European History: A Grim Half-century

A fine addition to the Penguin “History of Europe”

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949. By Ian Kershaw. Viking; 624 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30.

For Europe, as Ian Kershaw notes in this magisterial history, which came out in Britain in September and is just being published in America, the 20th century was a game of two halves. The first saw a cataclysm that brought down empires, plunged the continent into a deep slump and culminated in the horrors of the second world war. At least for Western Europe, the second was, in contrast, a triumph of peace and prosperity. That distinction may explain why Mr Kershaw has sensibly divided his original assignment to write the 20th-century volume in the Penguin “History of Europe” series into two books, of which this is the first.

His broad picture of what went wrong in Europe in the 20th century is built around four related points. First was the rise of ethnic nationalism, something that helped to doom the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottomans. Next were demands for territorial revision, between France and Germany, in central and eastern Europe and all over the Balkans. Third was class conflict, as workers and a nascent socialist movement flexed their muscles against bosses and the traditional aristocratic ruling class. And fourth was the crisis of capitalism, which struck home in the early 1930s and contributed hugely to the rise of Nazism.

Mr Kershaw, an acknowledged expert on Germany and author of the best biography of Adolf Hitler, naturally places the two world wars at the heart of his narrative, with Germany standing condemned as the main cause of both. That is a more controversial position to take for the first than the second, but on the whole Mr Kershaw justifies his claim. He also delineates cogently and chillingly the way in which the collapse of the tsarist empire, brought about to a large extent by Russia’s military and political setbacks during the first world war, led to the Bolshevik triumph and the creation of the Soviet Union, which in almost all respects was worse than what went before.

The author shows how the failings of that first war’s victors – the reparations fiasco, the Versailles treaty, America's withdrawal into isolationism – laid the ground for a path that led inexorably to the second. But he also insists that the path was not inevitable. The Locarno treaty of 1925 between Germany, France, Britain, Belgium and Italy, and the entry of Weimar Germany into the League of Nations, could, just about, have led to something rather like the rehabilitation of West Germany in the 1950s. What really took Europe back to the horrors that culminated in another war was economic collapse after 1929. Just as after the recent financial crisis of 2007-08, it was the political right, not the left, that benefited most from this collapse. In Europe that ultimately meant a snuffing out of democracy and the rise of the extreme right in Spain, much of central Europe and, above all, in Germany.

Mr Kershaw’s focus on Germany inevitably means a few weaknesses elsewhere. His strictures against the other great European tyrant of the period, Josef Stalin, are softer than those against Hitler. Indeed, he somewhat underplays the horrific history of the Soviet Union from the late 1920s up to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. He has little to say on Turkey: no mention of Field-Marshal Allenby nor T.E. Lawrence, little on Kemal Ataturk. His treatment of the military story of the two world wars is succinct almost to the point of cursoriness, but this ground is well-tilled in other books. It is also obvious from his narrative that he is more interested in politics and war than in social, demographic and cultural changes, though he dutifully covers these too.

As in previous volumes in the series, the editors have decided to dispense with footnotes and sources (though there is a useful bibliography). That may be understandable in a history aimed more at the general public than at fellow academics, but it is still annoying. Yet this is a worthy, impressive and well-written addition to a series that has become the definitive history of Europe for our times – and one that whets the appetite for his next volume.

歐洲史：黑暗的五十年

對企鵝“歐洲史”叢書的一個絕好補充

《地獄重生：歐洲 1914—1949》作者：伊恩·科修;624頁;(美國版)維京出版社，售價35美元;(英國版)奧利雷恩出版社，售價30 英鎊。

對歐洲而言，正如伊恩·科修在這部已于9月份在英國上市、目前正在美國印刷的權威史中所言，20世紀是一場上下半場的博弈。上半場看到的一場帶來了多個帝國崩潰、令這塊大陸陷入了一場深度衰退、最后在第二次世界大戰的恐怖中達到了高潮的災難。與之相比，下半場，至少對西歐來說，是一場和平與繁榮的勝利。這種對比可能正是科修明智地將其為企鵝“歐洲史”叢書撰寫20世紀卷的最初打算分解為了上下兩冊的原因。此書為上冊。

他的歐洲在20世紀怎么了的廣闊畫卷是圍繞著四個相關要點構建起來的。一是促成了奧匈帝國、沙俄帝國和奧斯曼土耳其帝國等多民族帝國走向末日的民族國家主義的興起，二是法德之間、中歐和東歐各國以及所有巴爾干國家對于重新劃分領土的要求，三是隨著工人階層和初生的社會主義運動對資本家和傳統貴族統治階層展示力量而出現的階級沖突，四是在三十年代初期重創了各個國家并對納粹主義的興起起了推波助瀾作用的資本主義危機。

作為一位公認的德國問題老師和希特勒傳記最佳版本的作者，科修自然把兩次世界大戰作為其敘述的中心。具體地說，德國被當做兩次世界大戰的主要原因而受到了重點的指責。這是一種對第一次世界大戰較之對第二次世界大戰所采取的更有爭議性的立場。但是，科修基本上證明了他的觀點。他還冷靜而且中肯敘述了在很大程度上是拜第一次世界大戰期間的軍事和政治失敗所賜的沙俄帝國的崩潰是如何導致了幾乎在所有方面都是前所未有的糟糕的布爾什維克的勝利和蘇聯的建立。

作者展示了第一場戰爭的勝利者的錯誤——賠款的徹底失敗、凡爾賽條約以及美國退回孤立主義——如何為一條不可逆轉的通向第二場戰爭的道路打下了基礎。但是，他也堅持認為，這條道路不是不可避免的。1925年的法、德、英、比、意《洛迦諾公約》和魏瑪共和國加入國際聯盟曾經差一點就帶來了類似于西德在五十年代的復興。真正將歐洲拉回到在另一場戰爭中達到高潮的恐怖的是1929年之后的經濟大衰退。正如2007-08年金融危機之后那樣，那次衰退的最大獲益者政治上的右派，而不是左派。在歐洲，其終極含義就是一次民主的奄奄一息以及極右翼在西班牙、大多數中歐國家，以及最后在德國的興起。

科修之于德國的關注不可避免地意味著其他方面的不足。較之希特勒，他對那個時代的歐洲的另一位大獨裁者約瑟夫·斯大林的責難相對和緩。實際上，他多少弱化了蘇聯從二十年代末期到1939年蘇德協議這段時間的恐怖歷史。他對土耳其著墨不多：沒有提及艾倫比元帥、T.E勞倫斯和凱末爾·阿塔蒂爾克。他對兩次世界大戰戰事的處理，簡明扼要，一帶而過，好在這個領域已在另外幾本書中中得到了較好的發掘。從他的敘述來看，他對政治和戰爭的興趣明顯地超過了對社會變遷、人口變動以及文化變革的興趣，盡管他也盡職盡責地論述了這些內容。

正如這套叢書中的前幾卷那樣，編輯們已經決定放棄注釋和來源(盡管有一個有用的參考文獻)。對一套以普通讀者而不是老師學者為對象的歷史叢書來說，也許，這是可以理解的。但是，仍然會讓人感到不適。然而，該書卻是對一套已經成為我們時代的權威歐洲史叢書的一個有價值的、能給讀者留下深刻印象的、質量上乘的補充——同時，它也是能吊起讀者對下冊的胃口的一本書。

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