Neal Ascherson

On 19 March 1970, Willy Brandt went out on the balcony of a hotel at Erfurt and the East German crowd roared: ‘Willy, Willy!’ Some famous photographs show him looking down at them gravely, almost in meditation. This was one of the grand moments in postwar European politics, or so it then seemed. A Chancellor of the Federal Republic had broken through the Cold War barricades and visited the German Democratic Republic for the first time. He writes in these memoirs:

The revolutions of 1989 were ‘the end of an era in which world history was about the October Revolution … Those of us who believed that the October Revolution was the gate to the future of world history have been shown to be wrong.’ Not many of the contributors to After the Fall are able to face that wrongness with the stoic honesty of Eric Hobsbawm. They face it, but often fail to contain their rage and misery. Some perform their own version of ‘Back to the Drawing-Board’, a dive back into the warrens of classic Marxist literature where – somewhere – the plague-rat of error must be hiding. Others, with much justification, relieve their pain by belabouring the goblins dancing on the grave of ‘actually existing socialism’: carpet-baggers, warmongers, Thatcherites, nationalist demagogues, and gutless intellectual capitulators to the New World Order. After the Fall is, for the most part, the voice of that homeless Left which wandered and prophesied in the sands between Communism and Labourism (or Continental Social-Democracy). Most of the contributions appeared in New Left Review. All but about three were written before the collapse of Soviet Communism and then of the Soviet Union following the putsch in August 1991, which gives them a flavour of antiquity. But the reader’s hindsight does not greatly diminish their perception. These writers all knew the game was up. Exactly which game that was, however, is a matter which divides them.’

The war was finished – and so was the regime of occupation. Its most hated representatives had either fled or wound up in prison while their victims had been proclaimed martyrs. But all that concerned just a tiny section of the population: most of the people had not died, fled or gone to gaol, but merely gone on with their lives. Overnight, they had entered a world which commended actions that yesterday’s laws had identified as crimes, a world whose laws declared yesterday’s crimes to be acts of heroism. They naturally regarded this change as a victory for historical truth and agreed that guilt must be assessed, wrongs put right and society purged.’

In the winter of 1941, so I have been told, there were nights when it was never dark at the fighter airfield at North Weald. You could walk up the shallow ridge at the southern perimeter and see, twenty miles away, the whole horizon as an arch of intolerable red and orange light: London burning.

Historians as a tribe are suckers for anniversaries, no less than journalists. And both professions are equally unwilling to leave a nice, juicy coincidence alone, in the spirit of that pre-glasnost Pravda phrase: ‘It is no accident that …’ These faiblesses ensure that, in our lifetimes and in those of our children, books and journals and Sunday papers will continue to gnaw and growl over the fact that a year of revolutionary upheaval in Eastern and Central Europe took place precisely 200 years after the beginning of the French Revolution. Parallels, some interesting and many frankly idiotic, will go on being drawn.