Review:
Postwar, by Tony Judt
| Publisher: |
Penguin Books |
| Copyright: |
2005 |
| ISBN: |
1-4406-2476-3 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
835 |
Tony Judt (1948 2010) was a British-American historian and Erich Maria
Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University.
Postwar is his magnum opus, a history of Europe from 1945 to 2005.
A book described as a history of Europe could be anything from a textbook
to a political analysis, so the first useful question to ask is what sort
of history. That's a somewhat difficult question to answer.
Postwar mentions a great deal of conventional history, including
important political movements and changes of government, but despite a
stated topic that would suit a survey textbook, it doesn't provide that
sort of list of facts and dates. Judt expects the reader to already be
familiar with the broad outlines of modern European history. However,
Postwar is also not a specialty history and avoids diving too deep
into any one area. Trends in art, philosophy, and economics are all
mentioned to set a broader context, but still only at the level of a
general survey.
My best description is that
Postwar is a comprehensive social and
political history that attempts to focus less on specific events and more
on larger trends of thought. Judt grounds his narrative in concrete,
factual events, but the emphasis is on how those living in Europe, at each
point in history, thought of their society, their politics, and their
place in both. Most of the space goes to exploring those nuances of
thought and day-to-day life.
In the US university context, I'd place this book as an intermediate-level
course in modern European history, after the survey course that provides
students with a basic framework but before graduate-level specializations
in specific topics. If you have not had a solid basic education in
European history (and my guess is that most people from the US have not),
Judt will provide the necessary signposts, but you should expect to need
to look up the signposts you don't recognize. I, as the dubious
beneficiary of a US high school history education now many decades in the
past, frequently resorted to Wikipedia for additional background.
Postwar uses a simple chronological structure in four parts: the
immediate post-war years and the beginning of the Cold War (1945 1953),
the era of rapidly growing western European prosperity (1953 1971), the
years of recession and increased turmoil leading up to the collapse of
communism (1971 1989), and the aftermath of the collapse of communism and
the rise of the European Union (1989 2005). Each part is divided into
four to eight long chapters that trace a particular theme. Judt usually
starts with the overview of a theme and then follows the local
manifestations of it on a spiral through European countries in whatever
order seems appropriate. For the bulk of the book that covers the era of
the Cold War, when experiences were drastically different inside or
outside the Soviet bloc, he usually separates western and eastern Europe
into alternating chapters.
Reviewing this sort of book is tricky because so much will depend on how
well you already know the topic. My interest in history is strictly
amateur and I tend to avoid modern history (usually I find it too
depressing), so for me this book was remedial, filling in large knowledge
gaps that I ideally shouldn't have had.
Postwar was a runner up
for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, so I think I'm safe saying
you won't go far wrong reading it, but here's the necessary disclaimer
that the rest of my reactions may not be useful if you're better versed in
modern European history than I was. (This would not be difficult.)
That said, I found
Postwar invaluable because of its big-picture
focus. The events and dates are easy enough to find on the Internet; what
was missing for me in understanding Europe was the intent and social
structures created by and causing those events. For example, from early
in the book:
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.
It's one thing to be familiar with the basic economic and political
arguments between degrees of free market and planned economies. It's
quite another to understand how the appeal of one approach or the
discredit of another stems from recent historical experience, and that's
what a good history can provide.
Judt does not hesitate to draw these sorts of conclusions, and I'm sure
some of them are controversial. But while he's opinionated, he's rarely
ideological, and he offers no grand explanations. His discussion of the
Yugoslav Wars stands out as an example: he mentions various theories of
blame (a fraught local ethnic history, the decision by others to not
intervene until the situation was truly dire), but largely discards them.
Judt's offered explanation is that local politicians saw an opportunity to
gain power by inflaming ethnic animosity, and a large portion of the
population participated in this process, either passively or eagerly.
Other explanations are both unnecessarily complex and too willing to
deprive Yugoslavs of agency. I found this refreshingly blunt. When is
more complex analysis a way to diffuse responsibility and cling to an
ideological fantasy that the right foreign policy would have resolved a
problem?
A few personal grumblings do creep in, particularly in the chapters on the
1970s (and I think it's not a coincidence that this matches Judt's own
young adulthood, a time when one is prone to forming a lot of opinions).
There is a brief but stinging criticism of postmodernism in scholarship,
which I thought was justified but probably incomplete, and a decidedly
grumpy dismissal of punk music, which I thought was less fair. But these
are brief asides that don't detract from the overall work. Indeed, they,
along with the occasional wry asides ("respecting long-established
European practice, no one asked the Poles for their views [on Poland's new
frontiers]") add a lot of character.
Insofar as this book has a thesis, it's in the implications of the title:
Europe only exited the postwar period at the end of the 20th century.
Political stability through exhaustion, the overwhelming urgency of
economic recovery, and the degree to which the Iron Curtain and the Cold
War froze eastern Europe in amber meant that full European recovery from
World War II was drawn out and at times suspended. It's only after 1989
and its subsequent upheavals that European politics were able to move
beyond postwar concerns. Some of that movement was a reemergence of
earlier European politics of nations and ethnic conflict. But, new on the
scene, was a sense of identity as Europeans, one that western Europe
circled warily and eastern Europe saw as the only realistic path forward.
What binds Europeans together, even when they are deeply critical of
some aspect or other of its practical workings, is what it has become
conventional to call in disjunctive but revealing contrast with "the
American way of life" the "European model of society".
Judt also gave me a new appreciation of how traumatic people find the
assignment of fault, and how difficult it is to wrestle with guilt without
providing open invitations to political backlash. People will go to great
lengths to not feel guilty, and pressing the point runs a substantial risk
of creating popular support for ideological movements that are willing to
lie to their followers. The book's most memorable treatment of this
observation is in the epilogue, which traces popular European attitudes
towards the history of the Holocaust through the whole time period.
The largest problem with this book is that it is dense and very long. I'm
a fairly fast reader, but this was the only book I read through most of my
holiday vacation and it still took a full week into the new year to finish
it. By the end, I admit I was somewhat exhausted and ready to be finished
with European history for a while (although the epilogue is very much
worth waiting for). If you, unlike me, can read a book slowly among other
things, that may be a good tactic.
But despite feeling like this was a slog at times, I'm very glad that I
read it. I'm not sure if someone with a firmer grounding in European
history would have gotten as much out of it, but I, at least, needed
something this comprehensive to wrap my mind around the timeline and fill
in some embarrassing gaps. Judt is not the most entertaining writer
(although he has his moments), and this is not the sort of popular history
that goes out of its way to draw you in, but I found it approachable and
clear. If you're looking for a solid survey of modern European history
with this type of high-level focus, recommended.
Rating: 8 out of 10
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