Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Table of Contents
PART ONE - Post-War: 1945-1953
III - The Rehabilitation of Europe
IV - The Impossible Settlement
V - The Coming of the Cold War
PART TWO - Prosperity and Its Discontents: 1953-1971
VIII - The Politics of Stability
POSTSCRIPT: - A Tale of Two Economies
XI - The Social Democratic Moment
XII - The Spectre of Revolution
PART THREE - Recessional: 1971-1989
XVIII - The Power of the Powerless
XIX - The End of the Old Order
PART FOUR - After the Fall: 1989-2005
XXII - The Old Europe—and the New
XXIII - The Varieties of Europe
XXIV - Europe as a Way of Life
Suggestions for Further Reading
Praise for Tony Judt’s
Postwar
“If anyone can bring off the impossible task that Tony Judt has set himself in
Postwar
, it is he. . . . He brings to
Postwar
an astonishing range of knowledge and an intense political, intellectual and emotional engagement; these are nicely offset by the intellectual distance that the Channel and the Atlantic have helped to provide and by a wry sense of the innumerable ways in which events play tricks on all of us. The result is a book that has the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia; it is a very considerable achievement. . . . Brilliant.”—
The New York Review of Books
“
Postwar
is a remarkable book. . . . The excellence of
Postwar
was no doubt hard to achieve . . . but it is easy to describe. The writing is vivid; the coverage—of little countries as well as of great ones—is virtually superhuman; and, above all, the book is smart. Every page contains unexpected data, or a fresh observation, or a familiar observation freshly turned.”
—Louis Menand,
The New Yorker
“Massive, kaleidoscopic and thoroughly readable . . . [Judt’s] book becomes the definitive account of Europe’s rise from the ashes and its take-off into an uncertain future.”—
Time
(One of the Must-Read Books of 2005)
“Tony Judt is one of our most dazzling public intellectuals, as thoughtful as he is knowledgeable.
Postwar
is like having an extended personal seminar on Europe’s journey back both from the ashes of World War Two and the cruel, totalitarian hold of Soviet communism.”—David Halberstam
“Nobody is more qualified than Judt to combine serious descriptive history with incisive, original political analysis, to cover both western and eastern Europe, and to pass stinging yet informed judgments on the behavior and evasions, the deeds and the failings, of his subjects. . . . This monumental work is a tour-de-force.”—
Foreign Affairs
“Professor Judt knows more about contemporary Europe than almost any American (or any European, for that matter). In
Postwar
, he brings that formidable knowledge to bear on the inspiring story of Europe’s transformation from lethal division and devastating war to a peaceful, prosperous pan-continental union. His history of how the Iron Curtain crumbled is definitive.”—T. R. Reid, author of
The United States of Europe
“An epically important subject—Europe as both the epicenter of political and ideological catastrophes in the last century and the principal laboratory for an experiment in whatever chance humanity has of a peace in the century just begun—has, to the benefit of us all, found the author it deserves. Tony Judt, long one of the wisest heads and clearest voices around, has produced a magisterial history and a solid foundation for clear thinking about the future.
Postwar
is meticulous in its scholarship, compelling in the story it tells, and passionate in its judgments. A true masterpiece.”
—Strobe Talbott, president, Brookings Institution
“Truly superb. It is hard to imagine how a better—and more readable—history of the emergence of today’s Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written.”—Ian Kershaw
“Magisterial . . . He has written a magnificent conventional history of modern Europe, but its quality and its power come from the way he insists that his narrative is also a history of ideas and of the peculiar vulnerability of the European mind to ideologies and to the patterns of thought and political loyalty they impose.”—
National Affairs
“As soon as you realize how good it is, this book will frighten you. . . . This is a work which, on almost every page, evokes to readers over the age of forty what they once felt, hoped for, took part in, or fled from. Judt has written, in great detail and at great length, the biography of a middle-aged continent trying, after a disgraceful past, to settle down and go straight.”
—Neal Acherson,
London Review of Books
“Rich and immensely detailed.”—
The New York Times Book Review
“Tony Judt . . . has produced not only the heaviest history of modern Europe ever written, but probably the best. . . . [He] moves fluently and deftly from politics and economics to films and television, whisking the reader through West German coalition-building, past the French New Wave, and on toward the Eurovision Song Contest. . . . [A] magnificently rich and readable book.”—
The Sunday Times
(London)
“Masterly and exhilarating . . . Judt has made the ‘culture wars’ between communism and anticommunism a special subject and he deals with this brilliantly once more. . . . Judt has a fine eye for telling detail. . . . This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice. So many subjects are adroitly dealt with.”—Geoffrey Wheatcroft,
The Spectator
“This is the best history we have of Europe in the postwar period and not likely to be surpassed for many years. . . . Here [Judt] combines deep knowledge with a sharply honed style and an eye for the expressive detail. . . . Insightful analysis and excellent writing . . . overall, this is history writing at its very best.”—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“[A] lively and thoughtful historical overview of today’s Europe from the end of World War II through the economic, social, cultural and political changes and continuities of the last sixty years. . . . Judt sees the bigger picture of the trends, events, and people that have made contemporary Europe. . . . This book is certain to be a major addition to postwar European studies.”—
Library Journal
“Elegant and provocative . . . a genuinely magisterial account.”
—
The Times Literary Supplement
“[Judt’s] prose is lean, his metaphors vivid . . . He impressively covers a broad array of cultural themes.”—
The New York Sun
“Compelling and fluidly written.”—
The Oregonian
“
Postwar
, Judt’s learned, massive, and often quite wonderful summary of European public life since World War II . . . A triumph of narrative.”
—
The Nation
“For those who want to understand the course of contemporary Europe, the primary material is almost too copious and familiar; it takes a gifted historian to shape it into something fresh and coherent without sacrificing the details. [
Postwar
] does just that . . . it offers a brilliant and compelling synthesis of the past sixty years.”—
Time Europe
“
Postwar
. . . is a stupendous contribution to understanding developments in postwar Europe, especially in the countries behind the Iron Curtain. [Judt’s] brilliant survey of the culture wars is matched by his dramatic narrative of the political turmoil.”—
15 Minutes
“Unusually comprehensive and highly readable scholarship.”
—
International Herald Tribune
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Judt was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which he founded in 1995. The author or editor of eleven books, he is a frequent contributor to
The New York Review of Books
,
The New York Times
, and many other journals in Europe and the United States. Professor Judt is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Permanent Fellow of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna).
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First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright © Tony Judt, 2005
All rights reserved
Map illustrations copyright © ML Design, 2005
Photograph credits appear on pages 833-34.
eISBN: 9781101379615
1. Europe—History—1945- I. Title.
D1051.J84 2005
940.55—dc22 2005052126
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For Jennifer
Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present? THOMAS MANN,
The Magic Mountain
Preface & Acknowledgements
Europe is the smallest continent. It is not really even a continent—just a sub-continental annexe to Asia. The whole of Europe (excluding Russia and Turkey) comprises just five and a half million square kilometers: less than two thirds the area of Brazil, not much more than half the size of China or the US. It is dwarfed by Russia, which covers seventeen million square kilometers. But in the intensity of its internal differences and contrasts, Europe is unique. At the last count it comprised forty-six countries. Most of these consist of states and nations with their own languages; quite a few of them incorporate additional nations and languages without states; all have their distinct and overlapping histories, politics, cultures and memories; and every one of them has been copiously studied. Even for the brief, sixty-year period of Europe’s history since the end of the Second World War—indeed, for this period above all—the secondary literature in English alone is inexhaustible.