A review by brucemri
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Ιωάννης Χαλαζιάς, Keith Lowe
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.