I mention these works because, from both, you get a worrying sense of the same underlying destructive forces at work in our own era that resulted in such terrible destruction in Europe and the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Traverso sees the period from 1914 to 1945 as fundamentally a continuous civil war, triggered by the collapse of European empires, most critically the Austro-Hungarian and fought between two competing ideologies - Communism and Fascism. This political divide produced linked binaries -revolutionary v counter-revolutionary, fascist v anti-fascist, military v civilian, collaborator v resister. This ideologically driven violence initiated the idea of 'total war', civilians as legitimate, indeed necessary, targets, and resulted in death on a hitherto unprecedented scale, the partition of Europe and the beginning of the Cold War.
One of the central points he makes is that civil wars, driven by ideological certainties, permit violence of any kind against opponents. Everything can be justified, and although these two wars were ostensibly between nations, they should be seen as essentially a continuing, continent-wide civil war, begun by the fear of Bolshevism from 1917 onward when Western powers intervened in Russia to support the anti-Bolshevik forces, and thence driven by the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany with the new Soviet Union becoming the focus of anti-fascist activity throughout Europe.
Traverso concludes his analysis of this period by presenting another binary opposition that appeared as a response to the defeat of Nazism in 1945.
"The return to freedom and democracy was experienced as a new triumph of the Enlightenment, reason and right, which made fascism appear a parenthesis, an ephemeral episode, an anachronistic and absurd fall-back into ancestral barbarism, a vain attempt to arrest the 'march of history'. In this climate of confidence in the future, when history seemed to have resumed its natural course, the Nazi extermination camps were no more than the result of a tragic derailment. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, drew the rewards of the immense tribute it had paid to defeat Nazism." This avowal of the triumphant victory of rationalism was opposed by, among others, the Frankfurt school of philosophers, whose largely Jewish founders could not be so sanguine. For them, "Nazism had already changed the face of the century and the image of man....recognition of Auschwitz as a rupture in civilisation was indissociable from a radical challenge to the idea of progress. If Nazism had tried to wipe out the legacy of the Enlightenment, it had also to be understood dialectically as a product of civilisation itself, with its technical and instrumental rationality now released from an emancipatory aim and reduced to a project of domination.....Before the spectacle of a civilisation that had transformed modern technology into a gigantic destructive power, the only sentiment possible was one of shame."
For anyone wanting to understand the present state of European politics, Traverso's book is simply indispensable. Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who, with his wife, committed suicide in 1942, presumably due to their despair at what was happening in Europe, takes pains to make clear in his autobiography his feelings of being a European rather than having a purely national identity. Little known now, he was one of the most popular writers in the world between the two wars. He makes clear in his memoir that he had no interest in politics at all and spent his entire life devoted to art and the art of fiction in particular, seeming to know all the major European writers of the time (this included Soviet Russia, of course). He lived through the horror of the 1st. world war and records the rise of Nazism in Germany and Europe as he witnessed and suffered it. He concludes his review of his life with these bleak premonitions of his beloved Europe:
"And I knew that yet again all the past was over, all achievements were as nothing - our own native Europe, for which we had lived, was destroyed, and the destruction would live long after our own lives. Something else was beginning, a new time, and who knew how many hells and purgatories we still had to go through to reach it?"
The creation of the European Union, in its most elevated ideological justification, was seen as a means of eradicating the threat of European war through the development of a union in which the whole of Europe would have an investment. As we observe the rise in poverty throughout Europe as the neo-liberal economic policies of the EU, imposed on the poorest nations who have no means of defence against EU instructions that transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy in an entirely undemocratic way, we see, inevitably, the rise of far right and neo-nazi groups and regimes re-emerging in a dangerous fashion. A worrying similarity to the pre-1945 situation in Europe described by both Traverso and Zweig exists in Europe today. In terms of the immediate situation, despite its readily apparent weaknesses and lack of democratic accountability, the EU is all we have to act as a bulwark against the forces that threaten us all. It is an institution that needs a radical challenge and transformation, but to abandon that project for atavistic nationalist feelings is a profound mistake and will hand Britain over, at least for some time, to the most right wing and, indeed, racist factions in our -also- undemocratic and unrepresentative 'democracy'.
In 1961, even at the age of eleven, I did have fears of European warfare and its global expansion due to my mother's involvement in CND and the literature that ended up in our flat. Also, I overheard conversations at my paternal grandparents house when we were there and my uncle Edward and auntie Dorothy (Dottie to us) were visiting. Edward, you will recall from earlier posts, was the historian and political activist, E.P. Thompson and his historian wife, my father's sister, Dorothy Thompson. Those fears were to become very intense a year later when the Cuban missile crisis arose and threatened the extinction of us all.
The more real crisis for me in 1961 - where was I going after junior school - had been to some extent ameliorated by my getting a place at the Technical school rather than the Secondary Modern, but, being always prone to anxieties, I began to worry about what this intimidatingly new building and its large number of big men in suits had in store for me. Would I be able to cope with the work? Did I really 'fit' in such a new and swish place. It seemed so far removed from everything I had experienced so far in my life - and I had often found my far from intimidating junior school a lonely place where I would feel sudden overwhelming feelings of homesickness, even though home was less than a mile away and available at the end of the afternoon. What would it be like so far away in the alien world where the interviews had taken place? It scared me.
My mother, by this time, had begun to forge a career as a journalist, and now had enough money to buy me the compulsory new school uniform. Grey trousers, black shoes and a black blazer with a large and brilliantly garish badge sewn onto the breast pocket. I tried it on and was so taken with a complete set of new clothes - a first for me - that I went out in it to play with my mates on the estate. My first encounter was with Jimmy Burton, younger brother of the notorious Georgie, and Jimmy - still sucking his thumb at the age of ten - was suitably impressed with my new attire. "Bloody 'ell" he muttered through his thumb, and I joined him as he wandered off in the direction of the parade of shops nearby. He looked at me again "Fuck me wiv the wrong end of a pineapple." This was a new one on me and I added it unconsciously to the list of agreeable expletives for future use - this one particularly appropriate since it turned out we were headed for the greengrocers where the very object might be observed.
We entered the greengrocers where Jimmy had been dispatched to get various vegetables. The greengrocer was a man who seemed to be permanently at war with the world in general and his customers in particular - probably with good reason given his clientele. He had one trick, though, that always impressed me. His shop, due to its nature, attracted a large number of wasps, and he would kill them by trapping them mid-flight between his thumb and forefinger and flick them to the ground. He would do this without even apparently noticing he was doing it while he went about his tasks. If you entered his shop at the end of the day, the floor would be littered with small wasp corpses, but he remained always unscathed. I was mightily impressed with this, and often tried it myself, but would always draw back my hand at the last moment, fearful of the pain I was risking.For literary analysts, there's probably some symbolism there.
On this occasion, the greengrocer was particularly off-hand to Jimmy and myself, seeing the request to purchase some veg as something of an affront to his worth as a human being and giving me in particular a series of dark looks that suggested I might get the wasp treatment if I didn't get out of his shop pretty sharpish. When Jimmy had got his vegetables, he couldn't resist pointing over to me with the thumb that wasn't stuck in his mouth, and remarking "look at that then. Look at that badge eh? That means somfink dunnit ? Betcha not seen tha' in ere before." I hadn't realised that jimmy had been quite so taken with my new self that he felt compelled to show me off in this manner, and I felt acutely embarrassed. The greengrocer looked me up and down carefully. He slowly took the roll-up from out of his mouth, threw it down among the wasp carcasses on the floor, and in a thoughtful manner, ground it under his foot. He looked at me again, and said "That badge don't mean bugger all. That uniform means bugger all. An as far as I'm concerned, 'e means bugger all as well. E's no better than anyone else an e'd do well to remember that." This lesson in class consciousness, triggered by the now absurd crest on my chest left me - well - crestfallen. I wandered home and changed back into my usual jumble sale clothes, now knowing my place and even more anxious about what was to come.
