To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949
Authors: Ian KershawNarrator: Leighton Pugh
Duration: 26h 43m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Tags: historical
One of the best historical audiobooks that I’ve listened to - lot’s of things that were put in me by history teachers, stereotypes, propaganda were destroyed.
It shows not the war itself but a lot of things that were going on in the life of people of 20th century.
Lots of great quotes inside.
Quotes:
What sense did people in Europe make of the world they were living in, of the forces that were inexorably shaping their existence? A generalized answer is of course impossible. Patterns of life and the reflections they provoked depended on many variables. These included accidents of geography and family background as well as social class, political culture and the vagaries of historical development. Far-reaching reflective insights were in any case inevitably confined in the main to a well-educated elite – an elite with access to the higher levels of education denied to the overwhelming majority of the population. The most innovative talents in the creative arts both mirrored and shaped what, in the broadest understanding, could be described as the Zeitgeist, or ‘spirit of the age’. For those, mainly in the upper classes or the educated middle classes, who were used to imbibing the products of this ‘high culture’, important traits of social thought and artistic creativity could prove, if only indirectly, extremely influential. For much of the population, however, this ‘high culture’ was inaccessible; it lay beyond the parameters of normal life.
What remained for most people at the end of the working day or week were avenues of popular culture – entertainment films, dance halls, and not least (for men, at any rate), visits to the pub or bar – that offered not reflection on the world around them but escapism and momentary excitement, temporary release from the drab, often depressing, reality of daily life. Going to the cinema offered the greatest chance of escapism. New ‘picture palaces’ shot up in Europe’s towns and cities. … Professional sport – football especially – offered the other big escape for working men, though hardly at all for women. Football’s popularity had extended from Britain to other European countries long before the First World War. Major leagues had been established in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere. Huge attendances were commonplace. In England, the first Wembley Cup Final of 1923, when Bolton Wanderers beat West Ham United 2–0, had attracted a crowd officially put at 126,000, though usually thought to have been double that number.*
By the mid-1920s the dominant cultural trend seemed to mirror the more stable conditions that had taken hold in Germany. Preoccupation with the inner psyche, emotions and idealism that had characterized Expressionism and its related forms gave way to a search for clarity and order in aesthetic form, a ‘new objectivity’ or ‘new matter-of-factness’ (Neue Sachlichkeit), which took its name from an artistic exhibition held in 1925 in Mannheim. Modernism was now adopted in practical design, architecture, painting, photography, music and theatre. At Weimar, then Dessau, the Bauhaus founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 brought together artists, sculptors, architects and graphic designers to create a novel style marked by rationality and functionality. Among the leading artists associated with the Bauhaus was Wassily Kandinsky, who before the war had been the dominant figure in the Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter (‘The Blue Rider’) group of Expressionists. Now, back from Russia, he had turned to brilliantly striking, more angular, abstract geometrical compositions. The Bauhaus had a practical as well as an idealistic artistic purpose. Gropius believed in harnessing technology to create new forms of rationally planned housing that would overcome social misery and class distinction. Cleanliness, comfort and efficiency in the use of space were its hallmarks. Simplicity of style and beauty were indivisible in this utopian vision. It would be ‘new objectivity’ in its most practical and socially valuable expression.
Hindenburg, Brüning and the conservative elites who backed their move, were not for a moment contemplating a government run by the Nazis – seen as primitive, vulgar, loud-mouthed populists, not the sort to manage the German state. What they wanted was essentially to turn the clock back, with or without the monarchy, to a type of Bismarckian constitutional arrangement in which government was beyond the control of parliament – most of all beyond the control of the hated Social Democrats. The aim of Hindenburg, Brüning and the conservative elites was a sort of anti-democratic semi-authoritarianism managed by those elites.
By 1934, a critical shortage of foreign exchange and a worrying fall in currency reserves prompted a concentration on bilateral trade deals, especially with countries in south-eastern Europe that provided raw materials on credit set against delivery (invariably belated) of finished goods from Germany. The strategy emerged pragmatically from Germany’s economic weakness rather than from any preconceived calculation of establishing dominance over central and south-eastern Europe. It helped recovery in those parts of the continent. Over time, however, as the German economy strengthened, the economic dependency of such regions grew and they became increasingly sucked into Germany’s orbit.
By early 1936 an economic impasse had been reached, an inexorable consequence of Germany’s way out of the Depression under the Nazi regime. Removing the impasse could be achieved in one of two ways: either Germany scaled back rearmament and took steps towards re-entering the international economy; or it pressed on with rapid remilitarization, which meant a drive for autarchy that could only be partially accomplished without territorial expansion. And territorial expansion would be impossible without war at some point. … It was obvious which way his choice would fall.
The Nazi regime’s big leisure organization, ‘Strength through Joy’, set up as a subsection of the German Labour Front (the state-run substitute for the smashed trade unions) to provide an array of cultural and leisure activities for workers, was modelled on the Dopolavoro in Italy, created in 1925. The motorway (Autobahn), soon regarded as the emblem of the new Germany’s economic recovery and modernization, took its inspiration from the first motorway, the autostrada, which was built in Italy between 1924 and 1926. The German cult of the fallen in the First World War, the inculcation in the population of a militaristic ethos, the staging of huge rallies and parades as part of the attempt to construct a new aesthetics of mass mobilization, the creation of a youth movement to build a generation that imbibed Nazi values from early years, a panoply of welfare organizations, and, inevitably, the dominance of a huge, monopoly party bound together by unquestioned allegiance to the leader – all had parallels in Fascist Italy. The suppression of the Left and, of course, anti-Bolshevism were also traits that the two regimes had in common. So (in contrast to the radical state socialism in the Soviet Union) was the promotion of big business, as long as it served the regime’s interests. Both dictatorships were also not just stridently nationalistic and militarist, but quintessentially imperialist. For all the parallels, however, the regimes were inherently more distinctive than similar. That the Nazi regime was more radical, more dynamic, more aggressive, more ideologically driven in all it undertook reflected crucial structures of the German dictatorship that bore only superficial similarity to Italian Fascism.
The breakthrough came when Mussolini intervened to broker a four-power conference of Germany, Italy, France and Britain. (The Soviet Union, distrusted on all sides, was left out in the cold.) With that, the way was open for the climax of the drama in the Munich Agreement, signed on 30 September 1938. The Czechs were not represented at the gathering of the big powers that proceeded to break up their country. The two western democracies had forced another democracy to submit to the bullying of a dictator.
What eventually became a world war, joining the conflict in the Far East to that in Europe, fell into three main phases and afflicted the European continent in widely differing degrees and at different junctures. Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Ireland remained officially neutral. They took no part in the fighting, though they did not escape indirect involvement in the hostilities. All other European countries were in one way or another enveloped by the war.
Each of those sent to Auschwitz and the other death-camps had once had a name. The bureaucracy of mass-killing turned the names into numbers. For the killers, the victims were anonymous. It was a very modern way of killing.
Charles de Gaulle was a little-known junior officer in the French army before 1940. Elevated to the rank of general during the German invasion of Belgium, and soon afterwards appointed Under-Secretary for Defence in the French government, he had, with British backing, established himself by the summer of 1940 as the leader of the exiled Free French, a tiny force of only around 2,000 men and 140 officers. In a series of ringing radio addresses to the French people from London, de Gaulle asserted that the Free French represented the true France. He sought to embody defiance, both to the Germans and the Vichy regime (the government of the non-occupied zone of France following the defeat in 1940), to which he denied any claim to legitimacy. But he had little success until the middle of the war. Many in France, influenced by the Vichy press, saw him as a traitor.
Throughout all the horrors that afflicted Europe between 1914 and 1945, the economies and societies of European countries were, in fact, growing somewhat more like each other. Of course, major differences – especially national, ethnic, regional and (often interspersed with these) religious– remained. These were above all what shaped a sense of identity, even more so than social class. Opportunities for foreign travel, apart from for the upper classes and leaving aside service in the military, were extremely limited, enhancing the sense of national identity (and the prejudices that often accompanied it). The fragmentation after the First World War into a continent even more dominated than before by nation states (often driven by extreme nationalism), and the establishment – most notably in Russia, Italy and Germany – of systems of rule with quite different (and incompatible) economic models, tended to drive countries apart, rather than closer together. The two world wars, it goes without saying, produced their own distortions and divergences.
On 4 April 1949 the Brussels signatories together with the USA, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway and Iceland signed the Treaty of Washington, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), committing themselves to mutual assistance in the event of an attack against any one of them. NATO offered western Europe a sense of security that its own threadbare defences could not provide. Its importance was to a large extent symbolic, as an expression of unified commitment to the defence of western Europe. In reality, it was a fig-leaf. Soviet ground forces outnumbered those of the western Allies by 12 to 1; and only two of the latter’s fourteen divisions stationed in Europe were American.
National politics was confined to the margins in France, the ideas in their heart - the nation defined by exclusion of those deemed not fit to belong to it, jues quiet specifically remained undiluted as one part of divided french culture. Same arguments played out in other countries of europe.
Social democrats who’s spectrum of support embraced strong pacifist strains would support war, it was essential therefore that germany should be seen to be forced into defensive war. Russian general mobilization provided this justification.
1909 We want to glorify war, the only source of hygiene in the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive act. War was seen as heroic, adventurous, manly, the antidote to national decline. Those was sense of national unity with internal divisions temporarily overcome. For german intellectuals the new unity seems the embodiment of the spirit of 1914, almost the sense of religious awakening. It reinforced their feeling, that german culture wasn’t simply different from, but was superior to French civilization with it’s roots in revolution and republicanism, let alone the materialistic democracy in Britain. The values of superior culture have to be defended and if need be - enforced upon the rest of europe.
Bestseller - on first world war: “In storms of steel”
This was the war of industrialized mass slaughter. Human flesh stood against killing machines, facing soldiers were heavy artillery, machine guns, quick firing rifles, trench mortars, high explosives, grenades, flame throwers and poison gas.
The party’s organization rigidly controlled from center by general secretary Joseph Stalin created system of patronage and corruption that bought to the elligions of growing numbers of place man and apparatchiks. The number of bureaucrats quadrupled to 2.4 million within 4 years of the revolution. And the huge influx of new party members - almost 1.5 million entered by 1920. 2/3 of them from peasant background hoping for better life’s, helped the bolsheviks to consolidate their hold on power and to extend their penetration of countryside.
Early idealistic notions of popular participation in the running of political, economic and social masses through elective representatives in the soviets based upon worker control of production had on necessity been reformulated. Communism itself would have to wait till the dawn of utopia. Meanwhile power of the social state would and could be exercised by the avantgarde of proletarian - by party. Any opposition can be dube borjua and reactionary and had to be destroyed.
Terror as an the essential weapon in the class war was central to the bolsheviks revolutionary project. Let there be floods of borjua blood.
The president and effective founder of the state - Tomas Massaryk was a convinced democrat, helped by loyal army, and efficient bureaucracy inherited from Hapsburg Empire and economy with a good industrial base, pulling out from post-war recession. He was crucial in holding together a system that class and nationality interests in over 20 political parties threatened to undermine. In december 1918 and the first days of 1919 Massyaryk used czech troops to suppress moves to establish independent republic in Slovakia. He called upon allied assistance and proclaimed a state of emergency as he deployed new army units, commanded by a french officers to repel the invasion to recover slovakia by pro-bolshevik forces in hungary in may and june 1919. And he proved adapt at appointing a cabinet of officials independent of divisive party allegiances to tackle a wave of serious disturbances that summer. The government then used marshall law to counter a wave of strikes in november and december 1920, instigated by pro-soviet faction of the socialist party. This was important turning point. There after czech parliamentary system held together, somewhere shakily at first, but with increasing authority. The revolutionary left became isolated as most people wanted peace and order. A broad balance was struck between agrarian interests and those of the industrial proletarian, which was bigger in a czech lands then in other successes states. But mainly supportive of parliamentary democracy, not communism.
High and popular culture rarely met.
From about the beginning of 20th century, through the ideas themselves went back away 2 decades or so earlier, practically all branches of cultural creativity turned away from earlier classical realist and romantic forms of expression and self-concisely embraced modernism.
What united them was revolt against previous forms of representation, which they regarded as outmoded, superficial, devoid of inner meaning. The manifesto, presented in 1906 of the dresden group of expressionist artists who called themselves “Die brucker”, the name was meant to imply a bridge to a new artistic era - proclaimed as a young people who carry the future in us we want to rest freedom for us and for our actions and our lifes from older comfortably established forces. All that was conventual or borjua was rejected. It was replaced by boundless esthetic experimentation with a new ‘the modern`.