Europeans were not charging boldly into the future so much as building levees against the past.
Judt, Professor of History at New York University and Director of the Remarque Institute for European Studies there, is a transatlantic public intellectual -given his ties to Britain, France and the United States -who has argued passionately for history as a corrective to memory.
In his essays in the New York Review of Books and other journals, Judt has written widely and insightfully on how popular memory and state-inspired manipulation make thinking about the past an often partisan pursuit. These were themes in his earlier books on the French Left, on the myopia of some French intellectuals and the dissenting clairvoyance of others, and on the problematic calculus of memory, atonement and retribution. Following these lines of inquiry has at times made Judt a lodestone of controversy. A 2003 essay in which he referred to Israel as "an anachronism" and urged Israelis to reject the idea of a "Jewish state" in favour of a binational, Jewish/Arab one, brought both a robust exchange on the letters page of the New York Review and denunciations on extremist websites. But by chasing these lines where they lead, Judt has also made the Remarque Institute one of the more exciting venues for new research on modern Europe, a place where reading broadly and writing well are still valued.
Postwar surveys the history of Europe since 1945: the wreckage of war, the post-war reckoning and recovery, the emergence of Cold War politics, the dialectic of affluence and rebellion, the waning of power and expectations, the revolutionary dreams of 1989, and the emergence of a united yet complicated continent, still "fissile", in Judt's words, but unimaginably transformed over the past five decades. Judt's emphasis is on the ways in which Europeans, both literally and figuratively, have spent the last half-century crawling out from under the rubble, dusting themselves off, and trying to make sense of the ruins around them.
There is one sense in which this view of European affairs is obvious. The project of building a new Europe cannot be understood without reference to the miserable state of affairs at the end of the Second World War. Judt carefully recounts the scale of the damage, still shocking to consider: over 36 million dead, more than half of them non-combatants; tens of millions displaced and deported; entire cultures (and countries) wiped away; utter economic and political collapse. The war up-ended everything, in senses both horrible and ultimately fortuitous. The continent was divided, but that very division helped spur the consolidation of its Western half. Institutional and economic collapse allowed original thinking about how to organize the State. The substitution of new international rivalries for old ones meant that there was now room for, and powerful incentives for, reconciliation. But to read the book in this way -as an account of a new Europe built on a blank slate -is to miss Judt's central point. The war did more than destroy an old system. It also set up one of the enduring themes in Europe's long march away from 1945: the conscious struggle to misremember the past.
Trauma can produce three kinds of reactions. One is rugged determination, a courageous commitment to remake and rebuild. Another is nostalgia, a way of recalling the past that is selective and sepia-tinged. Yet another is creative amnesia, an effort to refashion the past so that it provides a coherent link to the imagined present. This third reaction is a quintessential marker of modernity, and as such it is the defining attribute of Blanche DuBois, nationalists, and, to a great degree, modern Europeans.
Amnesia has its uses, of course. It has facilitated the creation of a quasi state that was barely conceivable a few decades ago, a multifaceted and multilevel form of political and economic union that has knitted together the continent, improved the quality of life for its citizens, and inspired political change on its periphery. The next era in world affairs -if one believes in eras -might well be Europe's, or at least this Europe's. The old ghosts are still there, the ones of ethnic exclusivism, fractious politics, governments that promise too much and deliver too little. But the levees, by and large, have held, and what has been built behind them is, as Marxists used to say, of world-historical importance.
But creative amnesia is an act of will, and in Europe's case it has involved a particular relationship to victimhood which has produced both laudable soul-searching and a mental template that is difficult to escape. The Second World War, in great contrast to the First, shaped a way of thinking about violent conflict that made crimes more important than guilt. The grand bargain that led to continental reconciliation involved a conceptual innovation: that a war could end with former adversaries collectively avoiding blame but acknowledging responsibility. A nation could atone collectively, which was the point of Willy Brandt's dropping to his knees before the Warsaw Ghetto memorial; but it was the individual criminals who were to be punished: arrested and tried, or simply rooted out and exposed, for decades to come. Compared to the collective guilt on which past peace settlements had been built -and which lingered on in the mass expulsions in the Communist and postCommunist East -the focus on individual crimes was surely a kind of progress.
