Regimes of Terror and Memory

This book compares genocidal and other regimes of terror with Nazi Germany’s Holocaust regime. Yet the author’s interest extends to the question how societies have dealt with their respective records of evil.

---

Regimes of Terror and Memory: Beyond the Uniqueness of the Holocaust illustrates how convenient it has become in r not recognizing other regimes of terror in recent history. Manfred Henningsen compares the memory of Nazi Germany’s macro criminal record with the remembrances of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, the Japanese Empire, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Sukarno’s Indonesia . He discusses the cultural reasons for these memory distortions in the West and in the societies that have experienced these macro crimes of genocidal violence. Henningsen has embedded his search in an autobiographical context that begins with his birth, upbringing and education in Germany from 1938 to 1969, continues after his move to Hawaii in 1970 in the American political culture and becomes more realized through extensive traveling in Europe, Asia, and Africa.