Preview: HOMELANDS: A Personal History of Europe
Timothy Garton Ash traces the evolution of America’s strongest ally
Timothy Garton Ash was born in 1955 and has written ten books that have charted the transformation of Europe. For much of that time he has walked the byways of Europe – this continent of almost a billion people – in search of an answer to the question: Is Europe real, or is it a political invention?
Called the “historian of the present”, he explores in a personal way the soaring successes and the disheartening failures of Europe’s post-war evolution.
This is of immediate consequence for its ally America, which at the moment is teetering on a choice between presidential candidates who favor either walking away from or continuing to support this strengthening ally.
The Europe at the opening of Garton Ash’s book, was hell on earth.
Though the Nazi atrocities are well-recounted, one of his observations chilled me:
“Immediately after the war, English nurses were astonished at the behaviour of Jewish children who had survived the concentration camps. If a child went missing from the group, the others would say quite matter-of-factly: ‘Oh, he’s dead ’. To them, that was normality.”
European barbarism was done by Europeans to Europeans. “You cannot begin to understand what Europe has tried to do since 1945 unless you know about this hell.”
Some 18,000 people died in Bergen-Belsen in just one month (March 1945).
There were eight million forced labourers in Germany at the end of the war. More than ninety per cent of living space in Düsseldorf was uninhabitable because of Allied bombing. Central European states in what Garton Ash’s protégé Timothy Snyder has memorably called the ‘bloodlands’ were like Belarus, which lost some two million people out of a pre - war population of around nine million, with another three million or more displaced.
Close to 90 million people were either killed or displaced in Europe between 1939 and 1948…one out of every six people. Further millions who were starved, diseased, raped, tortured, crippled, impoverished, frozen, or reduced to prostitution.
“When I investigated the lives of the Stasi officers who had spied on me in East Germany in the late 1970s and early 80s , all but one of them had grown up without a father.”
The story of Europe can be told in the example of one boy. Bronisław Geremek lived in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. He was an emaciated, half-starved ten-year-old boy. As a Jewish kid he slipped out of the Warsaw ghetto through a hole in the wall, and after recovering his health in the care of family friends, he returned to his parents inside the ghetto. He then escapes a second time by slipping away from a funeral procession to the Jewish burial ground. His father was murdered in a Nazi extermination camp and his brother sent to Bergen-Belsen, the camp liberated by British soldiers.
He was brought up by his mother and a Polish Catholic stepfather; he became an altar boy. At the age of eighteen, he joined the communist party, believing it would build a better world. Years later, stripped of his last illusions by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he resigned.
Ten years later, Geremek was the foreign minister who signed the treaty by which Poland became a member of NATO.
The basic form of his Europeanism is typical of several generations of Europe-builders.
“When you look at how the argument for European integration was advanced in various countries, from the 1940s to the 1990s, each national story seems at first glance very different. But dig a little deeper and you find the same underlying thought: ‘We have been in a bad place, we want to be in a better one, and that better place is called Europe.’“
Garton Ash observes that the Europeans who founded the European Union tend to have different historical perspectives. Among the founding fathers of what is now the European Union were what one might call 14ers, who recalled the horrors of the First World War. The 14ers included the British PM Harold Macmillan. After them came 39ers like Geremek, indelibly shaped by traumas of war and Holocaust. Then there were the 68ers, revolting against their parents, with some having first-hand knowledge of dictatorships in eastern Europe. “They witnessed the velvet revolutions of 1989 that ended communism in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union.”
The 68ers are the most distinctive and influential generation of Europeans after the 39ers. As with the 39ers, there is a core group of men and women defined by participation in life - shaping events, but they are located within a broader demographic cohort. The core group of 68ers comprises those who participated in the long 1968, lasting from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, with its hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of political, cultural, social and environmental radicalism. ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible!’ It is forbidden to forbid!’ ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach!’
He calls the process of development a ‘memory transfusion’ - the gamble that we can learn from the past without having to go through it all again ourselves.
In the 1970’s much of the continent was still a Europe of the dictators. Including the European republics of the Soviet Union, some 389 million Europeans lived under dictatorships and only 289 million lived in democracies.
“Freedom meant Europe and Europe meant freedom. This is a way of thinking quite alien to most Brits, with their different historical experience. For an Englishman like my father, England stood for freedom and Europe was a threat to it. But it is entirely familiar to many other Europeans.”
Europe in our time differs from all earlier ‘Europes’ thanks to one revolutionary change: the exponential growth of mass travel and communication since the 1960s . For most of European history, most Europeans would never have visited another country. Asked about their identity , peasants in the eastern borderlands of Poland, Ukraine and Belarus sometimes answered that they were tutejszy, meaning simply ‘ the people of here ’.
The bigger “here” of Europe was first labelled in the Palace of Knossos on Crete, in 1973 BCE. It was dwelling place of the mythical woman called Europa - a beautiful princess who lived in what is now Lebanon.
Now Europe is something Garton Ash calls a “kaleidotapestry”. “Europe is a tapestry in the sense that it has been worked over by many hands to produce a single unique picture – a street scene , perhaps , or a landscape…it is a kaleidoscope inasmuch as the same colourful pieces are constantly reappearing in new combinations: the recurrent visual grammar of church, castle, marketplace and town hall; allusions to Rome, elements of the Gothic and Baroque…All this adds up to that characteristic European experience…as ‘being at home abroad’…There is no need to insist on the uniqueness, let alone the inherent superiority, of our part of human civilisation. We only need to decide what we value in our particular heritage.”
The number of languages in Europe range from 64 to 234. Umberto Eco says ‘the language of Europe is translation’…
To everyone, thank you for reading Barry’s Substack.
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