Reading Nietzsche on Europeans’ relationship to their past occasions a shudder of historical irony in 2007. In “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life,” the German philosopher questioned the value “to the present individual . . . of the monumental view of the past, the concern with the classical and the rare of earlier times” and then he answered, positively, “It is the knowledge that the great which once existed was at least possible once and may well again be possible.” After decades of warfare and mass slaughter, followed by decades of political and ideological division, the renewed possibility of a return to a divided, brutal past explains in large part why Europe is so focused on its post-World War II identities and challenges. Throughout this massive effort, however, Europe has remained a place still struggling with its bloody twentieth century, and this may be why the continent, anxious about immigration and plagued by deepening racial and social unrest, often seems mired in an outdated idea of itself.
This is, to be sure, a struggle of immense and far-reaching difficulty. Postwar Europe was deeply impoverished — economically, culturally, and, quite literally, demographically — and its tragic past produced a kind of necessary but perilous amnesia. But perhaps enough time has now passed to allow for a more demanding reckoning with this history, to prevent its terrible events from remaining in collective forgetfulness or being absorbed into offi- cial commemorations. Recent novels by Gary Shteyngart and William T. Vollmann and histories by John Lewis Gaddis and Tony Judt suggest and attempt as much.
Judt organizes this history into four broad periods: the uncertain years between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War; the mostly stable and prosperous 1950s and the chaotic, revolutionary 1960s; the lame 1970s and the even lamer 1980s; and the embryonic New Europe that has been evolving since 1989, which has still not been able to avoid bleak stumbles into the dark ways of the past, such as the atrocities perpetrated during the Bosnian conflict and then again in Kosovo. He is severe in his appraisals of assorted would-be revolutionaries, self-important public intellectuals, and uncritical European Union enthusiasts. These groups receive harsh treatment for neglecting the messiness of surrounding realities in favour of the self-serving pursuit of implausibly better futures. “Those in Paris or Berlin who aggressively declared their intention to ‘change the world’ were often the people,” he observes of the 1968 generation, “most devoted to parochial and even bodily obsessions . . . and absorbed in the contemplation of their own impact.” Judt displays a similar impatience for the pride of once-great nations. In an unforgiving section on de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, he contends that the general’s efforts to bring about “the restoration of French grandeur” after the shame of Vichy and the disgrace of Algeria weren’t nearly enough to overcome the long-standing fact of the nation’s diminishment. “France,” Judt declares, “has been in steady decline since at least 1871, a grim trajectory marked by military defeat, diplomatic humiliation, colonial retreat, economic deterioration and domestic instability.”
The micro-history that surrounds Judt’s major claims can be overwhelming, as with his analysis of the rapidly rising production rates of the Italian refrigerator industry in the early 1950s. One has, at best, a dutiful interest in this indicator of broader economic developments and related changes in European lifestyles, though attention blurs amongst countless other such details: Swedish population statistics, Moldovan monthly wage figures, Jacques Derrida’s political writings. This comprehensiveness is impressive if imposing, and one’s own exhaustion with the book at times reflects the challenge it presents as an all-encompassing account of sixty-odd years of European life.
But this type of exhaustion might also signal a vice among readers of history, a vice that John Lewis Gaddis’s latest book enthusiastically feeds. Gaddis, a renowned American chronicler of the Cold War, conceives of history in more delectable terms: high-stakes diplomacy and political moxie constitute its main business, the personality traits of great and terrible leaders are history’s primary currency, and open enthusiasm for one’s side in a given conflict is a self-evident good.
While The Cold War: A New History makes for infectious reading, the unfortunate consequence is that the book encourages a pulp-novel-and-portraitgallery notion of history — and a patriotic one at that. Gaddis is unabashed on this latter score. “I’ve not hesitated to write from a perspective that takes fully into account how the Cold War came out: I know no other way,” he declares in the book’s preface. And while he judiciously notes that understanding the history of the Cold War “exclusively [through] the role of great forces, great powers, or great leaders would fail to do it justice,” he seems to know no other way here either. In Gaddis’s fastpaced handling of the Cold War story, a succession of ideal-driven American presidents, diplomats, and generals bested a series of failing Soviet leaders and their apparatchiks in a grand political theatre that reached its climax when ballsy Ronald Reagan met open-minded Mikhail Gorbachev. Perhaps sensing the retrograde spin of this approach, Gaddis strives for the unexpected in his arguments: for instance, he celebrates the virtues of the nuclear arms race and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, “because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, [so that] there was now reason for hope that it would never take place.”
Gaddis’s statements come off as comforting parables beside Judt’s more demanding formulations. Indeed, after a far more textured analysis of Communism’s fall, focused on a series of Soviet- European encounters and Moscow internal disputes, Judt refuses to grant post-Communist Europe free passage in light of its prior divisions and repressions. In recent years, he argues, “the threat to history in Europe” no longer rests in “the deliberate distortion of the past for mendacious ends,” as happened in certain quarters where the outcome of World War II made this politically expedient, and happened again under and after various Communist regimes. Rather, it rests in the confused, colliding claims for reprisal and recognition among former victims and victimizers from the Communist era, and also in the European public’s current conception of the past itself, particularly with regard to the Holocaust, “as a detached artifact, encapsulating not recent memories but lost memories” that are convertible into the stuff of documentaries, theme parks, memorial projects, and museums.
In order to combat the neutralization of the past and the dangerous malleability of collective memory, Judt insists on the uncompromising mission of serious history, which “contributes to the disenchantment of the world” by being “discomforting, even disruptive” in what it brings to light. This is a difficult position to quarrel with, and indeed one would be hardpressed to find a more complete presentation of postwar Europe than the one presented by Judt. And yet, something is wanting here. The practice of history is responsible for clarifying and ordering the outer world of human doings from their chaotic multiplicity and, equally, for disabusing us of self-interested pretensions about the significance of our private encounters with larger events. But those very purposes, in turn, explain why we turn to literature — for imagining how individuals experience history from the inside.
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