Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air.

iron logic of politics.

the accidental outcomes of history

the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945

Vienna in 1989 was a palimpsest of Europe’s complicated, overlapping pasts. In the early years of the twentieth century Vienna was Europe: the fertile, edgy, self-deluding hub of a culture and a civilization on the threshold of apocalypse. Between the wars, reduced from a glorious imperial metropole to the impoverished, shrunken capital of a tiny rump-state, Vienna slid steadily from grace: finishing up as the provincial outpost of a Nazi empire to which most of its citizens swore enthusiastic fealty.

doubly unmerited good fortune authorized Vienna to exorcise its past.

a new identity as outrider and exemplar of the free world.

an imagined community of cosmopolitan civility that Europeans had somehow mislaid in the course of the century.

Austria embodied all the slightly self-satisfied attributes of post-war western Europe: capitalist prosperity underpinned by a richly-endowed welfare state; social peace guaranteed thanks to jobs and perks liberally distributed through all the main social groups and political parties; external security assured by the implicit protection of the Western nuclear umbrella—while Austria itself remained smugly ‘neutral’.

Vienna was much given to invoking older glories. But concerning the more recent past it was decidedly reticent.

And of the Jews who had once occupied many of the inner city’s buildings and who contributed decisively to the art, music, theatre, literature, journalism and ideas that were Vienna in its heyday, the city was most reticent of all.

the guilty calm of Vienna’s present.

an imposing edifice resting atop an unspeakable past.

Much of the worst of that past had taken place in the lands that fell under Soviet control, which was why it was so easily forgotten (in ...

the return of eastern Europe the past would be no less unspeakable: but now it would, unav...

the European Union, whose own emergence as a force in European affairs was a direct consequence of the east-European revolutions.

The ‘German problem’ that had surfaced in Europe with the rise of Prussia a generation before remained unsolved.

an interlude born of exhaustion.

The violence of war did not abate. It metamorphosed instead into domestic affairs—into nationalist polemics, racial prejudice, class confrontation and civil war.

An irenic, pacific continent had risen, ‘Phoenix-like’, from the ashes of its murderous—suicidal—past.

The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another.

It was the insecure child of anxiety.

Communist-led social revolution had definitively erased not just the shortcomings of the past but also the conditions that had made them possible.

long shadow cast by the dictators and wars in its immediate past. That is one of the experiences that Europeans of the post-war generation have in common with one another and which separates them from Americans,

After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe

Until brexit 2016 - meeting of thatcherism and corbynism

Europe’s post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations.

has thrown into relief not just Europe’s current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead ‘others’ of Europe’s past were cast far out of mind.

Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler.

the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complic...

Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.

Overseas, in their colonies, European states had habitually indentured or enslaved indigenous populations for their own benefit. They had not been above the use of torture, mutilation or mass murder to coerce their victims into obedience. But since the eighteenth century these practices were largely unknown among Europeans themselves,

the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.

it was not until 1944 that German civilians themselves began to feel the impact of wartime restrictions and shortages.

western Europeans returned the compliment by doing relatively little to disrupt or oppose the German war effort.

thirty-six and a half million Europeans died between 1939 and 1945 from war-related causes

such Jewish children as survived the pogroms and exterminations of the war years were mostly adolescent boys.

1945 the population of Vienna subsisted on a ration of 800 calories per day;

Few Jews remained. Of those who were liberated 4 out of 10 died within a few weeks of the arrival of Allied armies—their condition was beyond the experience of Western medicine.

What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer.

At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place.6 After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever before.

Most people expressed a desire to see immigration reduced rather than increased.

The difficulty of ‘placing’ the Jews of Europe was only solved by the creation of the state of Israel:

The ultimate authority of the modern state has always rested in extremis on its monopoly of violence and its willingness to deploy force if necessary.

The exhausted populations of continental western Europe aspired above all to recover the trappings of normal life in a properly regulated state.

decide the political shape of the new order that must now replace the unrecoverable past.

For most Europeans World War Two was experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something

The only source of collective national pride were the armed partisan resistance movements that had fought the invader—which is why it was in western Europe, where real resistance had actually been least in evidence, that the myth of Resistance mattered most.

Wreaking revenge on fallen women was one way to overcome the discomforting memory of personal and collective powerlessness.

once the Germans retreated the first victims of spontaneous retribution in the East were ethnic minorities.