Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared

Michael Geyer · Sheila Fitzpatrick

12/2008 · Cambridge University Press

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In essays written jointly by specialists on Soviet and German history, the contributors to this book rethink and rework the nature of Stalinism and Nazism and establish a new methodology for viewing their histories that goes well beyond the now-outdated twentieth-century models of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality. Doing the labor of comparison gives us the means to ascertain the historicity of the two extraordinary regimes and the wreckage they have left. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, scholars of Europe are no longer burdened with the political baggage that constricted research and conditioned interpretation and have access to hitherto closed archives. The time is right for a fresh look at the two gigantic dictatorships of the twentieth century and for a return to the original intent of thought on totalitarian regimes - understanding the intertwined trajectories of socialism and nationalism in European and global history.

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Michael Geyer has a PhD from the Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. He taught at the University of Michigan and as visiting professor in Bochum and Leipzig. He is most recently the author (with Konrad Jarausch) of Shattered Past; of Reconstructing German History; and of a forthcoming book (with Michel Espagne and Matthias Middell) titled European History in an Interconnected World. He has published extensively on the German military, war, and genocide as well as on resistance, terror, and religion. His current work focuses on defeat, nationalism, and self-destruction. He has been a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Humboldt Forschungspreis.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Russian History at the University of Chicago, is the author of many books on Soviet social, cultural, and political history, including The Russian Revolution, Stalin's Peasants, Everyday Stalinism, and, most recently, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (2005). With Robert Gellately, she edited Accusatory Practices. Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989. A past president of AAASS, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities, as well as a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. Her current research topics include displaced persons in Europe after the Second World War. In 2008–9, she will be a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.