Europe Revisited

...At least that is the conclusion one reaches after finishing William L. Shirer's new travelogue, Midcentury Journey, in which Shirer revisits his old European haunts and expounds on the changes he finds in them...

...that France is debilitated, and many of its citizens see little hope for the future...

...His readers are likely to feel that this remark could apply to the whole book, and that Shirer could quite easily have written Midcentury Journey without going anywhere at all—except possibly to a public library for back copies of the New York Times...

...Reviewed by C. L. Graebner THE FINE ART of journalistic punditing on the state of Europe, which burgeoned in the early thirties and reached its full flower during the war years, is still very much with us, though one is beginning to feel that its bloom has just about faded...

...Thus, in the first part of each chapter, we are told in turn of the steps that led up to Hitler's conquest of Austria, of the extraordinary bumblings of the English Conservatives in their efforts to keep the peace, of Hitler's rise in Germany, and of the decline in public morale in France...

...Shirer's pattern is a simple one...

...For one thing, countless Americans are making their own explorations of foreign parts...

...In the sections on present-day Europe, Shirer's views are profoundly true and supremely unoriginal...

...And finally, the learned pundits have perhaps done their work only too well...

...First he gives a long, detailed recapitulation of the immediate prewar history of each country he visits and then comments on its postwar state...

...Having for years diligently imbibed a series of courses on contemporary European history, the educated American public is surely ready for, and deserving of, meatier historical fare than that served up by even the most expert journalist...

...It is a sound and conscientious work, and it is a pleasure to find that Shirer is as determinedly against sin—in the form of fascism and dictatorship —as he was in his Berlin Diary days...

...For another, circumstances since the war have forced us in any case to keep more or less abreast of events taking place outside the United States...

...that Germany, although it suffered indescribable devastation during the war, is still a potential danger and still harbors men of Nazi philosophy...

...He tells us, for instance, that Vienna is still a pleasant and cheerful town...

...that the prospect for European union is dim...

...Times have changed, and a lot of books have flowed from the printing presses, since those first enthusiastic explorers, the Gunthers and the Durantys, the Howard K. Smiths and the Iceland Stowes, discovered the world and reported their findings to the American people...

...Towards the end of his book Shirer explains that he did not visit Geneva on this midcentury trip because "it was easy enough, without going to Geneva, to recall why the League had failed...

...The only surprising thing that comes out of these sections is the shock of discovering that the world-shaking happenings of less than twenty years ago now seem like the most ancient of ancient history, thanks to the terrifying speed with which events have marched in the last decade...

...that the center of world power has shifted from Europe to America and Russia...

...But any moderately well-informed individual would be hard put to it to extract from his pages any new fact or fresh interpretation...

...that English socialism is not Red revolution but a mild compromise between free enterprise and the welfare state...