OPINION:
OUT OF THE ASHES: A NEW HISTORY OF EUROPE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Princeton University Press, $39.50, 867 pages
If you were to read only one book about the history of Europe in the 20th century, Konrad Jarausch is your man. His “Out of the Ashes” is in many ways an admirable work. Although he writes and teaches in America, Mr. Jarausch was born in Germany and received a rigorous, classical “Gymnasium” education including Greek, Latin and Hebrew. It has left its mark. German scholarship has always excelled at erudition, sometimes bordering on pedantry, and at painting the big picture one painstaking brush stroke at a time. Mr. Jarausch piles on the facts and figures and produces a weighty volume that — like most German automobiles — is competently designed, well-assembled, sturdy and reliable, without being particularly stylish. Fortunately, what the author’s prose style lacks in animation is more than made up for by his subject matter. As he states in his preface, the 20th century European experience “presents a story of unparalleled drama, ranging from suffering and self-destruction to civility and prosperity.”
It all seemed so promising in 1900. But what began as an age of optimism with apparently open-ended economic, educational, technological and scientific progress within a stable framework — with the exception of absolutist Imperial Russia — of parliamentary republics and constitutional monarchies, quickly degenerated into a hellish scenario:
“European nations all too soon became embroiled in the bloodshed of the Great War that shook their confidence to the core. After a temporary respite during the 1920s, the competition between communist, fascist, and democratic ideologies led to an even more devastating Second World War … that has become synonymous with the human capacity for evil. In spite of the subsequent Cold War confrontation … the devastated continent emerged out of the ashes of self-immolation to regain a surprising measure of peace and affluence. Moreover, an unforeseen peaceful revolution spread liberal capitalism to Eastern Europe as well.”
The “interpretive challenge,” Mr. Jarausch writes, is to “render the succession of such reversals, ruptures, and displacements intelligible.” Even if he sometimes fails to make the inconceivable horrors of the age fully “intelligible,” he does catalogue them with Teutonic thoroughness. One is occasionally surprised by unscholarly lapses. Thus the author jumbles together several phases of Ottoman and Turkish history when he writes that “in 1908 the Young Turk Movement under Mustafa Kemal, called Ataturk, sought to modernize Istanbul in order to salvage the Turkish core.”
In fact, Ataturk was only a support player in the 1908 Young Turk coup, and was skeptical about its leadership’s eager — and ultimately disastrous — plunge into World War I on the side of the Central Powers. His postwar armed resistance to Allied attempts to partition what remained of the Ottoman Empire, and his establishment of the modern Turkish Republic, were all part of a new nationalist movement supplanting the failed Young Turk attempt at modernizing and preserving the empire itself. And one is disappointed to find that neither the author nor his publishers know how to spell the last name of the most significant of Great Britain’s inter-war prime ministers: it’s Stanley Baldwin, not “Baldwyn.”
Mr. Jarausch also tends to minimize the degree to which many of the best values of European civilization were preserved on the periphery rather than in the heart of the continent, largely by the Anglo-Saxon family of nations. In dealing with the post-World War II era leading to the triumphant end of the Cold War, some major players are ignored and others minimized: There are no indexed references to detente architects Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, only one for Pope John Paul II, three for Margaret Thatcher and four for Ronald Reagan. While Germany’s Helmut Kohl deserves his seven entries, Thatcher, Reagan and the pope were at least as instrumental in the fall of communism. Even the disgraced, longtime dictator of East Germany, Erich Honecker, is referred to more often than these three star players.
Finally, when Mr. Jarausch completed his manuscript in the summer of 2014, the euro was considerably stronger vis-a-vis what he calls “the almighty dollar” than it is today, the European Union was in much better shape, failed welfare states like Greece had not yet collapsed, the latest flood of Third World immigrants into countries with sharply declining native populations had barely begun, and Vladimir Putin was just starting to rattle his saber.
As much as one wants to share Mr. Jarausch’s optimism about the European future, it’s sometimes eerily reminiscent of the smug overconfidence that ushered in the beginning of Europe’s last century, two world wars and so many horrors ago.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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