The European Civil War 1914-1945

Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945
By  Enzo Traverso


This was a very dense book at first, but in time the point became clear that each chapter is exploring its own theme in some depth, while accumulating the basis for an overall argument. It suggests that European history from 1914 to 1945 should be viewed as a single cycle of events and described altogether as a European civil war. These observations are not original and many sources are cited to support them. Certainly the book examines them in great detail, describing just how radically the core values of humanity collapsed for the duration, how Europe abandoned the idea of the state as a lawful framework for diverse people to live together, typically within an empire, replacing this with the image and by 1945 often with the reality of a nation state with a homogenous population, from which vast numbers of people were excluded and either obliged to transfer to their own national home or rendered stateless and hence also without rights.

However, the book's task is not descriptive but analytical. The writer is dissatisfied with the pronouncement that this period represented a collapse from civilisation into depravity; on the contrary, it represented the culmination of a process that was in hand since at least the Enlightenment. He dislikes the idea that we should remember only the victims of this disaster; we should not forget those who took part on either side of the civil war and what it is that they were responsible for doing. He is not willing to accept that all those who participated were wrong to do so, nor that the values which led them to fight should be abandoned; on the contrary, he argues that it was essential to be committed, the moral imperatives could not have been greater. We should honour those who defeated Nazism in Europe, remember what they fought against and be prepared to do the same again.

"The only memory of the age of fire and blood that was the first half of the twentieth century that it seems necessary today to preserve is the memory of the victims, innocent victims of an explosion of insensate violence. In the face of this memory, that of the combatants has lost any exemplary dimension, unless that of a negative model. Fascists and antifascists are rejected equally as representatives of a bygone age, when Europe had sunk into totalitarianism (whether Communist or Nazi). The only great cause that deserved commitment, so post-totalitarian wisdom suggests, was not political but humanitarian.” [p14]

One of the difficult themes in the book is its opposition to the widely argued assumption that communism and fascism were equivalent, by virtue of their totalitarian nature and the numbers of their casualties. Traverso does not understate Stalin's crimes nor Russia's participation in the immense forced population transfers as well as large scale murders which marked the age. At the same time he observes that the discussion of communism and the Cold War requires a global picture, while his work is concerned specifically with European history and the concept of a European civil war. The fact is that in the European context, communists displayed a fierce commitment to the struggle against Nazism which was never displayed by liberal democrats, let alone by the elites of the liberal democracies and the war in Europe was primarily fought out on its Eastern front, between Russia and Germany. Both German and allied casualties on the Western front were a mere fraction of those in the East. Once the Germans were halted and defeated at Stalingrad, the war was strategically lost.

Beyond this, I will concede that I am not clear if Traverso actually does reject the contention that communist totatilitarianism was equivalent to fascist totalitarianism. I suspect he has a more nuanced attitude, which could only be set out after introducing work such as Losardo's, who demonstrated the totalitarian elements in British and US practices, especially but not only during the two world wars, or the work of the Frankfurt School along similar lines. Two things are clear enough. One: He derides the notion that liberal democracy was going to defeat fascism, given its collapse across Europe in the face of fascism. Two: He also is sceptical of the way the anti-fascist alliance fell apart once the Germans were defeated, giving way to the new lines of the Cold War. He explains that the alliance was inevitably made up of very different forces, temporarily setting aside profound differences, and bound to go their separate ways in due course, but within that alliance the communists nevertheless played a vital role and generated the fierce commitment without which Nazism could never have been defeated.

Despite its density the book becomes more interesting and more challenging in proportion to the effort expended on reading it. I have already made an effort at a second reading. It is too early to say if I have understood it correctly - probably not, though writing about it has been a good start - but I have gained a lot from it already and I know I will return to it again.


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