An Interview with Richard Vinen

Abstract

14 Historically Speaking May/June 2006 An Interview with Richard Vinen Conducted by Joseph S. Lucas RICHARD VINEN, READER IN HISTORY AT KING'S College London, has written several booL· and articles about 20th-century Europe, including The Politics ofFrench Business, 1936-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1991; new ed., 2002), The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (Allen Lane, 2006), and A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Little Brown, 2000). Joseph Lucas interviewed Vinen in February 2006, mostly about the extraordinarily wide-ranging account of 20th-century Europe Vinen offers in History and Fragments. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and the Nation, Vinen spoke to Lucasfrom Houston, Texas, where he will be spending much ofthe next three years. Joseph Lucas: What would you like readers to take away from A History in Fragments? Richard Vinen: The standard view of 20th-century Europe casts the first half of the century as an apocalypse —the two World Wars, Stalinism, and the Nazis. The postwar period comes across as a time of relative optimism. Further, historians —especially since the 1980s—tend to break up the second half of the 20th century into two or three subperiods . The key here is Eric Hobsbawm's argument that there was a golden age from 1945 to 1975 and then a collapse from the late 1970s on. I offer a less optimistic reading of the immediate postwar period. The golden age, in my view, was not quite so golden. It was tied up with exploitation, with great social trauma—even in the prosperous Western European countries—and it was a horrible time for Eastern Europeans. And the post1975 period, which Hobsbawm sees as the Thatcherite triumph of capitalism, I see as a more complicated time, a period characterized by the triumph ofdifferent kinds of freedoms, not just economic liberal freedom. The fall of communism made Europe a much more exciting and hopeful place. I wrote the book largely in Prague in 1997-98, so it has a certain amount ofthat perspective in it. Lucas: What are some of the most widely held misconceptions about the history of The ruins of Civitavecchia Harbor, ca. 1944. This west coast port, serving Rome, was a primary target for Allied planes which blasted ships carrying men and supplies to battle areas. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ggbain 27578]. even more fragmented— divisions of language, national frontiers, and simple distance counted for more. In another sense, they were more united in that most people's lives revolved around the harsh realities of an agricultural year. The very rapid technological change of the last few years brings people together in some ways, but the Internet and satellite television also create the possibility of ever more complicated forms of identity. 20th-century Europe? Vinen: My strongest objection is to the notion that the 20th century was a particularly horrific century or, alternatively, a particularly progressive century. Different centuries are impossible to compare. How do you compare the 14th century with the 20th century? How do you compare the Black Death with the Holocaust? These are fundamentally incomparable things. It's very hard to give the 20th century an identity at all. Lucas: You stress the diverse and "fragmentary nature" of the European experience in the 20th century. Is this true for all past societies and eras, or does it apply especially to 20th-century Europe? Vinen: In one sense, societies ofthe past were Lucas: How did educated Western Europeans in 1900 think about Europe and its place in history and the wider world? How do Europeans today think about these matters? Viven: Part of the answer is that educated Europeans (one should not forget that this group was much more select in 1900 than it is today) thought more about both history and Europe in 1900 than they do now. This varies a bit from country to country—in France, bigtime politicians write books on Joan ofArc or Napoleon and do so in the expectation that readers will see the implications of such work for contemporary politics; in Britain, politicians hardly ever mention even the recent past. In addition to this, Europeans...