This volume takes a comparative approach, locating totalitarianism in the vastly complex web of fragmented pasts, diverse presents and differently envisaged futures to enhance our understanding of this fraught era in European history. It shows that no matter how often totalitarian societies spoke of and imagined their subjects as so many slates to be wiped clean and re-written on, older identities, familial loyalties and the enormous resilience of the individual (or groups of individuals) meant that the almost impossible demands of their regimes needed to be constantly transformed, limited and recast.

1. Beyond the Delusion: New Histories of Totalitarian Dictatorship Daniela Baratieri, Mark Edele and Giuseppe Finaldi 2. Cold Empathy: Perpetrator Studies and the Challenges in Writing a Life of Reinhard Heydrich Robert Gerwarth 3. The Life and Death of General Blaskowitz Christopher Clark 4. Stalin and the World of Culture Sheila Fitzpatrick 5. The Great Manipulator: Francisco Franco Paul Preston 6. Blueblood and Blacksmith: A Comparative View of Churchill's and Mussolini's Speeches Giuseppe Finaldi 7. "A Place in the Sun": The Conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-36 As Seen in Contemporary Diaries Christopher Duggan 8. "Wrapped in Passionless Impartiality?": Italian Psychiatry During the Fascist Regime Daniela Baratieri 9. Coercion, Consent, and Accommodation in the Third Reich Dick Geary 10. Peasants into Nationals: Violence, War, and the Making of Turks and Greeks, 1912-1922 Nicholas Doumanis 11. Learning from the Enemy?: Entangling Histories of the German-Soviet War, 1941-1945 Mark Edele 12. Genocide in a Multiethnic Town: Event, Origins, Aftermath Omer Bartov 13. Memories of an Exodus: Istria, Fiume, Dalmatia, Trieste, Italy, 1943-2010 John Foot