A review by wardenred
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe

dark informative slow-paced

5.0

In wartime the worst atrocities do not generally occur in battle, but after the battle is over. 

This was a difficult book to read—not because of how it was written, but because of the subject matter. The author, I feel, does a very good job in delivering huge blocks of information concisely, switching back and forth between more of a bird's eye view on all the big processes that happened in post-war Europe and a focus on individual person-sized tragedies. Underneath the gruesome descriptions of all the awful ways people were awful to each other, there's this undercurrent of empathy that made reading about all that more bearable.

The book is packed with interesting and important (and also terrible) facts; some of them were familiar to me, though more in the WW2 context than in that of the immediate aftermath, others were new information. There's a lot of digging into the reasons behind the social processes depicted here—not just in terms of matching consequences to past events, but also in terms of enormous collective trauma that people all over the continent were trying to cope with. Even though these 500 pages cover numerous events and countries all over Europe, the people never become just a statistic. Oh, an speaking of all those events and countries—I appreciate how smooth the transitions between separate blocks of information were, and how clear the connections were made between the events that on the surface seemed almost completely separate.

All and all, I found this a great, though-provoking foray both into the aftermath of WW2 and the premise of the Cold War. It constantly made me think of how a lot of the events depicted here still echo through the modern history of Europe, some louder than the others. Maybe one day, those echoes will quiet down. I don't expect to live to see it, though. After all, today, right now there is once again a war going on in the middle of Europe—as usual. The one big war that spun the entirety of Europe may have ended over 80 years ago, but that doesn't mean there ever was an equally continent-wide peace for more than a few years at a time.

PS: One thing that slightly irritated me was how the names of all the Ukrainian and some of the Baltic geographical locations were transliterated from Russian, not from the native languages of these countries. These former Soviet republics are otherwise very clearly acknowledged as independent nations that were under Communist occupation for an unfortunately long while; wouldn't it be best to transliterate from their own languages? That's a minor gripe, though, all things considered.
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