Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

To a new and politically innocent generation, the truly appealing failures were European Communism’s lost leaders, the men and women who never had a chance to exercise any political responsibilities at all. Thus the 1960s saw the rediscovery of Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-Jewish Socialist assassinated by German Frei Korps soldiers in the doomed Berlin revolution of January 1919; György Lukacs, the Hungarian Communist thinker whose political writings of the 1920s briefly suggested an alternative to official Communist interpretations of history and literature before he was forced publicly to abjure them; and above all Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party and author of a cycle of brilliant, unpublished papers on revolutionary politics and Italian history, most of them written in the Fascist prisons where he languished from 1926 until his death, at the age of 46, in April 1937.