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Europe: A History

National Interest, The, Fall, 1997 by Anthony Hartley

For instance, Professor Theodore K. Rabb of Princeton, in his review in the New York Times (December 1, 1996), describes how he abandoned in despair the enterprise of reading Davies' Europe. Since he seemed determined to restrict his critical scope to the noting of errors and literals, this is hardly surprising. It must indeed have been a discouraging task to read so long a book purely to spot mistakes, and without any realization of what the author was getting at. Nor are his lists of errors entirely accurate, as noted by Anne Applebaum in The New Criterion (May 1997). I am sure that Professor Rabb does not wish to be known as the pedant from Princeton, and would prefer, therefore, the conclusion that the reading of Davies' Europe has been too difficult for him. It would be a pity, however, if readers should follow his example, since, as Tim Blanning, professor of modern European history at Cambridge University, writes in the Times Literary Supplement (December 20, 1996), "Despite all these blemishes, it is a tremendous achievement, before which one must stand in admiration, if not awe."

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The obvious absurdity of Professor Rabb's review leaves one puzzled. It is so clearly meant to be a "killing" review, and the emotion contained in it is far beyond the ordinary irritation caused by inadequate proofreading. Applebaum has sensed this too and puts it down to outrage at Davies' remarks on the Holocaust. The "worst" of them, it would appear, is that after describing in the same capsule the murderous anti-Jewish 1942 actions of German Reserve Police Battalion 101 at Otwock, Poland, and the 1944-45 actions against Germans of the mainly Jewish-staffed communist Security Office (UB) in Gliwice, Poland, Davies concludes, "In this light, it is difficult to justify the widespread practice whereby the murderers, the victims, and the bystanders of wartime Poland are each neatly identified with specific ethnic groups."

If umbrage over this capsule is indeed the main explanation for Rabb's hostility to Davies, it is strange that it has become increasingly difficult to comment broadly on these terrible happenings; immediately after the opening up of Auschwitz or Treblinka there was not such sensitivity. The Holocaust remains a mysterious event, one whose motives seem clear but which leaves much to be known about how ideology was translated into awful fact. It is also mysterious because it involves the descent of one of the more civilized peoples of Europe into an abyss of intolerance, persecution, and cruelty, culminating in the slaughter of most of the Jewish population of Germany and the countries around it - a slaughter, moreover, carried out at great inconvenience and with the expenditure of vast resources in the middle of a life-and-death struggle. How did the Germany of Goethe and Schiller, the Germany of small states, each furnished with its local opera-house, theaters, and orchestras, the Germany where families played Bach or read the Bible in the evening, manage to gestate these hellish events?

This is not the place to seek an answer to this terrible conundrum. But, at the very least, it is obvious that it poses a very difficult problem for all other Europeans. For, unless we have some idea of the special circumstances that produced it, then we must come to the conclusion that such an appalling development might have happened in any other European country. If Germany is not "special", then other countries might similarly hold the seeds of a final intolerance within themselves. If it is "special", in the sense of a special intolerance, a special brutality, then how does Germany fit into alliances or future plans for Europe? The question is one of some importance. It is not only legitimate but necessary to discuss it.

When, then, Professor Tony Judt asks - in a letter to the London Review of Books (April 3, 1997) objecting to Neal Ascherson's favorable notice of February 20 - why Davies should "feel constrained" to compare the Holocaust with past events, the answer, surely, is obvious, and it is unnecessary to draw the sinister conclusions that seem to lurk in the background of Professor Judt's mannerly prose. Comparisons with, say, the massacres carried out by the "blues" in the Vendean war that resulted from the French Revolution reveal the readiness of human beings to resort to brutality to wipe out opponents in a civil war - and the Vendee was a peculiarly bloody affair - without, it is true, possessing the means furnished by modern technology (efficient bureaucracy plus Zyklon B) that swelled the death toll of the Holocaust to such monstrous proportions. Such comparisons may at least suggest that the urge to brutality is not the possession of one people alone, and making them is not a proof of Davies' turpitude or secret prejudice. There is nothing in this book to justify the fears and suspicions floating beneath the surface of some reviews. If Davies showed less than perfect tact in the way he phrased the capsule "Batt-101" on pages 1,022-3, he showed nothing less than pro-Jewish sentiment in his capsule "Auschwitz" on pages 1,026-7.

Europe: A History

National Interest, The, Fall, 1997 by Anthony Hartley

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