Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps

by Tzvetan Todorov

Overview

The Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag provide the context for this acclaimed examination of the human capacity for moral life. Drawing on a striking array of documents, Tzvetan Todorov reconstructs a vivid portrait of the conduct of those who ran the camps and those who suffered their outrages. Challenging the widespread view that moral life was extinguished in the extreme circumstances of the camps, he uncovers instead a rich moral universe, composed not of grand acts of heroism but of ordinary gestures of dignity and care, compassion and solidarity.

A complex and profound study, Facing the Extreme restores a lost dimension to this anguished history, even as it offers an eloquent plea for the recognition of everyday virtues as a basis for contemporary morality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805042641
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/15/1997
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	307
Sales rank:	675,335
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Tzvetan Todorov is the director of research at the Centre National de Recherches in Paris and the author of many highly acclaimed works, including The Conquest of America.

Editorial Reviews

Graceful and gigantic...a fascinating tour through the subtlety, integrity, and brute honesty of Todorov's thought.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Todorov invigorates the debate over morality with rigor and grace, Aristotelian fineness, fluid prose, and his own virtues of compassion, humility, and realism.” —David Greenberg, The Washington Post

“In a world that continues to devalue human life, Todorov leaves us with a sense of hope that morality, with its ultimate action and caring, will not disappear.” —Eva Fogelman, The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

The concentration camp-including the Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag-marks a defining attribute of our century, declares Todorov (The Conquest of America), and the extreme experiences there make questions of virtue and vice more stark. In this resonant analysis, the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based critic draws on reports from Primo Levi, Victor Frankl and others, as well as on such philosophers as Sartre and Rousseau. Todorov's meditation is dense but accessible, raising a rich set of questions, even as he occasionally interjects harsh self-scrutiny about his family's life under Communism. He delves into the distinction and link between heroic virtues (courage) and ordinary ones (caring), the ``banal roots'' of monstrous behavior and the morality of recounting horrors (he finds Gitta Sereny's biography of Albert Speer more worthy than Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah). Though the camp experience seems to confirm that human good never expired, Todorov fears that our technological mentality has made it easier to demonize and depersonalize others. This book was first published in France. BOMC, History Book Club, Reader's Subscription alternate. (Jan.)

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