Scholars from a variety of academic disciplines have been drawn into exhaustive analyses of what went wrong in "the terrible 20th Century", as Winston Churchill dubbed it. In this book Stuart Scheingold adds political novels to those inquiries and argues that they make a distinctive and hitherto neglected contribution to the collective memory of the 20th Century. These fictional accounts are the work of some of the century's most celebrated novelists: Kafka, Heller, Boll, Grass, Vonnegut and others. As refracted through the literary imagination, the "terrible" 20th Century takes on new meaning that tends to elude historians and social scientists. Novelists peer into the shattered lives, the moral dilemmas, and the emotional chaos of the century, thus viewing a collective catastrophe through the everyday lives of victims, victimizers, temporizers, opportunists, true believers, and those who simply averted their eyes. In so doing, these novelists reveal, sometimes prophetically, the etiology of catastrophe, and both deepen our memory of the past and help us to think more clearly about the future.

Stuart A. Scheingold was Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington (Seattle), USA. He was the author or editor of 16 books and was the recipient in 2004 of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of American Political Science Association.

Preface

1. Novels of Political Estrangement: Subversion of Agency in the Twentieth Century
2. Anti-War Novels in the 20th Century: The Road to Late Modernity
3. The Alchemy of Catastrophe: Seeking Spiritual Solace in the Ashes of the Holocaust
4. Aftermath of Disaster: The Nazi Legacy
5. The Contradictions of Democracy: Political Estrangement in the U.S. and the U.K.
6. Re-Imagining the 20th Century, Remembering the 21st

Notes
Bibliography
Index