Myths and Memory in the Mediterranean. Remembering Fascism's Empire

For over forty years, attempts to compare Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were complicated by the Cold War. The theory of totalitarianism, which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s as a model to describe the Nazi and Communist systems, was vitiated from the start by its obvious political function: to tar the Soviet Union with the same brush as Nazi Germany. In the revisionist phase of scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, the anti-Communist spirit of earlier writings was rejected, totalitarianism became a dirty word, and a variety of historians sought to show Nazism's fundamental distinctiveness. They argued that the Nazi regime was anything but the monolithic, streamlined political system posited by classical totalitarian theory. But in ditching crude attempts to bracket left and right extremes together, the new phase of scholarship lost sight of Hitler and Stalin's common ground: a ruthlessness and revolutionary force that was unparalleled in history.