Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Read Free

I could not have written this book while running Remarque without the uncomplaining and ultra-efficient collaboration of its Administrative Director Jair Kessler.
    Like so many, I am deeply beholden for friendship and advice to my agents Andrew Wylie and Sarah Chalfant; they have been unfailingly supportive of a project that took longer—and grew larger—than they can ever have anticipated. I am also indebted to my editors—Ravi Marchandani and Caroline Knight in London and Scott Moyers and Jane Fleming in New York—for all the work they did to help bring this book to completion. Thanks to the hospitality of Leon Wieseltier, some of the evaluations and opinions that surface in Chapters 12 and 14 were first published in essay form in the remarkable arts pages that he cultivates at the back of The New Republic . By far my greatest professional debt is to Robert Silvers, peerless editor of The New York Review of Books , who over the years has encouraged me to roam an ever larger political and historical compass, with all the risks and benefits such adventurism entails.
    This book has benefitted greatly from the contribution of students at New York University. Some of them—in particular Drs Paulina Bren, Daniel Cohen (now at Rice University) and Nicole Rudolph—have contributed to my understanding of the period through their own historical research, which they will find acknowledged in these pages. Others—Jessica Cooperman and Avi Patt—did invaluable work as research assistants. Michelle Pinto, along with Simon Jackson, transformed herself uncomplainingly into a skilled picture researcher; she was responsible for locating many of the most engaging illustrations, notably the wrapped Lenin that graces the end of Part III. Alex Molot diligently identified and accumulated the published and unpublished statistical reports and data series on which a book of this sort inevitably and very properly depends. I truly could not have written it without them.
    My family has lived with postwar Europe for a very long time—in the case of my children for the whole of their young lives. Not only have they been tolerant of the absences, travels and obsessions to which it has given rise, but they have made distinctive contributions to its content. To Daniel, the book owes its title; to Nicholas, the reminder that not all good stories get a happy ending. To my wife Jennifer the book also owes a lot—not least two very careful and constructive readings. But its author owes much, much more. Postwar is dedicated to her.
    Europe in 1947

    Europe Today

Introduction
    ‘Every epoch is a sphinx that plunges into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved’. Heinrich Heine
     
    ‘Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing!) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect’. Edmund Burke
     
    ‘Events, dear boy, events’.
Harold Macmillan
     
    World history is not the soil in which happiness grows.
Periods of happiness are empty pages in it’.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
     
     
    I first decided to write this book while changing trains at the Westbahnhof, Vienna’s main railway terminus. It was December 1989, a propitious moment. I had just returned from Prague, where the playwrights and historians of Václav Havel’s Civic Forum were dislodging a Communist police state and tumbling forty years of ‘real existing Socialism’ into the dustbin of history. A few weeks earlier the Berlin Wall had been unexpectedly breached. In Hungary as in Poland, everyone was taken up with the challenges of post-Communist politics: the old regime—all-powerful just a few months before—was receding into irrelevance. The Communist Party of Lithuania had just declared itself for immediate independence from the Soviet Union. And in the taxi on the way to the railway station Austrian radio carried the first reports of an uprising against the nepotistic dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu