Postwar

Tony Judt POSTWAR A History of Europe Since 1945

For Jennifer

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?

THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain

Praise for Tony Judt’s Postwar

“If anyone can bring off the impossible task that Tony Judt has set himself in Postwar, it is he…. He brings to Postwar an astonishing range of knowledge and an intense political, intellectual and emotional engagement; these are nicely offset by the intellectual distance that the Channel and the Atlantic have helped to provide and by a wry sense of the innumerable ways in which events play tricks on all of us. The result is a book that has the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia; it is a very considerable achievement…. Brilliant.”

—The New York Review of Books

“Postwar is a remarkable book…. The excellence of Postwar was no doubt hard to achieve… but it is easy to describe. The writing is vivid; the coverage—of little countries as well as of great ones—is virtually superhuman; and, above all, the book is smart. Every page contains unexpected data, or a fresh observation, or a familiar observation freshly turned.”

—Louis Menand, The New Yorker

“Massive, kaleidoscopic and thoroughly readable… [Judt’s] book becomes the definitive account of Europe’s rise from the ashes and its take-off into an uncertain future.”

—Time (One of the Must-Read Books of 2005)

“Tony Judt is one of our most dazzling public intellectuals, as thoughtful as he is knowledgeable. Postwar is like having an extended personal seminar on Europe’s journey back both from the ashes of World War Two and the cruel, totalitarian hold of Soviet communism.”

—David Halberstam

“Nobody is more qualified than Judt to combine serious descriptive history with incisive, original political analysis, to cover both western and eastern Europe, and to pass stinging yet informed judgments on the behavior and evasions, the deeds and the failings, of his subjects…. This monumental work is a tour-de-force.”

—Foreign Affairs

“Professor Judt knows more about contemporary Europe than almost any American (or any European, for that matter). In Postwar, he brings that formidable knowledge to bear on the inspiring story of Europe’s transformation from lethal division and devastating war to a peaceful, prosperous pan-continental union. His history of how the Iron Curtain crumbled is definitive.”

—T. R. Reid, author of The United States of Europe

“An epically important subject—Europe as both the epicenter of political and ideological catastrophes in the last century and the principal laboratory for an experiment in whatever chance humanity has of a peace in the century just begun—has, to the benefit of us all, found the author it deserves. Tony Judt, long one of the wisest heads and clearest voices around, has produced a magisterial history and a solid foundation for clear thinking about the future. Postwar is meticulous in its scholarship, compelling in the story it tells, and passionate in its judgments. A true masterpiece.”

—Strobe Talbott, president, Brookings Institution

“Truly superb. It is hard to imagine how a better—and more readable—history of the emergence of today’s Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written.”

—Ian Kershaw

“Magisterial… He has written a magnificent conventional history of modern Europe, but its quality and its power come from the way he insists that his narrative is also a history of ideas and of the peculiar vulnerability of the European mind to ideologies and to the patterns of thought and political loyalty they impose.”

—National Affairs

“As soon as you realize how good it is, this book will frighten you…. This is a work which, on almost every page, evokes to readers over the age of forty what they once felt, hoped for, took part in, or fled from. Judt has written, in great detail and at great length, the biography of a middle-aged continent trying, after a disgraceful past, to settle down and go straight.”

—Neal Acherson, London Review of Books

“Rich and immensely detailed.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Tony Judt… has produced not only the heaviest history of modern Europe ever written, but probably the best…. [He] moves fluently and deftly from politics and economics to films and television, whisking the reader through West German coalition-building, past the French New Wave, and on toward the Eurovision Song Contest…. [A] magnificently rich and readable book.”

—The Sunday Times (London)

“Masterly and exhilarating… Judt has made the ‘culture wars’ between communism and anticommunism a special subject and he deals with this brilliantly once more…. Judt has a fine eye for telling detail…. This is a splendid book to which no review can do proper justice. So many subjects are adroitly dealt with.”