Why "History" has to wait | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Men do more from habit than from reason | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Tony Judt

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	• Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Tony Judt Penguin (Non-Classics), 2006 - 960 pages average customer review:based on 68 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Judtk's work essential for understanding postwar Europe

Tony Judt's book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 superbly covers events in Central and Eastern Europe as well as giving attention to the more widely covered Western European states. Judt's ability to point out hidden as well as long-term trends should prove useful to all serious students of Europe after WW II.
In addition, Judt's style makes his content readily available to most of us.

Why "History" has to wait

The book offers solid evidence as why it takes a generation or two before a work of "history" can be written. The book starts well enough following the end of WWII and maintains some credibility and credence until about 1960. By no coincidence, the author was born in 1948 so entered adolescence, the beginning of consciousness, about 1960.

After that the book starts to fall apart. While the facts keep on rolling (although some seem flat wrong but no references!), the analysis generally degrades into false strawmen and evidential self-contradictions. It becomes too often a polemic rather than analysis and history. It's as if the author had too much personal investment in issues or else was careful for his reputation amongst other European leftists. His trashing of Thatcher is a case in point.

Like so much of the Europe Project, the self-proclaimed "common values" imposed from the top down, so much just doesn't make sense to an American.

While not gruesomely anti-American, the haute and snobbery and self-delusions are almost self-parody. For example, he claims near the end that the defense of Western Europe was "sub-contracted" out to the Americans. Having had family and friends serve in the American armed forces in Europe during the Cold War, and personally long paid taxes for the defense of Europe, "sub-contracted" is hardly the word that fits. While our defense outlays were two or three times higher than those of Western Europe, they seem more free riders on their own security than paymasters.

Frankly, the author is one of those Europeans I just don't see eye-to-eye with. I can't help but view "public intellectuals" like Judt with the damning perspective of Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals" - a source of great troubles.

I will give the author credit (hence the 3 stars) for his encyclopedic knowledge. There was a lot of details here that would escape most of us on the other side of the Atlantic, especially within the Soviet Bloc. I did learn a lot but the inconsistent level of analysis and commentary brought the work down.

One bright point was where he pointed out that WWII wasn't about the Jews and the Holocaust. They were just part of the general misery, a intensive and extensive part yes, but only a part. The effort at placing blame and accountability was a way of opening the doors for Europeans to take a good hard, more honest, look at WWII.

Another surprise was how he could differentiate in relative menace Communists in Russia (ie Stalin) from those in France and Italy. To an American, ANY Communist is a potential totalitarian. Dictatorship is a feature, not a bug, in the Communist ideology.

Sure wish there was a book more solidly grounded in conservative thought that I could have read instead of the hours I spent on this one. I think my next book on this topic will be Bessel's "Germany 1945."

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Men do more from habit than from reason

Tony Judt's synopsis of European history from 1945-2005 is a masterpiece of historical research and narrative. To understand recent European history absent careful study of this book would require many years of in-depth research with numerous primary and secondary sources. I know of no comparable work, though the brief treatise by Volker Berghahn ("Europe in the Era of Two World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society, 1900-1950") is a more concise rendering of the topic.

The ever-erudite Judt, himself a "public intellectual" of the type currently derided in "post-modern" Europe, has intimate first-hand knowledge of many of the more recent events (e.g., the Yugoslavian War) described in this book. He also has comprehensive knowledge of apparently every other seminal event (and plenty of arcana) that has occurred in the European landmass and has incorporated his encylopedic knowledge into this complex history.

Following a roughly chronological approach, Judt analyzes the recovery from WW-II and progression towards the current EU. Social, historical, economic, political considerations are carefully reviewed and integrated into a genuinely compelling historical work. Particular emphasis (and insights) are devoted to the problems of incorporating refugees (from the "East") and migrants (from Turkey and former EU colonies) into the "fabric" of European culture.

Implicit in the history of the post-war era is, naturally the role of the various European (and "near-neighbor" nations, including the USSR and Turkey) entities in that conflict and one of its central events, the Holocaust. The centrality of the war (in general) and this event (in particular) as it applies to recent European history is perhaps best stated in the pithy aphorism on the enduring nature of guilt, "post equitem sedit atra cura", ("dark care sits behind the horseman" or, more concretely, "A guilty man cannot escape himself"). Judt devotes many pages to demonstrating that this observation also applies to societies; not only by dealing with the matter of complicity, but also in the need to empirically accommodate post-war national myths to undeniable facts. This took many forms, including "collective amnesia" (the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Poland and France, to name but a few) and sanitized history. The author notes that the same type of accommodation allowed European nations emerging from the wreckage of the USSR (during the breakup extending from 1989-1991) to initially adopt the posture of "occupied nations", evolving later to nostalgia for the drab social security provided by the Communist governments, all-the-while (in many cases) retaining the lack of insight required for critical self-study. Eventually, of course, insight developed, more-or-less coincident with the emergence of the "European mentality" and with the transition of leadership to a younger generation, one he considers more interested in forthright and candid investigations of wartime events. As a qualifier, however, he also acidly reports on the gross failure of the EU, Russia and others to deal with the Serbian atrocities perpetrated against Muslims (Bosnia), citing (as just one example) the massacre of over 7000 civilians in Screbrenica, an act committed under the eyes of Dutch troops), suggesting perhaps that maybe not much has changed after all.

Judt devotes much thought to the nature of Europe and compares/contrasts the European social/governmental "contract" to the approach taken by the US, generally to the detriment of the latter. Each and every one of his observations on this and other topics are brilliantly stated and carefully interlaced with factual detail.

In summary, this is a superb history. It really is a masterpiece.

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Turmoil

In 1989 Vienna was a palimpsest of Europe's past. Post World War II resettlement was massive. After World War I boundaries were moved, and after World War II people were moved. The last DP camp was closed in Germany in 1957.

The fabric of European states was corroded by Nazi and Soviet occupation. Most states were subject to dual occuations. Old social and economic elites were liquidated. To live normally in occupied Europe was to break the law. The state lost its monopoly of violence, and violence breeds cynicism. Punishment of collaborators began before the fighting ended. Austria got off lightly, even though it had been Nazi saturated. Collective amnesia assisted postwar recovery.

Europe developed a faith in planning. Material destruction and economic infrastructure was repaired with remarkable speed. Raw materials rather than war damage impeded recovery in Germany. The immedite problem after the war was the food supply. The winter of 1947 was brutally cold. Significant events and programs promoting or affecting recovery included the Marshall Plan, 1947, the Bretton Woods Agreement establish the IMF and the World Bank, the Berlin crisis of 1948 basically setting up the two Germanies, and the founding of NATO in 1949.

During the war the Soviet Union suffered permanent economic damage. Afterwards Stalin sought to create contiguous replica states. Moscow scripted show trials were held in Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. From 1947 to 1952 the Soviet Bloc was on permanet war footing. The Communist state was in an undeclared war with its own citizens. There was cynical quality to Communist misrule.

The collapse of the bloc began in Poland in 1989. In the 1990's Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, and the Ukraine became independent of Russia. Privatization in Russia was shameless. In Europe in general sub-regions have become increasingly important.

The Epilogue of this complex and wonderfully interesting history discusses how the European countries recognized and drew lessons from the Holocaust and how they came to terms with the facts of their citizens' conduct serving to enable the practice of genocide during the war. The book as a whole is a fine and detailed treatment of numerous political and economic issues.

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Europe is "the opposite of Communism"

This is a fascinating book that I'm glad that I read but that I'm also glad is over.

Judt sets out to explain how Europe went from being a continent made up of many countries to, well, the European Union. His central thesis is that the utter devastation of the two World Wars left Europe so hobbled and its citizenry so shell-shocked that the only way progress could occur was with strong direction from the government. In the case of Western Europe, that meant the "Welfare State" served up in various forms in different countries, and in Eastern Europe it meant a degree of acceptance of the communist regimes put in place by Stalin. Judt ends with the Soviet Union gone, Eastern Europe clamoring to get into the EU and Western Europe struggling to figure out just what it means to be European.

That probably doesn't sound like a scintillating read. I won't lie. This is isn't a page turner over all but parts of it do have the sweep and drive of great popular history. Other parts read like a text book. Judt loves facts and figures. Given the choice between telling you that coal production in Belgium fell 45% in ten years or telling you exactly what coal production was in 1960 and 1970, he'll always go with the later. Still, I haven't come across any other book which attempts to do what Judt does and while he does have his opinions, he's far from doctrinaire. Judt isn't a fan of Maggie Thatcher, Francoise Mitterand or Boutros Boutros-Ghali - which is quite a gamut.

Judt takes on a few sacred cows as well, for instance he explains the events of Paris 1968 in a way that is less heroic and more about squatters' rights. He doesn't shy away from Europe's less appealing actions either - like enforced sterilization through until the mid-1970s. What emerges is a full picture of a continent trying to assembly itself into a community.

If you want to know how the shambles of postwar Europe became the Europe of today, this is the place to start. It's especially notable for it's insistence on seeing Europe independent of the United States and for giving equal time to the Eastern European experience. Recommended for those interested in 20th Century history.

Kindle Note: no photographs

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Named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review

Almost a decade in the making , this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world?s most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change?all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.

* A Time and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
* Maps, photos, and cartoons throughout

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