ABSTRACT
This volume is not so much about the well-known ups and downs of contemporary European politics and society as it is about the structural changes, the longer-range trends, that have taken place in Europe, and the reasons why. Traditionally, historians refer to a good portion of this epoch from 1945 to the century’s end in 2000 as “postwar” or “post1945” Europe-glaring evidence that the Second World War marked a major turning point in European history. It is customary to begin contemporary analysis with a description of “Year Zero” or 1945, and its lamentable landscape of destruction. And, indeed, it is all there: a ravaged Europe was tragic testament to the viciousness of the conflict. Appalling suffering and carnage overwhelmed the continent from London to Stalingrad. Cities were in ruins. Ports, bridges, roads, and railroads were wrecked in what can only be described as a geography of rubble. Millions had died. Millions more were lost and homeless. The war certainly still represents an unforgettable, in some cases almost unspeakable, tragedy and even second-and third-generation Europeans remain influenced by it. But beyond the final battle for Berlin and the defeat of Nazi Germany, Year Zero, or 1945, has come to represent a dividing line of extraordinary proportions in other ways. Initially, at the war’s end, public opinion marked it as the boundary between an old, discredited order and a new order, a revolutionary society. It was the dividing line between fifty years of dramatic political and social hyperbole-that abruptly ended in 1945-and then fifty years of reconstruction and a new ordinariness won of consensus and prosperity. It was the border between the great age of ideological rivalries and an age stigmatized by an “end of ideology,” in the familiar words of Daniel Bell, in which it was “impossible to write poetry,” in the verdict of Theodor Adorno. 1945 marked the line between the past and what was considered appropriate for historical research, and the present, which was “contemporary studies,” open to political scientists, sociologists, and journalists.
