Without such collective amnesia, Europe’s astonishing post-war recovery would not have been possible. To be sure, much was put out of mind that would subsequently return in discomforting ways. But only much later would it become clear just how much post-war Europe rested on foundation myths that would fracture and shift with the passage of years. In the circumstances of 1945, in a continent covered with rubble, there was much to be gained by behaving as though the past was indeed dead and buried and a new age about to begin. The price paid was a certain amount of selective, collective forgetting, notably in Germany. But then, in Germany above all, there was much to forget.
III. The Rehabilitation of Europe
‘All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order’.
‘The all but general opinion seems to be that capitalist methods will be unequal to the task of reconstruction’.
‘A lot of us were disappointed in the Britain that we came back to… nobody could make it change overnight into the Britain we wanted’.
‘The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole’.
The sheer scale of the European calamity opened new opportunities. The war changed everything. A return to the way things had been before 1939 was out of the question almost everywhere. This was naturally the view of the young and the radical, but it was just as evident to perspicacious observers of an older generation. Charles De Gaulle, 54 years old when France was liberated and born into the conservative Catholic bourgeoisie of northern France, put the matter with characteristic precision: ‘During the catastrophe, beneath the burden of defeat, a great change had occurred in men’s minds. To many, the disaster of 1940 seemed like the failure of the ruling class and system in every realm.’
But the problems had not begun in 1940, either in France or elsewhere. Anti-Fascist resisters everywhere saw themselves in battle not just with the wartime occupiers and their local surrogates but with an entire political and social system which they held directly responsible for the disasters their countries had undergone. It was the politicians and bankers and businessmen and soldiers of the inter-war years who had brought their countries to catastrophe, who had betrayed the sacrifices of the First World War and laid the ground for the Second. These, in the words of a British pamphlet excoriating Conservative advocates of appeasement before 1940, were the ‘Guilty Men’. They, and their system, were the target of wartime plans for post-war change.
Resistance was thus everywhere implicitly revolutionary. This was inherent in its logic. To reject a society that had produced Fascism led one naturally ‘to a dream of revolution which would take off from a tabula rasa’ (Italo Calvino). In much of eastern Europe the slate was indeed wiped clean, as we have seen. But even in western Europe there was widespread expectation of dramatic and rapid social transformation: who, after all, would stand in its way?
Seen from the point of view of the wartime Resistance movements, post-war politics would be the continuation of their wartime struggle, a natural projection and extension of their clandestine existence. Many young men and women who came to the fore in the wartime underground had known no other form of public life: in Italy since 1924, in Germany, Austria and most of Eastern Europe since the early thirties, and throughout occupied continental Europe since 1940, normal politics were unknown. Political parties had been banned, elections rigged or abolished. To oppose the authorities, to advocate social change or even political reform, was to place your self beyond the law.
For this new generation, politics was therefore about resistance—resistance to authority, resistance to conventional social or economic arrangements, resistance to the past. Claude Bourdet, an activist in the French resistance and a prominent left-wing magazine editor and writer in the post-war years, captured the mood in his memoirs, L’aventure incertaine: ‘The Resistance’, he wrote, ‘turned us all into contestataires in every sense of the word, towards men as much as towards the social system.’ From resisting Fascism to resisting a post-war retreat to the errors of the thirties seemed a natural step. Out of this came the oddly optimistic mood upon which many observers remarked in the immediate aftermath of Liberation. In spite of the destitution all around—indeed, because of it—something new and better was bound to emerge. ‘None of us’ wrote the editors of the Italian review Società in November 1945, ‘recognizes his own past. It seems incomprehensible to us… Our life today is dominated by a sense of stupor and by an instinctive search for a direction. We are simply disarmed by the facts.’
The chief impediment to radical change in the aftermath of Hitler’s defeat was not the reactionaries or Fascists, who had thrown in their lot with the dictators and been swept away with them, but the legitimate governments-in-exile, most of which had sat out the war in London planning their return. They saw the local resistance organizations in their countries as a problem rather than as allies: careless youngsters who would need to be disarmed and returned to civilian life, leaving public affairs in the hands of a political class duly cleansed of collaborators and traitors. Anything less would mean anarchy—or else an indefinite occupation by Allied armies.
The wartime resistance groups, organized by 1944-45 into various political movements, were just as suspicious in return. For them, the politicians, functionaries and courtiers who had escaped the Occupation were doubly discredited: by their pre-war errors and by their subsequent absence. In France and Norway the legislators elected in 1936 were disqualified by their actions in 1940. In Belgium and the Netherlands their absence in the intervening five years had cut off the returning governments from any appreciation of local suffering and the change in public mood brought about under Nazi occupation. In central and eastern Europe, with the important exception of Czechoslovakia, the former governments were rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Red Army (though they were sometimes slow to grasp this).
The returning authorities were quite willing to compromise in matters of policy—in particular on social and economic reforms, as we shall see. What they insisted upon, however, was what De Gaulle and others perceived as an ‘orderly transition’. Since this was also the preference of the Allied occupying forces, West and East, the illusions of the Resistance were soon shattered. In eastern Europe (with the exception of Yugoslavia) it was the Soviets who determined the shape of post-war governments and who directed their actions. In western Europe, provisional authorities took office pending new elections. And in every case the resistance movements were encouraged and eventually forced to hand in their weapons and disband their organizations.