Over the Christmas break I succeeded in getting through Tony Judt�s monumental (878 pages) Postwar, which, incidentally, was chosen by the editors of the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year that�s just ended. The sheer scope of the book�tackling the history of Europe from 1945 right up to yesterday�s headlines (Judt discusses the rejection in France and the Netherlands of the EU Constitution)�means the author is automatically entitled to some respect merely for taking on such a daunting task. Moreover, although the author in his introduction modestly claims that his treatment of the history of the past 50 years on �the subcontinental annexe to Asia� lacks any thematic shape, the author�s concerns with the issues of memory and, equally important, forgetting, are evident throughout. If the book forwards a theory (which would be a piquant for a work that chronicles the disillusionment with the Grand Theory of the 20th century, Communism), it is that Europe�s success in clawing its way out of the rubble of World War II was down to its population�s selective remembrance of what occurred between 1939 and 1945. For example, in France, although the Resistance played a fairly marginal role, its role was elevated during the post-war years while the proactive collaboration of the French, epitomized by the Vichy regime, was largely occluded. Sometimes this national �economy with the truth� was replicated at a micro level in individuals�for example, Fran�ois Mitterand, the first Socialist President of the French Republic, understandably preferred to stress his service in the Resistance during the dying days of the German Occupation rather than the fact that he received an award for service to the Vichy government.Even in Germany, a country that really couldn�t evade its responsibilities for what had unfolded, collective guilt for what has happened was often evaded by attributing the atrocities committed to the �Nazis��a suitably abstract umbrella category that nevertheless focused on the culpability of the leadership and the relative blamelessness of those further down the hierarchy. Perhaps the most blatant manipulation of memory occurred in Austria, when an Allied agreement officially recognized the country as Hitler�s �first victim�. Thus facts such as the cheering hordes of �victims� that greeted Hitler�s motorcade as it entered the centre of Vienna and the startling statistic�quoted by Judt�that half of all concentration camp guards were Austrian were consigned to the memory hole.Although such evasions of the past might outrage both the historian and the moralist, the thrust of Judt�s argument is that such creative forgetfulness was necessary if European states were not to experience a rerun of the unstable decades after World War One, or indeed something worse. Even though many Europeans, especially in the Western half, did not experience or participate directly in genocide or military collaboration, their passivity was in many cases all that their Nazi administrators required. A full recognition of such shabby compromises might have undermined from the start an attempt to rebuild democracies in less than ideal circumstances: after all, if an electorate acknowledges that it lacks any sense of a fixed morality, what chance would politicians have of mobilizing voters with talk of liberty, fraternity, and equality? Secondly, and this was especially evident in West Germany, the effort to escape the burden of the past seems to have generated frenetic displacement behaviour in the form of extraordinary production and consumption. The moral vacuum of the Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder years, captured with uncanny brilliance by the novelist Walter Abish in How German Is It?, would later provoke the Red Army Faction (better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang) to goad the state through a campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations to reveal its latently Nazi character. Yet it is a testimony to the FRG�s stability and the consumerist thirst of its citizens, that the so-called German Autumn of 1977 memorably led to drivers putting bumper stickers proclaiming �I do not belong to the Baader-Meinhof Group� on the back of their 2002 model BMWs, which was the gang�s getaway car of choice.More thoughts on Judt�s book�including some of its glaring flaws�in the next post.