The first half of the 20th century, from 1914 to 1945, was a time of wars, devastations, and revolutions that swept through Europe with fire and iron. According to Enzo Traverso, the concept of "European civil war" allows us to interpret this terrible combination of total war without rules and limits, local civil wars, and genocides, which also included the conflict between opposing worldviews.

Elements of this pan-European civil war: the mix of archaic violence, cold administrative violence, and modern technology used to annihilate the enemy, the systematic attack against the civilian population that was bombed, displaced, or mass-exterminated, the various aspects of the militarization of citizens, and the emotional escalation of conflicts within divided societies (Soviet Union 1917-1923, Spain 1936-1939, Resistance 1939-1945), along with the invasion of fear and the horror of death into people's minds.

Focusing on the enlisted protagonists, Traverso analyzes the positions of those intellectuals in the interwar period who, through opposing choices, took a stand in the conflict, from Walter Benjamin or Antonio Gramsci to, on the other side, Ernst Jünger or Carl Schmitt. Finally, he examines the contradictions of anti-fascism, not shying away from critical questions such as the ties to Stalinism or the blindness towards the Holocaust.

This book stands against a current revisionism of this historical period, which, under the guise of a critique of the horror of totalitarianism, tends to condemn into an inseparable purgatory of ideologies all those who actively participated, fascists and anti-fascists alike, as though beyond the victims, who are today retroactively glorified, all the cats of the past were gray.