Postwar A History of Europe Since 1945

Theme:

Postwar A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt, examines six decades of European history from the end of World War II in Europe in 1945 up to 2005.

Famous Quotes:

“Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today’s Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety.”

“What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.’(Arthur Koestler)”

“Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.”

“The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

“triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’.”

“Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men.”

“East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth”

“In September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany, most of them there against their will, and they constituted 21 percent of the country’s labour force.”

“since throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of Germans believed that ‘Nazism was a good idea, badly applied’.”

“H.G. Wells, who recognized in the policies of Lenin and even Stalin something familiar and sympathetic: social engineering from above by those who know best.”

“is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable.”

“enthusiasm for Communism in theory was characteristically present in inverse proportion to direct experience of it in practice.”

“Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it”

“Not for the first time in international disputes over Germany, France was its own worst enemy.”

Literary awards: