The ‘postwar’ revival

Yesterday’s post on Hiroshima got me to thinking about the treatment of the post-World War Two world and the way it is interpreted—and has been interpreted—through the years. It would seem, after many years as a footnote to the war itself (and the subsequent Cold War), the immediate postwar period has become a (relatively) hot topic of late. There have been several new academic studies of the period, as well as a raft of new pop-culture artifacts exploring the late 1940s.

For instance, in his mammoth history of postwar Europe, Tony Judt excels in fleshing out the postwar European landscape in wonderful detail. Judt’s volume covers the entire late 20th century, but in the book’s early chapters, he provides a fresh and useful chronicle of postwar misery. It was a ‘bizzaro’ world, a far cry from the Europe of today. Judt explains how nearly every continental government charged with rebuilding Europe suffered from an absolute loss of legitimacy. Resurrecting Europe’s governments was not as easy as merely replacing defeated and collaborationist regimes with new, democratic ones, for it was not at all clear that Europe wanted democracy, and finding leaders and public servants who were not in some fashion compromised was exceedingly difficult.

The backdrop for these larger political questions was a thoroughgoing cynicism and loss of hope. Judt writes:

“As occupying forces, both Nazis and Soviets precipitated a war of all against all. They discouraged not just allegiance to the defunct authority of the previous regime or state, but any sense of civility or bond between individuals, and on the whole they were successful.”

Judt sums up his first chapter, ‘The Legacy of War,’ by quoting one John J. McCloy of the US Control Commission in Germany, who described Central Europe as being in a state of “complete economic, social, and political collapse…the extent of which is unparalleled in history unless one goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire.”

Obviously, this set the stage for the somewhat miraculous recovery that followed, a recovery that was about far more than economics and politics, for as Judt commences his second chapter:

“For most Europeans World War Two was experienced not as a war of movement and battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and many lost everything.”

This is the world that Steven Soderbergh recently attempted to capture in his film The Good German (2006), starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. Soderbergh’s movie is deeply flawed for myriad reasons, but it does undeniably capture an essential feeling that is key to understanding the period. Its characters occupy a more or less amoral universe where the fine lines of ethics are erased by a crushing sense of hopelessness. So it is that the movie’s first scene has young Tobey Maguire violently shagging Ms. Blanchett’s character in a purely animalistic display of carnality, where both characters seem completely detached from the act itself and perform their roles in robotic, unfeeling fashion.

Mr. Soderbergh’s film is an obvious homage to The Third Man (1949), that giant of the film noir genre, generally hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. Thus, The Good German was shot old-school, using black and white film, fixed focal-length lens, boom mikes, etc. And while the movie’s political backgrounding is a muddle of conspiracy and supposition, its atmospherics are very finely rendered. You do begin to inhabit, if but fleetingly, the miserable world of postwar Europe in a surprisingly felicitous ‘remaking’ of the traditional film noir.

However, Mr. Soderbergh’s failure to rise above comic-book sketches of the political actors involved in the movie’s complex plotlines is a pity. I bridle at the film’s suggestion that American motives and means were no different in quality or kind from those of the Soviets, but must concede that, to many of the defeated Germans at the time, surely it must have seemed so. I would suggest, never the less, that had Mr. Soderbergh’s project been set a little farther east—in, say, Warsaw or Tallinn—he might have come to appreciate the differences between US and Soviet postwar policies.

Which brings us back full circle to the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945. The centerpiece plot event of The Good German revolves around the Potsdam Conference of late July/early August 1945 and the two superpowers’ attempts to secure the services of a highly skilled German physicist. Yesterday, I referred to Racing the Enemy, a book written by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, that more or less argues that the atomic bombing was the opening salvo of the Cold War rather than the final act of the Second World War. Of course, such a theory of cause and effect relies a great deal on hindsight. For instance, it is very easy to subsume the Marshall Plan, too, under this kind of nascent Cold War competition (it was that, but also a good deal more). But there is also plenty of evidence that the wartime alliance between the US and USSR was fraying even as the war raged on, and The Good German does provide an entertaining, if simplistic, reminder that war makes for strange bedfellows.

George F. Kennan’s historic Long Telegram wouldn’t be written for another five months, and to be sure, there were still numerous high-ranking US officials (mostly lefties) wedded to the idea that a peaceful postwar era could be attained through a US-USSR partnership. But I suspect that most clear-thinking folks realized, far before August 1945, that the USSR would pose a grave danger to free markets and democracy in the postwar world. Mr. Hasegawa’s thesis, then, deserves closer scrutiny and a wider audience.