Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century

by Tzvetan Todorov

Book Overview

Both a political history and a moral critique of the twentieth century, this is a personal and impassioned book from one of Europe's most outstanding intellectuals. Identifying totalitarianism as the major innovation of the twentieth century, Tzvetan Todorov examines the struggle between this system and democracy and its effects on human life and consciousness.

Totalitarianism managed to impose itself because, more than any other political...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691171424
• ISBN13: 9780691171425
• Release Date: May 2016
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

In defense of humanism

Bulgarian-French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has with Hope and Memory written a penetrating, personal account of the twentieth century and the lessons we can learn from its misfortunes. Starting with World War I, he first outlines the historical and political situation and then concludes each chapter with a desription of the destiny of Vasily Grossman, Margarete Buber-Neumann, David Rousset, Primo Levi, Romain Gary and Germaine Tillion respectively. These were people who early on opposed totalitarianism - both Nazism and Stalinism - and always defended personal autonomy, pluralism and democracy. In the case of Vasily Grossman, it took some time to make the transformation from official author of the regime to dissident. After the death of Stalin, instead of sending the writer himself to the Gulag, Khrushchev confiscated the critical novel (Life and Fate), which was later famously smuggled to Switzerland for publication. By then it was too late for Grossman himself; he died without knowing if it would ever see the light of day. It's commonplace today to hear people argue that we are all capable of committing atrocities, that we are all potential torturers and murderers. Todorov cites Primo Levi as saying: "I do not know, and it does not interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that murderers existed...and to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or else a sinister sign of complicity" (180). Because some people can kill and torture and others cannot, Todorov prefers to avoid Hannah Arendt's term "banality of evil". There really seems to be a difference; when Eichmann put thousands of people to death he was not acting as an ordinary man. On the other hand, Levi also reacted against portraying war criminals as an incarnation of absolute evil. "Such total barbarity did not exist." Levi talks about a Gray Zone inside which we all operate. We are neither angels nor demons but ordinary human beings comprising both good AND evil. An illustration of this dualism, albeit to a lesser degree, might be the comments of Vaclav Havel concerning the NATO intervention in Kosovo: "the raids and the bombs are not the result of any material interest. Their character is exclusively humanitarian" (258). For Todorov it's embarrassing to hear such a staunch antitotalitarian inventing a term that would fit right into Orwell's 1984. To him "humanitarian bombs" sounds just like "War is Peace "or "Freedom is Slavery." Havel wasn't present to tell the civilians in Serbia that these bombs were friendly and not aggressive. All talk about ethical war or collateral damage is profoundly shocking. Although some wars can be considered to be just, no war is merciful and we have no right to forget this. In his elegant defense of humanist values, Tzvetan Todorov argues that the cult of science belongs to modernity. But despite what "so many fa