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 anti-fascists 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. So Oskar Schindler has dethroned [French Resistance leader] Missak Manouchian. The example kept in mind today is that of the businessman (a Nazi party member) who rescued his Jewish employees, rather than that of the immigrants in France (Jews and Armenians, Italians and Spaniards) who fought against Nazism in a movement linked to the Communist Party.

The example of Oskar Schindler here is instructive. Traverso is alert to the problems posed by a modern culture industry that would lionize a Nazi, by way of Steven Spielberg’s Best Picture entry Schindler’s List (1993), at the expense of a historical narrative that could accommodate a communist anti-fascist combatant such as Manouchian who had been murdered by Nazis. Such a history would, by necessity, strive to understand the World Wars as more than a series of interstate struggles, ultimately rendering them more intelligibly, and compellingly, as a series of violent civil wars between partisans and fascists.