The Atlantic Gap

Neal Ascherson

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt
Heinemann, 878 pp, £25.00, October 2005, ISBN 0 434 00749 8

As soon as you realise how good it is, this book will frighten you. This is not just a history. It is a highly intrusive biography, especially if, like me, you belong to the British generations who were children before and during the war. When we were learning to read, Europe was a dark word, an inaccessible ‘over there’ place of suffering and menace. But as we grew up and the war ended, so Europe changed into a shore which could be visited, a site for taking independent steps, accumulating our own experience, forming our early opinions. In other words, ‘postwar Europe’ is us. How will we look, in these pages?

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Vol. 27 No. 22 · 17 November 2005 » Neal Ascherson » The Atlantic Gap (print version)
pages 7-9 | 4264 words

Letters

From Jim Harper

Neal Ascherson thinks there’s a book to be written called ‘Europe’s Buried Revolution 1943-48’ (LRB, 17 November). He suggests that across the Resistance movements, both East and West, there was a ‘consensus on postwar change’ which ‘sank under the floods of Stalinism and Cold War mobilisation’: an apparently unified non-Communist revolutionary tendency that was supressed, in Eastern Europe, with the arrival of the Red Army. And then he praises Tony Judt for giving some recognition to what he calls a ‘currently obscure’ topic. In Slovenia, it’s a live political issue. In October 1945 eight thousand Slovene refugees were captured by British forces and sent back to Tito’s Partisans, who executed them. They were mostly members of the collaborationist Home Guard. In July 2003, after a series of arguments lasting five years, the Slovene parliament finally rejected the centre-right proposal to mark the mass graves, there and elsewhere, as containing victims of ‘Communist violence’. This, many had felt, tried to turn the dead into martyrs to an anti-Communist cause – and, by implication, into Resistance heroes whose tactics had been disallowed by the Communists. But was there non-Communist resistance in Slovenia? In August 2004, in the run-up to the last general election, various veterans described the Slovene Resistance movement: it had been a ‘national liberation struggle’, Janez Stanovnik said, which included people of all political stripes. It didn’t. The Slovene Liberation Front didn’t admit non-Communists: mostly because, among those opposed to the occupation, there were very few non-Communists – and those there were had questionable aims. The anti-Fascist paramilitary groups that existed in Italian-run territory before the war – where their manifesto was anti-assimilationist and strongly nationalist or regionalist – continued their operations against Fascist targets only until 1943.Stanovnik, Slovenia’s last socialist president, had a reason for making the claim he did: with the country’s accession to the EU, it was important that Slovenia be seen to have been part of a gently social democratic tradition, with a history of pro-Western and anti-Soviet activity going back to the years of occupation. Current political imperatives mean inventing a buried revolution that never existed, and burying the revolution that did.

Jim Harper
Ljubljana