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Editor's Introduction OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 04/14/12, SPi editor’s introduction Postwar Europe as History d a n s t o n e ‘Who would dare to impute to those masses who have risen in Europe against Nazi rule that they are fi ghting for the revival of a past whose profound weaknesses and irrevocable collapse they have experienced? Th eir goal is a new world!’ Le Franc-tireur , 1 March 1944 ‘We live on the cusp of two worlds. If we fi nd an ethic that will have as its goal the welfare of man and not economic profi t or the selfi sh interests of some race, nation, or social class, then, perhaps, we will be able to clear the rubble from our continent and provide education and comfort to people who crave housing, work, and books more than uniforms, guns, and tanks.’ Anatol Girs ‘You are likely to lose faith in yourself and in mankind when you see the survivors of the cataclysm trying to build up a new world by building into it all the same structures that led to the decomposition of the old.’ Gregor von Rezzori 1 Primo Levi is famous as the author of one of the great testimonies of Europe’s catastro- phe. Indeed, the rise to prominence of the genre of testimony in the late twentieth 1 Le Franc-tireur, Organe du Mouvement de Libération Nationale , Édition Sud, 1 March 1944, cited in Walter Lipgens , ‘European Federation in the Political Th ought of Resistance Movements during World War II’, Central European History 1:1 (1968), 9 ; Anatol Girs , ‘From the Publisher’, in Janusz Nel Siedlecki , Krystyn Olszewski and Tadeusz Borowski , We Were in Auschwitz (New York: Welcome Rain, 2000 [1946]), 2 ; Gregor Von Rezzori , Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (London: Pan Books, 1983), 251 . My thanks to Roger Markwick for comments on an earlier version of this introduction. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 04/14/12, SPi 2 dan stone century is unthinkable without him. But Levi was also the author of numerous short stories, which he published in Italian journals in the 1960s and 1970s. Where If Th is Is a Man and Th e Truce eventually came to defi ne the Holocaust and to establish Auschwitz as postwar Europe’s epitome of evil, ‘Gladiators’, fi rst published in L’Automobile in 1976, seems to sum up many of the postwar period’s characteristics: technology, wealth, leisure, sport, and changing gender relations; but also mass consumption, alienation, ‘massifi ca- tion’, and violence. All are exemplifi ed in Levi’s story, in which the eponymous fi ghters— mostly convicts—are thrown into an arena where, armed only with a hammer, they must face being mown down by cars. 2 Th e spectators applaud when a gladiator performs an acrobatic manoeuvre that facilitates his escape, but the wildest applause is reserved for the gladiator who smashes in the head of a driver with his hammer. Th e violence in this story is shocking, all the more so for being juxtaposed with leisure, relaxation, and that epitome of postwar mass culture, the automobile. But coming from the pen of Levi, with the ominous threat of Auschwitz always in the background, ‘Gladiators’ also suggests that the apparent stability of postwar European consumer society belies the fact that Europe’s darker history is still present, just below the surface. In contrast to a novel like Georges Perec’s W or Th e Memory of Childhood (1975), in which an entire society is based on the rigid lines of sport—an allegory of the attempt to turn interwar and wartime society into a grand barracks—Levi’s vision is of a society not permanently mobilized, as under fas- cism, but nevertheless ready and willing to employ and enjoy violence. Italy in the 1970s, when Levi wrote ‘Gladiators’, was a society scarred by the memory of fascism. In its most violent manifestation, the extreme-left Red Brigades ( Brigate Rosse ) sought to expose the ‘objective’ fascism of the modern state by provoking it into a clampdown, forcing a rightward shift . As with the Red Army Faction in West Germany at the same time, the Red Brigades were, unwittingly, doing the work of the fascists for them; indeed, their immature psychological proclivities towards violence made them, despite their stated ideologies, heirs to European fascism in a complex way. In a time defi ned by both Eurocommunism and Eurosclerosis, the everyday chaos of postwar Italian politics meant that violence, corruption (including the machinations of the P2 masonic lodge), instability, and terrorism coexisted with historically unprecedented economic prosperity in the new, peaceful context of the EEC. It is tempting to tell the story of Europe in the twentieth century in two halves: the fi rst, a sorry, bleak tale of poverty, war, and genocide; and the second, a happy narrative of stability and the triumph of boring normality over dangerous activism and exuberant politics. Th is is not entirely unwarranted, especially if we stick to Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘short twentieth century’ of 1914–1989. 3 However, as the Italian example shows, while the extremes of the ‘second thirty years war’ did not return to Europe between 1945 and 1989, it behoves us to dig a little deeper and uncover some of the subplots of the redemp- tive narrative which is so appealing. Quite apart from the fact that Europe in 1944–45 2 Primo Levi , ‘Gladiators’, in A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories (London: Penguin, 2008), 83–9. 3 Eric Hobsbawm , Th e Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994) . OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 04/14/12, SPi editor’s intro: postwar europe as history 3 could not feed itself—and therefore that the view from the early twenty-fi rst century should avoid whiggish triumphalism—there were numerous fault lines along which European politics, culture, and society split, sometimes very dangerously. Most obvious of these is of course the Cold War, which divided the continent in a way that defi ned it for forty years and whose aft er-eff ects are still evident. I will say more about the Cold War shortly, but it should not be taken as synonymous with the postwar period tout court , for this would lead one to overlook many other signifi cant pressure points. Th e impact of World War II, the largest and bloodiest confl ict in world history, leav- ing so many dead that ‘the very earth seemed to breathe’, did not end in 1945. 4 W i t h o u t understanding the nature of World War II, one cannot get to grips with what followed. It was not just a classic territorial struggle best understood in terms of military strategy, but an ideological clash, in which a racialized vision of a Europe united under German domination fought, aft er 1941, against an uneasy alliance of liberals and communists. Th is war of ideologies, inspired primarily by Nazi chiliasm, gave the war its millenarian character, and accounts for the fact that in every state there was a mini-war going on, with large sections of the European population believing—with a peak in about 1941–42—that a Nazifi ed Europe was an unstoppable reality. Military and ideological collaboration with Nazism meant that the viciousness of the fi ghting was akin to a civil war. 5 As the Italian fascist novelist Curzio Malaparte wrote: all over Europe, a frightful civil war was festering like a tumour beneath the surface of the war which the Allies were fi ghting against Hitler’s Germany. In their eff orts to liberate Europe from the German yoke Poles were killing Poles, Greeks were killing Greeks, Frenchmen were killing Frenchmen, Rumanians were killing Rumanians, and Jugoslavs were killing Jugoslavs . While the Allies were allowing themselves to be killed in the attempt to liberate Italy from the Germans, we Italians were killing one another.6 In the Yugoslav context, renegade communist Milovan Djilas put it even more suc- cinctly: ‘A people was at grips with the invader, while brothers slaughtered one another in even more bitter warfare’. 7 Th e Liberation itself was a bloody and frightening process for millions of Europeans, from the citizens of Normandy whose towns were bombed by the Allies on and aft er D-Day, to the inhabitants of Nazi camps who were too dazed and weak to comprehend what was happening, and who continued to die in droves aft er being ‘liberated’.8 In the immediate postwar years, many millions of people—espe- cially Germans—were displaced as borders were shift ed and populations expelled or forcibly ‘transferred’, in the largest internal population migration in recorded European 4 Milovan Djilas , Wartime (London: Secker &Warburg, 1980), 447. 5 See Dan Stone , Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) , ch. 1 for more detail. 6 Curzio Malaparte , Th e Skin (London: Ace Books, 1959), 228–9. 7 Milovan Djilas , Conversations with Stalin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 19. 8 William I. Hitchcock , Liberation: Th e Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2009). OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 04/14/12, SPi 4 dan stone history. 9 By the end of the war, the Allies were in eff ect promoting what the Nazis had advocated in the 1930s: ‘ethnic homogeneity as a desirable feature of national self- determination and international stability’. 10 Purges of collaborators—oft en carried out by people who themselves had dubious pasts—resulted in tens of thousands of deaths before the return of governments-in-exile.
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