In an epilogue, Judt addresses the question of memory, which has haunted his whole book. After the war a degree of amnesia or oblivion about the horrors of the immediate past had been necessary, and the Germans had been, as it were, let off with a caution. In recent decades there has been a steady recovery of memory, above all about the great genocide of the Jews which took place just before this story begins. If ‘Europe’s postwar history is a story shadowed by silences,’ as Judt says, the silence has turned into a crescendo, and that recovered memory permeates life today.

This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice. So many subjects are adroitly dealt with, from the truly drastic transformation of southern European countries to the rapid decline of religion. But then that last is indirectly part of Judt’s theme: this period saw ‘the withering away of the “master narratives” of European history’ — from the narrative of Christendom to the narrative of national greatness to the narrative of dialectical materialism.

It is now 50 years since the great Raymond Aron proposed an ‘end to the Ideological Age’, and that has at last happened, both for worse and for better. As Judt writes:

In 1945 the radical Right had discredited itself as a legitimate vehicle for political expression. In 1970, the radical Left was set fair to emulate it. A 180-years cycle of ideological politics in Europe was drawing to a close.
Europe in these six decades has avoided just those miseries which had plagued it before, destitution, violent class conflict, tryranny and war. Ours is an unheroic age, when Europe has lost its beliefs but has stopped killing because of them, in marked contrast to its immediate neighbours. We are irreligious and depoliticised, prosperous but bored, fat but impotent — and happy?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s latest book, The Strange Death of Tory England, is published in paperback by Penguin.

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