Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

This was the brave new world that the British novelist J. B. Priestley described in 1955 as ‘admass’. For many other contemporary observers it was, very simply, ‘Americanization’: the adoption in Europe of all the practices and aspirations of modern America. A radical departure though it seemed to many, this was not in fact a new experience. Europeans had been ‘Americanizing’—and dreading the thought—for at least thirty years.22 The vogue for US-style production lines and ‘Taylorized’ work rates, like the fascination with American films and fashions, was an old story even before World War Two. European intellectuals between the wars had bemoaned the ‘soulless’ world of American modernity that lay ahead for everyone; and Nazis and Communists both made great play with their role as the preservers of culture and values in the face of unrestricted American capitalism and a ‘mongrelized’ rootless cosmopolitanism symbolized by New York and its spreading example. And yet, for all its presence in the European imagination—and the very physical reality of American soldiers based all over western Europe—the United States was still a great unknown for most Europeans. Americans spoke English—not a language with which most continental Europeans had any acquaintance in these years. The history and geography of the USA were not studied in European schools; its writers were unknown even to an educated minority; its political system was a mystery to all but a privileged few.