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Year Zero: A History of 1945Kindle Edition
by Ian Buruma (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars 201 customer reviews
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$7.22Read with Our Free App Many books have been written, and continue to be written, about the Second World War: military histories, histories of the Holocaust, the war in Asia, or collaboration and resistance in Europe. Few books have taken a close look at the immediate aftermath of the worldwide catastrophe.
Drawing on hundreds of eye-witness accounts and personal stories, this sweeping book examines the seven months (in Europe) and four months (in Asia) that followed the surrender of the Axis powers, from the fate of Holocaust survivors liberated from the concentration camps, and the formation of the state of Israel, to the incipient civil war in China, and the allied occupation of Japan.
It was a time when terrible revenge was taken on collaborators and their former masters; of ubiquitous black markets, war crime tribunals; and the servicing of millions of occupation troops, former foes in some places, liberators in others. But Year Zero is not just a story of vengeance. It was also a new beginning, of democratic restorations in Japan and West Germany, of social democracy in Britain and of a new world order under the United Nations.
If construction follows destruction, Year Zero describes that extraordinary moment in between, when people faced the wreckage, full of despair, as well as great hope. An o
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
In 1945, the war ended, but a new world began. Taken and destroyed cities were transformed; the liberated celebrated; scores were settled; people starved; justice was and was not meted out; soldiers and refugees came home; suffering ended, or continued, or began anew. An eclectic scholar who has written on religion, democracy, and war, Buruma presents a panoramic view of a global transformation and emphasizes common themes: exultation, hunger, revenge, homecoming, renewed confidence. Though there was great cause for pessimism, many of the institutions established in the immediate postwar period—the United Nations, the modern European welfare state, the international criminal-justice system—reflected profound optimism that remains unmatched. Buruma’s facility with Asian history lends this selection a particularly internationalized perspective. But it is the story of his father—a Dutch man who returned home in 1945 after being forced into factory labor by the Nazis—that sews the various pieces together and provides a moving personal touch. --Brendan Driscoll
Review
Ian Buruma's lively new history, Year Zero, is about the various ways in which the aftermath of the Good War turned out badly for many people and splendidly for some who didn't deserve it. It is enriched by his knowledge of six languages, a sense of personal connection to the era (his Dutch father was a forced laborer in Berlin), and his understanding of this period from a book he wrote two decades ago that is still worth reading, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan.
-- "New York Times Book Review"
A very human history.
-- "New Yorker"
Year Zero...covers a great deal of history without minimizing the complexity of the events and the issues. It is well written and researched, full of little-known facts and incisive political analysis. What makes it unique among hundreds of other works written about this period is that it gives an overview of the effects of the war and liberation, not only in Europe but also in Asia...A stirring account of the year in which the world woke up to the horror of what had just occurred and-while some new horrors were being committed-began to reflect on how to make sure that it never happens again.
-- "New York Review of Books"
[Buruma] makes a compelling case that many of the modern triumphs and traumas yet to come took root in this fateful year of retribution, revenge, suffering, and healing.
-- "Smithsonian"
Buruma presents a panoramic view of a global transformation and emphasizes common themes: exultation, hunger, revenge, homecoming, renewed confidence.
-- "Booklist"
Insightful meditation on the world's emergence from the wreckage of World War II...Recounting the occupations of Germany and Japan and life in the Allied nations, Buruma finds that the war was a great leveler, eliminating inequalities in Great Britain and rooting out feudal customs and habits in Japan. Despite much longing for a new world under global government, postwar life was shaped not by moral ideals but by the politics of the Cold War. An authoritative, illuminating history/memoir.
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Gripping, poignant and unsparing, Year Zero is worthy of its author in being at home in both Europe and Asia. It is a book at once deeply empathetic and utterly fair, marked by wisdom and great knowledge; the often personal tone inspired by the fate of his father, a Dutchman forced into German labor camps. In the face of so much horror, it is an astounding effort at deep comprehension. A superb book, splendidly written.
-- "Fritz Stern, university professor emeritus, Columbia University "
Year Zero is the founding moment of the modern era. Ian Buruma's history of that moment is vivid, compassionate, and compelling...His story takes in the world: from Holland to Japan, and his heroes and heroines are the ordinary men and women who picked up the pieces of a broken world and put it back together for their children and grandchildren.
-- "Michael Ignatieff, Canadian author, academic, and former politician"
-- "New York Times Book Review"
A very human history.
-- "New Yorker"
Year Zero...covers a great deal of history without minimizing the complexity of the events and the issues. It is well written and researched, full of little-known facts and incisive political analysis. What makes it unique among hundreds of other works written about this period is that it gives an overview of the effects of the war and liberation, not only in Europe but also in Asia...A stirring account of the year in which the world woke up to the horror of what had just occurred and-while some new horrors were being committed-began to reflect on how to make sure that it never happens again.
-- "New York Review of Books"
[Buruma] makes a compelling case that many of the modern triumphs and traumas yet to come took root in this fateful year of retribution, revenge, suffering, and healing.
-- "Smithsonian"
Buruma presents a panoramic view of a global transformation and emphasizes common themes: exultation, hunger, revenge, homecoming, renewed confidence.
-- "Booklist"
Insightful meditation on the world's emergence from the wreckage of World War II...Recounting the occupations of Germany and Japan and life in the Allied nations, Buruma finds that the war was a great leveler, eliminating inequalities in Great Britain and rooting out feudal customs and habits in Japan. Despite much longing for a new world under global government, postwar life was shaped not by moral ideals but by the politics of the Cold War. An authoritative, illuminating history/memoir.
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Gripping, poignant and unsparing, Year Zero is worthy of its author in being at home in both Europe and Asia. It is a book at once deeply empathetic and utterly fair, marked by wisdom and great knowledge; the often personal tone inspired by the fate of his father, a Dutchman forced into German labor camps. In the face of so much horror, it is an astounding effort at deep comprehension. A superb book, splendidly written.
-- "Fritz Stern, university professor emeritus, Columbia University "
Year Zero is the founding moment of the modern era. Ian Buruma's history of that moment is vivid, compassionate, and compelling...His story takes in the world: from Holland to Japan, and his heroes and heroines are the ordinary men and women who picked up the pieces of a broken world and put it back together for their children and grandchildren.
-- "Michael Ignatieff, Canadian author, academic, and former politician"
Product details
File Size: 3323 KB
Print Length: 385 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Books; Main edition (October 3, 2013)
Publication Date: October 3, 2013
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1782392084
ISBN-13: 978-1782392088
ASIN: B00E3R60XW
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
Not Enabled
Word Wise: Not Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #723,444 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#1765 in 20th Century World History
#3344 in World War II History (Kindle Store)
#2755 in History of Asia
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Biography
Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan. He has spent many years in Asia, which he has written about in God's Dust, A Japanese Mirror, and Behind the Mask. He has also written Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, and Anglomania. Buruma is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for the Humanities in Washington, DC.
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Robert S. Hanenberg
5.0 out of 5 starsWe are wrong to think that the horrors ended after the surrenders of Germany and Japan.October 2, 2013
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
At the end of World War II after the death camps were liberated, aid workers noticed a strange thing among the survivors waiting to be relocated. Half-dead, grotesquely emaciated, many became sexually promiscuous. The author of the book, Ian Buruma, quotes a doctor that one could not really blame the young girls who had passed through hell and "are now seized by an irresistible desire for affection and forgetfulness..." Outside the camps VD rates and illegitimate births rose sharply. Buruma says "the fact is that many women and men were simply looking for warmth, companionship, love, even marriage." This book is worth reading if for no other reason than to learn what happened to a case of lipstick mistakenly sent to Bergen-Belsen after the war.
More than 60 million people died in World War II, over three percent of the world's population, for no good reason as far as anyone can tell now. Among the least ignoble reasons for the German and Japanese leaders who decided to go to war was to get "living space," because it was thought that without land and colonies their countries would decline. Look at them now, Germany with no eastern territories and Japan with no colonies, two of the richest places on earth. The men in those countries who made World War II caused unspeakable suffering for an idea which was dead wrong.
The country which lost the most people was the Soviet Union. Eight million Soviet soldiers died, of whom 3.3 million were deliberately starved to death. Sixteen million Soviet civilians died. Ten million Chinese civilians died (the United States lost 0.4 million soldiers and civilians).
This is a book about the people who survived. We are wrong to think that the horrors ended after the surrenders of Germany and Japan. Although the magnitude of the horrors was smaller, the stories are harrowing. In 1945 in the Netherlands 18,000 people died of starvation, which got so bad that the British and Americans took to dropping loaves of bread from the sky. In Japan more than 20,000 people died of dysentery in 1945. In Italy 20,000 fascists and collaborators were killed in the north of Italy, 8,000 thousand in the Piedmont, 4,000 in Lombardy, 3,000 in Emilia and 3,000 in Milan province. In France over 10,000 collaborators were murdered. One American soldier machine-gunned three hundred concentration camp guards.
Some the people who were murdered after the war were "collaborators", but as Buruma points out, most of the collaborators were never punished. In fact it would have been impossible to punish all the collaborators, because there would have been no one left to govern the cities or teach the children. Many of the worst offenders went unpunished. Some people were tried and executed, but often the wrong ones and on shaky evidence. Often the people exacting revenge were themselves guilty. One feels after reading this book that a person who lived through World War II could not possibly have known which decisions might save them. The innocent, the righteous, the evil and the sadistic seem to have had equal chances of perishing.
The main point of this book is that after the war as well as during it, there were no good ways to proceed. The victors made bad decisions, but often any decision would have been bad, and many of the decisions were the lesser of many evils. As time went on, people constructed myths about the war, but nothing we thought was true turns out to have been so. For instance,
* Although the rapes committed by the Soviet troops in Germany and the Japanese in China were on a massive scale, the victims being in the millions, one estimate is that at least 40 Japanese women per day were raped by the allied soldiers in the latter half of 1945.
* Although the Germans and Russians were notorious thieves and looters, the American army had its share. After France was liberated some US soldiers deserted from the army, stole army trucks, stocked up on gasoline and sold it to French gangsters (they were caught because they took to living like kings in Paris).
* One weeps for the Jews and Poles who died in the concentration camps, but also for the captured Soviet soldiers whom the allies forced to return home to a certain death (anyone who was captured was by definition a traitor) and for the 10 million (TEN MILLION) German speaking citizens of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania who, after the war, were forced leave their homes for a devastated Germany, where many had never been before. Many were killed on the way.
This is one of those books which teach you that if ever you thought you knew anything definite, you are wrong. The world is too complex. Ian Buruma, half-Dutch, half English, descended from Mennonites and Jews, a scholar of Japanese history and culture, and a flawless prose stylist, is the right man to make this point.
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Tired Parent
5.0 out of 5 starsAbsolutely outstanding work of non-fiction!June 5, 2019
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Too many people tend to believe that the horror of WW II stopped with V.E. and V.J. Days. After all, what else is there? The Allies won. The Axis lost. End of story...
No. Far from it. In his absolutely brilliant overview of immediate events following the Allies' victory, Ian Buruma pointedly chronicles the tragic events that ensue. It is difficult to narrate to someone who has not yet read this book the feelings of ambivalence that this work stirs in its reader. It is UNarguable that the war crimes committed by the Axis are beyond reprehension. It is absolutely abominable that many of the perpetrators of these atrocities escaped their just punishment or got away with little more than the proverbial "slap on the wrist." These are not the issues Ian Buruma – the son of a Dutch slave laborer seized by the Nazis and brought to Germany after his country was overran by Werhmacht -- brings to the forefront of his narrative in "Year Zero: a history of 1945." Nor is there a question that the civilian populations of Axis countries must bear some responsibility for abhorrent atrocities of that period. They do. For nothing can possibly justify the absolute and catastrophic horror and misery their military and paramilitary entities (i.e. armies, SS, Gestapo, etc.) inflicted upon their victim populations: the tears, the pain, the heartache... death, destruction, sadness... starvation, disease, abandonment...
But just how much of the punishment inflicted upon Axis civilian populations in retribution can be justified? Should a line be drawn between what is morally acceptable and what is not? The revenge killings?... The way the righteous French took out their post-occupation anger on some of their own women accused of (literally) sleeping with the enemy?... The mass rapes of East German women?... The fate of Japanese civilians abandoned by the retreating Imperial Army in China and Manchuria?... The fate of Russian émigrés, who escaped the Soviets in 1918-1920, but ended up in the hands of Western Allies in 1945?... The fate of Soviet (Red Army) POWs captured by the Wehrmacht in WW II and ended up in the hands of Western Allies in 1945?...
The book is meticulously researched and cogently written. Thoroughly referenced and conscientiously indexed, this text (IMHO) should be a part of any self-respecting college history curriculum. After reading every word of its 337 pages, I have but one regret – Ian Buruma's book is too short. I wish there were more.
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