What Book to Read?

I’ve been reading this book for a while, for as befits such a big topic, it’s a big book. And Judt makes the scope even wider than some other histories of Europe by including Eastern Europe within his scope. I found it fascinating, with new insights – new to me anyway – on almost every page.

Judt looks at Europe in terms both of its common themes, and its multiplicity. He has a (mostly) dramatic story to tell. The period the book covers – 1945 to 2005 – has seen huge changes that were almost unimaginable in 1945 when Europe was mired in the chaos and destruction of war, and soon to be divided by a seemingly unassailable iron curtain. Much that has happened since, Judt argues, is a legacy of the war (and the years leading up to it), and is in that sense, ‘postwar’. ‘Shadowed by history,’ Europe’s leaders, in both the West and the East, and in very different ways, ‘built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.’ By 2005 he considers this period to be coming to a close, though given Europe’s problem since the Global Financial Crisis, I’m not sure he’d still make this claim.

So vast a topic imposes the need for the historian to be very selective, and Judt is quite open about the personal quality of what he has included or left out. ‘Without, I hope, abandoning objectivity and fairness,’ he writes, ‘Postwar offers an avowedly personal interpretation of the recent European past.’ He identifies five main themes around which his interpretation is based. The first is the ‘reduction of Europe’, with the loss of imperial territories and aspirations – a reduction long deferred in the case of the Soviet Union, but shattering the old order when it came. Secondly, he says, the last decades of the century saw the ‘withering away’ of the ‘master narratives’ of revolution and transformation that had driven the politics of Europe. Third, he sees an emergence ‘belatedly – and largely by accident’, of the ‘European model’, which encompasses more than just the bureaucratic forms of the European Union, and amounts to a distinctively ‘European’ way that is consciously at odds with a notional ‘American’ way. Fourth is Europe’s ‘complicated and frequently misunderstood’ relationship with America. And fifth, there is Europe’s post-war history as a story ‘shadowed by silences; by absence.’ He argues that initially, nearly all European countries to a greater or lesser degree supressed the history of persecution and genocide which they had taken part in, and their versions of the war involved much ‘forgetful remembering’. The Holocaust, in particular, was ignored. Not until this has been corrected does he believe that Europe can move on; ‘a nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it’.

I’m not in a position to judge the accuracy of Judt’s history; as he says himself, his judgements may prove to be right or wrong. But I do find them illuminating. There are some phrases that will stay with me when the detail is (all too quickly) forgotten, such as the ‘forgetful remembering’ mentioned above, or the Soviet Union’s transition to free market capitalism as ‘privatisation as kelptocracy’. His arguments that totalitarian regimes cannot reform, only collapse once any piece of the jigsaw is removed, or that poorly restrained market capitalism and communism both hollow out institutions essential to civil society, to the detriment of citizens, are hardly new, but none the less important for that. I’m not sure that I agree that in retrospect, ‘Auschwitz’ is ‘the most important thing to know about World War II’, but it’s certainly food for thought. And I’ve stuck his quote from Carlyle up on the fridge: ‘if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody.’ (Climate change, anyone?)

But in addition to seeing Judt’s picture of post-war Europe, the other pleasure I found in this book was filling out my own picture. How could I have lived through most of this, and yet had such selective and fragmentary memories of it? Names barely recalled from the 1950s, events of the sixties and seventies, all these were given a context that helped to make sense of, or to challenge, my own experience of the world. What was behind the American boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games? That’s right, the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. What was I doing when the Berlin Wall fell? Did I then see the immense significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or the tragedy of the Serbian attack on Sarajevo? Who can follow what’s going on in all those funny little Balkan states…? Judt provides a map, no doubt over-simplified, but nevertheless immensely valuable to me.

That I admire the late Tony Judt will be evident from my earlier posts on his (much shorter) recent books Ill Fares the Land (2010) and The Memory Chalet (2010). You can read more about him here.