Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide ed. Volker Benkert and Michael Mayer

The edited volume Terrortimes, Terrorscapes: Continuities of Space, Time, and Memory in Twentieth-Century War and Genocide ambitiously seeks to broaden our understanding of how mass violence occurs and is remembered. Acknowledging Timothy Snyder's efficacious codification of how space and time shaped the “Bloodlands” between Hitler and Stalin, but also desiring to move beyond this clearly defined, but fairly constricted scope, editors Volker Benkert and Michael Mayer observe that “violence triggered in a host of different situational contexts also has underlying notions of space, time, and memory, which together form a deep fabric of interwoven meanings difficult to disentangle” (p. 12). With contributions from eleven scholars, the book effectively argues that exploring these continuities “does not imply sameness of past and present horrors or sameness of pathways to redemption after them” (p. 274). Rather, “understanding violence in this overlapping manner adds to scholarship that often has compartmentalized its study by wars, nations, theaters, dates, and atrocities” (p. 9).