Review, Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back

Stefan Berger/Christoph Conrad (Eds.): The Past as History. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe, pp. 285-379., 2015

This is the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (OUP, 2012)

Twentieth Century British History, 2011

chapter twelve A New Europe? 1945-48 157 chapter thirteen Europeans in the Cold War: Between Moscow and Washington 171 chapter fourteen From the Berlin Wall to the Prague Spring: A New Generation of Europeans 183 First, I must praise David Castle, my editor at Pluto Press, who treated my manuscript with a level of skill, care, understanding and sophistication so sadly lacking in most modern editors. The book is only as good as it is because of David's expertise and dedication. As authors often note, there are countless people who contribute to any book whether directly or indirectly. As is so often the case there are more than can be credited. So, I'd like to thank everyone whom I don't name for their contribution to the writing of this book. Katie Stollenwerk, Secretary of the Institute of Working Class History (Chicago), was invaluable in correcting my often odd English (the author grew up in the working-class Englewood district of Chicago). If this book has sentences that contain verbs, much of the credit goes to Katie. Embarrassing factual mistakes were discovered by Ian Birchall (London) and Boris Kagarlitsky (Moscow) when reviewing a draft of the book. These have been corrected but as they say "to err is human, to forgive divine." I have gained information, have had insights sharpened, and new approaches suggested by countless talks with generous and committed colleagues.

Contemporary European History, 2023

Approaching Europe's historical trajectories to explain its present condition is an ever-growing genre. More than 200 years after the Congress of Vienna, more than 100 years after the First World War, more than sixty years after the Treaty of Rome, more than half a decade after the Brexit referendum – and after more than a year of open warfare in Ukraine, the European project remains in constant flux. A seemingly endless sequence of junctures over the last two decades has raised the demand for historically grounded analyses of Europe. The desire for such publications, both academic and for a broader audience, is thus far from exhausted. Every turn in European politics gives rise to a new take on Europe's past by historians and scholars working in related disciplines.

Europe as an idea as well as a political and cultural project has been a vast subject of scholarly interest, but in the English context this attention has often been restricted to the analysis of the diplomatic policies that accompanied the UK’s reluctant approach to the process of European unification. According to the recent historiography, intellectuals and intellectual public discourse have been an essential condition for forging, shaping and (re)creating the idea of ‘politics’ and ‘identity’ in Britain during the post-WW2 phase. After the Suez crisis and the end of the Cold War, the international roles of Britain changed dramatically (from world-imperial power and main actors of the Concert of Europe to middle-ranking European states) and the ideological turning points on the international scene as well as the upspring of the European economic miracles forced intellectual discourses to rethink themes and categories by which public opinion perceived and interpreted Europe – understood here as a historical as well as a political subject. This paper draws attention to the intellectual debate on Europe in Britain from 1957 to the end of the Cold War. Intellectuals – understood here in the sense of cultural actors engaged in public and/or political debates developed on journals or newspapers – played a major role in fostering this process. Starting from here I intend will consider, on the one hand, how intellectuals narrated Europe as an autonomous cultural subject; on the other, I will deal primarily with the response to the profound transition taking place in the intellectual environment. I will illustrate how British intellectuals pursued a new international role for Britain as a champion of freedom and as an example of democracy. In this discourse European history and the European project are central, and the contradictory debate about the role of Britain in Europe is a striking example of how national and European narratives can interact and, eventually, collapse.

Central European History, 2012

The English Historical Review, 2014