Waterloo Verdun Auschwitz

Title: Waterloo Verdun Auschwitz

Author: E. Runia

Binding: Paperback

EAN: 9789029059381

Condition: Good

Please note: Below is a general description of how we classify our condition types. If you would like a more precise picture or have specific questions, please send us a message and we will be happy to look into it for you.

Condition descriptions:
- As New: Hardly any signs of use, almost as new.
- Good: May show minor signs of use, such as some discoloration or a name on the endpapers, but generally no underlining or notes in the text.
- Fair: Book in fair condition. May show signs of use, such as discoloration, reading creases in spine, underlinings, notes, light soiling at edges, dog-ears, or a crooked spine.
- New: Book is new.

Description:
'In the beginning was the word,' the Bible says. In Waterloo, Verdun, Auschwitz, Eelco Runia assumes exactly the opposite: history, or at least the history that really matters - the French Revolution, the murder of six million Jews, the barbarism in the former Yugoslavia - is not a series of attempts to 'put words into action', but a series of actions that grossly exceed the bounds of normality and clash with the worldview from which they emerge.
come into being. The book's motto is Freud's lm The Beginning of the Tat.
The realization that what should not have happened did happen is impossible to live with: if we fail to explain away an 'anomalistic' - monstrous - event by means of, for example, a conspiracy theory (as in the Bijlmer disaster), then we have no other option than to revise our worldview in such a way that the event in question ceases to be anomalistic. The theme of Runia's book is the tension between events and worldviews. Time and again, we exceed our remit in history - and time and again, in order to 'let the past pass', we are forced to bring our worldview into line with what we appear to have done.
Waterloo, Verdun, Auschwitz consists of reports and essays. In the essays, Runia examines how historians and other commemorators (such as monument founders, museum builders and novelists) deal with events and experiences that are bigger than themselves. In the reports, he confronts himself with the fact that history is flagrantly unconcerned with what we consider possible.