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Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by
Tony Judt
4.36 · Rating details · 10,350 ratings · 800 reviews
Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award
One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year.

Table of contents

About the author
Copyright page
Dedication
Preface & acknowledgement
Introduction

PART ONE - Post-War: 1945-1953
1. The legacy of war
2. Retribution
3. The rehabilitation of Europe
4. The impossible settlement
5. The coming of the Cold War
6. Into the whirlwind
7. Culture wars
CODA The end of old Europe

PART TWO - Prosperity and its discontents: 1953-1971
8. The politics of stability
9. Lost illusions
10. The age of affluence
POSTSCRIPT: A Tale of two economies
11. The Social Democrat moment
12. The spectre of revolution
13. The end of the affair

PART THREE - Recessional: 1971-1989
14. Diminished expectations
15. Politics in a new key
16. A time of transition
17. The new realism
18. The power of the powerless
19. The end of the old order

PART FOUR - After the Fall: 1989-2005
20. A fissile continent
21. The reckoning
22. The old Europe -and the new
23. The varieties of Europe
24. Europe as a way of life

Photo crdits
Suggestions for further readings (less)

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Paperback, 933 pages
Published September 5th 2006 by Penguin Books (first published October 6th 2005)
Original Title
Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
ISBN
0143037757 (ISBN13: 9780143037750)
Edition Language
English
Literary Awards
Pulitzer Prize Nominee for General Nonfiction (2006), European Book Prize (2008), Arthur Ross Book Award for Gold Medal (2006), Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction Nominee (2006)

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Svetlana I don't think a post-Coldwar Marshall plan would have helped, since it was not the lack of money for economic development per se, but the lack of expe…more
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Jun 15, 2015 Roy Lotz rated it really liked it
Shelves: eurotrip, supermassive, one-damn-thing-after-another

History is a discipline peculiarly impervious to high theoretical speculation: the more Theory intrudes, the farther History recedes.
When I was in university, studying anthropology, I always resented the requirement that my essays have thesis statements. Can’t I just collect information and serve it up without taking some ultimate stance? Tony Judt seems to have been of the same mind, since this book is one very large serving of information, absent of any overarching thesis. As he says himself, Judt is rather like the proverbial fox than the hegdehog: he knows many things, and has many valuable observations scattered throughout the text, without any one big idea to tie them together.

There are compelling advantages to this approach. This book is one-stop shopping for many aspects of post-war European life. Economic development, intellectual fashions, architecture, film history, political movements, the Cold War, regionalism, the emergence of the European Union—all this and more is covered in impressive detail. And though multifarious, all of these pieces come together to form an astounding story: a continent nearly destroyed by war, divided by dangerous political tension, slowly emerging from American and Soviet dominance to become the most affluent, most peaceful, and most progressive place in the world.

The main disadvantage of this method is, of course, that this story remains fairly messy and haphazard. Without a thesis to guide him, Judt had to rely on a mixture of interest, instinct, and whim—the latter playing an especially significant role in some sections. What is more, though Judt is an opinionated and assertive guide, the lack of a thesis renders it difficult to point to anything distinctly “Judtean” in his analysis. What ties the narrative together is, rather, a certain mood or sensibility—most notably, Judt’s keen sense of historical irony, which he employs to great effect.

This ironic sensibility is most often directed toward Judt’s political foes. Though he is never explicitly partisan, it is easy to tell where Judt’s sympathies lie: in the center-left, socialist-democratic camp. Thus, depending on where the reader falls on the political spectrum, Judt’s comments will be either gratifying or grating. For me they were usually the former. What irked me, instead, was Judt’s relatively brief treatment of Spain—the Franco era is entirely ignored, and the transition to democracy is covered in just a few pages. But this is admittedly my own prejudice speaking.

If Postwar has one takeaway message, it is this: that Postwar Europe is the anxious construction of a generation wearied and horrified by conflict. After going through the belligerent nationalism of the First World War, the economic depression and intense ideological polarization of the interwar period, the even more gruesome Second World War and the unspeakable Holocaust—all this, coupled with the prolonged armed standoff and Soviet repression of the Cold War—Europeans were intent on creating a world where this could never happen again. Extreme ideological stances fell into disgrace; strong government social safety nets helped to prevent economic crisis and, in so doing, made people less susceptible to demagogues; and governments forged institutional ties with one another, a project that culminated in the European Union.

Without constant reminders of this catastrophe—a European civil war that began in 1914 and whose political aftereffects did not disappear until 1991, if then—we risk falling into the same errors that tore the continent apart one hundred years ago. For this, we need good historians—and Judt is certainly among the best. (less)
flag 74 likes · Like · 11 comments · see review

Wastrel But isn't that kind of a propagandistic way of explaining it?
First, the genius of taking "not forcing rule on a reluctant citizenry but actually persuading people to engage actively in the political process" as proof of even further tyranny.

[let's note that the US and UK do ALSO encourage people to collaborate with the police by spying on their fellows, just less often - in part because technology allows more efficient spying than was possible in those days. But the government does still do 'outreach' to target populations, like Muslims, to encourage them (and sometimes reward them) to "share their concerns" about any "dangerous" neighbours they may have who may wish to undermine our political system]

And, second, to divide collaboration into venality and cowardice. This seems to preclude "earnest desire to further the cause of the revolution", which at least in Russia was also a serious factor in many cases, at least in certain periods. (less)
Nov 08, 2017 02:09PM · flag

Jose Moa A very fitted comentary to what is happening in Catalonia where the dissoriented left is having support of Russia and the european extreme right wing,a utterly contradiction as some histhoric socialist and comunist dirigents have put the finger in. (less)
Nov 15, 2017 11:30AM · flag

Brad Lyerla I want to read this book.
Nov 19, 2017 02:23PM · flag

Jan-Maat well short-changing Spain gets back to the absence of a thesis, in a book about Post-war Europe why discuss Spain (or Switzerland or Sweden)? Effectively the book is: 'stuff happening in Europe 1945...'
but very readable! (less)
Nov 20, 2017 12:53AM · flag

Roy Lotz Jan-Maat wrote: "well short-changing Spain gets back to the absence of a thesis, in a book about Post-war Europe why discuss Spain (or Switzerland or Sweden)? Effectively the book is: 'stuff happening in Europe 194..."

Indeed, very readable and informative! (less)
Nov 20, 2017 01:19AM · flag

B. P. Rinehart Can't wait to read this! Next year I hope to begin a personal reading syllabus on European history. I want to read, in order: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, (possibly?) The Thirty Years War, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914, The Guns of August and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.

I'm already in the middle of one on 19th Century America. I read The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Battle Cry of Freedom, and I will soon start reading Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. I like covering books at my own pace so I never feel rushed to get through them. (less)
Nov 20, 2017 02:44PM · flag

Roy Lotz Ken wrote: "Can't wait to read this! Next year I hope to begin a personal reading syllabus on European history. I want to read, in order: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, (possibly?..."

That's quite a list! I am hoping to read many of those as well. Enjoy! (less)
Nov 20, 2017 02:51PM · flag

Wastrel Ken wrote: "Can't wait to read this! Next year I hope to begin a personal reading syllabus on European history. I want to read, in order: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, (possibly?..."

For a general overview, I'd recommend Europe. It's about... well...

(for those in any doubt, the full title is "Europe: A History".) (less)
updated Nov 20, 2017 05:15PM · flag

B. P. Rinehart Thanks for the tip, Wastrel. I will look-out for the book.
Nov 20, 2017 05:41PM · flag

Thomas Ray "creating a world where this could never happen again."

Yet our long nightmare of peace and prosperity is fraying. Thanks largely to unrelenting efforts of the U.S. military and arms industry to spread weapons, death, destruction, instability, chaos. Creating refugees and right-wing nationalistic backlash against them. And Blowback. (less)
Dec 21, 2017 01:24AM · flag

Roy Lotz Thomas Ray wrote: "Yet our long nightmare of peace and prosperity is fraying."

Yes, it does seem that these institutions, once taken for granted, are under strain. Certainly US militarism contributed to this, but I also think the 2007-8 economic crisis and the anemic recovery that followed have also played a large role in voter disenchantment with the status quo. (less)
updated Dec 21, 2017 06:59AM · flag

Aug 20, 2010 Szplug rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
This is history writ large done to perfection. Judt has compressed a lifetime of study and exploration of European cultural memes into this masterwork, one which abounds with erudition, penetrating analysis, and wise reflection. Judt states in his introduction that he hoped to produce a work that might compare favorably with that of the historians he had read and enjoyed, such as Eric Hosbsbawn. Speaking as one who has read the latter's brilliant tetralogy that runs from the French Revolution to the end of the twentieth century, I can announce that the author succeeded in every single way. Fifty years of European history, producing such an amazing amount of transformative change and renewal, presents a daunting task for the historian; that Judt manages to pull it off with prose that is compulsively readable and effortlessly scintillating, that combines broad overview with pinpoint observation, is endlessly impressive. This truly is as good as it gets.

The period under examination encompasses the broken, ruined remnants of a shattered Europe that grimly faced an exhausted world in 1945 through to the 2005 admission of several former communist states—Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Czech, Slovak, and Baltic Republics—into the European Union, the continent's overdue response to the cycle of war and destruction enacted with sanguine regularity throughout the first half of the twentieth century. These five decades witnessed the astonishing economic and political recovery of the western half set against the repression and stagnation endured by those eastern realms with the misfortune to have been liberated by the mighty Red Army and wrapped in the strangling bonds of Real Existing Socialism. This bifurcation was enacted as the Cold War under the auspices of the twin superpower patrons, the United States and the Soviet Union—a continental standoff that sparked a handful of terrifying flash points before settling into a more endurable détente—until the eastern communist edifice shrugged its shoulders in 1989 and the entire house of cards tumbled down.

From his vantage point circa 2005, Judt posits that the World War was a single event which began in 1914 with the onset of mass mobilization and mechanized slaughter, and didn't end until the global embers of the Cold War were fully extinguished with the Soviet Empire's final implosion in 1991. The eighty-some year conflict—a search for workable political and economic systems to go along with military and colonial conquest—ended with the United States globally regnant from its ocean-moated stronghold; Russia dazed and reeling after its recent tumultuous imperial dissolution; and the former Great Powers of Europe—having been thoroughly chastised and humbled by the ruinous outcome of their own folly and hubris—shadows of their former dominant strength and influence. The ofttimes troubled and resentful attitude of Europeans towards their American protector and benefactor—whose tendrils were uncomfortably taking root everywhere—was deeply intermingled with a profound gratitude and appreciation for America's unyielding and unending support over the decades. Needing America yet resisting America—this would become Europe's seemingly permanent modus operandi. This love/hate relationship would subsequently emerge in the Eastern nations that rejected communism and undertook crash courses in market economies in the nineties—the painful lessons quickly learned from Shock Therapy and the resulting liquidation of savings and support networks meant that before the dawn of the new century, a sizable portion of the Eastern populace looked with a nostalgic longing upon the staid, boring security that Real Existing Socialism provided for its closed-off citizenry. Not everybody finds it easy—or preferable—dealing with freedom, with the rapid, daily change that is inherent to democratic capitalism with unfettered markets. As Judt points out, Europe needs both to remember and forget its history in the past century if future generations are to expand upon the continent's remarkable resurrection and transformation and put paid to the ghosts that haunt a collective memory's retreats.

It really is difficult to convey, in the space of a review, the extraordinary range of Judt's knowledge of this tumultuous and historic epoch of our recent past. His assessments are liberally spiced with wry commentary and thoughtful opinion, and there really is no corner of the European landscape that escapes his sure-footed stride. The impossible task that faced the triumphant allies, as they surveyed the endless wreckage of a continent brought low, is laid out clearly; and while he stresses the admixture of American generosity and commitment with European forbearance and resolve that wrought such transformative changes upon the West, he also illuminates the willful amnesia that was both tacitly encouraged, and required, by the postwar governments in order to bring off this stunning turnaround—a collective disremembering that would surface in future years seeking payback with interest. On the Soviet side of the liberation the introduction of Stalinist terror and repression—with the brutal show trials and torture-induced confessions that inevitably accompanied them—quickly snuffed whatever enthusiasm for communism existed in the repressed nations and opened the West's eyes to exactly what they were dealing with. In this, as in so many things, Stalin proved his own worst enemy—his murderous implementation of Soviet-style communism increasingly diminished the political power of communist parties in the Western half of Europe, ceding the left-wing ground to the various Social Democratic parties that were resolved to work within the confines of elective political systems and capitalist economies. As acute as Judt is in relating the story of the West, he truly excels in his dissection of the miseries and impositions enacted upon the East, especially the travails of long-suffering Poland and perpetually betrayed Czechoslovakia. As the dynamic recovery in West Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom churns along—even as the latter two shed their remaining Imperial territories, peacefully and bloodily—the festering wards of the Red Army endure the crushed hopes of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring. The brutal subjugation of these doomed-but-inspired attempts to pull free of the Soviet Union's grasp shattered what remained of the unity of the European Left, along with whatever traces existed in the Communist buffer states of a belief in Socialism's Historical Necessity.

Judt's take upon the sixties and the seventies, and their impact—both perceived then and realized later—upon the courses of European history is masterful. The origins of the European Union in a sidebar French project to unite France, West Germany, and the Benelux countries in a tariff union against the overweening domination of the Anglo-American alliance; the re-birth of democracy from the authoritarian ashes of Portugal, Greece, and Spain; the Post-Keynesian enthusiasm for Hayekian market reforms, privatization, and tax cuts that launched the eighties into a remarkably affluent, and destructive, financial boom; the Soviet Union's long road to dissolution and ephemerality that proceeded from the unlikely turning point of the Helsinki Accords through the Afghanistan invasion, the formation of Poland's Solidarity movement, and the unrelenting bravery and passion that exploded over Gorbachev's introduction of glasnost and perestroika, reforms that lead to the unforeseen and swift shedding of communist shackles by the Warsaw Pact realms in the miracle year of 1989; Judt produces the entire story, beautifully written and packed full of immensely courageous individuals—Adam Michnik being a favorite of mine—in history that probes and sheds light in prodigious abundance.

Yet perhaps the best is saved for last: the seesaw struggles that played out in the East—newfound, shaky freedom greeting these blinking patients awoken from stasis—and the wary enthusiasm these desperate struggles were greeted with by a West startled out of a complacent and accepted duality. The author's disappointment is palpable at the manner in which these fledgling Eastern democracies were treated by their Western cousins, who abandoned the American wisdom in the aftermath of the Second World War in favor of the misguided approach of the First: there was no Marshall Plan to be extended in 1990—rather, a slew of consultants and corporations offered their advice and money, and made a fortune purchasing national assets (in Russia foremost) for a fraction of their market value. This avaricious plunder of the East's resources would be a source of simmering anger and foster a sense of betrayal in the years to come. The story arc of the European Union—its bureaucratic complexities, its financial strictures and structures, the long waltz that wended its way across the dance floor of the nineties before the post-Communist nations, impatient to embrace their new continental destiny, received their invitations to the European community—is described better than any account I've read. The overarching need for a purpose for the new communal powerhouse makes itself clear in the shameful response of the European powers to the tragedy that was enacted by murderous bands of paramilitary thugs in the broken shards of Yugoslavia, filled with bloodlust by cynical and power-hungry demagogues and enjoined to genocide while the UN peacekeepers idly stood by. Without the firm directing hand of the US, who knows how much more blood would have soaked the already well-watered soils of the Balkans?

Judt closes with a pair of chapters that examine the modern European identity, contrasts it favorably with that of the dominant economic titans, America and China, and posits that if the EU and its plurality of ethnicities, religions, and nationalisms can manage to seriously get its shit together, there is really no reason that the twenty-first century couldn't belong to a Europe that has learned so many painful lessons, and crafted so many prudent and preventative responses. The epilogue, a thirty page essay examining the lingering memories of the Holocaust that have hung over the postwar continent for decades—a relentless burden of guilt that had been studiously ignored, prevaricated over, avoided and then finally accepted and acknowledged, in various (perhaps necessary) stages as the savage slaughter of World War Two began to fade in the rearview mirror—brings this masterpiece to a close with a sober, but optimistic caution. Evil was unleashed in the war, and of necessity this evil had to be confronted by those who had participated in or enabled it; but if this guilt can be cleansed without leaving the stains of self-pity or angry ressentiment, there is a real possibility that the future existence of Europe may be—finally, enduringly—one of peace. (less)
flag 61 likes · Like · 9 comments · see review

Szplug Thank you, Abigail, I really appreciate that!
updated Sep 15, 2010 08:14AM · flag

AC man..., just *reading* this made me feel smart.... I can't writing it... Great review...! ...more
Feb 24, 2011 06:28PM · flag

Szplug Thanks, AC! I have to give all the credit to Judt - this amazing book inspired me in all of the right ways.
Feb 24, 2011 09:04PM · flag

AC False modesty...!

Anyway, I look forward to driving now...
Feb 24, 2011 09:57PM · flag

Wilson Tomba Excellent review of an outstanding book!
Jul 04, 2012 04:21PM · flag

Szplug I apologize for the late acknowledgement, Wilson—GR notifications blow—but thank you!
Jul 28, 2012 09:16AM · flag

Gatesvillegirl Outstanding review, one of the very best I have read on this site.
Dec 19, 2016 03:59PM · flag

Seito Yamamoto Wonderful review!
Dec 02, 2017 01:37AM · flag

Hatuxka My copy had no source citations. What kind of history writing is that? Were any sources posted elsewhere?
Jun 24, 2021 07:39AM · flag

Jun 13, 2011 Jan-Maat added it
Shelves: modern-history, 21st-century, europe
A history of Europe from 1945 up to 2005, readable, interesting and puts a lot in context.

For Judt Europe ends where North Africa, Turkey and Russia begin, so everywhere in between gets some coverage. The coverage given to eastern Europe contrasts with the situation in the west - an advantage which earlier pre-1989 histories can't offer.

In retrospect the treatment of the immediate post war years stands out as particularly good - but this may be due to their inherent drama. There are lots of points were I disagree with Judt's opinion (say on the film Heimat) or on his coverage - it feels as though he pulls his punch over terrorism in Italy when the involvement of senior government and party figures is relegated to a footnote and the fact that Andreotti, seven times prime minister of Italy during the period actually went through a series of trials accused of intimate involvement with the mafia and political violence. Perhaps one of the pleasures about a book like this is that you can disagree on the details but still be impressed by the book as a whole.

Maybe there should have been more on Vatican II (the treatment of religion is not a strong point)and less on CAMRA (the UK campaign for real ale, ie traditionally brewed beer, as opposed to Lager style beers) and with a book of such ambitious scope you can always question the distribution of space but on the whole - there is a want of a conception demonstrated in this, a big Braudelian vision of the direction of travel over this period, and so one can only wonder what is the historical significance of CAMRA (for example), what does it tell us about modern Britain, and how does it fit into a history of postwar Europe, and why is it worth mentioning? If Judt has no conception or overall picture of post war European history then this can't be a coherent book, but can only be a rag bag of fragments, some intrinsically interesting, others not. Still I'd be happy to recommend it to anyone looking for an introduction to modern European history, or looking to understand something more about modern Europe.

Read and release. (less)
flag 50 likes · Like · 3 comments · see review

·Karen· I need to hunt through the double rows on my shelves. I have a funny feeling that I have this one somewhere......... (Story of my GR life)
May 02, 2017 09:43AM · flag

Ray Not sure about the fixation on CAMRA but I would offer that perhaps it is an example of a grassroots rebellion about mass consumerism - a backlash against Heineken and insipid lager.

Then again it could just have been an excuse for men with beer bellies and beards to talk about and drink beer. (less)
Nov 15, 2017 01:25PM · flag

Jan-Maat Ray wrote: "Not sure about the fixation on CAMRA but I would offer that perhaps it is an example of a grassroots rebellion about mass consumerism - a backlash against Heineken and insipid lager.

Then again it..."

oh certainly, I don't disagree about either, I just expected more of a sense of where the 'stuff' fits into a framework, or a conception of what was happening, rather than a chronological basket of facts (sorry messy metaphor) (less)
updated Nov 16, 2017 05:34AM · flag

Jan 06, 2013 Marc rated it really liked it
Shelves: holocaust, history, europe
This book is a real 'tour de force': incredibly balanced in its width, accurate in its general outlines and details, critical and lucid. Judt brings a reasonably classic political narrative of European history, but adds it with many socio-economic data and elements on mentality. All well supported by statistics, examples and quotations.

The whole book also has a personal stamp: an at times explicit nostalgic yearning to the time social democracy improved so many things in Europe, for so many people. In that sense Judt isn't very popular with neoliberals and neocons these days. You can endlessly debate about that, but Judt at least had the courage to stand for his opinions.

Yet there are also some clear weaknesses in this book: Judt regularly settles personal scores, with the generation of May 68 for example, with the 'Third Way' of Blair, with Mitterrand and so on. And in the end this historical work inevitably becomes more of an essay which results in rather ambiguous points of view, like on the European Union.

Remarkable is the central place Judt gives to the way the Holocaust has been dealt with in different countries; he uses it as a benchmark to judge people and deeds; the essay that is added at the end of the book rightfully underlines this. This is a must read for years to come! (less)
flag 30 likes · Like · 4 comments · see review

Miltiadis Michalopoulos Thank you for your interesting review. Could you please define what you mean by the following: "And in the end this historical work inevitably becomes more of an essay which results in rather ambiguous points of view, like on the European Union". Is this what you mean by saying that "the book has its flaws"? (...believing in EU is an ambiguous point of view? ... ) I would like to make this clear before I get the book. Thank you. (less)
updated Mar 01, 2021 03:20AM · flag

Marc Miltiadis wrote: "Thank you for your interesting review. Could you please define what you mean by the following: "And in the end this historical work inevitably becomes more of an essay which results in rather ambig..."
On the EU Judt certainly was on the 'believing' side, Miltiades, and that obviously is no flaw to me. But in his final chapter he is focussing completely on the deficiencies of the Union, like the bureaucratic and neoliberal tendency (and that is undeniable), but also the lack of identity, without coming to a definitive conclusion. As to the indicated 'flaws' of the book, I meant his personal reckonings with the generation of 68, with Mitterrand and with Blair; there seems to be some emotional element involved in this that is undermining the strength of his global, more balanced and very analythical approach. But in general, this is absolutely a book I can recommend! (less)
Mar 01, 2021 06:52AM · flag

Miltiadis Michalopoulos Miltiadis wrote: "Thank you for your interesting review. Could you please define what you mean by the following: "And in the end this historical work inevitably becomes more of an essay which results in rather ambig..."
Thank you very much for answeringmy question. (less)
updated Mar 01, 2021 12:27PM · flag

Daniel1974nlgmail.com Yes, certainly my favourite book about Europe after the war. I think I read it what 3 times. Dutch translation was quite expensive I remember. Something like 70,- Though information wise it is worth it. It's really a reference book. Can recommend other books of TJ too. (less)
Apr 12, 2021 06:22AM · flag

Dec 30, 2013 Jim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: economics, history
I was born in 1945 and lived through everything that Tony Judt writes about in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, but from a slightly different perspective. I was a Hungarian born in the United States, in Cleveland, which along Buckeye Road was fully as Hungarian as that ancient capital on the Duna. From my youth, I was surrounded by stories about Hungary, about the little farm in Felcsut that was "taken away from us" by the Communists.

Europe was always very near to me, even though it was many years before I was to see it with my own eyes. What Judt does in Postwar is fill in many of the blanks for me. In high school, I wrote papers about the Common Market (as the Euro Zone was called back then), and even about geopolitical considerations in a nuclear war with the Russians.

Even though I was looking at Europe, so to speak, through the wrong end of the telescope, from the point of view of a mighty postwar America that could do no wrong, I found myself following the late historian closely, saying to myself, frequently, "Yes, it must have been this way!"

... until ... until finally the whole thing came clear to me. World War II never really ended: It merely continued using "other weapons" until Communism came unglued around 1990 (and not because Reagan had outspent the Russians in the arms race, as our more dim politicos insisted) and Europe became a bright little economic island because, for once, its countries did not try to savage each other (with some exceptions, such as Yugoslavia and the Balkans).

Postwar is a superb work of history. It is never easy to write about one's own time (and the period of the book is exactly my own time, too). I almost feel as if it had been written for me.
(less)
flag 29 likes · Like · 8 comments · see review

Clif Hostetler I'm currently reading The War That Ended Peace: The Road To 1914 by Margaret MacMillan. A quote I noticed from that book was that WWI and WWII were Europe's latest Thirty Years War (it may have been a quotation from Churchill). Your observation that the Cold War was a continuation of WWII suggests that it may be more accurate to refer to most of the 20th Century as Europe's Seventy Years War.

It's an example of how war seldom solves any problems and usually creates more (or reveals previously hidden underlying problems).

I too was born in 1945, and thus I placed the book, Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma on my "to read list." Afterall, the year 1945 is year zero for those of us born in 1945. (less)
Jan 27, 2014 07:03AM · flag

Jim Good point: It really has been a 70-Years-War.
Jan 27, 2014 02:52PM · flag

Clif Hostetler Upon additional reflection I've decided 70 years is not the correct length. There was the 1st Balkan War (1912), the 2nd Balkan War (1913), WWI, WWII, the Cold War, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Bosnian War (1992-1995) and the Kosovo War (1998-1999). A strong argument could be made that all these wars were related and led to each other. Therefore the war lasted at least 88 years. I'm sort of inclined to round off to the nearest 100 and call it the Second Hundred Years War or the European 20th Century War (with spill over into the rest of the world during WWI and WWII). (less)
Jan 28, 2014 06:59AM · flag

Jim Who knows? There may be more to come.
Jan 28, 2014 11:34AM · flag

Mike Hill I agree with your points. I think that war will finally end when Russia finally reach stability in someway.
Jun 06, 2015 05:00AM · flag

Clif Hostetler Mike wrote: " ... I think that war will finally end when Russia finally reach stability in someway."

Good point! The current fighting in Ukraine can pr ...more
Jun 06, 2015 08:17AM · flag

Stephen I was just reading something about Shaker Heights on Wikipedia. You know how they give you links to other entries and they mentioned Shaker Square. Last year, about this time my wife and I were in Cleveland do some recruiting and we at a Balaton on Shaker Square, a wonderful restaurant. I did not know that the community surrounding Shaker Square was the largest Hungarian Community outside Hungary! And the food was amazing. We have a very good friend who grew up in Hungary, married to an American and now lives in Washington. She goes back every few summers to Lake Balatan. (less)
Feb 03, 2016 11:05AM · flag

Murtaza Excellent review!
Jan 11, 2017 09:00AM · flag

Sep 23, 2011 Will Ansbacher rated it it was amazing
Shelves: politics, history, gasping-at-the-brilliance
What an absolutely outstanding book. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed reading history so much - there were some nights I read till after 1 because I couldn’t put it down. This is the story of Europe since the end of WW2, a seemingly dry topic if ever there was one, so what is it that makes the book so compelling? Well, it feels as if it is all here, every significant event for the whole period presented in so balanced a way that the weight given to each just “feels right”. Reading Postwar is like entering a fast-flowing river, experiencing the torrent of events as they occurred, but sped up so that 60 years pass in just a few weeks (it did take me a couple of months to read, on and off).

At the same time Judt is not at all dogmatic or polemical; and you feel you are standing back far enough to get a clear sense of why events developed the way they did. And how do I know that he got the balance and interpretation of events so right? I don’t of course, but such is the power of this book that the “plot”, as it were, just makes so much sense.

When I first started reading it, one of my motives was to get a better sense of those events that I thought were so momentous when I was younger – the student uprisings and riots in the ‘60s, the oil shocks and hyperinflation of the 70’s and so on. At the time they seemed like defining moments in history. How wrong I was. In Postwar they appear as rather minor and not very interesting developments: the first following naturally from the coming-of-age of a mass of baby boomers and its discontent with the safe world their parents created after WW2; and the second, the almost inevitable aftermath of the US’s insane war in Vietnam and its inability to pay for it.
I had also wanted to get a better sense of earlier events that I dimly remember from my parents’ conversations – these would have been from the late 50’s on: they’re all there too.

Although this is not your average footnote-laden academic textbook, there are some slightly dry segments of course – some very detailed accounts of heinous but rather obscure events in communist Eastern Europe, and a couple too many statistics comparing the number of TVs in the East versus the West. But I devoured them all, wonk that I am.

I have a couple of minor regrets after finishing this book. One is that it was written in 2005 – a natural cutoff so the span is a nice round 60 years. But I would have liked to have known how he viewed the deepening depression since 2008. Judt saw the much-unloved EU as a significant success but more importantly a necessary development for Europe, but it seems to me that some sort of major readjustment would have been inevitable even if there hadn’t been a financial meltdown, given the disparity between the newer members like Greece and the original countries.

The other is a connection that was not made. In the Epilogue which for me was one of the most important and emotional chapters, Judt sums up the essential meaning and lesson to be learned after WW2 – the defining event that lead to everything else - and that is atonement for and real acceptance of the consequences of the Holocaust. That was a real surprise to me, but as he points out, virtually every country was complicit in some way. In the immediate years after the war, “forgetting” was the practical response that allowed Europe’s rebuilding to take place, and it took many years for the reality to be faced. Now, as he says, the actual experience of the Holocaust is moving into history and there has to be a proper way to remember it. I’m not saying this well. But this last chapter is a searing reminder of the evil that ordinary people can either be persuaded to do, or tolerate or just not see, then justify afterwards. And my regret about the point he didn't make was that this tolerance seems to be in direct proportion to the level of desperation and deprivation in everyday life.

I don’t know, perhaps Judt felt that this point was sufficiently obvious from everything he had written, but I thought the link needed to be made, as a warning lesson for the future. Perhaps that’s why I’m so concerned about the current deepening depression. Or maybe I’m wrong and history does not repeat itself in so obvious a way. I think Judt would have had the answer, but anyway I seem to have drifted some distance from reviewing this wonderful book.
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May 07, 2020 Michael Kotsarinis added it · review of another edition
Shelves: reference
Astonishing!

I know that this book has already received enough praise but it is very well deserved indeed.
It is a detailed and vivid tour of Europe from the end of World War II to 2005. Using the political, social, economic and cultural events and their perspectives the author managed to construct an elegant and convincing narrative that makes the sequence of events that shaped postwar Europe a coherent read.

I can only recommend it to everyone who is (or considers oneself) European, it will be a journey into self-awareness. (less)
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May 06, 2010 Michael rated it it was amazing
I have often referred to this book as a great act of hubris and an uncommon realization of the author's ambition. The sheer audacity in enclosing a continent's history over 60 years in one spine is staggering and only pales in comparison to the striking amount of detail and context Judt provides his readers. In many ways Postwar is the ultimate starting point for anyone who seeks to enhance their postwar history chops, in other ways Judt provides a perfect condensation of thousands of postwar texts, providing an original review of nearly all pertinent developments, and I again stress that no author has approached "all" in this genre to such a degree of completion.

Judt does not focus solely on political development and is certainly not a "Great Man" historian, although he does provide detailed portraits of the drivers of Europe's postwar history. Instead Postwar encompasses social movements, intellectual debates, economic conditions, the slight variations of oppression in the Eastern Bloc, and the importance of music and film in imagining and conceptualizing the shifting understandings of life on the old continent after its suicide. A great achievement in prose and non-fiction, Judt's Postwar is the Complete Idiot's Guide to Postwar Europe for the thinking man. (less)
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Dec 02, 2015 fourtriplezed rated it it was amazing
Shelves: history, europe
What an outstanding history book. Postwar probably covered the events and issues as well as I can imagine considering the massive scope of the subject. Well written, informative, thoughtful and maybe as good an attempt at being even handed as I can think of. Highly recommended.
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Feb 12, 2015 Max rated it it was amazing
Shelves: european-history
Postwar is a masterful presentation; comprehensive and detailed without losing focus. Judt fits together the pieces of European history from the fall of Nazi Germany to the fall of the Soviet Union. He goes on to describe the new Europe that ensued and its challenges. He creates the sense of flow of history usually found in the more distant past. For those focused on topical interests such as WWII, the cold war, economic or social history, this book can provide context. To cover so much in one volume in such an engaging style is an outstanding accomplishment. I don’t know how to summarize it succinctly. For anyone interested, my notes follow, but I recommend going straight to the book.

Judt views WWII as an extension of an unresolved WWI. The German people felt betrayed more than defeated. In WWII civilians were impacted as much as soldiers. Tens of millions were killed or injured. Survivors had been subjected to occupation, deprivation, and exploitation. WWI ended with borders being shifted, WWII ended with people being shifted. Millions were starving, homeless or displaced. At war’s end ethnic groups were evicted in mass, old scores settled, and many killed in retribution. Europe was turned into a collection of homogenous nations with the notable exception of the Balkans. Germany and Europe were profoundly changed.

Existing governments were swept aside by occupational governments followed often by partisan groups seeking revenge on collaborators. Ill equipped to govern resistance groups were soon replaced by pre-war left wing parties, the only ones with remaining credibility. The professional classes had been decimated. Many doctors, bankers, lawyers had been Jews. The Jews were exterminated for “racial purity” and other professionals eliminated to turn conquered ethnic groups into laborers for Germans. With governments gone twice or thrice over and community leaders killed off an entirely new order would have to take hold. Continuity with the past was broken.

Left leaning parties from Communist to Christian Democratic vied for power. All turned to planned economies and welfare state programs as a way out of their dire circumstances. European agriculture was unable to meet the most basic needs. Transportation networks had been destroyed. Food could not get to those who needed it. Housing likewise had suffered wholesale destruction. By 1947 most Europeans still lacked decent housing and sufficient food. At this time of dour moods and prospects, the Marshall plan was announced. The US realized the importance of getting Europe back on its feet. In part the fear of communism was behind the US plan. Stalin looked at the plan as a threat to his control and got Eastern Europe to opt out setting up a great divide. Stalin erred in this as the less confrontational approach of accepting the Marshall plan might have bolstered his case with the West to establish a weak neutral unified Germany which he might have eventually controlled entirely.

Just as WWII was a continuation of WWI so the Cold War was a continuation of Western and Soviet animosity since WWI, the common enemy, Germany, bringing a brief interlude during the war. The division of Europe between Soviet and Western control was based primarily on military reality. The much maligned Yalta agreement and the holding back of American advances near the war’s end made little difference to the eventual outcome.

Realizing the depression, caused by an inefficient mercantile system, the gold standard, and deflation, had led to fascism and war, Keynes championed and the US backed new economic initiatives. The Bretton Woods agreements established the International Monetary Fund based on US cash and the World Bank. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs promoted free trade and convertibility of currencies and was followed by the World Trade Organization.

Along with fear of a return to depression, America feared Germany might again rebuild and start a third war. Americans were concerned with domestic issues and wanted out of Europe. These reasons led to the initial American reaction to placate the Soviet Union and its reluctance to realize Soviet intransigence. It was the foreign ministers meeting in 1947 that marked the recognition by France and the US that we were locked in a cold war. Britain had already figured it out. Unable to agree with Russia on the future of Germany, the West began rebuilding their zones in Germany as a bulwark against communism, while the Soviets kept exploiting East Germany. The Russians now also tightened control throughout Eastern Europe, conducting a successful communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and instructing Western communist parties to become more active.

The West established the Federal Republic of Germany with a new currency, the Deutsche Mark, which brought in goods and fostered economic recovery. Stalin responded with the Berlin blockade which he hoped to use as a bargaining chip to set up a weak neutral Germany he could subvert. But the US responded with the airlift and founded NATO. Stalin’s hopes were now dashed. Concurrently Stalin’s problem child, Tito, trying to establish his own communist federation in the Balkans, split with Stalin defying Moscow’s attempts to control him. Stalin considered attacking Yugoslavia. The West misinterpreted his military buildup. With Stalin’s support for the invasion of South Korea, the West believed Germany would be next. Dramatic increases in defense spending quickly ensued in America to give NATO some military capability.

With the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War in 1953, Europe began to stabilize. Fears of German revanchism subsided and communist party memberships declined. West Germany was admitted to NATO and in response the Warsaw pact was formed. It was agreed that Austria would be neutral and foreign troops were withdrawn. The city of Trieste was returned to Italy, its hinterlands went to Yugoslavia. Europeans started looking forward rather than back to the war. With the growth of nuclear stockpiles and the missile race, European nations were bystanders. All power was in Washington and Moscow. The harsh Soviet putdown of the 1956 Hungarian revolt forever changed perceptions of Soviet communism further alienating the general population in East Europe and bringing a final precipitous decline in party memberships in the West. Berlin remained a touch point, ultimately settled by the wall in 1961. By 1963 a Washington Moscow hotline was in place. Both sides accepted the status quo in Europe.

Colonial empires were abandoned. Impoverished by the war and facing increasing local opposition, the economic drain of administering these dependencies outweighed the benefits. The Dutch left Indonesia, the Belgians left the Congo, the Portuguese left Angola and Mozambique. France carried on its heritage of humiliation with the debacle at Dien Bien Phu in Viet Nam. After losing Indo China, its other possessions followed, most notably Algeria after another long and costly war. Britain had acquiesced quickly in India in 1947, but it would take another dozen years for it to unwind its extensive colonial positions. Sealing the fate of France and Britain was the 1956 attack on the Suez Canal. The plans were kept secret from Washington angering the US which brought financial pressure on Britain to stop, showing who held all the cards. After which Britain fell in line with Washington. This and the mess in Algeria brought down the Fourth Republic in 1958 and France went its independent way with De Gaulle leading the new Fifth Republic with a stronger directly elected executive.

The 1950’s and 1960’s saw dramatic increases in production and employment. For the first time many people including the young had disposable income. Consumerism American style ensued with the emergent teenage category spending heavily on music and clothes. Social Democratic parties prevailed throughout Europe providing many public services with budgets representing large portions of GDP. However effective application varied. The UK engaged in endless labor disputes that restricted progress whereas the German government was able to promote cooperation. Education levels increased dramatically. For example in 1946 in Italy 5% graduated from secondary school, by the end of the sixties 1 in 7 attended university. The so called sexual revolution actually paled in comparison to the 1920’s, the fin de siècle or demi monde Paris 100 years earlier.

Student protest and radicalism took off. Largely peaceful in France led by middleclass youth who stood for little but did inspire disgruntled workers to strike. In Italy where universities were awash with students they didn’t know what to do with, some groups turned violent engaging in bombings. Italian workers who like their French counterparts had no say in their working conditions also began a series of strikes. In Germany students who had been taught nothing about their Nazi past in school or by their parents turned against their government and America many adopting heroes like Mao or Che Guevara. However, the sixties were the swansong of student dissidence both in the East and in the West. In the East the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 permanently ended any hope that they could morph their communist system into one that allowed freedom. In the West protesters were faced with more mundane concerns, jobs and economic security.

In the seventies, the US announced floating rates for the dollar to compensate for debts incurred financing the Viet Nam War. This caused all major currencies to abandon fixed exchange rates. Growth rates slowed and inflation ensued worldwide. Amidst economic challenges, violent terrorist groups sprouted up across the continent: the IRA in Northern Ireland, the ETA in Basque Spain, the RAF starting as the Baader-Meinhof group in West Germany and the BR (Red Brigade) in Italy.

New political constituencies developed particularly that of women. As increasing members of the workforce they fought for abortion and contraception rights, equal pay, child care, and against domestic violence and pornography. The environmentalist movement became prominent resulting in the formation of Green parties.

Two things in the seventies changed East-West relations. First was Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik which called for recognition of East Germany and increased exchanges between the two countries. Second was the Helsinki accord which legitimized Soviet influence over its neighbors but carried the responsibility of equal rights, an unanticipated thorn in Russia’s side. The 1970’s also saw three of the poorest countries in Western Europe move from autocratic rule to democracy: Spain, Portugal and Greece.

The 1980’s saw the privatization of most government owned industries in Britain under the strong willed conservative Margaret Thatcher. This led to economic efficiency; however, it also brought high unemployment, poverty and income inequality. Britain was the only European country to aggressively pursue this American model. France under Mitterrand started in the opposite direction, nationalizing industries until the dire economic consequences forced an about face. Mitterrand then began selling off government properties but typically maintained some government interest in a more balanced approach. Other European states also privatized industries. The communist countries continued to stagnate.

The 1980’s brought increased pressure on the Soviet Union’s moribund economy. Reagan’s aggressive defense buildup strained the Soviets to keep pace. More importantly the Soviet Afghanistan war led to economic drain and increased Muslim dissidence. Returning soldiers succumbed to alcoholism and psychological problems the same as America’s Viet Nam and Iraq/Afghanistan vets. Most important was the dying off of the old guard: Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko in quick succession. Gorbachev, who took over, was born well after WWI and the revolution. He was a reformer and as the author quotes de Tocqueville, “The most dangerous time for bad government is when it starts to reform itself.” The loosening of control through Glasnost and Perestroika ended in the unraveling of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev through a Leninist lens tried modifying the Soviet System one piece at a time but this was not possible in such a tightly controlled system.

Soviet European satellites were reeling under massive debt that had propped up their inefficient economies; limited reforms only emboldened the growing opposition. Poland for example could keep implementing martial law or finally deal with the illegal trade union Solidarity. With no support from Gorbachev Poland chose the latter and communist rule ended quickly. Hungary soon followed suit and paved the way for the especially repressive East Germany to crack despite its acceptance and support by the West German government. Once Hungary opened its border East Germans flooded in, many crossing into Austria then West Germany. Tens of thousands East German’s stayed in Czechoslovakia and Hungary embarrassing the East German communist party and its West German accommodators. This inability to control its borders made the Berlin Wall superfluous and it was opened.

One after another, the USSR’s Eastern European satellites declared independence then the USSR itself fell apart. First the Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were able to separate then as 1991 came to a close, the Central Asian Republics, the Caucuses Republics and finally long time significant pieces of the USSR, Belarus and Ukraine. Gorbachev was clueless and in the end outmaneuvered by Yeltsin who became President of Russia which left the Soviet Union with nothing for Gorbachev to rule. The fall of the Soviet Union was the final phase of the aftermath of events beginning with WWI.

Only in the Balkans had ethnic populations not been separated out into homogeneous regions after WWII. Thus Croats, Slovenes, Serbians, Albanians all found themselves intermixed throughout Yugoslavia. Bosnia was the most heterogeneous with Croat, Serb and Muslim populations. Milosevic and Belgrade politicians following Tito’s death played on ethnic divisions to secure power leading to the destabilization of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed. Slovenia and Croatia were much more prosperous than the rest of Yugoslavia and as things deteriorated they quickly seceded leaving Milosevic to exploit Kosovo and Bosnia. Europe did nothing as ethnic cleansing took thousands of lives. Finally the US through NATO took action.

The European Union breaking down trade and travel barriers promoted a new European identity. Mobile educated prosperous classes in different countries had more in common with each other than with their countrymen. The euro provided a common currency and English became the common language for the mobile elite. Similarly, immigrant communities had identities that crossed traditional boundaries. As welfare state programs declined, income disparity and poverty increased particularly among the many Turks, Africans and other non-Europeans who had migrated to Europe for work. Globalization exacerbated the problem as European businesses moved investment outside of Europe. The growing Muslim community became restless and drew heated right wing reaction

Fast-forwarding to the present one can only hope that Europe can deal with the new ethnic diversity better than it has in the past. Ethnic tensions are exacerbated by the threat of radical Islam. Another challenge is the backlash in richer states particularly Germany that support poorer ones such as Greece. And last but not least is the reemergence of Russian nationalism as Putin carries on where the Tsar’s left off. Only time will tell whether the new Europe can fulfill its promise or is doomed to repeat its history.
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Oct 12, 2019 Anna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: nonfiction, history, brexit
‘Postwar’ is one of those books that merits the term magisterial. It certainly demands commitment from the reader. A mere glance conveys its length, but I didn’t notice until I began reading that the text is also in an unusually small font. Thus my usual reading speed was much reduced, provoking the usual fears of forgetting how to read properly, brain decay, etc. The time it demands is nonetheless richly rewarded. Judt is a consummate synoptic writer. He covers a vast amount of ground and commands a huge array of material, synthesising a coherent narrative that nonetheless avoids becoming simplistic or reductive. I learned a great deal of substance from this history, while also finding his choices of focus fascinating.

As I am British and was taught history in the UK school system, my view of European history is highly Western-centric. Judt avoids this and achieves an excellent balance between East and West, while conceding the ambiguous and debatable limits of continental Europe. This is first and foremost a political history, with secondary economic and socio-cultural considerations. Thus it traces how the Iron Curtain came to divide Europe, the differences either side of it, the circumstances of its fall, and what succeeded it. I don’t think I’ve read such a detailed account before. Judt is admirably wary of generalisations and thus explains the differences in experiences of communism across different Eastern European countries, something I previously knew practically nothing about. Britain comes off as marginal and largely unimportant which, of course, it is. If only our political culture could begin to accept that. There were some resonances with a book I dismissed as ridiculous while reading it years ago: Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014. That argued Britain has been in economic decline since the 1870s which, despite the title’s hyperbole, does have some plausibility.

'Postwar' begins, of course, with the state of Europe immediately after the end of the Second World War. The portrait of a continent in ruins is vivid and horrifying. Some surprising paradoxes emerge: a vast amount of housing was destroyed, requiring decades of rebuilding. Yet Germany lost hardly any industrial machinery, facilitating an impressively swift economic recovery. Of the European countries (and Russia), only Britain and Germany suffered more military than civilian casualties. I’m sure that the British (English?) nostalgia for the ‘Blitz Spirit’ is influenced by this fact, which is also linked our not being invaded. One thing that stuck with me amongst the litany of disaster was the sheer number of refugees moving between European countries after the end of the war, numbering in the millions. And the fact that Germany’s currency was cigarettes, allowing American GIs to profit from arbitrage. Of course, it was also American money that helped Europe come back from complete collapse.

The broad structure of ‘Postwar’ is intriguing in itself. The four parts cover 1945-1953, 1953-1971, 1971-1989, and 1989-2005. I was surprised to find Judt much more interested in the 1970s than the 1960s. In general, he treats the 60s as a time of comfortable prosperity and cultural change in Europe, while not considering the 1968 upheavals as particularly transformative. He does not dispute that they had impacts, but devotes much more attention to the growing political and social cynicism of the 70s. I got the impression of Europe being complacent in the 60s, then losing its confidence in the 70s, both in the East and West. The subsequent account of how the USSR collapsed from within in 1989 is really moving. As in the rest of the book, Judt’s writing is clear, specific, and humane.

Two areas of history that I was particularly glad to learn more about were the Irish Troubles (which I shamefully have never read a whole book about) and the wars in Yugoslavia. Both had a vague and distant familiarity from the TV news during my childhood, yet I was too young and unaffected by them to understand what was actually happening. Judt provides elegant and thorough summaries, a reminder that postwar Europe has not been entirely peaceful. He also compares the sectarian violence in Ireland with that of ETA and German paramilitary organisations during the same period, something I hadn’t come across before. The complexity of Yugoslavia’s descent into multiple wars is difficult to explain given the web of historical, linguistic, and religious dynamics involved. I feel better informed, albeit probably not able to describe the conflicts to someone else.

While reading ‘Postwar’, my mind often strayed to the issue currently consuming UK politics in a collective nervous breakdown: Brexit. The genesis and somewhat erratic evolution of the EU is woven throughout the book, with the relationship between France and Germany presented as the greatest influence. It’s very ironic to read that Britain’s original interest in joining the European Community was purely economic, as it began as a customs union. Now the UK has a hopelessly fanatical government that refuses to contemplate Northern Ireland remaining in the European customs union, let alone Great Britain. Indeed, the government has just spent millions on an advertising campaign stating authoritatively that the UK will leave the EU in just over two weeks. On what terms? Who the fuck knows!

As ‘Postwar’ ends in 2005, it does not cover the financial crisis or its legacy of austerity across Europe. Searching for evidence of how it all came to this, however, still turned up highly relevant insights. On the EU as an institution:

The levers of the Union’s economic machinery depend for their efficiency upon the consent of all constituent parts. Where everyone more or less concurs on the principle and benefits of a given policy - on open internal borders, or unrestricted markets for goods and services - the EU has made remarkable progress. Where there is real dissent from a handful of members (or even just one, particularly if it is a major contributor), policy stalls: tax harmonisation, like the reduction in agricultural supports, has been on the agenda for decades.

This is striking to read in 2019. During the aftermath of the financial crisis, the European Central Bank definitely no longer relied entirely upon consent when it came to heavily indebted member states. I recall both Greece and Italy having their governments essentially replaced at the ECB’s behest. Both countries are more closely linked to the EU, and thus limited in their economic policy options, by the euro. Still, the UK is the only country to apparently think that leaving the EU would solve more problems than the myriad it would cause. I find it notable how rarely the idea is raised in British politics that we need to be in the EU whether we like it or not. On the continent, as Judt writes, this is taken for granted. Flawed as it is, the EU cannot be ignored and interacting with it somehow forms the only viable economic option on offer in the vicinity.

This passage also reads very differently now than it would have in 2005. It's rather bittersweet:

If a clearly articulated ‘European project’, describing the goals and institutions of the Union as they later evolved, had ever been put to the separate voters of the states of Western Europe it would surely have been rejected.

The advantage of the European project in the decades following World War Two had thus lain precisely in its imprecision. Like ‘growth’ or ‘peace’ - with both of which it was closely associated in the minds of its proponents - ‘Europe’ was too benign to attract effective opposition. [...]

For all its faults as a system of indirect government, the Union has certain interesting and original attributes. Decisions and laws may be passed at a transgovernmental level, but they are implemented by and through national authorities. Everything has to be undertaken by agreement, since there are no instruments of coercion: no EU tax collectors, no EU policemen. The European Union thus represents an unusual compromise: international governance undertaken by national governments.

When the ECB subsequently wielded debt relief as an instrument of coercion, I think it demonstrated the continuing strength of Germany as the heart of the EU. National government remained instrumental, albeit in penalising other such governments.

By the time ‘Postwar’ was published, nationalist and neo-fascist parties with no policies beyond hysterical opposition were already rising in Western Europe, among them UKIP and the National Front in France. Judt presents these as in part the political heirs of communist parties before the fall of the USSR, while also linking them with growing wealth inequality and anti-immigrant and islamophobic racism. He points out that far-right parties have been able to wield influence disproportionate to their electoral support, which is how the UK ended up with the bloody referendum on EU membership in the first place. On Blair’s restriction of access to social security for immigrants:

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters in the 2001 election should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this was to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique [the BNP] which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large.

Although this was not dissimilar to events across Western Europe, I think in the UK case at least part of the blame should be placed on the Murdoch-owned tabloid newspapers. Judt also comments on the EU’s encouragement of regionalism, which he explicitly links to the rise of Welsh and Scottish nationalist identification.

Perhaps the most immediately relevant part, though, reflects upon Britain’s toxic nostalgia, which I consider a major influence on Brexit:

In its place there emerged a country incapable of relating to its immediate past except through the unintentional irony of denial, or else as a sort of disinfected, disembodied ‘heritage’. [...] Thus the real, existing British railways were an acknowledged national scandal; but by the year 2000 Great Britain had more steam railways and steam-railway museums than all the rest of Europe combined: one hundred and twenty of them, ninety-one in England alone. Most of the trains don’t go anywhere, and even those that do manage to interweave reality and fantasy with a certain marvellous insouciance [...]

In contemporary England, then, history and fiction blend seamlessly. Industry, poverty, and class conflict have been officially forgotten and paved over. Deep social contrasts are denied or homogenised. And even the most recent and contested past is available only in nostalgic plastic reproduction. [...] The English capacity to plant and tend a Garden of Forgetting, fondly invoking the past while strenuously denying it, is unique.

While these quotations are all to be found in the last hundred pages of the book, the continuity with previous decades is shown beautifully. The final chapter is a stand alone essay on the centrality to European identity of remembering and memorialising the Holocaust. This implies that the English tendency to nostalgic forgetting represents a philosophical schism with the rest of Europe. When observing British politics in Autumn 2019, what’s in evidence from the government is this tendency at its most extreme, manifesting as Boris Johnson’s constant lies and contradictions or denials of previous statements. I found reading ‘Postwar’ much more enlightening as to what’s happening than following the livetweeted mayhem in real time. Judt recounts not just the legacy of the Second World War but how it has been remembered very differently across Europe, sometimes with destructive consequences. (less)
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Aug 22, 2011 Anthony rated it it was amazing
I managed to get through my entire undergraduate and graduate studies in history without having ever read a single book by Tony Judt. I have read some of his essays over the years, however, and they always struck me as pragmatic and apolitical. Other than his controversial positions on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Judt, an ex-Marxist and fervent Social Democrat, is a believer in being "objective" (a term he is surprisingly critical of in the introduction to Postwar). While he admires past giants like Hosbawm and Toynbee, Postwar is clearly his attempt at challenging Marxist and Whigish historical accounts of European history.

Although Judt chooses to "let the facts speak for themselves" he certainly is far from apolitical. On the contrary, I found him to be especially harder on the Left rather than the Right. I suspect this had to do more with his personal animosity towards his Marxist past. Judt's optimism with regard to Europe's future is admittingly refreshing in that he entirely dismisses the "Europe in decline" trope that American historians love to assign to the continent.

On the whole he succeeds. The book is beautifully written and his thoughful analysis of both the "bigger" countries (Britain, France, USSR etc) alongside the "smaller" and lesser known countries(ex-Soviet satellities, Romania, Albania etc) ranks him right up there with Hobsbawm and Toynbee. In that sense, this book is very old fashioned which is why it serves as a great, general introduction to post-war European history. Highly recommended.

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Jun 05, 2012 Geoff marked it as to-read
Been meaning to read this for years. Now seems a more auspicious time than ever.
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Nov 13, 2010 Matthew rated it it was amazing
Shelves: history
This book is filling a gap in my knowledge so large that I cannot believe I never realised it was there. It seems to touch on so many things; it delivers the events, yes, but more interestingly it jumps from political commentary to economics to aesthetic and social theory to intellectual history. It is my first book on general European history, so I can't really critique the content, except to say I feel like I've been brought a long way. Above all I think it is a political history, delving -- sometimes for long periods -- into other areas more as a function of the politics of time. I started on this book to answer for myself the question, raised from reading Wolfgang Munchau in the FT, of why the EU is more a political construct than a streamlined economic entity. Judt's book is framed like if you asked a wise person a question and they told you a really, really, really long story, and at the end of that story you 'feel' the answer rather than 'know' the answer, and along the way you learnt about a lot of related stuff besides.

His thesis is, I think, that the EU started as a French initiative to bind a Marshall-plan aided Germany to the rest of Europe in a way that would preclude another invasion of French soil. Along the way, though, the EU grew from out from being just a political institution and into an identity, a political and social philosophy, an aesthetic, a way of life. It is interesting to a non European reader like myself because I have always seen America as standing for a concrete set of ideals or an idea you could hold on to, Judt's narrative concludes that neither America nor China could ever end up universal ideas, but Europe -- with its social democracy, its mix of capitalism and welfare, ultimately founded on respect for human rights -- can. I wonder what he would think of the EU's budget and debt crisis going on now; he mentions early that the social democracy of Europe was fashioned in the boom of the post-war reconstruction 50s and 60s, and as early as the 70s and 80s ominous hints of budgetary constraint and shrinking demographic base had started to show -- but he doesn't take these economic considerations to their full political implication, choosing instead to end on an optimistic note in support of the European idea.

Separately it is interesting to read of the chaos in Eastern Europe post the official end of WWII as per the Allied narrative -- as an extension of the Nazi occupation under new Communist rulers. I really appreciate Judt's comprehensive knowledge here and how he pointedly covers virtually every country pushing up against Russia's borders. As someone who grew up in Singapore, it also contextualises for me the local politics -- Singapore's independence in 1965 -- and the emphasis (as written in our national pledge, at least) on a neutrality of race and religion.

Finally, he is just a great writer, never sententious, and perhaps more impressively given the topic, never tendentious, and his footnotes are on occasion very very funny.

(less)
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Aug 08, 2020 Dan rated it really liked it
This very lengthy Pulitzer winning book covers Europe from 1945 to 2005. First off it is well written. Naturally 900 pages is insufficient to cover sixty years of history of nearly thirty nations. It quite simply tried to cover so much ground that there is not so much depth on anyone topic. There were some insights that I found fascinating including:

1. Britain was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe well into the 1970’s.

2. France was the most reluctant of the European nations to give up its overseas Empire essentially southeast Asia and North Africa colonies.

3. Post War Berlin did not mean as much to Russia as either the Eisenhower or Kennedy administration thought. In fact many officials in America were relieved when the Berlin Wall was built because they thought an open Berlin might be the flash point for WWIII.

4. In the late 1960’s West Germany had serious riots as large and deadly as those occurring in the U.S. A new generation of youth were sympathetic to the Nazis and dismissive of the West German government.

5. The U.S. and Britain allowed Russia to occupy Eastern Europe without resistance, a fait accompli, in part because they were concerned that Russia might co-opt a down and out but not quite dead German Army and meddle militarily in Western and Southern Europe.

6. Consumerism in tandem with the U.S., an emphasis on education, less emphasis on farming were three major focal points of modernization that led to Western Europe’s surprising economic success post WWII. West Germany led the way, perhaps surprisingly the ‘high tech’ infrastructure (roads, manufacturing capability, telecommunication networks) built during the Nazi era was largely intact. By the 1950’s West Germany had a larger GDP than Britain.

One additional area that was insightful was the excellent epilogue which discusses Europe’s much delayed reckoning with the Holocaust. It was not until the 1990’s and 2000’s, after Germany had made genuine efforts and progress toward taking responsibility, that many European countries including France and Holland more fully dealt with their complicity during the Holocaust.

4 stars. (less)
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Jun 14, 2014 Elena rated it it was amazing
Despite the title "A History of Europe since 1945," the late Tony Judt's 2005 book covers more than Europe and more than post 1945. In the avalanche of historical facts, Judt identifies a pattern of growing intolerance in the postwar world, and he's actually talking about post World War I. Where once different ethnic groups lived together in uneasy but workable ways, from 1914 on that pragmatic tolerance has been evaporating and ethnic strife has been increasing, even today when we should know better. There is a tendency to see each local conflict as an isolated instance, but Judt provides a context that deserves serious attention. Since I'm currently reading a lot of Stefan Zweig, it's interesting to me that Judt mentions Zweig in his opening on page 5, and again as he draws to a conclusion on page 751: "Before he committed suicide in 1942 the Viennese novelist and critic Stefan Zweig wrote longingly of the lost world of pre-1914 Europe, expressing 'pity for those who were not young during those last years of confidence'. Sixty years later, at the end of the twentieth century, almost everything else has been recovered or rebuilt. But the confidence with which Zweig's generation of Europeans entered the century could never be entirely recaptured: too much had happened." The emerging European Union is an attempt to recover the "successes of the second half of the nineteenth century." (less)
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Sue Thanks for introducing me to this book. It definitely sounds like something of interest. I may not get to it for a while, with my attention to WWI rig ...more
Jun 14, 2014 07:53AM · flag

Fionnuala You make this book sound like essential reading, Elena and Tony Judt sounds like a very astute historian. He writes well too - I've read his memoir ca ...more
Jun 14, 2014 12:58PM · flag

Elena Fionnuala wrote: "You make this book sound like essential reading, Elena and Tony Judt sounds like a very astute historian. He writes well too - I've ...more
Jun 14, 2014 01:09PM · flag

Sue Thanks for the idea, Fionnuala. I added the memoir too.
Jun 14, 2014 02:21PM · flag

May 13, 2010 Lazarus P Badpenny Esq rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Recommends it for: Good Europeans, bad Europeans, and those with short memories
Shelves: contemporary, diplomacy, twentieth-century, espionage, russia, 2011, europa, the-proper-study-of-mankind, international_relations, germany
A veritable Mont Blanc of a book in both scale and scope that successfully synthesizes the political, economic, social, and cultural developments in Europe following the Second World War. No doubt I shall be returning to its component parts for some time to come. The Epilogue concerning evolving postwar attitudes to Holocaust culpability was equally illuminating.
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Mar 28, 2020 Joseph Stieb rated it really liked it
Shelves: european-history-non-military
I think this is on just about everyone "to-read" list, but thanks to Coronavirus, I read it. Took about 2 weeks of pretty consistent reading because this book is mass-ive. Still, it is worth it as a way to excavate (I think that's a better word for this book than "survey") a huge amount of history from a first-class historian in a relatively efficient way. In place of an in-depth review (this book really has themes more than arguments), I'm just going to reflect on a few pieces.

This book's greatest strength is the sections on intellectual history. Judt's big points here are 1. The great intellectual struggle of the 20th century (capitalism v communism) basically faded away even before the end of the Cold War as the communist alternative became fully discredited. The catch is that Europe also distanced itself from the American free market model by developing the social-democratic state. Judt contends that since the end of hte Cold War the US and Europe have moved further away from each other culturally and politically. He holds out hope that just like America and the Soviet Union held out "models" for emulation in the 20th century that Europe can do the same in the 21st. 2. Judt is also highly critical of the European intellectual class for its persistent apologetics for communism and then its fanciful embrace of postcolonialism in the 60s and 70s. He excoriates 60s radicals for basically being spoiled brats who thought they were fighting on behalf of an oppressed working class that actually hated them. He shows that the public intellectual has faded in importance in European life, and honestly this doesn't seem like such a bad thing, given the ridiculous and obscurantist writings and political leanings of your Sartres, Derridas, and Foucaults. Judt doesn't quite come out and say all this, but the subtext is just barely submerged.

Judt's conclusion is the best part of the whole book, something I'll probably assign in classes on historiography in the future. In it, he shows how consciousness of and a sense of guilt for the Holocaust in most of Europe didn't really coalesce until the 60s and 70s, when public trials, televisions shows, and historical studies thrust it into prominence. From that period on, the Holocaust became a touchstone for an entire transnational culture, something to be honored and begged forgiveness for. Judt argues that this consciousness underlies the entire social democratic project; the hope of transcending nationalism and hatred. He sees this generally as a good thing, but he says that we must soon transition from memory to history, to an unflinching look at a horrific first half of the 20th century, to motivate future generations to share in this project. Memory, for Judt, is too self-justifying and partial; we need the unflinching rigor of history.

If this book has any weaknesses, I'd say there are 2: First, Judt emphasizes high culture stuff like "film" and plays a lot more than pop culture. That's not necessarily bad as a way to talk about national moods and artistic trends, but it isn't that fun to read numerous pages about French and Italian movies that are 60 years old that I will never ever see. Second, and this may be unfair, but I think this book might have been more effective if it was subdivided into 2 volumes. It would be a bit more...digestible. That's obviously a petty criticism of a great history, but it is hard to absorb the skillful way that Judt pieces together certain themes if you can't read this book relatively quickly (which is really hard to do barring a pandemic that shuts you inside).

So who is this book good for? I know that it will be a great reference point for me, and the survey of European intellectual history will save me a lot of primary readings in that area. Russian history is more or less left out (thank goodness or this book would have cracked 1k pages), FYI. I'd say anyone teaching modern world, intellectual or obviously European history should at least have access to this for reference, if not read it cover to cover. However, if you are looking for a survey that's shorter and less coverage-oriented, Mark Mazower's Dark Continent is also very good. (less)
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Aug 11, 2015 Patrick Brown rated it it was amazing
3 notes & 4 highlights
How does one review a book like this? It's like trying to review the sun. It's huge, everything revolves around it, and there times when it seems to fill up the sky.

Postwar is absolutely monumental. Not only is it a tremendous work of scholarship, but it also has a really great sense of humor. Judt throws shade on everyone from Marxists to ex-Nazis to the Sex Pistols to David Beckham. All of that and I learned a bunch of new words (autarkic! propitious! adumbrated!).

Why are you reading this review when you could be reading Postwar? (less)
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Oct 18, 2013 Eleni rated it it was amazing
“By the end of the twentieth century the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity and memory seemed secure” .

Even if memory remains somewhat… asymmetrical across European nations, even if this book was completed, ironically, just a few years before the fiscal crisis kicked off – which means that the much appraised postwar recovery doesn’t register as an economic miracle in individual conscience anymore, and rightly so – Europe, as we know it today, is still a phenomenal achievement.

And so is this book; a massive yet captivating narration of an astonishingly heterogeneous continent between 1945 and 2005, encompassing an enormous amount of political, economic, spatial and cultural knowledge, which is sufficiently documented, eloquently explained and geographically balanced.

Postwar covers truly EVERYTHING from the old West under reconstruction to the old East under Real Socialism and from the privileged North to the obstreperous Balkan countries and the sui generis Mediterranean area. Sixty years in the making, postwar Europe has seen a dramatic transformation and again, EVERYTHING is recorded here.

Liberalism against Communism, The Iron Curtain and the political involvement of the left wing French intellectuals; Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. Stalin versus the West, but also Stalin versus Tito.

The socio-economic and cultural processes in the context of the early/mid Cold War and the era of affluence. From the long-playing vinyl record in 1948 to the mid 50s economic boom and the modernist explosion in the arts, literature and theatre. The age of Beckett, Brecht, Pinter, the young Peter Brook and the French nouvelle vague later on; Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut.

The early, hesitant European integration, the rearment of West Germany and Moscow’s attempts to build its bridges with the West, Yugoslavia and the rest of the ‘non-Aligned’ communist world following Stalin’s death in 1953. Intra-European migration and aggressive urbanisation in France and Lithuania through ahistorical, uninspiring architecture targeted solely to meeting demographic pressures, with its notoriously known ugly results.

The age of transformation of the baby boomers’ consuming habits between the 1950s and the 1970s. The miniskirt and the invasion of the fridge, the washing machine and the transistor! The impact of television, the explosion of pop music and the expansion of the Italian film industry.

The unavoidable “Americanization” of European societies on the one hand, and the widespread notion within the cultural elite that “America was a land of hysterical puritans, given over to technology, standardization and conformism, bereft of originality of thought” on the other hand.

Swinging Sixties and the revolution of the intellectuals in the West. The era which saw the apogee of the European state; the era when protesting on the streets and being mobilized for a cause was a regular routine. The anti-Vietnam war public activists. The Who and the Beatles! Carnaby Street, London and its cloning across Europe. The sexual revolution. Marx’s intellectual legacy and the youthful impulse not to understand the world, but to change it leading to the legendary May ‘68 student revolt.

But also the Sixties as experienced in the East, which was undergoing de-Stalinization. The emergence of the Hungarian, the Yugoslavian and the Romanian / Albanian Communist political models. The critical difference between the oppressive and repressive totalitarian state and the hypocritical encouragement of both types by the US nevertheless, as “suitable for the East”, stemming in reality solely from the satellite states’ decision to differentiate politically from Moscow. The tragic events in Hungary 1956, and more importantly later on, the events in the context of the Prague Spring 1968, which marked the death of the very soul of real socialism.

“The illusion that Communism was reformable, that Stalinism had been a wrong turning, a mistake that could still be corrected, that the core ideals of democratic pluralism might somehow still be compatible with the structures of Marxist collectivism: that illusion was crushed under the tanks on August 21st 1968 and it never recovered”.

The self-doubting Seventies. The rise of the price of oil, inflation and the inevitable economic slowdown leading to depression for well.., everyone. A decade that signalled the emergence of raw political violence and a symbolic shift of focus for young people: from changing the world to finding a job. Political instability and/or lack of democracy in the Mediterranean countries.

The contribution of the German thought. “Michel Foucault’s radical skepticism was in large measure an adaptation of Nietzsche. Other influential French authors, notably the literary critic Jacques Derrida, looked instead to Martin Heidegger for their critique of human agency and their ‘de-construction’, as it was becoming known, of the cognitive human subject and his textual subject matter”.

...On to the cynical punk generation, the Sex Pistols and the replacement of writers and artists by satirists and political comedians as the new intellectual heroes. The Monty Python. And the rise of the feminist movement, environmentalism, and peace activism.

Further European integration in the 80s as Greece, Spain and Portugal join the EEC and the desperate attempts of the Spanish society to make up for lost time as also reflected in Pedro Almodovar’s work. The Single European Act and the commitment towards a single internal market of goods and labour. The privatisation wave that took the West by storm. Censorship of literature and exile of authors in Central Europe and the tragedy of communist totalitarianism.

The leninist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, the relaxation of censorship and the emergence of Perestroika, which led to the end of Communism from within. Not from America, but from the Soviet Union itself.

The 90s and the Yugoslav catastrophe. The mid 00s which marked the progression to a new era: The Maastricht Treaty, EU enlargement to the East and the Euro (ironically...)

Last but not least, globalization and the rise of… football!

Indeed, Postwar gives a brilliant portrayal of almost every aspect of collective human activity that has had an impact on the old continent; the old continent that managed to pick up the pieces and transform itself from the shattered buffer between Washington and Moscow to a thriving new world; from a haunted graveyard to a land of hope.

That said, there is one minor kink here: Judt's criticism of the Left is observably harsher than that of the Right. It is one thing to boldly condemn Stalin’s actions or Moscow’s political choice over the Prague Spring, but it is quite another to occasionally suggest that the West represent the good guys here (the latter being clearly inaccurate). Nevertheless, this is also understandable, on the basis of how the author’s own left-leaning disposition had fought with his renouncement of his marxist past through the years. Even more importantly, Tony Judt’s opinion is well declared and carefully documented throughout. It is in fact, obvious, justified and transparent. Postwar is not an apolitical document, which is exactly why this book is so engaging and often entertaining.

Highly recommended and absolutely lives up to its appraisal. Postwar is a very easy 5 star for the thinking man. (less)
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Mar 03, 2020 Frank Stein rated it it was amazing
This book deserves the seemingly inordinate praise that's been heaped upon it. It takes something that seems familiar and relatively stable, the Postwar European welfare states (and, for awhile, their Communist counterparts), and demonstrates them to be strange and conflicted and filled with surprising people and places. I don't think I'll look at Europe, or modern politics, the same again.

Although never stated as such, the book shows that Europe had to reckon with two major ideas after World War II. The first, as befits the title, was the desire to bury or atone for or move on from the devastation of the German Nazi machine. Judt does a marvelous job showing just how materially and spiritually bereft Europe was after the war, and how the Nazis, or the ideas behind them, did not retreat easily into the past. About 1/5 Germans after the war were willing to admit to pollsters that they thought the Jews were partially responsible for what happened to them, and mini-parties of revanchist Vertreiben (Germans expelled from other countries) won similar percentages of votes in many former Nazi strongholds like Schleswig-Holstein. Even more shockingly, about half of Germans thought Hitler would have gone down as one of Germany's greatest leaders "if not for the war." Meanwhile, leaders in other countries like France did everything they could to paper over the work of their collaborationist gendarmes, like Maurice Papon, who rounded up Jews without any provocation from the Nazis under the Vichy government, and then stayed in the postwar regime. As late as 1961 policeman Papon killed almost 200 Algerians by driving them into the Seine after a protest. In Italy, as late as 1971, over 90% of the civil service had gotten their start under Fascism, and large parts of the country were known to be sympathetic to this lost age. The fact that this brutal legacy was somehow papered over without much violence is both Europe's greatest postwar success and its greatest tragedy. The Christian Democrats in Italy, led by Alcide de Gasperi, put up posters within a year of the end of the war saying "We Have the Strength to Forget." The radical movements of the late 1960s were often presented as a way to force Europe to confront its fascist past, but unlike the hippies of America, they draped themselves in militant uniforms and took the language of Marxism as their guiding star. To them, fascism was too great a stain to be covered with sentiments of love.

Much of the international architecture that now seems like the outcome of a renascent continent was then viewed as a way to manage decline after the Nazis, and to deal with their remnants. The "Brussels Pact" of 1948, which bound France, Britain, and the Benelux countries for mural defense for 50 years, and which lead to the establishment of NATO the next year, was done to counter "the event of a renewal of German aggression," which makes it all more amazing that West Germany joined NATO by 1955 and started its Bundeswehr the following year. When Belgium Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak released his report that led to the Treaty of Rome and the European Community in 1957, it said that Europe needed to combine because "Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas possessions, today sees its external position weakened, its influence declining." The Community itself was the result of France's veto of a common defense program years earlier and a more perfect union. The reason Britain did not join at the time was because they did not yet recognize that their overseas empires were dying (It wasn't until 1965 that Britain's trade with Europe outdistanced that of its Commonwealth countries. When it did petition to join, twice, in that decade, France under Charles de Gaulle blocked them, out of fear of "Anglo-Saxon" dominance, just as he made a treaty with his former enemy West Germany, in order to secure a more stable "Europe.") For much of the continent, entering "Europe" was a way to manage the end of their international standing, and to make-up for the gradual loss of their former overseas colonies.

The second great force Judt discusses, and to my mind the heart of the book, is Europe's wrestling with communism. The fact that respected intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre could say in the postwar period that the fundamental decision of Europe was whether to go with America or Communism, and that he chose Communism, shows how positively the Soviet Union was still viewed in this period. Judt has no sympathy for those fellow-travelers, and touts the work of intellectuals like Raymond Aron, who argued also that the great question of the period was between freedom and Communism, and he chose the former. Freedom, for Aron and others, often meant a kind of peaceful, non-ideological "Europe," with few internal political or geographic divisions, which was a way to exorcise both fascism and communism. When Aron, at the Congress of Cultural Freedom in 1955, argued that Europe was entering a "post-ideological age," he was stating it as a hope more than a prediction. Yet the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Communist Imre Nagy and his "Socialism with a Human Face" the following year soured much, although not all, of the West on Communism, and led many to embrace the post-ideological goal as its own kind of ideology. The new, watery welfare-state politics (supported both by the transnational "Christian Democrat" movement, which the Catholic Church said parishioners had a duty to vote for, and Social Democrats), was a surprising triumph precisely because it had such limited goals.

The attempt by Khrushchev and others (like Janos Kadar's "Reform Communism" in Hungary) to implement a similar post-ideological stability in Communist countries failed due to the increasing restlessness of their subjects and the obvious failures of the system. Writers like Milan Kundera trumpeted their area as a "MittelEuropa" taken over by an Asiatic dictatorship, that wanted to move to the true and peaceful low-stakes politics of the West. The sudden and largely peaceful 1989 revolutions (many of the anti-Communist movements called themselves "Peace Movements," like the "Public Against Violence" in Slovakia) showed how fragile that false Communist consensus was, and the attraction of Europe. The East was desperate to enter a post-ideological Europe, and, for awhile at least, they succeeded. Judt recounts these ideological and political battles with mastery, but, admittedly, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism, the lack of comparable struggle makes the last part of the book less scintillating.

Judt also gets a little tedious when he gets into economics (lists of number of wash machines per person per country and so on), or cultural ephemera (sports victories or second-tier Italian movies). But the heart of the book remains its analysis of European politics, and there Judt has no competitor. It's sweep of history and insightful bon mots should make this required reading for anyone interesting the modern world. (less)
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Jul 21, 2021 Ben rated it really liked it
Shelves: history
The story flies, particularly in the second half.

> At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead … The exception, as so often, was Poland. The geographical re-arrangement of Poland—losing 69,000 square miles of its eastern borderlands to the Soviet Union and being compensated with 40,000 square miles of rather better land from German territories east of the Oder-Neisse rivers—was dramatic … With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever before. The Soviet Union of course remained a multi-national empire.

> In Denmark the crime of collaboration was virtually unknown. Yet 374 out of every 100,000 Danes were sentenced to prison in post-war trials. In France, where wartime collaboration was widespread, it was for just that reason punished rather lightly. Since the state itself was the chief collaborator, it seemed harsh and more than a little divisive to charge lowly citizens with the same crime

> The Soviet presence at Nuremberg was the price paid for the wartime alliance and for the Red Army’s pre-eminent role in Hitler’s defeat. But the second shortcoming of the trials was inherent in the very nature of judicial process. Precisely because the personal guilt of the Nazi leadership, beginning with Hitler himself, was so fully and carefully established, many Germans felt licensed to believe that the rest of the nation was innocent

> On one thing, however, all were agreed—resisters and politicians alike: ‘planning’. The disasters of the inter-war decades—the missed opportunities after 1918, the great depression that followed the stock-market crash of 1929, the waste of unemployment, the inequalities, injustices and inefficiencies of laissez-faire capitalism that had led so many into authoritarian temptation, the brazen indifference of an arrogant ruling elite and the incompetence of an inadequate political class—all seemed to be connected by the utter failure to organize society better. If democracy was to work, if it was to recover its appeal, it would have to be planned.

> Secondly, the welfare states of western Europe were not politically divisive. They were socially re-distributive in general intent (some more than others) but not at all revolutionary—they did not ‘soak the rich’. On the contrary: although the greatest immediate advantage was felt by the poor, the real long-term beneficiaries were the professional and commercial middle class. In many cases they had not previously been eligible for work-related health, unemployment or retirement benefits

> In Italy, France and Belgium women finally secured the vote. In June 1946 the Italians voted to become a Republic, but the margin was narrow (12.7 million votes in favour of abolishing the monarchy, 10.7 million for retaining it) and the country’s historical divisions were if anything further exacerbated by the outcome: the South, except for the region of Basilicata, voted overwhelmingly for the king (by a ratio of 4:1 in Naples).

> February 1945. ‘Yalta’ has entered the lexicon of central European politics as a synonym for Western betrayal, the moment when the Western Allies sold out Poland and the other small states between Russia and Germany. But Yalta actually mattered little … The immediate cause of the division of Germany and Europe lies rather in Stalin’s own errors in these years. In central Europe, where he would have preferred a united Germany, weak and neutral, he squandered his advantage in 1945 and subsequent years by uncompromising rigidity and confrontational tactics. If Stalin’s hope had been to let Germany rot until the fruit of German resentment and hopelessness fell into his lap, then he miscalculated seriously

> All the Soviet Union needed to do was accept the Marshall Plan and convince a majority of the Germans of Moscow’s good faith in seeking a neutral, independent Germany. In 1947 this would radically have shifted the European balance of advantage.

> Looking back, it is somewhat ironic that after fighting a murderous war to reduce the power of an over-mighty Germany at the heart of the European continent, the victors should have proven so unable to agree on post-war arrangements to keep the German colossus down that they ended up dividing it between them in order to benefit separately from its restored strength.

> The apparent exception was of course Czechoslovakia. Many Czechs welcomed the Russians as liberators. Thanks to Munich they had few illusions about the Western powers and Edvard Benes’s London-based government-in-exile was the only one that made unambivalent overtures to Moscow well before 1945.

> Thanks to Prague, a significant part of the non-Communist Left in France, Italy and elsewhere would now firmly situate itself in the Western camp, a development that consigned Communist parties in countries beyond Soviet reach to isolation and growing impotence. If Stalin engineered the Prague coup without fully anticipating these consequences

> A typical French farmer produced food for five fellow Frenchmen; the American farmer was already producing at three times this rate. Forty years of war and economic depression had taken a heavy toll.

> The growing emphasis in US and Soviet strategic thinking on nuclear weapons, and the intercontinental missiles with which to deliver them, released European states from the need to compete in an arena where they could not hope to match the resources of the superpowers, even though central Europe remained the most likely terrain over which any future war might be fought.

> East Europeans experienced the events of 1956 as a distillation of cumulative disappointments. Their expectations of Communism, briefly renewed with the promise of de-Stalinization, were extinguished; but so were their hopes of Western succor. Whereas Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin, or the hesitant moves to rehabilitate show-trial victims, had suggested up until then that Communism might yet contain within itself the seeds of renewal and liberation, after Hungary the dominant sentiment was one of cynical resignation.

> Precisely because the populations of Communist Eastern Europe were now quiescent, and the order of things restored, the Khrushchev-era Soviet leadership came in time to allow a limited degree of local liberalization—ironically enough, in Hungary above all. There, in the wake of his punitive retaliation against the insurgents of 1956 and their sympathizers, Kadar established the model ‘post-political’ Communist state. In return for their unquestioning acceptance of the Party’s monopoly of power and authority, Hungarians were allowed a strictly limited but genuine degree of freedom to produce and consume (less)
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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it · review of another edition

The unassuming, almost provocatively direct title belies an almost 1,000-page exhaustive survey of European history since the end of World War II. Yet this book isn't meant just to look impressive on the bookshelf; Judt is an astute thinker and polished writer who brings extensive cultural knowledge about film, music, and literature to bear on his daunting subjects: the Holocaust, the Stalinized East, the tide-changing 1960s, the implosion of the Iron Curtain, the policies of the European Union, and the new European way of life. Some critics attribute his clear-headed approach to almost two decades in America, where he founded New York University's Remarque Institute "to support and promote the study and discussion of Europe." Trans-Atlantic biases and assumptions aside, it's clear that Judt has written the book on Europe, for the moment at least.

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.(less)
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May 23, 2008 Kelly added it
Shelves: the-continent, great-and-terrible-men, owned, history, 20th-century-postwar-to-late, identity-crisis, londonreadinglist
I've basically read this. I get credit. I will explain later. (less)
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Jan 11, 2017 Murtaza rated it it was amazing
Shelves: best-of-2017
Europe's present era of political and economic stability has extended so long that few are alive who remember a different time in that continent's history. But prior to 1945, warfare, oppression and chaos - along with imperial largesse and ethnic diversity - were the historical norm for European societies. The twin calamities of World War I and World War II put an end to that old Europe once and for all. Out of the unfathomable death and destruction of these episodes an entirely new Europe was created, more homogenous, more cautious and more placid.

Postwar is Tony Judt's grand history of this period, where, as he put it, Europe emerged "blinking" into the aftermath of its near self-destruction. Broad histories like this are notoriously difficult to write, but Judt somehow manages to give a fulsome picture of the changes that have wrought European society, politically, culturally and philosophically, in the decades since the wars ended.

The fact that Europe exists as it does today was by no means a given in 1945. Amid the rubble, it seemed equally likely to many Europeans that their future might be one of immiseration and conflict. Two factors militated against this outcome. For one, most of the physical destruction of the war had actually occurred in Eastern Europe instead of the prosperous West. For all the losses to civilians, industrial production had survived largely intact. Secondly, the American decision to fund reconstruction through the Marshall Plan helped get European economies back on their feet - though at the expense of bringing them under the American umbrella for the foreseeable future.

The inflection point between Western and Eastern Europe begins at this point, and forms much of the subtext of the book. The Eastern countries suffered more during the war and were deprived of Marshall Plan benefits afterwards since they fell under the Soviet aegis in the postwar years. The continent was bisected. Prague and Budapest were suddenly cut off from "Europe" and endured a very different postwar history of humiliation, economic immiseration and tyranny. Judt's writings on the experience of Communist rule by Eastern Europeans are moving. For them, the unfinished business of World War II only even began to end in 1989, with the collapse of the heavy imperial edifice that had been imposed on them at the end of the war. Russia itself is not dealt with unsympathetically however. Judt accurately describes the sufferings and achievements of the Soviets, placing it into context with the undeniable calamities that they inflicted on their subject peoples as well as onto themselves. Looking at many of the modern states of the Arab world, themselves former Soviet clients, it is easy to see the lingering influence of the brutal security states patented by Lavrenty Beria and Stalin.

Exhausted by the disasters of political mass-mobilization, postwar Europe created a new type of depoliticized citizen. States did their part by deciding that strong welfare protections were insurance against upheaval (noting how many peasants and unemployed had been recruited by fascists and communists in the past) and thus worked cautiously and anxiously to ensure that the seeds for chaos would not be planted once more. So far, this strategy has worked out remarkably well. Europe has not returned to war and its social model has been taken by many as an ideal. However, as Judt painfully reminds us, the unspeakable past wasn't that long ago. It has only been a few decades since a veritable apocalypse engulfed the European continent, and, by extension, much of the world.

The boring left-right-center coalition governance many of us resent today was in large part a conscious creation; not a scam to deprive people unjustly of broader options. Far-left and far-right politics mixed with the crude dimensions of mass politics had proven itself to be a recipe for disaster. These, often tied to now-discredited ideas of History as a determinative force, had made possible the descent of an entire continent. The possible reawakening today of bellicose partisan sentiments, in large part due to avoidable failures by governing technocrats, bodes ill, as those with a serviceable memory of European history can attest.

This book is miraculous in some ways for simultaneously being an intimate and grand history of an entire continent. It is a profoundly sympathetic document. Judt does not spare any parties for their crimes, including the many unaccounted for crimes of the Holocaust (some history, he says, however, needs to be "forgotten" for governing in the future to be possible), but he also writes with profound empathy for the continent and its people. This is reflected in the careful detail and attention he gives to all its constituent parts; not neglecting any aspect of the region or privileging one as more important than the ever. The cultural transformations, aspirations, struggles, failures and prospects for Europe's people are given in great detail here, but despite the enormous amount of information provided somehow Judt's writing doesn't lag. On the contrary, it is frequently quite moving for its eloquence, on a consistent basis that is hard to achieve.

I think this is a worthwhile and necessary book for understanding Europe's present, but also for understanding the prospects of others around the world who are faced with a contemporary moment of fear, conflict and apparent destitution. Europe has "some modest advice" as a result of its 20th century struggles, Judt says, and his book is an excellent distillation of that guidance. (less)
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2021-09-19

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt | Goodreads

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