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The First World War itself was a traumatic killing field for all the participants—half of Serbia’s male population between 18 and 55 died in the fighting—but it resolved nothing.
After 1918 there was no restoration of international stability, no recovered equilibrium between the powers: merely 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.
Like many myths, this rather agreeable account of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century contains a kernel of truth. But it leaves out a lot. Eastern Europe—from the Austrian border to the Ural Mountains, from Tallinn to Tirana—doesn’t fit. Its post-war decades were certainly peaceful when contrasted with what went before, but only thanks to the uninvited presence of the Red Army: it was the peace of the prison-yard, enforced by the tank.
it was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) that western Europe took the new path with which we are now familiar. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.
This becomes easier to grasp when we recall that authorities in the Soviet bloc were in essence engaged in the same project. They, too, were above all concerned to install a barrier against political backsliding—though in countries under Communist rule this was to be secured not so much by social progress as through the application of physical force.
But the whole of Europe lived for many decades after 1945 in the 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, for whom the twentieth century taught rather different and altogether more optimistic lessons. And it is the necessary point of departure for anyone seeking to understand European history before 1989—and to appreciate how much it changed afterwards.
In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction.
Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century.
Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’.
Finally, Europe’s post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence.
What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called ‘the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe’ was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms—but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust.
But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future.
The material consequences in the East of the German occupation, the Soviet advance and the partisan struggles were thus of an altogether different order from the experience of war in the West.
It is estimated that about thirty-six and a half million Europeans died between 1939 and 1945 from war-related causes
No other conflict in recorded history killed so many people in so short a time. But what is most striking of all is the number of non-combatant civilians among the dead: at least 19 million, or more than half.
Estimates of civilian losses on the territory of the Soviet Union vary greatly, though the likeliest figure is in excess of 16 million people
In view of these figures, it is hardly surprising that post-war Europe, especially central and eastern Europe, suffered an acute shortage of men.
On its route west the Red Army raped and pillaged (the phrase, for once, is brutally apt) in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia; but German women suffered by far the worst. Between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ were born in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany in 1945–46, and these figures make no allowance for untold numbers of abortions, as a result of which many women died along with their unwanted foetuses. Many of the surviving infants joined the growing number of children now orphaned and homeless: the human flotsam of war.
people starved and they fell sick.
Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939–43.
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.
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.[*] 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.
At its peak, in September 1945, the number of liberated United Nations civilians (i.e. not including citizens of former Axis countries) being cared for or repatriated by UNRRA and other Allied agencies was 6,795,000—to
By 1953 a total of five and a half million Soviet nationals had been repatriated. One in five of them ended up shot or dispatched to the Gulag.
The problem of the Jews was distinctive.
There had never been any question of returning Jews to the east—no-one in the Soviet Union, Poland or anywhere else evinced the slightest interest in having them back. Nor were Jews particularly welcome in the west, especially if educated or qualified in non-manual professions.
The post-war impact of these European civil wars was immense. In a simple sense they meant that the war in Europe did not finish in 1945, with the departure of the Germans: it is one of the traumatic features of civil war that even after the enemy is defeated he remains in place; and with him the memory of the conflict. But the internecine struggles of these years did something else. Together with the unprecedented brutality of the Nazi and, later, Soviet occupations they corroded the very fabric of the European state. After them, nothing would ever be the same. In the truest sense of a
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With the exception of Germany and the heartland of the Soviet Union, every continental European state involved in World War Two was occupied at least twice: first by its enemies, then by the armies of liberation. Some countries—Poland, the Baltic states, Greece, Yugoslavia—were occupied three times in five years. With each succeeding invasion the previous regime was destroyed, its authority dismantled, its elites reduced.
The liquidation of old social and economic elites was perhaps the most dramatic change. The Nazis’ extermination of Europe’s Jews was not only devastating in its own right. It had significant social consequences for those many towns and cities of central Europe where Jews had constituted the local professional class:
This leveling process, whereby the native populations of central and eastern Europe took the place of the banished minorities, was Hitler’s most enduring contribution to European social history.
To live normally in occupied Europe meant breaking the law: in the first place the laws of the occupiers (curfews, travel regulations, race laws, etc) but also conventional laws and norms as well. Most common people who did not have access to farm produce were obliged, for example, to resort to the black market or illegal barter just to feed their families. Theft—whether from the state, from a fellow citizen or from a looted Jewish store—was so widespread that in the eyes of many people it ceased to be a crime.
Above all, violence became part of daily life.
Violence bred cynicism.
Under German occupation, the right to property was at best contingent. Europe’s Jews were simply stripped of money, goods, homes, shops and businesses. Their property was divided up among Nazis, collaborators and their friends, with the residue made available for looting and theft by the local community. But sequestration and confiscation went far beyond the Jews. The ‘right’ of possession was shown to be fragile, often meaningless, resting exclusively on the goodwill, interests or whim of those in power.
Hitler had successfully discredited at least one radical alternative to political pluralism and the rule of law. The exhausted populations of continental western Europe aspired above all to recover the trappings of normal life in a properly regulated state.
Europe. There is no doubt that from the point of view of Stalin and the Soviet occupation authorities throughout the territories under Red Army control, the trials and other punishments of collaborators, Fascists and Germans were always and above all a way of clearing the local political and social landscape of impediments to Communist rule.
In the circumstances of 1945, in a continent covered with rubble, there was much to be gained by behaving as though the past was indeed dead and buried and a new age about to begin. The price paid was a certain amount of selective, collective forgetting, notably in Germany. But then, in Germany above all, there was much to forget.
‘We are threatened,’ he declared, ‘with total economic and financial catastrophe’. This sense of hopelessness and impending disaster was everywhere.
Hamilton Fish, editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential house journal of the American foreign policy establishment, described his impressions of Europe in July 1947: ‘There is too little of everything—too few trains, trams, buses and automobiles to transport people to work on time, let alone to take them on holidays; too little flour to make bread without adulterants, and even so not enough bread to provide energies for hard labor; too little paper for newspapers to report more than a fraction of the world’s news; too little seed for planting and too little fertilizer to nourish it; too few
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Marshall’s plan for a European Recovery Program, discussed with his advisers over the next few weeks and made public in a famous Commencement Address at Harvard University on June 5th 1947, was dramatic and unique.
By the time Marshall Aid came to an end, in 1952, the United States had spent some $13 billion, more than all previous US overseas aid combined.
Czechoslovakia’s exclusion from the Marshall Aid programme was an economic and political catastrophe for the country. The same is true of the ‘choice’ imposed on every other country in the region, and above all, perhaps, for the Soviet Union itself.
Indeed, one might almost say that the Marshall Plan helped Europeans feel better about themselves. It helped them break decisively with a legacy of chauvinism, depression and authoritarian solutions.
There was one European problem, however, that the European Recovery Plan could neither solve nor avoid, yet everything else depended upon its resolution. This was the German Question.
‘In these countries we must be prepared to exchange one set of crooks for another.’
In better times the British would have retreated to their Isles, much as they suspected the Americans of wanting to retreat to their continent, and left the security of western Europe to its traditional guardians, the French.
‘Stalinism means the killing of the inner man. And no matter what the sophists say, no matter what lies the communist intellectuals tell, that’s what it all comes down to. The inner man must be killed for the communist Decalogue to be lodged in the soul’. Alexander Wat
