Abstract
Conan Fischer, Europe between Democracy and Dictatorship, 1900–1945, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011; xii + 395 pp.; £19.99 pbk; ISBN 9780631215127
Choices, choices and yet more choices: few would envy the task that Conan Fischer took upon himself by agreeing to write the 1900–45 volume of the Wiley-Blackwell History of Europe. No period surely throws up more formidable problems of selection, prioritization and simple coherence, as Europe (if there was such an entity) staggered through a series of crises, the scope and intensity of which defy any simple account. Fischer is fully aware of these difficulties, and at times seems a little intimidated by the ‘labyrinthine complexity’ (xi) of his task. Central to these is how one conceives the overall shape of the period. In the introductory chapter Fischer adopts a rather familiar decline-and-fall paradigm, contrasting the pattern of civilized European life in 1900, symbolized by the splendour of the KaDeWe department store in Berlin, with the horror of Auschwitz. But, by the end of the volume, Fischer seems a little less wedded to this tale of gloom, emphasizing the ‘countless features’ (330) of the history of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century – notably the Franco-German partnership that lay at the heart of the post-1945 process of European integration – which had their origins in the interwar years. The predominantly German focus of these examples is not accidental. This is an emphatically, if not explicitly, Germanocentric history of Europe. The priority Fischer accords to diplomacy and war (and there was plenty of it) might almost suggest that the sub-title of the volume should have been ‘Germany’s Quest for Ascendancy’. Germany is dominant throughout the early chapters, from ‘The Coming of War’ to ‘Fighting the War’ and ‘Ending the War’. These three chapters dominate the volume, and are the most successful. Fischer’s grasp of the complexities of the military-diplomatic history of the era of the First World War (and its historiography) gives them an assured confidence, which falters a little as the volume moves into the interwar period.
Here, the focus on Germany becomes a little constraining. This is a history of Europe which accords more space to the Ruhr Crisis than to the Spanish Civil War, and which, as he admits in the Preface, considers the history of ‘the “peripheral” and smaller nations of Europe’ only ‘as far as space has allowed’ (xi). This was no doubt a pragmatic decision, but it does not greatly suit the more devolved, indeed fractured, history of Europe in the interwar years. The consequence is the rather disjointed tone of the chapter on the 1930s (‘High Noon of the Dictators’ is its rather unsatisfactory title), in which Fischer hurries from state to state, providing brief and rather inadequate summaries of events in Fascist Italy, Spain, and everywhere else, which often rely rather too visibly on some rapid historiographical cramming on his part. France, in particular, gets slender coverage, with only six pages on its entire interwar politics. Limitations of this kind are of course well-nigh inevitable, and Fischer’s declared honesty in citing directly the words of the historians upon whose work he draws is one of the more endearing features of the volume – even if this reader became weary of the formula ‘as Payne has argued’. Only rarely are we allowed a break from the somewhat remorseless diet of high politics, diplomacy and war. An excellent section (187–98) on ‘A Contested Modernity’ briefly lets in telephones, cinemas, cars, hats and photography (albeit again from a largely German perspective), but all too soon we are back in the ‘Economic Armageddon’ of the Great Depression. Above all, problems of space develop as the volume proceeds. Halfway through the volume, Fischer is still (like the French) stuck in the Ruhr, and everything thereafter seems a bit of a rush. We only arrive at the Third Reich on page 221, a little more than a hundred pages from the end, and there is nothing like the same depth of treatment of the Second World War as there is of the previous conflict.
Fischer indeed seems inclined to stop early, declaring with some weariness (311) that ‘[in] many senses, therefore, time was called on our story during 1940 or 1941’. Nevertheless, he continues dutifully with his task to 1945; but Europe, or more exactly what he terms ‘the European global age’, was already, in his opinion, over, and everything that happened in the remaining years of the war (the collapse of overseas empires, the establishment of Soviet hegemony in east-central Europe and the arrival of the USA as the dominant force in the West) served to reinforce that conclusion. Well, perhaps; but of course it depends on what one means by ‘Europe’. The Europe that Fischer describes – the Europes of Wilhelm II, Stresemann and indeed of Hitler – had reached their nemesis by 1941. But there were always other Europes, and their demise was not so evident. Indeed, part of the difficulty of writing a textbook account of this period is that it was in many respects a hinge era, in which a certain European trajectory that began with the Second Reich in 1871 reached its terminus, but other European histories – those of a 1917 Communism, of a resurgent Catholic politics or of social democracy – began later and only reached their fruition after the Second World War. In that sense, Fischer’s well-documented account, admirable as it is in its own terms, remains a history only of a certain Europe.