Europe after 1945

Bibliographic Data

ID4494494
AuthorsG Eley (corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume65
Issue1
Pages195-212
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory Workshop Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/hwj/dbn002
OpenAlexW2084228384
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited8

For European historians to begin seeing the second half of the twentieth century as a distinct period has taken a very long time. Despite the lengthening gap between then and the ever-moving now, the time since 1945 was treated mainly as an aftermath, appearing in twentieth-century textbooks as a coda to the main story, which centred on the two world wars and the ‘interwar’. In the earliest versions this was undoubtedly connected to generation: for those who lived and wrote under the immediate shadow of Nazism, postwar Europe was the quiet and livable normality of the present tense, whereas history, in contrast, was to be found in all the spectacle and turbulence that came before.1 For a long time for the purposes of teaching and disciplinary identity – for distinguishing history from social science – the boundary ran straightforwardly through 1945. Only in the 1990s did a number of general histories begin to appear, self-consciously taking stock of the twentieth century from the vantage point of its end, most of them covering the world as a whole rather than Europe as such.2 But with one or two early exceptions European historians still seemed reluctant to appraise the post-1945 era discretely and on its own terms.3

Aesthetics · Art · Discipline · Period (music) · Political science · Shadow (psychology) · Spectacle · World War II · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law

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