That integrated, cosmopolitan Europe had of course only ever existed for a minority—and it died in 1918. But the new states hatched at Versailles were fragile and somehow impermanent from the very start. The inter-war decades had thus been a sort of interregnum, neither peace nor war, in which the fate of post-imperial central and eastern Europe remained somehow undecided. The likeliest outcome—that a renascent Germany would be the de facto heir to the old empires in the territories stretching from Stettin to Istanbul—was narrowly averted only by Hitler’s own errors. Instead, the imposition of
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