Černá zem

Who came up with the idea of a "final solution to the Jewish question" and how did the political and social conditions for its realization arise? Who killed and who was directly complicit? Who, on the other hand, helped and saved? And who determined which names should remain in historical memory and which should disappear from it? Timothy Snyder answers these questions in a comprehensive historical analysis that challenges standard interpretations of the Holocaust on a number of important points and significantly alters the received understanding of this key event in modern history: he discusses, for example, the "Auschwitz paradox" as a symbol that, for all its horror, also allows many of the horrific contexts of the war to be forgotten. In his analysis, the mass murder of Europe's Jews emerges as the hidden basis of many elements of the post-war political and social order in Eastern Europe, and also as a permanent threat that arises when we try to forcibly simplify political issues and subordinate them to unifying keys.

Czech edition