Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

cash were universally loved and adopted by the people whose freedom they were there to secure. The reality was more complicated. Individual American (and British) soldiers were certainly liked, for the most part. But after the initial relief at having been ‘liberated’ (sic) by the West (and not the Red Army) had worn off, other feelings surfaced. The hard post-war years of the Allied occupation contrasted unfavorably with life under the Nazis. During the Cold War some blamed America for putting Germany at the center of ‘its’ conflict with the Soviet Union and exposing the country to risk. Many conservatives, particularly in the Catholic South, attributed the rise of Hitler to the ‘secularizing’ influence of the West and argued that Germany should steer a ‘middle way’ between the triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’. And West Germany’s growing prominence on the eastern edge of the Western alliance subliminally recalled Nazi