This course seeks not to familiarize students with a basic factography of the 20th century, but to guide them into explorations of the infinite variety of its human conditions -- perceived through great art, literature and films pertaining to its great tragedies, bunched for example around the horror of trench warfare; the promise and failure of revolutions; Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism; totalitarianisms and their camp systems; occupations and resistance movements; atrocities and genocides; life in the shadow of nuclear weapons; readings and meanings of the collapse of Communism; the rise, degeneration and fall of the Third World.
