Book Review: The European challenge – here and now

A look at Europe’s moral bankruptcy from 1918 to 1942 sheds light on the renewal of anti-Semitism today.

By ALEXANDER ZVIELLI
The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, June 28, 1919’ by Sir William Orpen. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, June 28, 1919’ by Sir William Orpen.
(photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Who were the murderers? Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin head the grim list, but there were numerous other contestants and their assistants, spreading hate and Fascist domination, eager for power and profit.
How often we do ask ourselves what’s behind this renewed anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish phobia plaguing Europe in the here and now? Howard M. Sachar’s historical essays in The Assassination of Europe, 1918-1942: A Political History provide most of the answers.
Sachar – the author of numerous books on Israeli and world history, and a professor emeritus of history and international affairs at George Washington University – is a master researcher and storyteller who frankly brings to life the years of European deterioration, from the peace of Versailles to the middle of World War II (1918-1942).
In 11 major historical essays, he explains what brought about the continent’s ultimate bankruptcy.
The drama began with the failure of post-World War I peace-making arrangements, continued with the establishment of dictatorships in Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union, and ended in Europe’s utmost devastation and death of millions.
US president Woodrow Wilson, the spiritual founder of the League of Nations, wished Europe well via a brotherhood of peace, but Europeans regarded his ideas as gratuitous. Both the victors and losers preferred their conflated and idealized record of political and economic dictatorships that not only failed to extinguish the glowering hatreds, but exploited them – Germans against Slavs, Roman Catholics against the Eastern Orthodox, gentiles against Jews, poor against rich, conquerors against conquered.
The demons of hate survived and were cultivated by Fascist regimes, with the assistance of a wholesale persecution of the innocents and the murder of liberals in concentration camps.
The Great Depression of 1929, which lasted well into the ’30s, had affected Europe deeply. Within a short time factories, offices and shops closed, as thousands of the unemployed and long food relief lines clogged the streets. The massive unemployment and frustrations of the Depression increased hate against the Jews, and all the revolutionary elements and ideas offended the people’s religious and cultural sensibilities. The unemployed former warriors and war heroes established various paramilitary and Fascist movements, putting them at the disposal of the self-appointed dictators.
Mussolini was the first to seek an empire, Hitler followed him closely, and eventually Stalin joined the gang. We might not share the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg (the Red Rosa) and all those Jewish revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek, who tried to make this world a better place instead of caring for their own. But it was their bitter fate of being murdered by their ilk that was a sign of the times and the persecution to come.
The German Social Democratic White Terror scored numerous other Jewish intellectuals like Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller, Tovia Axelrod, Max Levien and Eugen Leviné, who wished to set up a “Soviet Republic of Bavaria.” Indeed, how could a reasonable mind contemplate the nonsense that the sensible Bavarian people would allow themselves to be governed by a few Jewish Communists or idealists? We learn much in great detail regarding how dictators rose to power and eliminated their opponents, to the fanfare of cheating and skillful propaganda. Hitler’s racism was initially less sociological than sexual in origin. “For hours,” he wrote in Mein Kampf about “the black-haired Jewish boy, diabolical in his face, waiting in an ambush for the unsuspecting blonde girl whom he would defile with his blood…” Elsewhere, Hitler wrote of the nightmare vision of the seduction of “thousands of Aryan girls by repulsive crooklegged Jewish bastards.” This was Der Stürmer publisher Julius Streicher’s favorite subject in spreading hate.
Sachar patiently traces Trotsky’s life, achievements, rise to power and tragic death in Mexico. He analyzes in depth Stalin’s ascent to power, massive, well-managed purges, trials and mass murders, including the murder of Sergey Kirov.
We watch with apprehension as Hitler “rapes” the willing-to-be-raped Austrians.
A lot can be learned from the 1940 disintegration of France, and Marshal Philippe Pétain’s rule in his racial Vichy kingdom.
We note how Jews gave so much to Europe, and how they were treated by their neighbors and professional colleagues.
Jews loved the continent and played a major role in liberal movements, which finally earned them scorn, betrayal and persecution.
The problems of Europe are all exposed in the well-defined, self-contained chapters, each of which could serve as the subject of a separate film or novel, with heroes and villains alike shown with a wealth of details and illustrations. It is frequently painful to note the bitter fate of individuals like French prime minister Léon Blum or Georges Mandel, a protégé of statesman Georges Clemenceau, who some Frenchmen predicted might one day become the master of France.
Sachar’s all-embracing description of Europe’s predicaments ends with a warm biography of Stefan Zweig, a renowned Austrian-Jewish belletrist, literary critic, biographer and humanist of yesterday.
Zweig had to leave Nazi Europe for Brazilian exile, where he received a warm welcome.
In his suicide alongside his wife, Lotte, there was an act of protest against the world in which they could live no more – a symbolic allusion to the cultural assassination of Europe on the altar of fascism, anti-Semitism and racial arrogance.
It is a bad omen that today, a European Jew can be no more certain of his future there. Sachar’s research should serve as warning light to the major European democracies on how to avoid sinking into similar mire ever again.