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 Südbahnhof: 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-European revolutions. Visiting Vienna in October 1999 I found the Westbahnhof covered in posters for the Freedom Party of Jörg Haider who, despite his open admiration for the ‘honourable men’ of the Nazi armies who ‘did their duty’ on the eastern front, won 27 percent of the vote that year by mobilizing his fellow Austrians’ anxiety and incomprehension at the changes that had taken place in their world over the past decade. After nearly half a century of quiescence Vienna—like the rest of Europe—had re-entered history.
This book tells the story of Europe since the Second World War and so it begins in 1945: Stunde nul, as the Germans called it—Zero hour. But like everything else in the twentieth-century its story is back-shadowed by the thirty-year war that began in 1914, when the European continent embarked upon its descent into catastrophe. The First World War itself was a traumatic killing field for all the participants—half of Serbia’s male population between 18 and 55 died in the fighting—but it resolved nothing. Germany (contrary to widespread belief at the time) was not crushed in the war or the post-war settlement: in that case its rise to near-total domination of Europe a mere twenty-five years later would be hard to explain. Indeed, because Germany didn’t pay its First World War debts the cost of victory to the Allies exceeded the cost of defeat to Germany, which thus emerged relatively stronger than in 1913. The ‘German problem’ that had surfaced in Europe with the rise of Prussia a generation before remained unsolved.
The little countries that emerged from the collapse of the old land empires in 1918 were poor, unstable, insecure—and resentful of their neighbours. Between the wars Europe was full of ‘revisionist’ states: Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria had all been defeated in the Great War and awaited an occasion for territorial redress. After 1918 there was no restoration of international stability, no recovered equilibrium between the powers: merely an interlude born of exhaustion. The violence of war did not abate. It metamorphosed instead into domestic affairs—into nationalist polemics, racial prejudice, class confrontation and civil war. Europe in the Twenties and especially the Thirties entered a twilight zone between the afterlife of one war and the looming anticipation of another.
The internal conflicts and inter-state antagonisms of the years between the world wars were exacerbated—and in some measure provoked—by the accompanying collapse of the European economy. Indeed economic life in Europe was struck a triple blow in those years. The First World War distorted domestic employment, destroyed trade and devastated whole regions—as well as bankrupting states. Many countries—in central Europe above all—never recovered from its effects. Those that did were then brought low again in the Slump of the Thirties, when deflation, business failures and desperate efforts to erect protective tariffs against foreign competition resulted not only in unprecedented levels of unemployment and wasted industrial capacity but also the collapse of international trade (between 1929 and 1936 Franco-German commerce fell by 83 percent), accompanied by bitter inter-state competition and resentment. And then came the Second World War, whose unprecedented impact upon the civilian populations and domestic economies of the affected nations is discussed in Part One of this book.