wardenred's review against another edition
dark
informative
slow-paced
5.0
In wartime the worst atrocities do not generally occur in battle, but after the battle is over.
This was a difficult book to read—not because of how it was written, but because of the subject matter. The author, I feel, does a very good job in delivering huge blocks of information concisely, switching back and forth between more of a bird's eye view on all the big processes that happened in post-war Europe and a focus on individual person-sized tragedies. Underneath the gruesome descriptions of all the awful ways people were awful to each other, there's this undercurrent of empathy that made reading about all that more bearable.
The book is packed with interesting and important (and also terrible) facts; some of them were familiar to me, though more in the WW2 context than in that of the immediate aftermath, others were new information. There's a lot of digging into the reasons behind the social processes depicted here—not just in terms of matching consequences to past events, but also in terms of enormous collective trauma that people all over the continent were trying to cope with. Even though these 500 pages cover numerous events and countries all over Europe, the people never become just a statistic. Oh, an speaking of all those events and countries—I appreciate how smooth the transitions between separate blocks of information were, and how clear the connections were made between the events that on the surface seemed almost completely separate.
All and all, I found this a great, though-provoking foray both into the aftermath of WW2 and the premise of the Cold War. It constantly made me think of how a lot of the events depicted here still echo through the modern history of Europe, some louder than the others. Maybe one day, those echoes will quiet down. I don't expect to live to see it, though. After all, today, right now there is once again a war going on in the middle of Europe—as usual. The one big war that spun the entirety of Europe may have ended over 80 years ago, but that doesn't mean there ever was an equally continent-wide peace for more than a few years at a time.
PS: One thing that slightly irritated me was how the names of all the Ukrainian and some of the Baltic geographical locations were transliterated from Russian, not from the native languages of these countries. These former Soviet republics are otherwise very clearly acknowledged as independent nations that were under Communist occupation for an unfortunately long while; wouldn't it be best to transliterate from their own languages? That's a minor gripe, though, all things considered.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Xenophobia, Antisemitism, Genocide, Deportation, and War
Moderate: Murder, Torture, Violence, and Rape
kiwi_fruit's review against another edition
5.0
Comprehensive in scope, a must read for anyone seriously interested in WWII in Europe and the postwar period. 4.5 stars
The immediate postwar period is one of the most important times in our recent history. If the Second World War destroyed the old continent, then its immediate aftermath was the protean chaos out of which the new Europe was formed. It was during this violent, vengeful time that many of our hopes, aspirations, prejudices and resentments first took shape. Anyone who truly wants to understand Europe as it is today must first have an understanding of what occurred here during this crucial formative period. There is no value in shying away from difficult or sensitive themes, since these are the very building blocks upon which the modern Europe has been built.
Those who wish to harness hatred and resentment for their own gain always try to distort the proper balance between one version of history and another. They take events out of context; they make blame a one-sided game; and they try to convince us that historical problems are the problems of today. If we are to bring an end to the cycle of hatred and violence we must do precisely the opposite of these things. We must show how competing views of history can exist alongside one another. We must show how past atrocities fit into their historical context, and how blame necessarily attaches itself not just to one party, but to a whole variety of parties. We must strive always to discover the truth, particularly when it comes to statistics, and then put that truth to bed. It is, after all, history, and should not be allowed to poison the present.
The immediate postwar period is one of the most important times in our recent history. If the Second World War destroyed the old continent, then its immediate aftermath was the protean chaos out of which the new Europe was formed. It was during this violent, vengeful time that many of our hopes, aspirations, prejudices and resentments first took shape. Anyone who truly wants to understand Europe as it is today must first have an understanding of what occurred here during this crucial formative period. There is no value in shying away from difficult or sensitive themes, since these are the very building blocks upon which the modern Europe has been built.
Those who wish to harness hatred and resentment for their own gain always try to distort the proper balance between one version of history and another. They take events out of context; they make blame a one-sided game; and they try to convince us that historical problems are the problems of today. If we are to bring an end to the cycle of hatred and violence we must do precisely the opposite of these things. We must show how competing views of history can exist alongside one another. We must show how past atrocities fit into their historical context, and how blame necessarily attaches itself not just to one party, but to a whole variety of parties. We must strive always to discover the truth, particularly when it comes to statistics, and then put that truth to bed. It is, after all, history, and should not be allowed to poison the present.
mburnamfink's review
5.0
World War II didn't end cleanly in 1945. The defeat of the Nazis occurred piecemeal in liberated territories from 1943 onwards, and stuttered forwards in civil war and internal purges for years after Hitler's death. While the Allied armies settled the key political question that fascism would not rule Europe, everything else was up in the air. So of course, after the war Europe came together as a community to ensure human rights and equality for all.
LOL, Nope. Europe faced massive challenges of rebuilding its shattered infrastructure, healing a traumatized population, and re-homing millions of displaced people. The refugee crisis was perhaps the first and largest problem. Most European cities had been wrecked by a combination of the combined bomber offensive and the Red Army. Millions of foreigners had been taken to Germany as forced laborers, and millions had fled their homes to escape the worst of war. Holocaust survivors found that they had no home to return to. Ethnic Germans had to flee areas where they had lived for centuries in Poland and Czechoslovakia. With agriculture and transit destroyed, famine ran rampant. In particularly grim comedy, gangs of orphans played with disused munitions, firing panzerfausts to see the bang. With millions on the move, and the economy and political system smashed, crime was omnipresent. Theft, sexual assault, and murder were so common as to be entirely unremarkable.
Occupied territory had to deal with a legacy of collaboration, and no one managed both a comprehensive and legally valid de-Nazification program. Nazi race laws had made Europeans newly aware of their mixed ethnicities, and particularly in Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia, ethnic militias embarked on new programs of ethnic cleansing. Civil wars between Communists and rightist groups broke out in Greece and Italy, while Stalinist repression crushed Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and the Baltic states.
Lowe's thesis is that pretty much everybody was victim and perpetrator, often simultaneously. National mythmaking has served to cover up the ugly truths that most people collaborated, that ardent resistance fighters carried out crude and often deadly attacks on collaborators after the war, with women who slept with Germans suffering special abuse, and that these resistance fighters were then punished by the new governments as threats to resurgent state power. An accurate count of the dead is impossible, and revisionists on all sides have created outlandish figures of the dead, with right-wing parties who have uneasy ties to 1930s and 1940s fascist movements being at the forefront.
This is a heavy book, and as a continent-wide survey Lowe can't afford to dive too deeply in any moment. But he has a strong analytical frame, and manages to keep the grim material moving quickly.
LOL, Nope. Europe faced massive challenges of rebuilding its shattered infrastructure, healing a traumatized population, and re-homing millions of displaced people. The refugee crisis was perhaps the first and largest problem. Most European cities had been wrecked by a combination of the combined bomber offensive and the Red Army. Millions of foreigners had been taken to Germany as forced laborers, and millions had fled their homes to escape the worst of war. Holocaust survivors found that they had no home to return to. Ethnic Germans had to flee areas where they had lived for centuries in Poland and Czechoslovakia. With agriculture and transit destroyed, famine ran rampant. In particularly grim comedy, gangs of orphans played with disused munitions, firing panzerfausts to see the bang. With millions on the move, and the economy and political system smashed, crime was omnipresent. Theft, sexual assault, and murder were so common as to be entirely unremarkable.
Occupied territory had to deal with a legacy of collaboration, and no one managed both a comprehensive and legally valid de-Nazification program. Nazi race laws had made Europeans newly aware of their mixed ethnicities, and particularly in Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia, ethnic militias embarked on new programs of ethnic cleansing. Civil wars between Communists and rightist groups broke out in Greece and Italy, while Stalinist repression crushed Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and the Baltic states.
Lowe's thesis is that pretty much everybody was victim and perpetrator, often simultaneously. National mythmaking has served to cover up the ugly truths that most people collaborated, that ardent resistance fighters carried out crude and often deadly attacks on collaborators after the war, with women who slept with Germans suffering special abuse, and that these resistance fighters were then punished by the new governments as threats to resurgent state power. An accurate count of the dead is impossible, and revisionists on all sides have created outlandish figures of the dead, with right-wing parties who have uneasy ties to 1930s and 1940s fascist movements being at the forefront.
This is a heavy book, and as a continent-wide survey Lowe can't afford to dive too deeply in any moment. But he has a strong analytical frame, and manages to keep the grim material moving quickly.
kgladfelder's review against another edition
4.0
A little slow to start the book, but pacing picked up and by the end was reading 20 pages at a time without even noticing that I read that many. Very insightful look into a period of history that I didn't know all that much about.
natalia71091's review against another edition
4.0
Definitely an interesting read since the years that followed WW2 aren't discussed that much. It went into a little too much detail in some chapters for my taste but I guess someone else would find these details as fascinating as some others were to me.
milos_dumbraci's review against another edition
5.0
Excepțională. O carte de un curaj deosebit, care ridică stratul gros de uitare așternut în mod intenționat de multe guverne peste valul de pogromuri, crime, violuri, torturi, masacre, exterminări și nenumărate alte ticăloșii în masă comise DUPĂ încheierea WW2 (ani de zile, de obicei în mod organizat, cel puțin cu complezența statului, deseori chiar cu implicare directă).
O maree de ură și de cruzimi de nedescris asupra victimelor (aproape întotdeauna civili complet nevinovați) în principal germane, dar și ucrainene, poloneze, croate, sârbe, italiene, baltice și, în mod ironic, evrei, iar și iar, comise de: polonezi (cei mai răi, Dumnezeule, ce popor veșnic însetat de sânge împotriva tuturor!), unguri, ruși, ocazional americani și... ucraineni, croați, sârbi, italieni... da, o mare parte din victime și călăi sunt aceiași, într-un veșnic lanț al răzbunării. A, și deseori cu binecuvântarea în deplină cunoștință de cauză a britanicilor.
O istorie îngrozitoare, mult prea bine îngropată de toată lumea implicată. Una cu MILIOANE de victime crunt oprimate și sute de mii de morți.
O maree de ură și de cruzimi de nedescris asupra victimelor (aproape întotdeauna civili complet nevinovați) în principal germane, dar și ucrainene, poloneze, croate, sârbe, italiene, baltice și, în mod ironic, evrei, iar și iar, comise de: polonezi (cei mai răi, Dumnezeule, ce popor veșnic însetat de sânge împotriva tuturor!), unguri, ruși, ocazional americani și... ucraineni, croați, sârbi, italieni... da, o mare parte din victime și călăi sunt aceiași, într-un veșnic lanț al răzbunării. A, și deseori cu binecuvântarea în deplină cunoștință de cauză a britanicilor.
O istorie îngrozitoare, mult prea bine îngropată de toată lumea implicată. Una cu MILIOANE de victime crunt oprimate și sute de mii de morți.
brucemri's review against another edition
5.0
This is a gripping, grueling, often painful and demoralizing, but tremendously rewarding book. Lowe covers the stretch that began while World War II was still raging and didn't end until (depending on the area and topic) until the late 1940s to early 1950s, when much of Europe was effectively ungoverned in many ways. He takes up issues of famine, routine law enforcement, the handling of military prisoners, and the overarching question of revenge in the wake of so many peoples' terrible suffering. Lowe takes revenge seriously: he writes with respect of those who successfully chose to give it up, but he acknowledges the hunger to make perpetrators pay as a fundamental human need, and not innately legitimate. The problem, as he shows again and again, is that it's just a matter of "both sides did bad things", but that _many_ sides did bad things, and that the sides themselves collapsed and reformed, sometimes more than once in the years he studies.
There's not much encouragement to be had in this book. He makes an excellent argument that "restoring order" was often not a possibility, that the damage to institutions, infrastructure, and people's own lives and goods was so severe in many cases that new orders had to be constituted from the ground up. And he shows that doing that wasn't always easy, either, and gives attention to the troubles faced by outsiders trying to come in and do good alongside suffering locals. He gives very close attention to how different countries purged their official hierarchies of Axis influence - or didn't - looking at investigations, arrests, punishments decreed and meted out, with extensive discussion of who claims what figures and how far to trust them, and why. It's a model of how to do history about subjects still very much in active contention.
Like many historians of the last couple decades, his work is greatly helped by post-Soviet access to Soviet-era archives. The situations in eastern Europe in his period of study are often just plain weirder than the ones in the west, far more tangled and obfuscated, and he does a good job chronicling how improved sources of information change good judgments. But he doesn't gloss over the complications in the west, and has especially good readings of how the western victors interfered with local elections and administrations to get their right-wing favorites into power along with his look at how the Soviets did the same with theirs.
A remarkable book, this, in which Lowe never abandons compassion and the wish for justice and peace, while not turning away from the challenge of showing how far both were from so many people's lives well after war was officially over.
There's not much encouragement to be had in this book. He makes an excellent argument that "restoring order" was often not a possibility, that the damage to institutions, infrastructure, and people's own lives and goods was so severe in many cases that new orders had to be constituted from the ground up. And he shows that doing that wasn't always easy, either, and gives attention to the troubles faced by outsiders trying to come in and do good alongside suffering locals. He gives very close attention to how different countries purged their official hierarchies of Axis influence - or didn't - looking at investigations, arrests, punishments decreed and meted out, with extensive discussion of who claims what figures and how far to trust them, and why. It's a model of how to do history about subjects still very much in active contention.
Like many historians of the last couple decades, his work is greatly helped by post-Soviet access to Soviet-era archives. The situations in eastern Europe in his period of study are often just plain weirder than the ones in the west, far more tangled and obfuscated, and he does a good job chronicling how improved sources of information change good judgments. But he doesn't gloss over the complications in the west, and has especially good readings of how the western victors interfered with local elections and administrations to get their right-wing favorites into power along with his look at how the Soviets did the same with theirs.
A remarkable book, this, in which Lowe never abandons compassion and the wish for justice and peace, while not turning away from the challenge of showing how far both were from so many people's lives well after war was officially over.