A history of postwar Europe that’s far too nostalgic to justify its thrilling title

One of our most lauded historians fails to address the significance of many crucial issues over the past 70 years 
East German guards look on as the Berlin Wall is destroyed in 1989
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Michael Burleigh16 August 2018

Roller coasters give passengers the sensation of falling as the cars twist and turn at great speed along a carefully engineered track. They were big in the US until the Depression but enjoyed a revival from the Seventies. Statistically, people are more likely to be killed by mishaps with folding garden chairs since roller-coaster rides are predictable.

The historian Ian Kershaw has rather oddly chosen Roller-Coaster as the title of his history of Europe between 1950 and 2017, the sequel to To Hell and Back, where he was on familiar wartime territory.

Having lived through most of the past 67 years too, I can’t remember being either thrilled or terrified by much — not by vast nuclear arsenals, terrorism or any political changeover — even when I did not vote for it. Surveying the immediate future, I am not so sanguine.

There is very little thrilling or surprising in Kershaw’s bland, split-screen account of the evolution of Western and Eastern Europe (until the fall of the Berlin Wall reunited the continent), partly because Sir Ian, a leading member of the Anglo-German Left Establishment, has too omniscient a view to convey the grubby realities of business, the media and politics after a lifetime in the academy. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm gets four times as many mentions as The Sun, the most widely read newspaper in Britain. Bond and derivatives markets might as well not exist.

One looks in vain for any sustained discussion about how serial political corruption scandals in many European countries, or a kind of generic managerialism, blurred mainstream Left and Right to the point that significant parts of the electorates revolted in recent years when they realised that their societies were being “overwritten” by mass immigration.

That is because these British, French, German or Polish societies were net casualties of globalisation, a problem to which French geographers such as Christophe Guilluy are better guides than a British historian of Nazi Germany. One needs to liberate oneself from the “past that won’t go away” (as Germans call it) to grasp the present, for viewing it through a 1930s optic is misleading — and is post-war Germany always the benign force represented here? Ask the Greeks and Italians, perhaps, for an alternative view.

While Kershaw is good on the complexities of the communal wars in former Yugoslavia in the Nineties, some subjects come up short. The checklist history of culture, for example, seems to stop in the Fifties with such “luminaries” as Jean-Luc Godard and Günther Grass. His understanding of culture is of the backwards-looking variety, towards the war, collaboration and Holocaust, rather than anything which deals with how we are now. One looks in vain for Michel Houellebecq, surely the most significant novelist dealing with our current predicaments, or any movie made since about 1980, such as La Haine (1995), about migrant-dominated Parisian suburbs.

There is nothing either on how, for example, high-rises such as Grenfell Tower replaced the terraces and tenements of yore, or the obliteration of the old smoke-stack industries (and the blue-collar working class) by antiseptic and increasingly digitalised service economies run by clerks until AI takes over. The huge amount of time people spend staring at screens, first in the living room and then hand-held, is surely something worthy of comment, especially since this is how they consume politics nowadays.

Attempts to insert individual testimony as to how something felt at the time are far too cryptic to be effective, as the witnesses lack any explanatory context. How one longs for a few lines of Larkin or a Bob Dylan lyric to enliven the mechanical prose.

Nostalgia for class-based politics and the benevolent big welfare state, permanently menaced by something called “neoliberalism”, pervades the book, even though stolid Sweden is about to be rocked in September by the insurgent Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant populist party. Is this just the product of recent crises, such as the 2008 financial crash and the influx of migrants after 2015, or must one search further back for its origins?

Kershaw mocks other historians such as Mark Mazower and Tony Judt for being overly optimistic about the abatement of ethno-nationalism and the onset of an era of peace, democracy and capitalism after the collapse of communism, only to write “at present (autumn 2017) the auguries are better than what they had been only a few months ago”, which is unfortunate timing given that Brexit Britain has become ungovernable and Chancellor Merkel is tottering out of the door, while the likes of Matteo Salvini (and Sweden’s Jimmie Åkesson) are in the ascendant.

After 562 pages, what is one to make of Sir Ian’s Delphic conclusion: “What will happen in the decades to come is impossible to know. The only certainty is uncertainty. Insecurity will remain a hallmark of modern life. Europe’s dips and turns, the ups and downs that have characterised its history, are sure to continue.”

Words such as “magisterial” will be heaped on this book but surely we deserve something more insightful? Maybe Europe will become the heritage theme park of the world, like Venice writ large, or, conceivably, it might make common cause with authoritarian and capitalist China. For with Trump on the loose with his new Russian best friend, who knows where things might be heading?

Michael Burleigh’s The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: A History of Now is published in paperback by Pan Macmillan.

Roller-Coaster: Europe 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw (Allen Lane, £30), buy it here.

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