This book represents a prodigious accomplishment. In twenty elegantly written chapters based on an extraordinary breadth and depth of research in several languages, Bernard Wasserstein has presented a vivid panorama of contemporary European history from the outbreak of World War I to the year 2007. Almost seamlessly, the author has integrated political, military, diplomatic, and economic history with social, cultural, and intellectual elements. Deftly, he has ranged over the entire continent, from Turkey to Scandinavia, from the Channel Islands to Malta, and from rural villages to giant cities. A work of great erudition, sagacity, and wit, Barbarism and Civilization combines strong narrative with meticulous historical analysis, incisive pen portraits of leaders with shrewd scrutiny of their milieu. Moreover, it has an excellent selection of illustrations, maps, charts, and supplementary readings that enhance the text.
The book's title and theme, borrowed from Walter Benjamin, assert the “dialectical relationship” between twentieth-century Europe's history of “lies, greed, deceit, and cruelty” (793), on the one hand, and its high political and cultural achievement, on the other. Although not unknown elsewhere (and in other eras), this paradoxical duality assumed lethal forms all over the world's second smallest continent, particularly during the two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Holocaust, the cold war, and the post-1989 decade. Moreover Europe, with its vast physical, human, financial, and military resources, transmitted its double nature to the entire world.
While allotting considerable space and attention to Europe's ideologies and its wars, Wasserstein also paints a vibrant picture of the lives of its diverse people—their work and leisure, their homes and diets, their clothing and sexual habits, their religious and ethnic groupings. Often, he is able to link elite political decision making with social and cultural changes and continuity (and vice versa). Although demography, production, and consumption were never dominant elements in twentieth-century Europe, Wasserstein has fine-tuned the balance between daily life and high politics, thus deepening the reader's knowledge of both.
Wasserstein also makes excellent use of quotations both in the poetic selections preceding each chapter and in the text. And he is as masterful in his discussions of topics such as Balkan nationalism, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the post-1945 attempts to unify Europe as with Sweden's economic policies during the Depression, the impact of Thatcherism, and the sentiments of the crowds that thronged Prague's Wenceslaus Square in 1989 and brought down one of the toughest communist regimes. Without overloading the narrative, Wasserstein introduces almost all the principal historiographical debates and takes a judicious stand on such issues as wartime collaboration and the legacies of European Marxism. Moreover, he never hesitates to point out an uninformed or hasty decision and to note unintended or disproportionate consequences.
Specialists will inevitably find elements of concern. The author's negative views of the political, economic, and military performance of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires have been contested by the conclusions of recent scholarship. The Armenian massacre in World War I, still the subject of debate, has been relegated to one slightly misleading sentence (75), and the U.S. role in ending the Great War, also a major topic, has been minimized.
There are a few errors. Rather than to establish the historical basis for imposing their “far-reaching territorial cessions, military limitations, and financial impositions” on Germany (118), the victors inserted Article 231 into the peace treaty at almost the last minute to cover their inability to settle the reparations question; to be sure, in the hands of German nationalists, the “War-Guilt Clause” immediately became a powerful propaganda tool for the enemies of Versailles. In 1922 the Genoa Conference was convened not to discuss reparations with the Germans (141) but to reestablish Western ties with the Soviet Union, which was why Rapallo created a major shock. Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy; 218) was the name of the vast organization created by the Labor Front to control every form of leisure in the Third Reich, including the building of the KdF (Volks) Wagen. And, according to recent reports, Yiddish (780) is now experiencing a robust revival in parts of the former Soviet Union and Israel as well as in the West.
On an interpretive level there are also a few concerns. By reducing Italian Fascism to “gangsterism” (160), Wasserstein ignores the intellectual and cultural roots of Mussolini's movement as well as the political and intellectual roots of the opposition. The almost complete omission of Europe's imperial subjects during World War I and the 1920s, ’30s, or ’40s removes an important aspect of great power policy making as well as large numbers of settlers and non-Europeans, who make an only brief appearance in the section on decolonization and, later, as migrants and asylum seekers. Even more important, the murder of European Jews is given an extraordinarily brief treatment (nine pages), European anti-Semitism before and after the Third Reich is only cursorily discussed, and the post–cold war struggles for restitution for slave laborers and other victims of the Nazis are not mentioned. Finally (and related to the above), Europe's signal innovation within the cause of human rights, the half century of work by the court in Strasbourg, has not been scrutinized.
These reservations notwithstanding, Barbarism and Civilization is a major contribution to a story that may now have ended. As the pages of this work have brilliantly related, contemporary Europe is currently more united, peaceful, and prosperous than a century ago, but its population has also lost its cultural moorings. The bitter memory quarrels over the recent past, superimposed on the huge influx of non-Europeans, have placed not only a figure such as Joan of Arc in the shadows but also Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler as well. Europeans today—without shared villains or heroes, real or fictional—who now occupy the burgeoning world of instant, undigested “information,” may perhaps inhabit the world's most interesting laboratory for a posthistorical existence.
