A
marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from
the ruins of World War II
Year Zero
is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an
end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime
change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea,
Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental
Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern
world as we know it.
In human
terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great
cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced,
starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid
for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the
euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The
postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations,
decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural,
and political reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors
on a scale that also
had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in
hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened,
humane, and effective.
A poignant
grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by
the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin
as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a
flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied
bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and
attempted reentry into normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s
experience.
A work of
enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European
theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps
uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.
No comments:
Post a Comment