Book description
Europe in 1945 was prostrate. Much of the continent was devastated by
war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. Large areas of Eastern Europe
were falling under Soviet control, exchanging one despotism for another.
Today, the Soviet Union is no more and the democracies of the European
Union reach as far as the borders of Russia itself.
Postwar
tells the rich and complex story of how we got from there to here. It
tells of Europe's recovery from the devastation; of the decline and fall
of Soviet Communism and the rise of the EC and EU; of the end of
Europe's empires; and of Europe's uneasy and changing relationships with
the memory of the war and with the two great powers that bracket it,
Russian and America. With clarity and economy, he tells of developments
across the continent as a whole, as well as of the contrasting
experiences of Eastern and Western Europe. Along the way, we learn of
Greece's Civil War, of Scandinavian social democracy, the stresses of
multilingual Belgium, the struggles of Northern Ireland and the Basque
country. And this is a history of people as well as of peoples,
Churchill and Mitterand, General Franco and General Jaruzelski, Silvio
Berlusconi and Joseph Stalin. And Postwar
also has cultural and social histories to tell: of French and Czech
cinema, of the rise of the fridge and the decline of the public
intellectual, of immigration and gastarbeiters
, existentialism and punk rock, Monty Python and brutalist architecture.
Running right up to the Iraq War and the election of Benedict XVI, Postwar
makes sense of Europe's recent history and identity, of what Europe is
and has been, in what can only be described as a masterpiece: Europe in
our time. Professor Tony Judt was born in London in 1948. He was
educated at King's College, Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Superieure,
Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York
University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of
European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which he
founded in 1995.
