ROMS 6550 - [The European Civil War: Violence, Politics & Culture in Europe (1914-1945)]

Spring. Not offered 2017-2018. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with ROMS 4550. Conducted in English.

E. Traverso.

At the end of the Great War, Europe became the realm of a new relationship among violence, culture and politics. From 1914 to 1945, the continent witnessed an extraordinary entanglement of inter-state wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, civil wars and genocides. Originating as a classical inter-state conflict, the Great War led to a Weltanschauungskrieg. In spite of its highly controversial uses, the concept of “European Civil War” is probably the must useful in order to sum up such an “age of extremes” in which wars have no rules: they become wars against civilians, politics makes groups into implacable enemies and an endemic violence deeply reshapes both cultures and collective imagination. This course will analyze some features of this cataclysmic time by engaging political theory, cultural and intellectual history.