This book explores the entanglement between politics, culture and violence in the age of the 'European civil war' (1914-1945). In these cataclysmic three decades, the old continent experienced a new fusion of 'warm' and 'cold' violence, of unchained passions and industrial, rationalized massacre. The dialectic of a century forged by the Soviets and Auschwitz, by revolution and genocide, is the subject of this book in which Traverso scrutinizes multiple sources spanning from political theory and philosophy to literature and the arts. Rejecting commonplace notions of 'the age of totalitarianism,' his book rediscovers the passions and ideas of an age of intellectual and political commitment when, for the last time, Europe shaped world history with its own collapse.