Postwar, Page 2

  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 Alex Molot diligently identified and accumulated the published and unpublished statistical reports and data series on which a book of this sort inevitably and very properly depends.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 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 optimistically, profitably west, the other negligently conceding Vienna’s eastern vocation—so the very streets of the Austrian capital bore witness to the chasm of silence separating Europe’s tranquil present from its discomforting past. The imposing, confident buildings lining the great Ringstrasse were a reminder of Vienna’s one-time imperial vocation—though the Ring itself seemed somehow too big and too grand to serve as a mere quotidian artery for commuters in a medium-sized European capital—and the city was justifiably proud of its public edifices and civic spaces. Indeed, Vienna was much given to invoking older glories. But concerning the more recent past it was decidedly reticent.

  And of the Jews who had once occupied many of the inner city’s buildings and who contributed decis
ively to the art, music, theatre, literature, journalism and ideas that were Vienna in its heyday, the city was most reticent of all. The very violence with which the Jews of Vienna had been expelled from their homes, shipped east from the city and stamped out of its memory helped account for the guilty calm of Vienna’s present. Post-war Vienna—like post-war western Europe—was an imposing edifice resting atop an unspeakable past. Much of the worst of that past had taken place in the lands that fell under Soviet control, which was why it was so easily forgotten (in the West) or suppressed (in the East). With the return of eastern Europe the past would be no less unspeakable: but now it would, unavoidably, have to be spoken. After 1989 nothing—not the future, not the present and above all not the past—would ever be the same.

  Although it was in December 1989 that I decided to undertake a history of postwar Europe, the book did not get written for many years to come. Circumstances intervened. In retrospect this was fortunate: many things which have become a little clearer today were still obscure back then. Archives have opened. The inevitable confusions attendant upon a revolutionary transformation have sorted themselves out and at least some of the longer-term consequences of the upheaval of 1989 are now intelligible. And the aftershocks of 1989 did not soon abate. The next time I was in Vienna the city was struggling to house tens of thousands of refugees from neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia.

  Three years after that Austria abandoned its carefully-cultivated post-war autonomy and joined the European Union, whose own emergence as a force in European affairs was a direct consequence of the east-European revolutions. Visiting Vienna in October 1999 I found the Westbahnhof covered in posters for the Freedom Party of Jörg Haider who, despite his open admiration for the ‘honourable men’ of the Nazi armies who ‘did their duty’ on the eastern front, won 27 percent of the vote that year by mobilizing his fellow Austrians’ anxiety and incomprehension at the changes that had taken place in their world over the past decade. After nearly half a century of quiescence Vienna—like the rest of Europe—had re-entered history.

  This book tells the story of Europe since the Second World War and so it begins in 1945: Stunde nul, as the Germans called it—Zero hour. But like everything else in the twentieth-century its story is back-shadowed by the thirty-year war that began in 1914, when the European continent embarked upon its descent into catastrophe. The First World War itself was a traumatic killing field for all the participants—half of Serbia’s male population between 18 and 55 died in the fighting—but it resolved nothing. Germany (contrary to widespread belief at the time) was not crushed in the war or the post-war settlement: in that case its rise to near-total domination of Europe a mere twenty-five years later would be hard to explain. Indeed, because Germany didn’t pay its First World War debts the cost of victory to the Allies exceeded the cost of defeat to Germany, which thus emerged relatively stronger than in 1913. The ‘German problem’ that had surfaced in Europe with the rise of Prussia a generation before remained unsolved.

  The little countries that emerged from the collapse of the old land empires in 1918 were poor, unstable, insecure—and resentful of their neighbours. Between the wars Europe was full of ‘revisionist’ states: Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria had all been defeated in the Great War and awaited an occasion for territorial redress. After 1918 there was no restoration of international stability, no recovered equilibrium between the powers: merely an interlude born of exhaustion. The violence of war did not abate. It metamorphosed instead into domestic affairs—into nationalist polemics, racial prejudice, class confrontation and civil war. Europe in the Twenties and especially the Thirties entered a twilight zone between the afterlife of one war and the looming anticipation of another.

  The internal conflicts and inter-state antagonisms of the years between the world wars were exacerbated—and in some measure provoked—by the accompanying collapse of the European economy. Indeed economic life in Europe was struck a triple blow in those years. The First World War distorted domestic employment, destroyed trade and devastated whole regions—as well as bankrupting states. Many countries—in central Europe above all—never recovered from its effects. Those that did were then brought low again in the Slump of the Thirties, when deflation, business failures and desperate efforts to erect protective tariffs against foreign competition resulted not only in unprecedented levels of unemployment and wasted industrial capacity but also the collapse of international trade (between 1929 and 1936 Franco-German commerce fell by 83 percent), accompanied by bitter inter-state competition and resentment. And then came the Second World War, whose unprecedented impact upon the civilian populations and domestic economies of the affected nations is discussed in Part One of this book.

  The cumulative impact of these blows was to destroy a civilization. The scale of the disaster that Europe had brought upon itself was perfectly clear to contemporaries even as it was happening. Some, on the far Left and far Right alike, saw the self-immolation of bourgeois Europe as an opportunity to fight for something better. The Thirties were Auden’s ‘low, dishonest decade’; but they were also an age of commitment and political faith, culminating in the illusions and lives lost to the civil war in Spain. This was the Indian summer of nineteenth-century radical visions, now invested in the violent ideological engagements of a grimmer age: ‘What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.’(Arthur Koestler)

  Despairing of Europe, some fled: first to the remaining liberal democracies of far-western Europe, thence—if they could get out in time—to the Americas. And some, like Stefan Zweig or Walter Benjamin, took their own lives. On the eve of the continent’s final descent into the abyss the prospect for Europe appeared hopeless. Whatever it was that had been lost in the course of the implosion of European civilization—a loss whose implications had long since been intuited by Karl Kraus and Franz Kafka in Zweig’s own Vienna—would never be recaptured. In Jean Renoir’s eponymous film classic of 1937, the Grand Illusion of the age was the resort to war and its accompanying myths of honour, caste and class. But by 1940, to observant Europeans, the grandest of all Europe’s illusions—now discredited beyond recovery—was ‘European civilisation’ itself.

  In the light of what had gone before it is thus understandably tempting to narrate the story of Europe’s unexpected recovery after 1945 in a self-congratulatory, even lyrical key. And this, indeed, has been the dominant underlying theme of histories of post-war Europe, above all those written before 1989—just as it was the tone adopted by European statesmen when reflecting upon their own achievements in these decades. The mere survival and re-emergence of the separate states of continental Europe after the cataclysm of total war; the absence of inter-state disputes and the steady extension of institutionalized forms of intra-European cooperation; the sustained recovery from thirty years of economic meltdown and the ‘normalization’ of prosperity, optimism and peace: all these invited a hyperbolic response. Europe’s recovery was a ‘miracle’. ‘Post-national’ Europe had learned the bitter lessons of recent history. An irenic, pacific continent had risen, ‘Phoenix-like’, from the ashes of its murderous—suicidal—past.

  Like many myths, this rather agreeable account of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century contains a kernel of truth. But it leaves out a lot. Eastern Europe—from the Austrian border to the Ural Mountains, from Tallinn to Tirana—doesn’t fit. Its post-war decades were certainly peaceful when contrasted with what went before, but only thanks to the uninvited presence of the Red Army: it was the peace of the prison-yard, enforced by the tank. And if the satellite countries of the Soviet bloc engaged in international cooperation superficially comparable to developments further west, this was only because Moscow imposed ‘fraternal’ institutions and exchanges upon them by force.

  The history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation from one another. The legacy of the Second World War—and th
e pre-war decades and the war before that—forced upon the governments and peoples of east and west Europe alike some hard choices about how best to order their affairs so as to avoid any return to the past. One option—to pursue the radical agenda of the popular front movements of the 1930s—was initially very popular in both parts of Europe (a reminder that 1945 was never quite the fresh start that it sometimes appears). In eastern Europe some sort of radical transformation was unavoidable. There could be no possibility of returning to the discredited past. What, then, would replace it? Communism may have been the wrong solution, but the dilemma to which it was responding was real enough.

  In the West the prospect of radical change was smoothed away, not least thanks to American aid (and pressure). The appeal of the popular-front agenda—and of Communism—faded: both were prescriptions for hard times and in the West, at least after 1952, the times were no longer so hard. And so, in the decades that followed, the uncertainties of the immediate post-war years were forgotten. But the possibility that things might take a different turn—indeed, the likelihood that they would take a different turn—had seemed very real in 1945; it was to head off a return of the old demons (unemployment, Fascism, German militarism, war, revolution) that western Europe took the new path with which we are now familiar. Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. Shadowed by history, its leaders implemented social reforms and built new institutions as a prophylactic, to keep the past at bay.

  This becomes easier to grasp when we recall that authorities in the Soviet bloc were in essence engaged in the same project. They, too, were above all concerned to install a barrier against political backsliding—though in countries under Communist rule this was to be secured not so much by social progress as through the application of physical force. Recent history was re-written—and citizens were encouraged to forget it—in accordance with the assertion that a Communist-led social revolution had definitively erased not just the shortcomings of the past but also the conditions that had made them possible. As we shall see, this claim was also a myth; at best a half-truth.