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Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "I first decided to write this book while changing trains at the Westbahnhof, Vienna's main railway terminus..." (more)
Key Phrases: rural collectivization, Soviet Union, World War Two, Cold War (more...)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

World War II may have ended in 1945, but according to historian Tony Judt, the conflict's epilogue lasted for nearly the rest of the century. Calling 1945-1989 "an interim age," Judt examines what happened on each side of the Iron Curtain, with the West nervously inching forward while the East endured the "peace of the prison yard" until the fall of Communism in 1989 signaled their chance to progress. Though he proposes no grand, overarching theory of the postwar period, Judt's massive work covers the broad strokes as well as the fine details of the years 1945 to 2005. No one book (even at nearly a thousand pages) could fully encompass this complex period, but Postwar comes close, and is impressive for its scope, synthesis, clarity, and narrative cohesion.

Judt treats the entire continent as a whole, providing equal coverage of social changes, economic forces, and cultural shifts in western and eastern Europe. He offers a county-by-county analysis of how each Eastern nation shed Communism and traces the rise of the European Union, looking at what it represents both economically and ideologically. Along with the dealings between European nations, he also covers Europe's conflicted relationship with the United States, which learned much different lessons from World War II than did Europe. In particular, he studies the success of the Marshall Plan and the way the West both appreciated and resented the help, for acceptance of it reminded them of their diminished place in the world. No impartial observer, Judt offers his judgments and opinions throughout the book in an attempt to instruct as well as inform. If a moral lesson is to come from World War II, Judt writes, "then it will have to be taught afresh with each passing generation. 'European Union' may be an answer to history, but it can never be a substitute." This book would be an excellent place to start that lesson. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This is the best history we have of Europe in the postwar period and not likely to be surpassed for many years. Judt, director of New York University's Remarque Institute, is an academic historian of repute and, more recently, a keen observer of European affairs whose powerfully written articles have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and elsewhere. Here he combines deep knowledge with a sharply honed style and an eye for the expressive detail. Postwar is a hefty volume, and there are places where the details might overwhelm some readers. But the reward is always there: after pages on cabinet shuffles in some small country, or endless diplomatic negotiations concerning the fate of Germany or moves toward the European Union, the reader is snapped back to attention by insightful analysis and excellent writing. Judt shows that the dire human and economic costs of WWII shadowed Europe for a very long time afterward. Europeans and Americans recall the economic miracle, but it didn't really transform people's lives until the late 1950s, when a new, more individualized, consumer-oriented society began to appear in the West. But Postwar is not just a history of Western Europe. One of its great virtues is that it fully integrates the history of Eastern and Western Europe, and covers the small countries as well as the large and powerful ones. Judt is judicious, even a bit uncritical, in his appraisal of American involvement in Europe in the early postwar years, and he's scathing about Western intellectuals' accommodation to communism. His book focuses on cultural and intellectual life rather than the social experiences of factory workers or peasants, but it would probably be impossible to encompass all of it in one volume. Overall, this is history writing at its very best.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 896 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; 1St Edition edition (October 6, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1594200653
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594200656
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #279,899 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Tony Judt
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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I first decided to write this book while changing trains at the Westbahnhof, Vienna's main railway terminus. Read the first page
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rural collectivization
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Soviet Union, World War Two, Cold War, Red Army, East German, United States, Marshall Plan, Christian Democrats, Labour Party, Great Britain, World War One, Margaret Thatcher, Second World War, Mikhail Gorbachev, Czech Republic, Warsaw Pact, Bretton Woods, Middle East, West Berlin, Central Committee, Civic Forum, General Secretary, German Democratic Republic, United Nations, Willy Brandt
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Customer Reviews

71 Reviews
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51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Narration and Analysis; Some Flaws; 4.5, December 8, 2005
By R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This is, in many respects, an outstanding book. Judt accomplishes the daunting job of providing a solid narrative overview of European history (excluding Russia/Soviet Union)from the end of WWII to the present. Accompanying the narrative is a great deal of astute analysis, both of major trends and of specific episodes. The book is divided into 4 major periods; the immediate post-war era of reconstruction and the onset of the Cold War, the great boom of the 50s and 60s with its major demographic, social, and economic changes, the recessional period of the 70s and 80s, and the most recent period after the fall of the Soviet Union. The major theme is a multi-generational effort to build a Europe that avoids the mistakes that led to the catastrophes of the WWI-WWII period. Judt provides a guardedly positive view of European success. The factors that led to the catastrophe of the first half of the 20th century were strong nationalism and what might be called neo-mercantilism, authoritarian/totalitarian states, powerful ideologies (particularly Marxism), and great internal social discord. Judt sees modern Europe, with democratic and pacific states, its emphasis on economic integration, and social welfare systems aimed at guaranteeing a minimum amount of social amity, as largely escaping the problems that led to WWI and WWII.
Judt deals very well with the major events (and often their social consequences) that propelled Europe along this pathway. The crucial role of the US, and in an ironic way, of the Soviet Union, helped to rescue Western Europe from post-WWII devastation and provided an international framework that demanded western european cooperation. This included a great deal of intelligent decision making by Western European leaders, requiring for example, that the French accept a revitalized and eventually rearmed Germany, that the Germans ultimately accept the post-WWII borders. He devotes equal time also to the fate of Eastern Europe, which stands in some ways as a distorted mirror of the Western European experience. The later convergence of Eastern and Western European history after the fall of the Soviet Union is described particularly, both with its positive and many negative aspects. While this political story is the armature of the book, Judt does an excellent job of outlining the relevant social history. Nor is this book schematic, while this is an overview, we get enough relevant history of individual nations to be more than satisfactory.
Judt is an excellent writer and his analyses are often telling. Read, for example, his discussion of why so many major European leaders of the 50s were elderly men or his evenhanded analysis of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister of Britain.
As good as this book is, there are blemishes and some of them are significant. Judt's breadth and depth of knowledge are really impressive but I detected a number of factual errors. I am skeptical that the Chernobyl accident caused 30,000 deaths and that the partition of India caused "millions" of the deaths (the usual estimate is 1 million). Judt is wrong to imply that defeat at Dien Bien Phu brought France to the bargaining table at Geneva. There are also a number of significant omissions. Given the importance of the demographic and economic history covered by Judt, it would have been useful to include a small number of summary charts on these topics. Judt covers some intellectual history, especially as related to social history, but he makes a major (and all too common) error by not including any discussion of changes in the natural sciences. For example, he states that in the 50s, Paris was established (partly by default) as the intellectual capital of Europe. In a sense he is correct but the 50s and 60s were a golden age for British science and no country in Europe matched the productivity of British scientists. Who is the more consequential figure, Jean-Paul Sartre or the Briton Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA structure (among several important contributions to biology)? Cambridge, London, and Oxford were intellectual capital in a way Paris could never match.
A final and real sin of omission is the lack of appropriate footnotes and a bibliography. The absence of the latter significantly reduces the utility of this admirable book for Judt's fellow scholars, for students, and for the general reading public. Both Judt and his publisher should make an effort to rectify this flaw.
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109 of 129 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars A flawed history of Europe, May 10, 2007
This review is from: Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Paperback)
Although there are quite a few books on aspects of European History written from a specific ideological angle, not many of them give an overview of the entire period. This book is one of them and, inevitably, it will cause many debates between those who agree and those who disagree with the author's political views. However, such a book should not be judged according to its political orientation but according to the consistency and coherence of its documentation and argumentation. It is in this respect I have some objections to the book.

In my opinion, its most fundamental flaw is the identification of liberal ideologies in Europe (centrist, social-democratic, Labour etc.) with left-wing radicalism, including accusations of Communist appeasement. If any proof were required for the manifest fallacy of this generalization, it is provided by facts described in the book itself, much as these are downplayed. The demand for fairer social policies and respect for human and civil rights by the liberals was not motivated by Communist sympathies but by the experience of the Nazi and the other fascist regimes (including the USSR) whose horrors are described well in the book. Liberal criticism focused only on actions and policies that contradicted the values for which the West was fighting the Communist tyranny. The book does not deny that such policies existed but excuses them in the usual the-goal-justifies-the-means manner. What is worse, it accuses those criticizing these policies as being soft on Communism! Absurdly, the book brands liberals as "discontents of prosperity", even though they were those who called for opportunities for more people to partake in exactly this prosperity.

One is tempted to believe that in reality, Judt's problem is not the inhumanity and lack of freedom in Communism, since he is often indifferent to other cases of suppression of freedom by non-communist dictators. Rather, it looks as if he objects to the principle of more social justice and greater opportunities for the more disadvantaged members of the society to realize their potential, a principle he wrongly associates with its perversion in the communist regims. While, many people were indeed misled by the Communist rhetoric into an outlook sympathetic towards the Eastern Block dictatorships, the overwhelming majority of those believing in this principle had definitely nothing to do with Communism and a large segment of them actively fought Communism (the Christian Social Union in Bavaria comes to mind).

It is a distortion of historical truth verging on the defamatory to collectively associate all those inspired by values of humanity with the Communist monstrosities.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars What is the future of Europe?, September 16, 2006
By Robert Muirhead "Bob" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
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"Postwar - A history of Europe since 1945" by Tony Judt is the best book I have read on the subject. Its perspective on events since 1989 up to 2005 is remarkably good.

Only two generations have passed since World War 2, and the risk with a book about this period is that its conclusions and themes may prove to be foolish in the fullness of time. One is reminded of Mao's response to a question about the consequences of the French Revolution, "It is too soon to tell."

We can probably be reasonably sure that the history of Europe from the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires plus the Soviet upheavals after WW1 to the final territorial and ethnic spasm in the Balkans in the 1990s can probably be written with some certainty, although we still lack access to original source documents for the Soviet role over that period.

All books dealing with post-war European history suffer from the fact that limited archival material from the Soviet Union has been available for study. Historians are forced to rely on sporadic Soviet documents and speeches and the assessments of western diplomats and analysts to interpret Soviet thinking and intentions.

The result is that this book (and others) views the history of the Communist world with Western eyes and Western mindsets. We are denied access to the thoughts, fears and hopes of communist politicians and dissidents and their influence on history. Hopefully, one day, more archival and other documents will become available to historians and a more balanced history will emerge over time.

If I may give another analogy: at present historians writing of the Communist world are peering through the windows of a house trying to understand the lives of the family living there. They see people going to and fro in the rooms. Occasionally they get glimpses of what the individuals are reading and writing. Sometimes a resident will hold up a photo or document for the historian to see. But the historian cannot hear what they say, nor can he go inside the house to talk to them or inspect their documents, or ask them their views on the outside world. He can draw conclusions only from what he sees through the windows.

A big message from this book is that the recovery and prosperity enjoyed by Western Europe for half a century is due to both the US and the USSR. The US provided critical economic aid and political support to Europe, including West Germany, because of the threat assumed to be posed by the USSR. Without such a threat, the US may have retreated into isolationism, leaving the Europeans to sort out the mess. Without the threat of the USSR, there may not have been the will forgo reparations from Germany and to encourage West Germany to recover. These were distinct possibilities in the immediate post-war period.

The book deals only with the history of Western Europe, with very little explanation of the impact of the rest of the world on that history. Events and policies in the USSR and USA are covered to the extent that they directly impinged on Europe. However, Communist and post-colonial developments in Asia and Africa certainly reinforced cold war attitudes in Europe, if they did not directly influence them.


What must still be provisional is the history of Europe since say 1990. Will the European Union and the Euro survive the test of time, or will one or the other go into the dustbin of history?

Judt's description of the moribund Soviet economies in the 1970s is the best I have read on the subject. The joke "You pretend to work and we pretend to pay you" sums up the cynicism and inefficiencies of Eastern bloc economies.

His account of the final years of the Eastern Bloc is excellent, as is discussion of the key issues facing Europe in the aftermath of its collapse and the apparent success of free market ideologies.

The final chapters of the struggle between socialism (in the form of modern European social capitalism) and capitalist individualism on the US model has yet to be written. Communism has probably failed for all time, but that does not mean that unrestrained US-style free enterprise will take over Europe. Beware of historians who proclaim "the end of history" and the "triumph of liberal democratic capitalism". Fortunately, Judt is too sensible to make such hubristic claims, although he does lean towards the European model.

Which model of society will "win" in the course of the 21st Century - the unfettered capitalism of the US, or the social capitalism of the EU? What is the future of the nation state in the face of the challenges from terrorist extremism?

These are important questions, and Judt's book provides the reader with an excellent exposition of the political, social and economic circumstances surrounding them.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Post War History Europe
This Tony Judt book seems to be a very thorough and comprehensive work. I say "seems to be" because this is my first foray into this subject. Read more
Published 6 days ago by Ski Guy

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best.
Very few folks have the courage or the skill to write this kind of all-encompassing modern history. Judt's skill is even more impressive in that the early chapters on immediate... Read more
Published 22 days ago by MissionPk

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What a remarkable book ! A true tour-de force. Step by step Professor Judt leads us, with a superb English style -- his great care with English punctuation is notable --, to the... Read more
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Tony Judt's book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 superbly covers events in Central and Eastern Europe as well as giving attention to the more widely covered Western... Read more
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4.0 out of 5 stars Europe is "the opposite of Communism"
This is a fascinating book that I'm glad that I read but that I'm also glad is over.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Turmoil
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Published 5 months ago by Mary E. Sibley

3.0 out of 5 stars Why "History" has to wait
The book offers solid evidence as why it takes a generation or two before a work of "history" can be written. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Joseph Somsel

5.0 out of 5 stars Men do more from habit than from reason
Tony Judt's synopsis of European history from 1945-2005 is a masterpiece of historical research and narrative. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Keith A. Comess

2.0 out of 5 stars Incomplete Analysis
In Postwar Judt has undertaken an immense task and has completed it fitfully.In certain details he has not checked whether his figures tally. Read more
Published 12 months ago by B. T. Sampath

2.0 out of 5 stars A Few Good Points, But More Bad Ones
When I first saw mention of Judt's POSTWAR, I put it on my book list. It took me a while to get to it, but I finally did. Read more
Published 13 months ago by C. Richard

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