Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 Read Free Page A

in Romania. A political earthquake was shattering the frozen topography of post-World War II Europe.
    An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history—and history was thrusting them aside.
    Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.
    The time was propitious; so, too, was the place. Vienna in 1989 was a palimpsest of Europe’s complicated, overlapping pasts. In the early years of the twentieth century Vienna was Europe: the fertile, edgy, self-deluding hub of a culture and a civilization on the threshold of apocalypse. Between the wars, reduced from a glorious imperial metropole to the impoverished, shrunken capital of a tiny rump-state, Vienna slid steadily from grace: finishing up as the provincial outpost of a Nazi empire to which most of its citizens swore enthusiastic fealty.
    After Germany was defeated Austria fell into the Western camp and was assigned the status of Hitler’s ‘first victim’. This stroke of doubly unmerited good fortune authorized Vienna to exorcise its past. Its Nazi allegiance conveniently forgotten, the Austrian capital—a ‘Western’ city surrounded by Soviet ‘eastern’ Europe—acquired a new identity as outrider and exemplar of the free world. To its former subjects now trapped in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, Vienna stood for ‘central Europe’: an imagined community of cosmopolitan civility that Europeans had somehow mislaid in the course of the century. In Communism’s dying years the city was to become a sort of listening post of liberty, a rejuvenated site of encounters and departures for eastern Europeans escaping West and Westerners building bridges to the East.
    Vienna in 1989 was thus a good place from which to ‘think’ Europe. Austria embodied all the slightly self-satisfied attributes of post-war western Europe: capitalist prosperity underpinned by a richly-endowed welfare state; social peace guaranteed thanks to jobs and perks liberally distributed through all the main social groups and political parties; external security assured by the implicit protection of the Western nuclear umbrella—while Austria itself remained smugly ‘neutral’. Meanwhile, across the Leitha and Danube rivers just a few kilometres to the east, there lay the ‘other’ Europe of bleak poverty and secret policemen. The distance separating the two was nicely encapsulated in the contrast between Vienna’s thrusting, energetic Westbahnhof, whence businessmen and vacationers boarded sleek modern expresses for Munich or Zurich or Paris; and the city’s grim, uninviting Südbahnhof: a shabby, dingy, faintly menacing hangout of penurious foreigners descending filthy old trains from Budapest or Belgrade.
    Just as the city’s two principal railway stations involuntarily acknowledged the geographical schism of Europe—one facing