Waterstones Savage Continent
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Price: £14.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Keith Lowe's Savage Continent is an awe-inspiring portrait of how Europe emerged from the ashes of WWII. The end of the Second World War saw a terrible explosion of violence across Europe. Prisoners murdered jailers. Soldiers visited atrocities on civilians. Resistance fighters killed and pilloried collaborators. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, rape and murder were rife in the days, months and years after hostilities ended. Exploring a Europe consumed by vengeance, Savage Continent is a shocking portrait of an until-now unacknowledged time of lawlessness and terror. Praise for Savage Continent:' Deeply harrowing, distinctly troubling. Moving, measured and provocative. A compelling and plausible picture of a continent physically and morally brutalized by slaughter' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times' Excellent', Independent 'Unbearable but essential. A serious account of things we never knew and our fathers would rather forget. Lowe's transparent prose makes it difficult to look away from a whole catalogue of horrors.you won't sleep afterwards. Such good history it keeps all the questions boiling in your mind', Scotsman Keith Lowe is widely recognized as an authority on the Second World War, and has often spoken on TV and radio, both in Britain and the United States. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943 (Penguin). He lives in north London with his wife and two children.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9780141034515
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9780141034515
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Author: Giraldus Cambrensis
Rating: 5
Review: Already the Western World is preparing for the centenary of the outbreak of WW1; and it will be portrayed as an uniquely terrible episode in world history; and in it's position as the first of World Wars and of the birth of trench warfare, it has claims to such special recognition. Maybe it is because WW2 on the other hand is still within living memory (my own among quite a few survivors), we will be in danger of overlooking how infinitely worse and more truely global was the second. This is in no way to detract from the sacrifices of those that gave their lives in the squalor of Flanders or on the fly-tormented shores of Gallipoli and the Middle East - many of my generation had learned of them at the knees of fathers who knew them at firsthand; but the sheer size of the numbers, the millions - both combatants and civilians - dead, mutilated, massacred, raped and just uncounted and forgotten, virtually from one end of our tormented continent tio the other - spelled out in this book (which does not touch upon those other millions in the other continents) sets a scale which dwarfs the first of these World Wars. We in Britain did not perhaps suffer so severely in this second madness; but ours was only a part of a truely global horror. This book should be required reading by everbody, preferably before they finish full-time education; but I for one could not stomach more than a chapter at a time, with time between chapters to recover. It is horrifyng on every page. Keith Lowe is a novel-writer as well as an historian; so his story is clearly presented in plain prose. It is so uniquely outstanding that it needs no novelist's literary tricks however to make its impact.
Author: Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk
Rating: 3
Review: I found this a very difficult book to read, not because it was "harrowing" as some reviewers have described it - for me there was nothing new here, just lots of facts and information that filled out the bones a little more. I found this book difficult because it is so dry. I believe this book is really aimed at an insular English-speaking audience for whom the Second World War (in Europe) ended in May 1945. Europeans, and serving soldiers at the time, will be well aware of the near-chaos and seeking of justice and vengeance that occurred at the end of military hostilities - they are the witnesses who speak to us through the pages. Lowe divides what happened into a number of smaller topics and in so doing manages to create a distortion. Instead of seeing the events of the post-combat period as a whole we see a fragmented picture. Lowe somehow manages to put small, albeit unsavoury, incidents on isolated, individual stages and then almost equates them with the state-sponsored mass murders of the Nazi state. It is only after he has made his judgemental comments (and I found him very judgemental) that he tries to point out that maybe we need to place these events in some sort of context. I am a fervent believer in the statement "as you sow so shall you reap". The Germans instigated a war of conquest and extermination in Eastern Europe that was very different to that in the West (and this contrast does emerge - even if it isn't highlighted enough). The Jews were merely at the top of the Nazi German kill list. In Poland ordinary men and women lived in daily fear for their lives. They regularly witnessed murders taking place (a young boy of fifteen would be taking his fathers cows out to pasture and know to instinctively hide when he sees a German military truck appear on the road; as a result he is witness to the execution of dozens of his neighbours, initially by hanging and then by being burnt alive in a nearby barn). Slave labour is commonplace (my mother had the distinction of being taken into forced labour by the Soviets, and then by the Germans in 1941). Polish and Ukrainian labourers were murdered at the whim of the farmer who "owned" them. As you sow... It is hardly surprising that at the end of the War these people sought justice and vengeance. They dished out just a small part of what they had received. Sometimes this seeking for justice would appear to be as brutal and evil as what had been done by the Germans... but there is a great difference between state-sponsored, racist violence and individual actions of revenge. There is a great difference between a pogrom in some small town that grows out of chaos and ignorance and the trainloads of victims being put on the assembly line of extermination. Somehow, Lowe manages to muddy these waters. The defeat of Nazi Germany was merely one aspect of the War. Lowe too easily plays the racist card and talks about ethnic cleansing and forgets, once again, to put the events that occurred after the War into the context of what happened during the War, and what was encouraged by the Allies, until long after he has planted his seeds of doubt and condemnation. He informs us, too late, that the Germans exploited local animosity and encouraged internecine fighting (divide and conquer). There will be many in Eastern Europe who know that the War didn't end but carried on as partisan groups clashed with the Soviet-sponsored government forces and one evil regime was replaced by another - there are many who would say it didn't end in Poland and Czechoslovakia until 1989, and in the Baltic States until 1991, just as there are many in the West who forget that Stalin and Hitler were allies in 1939. At least here, Lowe does a better job. Occasionally Lowe asks the important question or states the important fact; in instigating a war of terror and bringing Europe almost to the edge of extinction who should really bear the blame for the chaos that ensued? As you sow...
