
The Armenian Genocide and the Nazi Holocaust are often thought to be separated by a large distance in time and space. But Stefan Ihrig shows that they were much more connected than previously thought. Bismarck and then Wilhelm II staked their foreign policy on close relations with a stable Ottoman Empire. To the extent that…
Read more
Genocide. New Perspectives on its Causes, Courses and Consequences – ed. Uğur Ümit Üngör
The twentieth century has been called, not inaccurately, a century of genocide. And the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen little change, with genocidal violence in Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Why is genocide so widespread, and so difficult to stop, across societies that differ so much culturally, technologically, and politically? That’s the…
Read more
Germans and Jews since the Holocaust – Pól Ó Dochartaigh
From the very moment of the liberation of camps at Auschwitz, Belsen and Buchenwald, Germans have been held accountable for the crimes committed in the Holocaust. The Nazi regime unleashed the most systematic attempt in history to wipe out an entire people, murdering men, women and children for the simple ‘crime’ of being Jewish. After…
Read more
The Armenian Genocide Legacy – edited by Alexis Demirdjian
On the centennial of the acts commonly referred to as the Armenian Genocide, academics and professionals from a variety of disciplines discuss the impact of the Genocide in their respective fields. In this volume, they assess why it still remains relevant to discuss the Genocide today, as well as its global ramifications and its equally…
Read more
Holy Legionary Youth – Roland Clark
Founded in 1927, Romania’s Legion of the Archangel Michael was one of Europe’s largest and longest-lived fascist social movements. In Holy Legionary Youth, Roland Clark draws on oral histories, memoirs, and substantial research in the archives of the Romanian secret police to provide the most comprehensive account of the Legion in English to date. Clark…
Read more
Das Lachen der Täter: Breivik u.a. Psychogramm der Tötungslust Klaus Theweleit
Vom Lachen der Killer wird in zahlreichen Fällen berichtet, aber selten wird es in seiner zentralen Bedeutung gedeutet – so die provokante These dieses Psychogramms. In den „Männerphantasien“ wagte Theweleit erstmals eine Beschreibung des gewalttätigen faschistischen Mannes und seines innerlich fragmentierten, äußerlich aber gepanzerten Körpers. Auf diese bahnbrechende Theorie greift er nun zurück, um die…
Read more
The New Demons. Rethinking Power and Evil Today – Simona Forti
As long as we care about suffering in the world, says political philosopher Simona Forti, we are compelled to inquire into the question of evil. But is the concept of evil still useful in a postmodern landscape where absolute values have been leveled and relativized by a historicist perspective? Given our current unwillingness to judge…
Read more
Evil Men – James Dawes
Presented with accounts of genocide and torture, we ask how people could bring themselves to commit such horrendous acts. A searching meditation on our all-too-human capacity for inhumanity, Evil Men confronts atrocity head-on—how it looks and feels, what motivates it, how it can be stopped. Drawing on firsthand interviews with convicted war criminals from the…
Read more
The Media of Testimony. Remembering the East German Stasi in the Berlin Republic – Sara Jones
In The Media of Testimony, Sara Jones examines the use of eyewitness testimony in different cultural forms. The focus is on memories of the East German State Security Service (Stasi) in autobiographical writing, memorial museums and documentary film. Combining theoretical models from diverse disciplines, Jones develops a distinctive and interdisciplinary approach to testimony, memory and…
Read more
Radovan Karadžič. Architect of the Bosnian Genocide – Robert J. Donia
Radovan Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalists during the Bosnian War (1992–1995), stands accused of genocide and other crimes of war before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. This book traces the origins of the extreme violence of the war to the utopian national aspirations of the Serb Democratic…
Read more