The Wheels Come Off
The Europe of 1914, at least for its bourgeoisie,
represented the height of civilization, the “Belle Époque” if you will. And of a sudden the wheels fell off the track
and the continent plunged into the darkness The Great War. British historian
Ian Kershaw certainly proves George Kennan’s maxim that World War I was “the
great seminal catastrophe of the 20th Century.” The war arose in the
milieu of ethnic nationalism, territorial revisionism and increasing class
conflict growing out of mass industrialization. These three factors would
remain long after the war ended and into this pot would be thrown the crisis in
capitalism induced by the Great Depression.
Also arising out of the war was the
successful Bolshevik Revolution that sent chills down the spines of the
conservative elite. To Kershaw this was the most important event of the 20th
Century because the very real fear of communism made opposition to the rise of
fascism far more difficult in the West. It hardened the right and split the
left.
As a result the crisis in capitalism forced
politics to the right rather than the left which is not too much different from
what happened post-2008. Thus the West’s response to the rise of fascism was
timid, to say the least with respect to Germany’s re-occupation of the
Rhineland in 1936, the Spanish Civil War and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia
in 1938. All the while the great purge trials were going on in Moscow.
Kershaw’s view of this history seems
more deterministic than say that of Zara Steiner’s. To him there is more or
less a straight-line between the Versailles settlements to the start of World
War II. To be sure he gives credit to “the
spirit of Locarno,” but not enough in my opinion. He also leaves out two chance
events that may have altered history. The first is outside his topic and that
was the premature death of New York Federal Reserve President in 1928. Had he
lived, in the minds of more than a few economists the worst effects of the
Great Depression might have been avoided. Within his bailiwick was again the
premature death of German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in October 1929. If
there ever were a German politician who could have stopped Hitler, it was
Stresemann.
Kershaw brings the holocaust to the
forefront in Hitler’s war of annihilation in the East in his coverage of World
War II. Simply put Hitler wanted to conquer the West, but he wanted to destroy
the East. He almost succeeded.
Kershaw finishes his book with the
beginnings of the postwar recovery, the role of the Marshall plan and the start
of the Cold War. By 1949 Europe is central to the Cold War between the U.S. and
the Soviet Union, but its power is but a shadow of its former self. Kershaw has
done an excellent job in portraying this epochal period that this review hardly
does justice to.
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