Keith LoweBesprekingen

CUPRINS

1. Introducere - pag. 9

PARTEA I - MOSTENIREA RAZBOIULUI

2. Distrugerea fizica - pag. 19
3. Absenta - pag. 30
4. Stramutarea - pag. 49
5. Foametea - pag. 57
6. Distrugerea morala - pag. 67
7. Speranta - pag. 91
8. Peisajul haosului - pag. 102

PARTEA A II-A - RAZBUNAREA

9. Setea de sange - pag. 109
10. Lagarele eliberate - pag. 113
11. Razbunarea inabusita: munca fortata - pag. 133
12. Prizonierii de razboi germani - pag. 153
13. Razbunare nestavilita: Europa de Est - pag. 170
14. Dusmanul din interior - pag. 196
15. Razbunare impotriva femeilor si a copiilor - pag. 219
16. Scipul razbunarii - pag. 239

PARTEA A III-A - PURIFICAREA ETNICA

17. Optiuni in vreme de razboi - pag. 249
18. Fuga evreilor - pag. 252
19. Purificarea etnica a Ucrainei si a Poloniei - pag. 279
20. Expulzarea germanilor - pag. 301
21. Europa la scara mica: Iugoslavia - pag. 324
22. Toleranta in Vest, intoleranta in Est - pag. 344

PARTEA A IV-A - RAZBOI CIVIL

23. Razboiul din interiorul razboaielor - pag. 351
24. Violenta politica in Franta si Italia - pag. 357
25. Razboiul civil din Grecia - pag. 379
26. Un musafir nepoftit: comunismul in Romania - pag. 403
27. Subjugarea Europei de Est - pag. 422
28. Rezistenta "Fratilor Padurii" - pag. 433
29. Oglinda Razboiului Rece - pag. 457

30. Concluzii - pag. 464
31. Multumiri - pag. 480
32. Bibliografie - pag. 482
33. Note - pag. 506
34. Indice - pag. 561

La Segunda Guerra Mundial dejó a Europa sumida en el caos. Paisajes y cultivos destruidos, ciudades completamente arrasadas y más de 35 millones de muertos. En la mayor parte del continente, las instituciones como la policía, los medios de comunicación, el transporte, los gobiernos locales y nacionales, habían dejado de existir. Los índices de criminalidad aumentaron, las economías colapsaron y los ciudanos europeos estaban al límite de la extenuación.

An interesting and well written history of an understudied historical period. I'd really never read anything about the years immediately after WWII in Europe, and I guess I'd just never really thougth about how horrible it must have been. Great book.

This book should be required reading for serious WWII historians. Lowe deals with a subject that is often glossed over....what happened (and how it has been mythologized) in the immediate aftermath of the war. "The story of Europe in the immediate postwar period is therefore not primarily one of reconstruction and rehabilitation - it is firstly a story of the descent into anarchy." Further, Lowe opens our eyes to how the story was not simply one of a local person supporting their state against the Nazi occupiers. That local person could also have been fighting wars against people of different religions, different ethnicities, against the government of the state, against other neighbors who might be of different political persuasions, etc. "The sheer variety of grievances that existed in 1945 demonstrates not only how universal the war had been, but also how inadequate is our traditional way of understanding it." This _IS_ a difficult book to read....both because of the subject matter and keeping track of the particular conflict Lowe is focusing on at the moment, and how that conflict relates to other conflicts. But that doesn't make it unreadable or not worth the time it takes to read it. Can't recommend highly enough.

I found this to be a really excellent book. Lowe has a style that is easily understandable and relatable...lots of use of first person which is unusual in a history book but I didn't mind it. I found the last chapter to be tedious. Lowe is trying to explain to a younger generation why we should or should not memorialize the people of Hamburg or the Allied aircrews who carried out the bombing and ends up talking in circles. He makes some good points but they are lost amid the constant "on the other hand." The result was a real letdown after some very good informative chapters about the actual event. But great maps, and amazing appendices. I'll read more from Lowe.

Brutal and unrelenting. An extremely hard book to read, where every new page brings to light a new atrocity. The machinations of the world powers post WWII are thoroughly sifted through and show that no one, including those bronzed heroes of yesteryear was on the side of angels. Highly recommended.

Good stuff--well written, plenty of facts, a few too many anecdotes, but not too long. Not quite as good as 'The Vanquished,' which is a similar idea applied to the first world war, but certainly more worth reading than yet another book about how world war II started or played out.

M.2.3

This book is not for the faint of heart. Every time you think you've just read the worst thing that humans can do to other humans, you turn the page and realize that wasn't the worst. It explains why Europe was the way it was when I was growing up and even into early adulthood, but I had never heard or read of these things before. Wow.

A little slow to start the book, but pacing picked up and by the end was reading 20 pages at a time without even noticing that I read that many. Very insightful look into a period of history that I didn't know all that much about.

A charming children's book about how you can make undesired food palatable with some condiments.
The story is fine, but the illustrations really bring these superheroes to life. I absolutely love the style of the art and bought this book on that alone, despite my youngest now being 15 and a veritable artist with ketchup.½

The immediate aftermath of WWII is an oft-glossed over historical moment that deserves much more attention. Lowe does a very thorough job of not only exploring how WWII was more than just the Axis v. Allies, Good v. Evil but instead a tangled chaotic mess of conflicts regarding nations, ethnicities, territory, and ideologies and these conflicts didn't end with V-E Day.

The importance of Lowe's work is in portraying how these little-known conflicts can be used by ideologues to "prove" historical culpability of those they oppose. When the numbers are removed from historical context and myths are allowed to become accepted fact, right-wing nationalists are able to encourage further prejudice against their targets. Lowe's use of statistics and narrative to explain how no one came out of WWII without blood on their hands is an important way history can be employed to fight back against extremism.

In making the point that history is never totally objective, it is commonplace to observe that it is usually written by “the winners”; this book reads like a history written by one its losers. The author documents what has happened to the world after – and as a result of - the second world war, and he is disappointed with everything. In each of the spheres that his very comprehensive account covers – political and social philosophies, economics and law, international geopolitical developments – nothing has worked out as, in the eyes of the author, it was intended or hoped for.

In his opening chapters, Lowe explains how the war gave rise to a number of “myths” about heroes, martyrs and monsters. The perpetuation of these so-called myths after the war is, in the author’s view, one of the main reasons why things have gone wrong since. The myth of the “greatest generation” of heroes, the men who returned home having defeated the Nazi and Japanese monsters, led to an American triumphalism which forced it to look for new enemies at the end of the war in order to provide a unifying cause to distract from domestic differences. This, in turn, led to the demonization of communism at home (The “Red Scare”, McCarthyism) and abroad (the USSR). In place of the cooperation that characterized their relationships during the war, the myth of “evil” defeated the “the impetus to unite”, and led the USA and the USSR to demonize each other.

The author’s view of post-war history as having been steered by misleading myths, leads him to avoid calling things - or maybe even seeing things for - what they are. Not all Nazis were evil; there were “infinite gradations of guilt and innocence in the Holocaust”. He makes a specious philosophical distinction between being an evil person and committing evil acts. The Japanese doctor, whose wartime job involved dissecting living people and who suffered post-war remorse about this, should not – in Lowe’s view - be defined as monster and war-criminal; he should be judged by the circumstances of the the time and his subsequent mental realignment. His evil acts were just the consequence of the superiors who directed him to do it and the regime that created an environment in which this inhumanity was permissible. How many more times do we have to hear the excuse that people were “just following orders”?

Another result of his reluctance to call a spade a spade is the way that he insists on the essential equivalence between the USA and the Soviet Union. The latter was not a monster like Nazi Germany, and the use of the description “totalitarian” to describe the two regimes, conflates two “different ideologies”. Thus Stalin’s “terror” regime - the repression and murder of minorities, ethnic groups, the intelligentsia, Jews, etc, etc. - was just a more extreme and less opposed version of American domestic repression of communists. The subjugation of eastern Europe by the Soviets was not primarily about the spread of communism, but about protecting the motherland from future attack; it was just a reaction to America’s power at the end of the war, and its possession of nuclear weapons. Andrey Sakharov, the father of the Soviet Hydrogen bomb and later dissident, is one of the author’s poster children; but his later life, in which he served 8 years of internal exile, and during which time his sick wife was refused medical treatment, is referred to only as the Soviet authorities’ “irritation” at his dissidence.

The author’s biggest disappointment is how the post-war world has been driven by nationalism, a force which led to global conflict in the first place and which – as a consequence – might have been seen for the evil that he believes it to be. He documents the ragged course of post-war independence of new, often post-colonial, nations in Asia and Africa and identifies the twin evils that plagued them – a failure to see beyond a parochial nationalism and the Cold War, which was the root cause of much outside interference in these countries. The fact that all of the Latin American countries had emerged as separate nations already a century and a half earlier, hardly supports the author’s thesis about the disruptive influence of post-war nationalism in that part of the world; non the less he forces it into his analysis.

Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel is of course one of the prime manifestations of the follies of nationalism. Israel with its “network of self-serving myths” embodies everything that the author most deplores about the post-war world. In a chapter entitled “Israel; Nation of Archetypes” he describes all the myths that make up Israel – a nation of heroes and victims, a nation that created the “Arab other”; Israel has turned every threat into a new Holocaust and every enemy, the Arabs in particular, into new Nazi “monsters”. In spite of his explicit recognition of the enduring and disproportionate nature of the world’s bias against the Jewish State, he is unable to see its establishment as the only means of protecting Jews from the world’s prejudices; in Lowe’s view, Israel is a botched attempt to “abolish prejudice”. The way to do that, he says, is for the Jews to forget their history – strange advice from a historian - then they could just be ordinary!

In his final chapters, he brings us right up to date with all the deplorable things - the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the emergence of right wing anti-immigration parties - that have happened in the last few years. The final flourish of his “myth” trope - that anti-Muslim sentiment is just a new resurgence of the fear of Nazism – unfortunately takes him into a world wholly of his own invention: “Muslims now occupy the same place in the European imagination that Jews did at the beginning of the 20th century: the actions of a tiny minority opened the door to the demonization of an entire religion.” I must have missed reading the chapter in which some Jews waged a campaign of world-wide terrorism!

There is much to admire in this book. It is a very informed survey of global history since 1945; it is very readable, and the use of a cameo description of a real person’s life story to introduce the theme of each chapter or section, provides a nice variation in pace. However, the author’s fixation on myths, and his hatred of nationalism, mean that everything has to be force-fitted – even when it contradicts the facts – into a rather warped view of the world.

Great. I really enjoy European history and WWII history in particular. And I hadn't really been aware of what Europe had been like in the immediate aftermath of the war. This book is dark, dark, dark. But very interesting.

This is a well-written book about a controversial subject. The author brings a balanced approach to the book, neither demonising the Germans nor engaging in the ritual of RAF-bashing that has become increasingly popular in the last 20 years. Instead, he presents a very readable account of a tragedy for all who were associated with the aerial bombing of
Germany. If you want to read a book about the bombing war against Germany, this is the one.

For a person well read in the history of WW2 this book really exposed a huge gap in my own knowledge about the aftermath. In many ways it was worse for more people than the war itself. Who needs to read about the zombie apocalypse? Europe was the apocalypse defined and it was not pretty. The numbers in every realm of human suffering are more or less mind-blowing and hard to 'appreciate' (not that you really want to). Credit to the author for trying to humanize the story with little vignettes to illustrate the nature of the suffering but no one can describe the thousands, millions of lives ended, ruined or damaged without losing the reader completely. It seems he struck a good balance between overview and detail. The book could have easily been twice as long just trying to catalog the litany of suffering and vengeance but again there was enough to tell the 'story' while retaining readability. A fairly nice bibliography will allow readers to delve deeper if so interested. I emerged with more questions on the Greek Civil War. At the end you marvel that Europe was able to recover as it did which is a testimony itself to human resilience.½

WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 2012
Review, Keith Lowe, SAVAGE CONTINENT
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Released: July 3, 2012

ISBN-13: 978-1-250-00020-0

Softcover: 460 pages

Publisher contact: John Karle 646-307-5546 john.karle@stmartins.com

Nonfiction History Military History & Affairs World War II

Keith Lowe is a novelist and the author of Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg 1943, a critically acclaimed examination of the background for and implementation of the western Allies’ decision to destroy major German cities by fire.

***

What really happened in Europe after May 8/9, 1945 has remained largely unknown to the general public, especially in the United States. Keith Lowe argues, in the Introduction to Savage Continent, that neither historians nor the members of the foreign business and government elites who worked on the resurrection of western Europe ever wrote publicly about the reality of “life on the ground” in the immediate postwar era. They chose instead to depict the period as one in which Europe “rose like a phoenix from the ashes of destruction.”

Keith Lowe is not silly enough to contend that Europe did not ultimately rise “like a phoenix”. He is perceptive enough to know, however, that this did not happen either quickly or immediately after the war, and that it would likely not have happened the way it did without the East/West political conflict and the resultant Marshall Plan. But as Lowe makes abundantly clear, Savage Continent is not about the happy ending brought to Europe by the Marshall Plan and related western intervention. It is about the several immediate postwar years during which Europeans availed themselves of the opportunity to “settle scores”.

Lowe makes clear from the beginning of Savage Continent that his work is not the product of original research. Instead, he synthesizes a raft of existing books and articles written by many disparate authors. Lowe does a masterful job in bringing this material together in order to give the reader a more comprehensive description of the process by which Europe continued sinking into the moral abyss that filled the void left by the war’s conclusion.

The author’s prose is compelling, and nowhere more favorably demonstrated than in the first three paragraphs of his introduction, in which he invites the reader to “Imagine a world without institutions”. In such a world, there would be no governments, no education, no way of knowing about the rest of the world or communicating with it, no means of locomotion, no jobs, no money, no food, and utter chaos instead of law and order. These things strike one as the product of an overactive imagination, but Lowe cautions us to recognize that there remain several “hundreds of thousands of people alive today” who experienced such a way of living throughout Europe in the years after the end of the Second World War.

In order to best describe the events with which he deals, Lowe breaks the story down into manageable portions. He uses his first such section, called “The Legacy of War”, to lay the literal and figurative groundwork for the rest of his work. Here we are confronted with such horrors as the purposeful destruction during 1944-1945, on direct orders from Adolf Hitler, of “93 per cent of Warsaw’s dwellings”, as well as many priceless architectural treasures such as Pilsudski Square, the Jesuit Church, and the Royal Castle, along with numerous archives and libraries, including their contents.

There was also the partial or complete destruction, primarily by aerial bombing, of hundreds of cities throughout Europe, the nearly complete devastation of both cities and countryside in European Russia, the “de-housing” of 10 million Ukrainians and 18-20 million Germans, the obliteration of tens of thousands of places of work like factories, mines, and shipyards, and the reduction of the European transportation system to pre-Industrial Revolution standards through the destruction of roads, railroad tracks, harbors and canals.

Apart from the physical destruction of much of Europe, the war brought about the destruction of families, the displacement of millions of people, and perhaps most importantly, the catastrophic and nearly total undermining of moral standards, especially as they related to human interaction and the relationship between the powerful and the weak. And it is this aspect of the war’s legacy that is well documented and described in the remaining three parts of Lowe’s work.

Each of those parts is grim in the extreme. In the second section of the book, the author speaks to the question of vengeance, the all-consuming sentiment of those peoples who were on the receiving end of brutality for four years and more. So aroused were the victims of fascism that Europe was tortured for several more years beyond the coming of “peace”, wallowing in a pall of human suffering and grief the like of which had not been seen since the Thirty Years War. Yet further millions of human beings were brutally murdered, deliberately starved or frozen to death, herded into death camps, and otherwise brutalized for no other reason than that their existence was intolerable to others.

What we now refer to as “ethnic cleansing” was often treated as sport by the newly empowered in postwar Europe. It expressed the longings of its perpetrators not only for vengeance against their former masters, but also for their long-nurtured loathing and envy of their neighbors of differing ethnic background. Those groups with the upper hand seized the land and belongings of their victims, and drove them out of their traditional homes, often through the wilderness and in the dead of winter. By far the most victimized groups in this respect were large populations of ethnic Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia, whom their persecutors drove pitilessly west, out of the homes that they had occupied for centuries. Millions more human beings died miserably as a result of these forced “relocations”; most of the victims were women, children and the aged, as the majority of the able-bodied men had long since died in combat or were toiling without respite in a gulag of Soviet prisoner of war camps.

The last of Lowe’s topics is the series of civil wars that wracked Europe from the end of the war until the early 1950’s. These conflicts, which raged in France and Italy, as well as in Greece and Romania, stemmed from long-standing political disputes and were often exacerbated by the wartime collusion of one or another faction with the Nazis or Italian fascists. The already volatile relationships between differing political groups in these countries were not mollified by mutual accusations of treason. The result was yet another round of political murders, mass killings, and general lawlessness.

In Savage Continent Keith Lowe has continued the tradition of the synthesis in historical writing, and in doing so has made accessible to both the specialist and the general public a gruesome story of revenge in mid-twentieth century Europe. That story rarely sees the light of day, even though it is one that is important to readers trying to make sense of the Second World War. It would seem that one of the most important rewards given to the reader of Savage Continent is the understanding that the Second World War, including the Holocaust and like crimes against humanity, was not an aberrant event brought about solely through the agency of a blood-thirsty tyrant and his fanatical followers. Nazi Germany was but one of many places in Europe where groups of people consumed by fear of “the Other”, when provided with an opportunity to exorcise their fears, seized the chance to eradicate those fears as well as “the Other” itself.

A historian who goes the extra mile to get a better understanding of the issues. Definitely not afraid to take on sacred cows of history or cherished myths. Very good organization with flow of ideas developed in a coherent manner. Unusually good prose for historical writing, very fluid, no need for those pauses and backtracking where you have to untangle the meaning.

5230. Savage Continent Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe (read 20 Dec 2014) This tells of the conflicts in Europe after World War II, concentrating on the years 1945 and 1946. Mostly it tells of the conflict between Russian supported forces and those opposing those forces. It is pretty balanced, not hesitating to condemn either side for violent and treacherous behavior. It tells of the conflicts in Norway, Italy, and France--where Communists did not triumph, and then tells the dismal story of how Eastern Europe fell into Communist tyranny. It is not a pleasant story and I could not enjoy the book, and did not learn anything that surprised me. Some of the violence of the west European countries as they took revenge on the Hitler-supporting people in their countries was not well-known to me. Countries like Norway, which had long eschewed capital punishment, brought it back to deal with Hitler-supporting countrymen. Fortunately after that they again abandoned capital punishment.½

Most histories of WWII end with Germany's surrender. That is where this picks up. At times, the descriptions of the brutality and chaos (and it wasn't just the Russians) is at times difficult to get through, but this is a must for anyone interested in how modern Europe came to be. Also, if you think nation building is wasy, because we did in in Europe. Read this. Massive resettlement (today we call it ethnic cleansing) of populations. People who thought nation building in Afganistan or Iraq would be easy should have read this.

Perhaps the ultimate argument against anarchy is a history of how people behave, what it's really like, when it occurs. This is an excellent look at a forgotten period of history; the first few years post World War II in Europe.

I'm no historian, and I've never given much thought to the immediate aftermath of World War II in Europe. I knew that the Marshall Plan was devised and implemented to help rebuild the gutted economy and infrastructure, and that the Soviets grabbed much of Eastern Europe. But that was about it.
This book documents in considerable detail what actually happened. The fracturing that occurred when nationalities that shared pre-war countries took advantage of the chaotic situation to drive each other out. The vengeance extracted against collaborators. The conflicts that arose when displaced persons returned to their former homes and found them either destroyed or else occupied or looted by their neighbors.½

After the horror, more horrors still -- Keith Lowe's compelling book about Europe in the aftermath of WWII shows just how devastated the continent was, and how the devastation continued for months and years. His graphic descriptions make clear the extent to which physical and social structures were totally eradicated by VE Day. This left survivors without food, shelter, or any protection from other, stronger survivors -- women, being less likely to be armed, were prime targets. I found particularly telling his story of British observers who expected the sort of devastation they saw at home when they went to the continent, but saw something far, far worse -- unimaginably worse. And his narrative of events after the war shows the extent to which conflict persisted, in waves of crime, in civil wars, in ethnic cleansing, and all manner of violence in between. He buttresses the narrative with statistics, which he makes a serious attempt to evaluate, illustrating that claims of victimhood multiplied through and after the period. Eventually, the stories and numbers of expulsions, battles, and killings have a numbing effect. One might criticize Lowe's book for the absence of individual experiences of the horror, which might prevent the numbing: Ian Buruma's "Year Zero" does show the experiences of individuals, which may be why it is a more affecting read. But Lowe's book is intended to be general, not particular. It an attempt to show as accurately as possible the devastation that was Europe in 1945, and it succeeds. The only wonder is that most Europeans who lived through the war and the immediate postwar went on to rebuild societies, to have children, and to live what looked like normal lives.

A very thorough and detailed analysis of the aftermath of WWII in Europe. While informative this was almost "over the top"- too much - statistics upon statistics. The general premise that the unrest and instability the European governments and cultures experienced after WWII were seeded even before the war by the ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts between countries and cultures is valid. This book almost overdoes the analysis. Example after example - atrocity after atrocity - slaughter after slaughter - revenge upon revenge. This telling, at times, makes one wonder if the whole thing was worth the sacrifice made by and the loss of so much from so many countries. Was this continent really worth it ?

A very powerful account of the destruction of Hamburg, Germany by allied (US & British) air power. This is made all the more interesting by detailing the historical background of the city as well as how Hamburg and Germany struggled to recover from this assault. The actual description of the bombing and it's effects are horrible, sobering, and depressing.

Is it really an indicator of how far we have come as a species - how easily we can destroy one-another ?½