Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west given equal weight, in one nine-hundred-page volume by a historian who could actually write. The material everybody knows — Marshall Plan, Wall, 1968, 1989 — is here, but the value is in what usually gets cut: The refugee movements of the late forties, the way each country arranged its own amnesia about collaboration, the welfare states, the cinema, the sixties as a European rather than American event, Yugoslavia. Judt argues that the postwar order was built on a deliberate forgetting, and that the memory came back in the nineties and is still coming. I’m gonna read it, really I am.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945