The ancient legend of Dr. Faustus largely anticipates the paradoxical trajectory of European history during the past century. In this tale a successful scholar makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. After enjoying the fleeting fruits of his bargain, he is inevitably damned because his ambition violates the divine order. In Goethe’s version a restless Faust seeks to understand the essence of life with the aid of Mephistopheles, destroying the innocent young woman Gretchen in the process. But in the second part of the drama Faust learns to serve others rather than just to satisfy his own desires, and finally escapes damnation owing to his ceaseless striving for human improvement. Reflecting in his 1947 novel Dr. Faustus on the horror of the Third Reich, Thomas Mann returned to the earlier cautionary view by presenting Adrian Leverkühn as a composer who produces beautiful music at the cost of a syphilitic madness that devours him. Hence the tale can be read as an allegory either of the quest for innovation that leads to destruction or of the search for potential redemption.
Because of its drastic reversals, the European experience of the twentieth century presents a story of unparalleled drama, ranging from suffering and self-destruction to civility and prosperity. Ushering in 1900 with high hopes for further material progress and proud of their imperial command over the globe, the European nations all too soon became embroiled in the bloodshed of the Great War that shook their confidence to the core. After a temporary respite during the 1920s, the competition between communist, fascist, and democratic ideologies led to an even more devastating Second World War and frightful Holocaust that has become synonymous with the human capacity for evil. In spite of the subsequent Cold War confrontation and the loss of the overseas empires, the devastated continent emerged out of the ashes of self-immolation to regain a surprising measure of peace and affluence. Moreover, an unforeseen peaceful revolution spread liberal capitalism to Eastern Europe as well, only to be confronted by new global problems. The interpretative challenge is to render the succession of such reversals, ruptures, and displacements intelligible.
To explain such a confusing trajectory, this book focuses on the peculiar dialectic of European dynamism that inspired both an impressive march of material progress and a frightful process of political self-destruction. Defenders of Western civilization and postcolonial critics agree that the Europeans created a protean civilization that conquered and transformed the rest of the world so as to rule and exploit it. Near the beginning of the twentieth century some social thinkers began to call the conjuncture of scientific discovery, economic development, political participation, and cultural experimentation by the term “modernity” in order to distinguish such advances from earlier traditions and to differentiate themselves from the “backward peoples” of other continents. No doubt their quest for becoming “modern” was more an aspiration than a reality, a depiction of a goal rather than a statement of actual achievement. But like the Faustian legend, this self-description stressed the incessant drive for more knowledge, material gain, and mass mobilization that would plunge the continent into catastrophe, forcing it thereafter to struggle for a return to civility.
Especially fascinating about Europe’s experience of the last century are the many broken, but also touching, life stories that grew out of coping with such upheavals. For instance, about 1900 my grandparents moved from a Silesian farm to the bustling metropolis of Berlin in search of prosperity. Though my father survived military service during World War I, the family’s grocery store ran into difficulties during the hyperinflation. During the depression, my parents had a hard time finding teaching positions, and my father was drafted again in the Second World War. As I described in Reluctant Accomplice, he died in Russia in January 1942, while his widow escaped the bombing in a Bavarian farm and resumed her teaching career in the Rhineland after the war. Since prospects in Europe looked dim, my father-in-law migrated with his family to the United States in 1948 as a captured engineer and scientist. This book charts the framework of destructive forces that killed relatives, destroyed homes, threatened livelihoods—in short turned entire worlds upside down. But it also offers an encouraging record of recovery, reconciliation, and emancipation that inspires hope for the future.
My own perspective on the European past is a transatlantic vantage point, combining both inside and outside views. I was born in Magdeburg during the Second World War and grew up in West Germany, but then moved to the United States to go to college, obtain my PhD at the University of Wisconsin, and pursue an academic career there. As part of the last generation with classical training, I learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in the Gymnasium and then added English, French, Russian, and Italian, giving me access to a range of European cultures. Beyond getting acquainted with German-speaking Europe during vacations, fellowships and family ties allowed me to live at various times also in France, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Finally, professional travel brought me from the Balkans to Britain and from Russia to Portugal. While the following pages draw on my German background and training, they are animated by a sincere desire to do justice to the different trajectories of other countries. As a Euro-American hybrid, I have for over four decades made a scholarly effort to discern “the unity within diversity” of the Old Continent’s distinctive heritage.
Konrad H. Jarausch
Berlin/Washington/Chapel Hill, summer 2014