Gabriel Motzkin – författare

This book comprises 14 essays by scholars who disagree about the methods and purposes of comparing Nazism and Communism. The central idea is that if these two different memories of evil were to develop in isolation, their competition for significance would distort the real evils both movements propagated. Whilst many reject this comparison because they feel it could relativize the evil of one of these movements, the claim that a political movement is uniquely evil can only be made by comparing it to another movement.How do these issues affect postwar interrelations between memory and history? Are there tensions between the ways postwar societies remember these atrocities, and the ways in which intellectuals and scholars reconstruct what happened? Nazism and Communism have been constantly compared since the 1920s. A sense of the ways in which these comparisons have been used and abused by both Right and Left belongs to our common history.These twentieth century evils invite comparison, if only because of their traumatic effects. We have an obligation to understand what happened, and we also have an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.

This book comprises 14 essays by scholars who disagree about the methods and purposes of comparing Nazism and Communism. The central idea is that if these two different memories of evil were to develop in isolation, their competition for significance would distort the real evils both movements propagated. Whilst many reject this comparison because they feel it could relativize the evil of one of these movements, the claim that a political movement is uniquely evil can only be made by comparing it to another movement.How do these issues affect postwar interrelations between memory and history? Are there tensions between the ways postwar societies remember these atrocities, and the ways in which intellectuals and scholars reconstruct what happened? Nazism and Communism have been constantly compared since the 1920s. A sense of the ways in which these comparisons have been used and abused by both Right and Left belongs to our common history.These twentieth century evils invite comparison, if only because of their traumatic effects. We have an obligation to understand what happened, and we also have an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.

"Time and Transcendence" provides a new theory of secularization in the Catholic context, a new interpretation of the origins of modern historical science, and a new reading of Heidegger's theories of time and history. The author shows how a secular sense of the past evolved in early modern French memoirs. Memoirs uncovered a level of personal experience that was then applied as an intuitive framework for the study of history. Modern history's scientific study of sources is embedded in the imaginative sense of a personal past. 19th-century French Traditionalists countered this threat of a secular past by expanding the concept of tradition to include all of history. Neoscholasticism then canonized philosophy as Catholic tradition, turning the history of philosophy against secular culture. Heidegger's thinking developed in the contexts of both this Catholic counterattack and the "fin-de-siecle" disillusion with secular history. Against "fin-de-siecle" notions of memory as a better way of penetrating the past, Heidegger recast history as future-oriented action.Rejecting both secular culture and religious tradition, he used history as a tool for secularizing religious experiences that secular culture had ignored, such as grace, mystical experience, and death. This book shows that while religion can turn a self-conscious secular culture against itself, ultimately the religious critique of secular culture can also be turned against religion.