Arno J. Mayer

from Zionism to Israel

Plowshares into swords

In this classic work which analyzes the context in which thirty years of war and revolution wracked the European continent, the great historian Arno Mayer emphasizes the backwardness of the European economies and their political subjugation by aristocratic elites and their allies. Mayer turns upside down the vision of societies marked by modernization and forward-thrusting bourgeois and popular social classes, thereby transforming our understanding of the traumatic crises of the early twentieth century.

Europe to the Great War

The Persistence of the Old Regime

Exploring the role of mass violence and terror in the French and Russian Revolutions, the author demonstrates that the upheaval stemmed not from ideology but from the chaos that both events produced in each society.

Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions

The Furies

Was the extermination of the Jews part of the Nazi plan from the very start? Arno Mayer offers astartling and compelling answer to this question, which is much debated among historians today.In doing so, he provides one of the most thorough and convincing explanations of how the genocidecame about in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?, which provoked widespread interest and controversywhen first published. Mayer demonstrates that, while the Nazis’ anti-Semitism was always virulent, it did not becomegenocidal until well into the Second World War, when the failure of their massive, all-or-nothingcampaign against Russia triggered the Final Solution. He details the steps leading up to thisenormity, showing how the institutional and ideological frameworks that made it possible evolved,and how both related to the debacle in the Eastern theater. In this way, the Judeocide is placedwithin the larger context of European history, showing how similar ‘holy causes’ in the past havetriggered analogous – if far less cataclysmic – infamies.

Arno J. Mayer

About

Books

Join the club