Abstract
Reviewed by: Gary Bruce, University of Waterloo
As most travellers to Europe quickly realize, it is hard to sort out one’s feelings about the continent. One can, for example, attend Berlin’s Philharmonie, home to one of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras. Before listening to the music inside, an interested tourist might be drawn to the small exhibition on the grounds of this German cultural icon. Here, she would learn that during the Nazi era, the euthanasia program, which killed more than 200,000 individuals with disabilities (including 5000 children), was housed at the same location: Tiergartenstrasse-4, or T-4 as the program came to be called. To be clear, the Berlin symphony today performs not down the street from the former T-4 headquarters, nor around the corner; it occupies the very same physical space.
It is to this frustrating dual legacy that Konrad Jarausch turns in his sweeping synthesis of Europe in the twentieth century. How was it possible that Europe’s worst traits materialized in an era when the health, education, and prosperity of most Europeans had improved dramatically? Jarausch frames his answer within the concept of modernity. Although there are many different understandings of the term “modernism,” most scholars would agree with Jarausch that the European modern age is characterized by large bureaucracies, factory production, nation-states, an almost slavish devotion to science and technology, and an urbanized population. For Jarausch, the challenge that Europe faced in the twentieth century, and continues to face, is how to harness the benign aspects of modernity while keeping its destructive forces in check.
Although Out of Ashes is a history of Europe in its entirety, the emphasis is on the main powers of northern Europe. Countries such as Spain, Italy, Poland, and Yugoslavia appear in the narrative on occasion, but England, France, Germany, and Russia/Soviet Union receive sustained attention. The latter merit a place of prominence by virtue of their substantial economic and military power, but incorporating some of the most interesting aspects of recent transnational history, including the ability of smaller powers to influence larger ones, would have added more current texture to the traditional approach.
Jarausch moves quickly from the opening section on European thirst for colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to discuss the path to the First World War. Eager to break free from the tired school question on the “origins of World War I,” Jarausch focuses on the reasons for the breakdown of peace instead of the causes of war. After all, given the long periods of peace and increasing international ties that had characterized the previous century, there was every reason to believe that Europeans would avoid war. Jarausch pins responsibility for the first of Europe’s deadly wars in the twentieth century on the leaders of Europe’s major powers who, in their narrow-minded self-interest, made catastrophic decisions that unravelled the European diplomatic order. Spreading the blame equally, with perhaps a touch more finger pointing at Russia for escalating a local crisis to a continental war, Jarausch echoes the view of most European historians that no single country was to blame. It seems that we have now definitively left behind Fritz Fischer’s provocative ideas of the 1960s, which placed the blame for both world wars squarely on Germany.
The Golden 1920s, those far-too-brief five years at the end of the decade, which saw confident Europeans spending money in gleaming department stores and vacationing in booming centres like Berlin, came to an abrupt end when the Great Depression threw 20 million Europeans out of work. Even reasonable people sought out the Soviet and Nazi alternatives to what many considered defunct democracies and the capitalist god that had failed. Jarausch proposes that Nazism and Stalinism were two answers to the challenge of modernity. These totalitarian ideologies may have differed in their approach (in particular an economy dictated by the market rather than commanded centrally, and a “solution” in the unity of race rather than class), but Jarausch maintains that the societal issues that they purported to resolve arose similarly from modernism.
Jarausch’s expertise in German history comes through in his insightful discussion of the Nazi period. On the Holocaust, he aligns with scholars such as Zygmunt Bauman who see the genocide not as a radical departure from an otherwise civilized European historical path but rather as part and parcel of modernism. Rudolf Höß, the bureaucratic functionary-murderer who led Auschwitz for nearly four years, typifies for Jarausch “the murderous potential of modernity” (368).
After an Allied victory in the Second World War, which Jarausch sees as in part the result of a vastly superior industrial output over the Axis powers (the Allies produced five times as many tanks, for example), Europe began its tentative path “out of ashes.” Jarausch makes readers aware of the porous nature of the Iron Curtain. Rather than an impermeable barrier, the dividing line between liberalism and communism in postwar Europe served as a mirror by which both sides evaluated their own societies. Due to this mutual influence, capitalist democracies became more socialist, with the introduction of an expansive welfare net, while communist countries catered increasingly to civil rights.
Jarausch’s massive survey, which ranges across topics from the Bauhaus movement to the gold standard, is a welcome tonic in an age when historians and their graduate students write ever-narrower theses. It is also a powerful antidote in these nationalistic times. Disheartened by the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, Jarausch nevertheless sees reason to hope that Europe will learn from its past and recognize the mutual benefits that accrue from economic cooperation and, above all, a reduction in enmity. Whig history, with its eurocentrism and its emphasis on the steady march of progress, may be out of fashion, but Jarausch is right on this count: how can humanity move forward without at least a modicum of hope that things are going to get better?