Review of: To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, by Ian Kershaw

The one hundred twenty five years of Europe’s past that stretched from the French Revolution to the outbreak of World War I (1789-1914) is commonly treated by historians as the era known as the “Long nineteenth century.” This fact alone stands in extraordinary contrast to how the landscape of Europe—both figuratively and in all too many cases literally—was so dramatically and irrevocably altered in the slightly more than four decades that followed. The task of telling that story in a single volume—a chronicle of people and events at once complex and colossal in scope—falls to renowned British historian Ian Kershaw in To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 [2015], an installment in The Penguin History of Europe series, a big, ambitious, well-written survey of outsize consequences plotted along a concentrated timeline, and in this he mostly succeeds.

It is no small challenge. In the style of an old fashioned narrative history, Kershaw—a scholar regarded in some quarters as one of the foremost experts of Hitler and Nazi Germany—guides the reader through the catastrophe of World War I and the repercussions in its aftermath; the social, economic, and political instabilities of the interwar period that was marked by both great prosperity and financial collapse, as well as by the twin incongruities of a strengthening of democratic institutions and the birth of fascism; the unimaginably even greater calamity that was World War II; and, finally, the dawn of the Cold War. That’s a tall order, and I have to wonder if Kershaw, despite his credentials, at first hesitated at the assignment of fitting all that into one book rather than several.

Given the scope of the material and the confines of just one volume, the author must make a series of determinations as to where to focus: what warrants passing mention and what merits a deeper dive. There’s simply too much to detail it all in a bit more than five hundred pages. From the start, it is evident that Kershaw makes sound decisions. He correctly recognizes that while the aftershocks of the First World War were indeed momentous, reporting the course of the war itself other than in broad outline is unnecessary for this kind of survey. The second war gets far more attention, and rightly so. Here the reader is rewarded by Kershaw’s expertise with Nazi Germany as all the many moving parts of Hitler’s ambitions at home and abroad are skillfully assembled into what was to become the ruthless killing machine that by 1945 left the continent littered with an astonishing seventy five million dead—nearly twice as many casualties as in the first war.

But my own interests were most piqued by the author’s brilliant treatment of the interwar period that puts a lie to many popular myths, especially with regard to the Weimer Republic and its later hijack by Adolf Hitler. It turns out that reparations caused far less economic than psychological trauma. And hyper-inflation, at least in its first wave, was more helpful than harmful to Germany, as war debts were rapidly repaid, and the industrial manufacturing base rebuilt and refortified. Most surprising, perhaps, is Kershaw’s emphasis on the strength of German democratic institutions, which he pronounces among the most solid in Europe at the time. The latter serves as a tragic underscore to what might have been, absent the rise of Hitler. Fascism was born in Italy, of course, and Mussolini’s role in sponsoring and spreading its dangerous contagion internationally receives careful attention. Meanwhile, Stalin was curating his increasingly brutal brand of Soviet totalitarianism. The Spanish Civil War—which for a time acted as a kind of proxy dueling ground between Germany and the USSR—also gets the coverage it deserves. And there’s much more.

The toughest task for any so-called “European history” is to provide adequate if not exactly equitable coverage to all its member nations. That is not easy. There’s a lot of countries in Europe—many more after the First World War fragmented multiple empires into artificially constructed borders with adjacencies to sometimes hostile ethnicities. Of course, all the attention typically goes to the big guys: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and sometimes Spain—but those six only represent about eight percent of the seventy-three  sovereign states that existed in 1939!

Kershaw tries to do better, but frankly it is an impossible trial, especially in a single book. Still, he widens the lens enough to reveal most of these nations struggling against similar internal and outside urgencies and meeting these with either traditional remedies that were likely to fail or, rarely, sometimes novel approaches that might have bred success in the longer term had not the cataclysmic Second World War swallowed up all other exigencies. These forces included economic depression, the impact of American isolationism, the almost paranoid fear of the spread of Soviet communism, as well as the instability inherent in the sudden creation of multiple new nations, and the truncation of several existing empires that also saw their respective monarchies replaced by new kinds of governing mechanisms.

There was also the disenchantment of millions who walked away from the ruins of the First World War unwilling to simply return to the “business as usual” of a once familiar civilization that had been shattered beneath their feet. The latter existential crisis was more characteristic of the West, however. In the East, as Kershaw makes clear, there was far more celebration, at least at first, with nation-building that saw the tossing off of centuries-old yokes of oppressor states. The course of both wars was also quite different east and west, as were the outcomes. There were few trenches in the east in the first war, and the results of victories and defeats forged new sovereignties. But these lands were ravaged like never before in the second war, and the years that followed saw them fall victim to a new brand of tyranny under Soviet domination.

Academics may gripe that To Hell and Back lacks endnotes, but that was ordained by Penguin editors, not Kershaw. Notes here are likely superfluous anyway, for the most part, because this is a synthesis of existing scholarship, rather than groundbreaking new theses. The back matter does include an extensive bibliography, as well as a series of fine maps, something often frustratingly conspicuous in their absence in all too many books of history. Still, I suspect some readers will find something to complain about, if only because the curious mind will want Kershaw to spend more time on a topic of interest that only saw fleeting attention in the narrative. But I resist that. Instead, I have nothing but admiration for an author who was able to competently include so much between two covers while maintaining the reader’s interest throughout, and at once dodged the dreaded tedium of a textbook or Wikipedia entry. That is quite the achievement in itself.

But there’s more. Mark Twain allegedly quipped that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Hitler’s Austrian Anschluss, adventurism in the Sudetenland, and invasion of Poland echo eerily in Vladimir Putin’s brand of neofascist revanchism, manifested in the annexation of Crimea, the sponsoring of puppet statelets in the Donbas, and finally the full scale assault on Ukraine. That is indeed a kind of unsettling rhyme. I came to this book because while reading The Gates of Europe, Serhii Plokhy’s masterful history of Ukraine, I was struck by a series of uncomfortable gaps in my own knowledge base. It occurred to me that I could speak with greater facility of the Peloponnesian War or Appomattox than I could the Treaty of Versailles. Surveys are not intended to be comprehensive, but the very best ones—To Hell and Back certainly earns that accolade—tickle the brain to incite further pursuits.  And for that I offer my sincere gratitude to Ian Kershaw.

A review of the Plokhy book, referenced above … Review of: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Author: stanprager

Book nerd, computer geek, rock music fan, dogmatic skeptic. View all posts by stanprager