The title of Volker Berghahn’s 2006 book, Europe in the Era of the Two World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society, 1900–1950, suggests that his small work is something other than what it is—an extended essay on the crescendo of brutality in the Western world and the rapid subsidence of this violence by 1950. Oddly, although Berghahn devotes more than one third of his text to Hitler’s “violence without bounds,” he spends a mere five pages on Stalin’s “experiment in violence.”

T. Hunt Tooley is Chairman of the Department of History at Austin College.
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Other Independent Review articles by T. Hunt Tooley
Fall 2009 Some Costs of the Great War: Nationalizing Private Life
Winter 2006/07 “All the People Are Now Guerillas”: The Warfare of Sherman, Sheridan, and Lincoln, and the Brutality of the Twentieth Century
Fall 2004 A Low Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930–1941