ABSTRACT
Totalitarianism is probably the main burden of European modernity and nobody could really come to terms with it. As the heated German controversy about Daniel Goldhagen’s book on Hitler’s Willing Executioners or the row on the Wehrmacht exhibition in Germany and Austria have shown, there is still little certainty in dealing with the subject. National Socialism has conduced Western civilization to a breaking point beyond which no easy way of return to the beliefs and patterns of action of the tradition was and is available. In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote in the preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism:. After 1945, however, the overwhelming majority of the German and Austrian societies tried to treat the Nazi-past as past and to define the future in terms of what has been called the Wiederaufbau: the reconstruction of their markets and political institutions and the reassessment of their international status.
