Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The student riots and occupations had set the spark to a nationwide series of strikes and workplace occupations that brought France to a near-standstill by the end of May.

The strikes, sit-ins, office occupations and accompanying demonstrations and marches were the greatest movement of social protest in modern France, far more extensive than those of June 1936. Even in retrospect it is difficult to say with confidence exactly what they were about.

The millions of men and women who had stopped work had one thing at least in common with the students. Whatever their particular local grievances, they were above all frustrated with their conditions of existence. They did not so much want to get a better deal at work as to change something about their way of life; pamphlets and manifestos and speeches explicitly said as much. This was good news for the public authorities in that it diluted the mood of the strikers and directed their attention away from political targets; but it suggested a general malaise that would be hard to address. France was prosperous and secure and some conservative commentators concluded that the wave of protest was thus driven not by discontent but by simple boredom. But there was genuine frustration, not only in factories like those of Renault where working conditions had long been unsatisfactory, but everywhere. The Fifth Republic had accentuated the longstanding French habit of concentrating power in one place and a handful of institutions. France was run, and was seen to be run, by a tiny Parisian élite: socially exclusive, culturally privileged, haughty, hierarchical and unapproachable. Even some of its own members (and especially their children) found it stifling.

The May Events in France had a psychological impact out of all proportion to their true significance.

The national strike movement, while mysterious and unsettling, merely added to the aura of the students’ own actions: having quite by accident detonated the explosion of social resentment, they were retrospectively credited with anticipating and even articulating it.

As a consequence, the French ‘psychodrama’ (Aron) of 1968 entered popular mythology almost immediately as an object of nostalgia, a stylized struggle in which the forces of Life and Energy and Freedom were ranged against the numbing, gray dullness of the men of the past.

This was to be a victimless revolution, which in the end meant that it was no sort of revolution at all.

The Italian ‘economic miracle’ arrived later than elsewhere, and the transition out of an agrarian society had been more abrupt. As a consequence, the disruptions of first-generation industrialization overlapped and collided with the discontents of modernity.

The better-paid, better-protected, skilled employees in the factories of Fiat, or the Pirelli Rubber Company, demanded a greater say in management decisions—over shift hours, wage differentials and disciplinary measures. Unskilled workers sought some of these goals and opposed others. Their main objection was to exhausting piece rates, the unrelenting pace of mechanized mass production lines, and unsafe working conditions.

In these circumstances, the chief beneficiaries of Italy’s social tensions were not the established organizations of

the Left, but a handful of informal networks of the ‘extra-parliamentary’ Left. Their leaders—dissident Communists, academic theoreticians of worker autonomy, and spokesmen for student organizations—were quicker to identify the new sources of discontent at the industrial workplace and absorb them into their projects. Moreover, the universities themselves offered an irresistible analogy. There, too, a new and unorganized workforce (the massive influx of first-generation students) faced conditions of life and work that were deeply unsatisfactory. There, too, an old élite exercised untrammeled decision-making power over the student masses, imposing workload, tests, grades and penalties at will.

In the thinking of the New Left it was not the social origin of a group that counted, but rather its capacity to disrupt the institutions and structures of authority.

But unlike the French student movements, the Italian student organizers’ interest in the reform of academic institutions was always secondary to their identification with the workers’ movement,

Workers’ autonomy—as tactic and as objective—was the path of the future. Not only were reforms—in schools and factories alike—unattainable, they were undesirable. Compromise was defeat.

the class roles were now reversed: the privileged children of the bourgeoisie were screaming

revolutionary slogans and beating up the underpaid sons of southern sharecroppers charged with preserving civic order.

The ‘strategy of tension’ that underlay the lead years of the Seventies had begun.

Until 1961, a post-war generation had been raised to see Nazism as responsible for war and defeat; but its truly awful aspects were consistently downplayed. The trial that year in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, followed from 1963 to 1965 by the so-called ‘Auschwitz trials’ in Frankfurt, belatedly brought to German public attention the evils of the Nazi regime.

the official West German recognition of Nazi evil had never been accompanied by genuine individual recognition of responsibility.

West Germany’s post-war democracy was not the solution; it was the problem. The apolitical, consumerist, American-protected cocoon of the Bundesrepublik was not just imperfect and amnesiac; it had actively conspired with its Western masters to deny the German past, to bury it in material goods and anti-Communist propaganda.

The youthful radical intelligentsia of the German Sixties

accused the Bonn Republic of covering up the crimes of its founding generation.

As a result, in the eyes of their sons and daughters they stood for nothing. Their material achievements were tainted by their moral inheritance. If ever there was a generation whose rebellion really was grounded in the rejection of everything their parents represented—everything: national pride, Nazism, money, the West, peace, stability, law and democracy—it was ‘Hitler’s children’, the West German radicals of the Sixties.

Anti-militarism had a special place in German student protest as a tidy way to condemn both the Federal Republic and its Nazi predecessor. With the growth of opposition to the Vietnam War this conflation between past and present extended to West Germany’s military mentor. America,

If America was no better than the Hitler regime—if, in a slogan of the time, US=SS—then it was but a short step to treating Germany itself as Vietnam: both countries were divided by foreign occupiers, both were helplessly caught

up in other people’s conflicts. This way of talking allowed West German radicals to despise the Bonn Republic both for its present imperialist-capitalist associations and for its past fascist ones. More ominously, it authorized the radical Left to recycle the claim that it was Germans themselves who were the true victims—an assertion hitherto identified with the far Right.21 We should not, then, be surprised to learn that for all their anger at the ‘Auschwitz generation’, young Germans of the Sixties were not really much concerned with the Jewish Holocaust. Indeed, like their parents, they were uncomfortable with the ‘Jewish Question’. They preferred to subsume it in academic demands for classes on ‘Faschismustheorie’, obscuring the racist dimension of Nazism and emphasizing instead its links to capitalist production and imperial power—and thence forward to Washington and Bonn. The truly ‘repressive state apparatus’ was the imperial lackeys in Bonn; their victims were those who opposed America’s war in Vietnam. In this peculiar logic the populist, down-market tabloid Bild Zeitung, with its withering criticisms of student politics, was a revived Der Stürmer; students were the new ‘Jews’; and Nazi concentration camps were just a serviceable metaphor for the crimes of imperialism. In the words of a slogan graffitoed across the walls of Dachau in 1966 by a group of radicals: ‘Vietnam is the Auschwitz of America’. The German extra-parliamentary Left thus lost touch with its roo...

And once again, a bizarre, chilling analogy was drawn in certain quarters between Hitler’s Jewish victims and the youth of the 1960s, martyrs to the sexually repressive regime of their parents.

Jürgen Habermas, hitherto a prominent critic of the Bonn authorities, warned Dutschke and his friends a few days later of the risk of playing with fire. ‘Left Fascism’, he reminded the SDS leader, is as lethal as the right-wing kind. Those who talked loosely of the ‘hidden violence’ and ‘repressive tolerance’ of the peaceful Bonn regime—and who set out deliberately to provoke the authorities into repression by voluntaristic

acts of real violence—did not know what they were doing.

Quite a few of them had been born in what was now East Germany, or else in other lands to the east from which their ethnic German families had been expelled: East Prussia, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Perhaps not surprisingly, their parents’ nostalgia for a lost German past was unconsciously echoed in their own dreams of an alternative, better Germany to the East. East Germany, despite (because of?) its repressive, censorious authoritarianism, had a special attraction for hard-core young radicals: it was everything Bonn was not and it did not pretend otherwise. Thus the radicals’ hatred for the ‘hypocrisies’ of the Federal Republic made them uniquely susceptible to the claims of East Germany’s Communists to have faced up to German history and purged their Germany of its fascist past.

Emphasis upon the crimes of Communism was just a diversion from the crimes of capitalism. Communists, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit had expressed it in Paris, might be ‘Stalinist scoundrels’; but liberal democrats were no better. Thus the German Left turned a deaf ear to rumblings of discontent in Warsaw or Prague. The face of the Sixties in West Germany, as in Western Europe at large, was turned resolutely inwards. The cultural revolution of the era was remarkably parochial: if Western youth looked beyond their borders at all, it was to exotic lands whose image floated free of the irritating constraints of familiarity or information. Of alien cultures closer to home, the Western Sixties knew little. When Rudi Dutschke paid a fraternal visit to Prague, at the height of the Czech reform movement in the spring of 1968, local students were taken aback at his insistence that pluralist democracy was the real enemy. For them, it was the goal.

This in turn served as a reminder that the mainspring of Communism was the authority of Moscow; it was the mood and policies of the Soviet leadership that counted. Until his overthrow in 1964, it was Nikita Khrushchev who determined the history of Europe’s eastern half.

As the homeland of anti-capitalist revolution they continued to advertise their seditious ambitions and insist upon the undiminished authority of the Party, in the USSR and in its satellites. On the other hand the Kremlin continued to favour co-existence with the Western powers—and with its

own citizens.

In short, the Soviet Union—and its more advanced satellite states—became embryonic welfare states, at least in form.

In the Soviet Union as in Poland or Hungary, ‘Socialism’ depended for its survival upon the illicit ‘capitalist’ economy within, to whose existence it turned a blind eye.

But otherwise the liberalizations undertaken by Khrushchev, and after him Brezhnev, presented no immediate threat to the network of power and patronage on which the Soviet system depended. Indeed, it was just because economic improvements in the Soviet bloc were always subordinate to political priorities that they achieved so very little. Cultural reform was another matter. Lenin had always worried more about his critics than his principles; his heirs were no different.

in the competition for global influence Moscow set out to present a new face to its confused and vacillating foreign constituency.

The plotters against Khrushchev were irritated at his policy failures and his autocratic style; but above all it was his inconsistencies that made them uneasy.

The dissident movement of the last decades of the Soviet Union dates from this moment: underground ‘samizdat’ (‘self-publication’) began in the year of the arrests and because of them, and many of the most consequential figures in Soviet dissident circles of the seventies and eighties made their first appearance as protesters against the treatment of Sinyavsky and Daniel.

The mere fact that they were Moscow’s puppets and thus lacked local credibility made the Party leaders of the satellite states more sensitive to the benefits of accommodating local sentiment.

The point was not to condemn Communism, much less overthrow it; the goal, rather, was to think through what had gone so horribly wrong and propose an alternative within the terms of Communism itself.

Like most contemporary Western Marxists they were wedded to the notion that it was possible to distinguish clearly between the credibility of Marxism and the crimes of Stalin. For many Eastern European Marxists, Stalinism was a tragic parody of Marxist doctrine and the Soviet Union a permanent challenge to the credibility of the project of Socialist transformation. But unlike the New Left in the West, the intellectual revisionists of the East continued to work with, and often within, the Communist Party.

It was a peculiarity of Poland in the Gomułka years that Marxist philosophers and Catholic theologians could find some common ground in their defense of free speech and civil liberties—an

But by the early Sixties, following Khrushchev’s boast that Communism would ‘overtake’ the West and official proclamations about the now completed transition to Socialism, the gap between Party rhetoric and daily penury could no longer be bridged by exhortations to repair war damage or produce more.

In short, they conceded—though not in so many words—that the blanket application to eastern Europe of the Soviet Union’s own forced

industrialization and destruction of private property had been a disaster. And even more radically, they began to seek ways in which Communist economies might incorporate price signals and other market incentives into a collectivist system of property and production.

Reform economists like Ota Sik or the Hungarian János Kornai sought instead to define a ‘third way’: a mixed economy in which the non-negotiable fact of common ownership and central planning would be mitigated by increased local autonomy, some price signals and the relaxation of controls.

The point of the exercise was not so much to construct a working middle way between two incompatible economic systems, but rather to introduce the maximum of market activity (and thus, it was hoped, contentment-inducing consumer prosperity) compatible with undiluted political control of the commanding heights of the economy.

What mattered to the Communist leadership was not economics but politics. The ineluctable implication of the economic reformers’ theories was that the central authority of the Party-State would need to be weakened if normal economic life was to be resumed. But faced with that choice the Communist Party-States would always opt for economic abnormality. In the meantime, however, the regimes were interested above all in stability.