Postwar

Introduction

‘Every epoch is a sphinx that plunges into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved’.

Heinrich Heine

‘Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing!) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect’.

Edmund Burke

‘Events, dear boy, events’.

Harold Macmillan

‘World history is not the soil in which happiness grows.

Periods of happiness are empty pages in it’.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

I first decided to write this book while changing trains at the Westbahnhof, Vienna’s main railway terminus. It was December 1989, a propitious moment. I had just returned from Prague, where the playwrights and historians of Vaclav Havel’s Civic Forum were dislodging a Communist police state and tumbling forty years of ‘real existing Socialism’ into the dustbin of history. A few weeks earlier the Berlin Wall had been unexpectedly breached. In Hungary as in Poland, everyone was taken up with the challenges of post- Communist politics: the old regime—all-powerful just a few months before—was receding into irrelevance. The Communist Party of Lithuania had just declared itself for immediate independence from the Soviet Union. And in the taxi on the way to the railway station Austrian radio carried the first reports of an uprising against the nepotistic dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. A political earthquake was shattering the frozen topography of post-World War II Europe.

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history— and history was thrusting them aside.

Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.

The time was propitious; so, too, was the place. Vienna in 1989 was a palimpsest of Europe’s complicated, overlapping pasts. In the early years of the twentieth century Vienna was Europe: the fertile, edgy, self-deluding hub of a culture and a civilization on the threshold of apocalypse. Between the wars, reduced from a glorious imperial metropole to the impoverished, shrunken capital of a tiny rump-state, Vienna slid steadily from grace: finishing up as the provincial outpost of a Nazi empire to which most of its citizens swore enthusiastic fealty.

After Germany was defeated Austria fell into the Western camp and was assigned the status of Hitler’s ‘first victim’. This stroke of doubly unmerited good fortune authorized Vienna to exorcise its past. Its Nazi allegiance conveniently forgotten, the Austrian capital—a ‘Western’ city surrounded by Soviet ‘eastern’ Europe—acquired a new identity as outrider and exemplar of the free world. To its former subjects now trapped in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, Vienna stood for ‘central Europe’: an imagined community of cosmopolitan civility that Europeans had somehow mislaid in the course of the century. In Communism’s dying years the city was to become a sort of listening post of liberty, a rejuvenated site of encounters and departures for eastern Europeans escaping West and Westerners building bridges to the East.

Vienna in 1989 was thus a good place from which to ‘think’ Europe. Austria embodied all the slightly self- satisfied attributes of post-war western Europe: capitalist prosperity underpinned by a richly-endowed welfare state; social peace guaranteed thanks to jobs and perks liberally distributed through all the main social groups and political parties; external security assured by the implicit protection of the Western nuclear umbrella—while Austria itself remained smugly ‘neutral’. Meanwhile, across the Leitha and Danube rivers just a few kilometres to the east, there lay the ‘other’ Europe of bleak poverty and secret policemen. The distance separating the two was nicely encapsulated in the contrast between Vienna’s thrusting, energetic Westbahnhof, whence businessmen and vacationers boarded sleek modern expresses for Munich or Zurich or Paris; and the city’s grim, uninviting Sudbahnhof: a shabby, dingy, faintly menacing hangout of penurious foreigners descending filthy old trains from Budapest or Belgrade.

Just as the city’s two principal railway stations involuntarily acknowledged the geographical schism of Europe—one facing optimistically, profitably west, the other negligently conceding Vienna’s eastern vocation—so the very streets of the Austrian capital bore witness to the chasm of silence separating Europe’s tranquil present from its discomforting past. The imposing, confident buildings lining the great Ringstrasse were a reminder of Vienna’s one-time imperial vocation—though the Ring itself seemed somehow too big and too grand to serve as a mere quotidian artery for commuters in a medium-sized European capital—and the city was justifiably proud of its public edifices and civic spaces. Indeed, Vienna was much given to invoking older glories. But concerning the more recent past it was decidedly reticent.

And of the Jews who had once occupied many of the inner city’s buildings and who contributed decisively to the art, music, theatre, literature, journalism and ideas that were Vienna in its heyday, the city was most reticent of all. The very violence with which the Jews of Vienna had been expelled from their homes, shipped east from the city and stamped out of its memory helped account for the guilty calm of Vienna’s present. Post-war Vienna—like post-war western Europe—was an imposing edifice resting atop an unspeakable past. Much of the worst of that past had taken place in the lands that fell under Soviet control, which was why it was so easily forgotten (in the West) or suppressed (in the East). With the return of eastern Europe the past would be no less unspeakable: but now it would, unavoidably, have to be spoken. After 1989 nothing—not the future, not the present and above all not the past—would ever be the same.

Although it was in December 1989 that I decided to undertake a history of postwar Europe, the book did not get written for many years to come. Circumstances intervened. In retrospect this was fortunate: many things which have become a little clearer today were still obscure back then. Archives have opened. The inevitable confusions attendant upon a revolutionary transformation have sorted themselves out and at least some of the longer-term consequences of the upheaval of 1989 are now intelligible. And the aftershocks of 1989 did not soon abate. The next time I was in Vienna the city was struggling to house tens of thousands of refugees from neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia.

Three years after that Austria abandoned its carefully-cultivated post-war autonomy and joined the European Union, whose own emergence as a force in European affairs was a direct consequence of the east-