The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath Book

In his introduction to "The Politics of Retribution in Europe," Judt discusses the fragility of the European postwar settlement as a consequence of the change in memory that came at the end of the 20th century. The perspective of 1945 as the postwar rebirth of European society with a split between East and West disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it came a shift in memory of the decades after the war that were once seen as a time of prosperity and unity during which all of Europe forged on with a desire to forget what they did and knew.

The concerns of the book - collaboration/resistance, political justice, and "overcoming" the experience of war - are undertaken with a nod to the understanding of Europe as a whole, rather than split between East and West. The similarity of these themes between countries on both sides of the postwar divide are remarkable because of, not despite, the core differences between them. This is especially true in the sense that each country's history extends beyond the periodization of the war.

Judt says that "what happened before 1939, what happened between 1939 and 1945, and how the memory of those events was adapted or distorted or occluded after 1945" are only recently being tied together by historians in an attempt to better explain the larger context of the history of each country.

The presentation of Europe's history is changing, and I think the significance of this book lies in its efforts to explain from a modern perspective why the "collective amnesia" pervaded European thought and how that affected the postwar periods in terms of thinking about who was guilty and who was innocent, who deserved punishment vs who was seen as a hero, and other issues that emerged and needed to be solved in the wake of the war.

Definitely a great read for anyone with any interest in postwar European history. Some essays need a little more tooling perhaps, and I think there are possibly some contentious issues in the works by Jan Gross, but as a whole, it's excellent.