Thinking Europe’s Catastrophe: Selected Essays brings together some of historian Dan Stone’s most influential articles. With a focus on the history and interpretation of the Holocaust, the chapters range widely in history of ideas especially the idea of ‘race’, fascism, and genocide. Social history, international history, and the history of the human sciences are all represented here. From studies of individual thinkers from a range of scholarly backgrounds, to analyses of postwar tracing, open source intelligence, archival history, psychoanalysis, and collective memory, these chapters offer a way into Stone’s large body of work and show how his various approaches to the past are united by the attempt to uncover, from as wide a perspective as possible, the sources of Europe’s mid-twentieth-century catastrophe and to appreciate the Holocaust’s effects on the postwar world.
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Dan Stone
Dan Stone studied History in Oxford. Since 1999, he has worked at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute. Previously, Stone was a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. Stone is on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Holocaust Research and the Journal of Genocide Research, and is a member of the UK Oversight Committee of the Arolsen Archives; the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s Experts Reference Group; and the UK Government’s Advisory Group on Spoliation Matters. He was previously the chair of the academic advisory board for the Imperial War Museum’s revamped Holocaust Galleries, which opened in 2021. His previous books include: Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2010); Goodbye To All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (OUP, 2014); The Liberation of the Camps (Yale University Press, 2015); The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023); Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023); Psychoanalysis, Historiography and the Nazi Camps: Accounting for Survival (Palgrave, 2024); The Forgotten Holocaust: Romania 1940-1944 (Penguin, 2027). His papers have been published by, among other outlets: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Modern History, Contemporary European History, East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, History & Memory, Journal of Contemporary History, and American Imago.
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Delivery time
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Not yet available
Available on 01.09.2026
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Number of Pages |
472
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Format |
210,0 mm x 148,0 mm
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Language |
English
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Type |
Hardcover
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Publication date |
01.09.2026
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ISBN
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978-3-8382-2156-4
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Weight
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630 g
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Product safety information (EU GPSR)
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With his astonishing range, the historian Dan Stone excavates the multiple causes and inhuman consequences of Europe’s catastrophic twentieth century. This priceless collection of essays brings together his many studies, ranging from little-known psychologists to famous philosophers, from race science to the Holocaust in Romania—among many other topics. Stone’s research casts an exacting eye on the perpetrators and an empathic eye on their victims. Taken together, Thinking Europe’s Catastrophe presents an unsparing analysis of the last century that provides the intellectual tools to interpret the current one. Unfortunately the warnings he sounds are going unheeded.
—A. Dirk Moses, City College of New York, and author of The Problems of Genocide.
This two-volume collection offers a most welcome introduction to Dan Stone’s amazing scholarship. A historian of breathtaking scope and reach, Stone’s probing analyses illuminate a vast range of issues. In these volumes, he takes on race, genocide, modernity and Nazism and, with an equally deft hand, an array of postwar historical and historiographical questions. In short: an outstanding contribution.
—Debórah Dwork, Director, Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, Graduate Center—City University of New York
Thinking Europe’s Catastrophe is a powerful collection that brings together decades of Dan Stone’s pioneering scholarship on fascism, genocide, and Holocaust historiography. Combining theoretical insight with precise archival research, these essays illuminate how ideas and historical practice shape our understanding of Europe’s darkest chapters, while speaking urgently to the present. This work stands as an essential contribution to modern European history and Holocaust studies.
—Christine Schmidt, The Wiener Holocaust Library
There are few historians of the Holocaust and National Socialism who have conducted research and have written as diversely and originally as Dan Stone. We all know his books, like the fantastic one about the liberation of the concentration camps and his comprehensive history, “The Holocaust: An Unfinished History”. But what about all those other texts published here and there over the years? His various essays demonstrate the incredibly well-founded theoretical framework Dan Stone uses to interpret Nazism and the Holocaust, they show how his topics developed, how much he is interested in discussing different intellectual approaches, but also the archives, sources and empirical questions of the Holocaust. The essays are thought-provoking and illuminating. He analyzes the NS-regime and its crimes within a broader context, without losing sight of their specific nature. Stone sees the connection between past and present, his interpretations come from a British perspective but are deeply transnational at the same time. One must be very grateful to the publisher for making Stone’s articles, essays, reviews and interviews – spanning the time of over 25 years of extensive research and demonstrating Stone´s huge productivity – available in these two collected volumes.
—Andrea Löw, Center for Holocaust Studies at The Institute for Contemporary History in Munich
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