There is nothing hyperbolic about the title of this remarkable book. As Keith Lowe makes painfully plain, Europe in the months and years after the end of World War II was as much a cauldron of hate, murder and despair as it had been during the reign of Nazi Germany. “From the distance of the twenty-first century,” he writes, “we tend to look back on the end of the war as a time of celebration. We have seen images of sailors kissing girls in New York’s Times Square, and smiling troops of all nationalities linking arms along Paris’s Champs Elysees. However, for all the celebration that took place at the end of the war, Europe was actually a place in mourning. The sense of loss was both personal and communal. Just as the continent’s towns and cities had been replaced by a landscape of crumbling ruins, so too had families and communities been replaced by a series of gaping holes.”
(St. Martin's Press) - ’Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II’ by Keith Lowe
The end of the war was not really an end at all, Lowe argues, not only because violence continued long after peace had been declared, but because hidden behind the big conflict between the Allies and the Axis were “dozens of other, more local wars, which had different flavours and different motivations in each country and each region. In some cases they were conflicts over class or other political differences. In other cases . . . they were conflicts over race or nationalism.” Certainly the defeat of Nazi Germany was and still is cause for gratitude and even elation, but achieving that defeat left virtually all of Europe so devastated that “it is difficult to convey in meaningful terms the scale of the wreckage caused by the Second World War,” wreckage not merely physical but psychological and moral as well. The great journalist Alan Moorehead, in Naples immediately after its liberation, witnessed “the whole list of sordid human vices” and wrote, “What we were witnessing in fact was the moral collapse of a people.”
What is nearly as remarkable as the story itself is that it has taken nearly seven decades for it to be properly told. Why this is so is a mystery, although Lowe suspects that it is connected to the “tendency by some Western historians and politicians to look back at the aftermath of the Second World War through rose-tinted spectacles,” focusing in particular on the Marshall Plan as evidence of Europe’s speedy rebirth. Lowe — a British writer who has published two novels and the well-regarded “Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg 1943” — will have none of that, and “Savage Continent” leaves no doubt that he is right:
“The immediate postwar period is one of the most important times in our recent history. If the Second World War destroyed the old continent, then its immediate aftermath was the protean chaos out of which the new Europe was formed. It was during this violent, vengeful time that many of our hopes, aspirations, prejudices and resentments first took shape. Anyone who truly wants to understand Europe as it is today must first have an understanding of what occurred here during this crucial formative period. There is no value in shying away from difficult or sensitive themes, since these are the very building blocks upon which the modern Europe has been built.”
Loading...
Comments