In Europe (86 page)

The amazing thing is that out of the ruins of 1945 it was precisely that German dreamland which arose within the next ten years. In 1958 many German cinemas were showing the film
Wir Wunderkinder
, the story of two students who sold newspapers on Alexanderplatz in the 1930s, fell in love, married, survived the war and the bombardments and finally, in the 1950s, found respectable jobs and a certain prosperity. Their polar opposite was Bruno Tieges, an ambitious Nazi careerist who lived high off the hog during the war, sold goods on the black market afterwards, and became a respected entrepreneur in the 1950s. When Tieges is finally unmasked by the young couple, he falls in his rage into a lift shaft. And everyone lived happily ever after. That young couple was still only in their late thirties.

The
Wirtschaftswunder
, the economic upturn, was not limited to West Germany, but took place all over Western Europe. The ravaged countries recovered with astonishing speed, and during the 1950s the West actually experienced an explosion of welfare unlike any other in its history. By 1951 all the countries of Western Europe had recovered their pre-war production levels. After 1955, Austria was able to take part fully as well: the Soviets had suddenly withdrawn their occupational forces in exchange for the promise of neutrality, and hoped to solve the German issue in the same fashion.

Was this explosion of prosperity really, as is so frequently claimed, due primarily to the American Marshall Plan, that brilliant combination of aid and enlightened self-interest intended to help Europe to its feet
while opening new markets for America? Clearly, generous American humanitarian assistance in the first post-war years made the difference between life and death for many Europeans. But the economic impact of the Marshall Plan was probably less decisive than is often claimed. Statistics showed a sharp revival of the Western European economies even before mid-1948, when the first dollars began pouring in. By late 1947 British and French production was already back at pre-war levels; the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium followed suit in late 1948. At that point, the Marshall aid had only just begun.

There must, therefore, have been other reasons for this unexpected boom: during the war, Europe had become acquainted with countless new – and largely American – technologies and production methods; many young people had gained a wealth of organisational experience in the army; Germany and Italy were able to replace their ruined industries with the newest of the new; the traditional and predominantly agricultural Netherlands was forced to catch up quickly, and become industrialised on an unparalleled scale. The welfare state took shape: all Dutch citizens above the age of sixty-five received a government pension after 1947, the French began their enormous HLM (affordable social housing) projects, and in Britain the National Health Service was launched in 1948. In June 1948, the Deutschmark was introduced in Germany's British and American zones, a drastic monetary reform which took an almost immediate effect: the black market vanished from one week to the next, shops became well stocked and, to their amazement, the Germans began to realise that life would go on after the demise of the Third Reich.

In 1959, the Conservative leader Harold Macmillan won the British elections with the unimaginable slogan ‘You've never had it so good!’

Interestingly, along with all this, there was also a decline going on: the old, imperial Europe was being rapidly dismantled. During the war, powerful independence movements had arisen in almost all the colonies, the period saw both peaceful revolutions and violent wars of liberation, and in under two decades the sometimes centuries-old ties had been cut between Europe and the subcontinent, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, North Africa, the Congo and other colonies. In 1958 the British dropped the word ‘Empire’: from then on,‘Empire Day’ became ‘Commonwealth Day’. Following the Japanese occupation, the Netherlands proved unable to
restore its authority over the Dutch East Indies. France, so humiliated during the war, attempted to regroup overseas: an eight-year war was fought in Indochina, until the French were decisively defeated by the nationalist rebels at Dien Bien Phu. Something similar happened in Algeria. The Belgian Empire in Africa collapsed in 1960. And in 1975, the ancient Portuguese Empire dissolved at last after a long, drawn-out war in Angola and Mozambique.

Even so, during this period, the economies of Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands blossomed as never before. Some historians explain this phenomenon by noting that the occupation of many colonies had less to do with economic gain than with rivalry between the great European powers themselves. Until 1919, Germany was present in Africa, in modern-day Namibia and Tanzania, because the British and the French had colonies there as well. The British were in South-East Asia because of the French, and in order to defend India. That is how things were everywhere. Until the start of the twentieth century, empires were profitable, or at least cost-effective. From the 1920s, however, the balance of costs and assets became increasingly unreliable: in 1921, the management of Iraq alone was costing the British an annual £21 million – more than their entire health-care budget – and they were receiving very little in return. As Great Britain reached the verge of bankruptcy, as independence movements began spreading everywhere and many of the old European rivalries lost their relevance after 1945, the European empires soon expired. By the mid-1950s the countries of Western Europe were trading more with each other than they ever had with their colonies.

Italy in particular profited in many ways from these new forms of cooperation. The country began producing for customers all over Europe: refrigerators, scooters, washing machines, cars, typewriters, spin dryers, televisions, the first luxury goods for the masses. The number of cars sold in Europe rose from just over 1.5 million in 1950 to more than 13 million by 1973. In 1947, the Italian Candy washing-machine manufacturer was producing one machine a day; by 1967 it was producing one every fifteen seconds. In 1959 the
New Statesman
published a cartoon showing an old man staring blankly at moving images on a round screen. ‘No, grandpa,’ a little girl is telling him, ‘that's the washing machine, not the TV.’

In 1948 most Europeans looked a great deal alike. In the countryside especially, they lived and worked in more or less the same way their parents and grandparents had. Ten years later, Western and Eastern Europeans had grown far apart, both materially and intellectually, and another ten years later the alienation was complete.

While giant sunbeams enter his old, spacious Prague apartment, Hans Krijt (b.1927) tells me the story of a life ruled by dissent. Krijt was the son of a plumber in the city of Zaandam, a normal Dutch boy who found a job after the war in the packaging department of a factory that made flavourings for puddings. In early 1946 he decided to include a few letters along with the rum flavourings, in the hope of finding a pen pal. He received two replies: one from Berlin, from a ‘
sehr hübschen Verkehrspolizistin
’, the other from Czechoslovakia, from a serious boy who had thought Hans was a girl. He ignored the traffic policewoman from Berlin, but became friends with the boy. And now he has been living in Prague for almost half a century, his wife Olga Krijtova is a translator, and their sideboard is covered with photographs of all his Czech children and grandchildren. That is how things go sometimes for the son of a plumber from Zaandam.

‘I came here in February 1948, as a deserter,’ he tells me. ‘Holland was carrying out its last colonial police action in the Far East. My army comrades thought that was quite the thing, a war in the Indies, it would give them a chance to see something of the world. But the officers confiscated my copies of the left-wing weekly
De Groene
, that's the kind of guy I was, and Czechoslovakia was the only country where I knew people.’

He found work with a farmer. Less than two weeks later the Czechoslovakian communists seized power and arrested a great many non-communists. On 10 March, the popular minister of foreign affairs, Jan Masaryk, was found lying dead in the square in front of ćernín Palace, which still houses the country's ministry of foreign affairs. The communists claimed that Masaryk had committed suicide ‘because of the many false accusations in the Western press’. For most people, however, it was clearly a case of ‘defenestration’, a method used more than once in Prague to solve a political problem.

For the second time in ten years, the promising Czechoslovakian democracy had been brutally crushed. The reactions in the West bordered on
panic. Now ‘Ivan’ had shown his true colours. New security alliances were forged, the start of NATO (1949). America stopped its withdrawal from Western Europe and would continue to watch over the security of the Western European countries for more than half a century. The Soviet Bloc reacted in 1955 by setting up the Warsaw Pact.

Hans Krijt noticed little of the communist coup. ‘Only when a neigh-bour would come to have his cow covered, they would talk politics, always very excitedly.’ But during the purges that followed, the secret police had little trouble finding him. ‘They picked me up, simply because I was Dutch. In our cell there was a doctor who had just come back from a sabbatical in America, they pulled him right off the plane and put him in prison. No one knew why. I was locked up for ten days in an underground cell, with no light. We all slept on the floor. On the very first night some guy tried to molest me … I didn't even know things like that existed.’ He was released after promising to report to the intelligence service any contact he had with foreigners. ‘At first I thought: I never see any foreigners, so who cares? But it put me in their hands. I couldn't sleep at night because of it.’

In summer 1950 the first four opponents of the ‘new social order’, all former victims of the Nazi camps, were hanged in Prague. On a hill across the Vltava arose a huge graven image of Stalin. Today it has been replaced by a gigantic metronome, ticking away the years.

The Cold War was a forty-year battle of threats, of economic sanctions, of words and propaganda. No shot – with the exception of the popular revolts in the DDR, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – was ever fired in Europe. It was a textbook example of a long-lasting and extremely successful policy of ‘containment’.

The first step leading to that war of containment was the swerve to the political left that took place all over Europe, including the West: in England, the Conservatives had been replaced by Labour, in France the Communist Party became the country's largest, with a quarter of all votes in the October 1945 elections. In Italy, by late 1945, the PCI had 1.7 million members, and in the Netherlands and Norway the social democrats were making a clear mark on government policy. Countries everywhere were rushing to establish government pension plans and other social facilities, and in France a whole series of concerns – natural gas,
coal, banks, Renault – had even been nationalised. With regard to foreign policy, however, most European social democrats entertained very conventional views, and the communist cabinet ministers in France and Italy maintained a low profile as well.

Still, the Americans were becoming increasingly worried about the European ‘shift to the left’. When Churchill's government was replaced by a Labour cabinet in July 1945, they reacted immediately: within a few days, the celebrated Lend-Lease agreement had been withdrawn. Strict conditions were established for receiving Marshall Plan aid. In May 1947, the communists were removed from the government of France; a month later the Italian government also took on a clearly anti-communist aspect. When the Korean War broke out in 1950 and the Netherlands did not wish to send combat troops to this ‘decisive struggle’ against communism, the United States immediately threatened to stop all Marshall Plan assistance to that country. Later, President Truman would admit that the Marshall Plan was intended in part to curb the popularity of the left: ‘Without the Marshall Plan, it would have been difficult for Western Europe to remain free of the tyranny of communism.’

The growing tension was accompanied by an immense propaganda offensive. Harold Macmillan warned of an ‘invasion of the Goths’; the Lenten pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops in 1947 dealt largely with ‘Godless communism’; dockworkers’ strikes in Amsterdam (1946) and London (1949), like the miners’ strikes in Belgium (1948), were seen as ‘communist plots’ to take over the country, and books like George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949) and
The God that Failed
(1950), as well as a collection of essays by Arthur Koestler, André Gide and other former ‘fellow travellers’ caused great furore. Three years later, almost nothing was left of the general sympathy for the brave Red Army in 1945.
Life
magazine dedicated an entire issue to the discrepancy in the number of troops maintained by the two superpowers: 640,000 GIs were faced off against 2.6 million Red soldiers. Hollywood films like
I Married a Communist
,
I was a Communist for the FBI
,
Red Planet Mars
and
The Red Menace
played to packed cinemas.

This – at least partly spontaneous – mobilisation against communism strengthened the bonds between all non-communists. Just as during the war, a common enemy had been found, and this sense of unity became
almost as important as the struggle itself. Both the left and the right began reconsidering their standpoints. In Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, the social democrats dropped the term ‘class struggle’, while the Christian Democrats came up with new social policies: all across Europe, old conflicts were being abandoned or mollified. Anti-communism served in this as a kind of crystallisation point, a binding anti-ideology. Without a doubt, Stalin can be seen as one of the founders of a united Europe.

In this way, sometime in winter 1946, the Soviet Union suddenly changed from a friend into a foe. From his office in Moscow in mid-February, the American diplomat George Kennan sent his superiors in Washington a biting analysis of Soviet policies. In that historical ‘long telegram’, Kennan pointed out the Soviet Union's permanent urge to expand its power and entered a plea for a new ‘containment doctrine’.‘At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,’ he wrote, and the main element of United States policy ‘must be that of a long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies’.