Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Judt's central claim is that the whole of post-1945 European history can be explained as an unravelling of the consequences of World War II [citation:1][citation:9]. The book was groundbreaking because it was the first truly European history of the period: it covered thirty-four countries across sixty years in a single integrated narrative, drawing on research in six languages, and treated Eastern Europe as an integral part of the story rather than a separate or marginal subject [citation:12]. Previous histories had largely focused on Western Europe, with the East consigned to a chapter or afterword [citation:3].

Judt deliberately broke with the convention of treating Eastern Europe through the lens of Soviet studies or as a separate regional specialty. He examined the history of East European states as an organic part of European history, using East-West comparisons wherever possible and highlighting parallels between developments on both sides of the Iron Curtain [citation:3]. The book emerged from a research project at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (1993–1998) that Judt led, aimed at overcoming the mutual ignorance of national historiographies and creating a shared European historical consciousness after 1989 [citation:5].

Memory is the book's culminating theme. Judt argues that Europe was only able to reinvent itself after the war by 'forgetting' or suppressing its shameful participation in the Holocaust and other wartime horrors. This silence was, in his words, 'the necessary condition for the construction of a European future' [citation:13]. The book's epilogue, 'From the House of the Dead,' traces how this dynamic reversed: by the 1990s, the recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews had become the very definition and guarantee of the continent's restored humanity, and Holocaust recognition became Europe's 'entry ticket' [citation:13].

The book was widely acclaimed: it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, named one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2005, and winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award [citation:11][citation:15]. Foreign Affairs called it a 'monumental work' and a 'tour de force' [citation:10]. However, critics have challenged its synthesis. Dylan Riley argued that Judt's idealization of a 'European social model' blurred the actually unequal topography of the continent and that his later book, Ill Fares the Land, directly contradicted many of Postwar's claims about the welfare state and social democracy [citation:4].

A frequent misreading treats Postwar as presenting a uniformly positive account of a coherent 'European social model' that stands as a unified alternative to American capitalism. In fact, Judt's depiction of the model was vague and largely imagined an average of the rich northwest European states—Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany—rather than the uneven social landscape of the continent as a whole [citation:4]. He also acknowledged that European integration had weakened rather than expanded the welfare model, and that American intervention was historically constitutive of the 'European model' rather than an alternative to it [citation:4].

Judt rejected the triumphalist narrative that Washington 'brought down' communism, arguing instead that the Soviet system collapsed from internal contradictions [citation:10]. He described Gorbachev as a victim of the scale of the contradictions his attempt at controlled revolution aroused [citation:10]. This interpretation reflected Judt's broader skepticism toward narratives of Western agency in Eastern Europe's liberation, and it connected to his emphasis on 1989 as the end of a long cycle of ideological politics in Europe—a moment when the continent could finally begin to reckon with its past without the distorting lens of Cold War ideologies.