Europe ‘resurgent’

When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To Hell and Back, in these pages exactly three years ago, I compared our continent in 1945 to a punch-drunk boxer rising from the canvas with both eyes blacked. How, I wondered, would Kershaw handle the battered old bruiser coping with a not-so-brave new world in which he was no longer the undisputed champ?

The image of the wounded fighter, I think, was apt, for the red thread running through Europe in the first half of the century, as Kershaw rightly saw, was violence. States waged catastrophic war on each other and on their own citizens. Belonging to the ‘wrong’ race, religion, or political persuasion could mean imprisonment, torture and violent death. Millions were slaughtered on battlefields, in the bombed ruins of cities, and in networks of vile death camps disfiguring the continent. How could any civilisation survive such a cataclysm?

This book is his answer. It is the story of Europe’s long road to recovery from its self-inflicted wounds. It is not, however, an optimistic, congratulatory read, for it closes on a note of fearful pessimism as Kershaw is compelled to contemplate our ominously lowering likely future.

The narrative begins hopefully enough. Although Europe is divided between the Communist East and Democratic West (Iberia apart), the upside of being dominated by the rival superpowers of the US and USSR meant that the West at least — Germany in particular — was able to put its resources not into military spending, but into building a consumer society, increasingly prosperous, stable and hedonistic.

Kershaw’s favoured image is that of a roller-coaster, as Europe, under the threat of nuclear annihilation, survives the thrills of a white-knuckle ride as the continent successfully surmounts various crises: armed repression by Russia in its satellite states; the demise of geriatric dictatorships in Spain and Portugal; the end of colonialism; urban terrorism; the clouds of the Cold War lifting, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism.