Tony Judt's Postwar Europe, with another side trip to Brazill

I've resumed reading Tony Judt's magisterial, awesome, sweeping, magnificent Postwar, a history of Europe since 1945, wrapping up the book's third section, "Recessional: 1971-1989," and beginning its final part, "After the Fall: 1989-2005."

Here's a favorite bit from that third section, Judt summing up Margaret Thatcher and her successor:

"Riding on Thatcher's coat-tails, Tony Blair shared many of her prejudices, albeit in a less abrasive key. Like her, he intensely disliked the old political vocabulary. In his case this meant avoiding all talk of `class,' an antiquated social category displaces in New Labour's rhetorical boilerplate by `race' or `gender.' Like Mrs. Thatcher, Blair showed very little tolerance for decentralized decision-making or internal dissent. Like her, she preferred to surround himself with private-sector businessmen. And although New Labour remained vaguely committed to `society,' its Blairite leadership group was a viscerally suspicious of `the state' as the most doctrinaire of Thatcherites."

His jabs at "rhetorical boilerplate" ought to give pause to anyone tempted to write Judt off as a leftist) (though I think even conservatives have been cowed into using gender as if it were anything other than a grammatical category).    Elsewhere, Judt's respect for Thatcher's accomplishment shines through, whatever horror he may feel at its effect (A publisher's blurb sums up another of his books, Ill Fares the Land, this way: "As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America--the guarantee of security, stability, and fairness--is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it's no longer part of the common discourse.")

Judt wrote with a zest that lets his sympathies shine through, but without ever letting the historian in him degenerate into partisan polemics. But my favorite passage so far is his Gibbonlike footnote to the above observation about Blair's and Thatcher's shared propensity for surrounding themselves with business people:

"With perhaps this difference: whereas Margaret Thatcher believed in privatizaion as something akin to a moral good, Tony Blair just likes rich people."

Who says history can't be fun? (Read all my Postwar posts at http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/search?q=judt)

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Here's a bit more from Paul D. Brazill's Guns of Brixton,  discussed in this space earlier this week, about a feel-good euphemism so widespread that even people older than 30 use it without blushing:

"‘You see, they call them issues these days,’ said Bilko, as he fiddled with an unlit cigarette. ‘Not like issues of comics like The Beano or Shoot or Whizzer and Chips or Razzle, though. Naw, these are things like anger management issues, relationship issues, substance abuse issues. What that means is that these issues are stuff that’s wrong with you. Stuff that fucks you up. And fucked-up people are called people with issues. See?’"

Finally, a thumbs-up to Brazill for knowing that that long chair on which you might relax in sunny weather is a chaise longue.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2014

Talkin' (and talkin' and talkin') 'bout my generation: Tony Judt on the 1960s (plus a bit of Michael Gilbert)

(Detail of a giant revolving sign at Hard Rock
Cafe, Philadelphia. Hard Rock Cafe International,
founded in London in 1971. Photo by Peter 
Rozovsky, your humble blogkeeper)

This could turn into a Tony Judt Postwar blog if I'm not careful. For now, though, I'll restrict myself to a few favorite bits from Judt's chapters about the 1960s:

"Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times — and their own selves — was one of the special features of the age."

And here's Judt's delicious account of the end of possibly the most self-regarding episode of the age, the events of May 1968 in France:

"In the ensuing parliamentary elections, the ruling Gaullist parties won a crushing victory, increasing their vote by more than a fifth and securing an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly. The workers returned to work. The students went on vacation."

Finally, Judt's discussion of Western European students' complaints about their universities, overburdened and unprepared for the postwar flood of young people seeking places, makes excellent reading alongside the British crime writer Michael Gilbert's story "The Decline and Fall of Mr. Behrens" (in the collection Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens). Now that I've read Judt, the surprising ending to Gilbert's story makes even better sense as a piece of social observation, not bad from a writer who insisted his job was to entertain readers.

(See also "Rock and roll is here to pay.")

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Tony Judt, film noir, and American movies in Europe

(A Czech edition of Tony Judt's
"Postwar." As suggestive as it is
that the book should have been
translated into Czech, I included
this cover only because the English
edition I was going to use carries
a cover blurb that calls the book
"awesome." Such a word has
no place here.)

Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 offers observations that might interest fans of crime movies and novels. Here are a few from the final chapter of Judt's section on the immediate postwar years, when American cultural influence was at a peak in Europe:

"Only intellectuals were likely to be sufficiently moved by Sergei Eisenstein's depiction of Odessa in the Battleship Potemkin to translate their aesthetic appreciation into political affinity, but everyone--intellectuals included--could appreciate Humphrey Bogart."

I'm not sure how historically valid it is to compare a silent film from 1925 (Potemkin) with a talkie-era star who made his first well-known film only in 1934 (The Petrified Forest) and whose real stardom came in the 1940s. Still, the suggestion that intellectuals could appreciate Bogart provokes thought, if only because its perspective is unusual in discussions of American popular culture.

The very next page offers this, on the American.film industry's business practices after World War II:

"(W)hen European governments after 1949 took to taxing cinema receipts in order to subsidize domestic film producers, American producers began investing directly in, foreign productions, their choice of European Venue for the making of a film or group of films often depending on the level of `domestic' subsidy then available."

Among other things, Judt suggests, American domination of European movie markets meant that U.S. movies of the time can be better guides to European viewers' experience than domestic movies are. In addition, he writes, it was Europeans who were likelier to make escapist movies in this period while American directors and producers were turning out the melodramas the French would later call film noir.  I suspect most of us would say American movies took over the world merely because they were more glamorous or better made  (Judt recognizes the latter possibility). But the idea that American movie makers were better judges of European taste that were European movie makers is a good deal more exciting and opens the door to all sorts of interesting questions.

Your thoughts, please.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Hard-hitting post-war zest from Tony Judt

I left my copy of The Historian's Craft home today; what a blochhead! Instead, I'll offer one of many provocative passages from Postwar, Tony Judt's history of Europe since 1945 (and I still have almost 700 pages left to read, so expect more):

"Writers and journalists, having left a written record of their wartime allegiance, came off worst. Highly publicized trials of prominent intellectuals--like that of Robert Brasillach in Paris in January 1945--provoked protests from bona fide resisters like Albert Camus, who thought it both unjust and imprudent to condemn and execute men for their opinions, however ghastly these might be.

"In contrast, businessmen and high officials who had profited from the occupation suffered little, at least in western Europe. In Italy the Allies insisted that men like Vittorio Valletta of FIAT be left in place, despite his notorious engagement with the Fascist authorities. Other Italian business executives survived by demonstrating their erstwhile opposition to Mussolini's Social Republic at Salo--and indeed they had often opposed it, precisely for being too 'social.'"

I like this passage for several reasons, not least the zest with which Judt wrote it. As for its politics, I wonder what crime writers including Didier Daeninckx and Andrea Camilleri would think of it. Would they, like Camus, protest the execution of a man whose politics they surely abhor?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014