Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

To these concerns, American critics of the initial US ‘hard’ line added a further consideration. It was all very well forcibly bringing Germans to a consciousness of their own defeat, but unless they were given some prospect of a better future the outcome might be the same as before: a resentful, humiliated nation vulnerable to demagogy from Right or Left. As former President Herbert Hoover expressed it to Truman himself, in 1946, ‘You can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both.’ If, in American treatment of Germany, the balance of advantage swung increasingly to ‘peace’ this was largely due to the darkening prospect for US-Soviet relations. Among a restricted circle of Washington insiders, it was obvious from the outset that the incompatibility of Soviet and Western interests would lead to conflict and that clearly delimited zones of power might be a prudent solution to post-war problems. This was the view of George Kennan. Why, he wrote on January 26th 1945, ‘could we not make a decent and definite compromise with [the USSR]?—divide Europe frankly into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and the Russians out of ours? . . . And within whatever sphere of action was left to us we could at least . . . (try) to restore life, in the wake of the war, on a dignified and stable foundation.’ Six weeks later a more pessimistic and implicitly confrontational response to Soviet actions in