1945: Year Zero
Lukacs, John
BOOK REVIEW 1945 YEAR ZERO John Lukacs/Doubleday/$8.95 Robert J. Maddox This is an opinionated and unsystematic book. A brilliant opinionated and unsystematic book. John Lukacs belongs to...
...Maddox is professor of history at Pennsylvania State University...
...And a sketch is all it is, the chapter being devoted primarily to a survey of a few journals of opinion...
...The American Spectator January 1979 BOOK REVIEW 1945: Year Zero John Lukacs / Doubleday / $8.95 RobertJ...
...He depicts Hitler as a far more complex (though no less evil) individual than previous accounts suggest...
...It was the end of European predominance in the history and in the political geography of the world...
...Consider this description of V.M...
...Traditional labels such as "orthodox" or "revisionist'' simply do not apply, though clearly he regards most of the latter as muddle-headed or worse...
...It is obvious that he had a lot of good fun writing this chapter, and it makes delightful reading...
...Lukacs organized his book this way because he is convinced that at the time "great events were the result not so much of inevitable and relentless social forces as of the decisions and the ideas and the characters of these men...
...1945: Year Zero certainly should be read by anyone interested in understanding recent history...
...Nineteen forty-five, Lukacs believes, "was the last great turning point in the history of the world," more important than 1914, 1789, or 1776...
...He, along with thousands of others, had deserted from the Hungarian army as it retreated before the oncoming Russians...
...At the same time, policymakers in the United States were "beginning to fear that after the establishment of victorious Communism in Eastern Europe, the Red Flood would threaten to engulf Western Europe...
...Though overwritten in parts, and with digressions that sometimes make the reader think a page or two is missing, this is the work of a first-rate intellect...
...Maddox too much to his subordinates when he should have trusted his own instincts...
...I think Lukacs is altogether incorrect on some specifics (Roosevelt's attitude toward the Soviet Union at the time of his death, for instance) and partly wrong on others, but overall the result constitutes a dazzling performance of scholarship...
...His Churchill is right on most issues, but "like many of the great masters of language, Churchill was inclined to trust the influence of his expressions unduly...
...Roosevelt's mind, according to Lukacs, was "both broad and superficial...
...Stalin was afraid the Americans "were ready to challenge the Russian domination of Eastern Europe...
...Other examples are equally hilarious...
...And it marked the end of fascism, which, he reminds us, was not merely an aberration but for a time loomed as one of the three great forces along with capitalism and Communism...
...He can add what apparently is two and two, get five, and more often than not convince you that he is correct...
...Truman comes off fairly well, although he deferred RobertJ...
...General readers or scholars who pass it up will thereby miss out on a real feast...
...Consistent with his emphasis upon the importance of individuals, Lukacs believes the Cold War grew out of the misperceptions each side had of the other...
...It was," writes Lukacs, "a gigantic misunderstanding...
...Both were wrong...
...Insights he offers in a paragraph would take lesser minds a book to develop...
...The bulk of the book is taken up with a chapter each on Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and Truman...
...One can argue that he exaggerates the importance of personalities, but these portraits are among the most penetrating and provocative I have ever read...
...Part II of the volume, a chapter entitled "Recalling Zero," is an impressionistic recollection of the author's own experiences in Hungary as the war came to an end...
...John Lukacs belongs to a historical school of which he is the only member...
...His concern here is to show the fatuity exhibited by liberal-left writers in their efforts to present the Russians in the best possible light...
...It was the end of a united Germany...
...Following his analyses of world leaders, Lukacs presents an essay entitled "A Sketch of the National Mind...
...Stalin he sees as often irresolute, and as one who played things by ear rather than from an established score...
...By "last," of course, he means most recent and not final: "It was the end of the era of world wars...
...The "strange force," Lukacs sensibly suggests, probably was gravity...
...Not an integral part of the book, this essay nonetheless is absorbing as Lukacs describes how various people, himself included, tried to cope with the Russian occupation...
...If, having read a certain number of pages, you think at last you have pinned him down, you will be wrong...
...Molotov, published in the Altantic: Short, compact, massive-browed, as trim and collected as a tailor's model, he radiates force....He moves easily on his feet: yet one feels, watching him, that some strange force anchors him to earth...
...Arguing directly against the popular notion that history moves at an ever-increasing velocity, Lukacs makes a persuasive case that the three decades since the end of World War II have witnessed less real change than had the preceding three...
...His most recent book is The Unknown War with Russia...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
