Dark, bloody and savage: Twentieth-century European violence and its narratives

Abstract

This paper looks at major European twentieth-century narratives and interpretations that have seen it as an age of violence, terror and genocide. Using examples from historiographical debate and the analysis of specific historical processes (including the debates on genocide, concentrationary systems, civil wars and the Holocaust), it addresses both the characteristics of those narratives and some of their limitations and conceptual edges. Finally, the conceptual proposal put forward seeks to analyze, through historical contingency, continuities and discontinuities in the history of European collective violence.