Back in 2014 I posted my glowing review of Keith Lowe’s 2012 Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. Since then I’ve recommended the book a million times and enshrining it of sorts with a “highly recommended” designation on my blog. One would think then when Lowe’s follow-up The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us was released in 2017 I would have jumped at opportunity to read it. Perhaps because it was unavailable to borrow from my local library in either ebook or dead tree form I never I did. A few years ago during the pandemic I got off my butt and purchased a used hardcover edition using a Powell’s gift card I earned from winning the European Reading Challenge’s Jet Setter Prize. Last week I said enough is enough I finally got down to reading it. After recently finishing it I’m still trying to decide how well it stacks up to Lowe’s earlier book Savage Continent. Sweeping, ambitious and well researched The Fear and the Freedom shows how World War II shaped, and continues to shape our world.
Much like fellow British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore did with his recent tour de force The World: A Family History of Humanity Low shows how history unfolded by how it personally impacted two dozen people over the course of their lives. With the exception of just Andrei Sakharov none of them are major household names. (Although another, Aharon Appelfeld was an award-winning Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor. Back in 2014 I featured his novel Badenheim 1939 and in 2018 it was his final work before passing away in earlier that year The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping.) Unlike most history books this one at times can be deeply personal.
It’s silly to think a war that killed over 70 million people (a huge portion of them civilians across Eurasia, North Africa and Oceania, left national capitals and countless urban centers leveled or severely damaged, impoverished and made homeless tens of millions of people wouldn’t in some huge way change the course of history. Parts of the world impacted the greatest are where the most fighting occurred and suffered the largest civilian casualties, namely Europe and East Asia. World War II’s conclusion also set off a ripple effect of former European colonies becoming independent nations first in Asia and then Africa. As former heavyweights Great Britain, Germany, France and Japan faded from grandeur the United States and the Soviet Union filled the power vacuum. Eventually a kind of bipolar world ordered emerged with the United States and its allies on one side and on the other USSR, its satellite states and China (as a kind of wildcard) with a number of “nonaligned” nations mostly former colonial possessions in Asia and Africa all vying for influence in varying degrees.
A Europe exhausted by war, and their colonial subjects now eagerly embracing concepts of nationalism colonial empires collapsed across Asia and Africa . First to go was the Indian subcontinent followed by much of South East Asia including French Indochina, Indonesia and the Philippines, and much of the Middle East including hotly contested British Palestine. The independence of India, Pakistan and Israel would trigger a flood of population transfers and refugees whose aftereffects we still feel today. Around the same time Europe would undergo a similar process as millions of ethnic Germans were deported from across Eastern and Central Europe to war-ravaged Germany while large numbers of Ukrainians, Poles and Hungarians also being forcibly uprooted from their longtime homes. As Europeans granted independence to its far-flung colonies they would in turn be forced to repatriate countless of their countrymen and families now no longer able to live in former colonies like Indonesia, India, Kenya and Algeria. This would be followed by decades of additional migrations as former colonial subjects relocated to Europe to provide much needed manpower, refugees fleeing oppression, civil war and hunger and economic migrants from around the world. Tragically, the 20th century would go down as a century of refugees.
Europeans, at least those lucky enough not to get caught behind the newly imposed Iron Curtain wished not to relive the horrors of yet another world war and sought solutions. A few individuals would throw in their lot with Moral Re-Armament, a pacifist and spiritual movement founded before the War by an American seminary professor. With many now seeing the USSR replacing Nazi Germany as the next threat to the Continent’s security countries across Europe plus America and Canada soon formed NATO. At the same time, believing an economically integrated Europe would be both a peaceful and prosperous one a series of alliances and trade agreements over 50 years would eventual evolve into the EU. Meanwhile, across the globe in Asia countless individuals, disgusted by the excesses of European colonialism or corrupt local rule would embrace communism, while others took up causes of national liberation.
Of all the chapters I thought the one on Israel was the best. Lowe did a fine job putting the state’s creation in the proper historical context handling everything with nuance and good scholarship. Also good were a pair of chapters at the end of the book dealing with trauma and loss. Choi Myeong-sun, a young Korean woman forced by the Japanese into sexual slavery would spend the rest of her life dealing with unspeakable horrors inflicted upon her. After the War, Evgeniia Kiseleva, a young Russian woman would have to contend with a country now devoid of eligible men. Of the few who did survive many were severely wounded and/or ravaged by PTSD, driving many to drink earning them the nickname the vodka generation.
World War II didn’t just usher in political change but also technological and scientific. Into the late 1930s biplanes abounded but by the end of the 1940s jets were becoming the preferred mode of aircraft. Radar was adopted for both military and civilian applications, its widespread use becoming universal. (Soon in the world’s kitchens as this innovation was spun off into the microwave oven.) Wartime advances in rocketry and computing would go on to revolutionize the word, helping power a space race between East and West. Penicillin and DDT, whose first widespread usage occurred during World War II would do wonders in helping wipe out infectious disease in the following decades. Advances in nuclear science did give humankind a weapon of unimaginable destruction but hope abounded the atom could be harnessed for more peaceful uses like power generation. With so many of Europe’s cities leveled by fighting and bombing new practices in urban planning and municipal management were adopted to help in rebuilding, and then run cities in subsequent decades.
Again, I still haven’t decided if this book is as good as Lowe’s Savage Continent. Nor have I decided if that’s even a fair question to ask. But I’m fairly sure I wasn’t disappointed. Considering this is an ambitious book, and not all ambitious projects succeed that’s not a bad thing.
