This volume takes a comparative approach, locating totalitarianism in the vastly complex web of fragmented pasts, diverse presents and differently envisaged futures to enhance our understanding of this fraught era in European history. It shows that no matter how often totalitarian societies spoke of and imagined their subjects as so many slates to be wiped clean and re-written on, older identities, familial loyalties and the enormous resilience of the individual (or groups of individuals) meant that the almost impossible demands of their regimes needed to be constantly transformed, limited and recast.