Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

A second issue binding the Americans to Europe was the problem of Berlin. Thanks to the defeat of the blockade in 1948–49, the former capital of Germany remained something of an open city; East and West Berlin were linked by phone lines and transport networks criss-crossing the various zones of occupation. It was also the only transit route from East Europe into the West. Germans fleeing west could come to East Berlin from anywhere in the German Democratic Republic, make their way from the Russian Zone of occupation into the Western Zones and thence along the road and rail corridor linking West Berlin to the rest of the Federal Republic. Once there, they were automatically entitled to citizenship in West Germany. The journey was not entirely risk free, and refugees could bring only what they could carry; but neither consideration inhibited younger East Germans from undertaking it. Between the spring of 1949 and August 1961 somewhere between 2.8 and 3 million East Germans went through Berlin to the West, around 16 percent of the count...

Berlin’s curious status was thus a standing embarrassment and public-relations disaster for East Germany’s Communist regime. As the Soviet Ambassador to the GDR tactfully advised Moscow in December 1959: ‘The presence in Berlin of an open and, to speak to the point, uncontrolled border between the socialist and the capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which, unfortunately, does not always ...

the city had become the primary listening post and spy center of the Cold War; some 70 different agencies were operating there by 1961, and it was in Berlin that Soviet espionage ...

The Americans—unlike their West German clients—accepted the reality of an East German state, and understood Soviet anxiety over the aggressive tone of recent speeches by Adenauer and, especially, his Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss. Something had to be done to move the German situation forward—as Eisenhower said to Macmillan on March 28th 1960, the West couldn’t ‘really afford to stand on a dime for the next fifty years.’ In a similar spirit, Kennedy assured Khrushchev at Vienna that the United States did not ‘wish to act in a way that would deprive the Soviet Union of its ties in Eastern Europe’: a veiled acknowledgement that what the Russians had, they could hold, including the eastern zone of Germany and the former German territories now in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.9

Shortly after Kennedy returned to Washington, the East German authorities began imposing

travel restrictions on would-be emigrants. In direct response, the US President publicly re-asserted the Western commitment to West Berlin—thereby implicitly conceding that the city’s eastern half was in the Soviet sphere of influence. The rate of exodus through Berlin grew faster than ever: 30,415 people left for the West in July; by the first week of August 1961 a further 21,828 had followed, half of them under twenty-five years of age. At this rate the German Democratic Republic would soon be empty. Khrushchev’s response was to cut the Gordian knot of Berlin. After the Allied foreign ministers, meeting in Paris on August 6th, rejected yet another Soviet note threatening a separate Peace Treaty with the GDR if a settlement was not reached, Moscow authorized the East Ger...

Behind the scenes many Western leaders were secretly relieved at the appearance of the Wall. For three years Berlin had threatened to be the flashpoint for an international confrontation, just as it had been in 1948. Kennedy and other Western leaders privately agreed that a wall across Berlin was a far better outcome than a war—whatever was said in public, few Western politicians could seriously imagine asking their soldiers to ‘die for Berlin’. As Dean Rusk (Kennedy’s Secretary of State) quietly observed, the Wall had its uses: ‘the probability is that in realistic terms it would make a Berlin settlement easier.’ The outcome of the Berlin crisis showed that the two Great Powers had more in common than they sometimes appreciated. If Moscow undertook not to raise again the question of Allied status in Berlin, Washington would accept the reality of East German government there and would resist West German pressure for nuclear weapons. Both sides had an interest in stability in central Europe; but more to the point, the US and the USSR were both tired of responding to the demands and complaints of their respective German clients. The first decade of the Cold War had given German politicians on either side of the divide unparalleled leverage over their patrons in Washington and Moscow. Afraid of losing credibility with ‘their’ Germans, the Great Powers had allowed Adenauer and Ulbricht to blackmail them into ‘hanging tough’.

Moscow, which as we have seen had never set out to establish a client state in the eastern zone of occupied Germany, but had settled for it as a

second best, devoted inordinate effort to shoring up a weak and unloved Communist regime in Berlin. The East German Communists in their turn were always half-afraid that their Soviet patrons would sell them out.10 The Wall thus offered them some reassurance, although they were disappointed by Khrushchev’s refusal to keep pressing for a Peace Treaty once the barrier had gone up. As for Bonn, the longstanding fear there was that the ‘Amis’ (Americans) would just get up and walk away. Washington had always bent over backwards to reassure Bonn that it had America’s unswerving support, but after the Wall went up and the Americans conspicuously acquiesced, West German anxiety only increased. Hence the reiterated post-Wall promises from Washington that the US would never quit their z...

The Wall ended Berlin’s career as the crisis zone of world and European affairs. Although it took ten years to reach formal agreement on issues of access, after November 1961 Berlin ceased to matter and West Berlin began its steady descent into political irrelevance. Even the Russians lost interest in it. Curiously, this was not immediately clear to the West. When the Cuba crisis broke out the following year, Kennedy and his advisers were convinced that Khrushchev was engaged in a...

The problem was that Kennedy had taken recent Soviet bluster and propaganda all too seriously and built his understanding of US-Soviet relations around the Berlin question. This dramatically ratcheted up the apparent significance of the Cuban crisis, leading Kennedy to inform his closest advisers, on October 19th: ‘I don’t think we’ve got any satisfactory alternatives . . . Our problem is not merely Cuba but it is also Berlin. And when we recognize the importance of Berlin to Europe, and recognize the importance of our allies to us, that’s what has made this thing be a dilemma for these days. Otherwise, our answer would be quite easy.’ Three days earlier, as the Cuba crisis began,

Secretary of State Dean Rusk had summarized his own interpretation of the Soviet actions: ‘I think also that Berlin is very much involved in this. For the first time, I’m beginning really to wonder whether maybe Mr. Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin.’ But Khrushchev, as it transpired, was entirely rational about Berlin. The Soviet Union had indeed maintained a vast superiority of conventional forces in Europe and could have occupied West Berlin (and most of Western Europe) any time it wished. But now that the US had sworn to defend the freedom of West Berlin by all means (which in practice meant nuclear weapons), Khrushchev had no intention of risking nuclear war for Germany. As the Soviet ambassador to Washington later observed in his memoirs, ‘Kennedy overestimated the readiness of Khrushchev and his allies to take decisive actions on Berlin, the most aggressive of which really was the erection of the Berlin Wall.’11 With Berlin and Cuba behind them, the superpowers moved with surprising alacrity to resolve the uncertainties of the first Cold War. On June 20th 1963 a ‘hotline’ was established between Washington and Moscow; a month later talks in Moscow between the US, the Soviet Union and the UK culminated in a Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. This Treaty, which came into force on October 10th, had considerable significance for Europe—less because of its overt objectives than on account of the ‘sub-text’ underlying it.

The stabilization of the Cold War in Europe, the reduced likelihood of it ever becoming ‘hot’, and the fact that these matters lay largely out of their hands, induced among West Europeans the rather comfortable conviction that conventional armed conflict was obsolete. War, it seemed to many observers in the years 1953–63, was unthinkable, at least on the European continent (it never ceased to be the preferred approach to conflict resolution elsewhere).

There is no doubt that most West Europeans, when they thought about it at all, were in favor of nuclear disarmament: polls taken in 1963 showed that Italians in particular would welcome the abolition of all nuclear weapons. The French were somewhat less overwhelmingly abolitionist, while Germans and British were divided, though with a clear anti-nuclear majority in each case. But in contrast with the fraught debates over disarmament of the 1920s and early ’30s, the nuclear question in Europe did not move people much. It was too abstract. Only the British and (nominally) the French had nuclear arms, and of the others only a minority of the West German political establishment sought them.

The re-emergence in post-war Europe of self-governing democratic states—with neither the means nor the desire to make war, and led by elderly men whose common if unstated political creed was ‘No experiments’—came as something of a surprise. Notwithstanding widespread expectations to the contrary, the political temperature of Western Europe retreated from the fevered heights of the past forty years. With the calamities of the recent past still fresh in public memory, most Europeans turned away with relief from the politics of mass mobilization. The provision of administration and services replaced revolutionary hopes and economic despair as the chief concern of voters (who in many places now included women for the first time): governments and political parties responded accordingly. In Italy the change was especially striking. Unlike Europe’s other Mediterranean states—Portugal, Spain and Greece—Italy became a democracy, however imperfect, and remained a democracy throughout the post-war decades. This was no small achievement. Italy was a profoundly divided country. Indeed, its very existence as a country had long been a controversial issue—and would become so again in later years. Studies from the early 1950s suggest that fewer than one adult Italian in five communicated exclusively in Italian: many Italians continued to identify above all with their locality or region, and used its dialect or language for most of their daily exchanges. This was especially true of those—th...

Piedmont, in Italy’s wealthy North-West, was 174; that of Calabria, in the far South, just 52.

The war had further exacerbated the historical division of Italy: whereas the North, beginning in September 1943, had experienced nearly two years of German rule and political resistance, followed by Allied military occupation of its radicalized cities, the South of Italy had been effectively taken out of the war by the arrival of the Western Allied troops. In the Mezzogiorno the social and administrative structures inherited from the Fascists thus survived unscathed the bloodless coup that replaced Mussolini by one of his generals. To th...

by the mid-fifties nearly three civil servants in five were from the South, even though that region represented little more than a third of the country’s population. The opportunities that these arrangements afforded for corruption and crime were considerable; here too the Republic sat squarely in a tradition dating from the early years of the unified state. Whoever controlled the Italian state was peculiarly well placed to dispense favors, directly and indirectly. Politics in post-war Italy, then, whatever their patina of religious or ideological fervor, were primarily a struggle to occupy the state, to gain access to its levers of privilege and patronage. And when it came to securing and operating these levers, the Christian Democrats under Alcide De Gasperi and his successors demonstrated unmatched skill and enterprise.

In 1953, and again in 1958, the CDs secured more than 40 percent of the vote (their share did

not slip below 38 percent until the later 1970s). In coalition with small parties of the Center they ran the country without interruption until 1963, when they switched to a partnership with the minority parties of the non-Communist Left. Their strongest support, outside the traditionally Catholic voters of Venice and the Veneto, came in the South: in Basilicata, Molise, Calabria and the islands of Sardinia and Sicily. Here it was not faith but services that drew small-town voters to the Christian Democrats and kept them loyal for generations. A Christian Democrat mayor in a southern town hall or a representative in the national parliament was elected and re...

Christian Democracy in Italy resembled in many respects similar parties in West Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. It lacked ideological baggage. To be sure, De Gasperi and his successors took care to meet regularly with the Vatican authorities and never to propose or support any legislation of which the Vatican disapproved; post-war Italy was in some respects the Church’s moment of revenge for the aggressively anti-clerical secularism of the new Italian state after 1861. But the active role of the Catholic Church in Italian politics was smaller than both its defenders and its critics liked to assert. The main vehicle for social control was the powerful central ministries—it is...

In time, the clientelistic system of patronage and favors put in place by the Christian Democrats came to characterize na...

The country lacked a stable majority in favor of any one party or program, and the complicated electoral

system of proportional representation generated parliaments too divided to agree on substantial or controversial legislation: the post-war Republican constitution did not acquire a Constitutional Court to adjudicate its laws until 1956, and the much-discussed need for regional autonomy was not voted upon in Parliament until fourteen years later.

Italy was in practice run by un-elected administrators working in central government or one of the many para-state agencies. This distinctly un-democratic outcome has led historians to treat the Italian political system with some disdain. The opportunities for graft, bribery, corruption, political favoritism and plain robbery were extensive and they worked above all to the advantage of the virtual one-party monopoly of the Christian Democrats.13 Yet under the umbrella of these arrangements, state and society in Italy proved remarkably resilient

in the face of inherited challenges and new ones ahead. When measured by the standards of Canada or Denmark, Italy in the 1950s might appear wanting in public probity and institutional transparency. But by the standards of Italy’s strife-ridden national past, or by those prevailing in the other states of Mediterranean Europe with which the country was traditionally compared, Italy had taken a remarkable leap forward.

During the inter-war years of the First Austrian Republic, most of the rest of the country—rural, Alpine and deeply Catholic—voted for the Christian Socials, a provincial and conservative party suspicious of change and outsiders. Unlike the Social Democrats, the Christian Socials had no pan-German urge to be absorbed into an urban and mostly Protestant Germany. But nor did they have any sympathy for the Social Democratic policies of the Viennese workers’ movement; in 1934 a coup engineered by the Right destroyed the Social Democrats’ bastion in ‘Red Vienna’ and with it Austrian democracy. From 1934 until the Nazi invasion Austria was ruled by an authoritarian clericalist regime in which the Catholic party exercised a monopoly of power. The legacy of Austria’s first, unhappy experience with democracy lay heavily on the post-war Republic. The Christian Socials, reborn as the Austrian People’s Party, boasted proudly of their opposition in 1938 to the German takeover; but they were conspicuously silent on their singular contribution to the destruction of Austrian democracy just four years earlier. The Socialists, as the Social Democrats were now known, could reasonably claim to have been the victims twice over: first of the civil war in 1934 and then at the hands of the Nazis. What this obscured, however, was their erstwhile enthusiasm for the Anschluss. Dr Karl Renner, the Socialist leader and first president of the independent Republic established by the Austrian State Treat...

These uniquely narrow margins recalled the similarly close elections of the inter-war Republic. Catholic Austria and Socialist Austria thus faced the renewed prospect of parliamentary politics degenerating into a cultural civil war. Even with the help of a third party—the Liberals, who depended to an embarrassing extent on the vote of ex-Nazis, and whose vote in any case fell steadily at each election—neither Austrian party could hope to form a stable government, and any controversial legislation would risk resurrecting bitter memories. The prognosis for Austrian democracy was not promising. Yet Austria not only succeeded in avoiding a re-run of its history, but managed in a short space of time to repackage itself as a model Alpine democracy: neutral, prosperous and stable. In part this was due to the uncomfortable proximity of the

Red Army, occupying Lower Austria until 1955 and thence withdrawn just a few kilometers to the east—a reminder that Austria’s neighbors now included three Communist states (Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) and that the country’s vulnerable location made it prudent to pursue conciliatory and un-contentious policies at home and abroad. In addition, the Cold War assigned Austria an identit...

But the main source of Austria’s successful post-war political settlement lay in the widely acknowledged need to avoid ideological confrontations of the sort that had torn the country apart before the war. Since Austria had to be—there could be no question after 1945 of annexing it to its German neighbor—its political communities would have to find a way to co-exist. The sol...

by running the country in permanent tandem. In politics, the two major parties agreed to collaborate in office: from 1947 to 1966 Austria was governed by a ‘Grand Coalition’ of Socialists and People’s Party. Ministries were carefully divided up, with the People’s Party typically providing the Prime Minister, the Socialists the Foreign Minister and so on. In public administration—which in post-war Austria comprised all public services, most of the media and much of the economy, from banking to logging—a similar division of responsibilities was reached, known as Proporz. At almost every level jobs were filled, by agreement, with candidates proposed by one of the two dominant parties. Over time this system of ‘jobs for the boys’ reached deep into Austrian life, forming a chain of interlocking patrons and clients who settled virtually every argument either by negotiation or else through the exchange of favors and appointments. Labor disputes were handled by arbitration rather than confrontation, as the bi-cephalous state sought to head off dissent by incorporating ...

If Italy paid a price for political stability in an ultimately intolerable level of public corruption, the cost to Austrians was less tangible but just as pernicious. A Western diplomat once described post-war Austria as ‘an opera sung by the understudies’, and the point is well taken. As a result of the First World War Vienna lost its raison d’être as an imperial capital; in the course of Nazi occupation and the Second World War the city lost its Jews, a significant proportion of its most educated and cosmopolitan citizens.15 Once the Russians left in 1955, Vienna lacked even the louche appeal of divided Berlin. Indeed, the measure of Austria’s remarkable success in overcoming its troubled past was that to many visitors its most distinctive feature was its reassuringly humdrum quality.

Behind the tranquil appeal of an increasingly prosperous ‘Alpine Republic’, however, Austria too was corrupt in its own way. Like Italy, it won its

newfound security at the price of a measure of national forgetting. But whereas most other European countries—Italy especially—could boast at least a myth of national resistance to the occupying Germans, Austrians could not plausibly put their wartime experience to any such service. And unlike the West Germans, they had not been constrained to acknowledge, at least in public, the crimes they had committed or allowed. In a curious way Austria resembled East Germany, and not only in the rather monotonously bureaucratic quality of its civic facilities. Both countries were arbitrary geographical expressions whose post-war public life rested ...

Catholics in predominantly Protestant Holland not only prayed differently and attended a different church from their Protestant fellow citizens. They also voted differently, read a different newspaper and listened to their own radio programmes (and in later years watched different television channels). Of Dutch Catholic children in 1959, 90 percent attended Catholic elementary schools; 95 percent of Dutch Catholic farmers in that same year belonged to Catholic farmers’ unions. Catholics traveled, swam, cycled and played football in Catholic organizations; they were insured by Catholic societies, and when the time came they were of course buried separately as well.

Similar lifelong distinctions shaped the routines of Dutch-speakers in northern Belgium and marked them off absolutely from the French-speakers of Wallonia, even though in this case both communities were overwhelmingly Catholic. In Belgium, though, the pillars defined not just linguistic communities but also political ones: there were Catholic unions and Socialist unions, Catholic newspapers and Socialist newspapers, Catholic radio channels and Socialist radio channels—each in turn divided into those serving

the Dutch-speaking community and those serving French-speakers. Appropriately enough, the smaller Liberal tendency in both countries...

The institutions of post-war Germany were deliberately shaped so as to minimize the risk of a re-run of Weimar. Government was decentralized: primary responsibility for administration and the provision of services was devolved upon the Länder, the regional units into which the country was divided. Some of these, like Bavaria or Schleswig-Holstein, corresponded to once-independent German states that had been absorbed into Imperial Germany in the course of the nineteenth century. Others, like Rhineland-Westphalia in the north-west, were administrative conveniences that combined or bisected older territorial units. West Berlin became a Land in 1955 and was duly represented in the Bundesrat, the Upper House where the regions’ delegates sat (although its deputies in the directly elected Lower House, the Bundestag, could not vote in plenary sessions). The powers of the central government were on the one hand considerably restricted when compared to those of its predecessors—the Western Allies blamed the rise of Hitler upon the Prussian tradition of authoritarian government and set out to prevent any recurrence. On the other hand, the Bundestag could not casually unseat a Chancellor and his government once elected; to do so they were obliged to have ready in advance a candidate for the succession with sufficient parliamentary votes to assure his success. The purpose of this constraint was to prevent the kind of serial political instability and weak government that had characteriz...

the Christian Democratic-run state of the fifties owned or controlled 40 percent of all coal and iron production, two-thirds of electricity-generating plants, three quarters of aluminium manufacturing and, crucially, a majority of German banks. The decentralization of power, in other words, did not mean hands-off government. By maintaining an active economic presence either directly or indirectly (through holding companies), West German regional and national governments were in a position to encourage policies and practices conducive to social peace as well as private profit. Banks, acting as intermediaries between government and the businesses on whose boards bankers typically sat, played a crucial role. Older German economic practices returned, notably price-setting and consensual market-sharing. At the local level especially there had been very little stripping out of Nazi-era bureaucrats, businessmen or bankers, and by the later 1950s much of the West German economy was run in a manner that would have been familiar to the giant trusts and cartels of earlier decades.

But regulated markets and close government-business relations sat comfortably in the Christian Democratic schema, both on general social principles and from pragmatic calculation. Trade unions and business groups cooperated for the most part—the economic cake grew fast enough in these years for most demands to be accommodated without conflict.

The Christian Democrat Union ruled without interruption from the first FRG elections in 1949 until 1966; until Konrad Adenauer resigned in 1963 at the age of 87, he had unbroken charge of the affairs of the Bonn Republic. There were various reasons why the CDU, with Adenauer as Chancellor, enjoyed such a long period of continuous power. One was the strong position of the Catholic Church in post-war West Germany: with the predominantly Protestant regions of Brandenburg, Prussia and Saxony now in Communist hands, Catholics represented just over half the West German population. In Bavaria, where conservative Catholics constituted the overwhelming majority of the voters, the local Christian Social Union had an impregnable power base and used it to secure for itself a permanent place as junior coalition partner in the Adenauer governments.

Adenauer himself was old enough to remember the early years of the Wilhelminian Empire when the Catholic...

Bismarck’s Kulturkampf; he was wary of profiting excessively from the new balance of forces and thereby risking renewed conflict around the relations of church and state, especially in the aftermath of the German churches’ distinctly un-heroic record under the Nazis. From the outset, therefore, he sought to make of his party a nationwide Christian electoral vehicle rather than an exclusively Catholic one, emphasizing the socially ecumenical appeal of Christian Democracy. In this he was distinctly successful: the CDU/CSU only narrowly beat the Soci...

A related reason for the success of the CDU/CSU alliance (between them the two parties would always henceforth secure 44 percent or more of the national vote) was that, like the Christian Democrats in Italy, it appealed to a ...

homologues in the Low Countries, had a restricted appeal, attracting votes from a conservative, church-going community in a single region. But Adenauer’s CDU, though traditionally conservative in cultural matters—in many smaller towns and rural communities local CDU activists allied with the Catholic Church and other Christian groups to control and censor cinema programs, for example—was otherwise quite ecumenical: particularly in social policy. In this way, Germany’s Christian Democrats established a trans-regional, cross-denominational base in German politics. They could count on votes from the countryside and the towns, from employers and from workers. Whereas the Italian Christian Democrats colonized the state, in Germany the CDU colonized the issues. On economic policy, on social services and welfare, and especially on the still ...

Adenauer’s anti-Nazi record was spotty: as late as 1932 he had believed that Hitler could be brought to behave responsibly, and he was perhaps rather fortunate to have been an object of Nazi suspicion both in 1933 (when he was ousted from his post as mayor of Cologne) and again in the last months of the war when he was briefly imprisoned as an opponent of the regime. Without these points to his credit it is doubtful whether the Western Allies would have sponsored his rise to prominence.

The Socialist leader Kurt Schumacher, on the other hand, had been a resolute anti-Nazi from the outset. In the Reichstag on February 23rd

1932 he had famously denounced National Socialism as ‘a continuous appeal to the inner swine in human beings’, unique in German history in its success in ‘ceaselessly mobilizing human stupidity.’ Arrested in July 1933 he spent most of the next twelve years in concentration camps, which permanently damaged his health and shortened his life. Gaunt and stooped, Schumacher, with his personal heroism and his unswerving insistence after the war on Germany’s obligation to acknowledge its crimes, was not just the natural leader of the Socialists but the only national politician in post-war Germany who might have provided his fellow Germans with a clear moral compass. But Schumacher, for all his many qualities, was curiously slow to grasp the new international regime in Europe. Born in Kreisstadt, in Prussia, he was reluctant to abandon the prospect of a united, neutral Germany. He disliked and distrusted Communists and had no illusions about them; but he seems seriously to have believed that a demilitarized Germany would be left in peace to determine its fate, and that such circumstances would be propitious for the Socialists. He w...

Schumacher was particularly aroused by Adenauer’s enthusiasm for the project of West European integration. In Schumacher’s view, the 1950 Schuman Plan was intended to produce a Europe that would be ‘conservative, capitalist, clerical and dominated by cartels.’ Whether or not he was altogether mistaken is besides the point here. The trouble was that Schumacher’s Social Democrats had nothing practical to offer instead. By combining their traditiona...

respectably in the first FRG elections of 1949, receiving 29.2 percent of the vote and the support of 6,935,000 voters (424,000 less than the CDU/CSU). But by the mid-fifties, with West Germany firmly tied into the Western Alliance and the incipient project of European union, and with the Socialists’ doom-laden economic prophecies demonstrably falsified, the SPD was stymied. In the elections of 1953 and 1957 the Socialist vote increased only slightly and their share of the electorate stagnated. Only in 1959, seven years after Schumacher’s premature death, did a new generation of German Socialists formally abandon the party’s seventy-year-old commitment to Marxism and make a virtue of the necessity of compromise with West German reality. The funct...