by Tony Judt
But the Communist myth bears unintended witness to the importance (and the difficulty) in both halves of Europe of managing a burdensome inheritance. World War One destroyed old Europe; World War Two created the conditions for a new Europe. But the whole of Europe lived for many decades after 1945 in the long shadow cast by the dictators and wars in its immediate past. That is one of the experiences that Europeans of the post-war generation have in common with one another and which separates them from Americans, for whom the twentieth century taught rather different and altogether more optimistic lessons. And it is the necessary point of departure for anyone seeking to understand European history before 1989—and to appreciate how much it changed afterwards.
In his account of Tolstoy’s view of history, Isaiah Berlin drew an influential distinction between two styles of intellectual reasoning, citing a famous line from the Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ In Berlin’s terms this book is decidedly not a ‘hedgehog’. I have no big theory of contemporary European history to propose in these pages; no one overarching theme to expound; no single, all-embracing story to tell. It does not follow from this, however, that I think the post-World War Two history of Europe has no thematic shape. On the contrary: it has more than one. Fox-like, Europe knows many things.
In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself.
Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled.
Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.
This decidedly unanticipated transformation of Europe from a geographical expression (and a rather troubled one at that) into a rôle-model and magnet for individuals and countries alike was a slow, cumulative process. Europe was not, in Alexander Wat’s ironic paraphrase of the delusions of inter-war Polish statesmen, ‘doomed to greatness’. Its emergence in this capacity could certainly not have been predicted from the circumstances of 1945, or even 1975. This new Europe was not a preconceived common project: no-one set out to bring it about. But once it became clear, after 1992, that Europe did occupy this novel place in the international scheme of things, its relations with the US in particular took on a different aspect—for Europeans and Americans alike.
This is the fourth theme interwoven into this account of post-war Europe: its complicated and frequently misunderstood relationship to the United States of America. Western Europeans wanted the US to involve itself in European affairs after 1945—but they also resented that involvement and what it implied about Europe’s decline. Moreover, despite the US presence in Europe, especially in the years after 1949, the two sides of the ‘West’ remained very different places. The Cold War was perceived quite differently in western Europe from the rather alarmist response it aroused in the US, and the subsequent ‘Americanisation’ of Europe in the Fifties and Sixties is often exaggerated, as we shall see.
Eastern Europe, of course, saw America and its attributes rather differently. But there, too, it would be misleading to overstate the exemplary influence of the US upon eastern Europeans both before and after 1989. Dissident critics in both halves of Europe—Raymond Aron in France, for example, or Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia—were careful to emphasize that they did not regard America as any sort of model or example for their own societies. And although a younger generation of post-’89 eastern Europeans did aspire for a while to liberalize their countries on the American model, with limited public services, low taxes and a free market, the fashion has not caught on. Europe’s ‘American moment’ lay in the past. The future of eastern Europe’s ‘little Americas’ lay squarely in Europe.
Finally, Europe’s post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities—particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna—were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called ‘the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe’ was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms—but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities—the Jews in France, for example—represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union—an empire, not a country and anyway only part-European, as already noted—stood aside from this new, serially homogenous Europe.
But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future. Between them refugees; guest-workers; the denizens of Europe’s former colonies drawn back to the imperial metropole by the prospect of jobs and freedom; and the voluntary and involuntary migrants from failed or repressive states at Europe�
�s expanded margins have turned London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan and a dozen other places into cosmopolitan world cities whether they like it or not.
This new presence of Europe’s living ‘others’—perhaps fifteen million Muslims in the EU as currently constituted, for example, with a further eighty million awaiting admission in Bulgaria and Turkey—has thrown into relief not just Europe’s current discomfort at the prospect of ever greater variety, but also the ease with which the dead ‘others’ of Europe’s past were cast far out of mind. Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.
This disconcerting kink in the smooth narrative of Europe’s progress towards Winston Churchill’s ‘broad sunlit uplands’ was left largely unmentioned in both halves of postwar Europe—at least until the Sixties, after which it was usually invoked uniquely in reference to the extermination of Jews by Germans. With only the occasional controversial exception, the record of other perpetrators—and other victims—was kept closed. The history and memory of the Second World War were typically confined to a familiar set of moral conventions: Good versus Evil, Anti-Fascists against Fascists, Resisters against Collaborators and so forth.
Since 1989—with the overcoming of long-established inhibitions—it has proven possible to acknowledge (sometimes in the teeth of virulent opposition and denial) the moral price that was paid for Europe’s rebirth. Poles, French, Swiss, Italians, Romanians and others are now better placed to know—if they wish to know—what really happened in their country just a few short decades ago. Even Germans, too, are revisiting the received history of their country—with paradoxical consequences. Now—for the first time in many decades—it is German suffering and German victimhood, whether at the hands of British bombers, Russian soldiers or Czech expellers—that are receiving attention. The Jews, it is once again being tentatively suggested in certain respectable quarters, were not the only victims . . .
Whether these discussions are a good or a bad thing is a matter for debate. Is all this public remembering a sign of political health? Or is it sometimes more prudent, as De Gaulle among others understood all too well, to forget? This question will be taken up in the Epilogue. Here I would simply note that these latest hiccups of disruptive recall need not be understood—as they sometimes are understood (notably in the United States), when juxtaposed to contemporary outbreaks of ethnic or racial prejudice—as baleful evidence of Europe’s Original Sin: its inability to learn from past crimes, its amnesiac nostalgia, its ever-imminent propensity to return to 1938. This is not, in the words of Yogi Berra, ‘déjà vu all over again’.
Europe is not re-entering its troubled wartime past—on the contrary, it is leaving it. Germany today, like the rest of Europe, is more conscious of its twentieth-century history than at any time in the past fifty years. But this does not mean that it is being drawn back into it. For that history never went away. As this book tries to show, the long shadow of World War Two lay heavy across postwar Europe. It could not, however, be acknowledged in full. Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future. Today—in the wake of painful public debates in almost every other European country—it seems somehow fitting (and in any case unavoidable) that Germans, too, should at last feel able openly to question the canons of well-intentioned official memory. We may not be very comfortable with this; it may not even be a good portent. But it is a kind of closure. Sixty years after Hitler’s death, his war and its consequences are entering history. Postwar in Europe lasted a very long time, but it is finally coming to a close.
PART ONE
Post-War: 1945-1953
I
The Legacy of War
‘This was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanised world—other
civilizations rolled and crumbled down, the European civilization was, as it
were, blown up’.
H.G. Wells, War in the Air (1908)
‘The human problem the war will leave behind it has not yet been
imagined, much less faced by anybody. There has never been such
destruction, such disintegration of the structure of life’.
Anne O’Hare McCormick
‘Everywhere there is a craving for miracles and cures. The war has pushed
the Neapolitans back into the Middle Ages’.
Norman Lewis, Naples ’44
Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War offered a prospect of utter misery and desolation. Photographs and documentary films of the time show pitiful streams of helpless civilians trekking through a blasted landscape of broken cities and barren fields. Orphaned children wander forlornly past groups of worn out women picking over heaps of masonry. Shaven-headed deportees and concentration camp inmates in striped pyjamas stare listlessly at the camera, starving and diseased. Even the trams, propelled uncertainly along damaged tracks by intermittently available electric current, appear shell-shocked. Everyone and everything—with the notable exception of the well-fed Allied occupation forces—seems worn out, without resources, exhausted.
This image will need to be nuanced if we are to understand how that same shattered continent was able to recover so rapidly in years to come. But it conveys an essential truth about the European condition in the wake of Germany’s defeat. Europeans felt hopeless, they were exhausted—and for good reason. The European war that began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and ended with Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945 was a total war. It embraced civilians as well as soldiers.
Indeed, in those countries occupied by Nazi Germany, from France to the Ukraine, from Norway to Greece, World War Two was primarily a civilian experience. Formal military combat was confined to the beginning and end of the conflict. In between, this was a war of occupation, of repression, of exploitation and extermination, in which soldiers, storm-troopers and policemen disposed of the daily lives and very existence of tens of millions of imprisoned peoples. In some countries the occupation lasted most of the war; everywhere it brought fear and deprivation.
Unlike World War One, then, the Second War—Hitler’s War—was a near-universal experience. And it lasted a long time—nearly six years for those countries (Britain, Germany) that were engaged in it from beginning to end. In Czechoslovakia it began earlier still, with the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in October 1938. In eastern Europe and the Balkans it did not even end with the defeat of Hitler, since occupation (by the Soviet army) and civil war continued long after the dismemberment of Germany.
Wars of occupation were not unknown in Europe, of course. Far from it. Folk memories of the Thirty Years War in seventeenth-century Germany, during which foreign mercenary armies lived off the land and terrorized the local population, were still preserved three centuries later, in local myths and in fairy tales. Well into the nineteen-thirties Spanish grandmothers were chastening wayward children with the threat of Napoleon. But there was a peculiar intensity to the experience of occupation in World War Two. In part this was because of the distinctive Nazi attitude towards subject populations.
Previous occupying armies—the Swedes in seventeenth-century Germany, the Prussians in France after 1815—lived off the land and assaulted and killed local civilians on an occasional and even random basis. But the peoples who fell under German rule after 1939 were either put to the service of the Reich or else were scheduled for destruction. For Europeans this was a new experience. Overseas, in their colonies, European states had habitually indentured or enslaved indigenous populations for their own benefit. They had not been above the use of torture, mutilation or mass murder to coerce their victims into obedience. But since the eighteenth century these practices were largely unknown among Europeans th
emselves, at least west of the Bug and Prut rivers.
It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans. In order to fight and win the war, the British exploited and ransacked their own resources: by the end of the war, Great Britain was spending more than half its Gross National Product on the war effort. Nazi Germany, however, fought the war—especially in its latter years—with significant help from the ransacked economies of its victims (much as Napoleon had done after 1805, but with incomparably greater efficiency). Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Bohemia-Moravia and, especially, France made significant involuntary contributions to the German war effort. Their mines, factories, farms and railways were directed to servicing German requirements and their populations were obliged to work at German war production: at first in their own countries, later on in Germany itself. In September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany, most Axis-Occupied Europe: November 1942
of them there against their will, and they constituted 21 percent of the country’s labour force.
The Nazis lived for as long as they could off the wealth of their victims—so successfully in fact that it was not until 1944 that German civilians themselves began to feel the impact of wartime restrictions and shortages. By then, however, the military conflict was closing in on them, first through Allied bombing campaigns, then with the simultaneous advance of Allied armies from east and west. And it was in this final year of the war, during the relatively brief period of active campaigning west of the Soviet Union, that much of the worst physical destruction took place.
