Goodbye to All That?: A History of Europe Since 1945

408 Pages·2014·3.61 MB·English

by  Dan Stone

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GOODBYE TO ALL THAT?
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/01/2013, SPi
GOODBYE TO

ALL THAT?

the story of europe
since 1945
DAN STONE
1
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3

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for Libby, Greta, and Clem
and their mum
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 10/01/2013, SPi
Preface
In 1946, one of the fi nest achievements of the newly recreated German
fi lm industry, DEFA, was released. The Murderers Are Among Us ( Die Mörder
sind unter uns ), directed by Wolfgang Staudte, was not only a powerful
work of fi lm noir, establishing, despite its being in the Soviet zone, DEFA’s
cinematographic debt to Hollywood, but, for its day, was a remarkably
frank assessment of the fact that many of those in successful positions in
the postwar western zones of Germany (that later joined together to form
the Federal Republic) had already enjoyed successful careers under Nazism,
embodied in this instance by a factory owner who had been responsible
for murdering civilians. In one particularly powerful scene, when the two
protagonists, Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef ) and Dr Hans Mertens
(Ernst Wilhelm Borchert), are together for Christmas, their moment of
calm is shattered when, almost unthinkingly, Wallner says, ‘Peace, Christ-
mas, how I longed for the day. But now I’m not sure anymore. It all seems
so unreal somehow.’ Mertens responds with the equally instinctive com-
ment: ‘Maybe because in our hearts there is no peace.’
The argument of this book is that there was no peace in the hearts of
Europeans in the immediate aftermath of the war because so much of what
had happened was being suppressed, as, for example, the wartime careers of
many Germans who were able to evade the denazifi cation process. That is
hardly novel. What I stress, however, is that this absence of inner peace—in
contrast with the absence of war, which was displaced to other parts of the
globe, European colonies and Cold War proxy wars—lasted throughout
the Cold War. It came increasingly under scrutiny from the 1960s onwards,
but only with the end of the Cold War could Europe’s wartime record
really be examined unblinkingly. Since then, what we see is that this lack
of peace in people’s hearts not only still animates the way Europeans think,
but does so even more than it did in the fi rst few years after 1945. In con-
temporary Europe, competing memories of the war still lie at the heart of
political debates.
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viii preface
Although this is a work of history, it is a resolutely presentist book. For
the generation now coming of age born after the end of the Cold War,
the 1940s and 1950s might seem as much like ancient history as the Nor-
man Conquest or the Wars of the Roses. In fact, the Second World War
and its immediate after-effects shape the world in which we live in
many ways. Even more noteworthy is the fact that, for all the many, often
extraordinary changes that have taken place in Europe since 1945—socially,
economically, technologically, and in every other respect, such that a per-
son who fell asleep in 1950 and woke again in 2000 would hardly recog-
nize the world around them—it is the contention of this book that,
paradoxically, the further from the war we get, the more its impact is
being felt and the more its meanings are being fought over. In fact, as I
will show, although ‘postwar’ is primarily to be understood chronologi-
cally, so that one can agree with commentators who claim that the end
of the Cold War marked the end of the postwar period, in another, quasi-
philosophical sense, the years since 1989 should be understood as the real
postwar years. What I mean by that is that the absence of peace in Euro-
peans’ hearts, as articulated by Susanne Wallner in the fi lm, could only be
explained in certain offi cially approved and politically acceptable ways
during the Cold War: the ideology of antifascism in communist Eastern
Europe and the devotion to reconstruction combined with silence over
the widespread collaboration with Nazism—or the failure to prevent its
rise—in Western Europe meant that a full and frank discussion of what
transpired during the Second World War has only been possible since the
end of the Cold War brought about the defi nitive conclusion of a process
that was already in train: the demise of the postwar consensus.
This concept of the ‘postwar consensus’ should be understood in two
senses: fi rst, socio-economically as the creation of welfare-capitalist states
and a more or less successful turn to corporate industrial relations in West-
ern Europe, and the building of communism with its concomitant sup-
pression of alternatives in the east (the Iberian peninsula is an exception
here, as we will later see, for there was no ‘consensus’, just continuity in
Francoist or Salazarist authoritarianism, connived in by the west, and their
gradual unravelling). Second, and no less signifi cant, the consensus meant
the triumph of antifascism, offi cially endorsed and ever more instrumen-
talized as a tool of legitimacy in Eastern Europe, and providing an intel-
lectual basis in Western Europe for political and social stability,
anti-communism, and the turn to consumerism and economic growth.
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preface ix
The major contention of this book, then, is that the postwar consensus
went hand in hand with a particular memory of the Second World War,
and that the death of that consensus should not be understood only eco-
nomically (the turn from primary and secondary to tertiary industries, the
gradual ‘modernization’ [=dismantling] of the welfare state, or the aban-
donment of social democratic values, for example), but also politically, and
especially in terms of memory politics. The collapse of the political project
of social democracy in the west and communism in the east went hand in
hand with the death of antifascism, hence the reappearance of ideas and
values which had long been assumed to be dead, or at best marginal and
lunatic. If we want to understand the roots of today’s right-wing pop-
ulism, which is taking hold in even normally boringly predictable coun-
tries such as Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium, then we should
look not only to very recent debates about ‘radical Islam’, the ‘war on ter-
ror’, immigration, or fi nancial crisis, but to the revival of memories—
primarily related to Europeans’ experiences and commitments during the
Second World War—that reveal a deep-seated resentment at the norma-
tive values of the years 1945–89, when many, so it now seems, had to hold
their tongues.
This analysis should not be interpreted as nostalgia for the brutal stability
of the Cold War, which would be a deeply unsavoury position. ‘Antifascism’,
originally a source of inspiration, ended as the cynically deployed basis for
the old guard to hang on to power in the communist countries and, in its
western variant, it enjoined Western Europeans not to delve too deeply into
the murkier aspects of their countries’ records during the war. But the argu-
ment of this book follows the simple logic of ‘don’t throw the baby out with
the bathwater’, as follows: the death of antifascism in both Eastern and
Western Europe went hand in hand with a sustained attack on social democ-
racy, which had already been coming under intense pressure since the oil
crises and the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s (and, as we will see, social
democracy is itself a somewhat awkward term to apply in a Western Europe
that was dominated by centre-right Christian Democrats). Memory politics
and socio-economic change have been inextricably linked in a way that
historians have thus far insuffi ciently recognized. Tony Judt has hinted at the
connection, writing of a ‘widely-shared understanding of Europe’s recent
past [which] blended the memory of Depression, the struggle between
Democracy and Fascism, the moral legitimacy of the welfare state and—for
many on both sides of the Iron Curtain—the expectation of social progress’,